Picture of the Day

Life Studies (Pink)

The House that Taxpayer Money Built

I'll never forget the first time that I entered the original Yankee Stadium, way back in the early 1990's. Having spent years watching Yankees telecasts, I was simply unprepared for the moment when I walked through the turnstiles and saw the Stadium's facade, the freshly cut grass of the outfield, and the finely manicured infield where my childhood hero, Don Mattingly, over at first base, ate up baseballs like a vacuum. The feeling was overwhelming, because the "House that Ruth Built" seemed so much larger than anything I could have ever forseen; words cannot convey the awe, absolute in its scope, that filled my teenage body and on which I still look back on fondly. The majesty of that building remains a formidable memory, one that I am not likely to forget soon. Such is baseball, and such are the bonds, emotional and otherwise, that are formed through this game.

Earlier today, after many years of attending games up in the Bronx, my brother and I went to the latest incarnation of Yankee Stadium, an edifice created at the cost of $1.5 billion (that's billion with a "b") dollars. The new home of the Yankees, make no mistake, is beautiful, and pays homage to the team's rich, unrivaled legacy, but was raised at great expense to those who live year-round in the South Bronx, one of the country's poorest and most economically depressed areas. The Stadium, built atop what was once public parkland, and which was secured by financial incentives, makes little sense in today's world, a world in which people suffer to pay off their mortgages in light of so much uncertainty. Truth be told, there was nothing wrong with the old Yankee Stadium, a building that lacked comfort and amenities, but which had plenty of gritty, rough-hewn charm and a fabled history courtesy of some of baseball's all-time greatest players.

Did I mention that the new Yankee Stadium cost a total of $1.5 billion to build? The figure is worth repeating, because with all of the shops and restaurants, the place simply begs for you to open up your wallet and spend money. Incredible. Here's a total of how much money I spent on food, drinks, etc.:

1 game-day program/magazine: $10.00
4 hot dogs + two beers: $42.00
1 salmon sushi roll + 1 soft drink: $14.25
1 noodle bowl: $8.50
TOTAL: $74.75

I write those numbers not to brag, but to show just how expensive it is to attend a major-league baseball game in New York City. Can you imagine taking a family of four to see Derek Jeter perform his signature leaping throws? An evening at the ballpark will surely cost fans hundreds, and shows just how out of touch Yankees' management is with reality, the working public; one wonders how the team, in what is considered one of the deepest American recessions in decades, can dare charge upwards of $2,000 for its prime, field-level seats. I hate to say it, but my Yankees, my beloved Yankees, have taken what I love about baseball and turned it something vile and crass; the team seemingly spits in the faces of those who can no longer afford to subsidize the multi-million-dollar contracts of men playing what is essentially a game for children. While it is true that the glory years of baseball, its professed innocence, faded long ago, and that the sport is a business like any other, there is absolutely no reason for the Yankees to take advantage of its own fans by forcing them to pay exorbitant ticket fees--extortion money, really--for the "privilege" of sitting in the last row of the bleachers.

I didn't quite feel the same sense of wonder earlier today on my first visit to the new Yankee Stadium, but then again, I am much older if not a little wiser, and understand that some changes are simply meant to carry one moment into the next.

[D | R]

Two Poems

Hymnal I

Winter again, throbbing as brightest fear.
On the westbound train into the city, a man
reads from a prayerbook, the timbre of his
breathing an ofrenda, an insistent wave. His
voice I claim as my own (suffer quietly), and
I imagine her in bed, alone, arms raised to light.

Sleep now, without disquiet.

--December 22, 2008

Hymnal II

“Love is a special humiliation reserved
for bleating dogs, infantrymen, the elderly,
and the invalid,” you once said. In your
mouth, memory becomes its own pressing
noise, and yet, in that battery, the crowding
of the heart is refused no longer; another
lamb siphons the afterbirth from her young,
and a wind, insolent, forces itself through
marrow in steps as delicate as hunger.
“Love,” you say years later, “is a question
borne not of necessity, but of integrity.”

--December 21, 2008


[D | R]

Big Beat

Let me start off this brief review of It's Blitz!, the new record by downtown rock-aesthetes Yeah Yeah Yeah's, by saying that its album artwork is the most memorable I've seen in ages, rivaling even Spiritualized's stunning Ladies and Gentlemen We are Floating in Space and Fantomas' Delirium Cordia. It is a bit of a rarity nowadays for musicians, or, rather, the art departments of the record labels for which bands aim to move "units," to apply as much thought to the packaging of an album as much as its to the songs therein. A hearty bravissimo!, then, to artist-photographer Urs Fischer for having the technical capacity and artistic vision necessary to capture the temperament of a record that refuses to be held down, even by its own limitations.

