Good piece on a group of session musicians called “The Section” by David Browne in the new issue of Rolling Stone:

[Danny] Kortchmar’s terse guitar riffs, inspired by his hero Steve Cropper, nudged their way into the songs. He had his own rules: “The parts gotta be simple. You gotta help the song. Don’t step on the singer.” Kunkel became known not just for his firm, unobtrusive playing but as one of the few drummers who would read the words to a song before recording. “I’d get a feel for what the artist was trying to portray,” he says. “If it’s a love story and doesn’t require big drums, what can I do to complete the story?”

…They may also be the last of the great session crews, before home studios, Pro Tools and GarageBand made studio ensembles superfluous. With them, a style of pop – and of making records – came to an end. “I’m running around with a baton in front of me and there’s no one to hand it to,” says Sklar. Asked to name their successors, producer Rick Rubin – who occasionally uses a small, hand-picked combo when recording with acts like Adele and the Dixie Chicks – pauses. “I’m not sure,” he says. “You don’t really need bands anymore.”

Kortchmar, Kunkel, Wachtel and Sklar have been approached about participating in a rock & roll fantasy camp devoted to rhythm sections. “If one of your ambitions is to hang out with Sammy Hagar, you’ll be disappointed with us,” Kortchmar says. “But we want to demonstrate what it’s like to play in an ensemble. That isn’t taught much by anyone.”

[Photo Credit: Joe Martz]

Mike Brodie’s pictures of kids on freight trains.

Dig this article on Raymond Chandler by Jonah Raskin over at Boom:

Raymond Chandler relished finding names for his quirky characters, including Philip Marlowe, the pipe-smoking, chess-playing private eye—a literary kinsman to Sam Spade, Dashiell Hammett’s solitary sleuth—whom I first met in the pages of fiction as a teenager and whom I have known more than fifty years. Sometimes the names are dead giveaways about the morality or immorality of the character, sometimes they’re opaque, but I’ve always found them intriguing and an open invitation to try to solve the mystery myself. In his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939) Chandler calls the bellicose gangster Eddie Mars, the smut peddler Arthur Gwynn Geiger, and the top cop Captain Cronjager. In The High Window (1942), Lois Magic is the femme fatale, Linda Conquest is a torch singer, and Leslie Murdoch is the effete son of a nasty heiress who has murdered her own husband and brainwashed Merle Davis (a wholesome girl from the Midwest and a victim of sexual assault) into thinking she’s guilty of the crime. Nice people, Marlowe observes wryly.

Born in Chicago in 1888, near the end of the Victorian era, raised in England among elite Edwardians, and transplanted to Los Angeles in 1913, Chandler saw California through the eyes of an English eccentric. A veteran of World War I who was wounded in action in France, and a child of Prohibition and Depression America, he recognized that crime was an industry in both boom and bust times, and a rich field for a writer. Then, too, as a displaced person and an alien in the Southern California world of cars and freeways, among phony and lonely people, he tapped into a vast reservoir of mass discontent. In his seven novels, all of them set in and around Los Angeles, he depicted the world as a vile place inhabited by loathsome people. A cynic, he envisioned no way to escape nastiness—certainly not by going to the movies, which, in his view, offered much the same trite boy-meets-girl story over and over again and trivialized psychological issues and social problems.

“Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him,” Chandler wrote of LA. He added that it was “a city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.” Chandler loved and hated LA in much the same way that Balzac loved and hated mid-nineteenth-century Paris and F. Scott Fitzgerald loved and hated Jazz Age Manhattan.

[Featured Image Via the most cool: Daylight Noir]

“Eugenie in the Garden” by Lilla Cabot Perry.

Cinephilia and Beyond on Cool Hand Luke.

Friday night, went to Eataly for bread and prosciutto; Saturday, the Farmer’s Market.

It was uncommonly beautiful in New York today, one of those days that the weatherman likes to call one of the ten best days of the year. Watching the Yankees on an HD TV, the colors and sharpness created an almost surreal hyper-realism.

Another pretty good game in a good series, too. The A’s won 5-4.

Tough day for Andy Pettitte as Brian Heyman reports:

“It’s a struggle,” Pettitte said. “The issue is everything. Everything I’ve got to do as a starting pitcher, I’m not able to do right now. … My release point is floating around a little bit. … It’s been a long, long time since I haven’t had a feeling for my pitches.”

Pettitte is good at being brutally frank when it comes to self-assessments.

“My cutter is nonexistent right now,” Pettitte said.

