More on the Pryor revival in Brooklyn.

Some Yankee notes from: It’s About the Money,  Hardball Talk, and Lo-Hud (A and B), and Sports Illustrated.

Also over at SI.com, our pal Jay grades the Yankees’ off-season:

Preliminary grade: D+. At a weighted average age of 32.7 years, the Yankee lineup was the oldest in the AL by nearly three full years, and yet they seem to have taken steps to get even older this winter while leaving significant holes in their lineup. Without a few more fixes — fixes that should be easy given this team’s resources, but which are suddenly agonizingly hard to come by — this may well be the year where age catches up to them and leaves them on the outside looking in.

[Photo Credit: Duanexharris via It’s a Long Season]

Sticking with the good stuff, here’s Mark Jacobson’s New York story that was the basis for the movie, American Gangster:

Twenty-five years after the end of his uptown rule, Frank Lucas, now 69, has returned to Harlem for a whirlwind retrospective of his life and times. Sitting in a blue Toyota at the corner of 116th Street and what is now called Frederick Douglass Boulevard (“What was wrong with just plain Eighth Avenue?” Lucas grouses), Frank, once by his own description “tall, pretty, slick, and something to see” but now stiff and teetering around “like a fucking one-legged tripod,” is no more noticeable than when he peered from Nellybelle’s window.

Indeed, few passersby might guess that Lucas, at least according to his own exceedingly ad hoc records, once had “something like $52 million,” most of it in Cayman Islands banks. Added to this is “maybe 1,000 keys of dope on hand” with a potential profit of no less than $300,000 per kilo. Also in his portfolio were office buildings in Detroit, apartments in Los Angeles and Miami, “and a mess of Puerto Rico.” There was also “Frank Lucas’s Paradise Valley,” a several-thousand-acre spread back in North Carolina on which ranged 300 head of Black Angus cows, including a “big-balled” breeding bull worth $125,000.

Nor would most imagine that the old man in the fake Timberland jacket was a prime mover in what federal judge Sterling Johnson, who in the seventies served as New York City special narcotics prosecutor, calls “one of the most outrageous international dope-smuggling gangs ever . . . an innovator who got his own connection outside the U.S. and then sold the stuff himself in the street.”

It was “a real womb-to-tomb operation,” Johnson says, and the funerary image fits, especially in light of Lucas’s most culturally pungent claim to fame, the so-called Cadaver Connection. Woodstockers may remember being urged by Country Joe & the Fish to sing along on the “Fixin’ to Die Rag” — “Be the first one on your block to have your boy come home in a box.” But even the most apocalyptic-minded sixties freak wouldn’t guess the box also contained a dozen keys of 98 percent-pure heroin. Of all the dreadful iconography of Vietnam — the napalmed girl running down the road, Calley at My Lai, etc., etc. — dope in the body bag, death begetting death, most hideously conveys ‘Nam’s spreading pestilence. The metaphor is almost too rich. In fact, to someone who got his 1-A in the mail the same day the NVA raised the Red Star over Hue City, the story has always seemed a tad apocryphal.

But it is not.

Here’s Jacobson…

From the vaults, here’s Pat Jordan’s 2001 New Yorker profile of O.J. Simpson:

We turned the corner and drove down a residential street. Housewives in spandex shorts were jogging on the sidewalk. Simpson glanced at them and said, “I loved the way Nicole looked. If I saw her on that sidewalk right now, I’d pull over and hit on her. If she had a different head.”

Simpson is used to playing the character he created over the years—the genial O.J. we saw in the broadcasting booth, in TV commercials, and in films—and he seemed ill equipped to play a man tormented by tragedy. His features rearranged themselves constantly. His brow furrowed with worry; his eyebrows rose in disbelief; his eyelashes fluttered, suggesting humility; his eyes grew wide with sincerity. All of this was punctuated by an incongruous, almost girlish giggle.

It was Simpson’s will, as much as his talent, that enabled him to become not only a great football player but also one of America’s most beloved black athletes. (“When I was a kid growing up in San Francisco, Willie Mays was the single biggest influence on my life,” Simpson told me. “I saw how he made white people happy. I wanted to be like Willie Mays.”) Over the course of his life, Simpson had gotten virtually everything he has wanted—fame, wealth, adulation, Nicole Brown, and, eventually, acquittal. It was widely reported that Nicole told friends that if her husband ever killed her he’d probably “O.J. his way out of it.” Today, at fifty-three, almost six years after his acquittal, Simpson seems to be free of doubt, shame, or guilt. He refers to the murders of his wife and Ron Goldman, and his subsequent trials for those murders, as “my ordeal.” Now he wants vindication. Only that can erase the stigma that has transformed him from an American hero into a pariah, living out his days in a pathetic mimicry of his former life. And he appears to believe that he will get it, as he got everything—by sheer will—and with it a return to fame and wealth and adulation.

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, dig this piece on Pauline Kael by Ricard Kramer:

Pauline Kael herself opened the door to her apartment and it was the first of many doors she would open for me, over many years. Standing there in the hallway, I had yet to reach my full height, but she still had to look up to see me. I was amazed. She was tiny? How could that be? She was huge on the page, an empress!

