→ December 24, 2008
→ By

Legs.

William Kennedy’s Legs, the first of his “Albany” novels (one of which, Ironweed , won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1984), is a fictionalized biography of the Prohibition-era bootlegger Jack “Legs” Diamond, using a number of other real people in Diamond’s orbit as characters to give a picture of the life and culture of upstate New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s. As a period piece, it’s very successful, but as a novel, it’s less so.

The novel opens with a discussion thirty-odd years after Diamond’s death, leading into a series of remembrances of Diamond’s life from his emergence as the main bootlegger in the Hudson Valley until his murder. Kennedy evokes the era by using the vernacular of the time and threading alcohol through every scene (did people drink more during Prohibition, or is that just in the literature of the time?), and I admit that I’m a sucker for books written in this time period. From Fitzgerald to Hammett and just about everything in between, I’m riveted by books about the Roaring Twenties and life under the Volstead Act, so I enjoyed Legs on a superficial level.

By posing as a biography, Legs loses something in the way of plot. Diamond is simply careening from one event to the next – a shooting, a trial, a tiff with his wife (Alice) or mistress (Kiki) – without any clear cohesiveness or upward trajectory to the story. Jack’s character doesn’t develop at all, nor does that of the narrator, Marcus, who remains as detached at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. It makes for an interesting read, but in the last few pages, I found myself wondering what the point was.

If there’s any point at all, it revolves around Marcus, who begins the novel as a successful lawyer on the rise in Albany circles, with an eye towards a career in state government. A chance encounter leads him to become Jack’s lawyer, and he becomes a consigliere to Jack up to the gangster’s death, all the while telling Jack he doesn’t want any part of this scheme or that plan while going along with them. Is Kennedy trying to tell us that we all have the capacity to talk ourselves into going along with something we know is wrong or is a bad idea? Is he detailing the journey of a man disaffected by success and society who looks for a more dangerous path to bring some excitement into his life? These feel like stretches to me, since neither theme is all that well explored with Marcus telling stories about Jack that often don’t directly involve him.

Next up: A brief nonfiction read, Amir Aczel’s The Riddle of the Compass: The Invention that Changed the World.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: ,
→ December 24, 2008
→ By

Want to get dumber?

Then read this, an article by an self-proclaimed ethicist on why no one signed Barry Bonds. He compares Bonds to a murderer, a convict, and a drug abuser; misunderstands the purpose of the Mitchell Report (it was about getting Congress to back off, and perhaps scoring some PR points); and argues that teams also didn’t sign Bonds because he wasn’t a good bet to “duplicate” his previous performances, even though a 20% drop in performance would still make him obscenely valuable.

I thought THT took a great step forward in adding Craig Calcaterra’s Shysterball blog – among my must-reads every day – but content like this “ethics” article is just inexcusable.

UPDATE: The article’s author, Jack Marshall, posted a lengthy rejoinder in the comments below.

Filed Under: Media, Sports Tagged With: ,
→ December 19, 2008
→ By

Five laughable sports leagues.

My editors at ESPN have always hammered home one point, even mentioning it before I was hired: Readers love lists. That’s why we rank everything – prospects, draft prospects, free agents, and so on. And I guess I’m just as susceptible as any other reader, since I was sucked into Mental Floss’s various lists (discovered by way of Shysterball), including their list of 5 Sports Leagues That Didn’t Make It, including Roller Hockey International and the WFL.

I’m curious why they stopped at five, though. I’ve always been fascinated by the business of sports leagues – a sort of empires rising and falling without all the war and death and backstabbing (okay, some backstabbing) – particularly the ways in which they respond to success (overexpansion, usually) and setbacks. I imagine this economy will prove particularly tough going for some of the fringe leagues out there, such as the National Lacrosse League, which hasn’t exactly been a hallmark of stability but is still going after 22 years with one of its original franchises still extant. (I’ve been to probably half a dozen NLL games, although none since the original Boston Blazers went under in 1997.)