Joe Girardi said he wasn’t going to make a big deal out of two bad starts. Pettitte is just hoping to find a steady release point in a hurry.

“I wish I could tell you something hurt,” Pettitte said. “But I feel good.”

I wish I could be more expansive but I kept nodding off which added to the dreamlike quality of the afternoon. I was up in time to watch the end of a thrilling OKC-Memphis game and plenty awake to watch the Knicks take one in the nuts against the Pacers at the Garden.

Then I stretched, took a shower, changed clothes and took a good, long walk.

[Photo Credit: J. L. Russell]

Yanks and the A’s followed by Agita at the Garden.

Andy caught a beatin’ last time out, let’s see what he’s got today.

1. Gardner CF
2. Cano 2B
3. Wells LF
4. Hafner DH
5. Suzuki RF
6. Nix 3B
7. Overbay 1B
8. Nunez SS
9. Stewart C

Never mind the cool breeze:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: Eye Heart New York]

Phil Hughes pitched his best game of the year, Chris Stewart and Lyle Overbay hit solo home runs (Overbays was a bomb) and Mariano Rivera was the last man standing–though he didn’t earn a save–as the Yanks beat the A’s yesterday afternoon, 4-2.

Smiles all around.

Today gives another afternoon game and Game 1 of the Knicks-Pacers, which proves to be dramatic, dumb, aggravating, and other clumsy adjectives to describe hardship and pain.

But first, listen to this:

“Fallin'”–Teenaged Fan Club with De La Soul

[Photo Credit: Katherine Squler]

Cool breeze but just bee-too-tee-ful in the BX today.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Vernon Wells LF
Travis Hafner DH
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Chris Nelson 3B
Lyle Overbay 1B
Eduardo Nunez SS
Chris Stewart C

Never mind the sun rays:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Via: The Minimalisto]

I watched the first part of the Yankee game on the count of I was too chicken to watch the Knicks. For me, as a casual Knicks fan, and one with a delicate constitution, they are more aggravating than enjoyable. So pronounced first-half leads–hell, 20-point 4th quarter leads–are just fool’s gold, dirty tricks.

But as the night wore on, and A.J. Griffin out-dueled C.C. Sabathia (both pitched well, in spite of a tiny strike zone), I found myself watching more of the Knicks and my emotion blurred out any memory of what was going on in the Bronx. (The A’s won, 2-0.)

The Knicks did almost blow a 20-point 4th quarter lead, of course, until Melo hit a huge three-pointer (and his first since Christ was a cowboy), and then Paul Pierce missed a shot before J.R. Smith scored and was fouled leading to another three-point play. Both possessions for the Knicks punctured the optimism and good cheer of the Boston crowd and that in and of itself was a pleasure to witness.

And so, the Knicks won a playoff round for the first time since 2000. Not only that, but they set the stage for another throwback match-up as they’ll face the Indiana Pacers–a bruising group–in the second round.

As Carlito once said, “Here comes the pain.”

Poppa Large toes the rubber tonight in the BX.

He hasn’t been throwing hard and  he has not been great, but he’s been tough and a gamer.

Brett Gardner CF
Robinson Cano 2B
Vernon Wells LF
Travis Hafner DH
Ichiro Suzuki RF
Eduardo Nunez SS
Lyle Overbay 1B
Jayson Nix 3B
Chris Stewart C

Wait, that’s Ichi batting fifth? Got to love your 2013 Yanks.

Never mind the agita those Knicks are giving ya:

Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: John Iacono/SI]

Over at Deadspin, here’s Jim Windolf on how Daily News writer Frank Isola became the most hated man at MSG.

[Photo Credit: Calvin Flow;  Tony Shi]

Grand Groove.

[Photo Via: New York Shitty]

Garden & Gun gives Bourbon Pecan Pie just in the time for the Derby. 

Heppy Boifdaze,

[Photo Credit:  Bron Stadheim]

This is excellent: “The Power of ‘I Don’t Know'” by Tim Kreider:

Since I am not and never will be anyone who knows enough about anything to be worth listening to on the basis of my expertise, my only possible claim to anyone’s attention is honesty. Unalloyed honesty is the iridium of the information economy — vanishingly rare, and therefore precious. We don’t respect people like Louis C.K. or George Saunders because of their credentials; it’s because they’re among the few people in public life who’ll say anything obviously true — or, at the very least, anything they really mean. We trust that, unlike politicians or their spin doctors, corporate flacks, think-tank flunkies or cable propagandists, they have no agenda beyond the self-evident one of making a living with their work. I have no pretensions to any special knowledge, let alone anything like wisdom; I am just some guy, a PERSON IN WORLD looking around and noticing things and saying what I think. If what I say doesn’t reflect your own experience, it’s possible that it isn’t about you. It’s also possible that something that’s not About You might still be of some interest or use. There is even some remote possibility that I am oversimplifying, missing something obvious, or just speaking ex rectum.

