You know that weird feeling you get when you watch a movie and there’s a bunch of actors playing the big bad New York Yankees? That’s sort of what I experienced last night watching these new faces in the home pinstripes. And–get this–for all my talk of how I wouldn’t miss Nick Swisher, I found myself missing Nick Swisher. Certainly Derek Jeter. I mean:  Who are these guys?

Welp, these guys, this team, are a work in progress, and that’s being nice about it. Hiroki Kuroda was hit in the hand trying to field a ball, left the game early, and the Sox cruised to a 7-4 win. Travis Hafner hit a solo home run and in the eighth inning, Vernon Wells hit a line drive into the seats in left field, good for a three-run homer. It sounded great, a clear, sharp crack. The only other memorable part of the game came when the Yankee catcher Chris Stewart caught a pop up next to the Red Sox dugout. After he made the catch, he began to fall into the dugout and three players, including Dustin Pedroia instinctively moved to catch him. Stewart didn’t acknowledge their gesture but didn’t need to. I’m sure he appreciated the professional courtesy.

Otherwise, it was a lousy night for the Bombers. But ol’ reliable Andy Pettitte goes tonight so there’s always that.

[Photo Credit: Mark Steinmetz]

Our man Hiroki.

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

Never mind Opening Day: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: N.Y. Daily News]

Jim Dwyer on Mike McAlary and the final work by Nora Ephron, “Lucky Guy”:

If memory serves, sometime around March 1999 a caller to The Daily News introduced herself as Nora Ephron, and how about dinner?

She was thinking that the life and death of Mike McAlary would make a film. Ephron told me that she couldn’t remember ever meeting him, but that she had read the obituaries a few months earlier, after his death at 41 on Christmas Day 1998. Seen from a distance, the contrails of his life were the stuff of myths.

Fueled by high-octane swagger, McAlary had been a star columnist at the city tabloids for a decade, specializing in police corruption and police heroics. Near the end he fell spectacularly on his face and was written off, prematurely and in some circles, gleefully, as a sloppy, self-aggrandizing hack. Terminally ill, he bolted his own chemotherapy session one summer morning to sneak into the hospital room of Abner Louima, who had been grotesquely tortured with a plunger by police officers. A few months before he died, McAlary was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the columns that made the case a national scandal.

What Ephron needed from me, and others, were not bold-type headlines, but brush strokes. There were things I couldn’t be much help on. McAlary and I were not bar buddies — he was a night life Olympian — and for most of the decade, we worked at different papers. But we were the same age, both writing columns three times a week and we spoke almost every day to help each other feed the column furnace, swapping names, phone numbers, angles.

He began practically every conversation not with hello, but by announcing, “This is good for us.”

[Image Via: Iconoclast]

From Kottke, here is a link to Lester Bang’s obit for Elvis:

It was the autumn of 1971, and two tickets to an Elvis show turned up at the offices of Creem magazine, where I was then employed. It was decided that those staff members who had never had the privilege of witnessing Elvis should get the tickets, which was how me and art director Charlie Auringer ended up in nearly the front row of the biggest arena in Detroit. Earlier Charlie had said, “Do you realize how much we could get if we sold these fucking things?” I didn’t, but how precious they were became totally clear the instant Elvis sauntered onto the stage. He was the only male performer I have ever seen to whom I responded sexually; it wasn’t real arousal, rather an erection of the heart, when I looked at him I went mad with desire and envy and worship and self-projection. I mean, Mick Jagger, whom I saw as far back as 1964 and twice in ’65, never even came close.

