→ March 30, 2009
→ By

Facebook page.

A few of you have already noticed that I set up a fan page for myself on Facebook, which I have to admit feels a bit presumptuous. I just learned that Facebook has an upper limit on the number of friends a person can have of 5000, which I’ll hit in about a year and a half at the rate at which friend requests have been coming in of late. I figured I should get ahead of the curve and am no longer accepting friend requests from people I don’t actually know.

I don’t intend to unfriend any of you who are already friends with me – well, unless you piss me off – but would encourage you to follow me through the fan page, which I’ll update regularly with links to ESPN content and media appearances.

Speaking of which, I’m doing a phoner on First Take on Monday at 11:25 am EDT on ESPN2, and am tentatively scheduled for a hit on Phoenix’s KTAR 620 AM on Thursday at 7:20 am Arizona time.

Filed Under: Appearances Tagged With: ,
→ March 27, 2009
→ By

March Maidens.

I don’t follow college basketball at all, and even March Madness holds only a faint interest for me, since I’m usually wrapped up in spring training at that point. I do pay attention to one aspect of the tournament though: I pull for the maidens – that is, the teams that have never won the championship before. (In horse racing, a maiden is a horse that has never won a race.) We came close to having a maiden team win last year with Memphis, but they let me down.

Unfortunately, this is looking like a really lousy year for maidens. Memphis has just been knocked off by Missouri, and while Missouri is an even bigger maiden than Memphis (the Mizzou Tigers have never reached the Final Four, and this is just their third Elite Eight appearance), Memphis was Ken Pomeroy’s top-ranked team, so in theory, they had a better shot to topple one or more #1 seeds.

Pitt is the only maiden among the #1 seeds, but of course, they barely got by Xavier, which doesn’t inspire any confidence in me that they’re going to beat this relentless ‘Nova team.

Today was actually the better day of the two Sweet 16 days for maiden teams, as Friday’s four games feature just two maidens: Oklahoma (two title game appearances: a 1988 loss to Kansas and a 1947 loss to WHO THE HELL LOSES TO HOLY CROSS IN ANYTHING? back when the court was 12 feet long and they used peach baskets instead of nets) and Gonzaga (never reached the Final Four). Gonzaga faces UNC, who seem to be the consensus “expert” pick to win the whole shebang.

College basketball might be the most likely endeavor among major team sports where you could very easily see a maiden winner every two or three years. In MLB, we get long droughts, but there are only eight franchises that have never won, two of which are less than twenty years old. (It’s nine if you don’t count the New York Giants’ titles for San Francisco). The NFL and NBA have more maidens, but more than half the franchises in each league have won, and it’s hard to get all worked up about Oklahoma City’s title drought of one year even if we don’t give them Seattle’s win in 1978-79. In college basketball, not only do we have a huge number of schools that have never won – only 34 of 347 schools who play D1 basketball have won it – but it takes neither a long time nor a large number of great players to make a team competitive. Unfortunately, we’re on track for our third straight year without a maiden winner after a great run of five in ten years (Arizona, Connecticut, Maryland, Syracuse, and Florida).

* Speaking of the NCAA, Dayn Perry has a great post on Spolitical about the exploitation of college athletes, specifically those in “revenue sports,” which for most schools means football and basketball. That said, issues like revocable scholarships crop up in baseball as well. You’re a freshman pitcher. Coach works you so hard that by year-end you can’t comb your hair and have to visit Dr. Andrews. You’re out for a year or more and odds are your velocity isn’t coming back. You lose your scholarship. Coach loses … nothing. Yeah, that seems fair. If scholarships were guaranteed for three years, wouldn’t coaches have an incentive to handle players (particularly pitchers) better in at least their first two years at the school?

* So my alma mater has a couple of researchers trotting out the new vegetarian mantra that eating beef boosts global warming. Here’s the part that confuses me: If raising cows means more greenhouse gas emissions, can’t we slow global warming by killing all cows? That seems to be the obvious conclusion here.

* Handshake deals are illegal under MLB rules, folks. The Nats should tell Young’s agent to shove it. An oral agreement is only worth as much as the paper it’s written on.

Filed Under: Food, Sports Tagged With: , , , ,
→ March 25, 2009
→ By

The City and the Mountains.

José Maria de Eça de Queirós is, according to several sources (including Encyclopedia Britannica and novelist Jose Saramago), considered Portugal’s greatest novelist, yet his works are apparently just now becoming available in English. He introduced realism to Portuguese literature and idolized Flaubert and Balzac while earning comparisons to Zola.