Anyway, here are five other leagues that didn’t make it and included some silliness:

  • The North American Soccer League. This league did at least have a peak, packing Giants Stadium for New York Cosmos games and employing some of the best players in the world, including Pele, but they expanded like crazy, ran up huge debts, tried to run a winter indoor season to compete with the similarly ill-fated MISL, and – worst of all – named a team the Tea Men, which was marginally acceptable when they were in New England, but just plain stupid when the team moved to Jacksonville and kept the nickname.
  • The American Lacrosse League. This ALL didn’t finish its first season, in 1988, because the entire operation was a financial scam run by the two founders. As if that wasn’t bizarre enough, the league included five teams in the northeast … and one in Denver. That’s a good way to manage your travel costs.
  • The National Professional Soccer League. Originally called the American Indoor Soccer Association, the NPSL used a weird scoring system where goals could be worth more points if they were shot from farther away. It didn’t help.
  • Major League Volleyball. A women’s volleyball league that lasted a year and a half, and part of the now-quaint trend of giving women’s sports teams feminine names like the Dallas Belles. I actually am surprised that there hasn’t been an effort to start a men’s professional volleyball league in the United States; while it may always be a fringe sport, it’s very popular in other countries (face it – we are a country of people from other countries), is fun to watch, and doesn’t require construction of giant or single-use facilities.
  • World Basketball League. Another of my all-time favorite wacko sports leagues, for two reasons. First, the league had a height restriction: Players over 6’5″ were ineligible to play in the league. Second, the league was funded with money the founder had embezzled from his other company, the discount pharmacy chain Phar-Mor. I thought that Bo Jackson was drafted by an Orange County entry in this league, although the one article I managed to find on the subject identifies that league as the International Basketball Association, which appears to have held a draft (easy) but not to have played a game (hard).
Filed Under: Humor, Sports Tagged With:
→ December 18, 2008
→ By

Nobody’s Fool.

Admin stuff for today: Chat 1 pm EST, and I’ll be on ESPN 710 in Los Angeles at 1:40 pm PST.

Sully had known Rub too long to believe this particular coincidence. He could tell by the way the young man was carrying his large head, like a medicine ball precariously balanced on his thick shoulders, that he was coming to see Sully and that he wanted to borrow money. In fact, Sully could tell just by looking at him how much Rub wanted (twenty dollars), how much he’d settle for (ten), and how long it would take for them to arrive at this figure (thirty minutes).

Sully is the ne’er-do-well protagonist of Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool, written before his Pulitzer Prize-winning Empire Falls and something of a tune-up work, a funny and engaging novel where the reader can see the author working on his craft, particularly his prose.

Sully, né Donald Sullivan, is a sixty-year-old man living in a dying town in upstate New York, a ne’er-do-well in a community short of do-wells of any ilk, although his own brand of doing-not-well is as unique as a fingerprint. He’s surrounded by a cast of believably-crazy locals, from the dimwitted Rub of the above quote to his tightly-wound ex-wife Vera to his landlady Miss Beryl (who talks to her late husband’s picture as well as to the African mask on her wall) and her hyper-ambitious son Clive Jr. Yet Sully is most affected by one character who died before the book even began – his alcoholic, abusive father.

Russo unfolds a tableau more than he tells a straight story, although there is ultimately a central narrative thread revolving around Sully’s relationship with his father and reconnection with his estranged son, Peter, whose own marriage and career are falling apart through bad choices in a higher-rent variation of Sully’s life. The story is richer by far for the additional characters and subplots – although “subplot” sounds so perfunctory for the side stories Russo weaves so well into and around the main narrative – built around well-rounded characters living believable lives and facing difficult choices.

Many of those choices revolve around getting older, whether it’s the infirmities and occasional indignities of aging (faced by, among others, Sully and his wounded knee, and Miss Beryl and her slender threads of independence), or anticipating and then dealing with the death of a parent. Yet despite so many heavy storylines – among others, there’s a man who hunts down and nearly kills his estranged wife – Russo manages to infuse the book with humor, particularly in the dialogue. Sully is the perfect smartass, a lifelong class clown who never stops running his mouth, often to his own detriment – not that that stops him from running it.

