Here is a good piece on Sarah Burns whose documentary on the Central Park Five is making the rounds at the film festivals.

Photograph Via Inspirefirst.

Take the A Train.

To Sir, With Love.

It is cool and sunny in New York today just like it was yesterday. This is just the kind of brilliant autumn day we had on September 11, 2001.

Let’s take a moment to remember everything about that day.

Salute.

[Images Via: This Isn’t Happiness and Manzari]

Word is Mark Teixeira will be out 10-14 days.

Bronx Banter Excerpt

Please enjoy this essay by Carlo Rotella, featured in his new collection, Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, And Other True Stories.

“Bedtime Story”

By Carlo Rotella

I was in a city far from home, working on a magazine story. I spent the day and evening going around asking questions, watching people do what they do, filling up a couple of pocket notebooks. Among other places, I visited the dog pound, a place of grimness even though—or because—the people who worked there seemed gentle and well-intentioned. All those pit bulls, muscled up with nowhere to go, flexing as we walked past on the other side of the bars. They were desperate and accommodating, and they knew that something was wrong. They could smell all the dogs that came before them. Where had they gone?

Around midnight I retired to the dingy motel where I’d been put by the magazine that sent me out to do the story. In an effort to cut down on expenses, its travel offi ce had found me a place where if you wanted to line up some crack or a prostitute all you had to do was hang out for a while in the parking lot. It had been a long day and evening, with drinking at the end of it. The pit bulls were on my mind. I don’t have much use for dogs but I kept coming back to the sight of the animals lined up in their cages, going all rigid and alert and eager to please when visitors came by. They had thought something was going to happen, even if they didn’t know what it might be, but it didn’t happen. Life would go on like that for a while until, I guessed, some were adopted and some were taken out and killed, and then other dogs would take their place, and soon it would be the new dogs’ turn to win the lottery or die.

One thing to do in a dingy motel is to watch dingy TV. There was lots of it—tedious sports shows and talk shows, unfunny comedies, dumbass celebrity updates, bad movies of the ’80s, a charnel house of shitty writing and stale ideas. I ran aground for a while on an offbrand show or movie about the crew of a rocket ship who go around fighting space vampires. The heroes dashed from here to there shouting fakey jargon and toting futuristic weapons that looked like the weapons we have now with nonfunctional molded-plastic appendages glued to them. The vampires glowered, hissed, and suppurated. It kind of ruins the space-opera magic to wonder what the actors’ parents think when they see them on the screen, but that’s what I usually wonder about. The talented darling who starred in school plays and expectant local fantasies back in Elk Grove Village or Mamaroneck or wherever is now wearing fangs and slathered in gory makeup and being blown unconvincingly in half by a plasmoid megablaster. I picture the parents thinking, “Well, at least he is on TV.”

The lameness of it all caught me just right—in that end-of-day, far-from-home, buzzed-from-work mood—and laid me low. Deep gloom descended. I went through the channels a few more times, only growing more despondent, until I happened upon round one of the middleweight title fight between Marvin Hagler and John Mugabi—held 22 years before, almost to the day. Hagler had his hands full, but he knew what to do about it. He was settling in to cope with Mugabi’s strength and power by taking him deep into the fight, wearing him out over the long haul and fi nishing him late. Mugabi, a blowout artist, had gone ten rounds just once and six only twice in his twenty-five fights, all wins. The turning point would come in the sixth round, when Hagler, having blunted the force of Mugabi’s early-round assault, would take over the fight by giving his man a spine-jellying pounding, then settle in to finish him inside the distance, KO’ing him in the eleventh.