His novel The City and the Mountains, published in Portugal a year after his death and recently translated by Margaret Jull Costa, is a fable wrapped in a paean to natural and rural living. The story revolves around the narrator’s lifelong friend, Jacinto, who lives in luxury in Paris surrounded by high society and machines designed to make his life easier, yet who is miserable and dying of ennui until a chance occurrence recalls him to his ancestral home in the fictional countryside town of Tormes, Portugal.

The novel begins in in Paris (the City) and ends in Tormes (the Mountains), moving from a satire of the decadent and spiritually bankrupt Paris of the late 1800s to the pure, honest, yet feudal society of the still-agrarian Portuguese country. Jacinto’s life in Paris is one of misadventure more than adventure, especially as his machines malfunction, leading him to try to acquire bigger and more complex machines to replace them. Eça de Quierós lampoons the opulence and conspicuous consumption of Parisian society with depictions of over-the-top parties and empty-headed aristocrats as Jacinto drifts unwittingly into soul-crushing despair. Even the religion of the wealthy city-dwellers is perfunctory and perhaps faithless, more concerned with status and the religious hierarchy than questions of piety and charity.

Yet a chance event in Tormes beckons him home, a trip for which he tries to pack as many of his earthly possessions, fearing (ironically) boredom in the isolated hillside town where his family estate lies. After the comic misadventures of the multi-day train trip with the narrator, Zé Fernandes, they arrive in Tormes and Jacinto gradually rediscovers himself, according to Zé:

I forthrightly compared him to an etiolated plant that had been shriveling up in the darkness, among rugs and silks, but which, once placed outside in the wind and the sun and watered profusely, grows green again, bursts into flower and does honor to Mother Nature! … In the City, his eyes had grown crepuscular, as if averted from the World; now, though, there danced in them a noon-tide light, resolute and generous, content to drink in the beauty of things. Even his moustache had grown curly.

Yet Tormes isn’t quite the paradise Jacinto first believes it to be, as the income disparity that was hidden from view in Paris is out in the open on his family’s vast estate. Jacinto himself decides to take on the role of social reformer in the face of opposition from the caretakers, standing in as symbols of the old way of life. It is, in many ways, a call to action to readers who have lost their spirits in the great cities of the time: return to the country, to nature, to your faith, and to your humanity. Even if the setting is dated, the disconnect with nature and the emotional desolation of city life is more than ever a part of our society (and I say that as an unabashed fan in many ways of great cities).

Eça de Queirós litters the book with direct and indirect allusions to literary works, particularly Don Quixote (also a tale of two friends on a quest) and Homer’s The Odyssey (also a quest, one where the main character, like Jacinto, returns at the end to the place of his birth). The two main characters read and re-read these works, and Zé does comment on the parallels between their quest and those of the stories they read, but Eça de Queirós imbues his characters’ quest with a more urgent meaning while still bringing much of the comic brilliance of Cervantes, perhaps even more impressively since he doesn’t get to use the obvious dim-bulb jokes on which Cervantes could rely.

I was talking to We’ve Got Heart’s Kristen H. about the book, and she brought up The Alchemist. I found The City and the Mountains to be a better book overall, with a stronger plot and much better prose, while also offering a powerful message, one with both mundane and spiritual elements.

Next up: Our friend Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America, still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 25, 2009
→ By

Okay…

The Strasburg report is up, with video. So is a report on prep LHP Tyler Matzek, who is one of the top two high school arms in the draft.

One question I’ve heard and seen is what a six-year deal would mean for Strasburg’s free agency. The answer is … nothing. If he signs on Draft Day, passes a physical the next day, and starts for Washington on the following Monday, the six-year deal will run out after the 2014 season, at which point he will have roughly 5 years and 120 days of service and thus be ineligible for free agency. He would, however, be eligible for arbitration, with the salary from the sixth year of the contract serving as his “base” in the hearing.

I also did a Q&A with MLB Trade Rumors.

Dayn Perry’s new sports+politics blog, Spolitical, earned a quick entry into my RSS reader, and one of today’s posts, The Case Against the Case Against Barry Bonds, was an excellent overview of the giant boatload of fail that the government is sailing into McCovey Cove right now – with your money, I might add.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: , ,
→ March 23, 2009
→ By

Strasburg.

My Strasburg piece, with video, has been pushed back to Tuesday. It’ll be on the draft blog at some point tomorrow morning.