There was Elvis, dressed up in this ridiculous white suit which looked like some studded Arthurian castle, and he was too fat, and the buckle on his belt was as big as your head except that your head is not made of solid gold, and any lesser man would have been the spittin’ image of a Neil Diamond damfool in such a getup, but on Elvis it fit. What didn’t? No matter how lousy his records ever got, no matter how intently he pursued mediocrity, there was still some hint, some flash left over from the days when…well, I wasn’t there, so I won’t presume to comment. But I will say this: Elvis Presley was the man who brought overt blatant vulgar sexual frenzy to the popular arts in America (and thereby to the nation itself, since putting “popular arts” and “America” in the same sentence seems almost redundant). It has been said that he was the first white to sing like a black person, which is untrue in terms of hard facts but totally true in terms of cultural impact. But what’s more crucial is that when Elvis started wiggling his hips and Ed Sullivan refused to show it, the entire country went into a paroxysm of sexual frustration leading to abiding discontent which culminated in the explosion of psychedelic-militant folklore which was the sixties.

I mean, don’t tell me about Lenny Bruce, man – Lenny Bruce said dirty words in public and obtained a kind of consensual martyrdom. Plus which Lenny Bruce was hip, too goddam hip if you ask me, which was his undoing, whereas Elvis was not hip at all, Elvis was a goddam truck driver who worshipped his mother and would never say shit or fuck around her, and Elvis alerted America to the fact that it had a groin with imperatives that had been stifled. Lenny Bruce demonstrated how far you could push a society as repressed as ours and how much you could get away with, but Elvis kicked “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window” out the window and replaced it with “Let’s fuck.” The rest of us are still reeling from the impact. Sexual chaos reigns currently, but out of chaos may flow true understanding and harmony, and either way Elvis almost singlehandedly opened the floodgates. That night in Detroit, a night I will never forget, he had but to ever so slightly move one shoulder muscle, not even a shrug, and the girls in the gallery hit by its ray screamed, fainted, howled in heat. Literally, every time this man moved any part of his body the slightest centimeter, tens or tens of thousands of people went berserk. Not Sinatra, not Jagger, not the Beatles, nobody you can come up with ever elicited such hysteria among so many. And this after a decade and a half of crappy records, of making a point of not trying.

Listen to this story about the 1981 All-Star Game by Michaela Murphy.

Photograph by Richard G. Auxilio.

Get Down with the Get Down.

[Image Via: Pleasure Photo by way of This Isn’t Happiness]

Tarragon reminds me of visiting my grandparents in Belgium when I was a kid. That explains why I’m partial to it. It’s a strong flavor–the anise vibe isn’t for everyone–but works well with carrots, asparagus, artichokes, eggs, and chicken.

[Photo Credit: Luluto]

Marley Marl: Droppin’ Science. Man, these two videos are great.

And here’s Pat Jordan on Joe Maddon:

Maddon likes to do what he calls “theme road trips.” There was the pajama road trip, the nerd road trip. For the nerd one, he had the players pose for a photo outside their chartered flight dressed in high-water pants, bow ties, and suspenders. “Some guys won’t do it,” Maddon says. “They think it’s not big-league. They can’t laugh at themselves.” David Price, the Rays’ Cy Young Award-winning left-hander, says, “He asks us for theme ideas. Once, we dressed as cowboys. It’s fun.” Ben Zobrist, a utility player for the Rays, adds, “Joe wants us to do one wearing skinny jeans. Never gonna happen.”

“You couldn’t do theme days with Alex Rodriguez,” I say.

Maddon shakes his head. “I dunno. I hope I could convince A-Rod to wear onesies. He’s not a bad guy.” He looks over at me. “I hear a lot of Yankees like him better than Jeter.”

Maddon says the most important thing he has to do as manager is listen to the players. “I coached for a manager once who told his guys, ‘There’s 25 of you and one of me, so you have to adjust to me.’ I hope I’m never like that guy. The days of dictatorial managers are over.”

When I tell him the hotdogging and emotional outbursts of B.J. Upton (the former Rays center fielder, now with the Atlanta Braves) offend my sense of the way the game should be played, Maddon says, “Aw, he’s a good kid. He was brought to the big leagues too soon. He had to make his mistakes in front of a lot of people and the media. He’s learning mental stuff he should have learned in the minors.”