Empire Falls is a more complete novel, with a better-rounded storyline and a more empathetic main character, but it doesn’t have the same degree of wit or slapstick as Nobody’s Fool; I preferred the former but would recommend the latter as well. And I credit Russo for acknowledging that life revolves around food by putting that most American of culinary institutions, the greasy spoon, at the center of both novels.

Next up: William Kennedy’s Legs, part one of the “Albany” trilogy that eventually earned him a Pulitzer Prize of his own.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 17, 2008
→ By

Mary Poppins.

Mary Poppins is one of my daughter’s favorite movies, and I’ve seen it probably 30 or 40 times in the last few months. (“Watcha Poppins?” could get annoying after the hundredth time, except that she’s so excited about it that I could never hold it against her.) So I decided to take a crack at the book on which the movie is loosely based. Mind you, I was unaware that there was a book until a few months ago, and it turns out that there are eight in the series, although reportedly P.L. Travers, the Australian critic who wrote the books, hated the Disney film so much that she refused to allow them to make a sequel.

Even for an adult, the book is fun, although it’s a lot less whimsical than I would have expected from the movie. Poppins herself is not Julie Andrews’ version: She’s quite severe with the children, who are naughtier than their film counterparts, and she’s nowhere near as pretty as Julie Andrews was. Most of the anecdotes in the film come from the book, but with changes:

  • Mary and Bert (who barely appears in the book) do enter into a painting and go to a country fair, but without the children.
  • Admiral Boom, who appears a few times in the film as comic relief, appears just once in passing in the book.
  • The tea party on the ceiling comes doesn’t include the jokes that are central to the film scene. The talking dog that alerts Mary to the problem in the movie is actually part of a different story altogether in the book.
  • Katie Nanna has already quit at the start of the book.
  • Jane and Michael have twin, infant siblings who get their own story in the book.
  • The entire sequence on the rooftops appears to be original – Bert, also called the “Match Man” in the book, is clearly a longtime friend of Mary Poppins’ but only makes his appearance as a street artist, not a chimney sweep.
  • The run on Mr. Banks’ bank and Mrs. Banks’ suffragette efforts are original to the film, and in the book, Mary Poppins stays a year or so, rather than the week of the movie.

Yet at the same time, two of the best stories in the book – which is more a collection of stories than a single narrative – is omitted from the film entirely. In one, Mary takes the children to Mrs. Corry’s for gingerbread cookies, only to learn how the stars ended up in the sky. In another, the twins earn top billing, and the reader sees how infants see the world and that we lose something when we grow out of that stage of life.

The difference in Mary Poppins’ character between the book and the film is enormous. In the film, she’s there for the purpose of bringing the slightly neglectful father who is married to his work and has some rather definite ideas about family life back into the loving-father role. In the book, she’s there to trigger Jane and Michael’s imaginations and improve their behavior; Michael in particular has one story where he’s a real brat, and Mary whisks him and Jane around the world visiting “friends” of hers (they’re animals now, but in the original version were apparently people based on unflattering stereotypes).

Unlike the movie, which has a single narrative and draws you into the story and the two main characters (Mary and Bert), the book is just a collection of fun and imaginative stories that doesn’t create the same connection between the reader and the main character. So while I recommend the book because it’s fun and the magical twist in each story is usually very clever, I wasn’t sucked in the way I have been to other great children’s novels like The Phantom Tollbooth.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,
→ December 16, 2008
→ By

TV, radio.

I’ll be on ESPNEWS today at either 3:40 pm or 4:10 pm EST – just waiting for confirmation. Radio hits today include 12:25 pm on ESPN 1050 in New York, 6:40 pm on ESPN 850 in Cleveland, and on AllNight with guest host Mike Salk some time overnight tonight.

Also, the RSS feed should be working again, finally.

Filed Under: Appearances
→ December 14, 2008
→ By

Las Vegas eats.

I was pretty much full for four days straight in Las Vegas; I hit an In-n-Out on the way to the hotel, ended up hungry that afternoon because I had an early lunch and a late dinner, and wasn’t hungry again until I landed at Newark on Friday morning. I’d say that’s a successful trip. I’ll start with breakfast.

Breakfast

I would say that if you don’t mind dropping a little coin and getting a little fat at breakfast, you must hit Café Bouchon in the Venetian. Granted, Jeff Erickson of Rotowire and I were in the mood to try everything, so we might have ordered too much, but everything looked so damn good. The key was the $12 plate of four pastries of your choice; we went with the two pastries of the day, the baked apple croissant and the chocolate-almond croissant, and two off the menu, the lemon-currant scone and the sticky pecan roll. This came first, and I had a sugar high going before the rest of the food came, mostly because once I started eating the pastries I couldn’t stop. The apple croissant had been split the long way, topped with crumbs, and baked until the crumbs browned. The chocolate almond croissant was messy, as good chocolate desserts usually are, with dark chocolate and sliced almonds that were falling out of and off the pastry. Those were the two best pastries of the four, although the scone and sticky bun were good. The scone had a perfect balance of sweetness and lemon flavor, but the sticky bun … well, I’m not sure how you complain about a sticky bun being sticky, but there you go. For the meal, I ordered a bowl of yogurt with honey and strawberries, which was huge but otherwise unremarkable (I’m just a big yogurt eater), and the “French toast” which was more like a bread pudding, served as a ring-molded tower with sliced apples and the maple syrup already incorporated. The toast was soggy – not moist but firm, like in a bread pudding, but just plain soggy. I left most of it and went back to the pastries. Jeff ordered the sourdough waffles with bananas, about which he raved; I hate sourdough waffles and pancakes, so there was no point in filching a bite off his plate. Besides, I’d rather do that to Sheehan because he gets more annoyed it about it.

Update, 2012: I revisited Bouchon in April and had their version of chicken and waffles, roasted chicken with hunter’s sauce and a savory, ultra-crisp waffle, that, while not traditional, was probably the best chicken and waffles dish I’ve ever had.

I went to breakfast at Payard Bistro over at Caesar’s twice. The first time, I inadvertently stopped at the café outside the restaurant, thinking that was all there was; the chocolate croissant was fine, but probably made the day before, and the yogurt/granola parfait featured fresh berries but the “granola” was obviously a bar that had been broken up into pieces. The second time I actually found the restaurant, which is just a single room cordoned off from the main restaurant, and it wins huge points for the setup: It’s a circle with the cooking station in the center, so no matter where you sit, you can see something that the chef is doing. Their menu wasn’t that well tailored to me, with a lot of dishes that included cheese and/or ham (I hate American ham), so I went with the three eggs and potatoes. The eggs, scrambled, were light and fluffy, cooked just to the point of “done” and then stopped on a dime, so they weren’t runny but weren’t dry; they could have used some more seasoning, and they weren’t the best scrambled eggs I’ve ever had, but they were done perfectly, if that makes any sense. The potatoes were ridiculous: fingerlings, halved, cooked in butter until brown, with salt and some herbs. They’re called “pommes rissolet,” a typo for “rissolé,” which means browned in butter (or another animal fat) until browned, and for potatoes can also imply that they were blanched before browning. Of course, all of this wasn’t cheap – about $22, including an expensive pot of tea, before tax and tip. For the same price, you could go to Bouchon, have the four-pastry selection, yogurt, and tea, and be much more satisfied.

Dinner/lunch

The one meal for which I didn’t leave the hotel was lunch, since I didn’t think I could sacrifice that much time in the middle of the day. I went to the Bellagio’s buffet twice, having heard from several people that it was the best buffet on the Strip, and it was actually quite good. The oak-roasted salmon is addictive – perfectly cooked, with a strong, almost smoky flavor of oak. The soy-chili marinated flank steak, duck legs in peanut sauce, and large pastry selection were other highlights; the vegetables were mostly mediocre, the St. Louis ribs were a little boring, and the stir-fried bok choy was very bitter. I stayed away from the sushi bar – no way it’s good, even if it’s fresh – and took the bartender’s (good) recommendations for dessert: chocolate-raspberry mousse and the chocolate-chocolate chip cookies.

I was dying to hit Firefly, a tapas bar on Paradise just off the Strip, after hearing about it on Food Network a few years ago, and liked it enough to go twice. (For research purposes, of course.) The first trip was with Alex Speier of WEEI.com, probably a more adventurous eater than I am, which makes him a good dining partner for (wait for it) research purposes. Anyway, despite some below-average dishes, the food was, on the whole, incredible. If you go there knowing what to order, you should do extremely well, and the prices are very reasonable for the strip. I can’t think of a better way to do this than with bullet points:

  • Bacon-wrapped dates stuffed with almonds: The one dish I ordered twice. The perfect marriage of sweet, salty, smoky, and tart (from the red wine reduction). They’re like candy. Only bacon-ier.
  • Boquerones: Spanish white anchovies, served as canapés on long pieces of toast with roasted red pepper and yellow peppers. They’re nothing like the anchovies you might find on a pizza or in a tin at the supermarket; they’re fresh and soft and just a little bit salty, and since they’re fish, you can pretend that the dish constitutes health food.
  • Artichoke toasts: Same idea, but with a piece of artichoke heart sitting on a toast on a thin layer of “aïoli” (which has become a fancypants synonym for “mayonnaise”), sliced roasted red pepper, and chiffonade of basil. Again, completely fresh, and easy to inhale.
  • Crispy duck rolls with cherry hoisin: I didn’t care for these, but Alex did. The roll’s exterior was greasy, and the hoisin was too sweet/tangy and overwhelmed the flavor of the duck.
  • Pork empanada: Fried, rather than baked, which was a disappointment, because in a tapas bar I expect things to lean more towards the Spanish style. The inside was mushy, the outside was greasy, and the empanada was doused in “aïoli.” I didn’t even eat half of it.
  • Patatas bravas: Now this was a good use of aioli, both in application and in the light hand used to apply it. Small red potatoes roasted in olive oil and tossed with rosemary, finished with a little bit of a spicy mayonnaise.
  • Chicken and chorizo stuffed mushrooms: Nothing special – small creminis stuffed with a tiny amount of chorizo – if there was chicken in there, it was hidden by the sausage – and served with some sort of cheese melted to the bottom of the dish. I’m not sure what the point of the cheese was.
  • Chocolate tres leches cake: An afterthought order that was the star of the show. It’s not a traditional tres leches cake, with a cream or custard filling or some sort of frosting; instead, you get two wedges of a strong cocoa-flavored cake, doused in a mixture of what I assume is three milks (condensed, evaporated, and milk or cream), although the sauce was thinner than I expected, and I doubt it was soaked for the full three hours given the firmness of the cake. It was amazing, with the vanilla/nutmeg flavor of the sauce doing just enough to cut the potential harshness of the cocoa, everything working together to give this chocolate-eggnog flavor that defies prose description. I had to stop eating it only because I was fit to burst.

Alex and I also ventured out to Lotus of Siam, considered one of the best Thai restaurants in the country, a little further off the Strip on Sahara. Neither of us felt qualified to comment on whether it really is one of the best, but it was very good and the service was outstanding. At the server’s suggestion, we started with a Yum Nuah salad, with sliced flank steak and vegetables over mixed greens with a spicy lime-chili dressing. This was about the limit of my spice tolerance, although it was delicious, and I’m pretty sure Alex was mocking me under his breath. I ordered Khao Soi, a northern Thai dish of egg noodles, beef, red onion, and picked vegetables, served – or, more accurately, drowned – in a faintly sweet curry and coconut cream sauce. The flavors mixed well, with the intense tartness of the pickled vegetables helping to offset the sweetness of the sauce, but I could have done with a little less liquid at the bottom of the bowl. I have no idea what Alex ordered – something else I found too hot that he found a little mild. Like Firefly, Lotus was affordable, more evidence that the key to surviving Vegas financially is to eat off the Strip when you can.