EDIT: My piece on ASU lefty Josh Spence is up. He’s not a first- or second-round guy, but he’s fun to watch.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ March 21, 2009
→ By

Tropic of Cancer.

I hated this book. It’s not a novel, certainly; filling 300 pages with f-bombs and see-you-next-Tuesdays without regard for plot or character does not a novel make. There is one sequence, covering about 3% of the book, that might actually be called a plot, but the rest is the self-serving and often vile ramblings of Miller’s alter-ego narrator. I’m a little Homer Simpsonish in that I like stories. When I pick up a novel, I want a story. Miller didn’t bother with one. Somehow it still made the TIME, Modern Library (#50), and Radcliffe (#84) 100s.

And since there’s little more to say on that front, here’s the Klaw anti-10, the ten books I’ve read through and hated the most.

10. A Death in the Family, James Agee.

Reviewed in December of 2007. Depressing, but also incoherent and distant.

9. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon

I know many of you loved it. I found it simplistic and totally derivative of the first book of The Sound and the Fury, and was put off by the diatribes Haddon put into the protagonist’s mouth. And it was boring. Other than that it rocked.

8. The Mambo Kings Sing Songs of Love, Oscar Hijuelos.

Reviewed in January. Other than occasionally making me hungry with its descriptions of Cuban food, the book has nothing to recommend it. It’s definitely in the Miller tradition of sex-as-bodily-function writing, but I’m pretty sure Hijuelos was trying to be lascivious, whereas Miller was just writing whatever words he vomited out of his brain.

7. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

Difficult prose, the merest shadow of a plot, and a completely bizarre and long tangent on the specific physical characteristics of hell. I know I’m eventually going to crater and read Ulysses, but let’s just say starting Joyce with Portrait because it was short was a Pedroia-esque error on my part.

6. The Sportswriter, Richard Ford

I would guess that of the TIME 100, this book is the most-read among BBWAA members, most of whom have told me they liked it. I found the title character to be insipid and immature and self-justifying and I wanted to smack him for about 300 pages. Grow up already.

5. Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin

Perhaps the only major work of African-American literature that I didn’t like – and oh boy did I not like it. It was never clear to me what the book was about; there was brutality, but to what end? I also felt no connection or empathy with the main character, John, which made the whole exercise seem like a waste of time.

4. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

More plot than Joyce or Miller, which is saying little. Three parts, the middle being the shortest and containing all of the significant events. I don’t love Hemingway’s sparse prose but it’s ambrosia compared to Woolf’s.

3. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence

Another utterly pointless book, also banned or criticized for obscenity. The introduction to the edition of Tropic of Cancer that I read argues that Miller is the only author to write properly about sex, saying that Lawrence and James Joyce had “too much religion in their veins.” I have to say I found neither depiction of sex all that compelling, but at least Lawrence has the tension that arises from a set of externally-imposed sexual mores coming into contact with the physical and emotional nature of sex. Miller wrote about sex as a bodily function; getting laid was like taking a dump, more reminiscent of the random sex of Jonathan Swift’s Houyhnhnms than anything approaching erotica. Anyway, Women in Love is primarily notable for nothing much of anything happening until someone dies in a skiing accident, after which the book mercifully ends.

2. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller.

Suck. QED.

1. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

If this is the Great American Novel, everyone should just put away their typewriters and go home. They chase a whale that may or may not exist. There are extended passages that seem to be straight out of a 19th century whaleopedia. They chase some more. That’s pretty much the book, and the prose is maddeningly slow. Yet it was #5 on the Novel 100 and will come up in any discussion of great novels in the English language. My wife was an English major but never read the book for any class; she asked one of her college professors if she should read it, knowing it was considered a classic, and he gave an emphatic, “No.” He was probably later denied tenure for literary apostasy.

That list includes four books on the Novel 100 and five on the TIME 100, so even those rankings haven’t been fully reliable as my reading lists.

Next up: The City and the Mountains by Jose Maria Eça de Queirós, which I am already reading and enjoying.

Filed Under: Literature, TIME 100 Tagged With: , , , , , ,
→ March 19, 2009
→ By

Chat today.

Slight change of schedule means I’m doing a quick Klawchat today.

Also, Jacob over at Vegas Watch is doing a March Madness day one chat starting … a few minutes ago, apparently. That’s for when you’re done with my chat, of course.

By the way, if you bookmark this link, you’ll always be able to find player videos I’ve posted on the Four-Letter.