[Photo Credit: Associated Press]

Over at Roopstigo, here’s the latest from Pat Jordan:

Vito Frabizio is 23 now. In 2009, when he was 19, the Baltimore Orioles signed him to a $130,000 bonus. “I was the best pitcher in the Orioles’ minor leagues,” he says. “Scotty McGregor (former O’s pitcher) told me I’d win the Cy Young Award one day.” He looks around, and then back at me, adding, “I’d always been in the right place at the right time. Now I’m here, the lowest of the low.”

Vito is sitting behind bars in the visiting room of the Yaphank, Long Island, minimum security prison on a fall day. The visiting room is crowded with men in green prison jumpsuits talking to women, some of them in low-cut blouses, who lean over to remind their men of what waits for them when they get out. The guards have put Vito in the far corner of the room so he can talk to me with a little privacy through the bars. He grips the bars with both hands and says, “The other prisoners can’t believe it. ‘You played baseball and robbed banks? Why?’” Actually, Vito robbed three banks to support his 20-bag, $200-a-day heroin habit.

Even in his prison-issued jumpsuit, with white socks and flip-flops that slapped against the floor when he walked toward me with that slouching, hangdog shuffle of prison cons, Vito is still a good-looking man. Just not that good-looking anymore. He has a jailhouse pallor — he’s been incarcerated for two years at this point — with the blemished skin of a needle junkie and tattoos, which can be seen in his police mug shots. There’s a naked woman in flames on his upper left arm. A heart and a cross adorn his upper right (throwing) arm. A Burmese python suffocates a tiger on his stomach. The word “Hollywood” is scrawled across his upper back. “I always had to be the center of attention,” he tells me. “The most popular. Class clown. Even in here I make people laugh so the time goes easier.” He also amuses them with glimpses of his pitching prowess of two years ago. He wets paper, molds it into a ball, and puts a sock over it, then shows his fellow cons his pitching motion. “Until the guards take the ball away,” he says. “Then I make another.”

[Photo Credit: David Bauman]

Over at Esquire, Chris Jones has a long piece on Hugh Hefner:

Playboy will survive, at least as a company, as a business proposition, as a brand owned and managed by private-equity firm Rizvi Traverse Management. The white rabbit will still be on T-shirts in the Czech Republic and beer bottles in Brazil. The magazine will probably continue to exist in some shape or form, profitably perhaps only in countries like Mongolia, like Thailand, where it still means the things that it doesn’t mean here anymore. There are still places in the world where Playboy represents change, not changelessness. Cooper Hefner might succeed in becoming the company’s new face, which will look so much like the old face that it will take a moment to remember that the party, this particular party, will be over. It’s not just this universe that will collapse when it loses its center. It’s not only these bizarre, beautiful, damaged, openhearted people who will be left homeless, who will be cast adrift absent the anchors of Manly Night and Mexican Train. All of us will lose something. Hugh Hefner is no longer ahead of his time; time has caught up with him. And you can feel, late at night, when the Mansion is quiet, that this place is already a museum, and it isn’t hard to imagine those tourists in the van at the bottom of the driveway lining up for their tickets to Heaven on Earth and being allowed through that gate, and they will look at these rooms, at the bed with its black satin sheets, at all that dusty underwear hanging from the chandelier, and they will smile and shake their heads in wonder. But Playboy, at its best, wasn’t just an artifact of its time. It helped make us who we are. Yes, Hefner’s magazine was a Rorschach test. It was also a stick in your eye. “It had lightning bolts coming out of it,” Jimmy Jellinek says. For sixty years, Playboy has been on the right side of history — on sex, birth control, civil rights, AIDS, gay marriage, war, social tolerance, personal liberty — while also serving as a vehicle for that history. But it wasn’t Playboy, really. It wasn’t the brand or the rabbit. It was him. It is him. And without him, it will be no more.