The first few measures of the album's opener, "Zero," will tell long-time listeners that Yeah Yeah Yeah's find themselves in a period of transition, growth, and, dare I say, "maturity" (if maturity means abandoning a formula that was already successful, deliriously so). Gone are the diamond-cut guitar lines of the band's debut, replaced with the decidedly more subtle textures of keyboards usually reserved for dance music, the song's propulsive rhythm framed around Karen O.'s distinctive cooing. And so it goes until midway through the album, where there's something of a shift in tenor, as though the band decided to abandon its experiment and embrace once again the chug-chug-chug of Marshall-driven rock music.

In this context, Yeah Yeah Yeah's, the 2.0 version are, in essence, a dance band for listeners, the hip and uncool alike, who lift hairbrushes to their mouths and gyrate in bedrooms while no one is around, because such is the fantasy that dance music generates. This change in approach can be a little jarring, given that this is a band that once opened for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion (remember them?) at the Knitting Factory, which once relied on dirty aggression and the sort of detachment which marked one's membership into the privileged circles of indie rock fanatics. Ah, but if only things were so simple: the most effective, kinetic song on this record is "Dull Life," a track that relies on Nick Zinner's tunefully aware guitar; it rocks, plain and simple, which is a reminder why YYY's were so popular in the first place.

Here's to hoping that the band doesn't entirely turn its back on its substantive strengths for the sake of creating a mood, a tone. Incidentally, the Yeah Yeah Yeah's are the musical guest on "Saturday Night Live" tonight.

HOT WAX:

"Dull Life"

"Softshock"

The Smallest and Longest

The world's smallest dog and the longest wedding dress have been unveiled today.  

The pup is a chihuahua-Jack Russell cross named Tom Thumb. He weighs a few ounces. The dress hails from Romania and is more than 5,000 feet long. It was designed by Oana Comanescu of Il Creatore in 70 days. 

A Partial History of My Stupidity by Edward Hirsch

Traffic was heavy coming off the bridge

and I took the road to the right, the wrong one,

and got stuck in the car for hours.

Most nights I rushed out into the evening

without paying attention to the trees,

whose names I didn't know,

or the birds, which flew heedlessly on.

I couldn't relinquish my desires

or accept them, and so I strolled along

like a tiger that wanted to spring,

but was still afraid of the wilderness within.

The iron bars seemed invisible to others,

but I carried a cage around inside me.

I cared too much what other people thought

and made remarks I shouldn't have made.

I was silent when I should have spoken.

Forgive me, philosophers, 

I read the Stoics but never understood them.

I felt that I was living the wrong life,

spiritually speaking,

while halfway around the world

thousands of people were being slaughtered,

some of them by my countrymen.

So I walked on--distracted, lost in thought--

and forgot to attend to those who suffered

far away, nearby.

Forgive me, faith, for never having any.

I did not believe in God,

who eluded me.

What I should be doing now, on this rainy Friday afternoon...

The Part About the Book Review

[I've been reading Roberto Bolaños' 2666, the future of pan-global fiction within a geography devoid of border towns and customs requirements--an epic, sprawling novel which features long, meticulous sentences, one flash-dynamo of a sentence after the other (and you wonder, how is language possible in translation; isn't everything a false repetition, a reflection of something misplaced? Is language possible when uttered at our backs?), all of which shape paragraphs populated with characters, no, lives, named after some distant European principality, or such is the impression--Archimboldi and Morini are some examples--lives, rich, full lives of beings residing in places as wide-ranging as Leipzig and Turin, beings, like most others, in pursuit of women and themselves because this the hunger of the sudden world, a world refused once disease overtook the author, a Chilean expatriate who, in wanting to secure a future of his family, planned to see his final novel, his final examination of all that is proper and human, published in the five, distinct chapters that now make up 2666, until his literary executors saw fit to do otherwise, and we are given this presence to consume in a single block, a single, undulating mass that needles and underscores, and for this the author is forgiven, he is forgiven because he was not to know, he could not ever have known, that I was unable to stop reading and turning, even after fourteen pages in, no, twenty, sixty, one-hundred pages in, despite my being hungry, despite my being tired after a session of work in Lower Manhattan, though lately these days I have been feeling something closer to dread, because the words that most closely approximate tiredness and hunger are not words at all, but are, instead, screens through which I confess, forgive me, Father, I sin and remain--]