Over man in Texas, Mark Lamster, wrote this fascinating profile about an equally fascinating guy named Robert Bruno:

The house itself is unoccupied and has been since 2008, when Robert Bruno, the charismatic if somewhat mysterious sculptor who had made the house his life’s work, died at age 64 after a prolonged battle with colon cancer.

As meticulous as he was capricious, Bruno had built the house with virtually no assistance over the course of some 30 years, designing and modifying it as he went, frequently tearing out portions that no longer pleased him. On an apparent whim, he was known to jettison months of work. It was a process that seemed to take as many steps backward as forward and left friends and neighbors to wonder if he would ever finish. Indeed, after so many decades, they had come to understand that finishing was something that didn’t matter to him.

“The truthful answer is it was unimportant,” says Dudley Thompson, a retired Lubbock architect who was a longtime Bruno confidant. “I visited him frequently while he was doing it. It rarely came up. He just enjoyed doing it. … The doing it as he thought it should be done was his only priority.”

The work, not the end result, was the thing for Bruno.

[Photo Credit: Leaflet]

Over at SI.com, Jay Jaffe’s winter report card gives the Yanks a preliminary grade of B-:

New York has exercised atypical financial restraint this winter, yet managed to shore up trouble spots by adding younger and less expensive players. Gregorius and Headley are the two youngest in the lineup, with McCann, who turns 31 in February, the only other regular younger than Drew. Meanwhile, the influx of new pitchers over the last two years leaves Sabathia and Capuano as the only pitchers over 30. Payroll will still be well over $200 million, but Cashman has ensured the Yankees more flexibility down the road, and the farm system is much improved thanks to better drafting and a burst of international signings. Whether or not they deviate by adding Shields, it’s a coherent philosophy that better sets them up for the long haul, even if they fall short of the postseason again in 2015.

[Photo Credit: USATSI]

It’s no fraud, it’s gluten, dahlinks.

“February” by Michael Sowa

Never mind that pigskin nonsense, you’ve got 8 days left to see the beautiful Mattise show at the Modern.

I’m rooting for the Seahawks but think the Pats will win. This’ll be to Brady what ’09 was to Jeter.

Hope I’m wrong.

Either way, you guys, enjoy!

Fake or not, I’m trying this recipe from Patricia Wells today. Gotta couple of pork chops I’m going to do something with. Serve it all with a salad of some sort. Chips and salsa before that. Super Bowl Sunday eats.

Hut…Hut…

[Image Via: Simple Dreams]

Please don’t play this song, said no woman ever.

Picture by Bags.

That’d be our man Charlie Pierce:

Watching Marshawn Lynch run with the football these days is like watching Jim Brown in short bursts. (Brown ran like Lynch all the time, and that’s why he’s the greatest football player who ever lived.) Watching him in interviews is to see an artist at work — a natural deconstructionist, fashioning a media event to his own intriguing style.

Lynch doesn’t like to talk — and despite all the criticism he’s received, this seems to stem from a genuine reluctance almost bordering on shyness. But he has moved beyond simply not commenting. He now turns the very odd waltz between the reporter and the athlete into something resembling a parody of itself. Lynch was threatened with a half-million-dollar fine if he didn’t show up to take questions from people dressed like carrots at media day. (This, it must be said, is from a league that originally gave Ray Rice a two-game suspension.) So Lynch showed up, and he answered every question with the phrase, “I’m here so I won’t get fined.” To me, this seems a perfectly reasonable answer, and it clearly is the unvarnished truth. However, it was not received that way. All the people who had ginned themselves up beyond all recall to defend Western values against deflated footballs now rose up against Lynch for disrespecting … well … something anyway.

…Lynch owes only an honest day’s play for an honest day’s dollar, something he does with fair regularity, by my calculations. He doesn’t owe me or any mook like me any more than that. He does not owe The Brand any more than that, either. And in a way, that’s what the whole mad week was about. The Brand. The Patriots were accused of offending the league’s brand with deflated footballs. Kraft chose to try to protect his own brand instead of the league’s. And Lynch, god bless him, accused of heresy against all the brands, chose to laugh up his sleeve at the whole idea. In his own way, following his own drummer, Lynch is in rebellion against the tyranny of The Brand, and against all the artificial and corporatized encrustation that has covered all of our sports, and especially the NFL, and especially this one event. He may not be doing this consciously; I think he still just doesn’t like talking to strangers. But he’s striking a genuine blow against a genuine empire.

Play ball.

[Photo Credit: USATSI]

Such a long way…And no, I didn’t lose a bet and I’m not intentionally trying to be mean. Sometimes, a corny old tune just pops in your head and won’t leave you alone.

Picture by Bags. 

Somebody come and play. 

Food 52 gives Dorie Greenspan’s Custardy Apple Squares. Why the hell not?

Painting by Ali Cavanaugh.

Over at Grantland, dig this nice appreciation of our man Gene Hackman by Steven Hyden:

If you love movies, it’s hard not to miss him. So, for the past month I’ve been watching Gene Hackman films — not just the iconic ones,2 but also the deep cuts, good and bad. Almost all of them are worth seeing, because Hackman himself is almost always worth seeing, but also because the man had a knack for picking projects that have only gotten more strange with time. I refer to films like Prime Cut, in which Hackman plays a Kansas City gangster named Mary Ann who forces Sissy Spacek to lie naked in a pen at a sex slave farm until Lee Marvin comes along; Cisco Pike, a far-out drug thriller set in early-’70s Los Angeles in which Hackman plays Big Foot Bjornsen to Kris Kristofferson’s Doc Sportello; and Loose Cannons, a confoundingly stupid buddy-cop comedy costarring Dan Aykroyd that has one of the all-time great Netflix plot summaries.

Never mind an oddity like All Night Long.

Or Full Moon in Blue Water:

Hyden continues:

Hackman for me is the greatest living American actor because — with the exception of the Reverend Frank Scott in The Poseidon Adventure — I always buy what he’s selling. Even when the movie is bad, you believe what Hackman is telling you, right down to the last “heh-heh.”

Hackman’s my favorite.

On my way to work each day I walk by a post office in my neighborhood. I’ve gotten to know a few of the women who work there. Today, I see one them–a sports fan–quick-stepping through the cold to the deli.

She says to me, “Super Bowl this weekend?”

Yes, I tell her and then she said, “Oh, I’ll need to get some frankfurters.”

And it occurred to me right there that I couldn’t remember the last time I heard someone say frankfurters and that it might be some time before I hear it again.

[Photo Via: Found Shit]

Actually, the snow’s stopped for the moment. But it was steady all day and the big stuff is supposed to hit later tonight.

Hope y’all are safe and sound.

Picture by Invader. 

Cheap eats. 

I was in my Bronx apartment on the morning of September 11, 2001. I watched on TV like the rest of the country. Eventually, I don’t recall if it was later that day or the following day, or the day after that, I got on the subway and went as far south as I could go–14th Street. I felt the need to get closer. I couldn’t go further downtown so I turned around and walked up 8th Avenue. As I passed the bus terminal at 40th Street I saw Joe Franklin talking on a pay phone. He was alone, a pregnant briefcase resting between his feet. I had been in a daze and the sight of Franklin snapped me out of it for a moment. It was comforting to see him.

“Hey, Joe Franklin” I said to nobody in particular and kept walking. Franklin, a New York fixture for many of us, died the other day. He was 88.  

Salute.

[Photo Credit: Andrew Savulich; Illustration by Drew Friedman]