Look who just wrote a memoir.

Hard to imagine the Giants beating Roy Halladay twice–and to go to the Whirled Serious? Just don’t see it. But then again, they’ve got the Freak on their side so it’s not out of the question by any stretch. Anything can happen and often does.

I’ll be listening on the radio because I’ve got Cablevision and Fox is blocked-out.

Let’s Go Base-ball.

Straight out the Bay Area…

Cervelli gets the start.

First things first…

Genuine for ’89…

Knock ’em out the box.

Baseball later today. Meanwhile, the sky is clear and blue. Enjoy the day. Back later.

Meanwhile, music:

Don’t you worry…

Over at the Pinstriped Bible, Cliff, Steven and Stephani say Bring on the Rangers. Jay’s like, nah, bring on the Twins.

Hey, Yanks just need to win two games to reach the playoffs this weekend?

Things aren’t all that bad, after all.

Peace to Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York for hipping me to the photography of Ted Barron. Here’s some of Barron’s work, featured recently over at Sensitive Skin Magazine:

Check it out.

Then dig Barron’s blog:

Mmm, Mmm, Good.

Saturday Night Fever was based on a New York Magazine story by Nik Cohn called Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (It appeared in July, 1976):

Within the closed circuits of rock & roll fashion, it is assumed that New York means Manhattan. The center is everything, all the rest irrelevant. If the other boroughs exist at all, it is merely as a camp joke—Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens, monstrous urban limbo, filled with everyone who is no one.

In reality, however, almost the reverse is true. While Manhattan remains firmly rooted in the sixties, still caught up in faction and fad and the dreary games of decadence, a whole new generation has been growing up around it, virtually unrecognized. Kids of sixteen to twenty, full of energy, urgency, hunger. All the things, in fact, that the Manhattan circuit, in its smugness, has lost.

They are not so chic, these kids. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights; they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud. Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them by entirely. They know nothing of flower power or meditation, pansexuality, or mind expansion. No waterbeds or Moroccan cushions, no hand-thrown pottery, for them. No hep jargon either, and no Pepsi revolutions. In many cases, they genuinely can’t remember who Bob Dylan was, let alone Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary. Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, Altamont—all of them draw a blank. Instead, this generation’s real roots lie further back, in the fifties, the golden age of Saturday nights.

The cause of this reversion is not hard to spot. The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. No recession, no sense of danger. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes.

I don’t know from his best, but The Conformist is far and away my favorite Bertolucci movie. If you’ve got a big TV, do yourself a favor and rent it. If not, wait for it to play at a revival house. It’ll be so worth your time.

Movie is gorgeous to watch in more ways than one:

Saturday Morning Melodies…