All of a sudden I felt a lot better. I turned down the sound and put out the light. On the screen, Goody Petronelli, Hagler’s trainer, radiated calm and ease as he talked to his fighter between rounds. Everything was going to be fine; Petronelli’s every gesture said as much.His main task was to create a recurring pocket of serenity to which Hagler could retreat between hard-fought rounds for rest and reflection. Demonstrating a for-example combination he wanted Hagler to throw, Petronelli moved his own hands as if arranging flowers. Let’s just fix a couple of little mechanical things, he was saying, and it’s your fight. Doesn’t matter how strong the other guy is. Doesn’t matter what he’s done before this or who he’s done it to. We know how to beat him. We know how to beat everybody. Hagler wasn’t exactly looking at his trainer and he didn’t exactly nod, but he heard him. I took off my glasses and put them on the cigarette-stained bedside table, put my head down on the pillow, and was dreamlessly asleep before either fighter struck a blow in the next round.

Reprinted with permission from Playing in Time: Essays, Profiles, and Other True Stories, by Carlo Rotella, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Carlo Rotella is the author of Good with Their Hands: Boxers, Bluesmen, and Other Characters from the Rust Belt; October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature; and Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, the last also published by the University of Chicago Press. He writes regularly for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post Magazine, and Boston Globe, and he is a commentator for WGBH FM in Boston.

[Featured Image: Motel Room by Greg Watts]

We said it before but I’ll say it again. Nothing says New York like our watertowers.

[IPhone finger painting by Jorge Columbo]

“Vivian” By Phillipe Deutsch (2010)

Think about that.

[Photo Credit: Dark Shadows]

Here’s an excerpt from Alex Witchel’s book about her mother’s struggle with dementia:

The meatloaf fooled me.

I should have known it would. That’s what a meatloaf is meant to do: make you believe the world is so forgiving a place that even an array of bits and pieces, all smashed up, can still find meaning as an eloquent whole. The duplicity is integral to the dish, if you make it well. And when I made my mother’s meatloaf, it was perfect.

In 2005, as my mother began the torturous process of disappearing in plain sight, I retreated to my kitchen, trying to reclaim her at the stove. Picking up a pot was not the instant panacea for illness and isolation and despair that I wanted it to be. But it helped. When I turned to my mother’s recipes, I felt grounded in her rules, and they worked every time. I could overcook or undercook the meatloaf, and it still tasted the same. I could eat it hot and eat it cold, and I ended up doing both, because my stepsons, Nat and Simon, and my husband, Frank, like meatloaf fine, but they don’t love it. The writer Peg Bracken summed it up perfectly in “The I Hate to Cook Book”: men prefer steaks and chops to casseroles and meatloaf, she wrote, because they “like a tune they can whistle.” But it was those inexact elements, murky and mystical, that drew me to my mother’s meatloaf again and again. It was my remnant of home and I conjured it, reaching back, always back. Each time I made it, it was absolutely perfect. And each time I made it, I felt more and more afraid.

[Picture Credit: Miya Ando via Zeroing]

Saturday morning I’m in a dentist office on the east side flipping through the pages of New York Magazine when I see a blurb on Maison Kayser a newly-opened bakery on the Upper East Side. It is the 80th location of the bakery worldwide but the first in the States. So when I finished the appointment I paid a visit, bought a baguette, a sugar brioche, and a pain au chocolat. They were all wonderful so I went back yesterday with my sister and The Wife for brunch.

My sister, whose been to Paris many times, walked in and said, “It smells right.”

We were in heaven. Maison Keyser is a bakery and a sit down restaurant. They are still getting their bearings in terms of service but nothing was egregiously bad and here’s the beauty part…I recognized a blond haired woman from the day before. She’d been working behind the cash register in the bakery, was friendly and had an open face.  Her name is Marine. I introduced her to my sister and The Wife and she asked us if we’d tried the white chocolate brioche (I think it’s called a Vin Blanc, but I could be wrong). We had not and she brought us one and explained that it is from Lyon, where she is from, a combination of a baguette and brioche.