“Oh shit,” she said. “You’re just a baby. Come on in.”

She laughed. The first time I would hear that laugh — musical, rangy, a broad’s laugh, a laugh that welcomed you even as it warned you that once you stepped through that door, you were expected to join her in her merry fuck-you to all bullshit, bluster, and begging-for-Oscars “worthiness.”

I followed her through her rooms. They were white, and the floors looked like someone had polished them with honey. The ceilings were high, and in every room books climbed from the floorboards all the way to the top. She led me to a table, and as she got me a soda, a large man emerged from the bathroom, tucking in his shirt. He nodded to me, didn’t offer a hand.

“Oh, fuck you, Bob,” she said. “You can shake hands with him. He’s not going to take a job from you.” “Bob” obeyed. “This man,” she told me then, “is our Next Great American Director, honey. And so far, I’m the only one who knows it. But that’ll change.” Next Great, etc. (yes, Robert Altman) left us and she told me about the movie he’d just finished, a comedy about the Korean War that was so good and so fresh the studio was talking about not releasing it — that before I arrived, he had been in tears.

“Peckinpah is a crybaby, too,” she said. “The tough guys always are. I don’t know about John Ford, but I’m not sure I want to know about John Ford.” (Thirty-five years later I sat across the aisle from Altman on a plane. He slept the whole way, so it wasn’t until we were both at baggage claim that I got up the nerve to introduce myself and share the scene of that long-ago afternoon. He thought for a moment, mumbled something, and then, adjusting his expensive suede cowboy hat, said, “Pauline Kael … Pauline Kael … Oh. Right. That’s the cunt who destroyed me.” And that is why one should never approach one’s idols at baggage claim. I’m convinced that Pauline would have laughed at that, though. She did love her bad boys.)

Matt McGough’s first day on the job as a Yankee bat boy.

Listen.

Last year, Texas Monthly ran a terrific oral history on the outlaw country music scene in Austin during the 1970s. John Spong did the work. And it’s well-worth your time for sure:

Halfway between the coasts sat Texas, where hundreds of honky-tonks functioned as Nashville’s farm system. But that music belonged to the old guard. Texas kids were more interested in the state’s thriving folkie circuit. The hub was a Dallas listening room called the Rubaiyat, from which young singer-songwriters like Steve Fromholz and B. W. Stevenson sallied forth to coffeehouses around the state. The music they played was distinct from the protest songs of Greenwich Village. Texas folk was rooted in cowboy, Tejano, and Cajun songs, in Czech dance halls and East Texas blues joints. It was dance music. And when the Texas folkies started gigging with their rock-minded peers, they found a truer sound than the L.A. country rockers. There was nothing ironic about the fiddle on Fromholz’s epic “Texas Trilogy.”

It’s impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when that sound and scene coalesced into something cohesive enough to merit a name, but then again none of the labels people came up with—cosmic cowboy, progressive country, redneck rock, and, ultimately, outlaw country—made everyone happy. Still, the pivotal year was 1972, and the place was Austin. Liquor by the drink had finally become legal in Texas, which prompted the folkies to migrate from coffeehouses to bars, turning their music into something you drank to. Songwriters moved to town, like Michael Murphey, a good-looking Dallas kid who’d written for performers such as the Monkees and Kenny Rogers in L.A. He was soon joined by Jerry Jeff Walker, a folkie from New York who’d had a radio hit when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band covered his song “Mr. Bojangles.” In March, Willie played a three-day country festival outside town, the Dripping Springs Reunion, that would grow into his Fourth of July Picnics. Then he too moved to Austin and started building an audience that didn’t look like or care about any Nashville ideal. By the time the scene started to wind down, in 1976, Willie and Austin were known worldwide.

Nice piece on Mark Teixeria by Daniel Barbarisi the other day in the Wall Street Journal:

“I looked at the first six or seven years of my career, I was in my 20s, it was easy. I wasn’t searching for the right formula. To think that I’m going to get remarkably better, as I get older and breaking down a little bit more, it’s not going to happen,” Teixeira said.

That makes sense. It’s the way it’s supposed to work: The years affect us all, and that is starkest for those who age in front of our eyes. But in baseball, where every player arrives at spring training having found the panacea that will make this the best year of their career, to hear a star player acknowledge the obvious sounds downright alien.

“Maybe I’m slowing down a tick. Look, I’m not going to play forever. Eventually you start, I don’t want to say declining, but it gets harder and harder to put up 30 [homers] and 100 [RBI],” Teixeira said.

This winter, Teixeira is accepting his new normal. After three seasons that for him would be considered down years, Teixeira is done tinkering with new ideas, done chasing a perpetual peak. If he is a .250 hitter, so be it. He is embracing his strengths—30-homer power, 90-walk patience, Gold Glove defense—and forgetting his weaknesses, on what he openly calls the backside of his career.