Filed Under: Uncategorized
→ March 17, 2009
→ By

Forgotten songs, part one.

This may or may not be a recurring feature here: songs I really like and never stopped liking but that, for one reason or another, were never huge hits in their times and have since been gathering dust on the music world’s shelves. I haven’t listed anything too obscure – I think everything here received radio airplay in the U.S. – and most are available for download via amazon.com. I started out with a list of over twenty candidates but pared it down to something more manageable. If you’ve got a forgotten classic of your own to nominate, throw it in the comments alongside your adulation of these tracks.

Love Spit Love – “Am I Wrong” (video)

I hated the Psychedelic Furs while they were peaking – I think it was because the name was too weird; my music preferences during childhood were often predicated on ridiculous things like that – only to discover afterwards that they produced some pretty amazing stuff. Half the band re-formed as Love Spit Love, who had a minor hit with this atmospheric, melancholy ballad. They’re probably better known now for their cover of the Smiths’ “How Soon is Now,” which became the theme song for the TV show Charmed, but that’s a perfunctory money-grab compared to “Am I Wrong.”

Moloko – “Fun For Me” (video)

I first heard this on WFNX in 1997 when it was playing as my alarm went off one morning, and despite not hearing it again for years, I remembered enough of the lyrics to track it down during what one might call the Napster era. It sticks in your head like treacle – and I know it’s not just my head, because everyone for whom I’ve played this song hasn’t just loved it, but become a little obsessed with it, regardless of what type(s) of music they typically liked. Which makes some sense, since I’m not sure how you could assign any genre to “Fun for Me.” But perhaps that’s why it never become any sort of hit in the U.S., given our tendency toward narrowcasting even on mainstream radio stations.

Pigeonhed feat. Lo Fidelity All-Stars – “Battleflag” (video)

I first heard this during my summer in Seattle in 1998 while pulling into the parking lot of the Safeway on Queen Anne Ave., and I sat in the car until the damn thing was over because I was riveted to the seat. It’s sort of like Prince meets … well, some other side of Prince, yet the end product doesn’t really sound that much like Prince but more like something by a couple of guys who really like Prince but also like overdubs and drum/bass samples and that ubiquitous handclap. There are a couple of versions around, but the best remix is the one found on MTV’s AMP 2.

Susanna Hoffs – “All I Want” (video)

Susanna Hoffs turned 50 in January, which I find horrifying, since I doubt I had a bigger crush on any celebrity during my formative years. I’m pleased, however, to discover that she still looks damn good. Hoffs released two solo albums in the 1990s between the Bangles’ breakup and inevitable reunion, neither of which did much on the charts, but her second effort included a fantastic cover of the Lightning Seeds’ “All I Want,” taking out the twee and turning into more of a folk-rock song. Sadly, the album is out of print and isn’t available for download. (Why wouldn’t a record label just push all of its songs out as mp3s? Is there some hidden cost of which I’m unaware? I imagine it would just be free revenue every time a song sells. And why post the video on Youtube if you don’t intend to sell the song?)

Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth – “They Reminisce Over You” (video)

As far as I’m concerned, the Bad Boy era killed hip-hop after an incredibly prolific decade of high-quality hip-hop songs, from the Golden Age of Rap coming out of New York to the short-lived jazz-rap movement (Digable Planets, anyone?) to southern California G-Funk in the early ’90s. (Warren G doesn’t qualify, sorry.) Producer Pete Rock was part of the jazz-rap movement, sticking with jazz and jazzy samples and lots of horn solos behind the, uh, smooth rhymes of C.L. Smooth. “T.R.O.Y.,” named as an homage to the late Troy Dixon of Heavy D and the Boyz, was easily their finest moment, built on a bass/horn riff from jazz saxophonist Tom Scott with fluid lyrics from C.L. Smooth.

Stone Roses – “Love Spreads” (video)

The opening 30 seconds constitute my main ring tone. If you like great guitar riffs, the entire album from which “Love Spreads” comes (Second Coming) will be right up your alley; guitarist John Squire wrote some enormous hooks and fills just about every available space with memorable licks. I still have no idea why this song, the first single from Second Coming, wasn’t at least a huge hit on “mainstream rock” stations, given the big guitar sounds and the catchy ad-infinitum chorus at the end. Also recommended: The Stone Roses’ guitarist’s post-breakup project, Seahorses, recorded one incredible song called “Love is the Law” (video) featuring awesome guitar work and the priceless line “Strap-on Sally/Chased us down the alley/We feared for our behinds.” Incidentally, the Stone Roses are going on tour this summer after more than a decade of “when hell freezes over” responses to reunion rumors.