We flipped over it and for $4.95 it might be one of the best greatest values bite-for-bite in the city. We wouldn’t have tried it if Marine didn’t offer us a sample. Eric Kayser’s breads and pastries are reason enough to trek over to the east side but he’s  fortunate to have someone like Marine working for him. She took great pride in their food and was eager to share it.  It’s that kind of care, warmth, and attentiveness that will keep us coming back.

Via Strictly Cassette, check out this nifty item. I’ve got boxes of mixes and mix-tape shows I’d like to convert…

The Yanks staked Freddy Garcia to a 5-0 lead but he couldn’t get out of the fourth inning. Joba Chamberlain relieved Garcia after the veteran allowed three runs. Then Curtis Granderson hit a pinch hit home run to give the Yanks some breathing room. Next time up, he blooped a single to left field, driving home two more. And to cap it off he hit a two run double later in the game. Three-for-three, five RBI, now, that’s the way to bust out of a slump. Alex Rodriguez continued to look good as does Russell Martin. Robbie Cano and Derek Jeter had terrific games.

And it helped make this one a laugher as the Yanks cruised, 13-3.

It precisely the way to respond to last night’s loss. Mark Teixeira is going to have an MRI tomorrow, will miss the series this week in Boston, and I’m guessing much more. Still, the news today was good–Joba Chamberlian, Boone Logan and Corey Wade put in quality work and the offense did the rest.

Onward and upward.

[Pictures by Bags]

Concerns and complaints from the Yankees after the game last night. Chad Jennings has the notes.

In the meantime, the Bombers turn to an unlikely source to stop stop the bleeding: Freddy Garcia.

He’ll need plenty of support, from his fielders, the bullpen, and especially the offense.

Never mind that hangover: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Luca Pierro]

“Two Sleepy People” Fats Waller

[Photo Credit: SuperHeroj]

The Yanks have two reliable starters–C.C. Sabathia and Hiroki Kuroda. Neither have been terrific of late and right when the team needs them the most. This especially true of Sabathia who has been their Little Big Man. Tonight, a win would put the Yankees two games ahead of the Orioles with a chance to make it three tomorrow. But Sabathia did not pitch like an ace, giving up five runs in 6.1 innings. The Orioles hit three home runs against him.

Meanwhile, the Yanks scored a run in the first and a run in the second against Joe Saunders but then he tantalized them with an effective combination of change-ups and breaking pitches (his fastball topped out at 87-88 mph), retiring ten in a row at one point. Yankee hitters just missed hitting home runs and they struck out in key situations. Example: they had men on first and second with one out in the sixth when Russell Martin whiffed and Curtis Granderson, you guessed it, struck out too.

Nick Swisher is 0-for his last-23, 2-38.

Mark Teixeira was called out on a close pitch against Pedro Strop with one out in the eighth. It was a full count and the damn pitch looked outside. I don’t know about you but I was screaming from my couch at home. Ken Singleton, ever the diplomat, said on the YES broadcast that it was too close to take.

Alex Rodriguez crushed the first pitch he saw from Strop, a fastball, over the center field fence for a homer and when a 1-1 breaking ball to Robinson Cano looked outside Rodriguez started yelling from the dugout at the ump. Cano walked and Russell Martin got ahead, 3-1, fouled off a fastball right over the plate, just a little too high to do anything with, and then lined a base hit, off another high fastball, to right center.

That put runners at first and third and ended Strop’s night. Brian Matusz relieved him and faced Curtis-5-for-his-last-42-Granderson. Eduardo Nunez pinch running for Martin. A ball, a called strike, a ball, then a fastball over the plate and Grandy got under it: a harmless pop up to the catcher.

Fail.

In the ninth, Ichiro singles to left to open the inning against Jim Johnson. Eric Chavez singles to left on the first pitch he saw.

Hey, Now.

Jeter and nerves a plenty round my way. Does he bunt? The Orioles play the infield in. He bunts…and gets a base hit.