“This is my 11th year,” Teixeira said. “I’m not going to play 10 more years. I want 5 or 6 good ones. So that would say I’m on the backside of my career. And instead of trying to do things differently on the backside of my career, why not focus on the things I do well, and try to be very good at that?”

There’s more, too. Check out the entire piece.

[Photo Credit: John Munson/The Star-Ledger]

The Ravens were beating the snot out of the 49ners tonight and then a power outage stopped the game and the Ravens dead in their tracks. San Francisco came back, the Ravens buckled, palms got sweaty, asses itched, hearts pounded, and it came down to the final minutes, a fourth down play, a call that the officials didn’t make–though they’ll argue forever in San Francisco that they wuz robbed–a safety with less than ten seconds left, and when the clock struck 0:00 and the season ended it was big brother Harbaugh and the Ravens standing tall.

Eat Up, America.

[Photo Via: Sleepless]

“(Take Me Back To) The Wide Open Places”–Fats Waller

[Photo Via: Eye Heart New York]

Ed Koch, the former mayor of our city, and a bona fide character–among other things–passed away this morning. He was 88.

More on Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees from: Selena Roberts, Jay Jaffe, Craig Calcaterra and David Roth.

It’s a little late for “Best Of 2012” lists but heck, this Garden & Gun photo gallery is fun.

Over at Salon, here’s the most gifted Jennifer Egan:

One of my strengths as a writer is that I’m a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.

I want all the flights of fancy, and I can only get them in a thoughtless way. So I allow myself that. Which means that my next step has to be all about problem-solving. My attitude cannot be, Gee, I wrote it, it’s good. I’d never get anywhere. It’s all about seeing what’s wrong from a very analytical place. It’s a dialectic.

Once I have a draft I make the plans, edit on hard copy, and make an extensive outline for the revision. The revision notes I wrote for “Look at Me” were 80 pages long.

This essay appears in a new book: Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and WhyThey Do What They Do.

February 8-21, a reason to troop to Brooklyn: A Pryor Engagement.

Ken Davidoff with a sensible take on the Alex Rodriguez news.

Andy Pettitte ain’t pitching in no WBC.

Pronk?

Check out Michael Weinreb’s appreciation of Donald Westlake over at Grantland:

Westlake admired Hammett’s laconic ability to tell a story without delving into sentimentality; he never liked Chandler and some of the others much at all, and while he published some private-eye novels under a pseudonym, he also recognized the shortcomings of the form. In 1960, he wrote his first novel under his own name, The Mercenaries. He was young and voracious, and he produced so much that he required multiple pen names to keep up with his output: In 1961 alone, he published nine books under three different names.10 And then one day around that time, Westlake went to visit a friend in New Jersey and took the wrong bus home and wound up on the wrong side of the George Washington Bridge. He trudged across the bridge, and the wind and the tension of the bridge inspired in him the idea of a character whose “speed and solidity and tension matched that of the bridge” itself. He thought of a man who looked a little like Jack Palance, a man seething with anger, a man who, when offered a ride by a Samaritan while walking across the bridge, tells him — “for reasons none of us have been able to figure out,” Block says — to go to hell. This was the catalyst, and this became the opening scene of the first Parker novel, The Hunter.

One evening Block traveled to Westlake’s apartment in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn and read the first chapter. Block asked if he knew where it was going; Westlake assured him he’d figure it out. It was how he worked on most everything: He called it the “narrative-push” method, in which one chapter leads to the inspiration for the next, and nothing is outlined. In his first draft of The Hunter, Westlake landed Parker in prison at the end, because, in the early 1960s, that seemed the natural denouement for such a remorseless persona; his paperback editor at Pocket Books, Bucklin Moon, found it compelling enough that he asked Westlake if he could devise a way to more easily position Parker for a follow-up. Westlake obliged. The Hunter was published in 1962, and the following year, Westlake published three more Parker books. In the sequel, The Man With the Getaway Face, Parker visits a plastic surgeon who alters his appearance, and then he robs an armored car; in The Outfit, Parker schemes against the mafia; in The Mourner, Parker attempts to abscond with a 15th-century statue and slugs an asthmatic hoodlum in the process; in The Score, Parker and a band of professionals manage to rob an entire small town over the course of an evening.11

More than anything, Westlake once said, these are books about a man at work. Parker is strangely puritanical, in that he does not permit himself to even think about sex until a job is complete. During a holdup, he learns the first names of the people he’s holding at gunpoint, in order to soothe their egos. Parker and his catalogue of partners carry their twisted Protestant work ethic from job to job: It is fascinating how much of the text focuses on the process of criminality, on scenes of men sitting around a table in front of blueprints, on the notion of preparing for the worst and then accepting that things might go off in unexpected directions regardless of how much you plan for them. There are double-crosses and betrayals and outright failures, and the world is indifferent to all of this suffering, but Parker soldiers onward. And I imagine all of this has at least a little to do with the way the author felt when he sat down at his typewriter every morning.

What’s next for Alex Rodriguez? Craig Calcaterra has this.

Cool…

Ness.

From Brock Davis.