I’ve lately been rereading Montaigne, generally considered the first essayist, inspired by Sarah Bakewell’s literary biography “How to Live.” Ms. Bakewell singles out the end of one passage in which Montaigne suggests that being self-aware of your own silliness and vanity at least puts you one up on those who aren’t, then shrugs, “But I don’t know.” It’s that implicit I don’t know at the heart of Montaigne’s essays — his frankness about being a foolish, flawed and biased human being — that she thinks has endeared him to centuries of readers and exasperated more plodding, systematic philosophers.

My least favorite parts of my own writing, the ones that make me cringe to reread, are the parts where I catch myself trying to smush the unwieldy mess of real life into some neatly-shaped conclusion, the sort of thesis statement you were obliged to tack on to essays in high school or the Joycean epiphanies that are de rigueur in apprentice fiction — whenever, in other words, I try to sound like I know what I’m talking about. Real life, in my experience, is not rife with epiphanies, let alone lessons; what little we learn tends to come exactly too late, gets contradicted by the next blunder, or is immediately forgotten and has to be learned all over again. More and more, the only things that seem to me worth writing about are the ones I don’t understand. Sometimes the most honest and helpful thing a writer can do is to acknowledge that some problems are insoluble, that life is hard and there aren’t going to be any answers, that he’s just as screwed-up and clueless as the rest of us. Or I don’t know, maybe it’s just me.

Steven Soderbergh on the state of the art:

I’ve stopped being embarrassed about being in the film business, I really have. I’m not spending my days trying to make a weapon that kills people more efficiently—it’s an interesting business. But again, taking the 30,000 foot view, maybe nothing’s wrong, and maybe my feeling that the studios are kind of like Detroit before the bailout is totally insupportable. I mean, I’m wrong a lot. I’m wrong so much, it doesn’t even raise my blood pressure anymore. [laughter] Maybe everything is just fine. …But. Admissions, this is the number of bodies that go through the turnstile, tenyears ago: 1.52 billion. Last year: 1.36 billion. That’s a ten and a half percent drop. Why are admissions dropping? Nobody knows, not even Nate Silver. [laughter] Probably a combination of things: ticket prices, maybe, a lot of competition for eyeballs. There’s a lot of good TV out there. Theft is a big problem. Now I know this is a really controversial subject, but for people who think everything on the internet should just be totally free all I can say is “good luck.” When you try to have a life and raise a family living off something that you create… There’s a great quote from Steve Jobs:

“From the earliest days of Apple I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: it’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people, and it hurts your own character.”

I do think… [applause] I agree. I agree with him. I think that what people go to the movies for has changed since 9/11. I still think the country is in some form of PTSD aboutthat event, and that we haven’t really healed in any sort of complete way, and that people are, as a result, looking more toward escapist entertainment. And look—I get it. There’s a very good argument to be made that only somebody who has it really good would want to make a movie that makes you feel really bad. People are working longer hours for less money these days, and maybe when they get in a movie, they want a break. I get it.

Head on over the SB Nation’s Longform page and check out this profile on Gary Stevens by Joe DePaolo:

“I got balls and guts,” Gary Stevens tweeted on the evening of Feb. 23. The barb was directed at an armchair critic who blasted the legendary jockey’s ride in that day’s Risen Star Stakes — at the Fair Grounds Race Course & Slots, in New Orleans. Stevens’ mount, Proud Strike, finished eighth in the race, and some fans in the blogosphere blamed the rider. Stevens felt compelled to respond directly to one of the more vocal detractors.

Few would argue with Gary Stevens’ declaration. He has competed in more than 27,000 Thoroughbred races worldwide over a 34- year span, winning more than 5,000 and frequently putting himself in danger in the process. Over the years, he’s often tried to squeeze his horse through a tight opening, or pin a rival down on the inside — whatever it takes to win.

Oh, yes. Gary Stevens has guts and balls. He has ‘em to spare.

He’s also got an intense desire to show the world that he’s got them. And should you challenge him, as the Twitter pundit did, he’s going to want to fight you.

Then go over to Time’s Lightbox site and dig this photo gallery by Jehad Nga.

And while you are at it, don’t forget this classic by Hunter S. Thompson.

From Magnificent Ruin.