Mansun – “Wide Open Space” (video – live version)

“Wide Open Spaces” garnered some modern-rock and mainstream-rock radio play when the album came out in 1996, but nothing else from the album broke through and their follow-up work wasn’t very good at all. (Incidentally, the album’s opening track, “The Chad Who Loved Me,” should have been all over the place in the fall of 2000, right?) There’s a lot of ’70s epic/arena rock to this song, but with this great underlying tension from that repeated two-note guitar riff. “Wide Open Spaces” would also rate highly on my list of “Songs I wish I had the range to sing.” Even solo, in the car, it’s a stretch.

Monster Magnet – “Negasonic Teenage Warhead” (video)

I know, they were completely ridiculous, a pastiche of stoner rock, New Wave of British Heavy Metal, and even a little bit of glam thrown in, but before the bombastic (if catchy) “Space Lord,” Monster Magnet threw down this straight-out rocker that will have you shouting “I will deny you!” for days. I wonder how much singer/songwriter Dave Wyndorf thinks he owes to Guns N Roses or White Zombie. It’s one of sleaze rock’s finest hours – or four-and-a-half minutes.

Catherine Wheel – “Waydown” (video)

This song wasn’t a great example of the Catherine Wheel’s music – “Black Metallic” and “Heal 2” are probably their signature songs – but it’s easily my favorite song by the group, still bringing that faint My Bloody Valentine influence to a much more polished finished product. The music is all energy and tension even as the lyrics describe a rapid, willful descent. It wasn’t quite grunge enough for its era but was harder and heavier than the hair-metal that grunge replaced.

Peter Murphy – “Cuts You Up” (video)

Murphy was the lead singer of the goth/arthouse band Bauhaus, which spawned the better-known Love and Rockets after its breakup. While “Cuts You Up” didn’t reach the commercial heights of L&R’s “So Alive,” it’s a seductive hook-laden Roxy Music-esque track that’s almost too sophisticated for its own commercial ambitions. Murphy tried to recreate the formula with “The Sweetest Drop” on his next album, but missed the mark somewhat painfully.

Say Trickle – “It Doesn’t Count” (video)

I know I promised nothing too obscure, but I’m making an exception to my own rule for this little-known British pop/rock band that sort of got caught between the Madchester craze in the early ’90s and the Britpop revival of a few years later. If they had a hit, this was it, although it just scraped the lower reaches of the modern rock charts and didn’t chart at all on Billboard‘s Hot 100. Unfortunately, Say Trickle’s only record is long out of print, but at least the video survives on Youtube.

Filed Under: Music Tagged With: , , , , ,
→ March 15, 2009
→ By

The Quickie Hall of Fame.

I finally had time to tally all of the ballots from the quickie ten-man Hall of Fame thread. There were five incomplete ballots that listed ineligible players (Bonds, Clemens, Maddux, and Rose) or had a joke player on the list; one ballot only had eight eligible names and the other four had nine. I’ve contacted those folks to ask if they wanted to revise their ballots, and I’ll update this post if any of them responds. (UPDATED: Two of the incomplete ballots are now complete, so the list below has changed, although the top ten were unaffected.)

So, out of 63 total ballots, including the partial ballots, here are the results:

Player Votes Percent
Babe Ruth 63 100%
Ted Williams 58 92%
Willie Mays 58 92%
Walter Johnson 55 87%
Honus Wagner 46 73%
Cy Young 37 59%
Hank Aaron 35 56%
Ty Cobb 35 56%
Lou Gehrig 29 46%
Mickey Mantle 26 41%
Christy Mathewson 25 40%
Stan Musial 23 37%
Jackie Robinson 20 32%
Rickey Henderson 18 29%
Rogers Hornsby 15 24%
Lefty Grove 15 24%
Joe DiMaggio 8 13%
Satchel Paige 8 13%
Josh Gibson 7 11%
Tom Seaver 6 10%
Sandy Koufax 5 8%
Warren Spahn 5 8%
Joe Morgan 5 8%
Mike Schmidt 5 8%
Yogi Berra 4 6%
Johnny Bench 2 3%
Jimmie Foxx 2 3%
Frank Robinson 2 3%
Bob Gibson 1 2%
Tris Speaker 1 2%
Reggie Jackson 1 2%
Hank Greenberg 1 2%
Eddie Collins 1 2%
Nap Lajoie 1 2%
Cal Ripken 1 2%
Oscar Charleston 1 2%
Nolan Ryan 1 2%
Harmon Killebrew 1 2%

The last column, just in case it isn’t obvious, tells you on how many ballots the player was listed.