I did have one bad meal, at an apparently once-renowned restaurant called Pamplemousse. The interior screamed “faded glamour” – a stupid art-school idea – and the impression was only cemented by the waiter’s comment that a certain menu item was “Mr. Sinatra’s favorite.” (I pointed out that if I were as young as I look, that comment would have meant nothing to me.) A reader had pointed me to the restaurant, raving about the duck, so I ordered it, a roast duck breast with duck confit and roasted potatoes. The owner took my order, since the waiter was nowhere to be found in the empty dining room, and we chatted about where’s from (Aix-en-Provence). Because two large parties had cancelled, the owner left the restaurant shortly after taking my order, and about ten minutes later, the waiter comes to me and asks if I had heard the specials. I said yes, but I had ordered the duck, at which point he informed me that they were out of the duck – making it clear that he knew all along that I had ordered the duck, but was playing some sort of waiter game. This started a downhill spiral; I ordered the fish special, a pan-seared escolar that had no taste and was almost certainly frozen at some point, served with a small dome of white rice that tasted like it came right out of one of those horrid boil-in-bag packages. And it took at least a half an hour from the re-order to delivery, and at that it only arrived after I asked the waiter for an ETA on the meal. The meal also started with a crudité bucket with a nice mustard vinaigrette, but some the vegetables were obviously not fresh and had been cut hours, if not a full day, prior to serving. I imagine once upon a time this was a great restaurant, but the food world has passed it by.

Last spot worth mentioning was Café Gelato in Belagio, where you can get a “small” gelato (bigger than my fist) for $4.75. I went with dulce de leche and chocolate; it was about average, a solid 50, but no better. The gelato was smooth but a little heavy and absolutely not traditional; the chocolate had a good, dark cocoa flavor but the dulce de leche was a little weak.

Filed Under: Food Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
→ December 10, 2008
→ By

Woo hoo.

Yes, I was admitted to the BBRAA this morning. As I mentioned in a comment on a previous thread, I didn’t ask ESPN to submit my name this year, and did not intend to seek membership, but once my name was submitted, I couldn’t retract my name without getting clearance from the powers that be at the Four-Letter.

I am still unclear on why, exactly, I might need to be a member; after conversations with probably a dozen current members, I think the opposite is true – the BBRAA needed people like me, Rob, etc. as members, to try to boost their credibility as an organization in a time when they receive so much criticism for the backwardness and outright hostility towards intelligent analysis (statistical or scouting) displayed in so much mainstream writing, to say nothing of the RBI/wins fetish in BBRAA voting.

I suppose the plus side is that Tim Raines will get one more Hall of Fame vote in 2018, because Lord knows he’s not getting in any time soon.

Filed Under: Media Tagged With: ,
→ December 9, 2008
→ By

Hip-hop hagiographies.

From a CNN story on the rapper Common:

Lyrically, violence has never been his thing; soft-drug use has been mentioned but rarely glamorized; he removed homophobic references from his lyrics years ago; and while there have been hints of misogyny and the occasional N-word in his verses, neither has been a staple of his rhymes.

Well, as long as they’re not staples, that’s okay, then. I’m glad we had this talk.

Filed Under: Media, Music Tagged With: ,
→ December 7, 2008
→ By

The Way of All Flesh.

Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh was #12 on the Modern Library 100 (a cheat, since it was written before 1900 but published posthumously) and made the Bloomsbury 100. I don’t usually give up on books, but I’m setting this one aside, at least for now, after making it through less than 15% of the book.

I’ve got two major problems with the novel. One is the sentences, which are positively Proustian (despite coming years before Proustian sentences existed) and meander between dependent and independent clauses that made me dizzy and, worse, disinterested. But the bigger problem for me was Butler’s creation of a central character for whom he has nothing but a deep, pathological loathing. George Pontifex is a weak, insipid man, barely capable of an independent thought, much less an independent decision, and Butler obviously hates him. George’s father, Theobald, is apparently a stand-in for Butler’s own father, so while I guess it’s OK to work out your daddy issues in novel form, the combination of the two characters makes the book start out at the top of a downward spiral, and 40-odd pages in I was still descending. I guess I should never say never – I did return to Tess of the D’Urbervilles 15 years after putting it down after half a chapter – but it ain’t likely.

Instead I’ll start Richard Russo’s Nobody’s Fool on the flight to Vegas.

Filed Under: Literature Tagged With: , , ,