That’s not a very nice thing to think about. Why even think about it? It’s better to stay here, fixed in time and space, and to escape into another movie, into another Movie Night in a lifetime of Movie Nights. In the interest of time, Hefner dispenses with his usual introductory speech, which he normally reads from notes written by his friend Dick Bann. This further departure from routine is also regarded solemnly, but soon the room rallies, and Hefner receives his customary round of applause all the same. Then the lights go out. The movie starts. Here is our host, only a little behind schedule, with his wife at his side, and his brother behind him, and his friends all around him. Hefner pulls up his blanket closer to his chin, making sure he’s sharing it with Crystal, making sure she’s comfortable and enjoying her piece of cake. Then he sinks back into his favorite spot on the couch, and all things are possible. The place feels warm, and it smells like popcorn.

[Featured Image by Danielh85]

Alex Witchel profiled Bobby Cannavale in the magazine a few days ago:

Cannavale turned serious. “I don’t come from an intellectual family,” he said. “I fly them in for the opening night of whatever show I’m in, and it’s great, they love me, they’re proud of me.” He paused. “But we don’t ever talk about what the play is about. So I was always in search of people I could talk to. I guess you could pull apart psychologically why it’s always a guy this happens with. My father-in-law” — the director Sidney Lumet — “was like a dad to me, and we talked about this art form ad nauseam.”

That was another way his life changed because of “The Normal Heart.” Jenny Lumet saw the closing performance. “We met in July, got married in December and had Jake in May,” he said. “He was born two days before my 25th birthday.” The marriage lasted nearly a decade, though his relationship with her father lasted until his death, in 2011. Among the films Lumet directed were “Serpico” and “Dog Day Afternoon,” both starring Pacino. For years, before a performance, Cannavale would psych himself up by saying, “Pacino’s coming tonight.”

It does boggle the mind to think of this Jersey boy suddenly hanging out with Sidney Lumet. Not to mention Jenny’s maternal grandmother, Lena Horne. “Sidney was the most down-to-earth guy you could meet,” Cannavale said. “He loved me because I didn’t have anything and he came from nothing. By the way, I didn’t know who she was,” he said of Horne. “But I think she liked that I was a little dirty.” He smiled. “She, like Sidney, would love to say around her friends, ‘Bobby, tell that story,’ and I’d tell some story they would all be charmed by.” His voice held no edge. “Nothing is more charming than poor folks.” He leaned back into the couch. “They were all great, but it was Sidney, that guy,” he said quietly. “To the end, he was like a dad to me.”

Report: Robbie Cano kicks Scott Boras to the curb. Jigga, baby.

Photograph by Andreas Feininger—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

Hungry Ghost Food + Travel gives a winter citrus coffee cake.

From Wired, some fun. Cover Songs: Famous Albums as Books.

In case you missed it here is Marc Fisher’s story in The New Yorker about a charismatic teacher and alleged abuse:

“People don’t understand,” Gene told me. “People think of child abuse as a moment in a shower, like Sandusky. They don’t think of it as essentially abducting and brainwashing. This was a cult of art, literature, and music, a cult that was revered in some circles. And being in a cult is seen as a sign of weakness.” Once a week, Gene goes to a meeting of adult survivors of childhood abuse. Others attend for a few months and move on. Five years later, Gene is still going.

Gene wants Berman to be held accountable. Yet he knows that some mystery will always remain. At one of their first conferences, in tenth grade, Berman gave Gene a small bronze Porcellino, Pietro Tacca’s Baroque sculpture of a piglet, which has become a common souvenir of Florence. Despite everything, Gene holds on to that pig. “This meant that somebody loved me, and nobody had ever shown me that before,” Gene says. “It’s a conundrum. Why don’t I just drop it in the garbage right now? It’s part of me, part of my life. I guess I’ll be done with it when I don’t need somebody’s love.”

[Illustration by Owen Freeman]

Coolin’ with Cal.

[Photo Via: Airows]

Sounds goo, right? A totally in-my-face shoot ’em up. CC Sabathia’s heater wasn’t that fast yesterday. Chad Jennings has the report.

I also nabbed this AP photo from Jennings’ great Yankee site. Okay, so there’s no game today, I got that wrong. But it is a new day.