Swisher. Bases loaded, nobody out. Soft ground ball to short, too slow for a double play. Run scores, 5-4. The relay throw to first bounced and Mark Reynolds made a nice play to field it and stay on the bag. They just get Swisher.

Ball one in the dirt to Teixeira. Fastball low, 2-0. Change up, up in the zone, outer part of the plate and good for a called strike. Fastball, same spot, called strike two. Curve ball, fouled off, barely. And then, a sinker. Teixeira hits a soft grounder to second, they go to second for the first out. Teixeira hobbling down the line dives head first into the bag and beats the play. Easily.

And Jerry Meals calls him out.

Orioles 5,  Yankees 4.

During this string of poor play, this has to count as one of the most dispiriting losses. It went from disappointing to infuriating.

The ump may have cost them a chance to win at the end but the majority of this one rests on Sabathia’s shoulders. There’s no way to soften it, unless he’s pitching hurt, which is a possibility, who knows? Regardless, he’s supposed to be The Stopper, The Ace, and right now, he’s a Grade A Dud.

As a side note, Sabathia hit Nick Markakis in the thumb with a pitch. Markakis left the game and was later seen in the dugout with his hand wrapped. Buck Showalter came over and gave him a hug. He’s a likable player and a damn good one too. But Markakis is out six weeks, and man, you hate to see that.

There was pain to go around tonight, even for the winners.

[Photo Credit: Brechtbug]

We’re expecting big things from C.C. Sabathia tonight. Not three runs over six or seven innings, more like one or two runs over eight.

No way around it. He’s their stud and he needs to perform accordingly.

Teix is back. The rain should clear up this evening so even if there is a delay, let’s hope they get ‘er in.

Derek Jeter SS
Nick Swisher RF
Mark Teixeira 1B
Alex Rodriguez DH
Robinson Cano 2B
Russell Martin C
Andruw Jones LF
Ichiro Suzuki CF
Jayson Nix 3B

Never mind the rain drops: Let’s Go Yank-ees!

[Photo Credit: Live Carefree; mOrtality]

Cross Country Remixed

[Photo Via: Day by Day]

The Orioles had runners on second and third with just one out in the bottom of the first inning tonight and it was easy to imagine the score being 2-0 in no time. But then Robinson Cano made a beautiful, sprinting catch in center field–followed by a strong, one-hop throw to the plate just in case–to save Phil Hughes’ ass. Matt Wieters got ahead 3-0 and here-we-go-again is what I was thinking But he swung at the next pitch and lined out to center and what do you know, today is a new day.

Russell Martin put the Yanks on the board in the fourth with a three-run homer to left and Steve Pearce nailed a two-run shot before the inning was over. Then Alex Rodriguez hit a long home run in the fifth (his 300th as a Yankee) which gave the vistors a 7-0 lead.

The O’s chipped away of course. Adam Jones hit a three-run homer against Hughes in the sixth, Robert Andino hit a solo shot against Cody Eppley in the seventh, and Manny Machado hit a line drive dinger against Rafael Soriano in the ninth.

By that time, however, it was too little too late. The Yanks scored an insurance run in the top of the inning and about the only ball hit to left that didn’t find it’s way into the seats came when Nate McClouth robbed Nick Swisher of a two-run homer in the ninth. Swisher had been 0-17 on this road trip and he could only smile at his dumb luck.

Fortunately, for the Yankees, it didn’t matter. Maybe he’ll save a couple of hits or three for tomorrow.

Yanks back in sole possession of first for now.

A good, much-needed win. Oh, and it should also be noted that David Robertson faced two batters in the eighth and retired them both. Jones took him deep last night but went down on three pitches this time: an overhand curve that buckled his knees for a called strike, and then two sweeping curves, breaking low and away, swung on and missed. Wieters hit a long line drive on the first pitch he saw but it fell harmlessly into Curtis Granderson’s glove for the third out.

Final Score: Yanks 8, O’s 5.