Nobody had the top ten vote-getters on his ballot; five different voters listed nine of the top ten. Kevin and Tom had the top nine vote-getters on their ballots, and eleven others had eight. Only five of the players on my ballot ended up in the top ten.

Some quick thoughts:

• I think omitting Mays from my ten was a mistake. As I said in the last discussion thread, it wasn’t deliberate; the point of the exercise was to give ten names that were more or less off the top of your head. I’d probably bump Young off of my ballot, because he was largely an accumulator and did so much of his work in the 19th century and early 20th century, when it was really a different game and much easier for pitchers.
• I was surprised by the general lack of support for Warren Spahn. Even ignoring the 4th-highest-all-time win total, that’s 5200+ innings of a 3.09 ERA in the postwar era. Until Maddux, he was the best pitcher of baseball’s integrated period.
• Just about all of us skewed towards old-timers. When we think “Hall of Fame,” we think of those guys, the ones who are just names and stat pages and old black-and-white photographs. Mike Schmidt is probably the greatest third baseman of all time; Johnny Bench might be the greatest catcher of all time; Joe Morgan was probably better than Rogers Hornsby, whom I listed; yet none of those three guys appeared on 10% of the ballots. In fact, 57 of the 63 ballots didn’t contain a single catcher, and 43 didn’t include a second baseman, even though we all understand where those positions lie on the defensive spectrum.
• I have no idea what to make of Negro League players, so I didn’t list any. I’m just not sure how to compare them to players from the racist era. I feel like we all accept Josh Gibson as the best Negro Leaguer because that’s what everyone says, and in other areas of baseball analysis, we would never be satisfied with that line of thinking.

Filed Under: Sports Tagged With: ,
→ March 14, 2009
→ By

Pizzeria Bianco.

Links first – my blog entries on Team Japan are here and here, the latter featuring a writeup of Yu Darvish.

Last night, I finally made it to Pizzeria Bianco, perhaps the best pizzeria in the United States. Chef/owner Chris Bianco won a James Beard Award for “Best Chef in the Southwest” in 2003. His restaurant earned a 29 rating (out of 30) from Zagat’s. Food writer Ed Levine called Bianco’s creations the best pizza in the United States. Jeffrey Steingarten called it the best in the world. Peter Reinhart echoed these sentiments in The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.

Who am I to argue? It was otherworldly.

The first bite I took of his margherita pizza – tomatoes, homemade mozzarella, and basil – was a Proustian moment, where memories of my last trip to Italy, made ten years prior, all came rushing back so fast that they were crowding each other out to take center stage in the theater of my mind. One bite and I was there, in Genova eating outside in an osteria, in Firenze in a trattoria one level below ground, in Rome, in Assisi, there and everywhere. I have never in my life had a food experience bring back such a torrent of memories.

The pizza nearly defies description; it must be tasted to be understood. The crust is amazing, puffy and blistered at the edges yet soft and airy inside, reminiscent of great naan in texture but thinner with that ideal near-cracker texture in the center of the pizza. The fresh mozzarella was firm, smooth, and – thank God – sufficiently salted, also the best we’d ever had. The tomatoes were bright red and sweet, and the olive oil that came both with the bread and with the insalata caprese was bright and fruity and drinkable straight from the bowl, although I admit I didn’t do this for fear of making a scene. We also tried the Biancoverde pizza, featuring mozzarella, Parmiggiano-Reggiano, and ricotta cheese and topped with peppery arugula; it was more of a knife-and-fork pizza because the dough couldn’t support all of the toppings, but the combination of creamy mozzarella, salty Parmiggiano-Reggiano, tangy ricotta, and spicy arugula was sublime.

The restaurant itself is tiny, with around a dozen tables and a bar with a handful of seats, and a good chunk of the real estate in the building is taken up by Chris’ kitchen and brick oven, which means that you can shower him with gratitude after you’ve experienced his pizza. From chatting with him and reading about him (here and here and here), I understand now that that is what he wants – to have you not just eat the food or enjoy it, but to experience it, to leave having had a magical experience that reminds you – as it did me – of how wonderful food can be.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , ,