Finally Went to the "White House"

Here I mean to use the quoted "White House" as the translation for the Casablanca, a neighborhood bar Corrie and I have passed thousands of times in the three years living here, and this past Friday ventured inside for the first time.

This establishment seems to keep strange hours...it's a bar that's more likely to be open on Wednesday morning than a Friday night, so planning a trip over there is difficult. But since it's closer to us than our closest subway, it's the kind of a place you needn't plan to go to. It is directly down Malcolm X Blvd, before the halfway point to the A-train.

We finally saw it looked open when we had some time and some cash money with us, and checked in. The door was locked and bolted. A small elder lady came up (I could see her from behind a small rhombus window), opened the metal gate, then unbolted the door, to see what the commotion was. I asked if it was okay for us to come in and get a cocktail. She eyed Corrie and I closely, and eventually let us in. She was the only person in the entire place.

I never caught her name, but she was about five feet tall, and shrinking, looked in her sixties, but moved like she was in her eighties. She could sure pour a drink, though, and at a reasonable price even. The interior reminded me of the Goodfellas scene when the kill Billy Bats; the lighting and the decor looked just like something out of the early seventies, and the great soul-music she put on fit right in. We would've stayed longer, but I had the market the next day. Corrie was sad to leave her alone again; she(Corrie) even offered to wash our cocktail glasses. The bar elder told us she'd owned the place for forty years, and that she lives on our street, up on Halsey.

We will be returning.

That trip prompted me to want to visit inside a simply titled Brooklynite Gallery, just a block south of the New Casablanca. This gallery has been here for a few months, but, also due to strange hours, Corrie and I haven't been able to get there, besides passing it everyday. Usually, the problem is we have groceries coming home that need to be put away, or are on our way out of town...the hours are like 7 pm to 10 pm Thursday through Saturday, maybe one of the days it opens at 3...

There is this cool thing over the facade, though.

(If you clicked on the link, there is a pause button on the left-side that stops that music. My bad.)

After Three-and-a-Half Years, Leafing!

Sort of!

Corrie and I finally got to see some of the famed foliage during the autumn months, before everything fully comes down. Usually we'd be upstate before the colors changed, then back up after the leaves fell but before it'd snow. So finally, after three-and-a-half years, we got up in time to see some of the real thing.

It was almost a-hundred percent a-flame with deep oranges and reds, dense yellows flowing over ridges like silent and chilly fire, smokeless and beautiful. It was magnificent.

This picture was of a hill directly across from the parking lot of probably the most picturesque Home Depot in America.

So, really, we didn't go on an hours long joy ride through New England marveling at the science that turns the leaves the brilliant "fall" colors, but we did get to see it pretty much up close.

The most beautiful part I remember came this morning, actually, riding the train down to the City from Beacon. That train ride is along the Hudson River, right up along the water for long stretches. This morning, around 8 am, the sun was at that golden angle bringing pure sharp light along the Palisades across the river, the sky was crisp and deep blue, and the riverbanks were fully red and orange, deep and warm looking, snapshots of flames from a distance, a small smattering of yellow that was nearly hushed by the dominant darker tones, mixing smugly with the rusty colored rock.

Feeling Safe?

Back on my mom's birthday, September 10th, there was a shooting in our neighborhood. It was of the drive-by persuasion, which is rare for Bed-Stuy. Young black men shooting each other is sadly less rare out here, as this 'hood has New York's highest homicide rate. That evening Corrie exited the subway to walk the few blocks back to our apartment, and was blocked by police cars and yellow tape, and was forced to take a circuitous way home. Earlier in the day I'd noticed helicopters hovering loudly for a solid ninety minutes, rattling the entire neighborhood. The next day there was this story in the paper. It highlights the grim and tragic tale in whatever details were made available to the cops by normally uncooperative witnesses.

A few days later, this made it's second appearance in our area, just away from the subway. It first appeared here a while ago, and was packed up soon after. I took this picture today, more than a month later.

Feel any safer?

Also, strangely in the same issue of the paper, I saw a photograph that looked familiar, that of a broken fire-hydrant that had been leaking for weeks, and that I was about to call 311 (our all-around helper line) to fix. I thought the article was about the broken and wasteful hydrant. It wasn't. It was about an apartment building across the street that hadn't had water for two months, and the hydrant had been broken by these residents so they could get some water for their daily needs. Another sad story, this one about a landlord dying before making repairs, about no heirs to rescue the building, about no electricity and water, and about another ghetto story of how it really works can be found here.

The picture from the paper was almost the same one that follows (but closer up), but the website has a picture of the building.

Forty and Counting

I may have turned thirty this year, but my Yankees have advanced to the World Series for the first time since 2003...around here that's a drought, but try telling the Cubbies that.

Corrie and I spent the weekend out in Beacon at Cousin Josh's (I showed them how to set tile...more on that later), and they were gracious to let me watch Game 6 against the Angels on their large television. I thought it was pretty nice of them since they don't care for baseball, and Elizabeth, being from Massachusetts, has a special dislike of the Yankees (and Jeter specifically, which isn't rare among Yankee haters out there).

It didn't help that sporadically I was screaming and cursing at the screen as Corrie tried to calm me and get my blood-pressure back to safe levels. I posted here a while back about watching the screen at MLB.com and itchily awaiting the colored circles to show up...I was notified by my good friend Ryan about specific websites that stream games like that for free. I found one and settled in last Thursday at my lappy screen to watch Game 5 on a live stream for ex-pats living in France.

I was a few minutes late and missed the Yankees starting pitcher give up four runs in his first thirteen pitches. He settled in, and I came and went from watching the game, getting aggravated that the Angels kept being successful throwing so much off-speed cheese (I swear I've never seen so many off-speed pitches in a series before). One time I came back and the Yankees had scored six runs in an inning, and were a few outs from advancing to the World Series. Burnett, the starter for the Yanks, came out when he shouldn't have, gave up a hit and a walk, then they brought in Damaso Marte, and I almost had a heart attack...the papers here love this lefty Marte, but in all the times I've seen him pitch in bars during this season, I don't think I've ever seen him get a single person out. Of course he gives up a run, and they bring in the struggling youngster Hughes, who coughs up the lead, and the game, and they had to travel back to the Bronx for last night's game, while I was ready to drink a bottle of whiskey, which probably wouldn't have helped my blood-pressure.

So I watched last night with Corrie and Josh and Elizabeth, who thanked me for being cool with there constant stream of trash talking, bad-Yankee-voodoo, and joking remarks. In between hilarious comments I tried to enlighten them on the strategy, the rules, the way to effectively pitch to certain batters, what happens when there's an error (Kazmir tossing it away? Yikes, these guys just couldn't get out of their own way)...I don't think they're fans now, but it was fun to watch with people you care about. Even Corrie got to give some lessons on things, having learned from the lessons I gave her.

But, the "Forty" in the title of this post alludes to this being the fortieth pennant for the Yankees--their fortieth trip to the World Series, more than twice as many as the next team, the Dodgers, who have eighteen World Series appearances.

Some Portuguese Literature

While deciding what to read next, I settled during the interim to read Jose Saramago's Death With Interruptions. I'd read about this book in the New Yorker months ago, and it sounded interesting...then later, I'd read about the other of Portugal's two most well-known contemporary authors, Antonio Lobo Antunes, and thought I should find some stuff by him. Lobo Antunes always has an eye cast backwards to the historical time of Portuguese conquests in Africa, South America, and their foothold in India...one novel has Magellan showing up, five-hundred-years late, sailing into Lisbon towing the nation of Brazil behind his ship...

But here I'm reading Death With Interruptions. Saramago's concept is that death, specifically with the small "d", even though it's a person, has taken a vacation, and at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Day no one dies. Horrific car accidents caused by alcoholic consumption end with mutilated bodies that refuse to turn into corpses. Elders on the cusp of death remain so indefinitely. At first this scenario, to the people living it, is like a utopian dream: we've conquered death. But, of course, the church is very upset (with no death there's no resurrection, with no resurrection there's no christianity) as well as the insurance industry and the undertaker industry. A black-market racket develops taking those on the cusp of death over the national lines, into one of the neighboring countries where death is still at work.

This is all very interesting, but sixty pages into the short book there are a two things that strike me. First, so far, there are no named characters at all, just titled voices like "the prime minister" and "the grandfather" of the poor country family we watch for a few pages. I don't think it's necessary to have characters to become emotionally involved with for a novel to work, but, I could be wrong, and I only say that characters may not be necessary because what I want to think can work for literature is that the obliteration of normal rules won't necessarily obliterate the art. I could be jumping to conclusions, but here it seems precarious, like the concept is the star, and we, as readers, should simply marvel in the quaint scenes that follow.

The second thing that struck me, something that leads this book to read more like a college student's transcript of a sci-fi movie treatment he's working on, is that the dialogue is not written in a conventional western way. As a reader, one gets used to seeing quotation marks breaking up dialogue, paragraph spacing being used, and the non-verbal action being housed outside of the quotes and commas. Here, Saramago crams entire conversations into super-duper run-on sentences, taking up entire pages sometimes, the actual spoken dialogue and non-verbal action all separated by commas, and capital letters being employed to signify that a voice has changed. So, on one hand, this looks like college-student summary, and on the other, it looks brilliant and poetic. Doing the dialogue this way lets him show characters and scenes that have emotion without needing the reader, or expecting the reader, to come away with any attachment to said characters. That's what really makes the concept the star.

I guess I did find something to read, not just for the interim.

A Note on Baseball: A Comparison That is Favorable to the Yankees

I am a Yankee fan. I freely admit this, and have for a long enough time, even since before they had Jeter and Big Mo and were winning World Series' in the late 90s.

I'd always felt that while, yes, the ownership style of Boss Steinbrenner was weakening at best, or destroying at worst, the financial fabric of the game, that he was acting in a way--spending the most money--that was in the interest of the fans of the New York Yankees: trying to put a perennial winner out on the field. Yes, the Yankees spend the most, and yes, they make the most money through licensing a brand that has come to signify more than a baseball team. But they pour it back into the team, trying to create a winner.

Other teams have created winners with less resources; this is obviously true since the last eight champions have not been the Yankees. One can see how that works in Tom Verducci and Joe Torre's book, about exploiting inefficiencies in the market, about learning the lessons from Billy Beane's MoneyBall, and about how the Yankees failed miserably at that science during the times from 2004 to 2008.

One highlight from that book is the Central Fund. The Central Fund is a trough of money that is filled by joint business ventures like MLB.com, and doled out in equal proportions to the teams. Teams like the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, and Cubs still (and probably always will) have a competitive advantage in terms of resources from television deals and licensing, but they each receive the same proportion of money from the Central Fund that smaller-market teams get. But, for the smaller-market teams, the money from the Central Fund helps them lock up their younger players to contracts, avoiding arbitration-eligible years and the start of free-agency, making it harder for teams like the Yankees or Cubs to just go out and buy the best young players. Each team, before a television or radio deal is signed, before they sell a single ticket or beer at their stadium, starts off a season with a nut of something like $35 million from the Central Fund. For the Yankees and Red Sox, this probably helps put nice cushions on their expensive seats; for the Rays and Indians (before this past season), this helped them lock up their good young rookies...then you have the Pittsburgh Pirates.

The Pirates have one of the oldest and most storied franchises in baseball. They've won World Series', fielded teams that included Honus Wagner, Bill Madlock, Willie Stargell, the Waner brothers, and of course the first Latino Hall of Famer, Roberto Clemente. Now? At least ten years of losing ball and the appearance of selling off their good young players just as they reach a point of being able to command a decent (by baseball standards) pay. They built a new stadium, hosted the All Star Game, drummed up some recognition for Pittsburgh as a new center for tech-commerce and industry, all the while still selling off their best players and staffing the team like a JV squad, and just hoping for fifty victories a year...and pocketing the Central Fund money. They don't lock up their good young talent, even though you never have to pay as much as you would later when they're a free agent, they don't pour that money into winning baseball...they pour it into their pockets. That's what it looks like anyway. The old cliche phrase 'Wait 'til next year' in Pittsburgh is now 'Wait 'til the Steelers' season starts'...

On the one hand, you've got a team that spends the most money, even while expecting things no team in any sport should be allowed to expect, and on the other, a team ownership that to whom baseball is a business and nothing else, lining their accounts, and selling off their best players once they get good enough to be worth something.

A Note on The Simpsons

I came across (or, more accurately, was sent)(thanks, mom) an unauthorized and unofficial history of The Simpsons, written in a snippet, oral tradition style.

Some of the way through it, I can definitely say I've learned things. It starts out with some background on Matt Groening, about his schooling, his college years, about moving to LA and starting Life in Hell, the comic strip that got the attention of Jim Brooks. The book describes the early stressful days at Fox, about their attempt to become a fourth network. It talks about Tracey Ullman, and the little bumper spots of animation, and about how there had been two different casts of characters, by two separate animation creators and groups (one was obviously dropped after a short while). About these things I knew some, but not in the details given here.

Then I read things of which I had no idea: that The Simpsons, as a satirical and heartwarming animation program, as a groundbreaking prime-time series, as an entity that continues to affect all realms of comedy in this country to this day was really the brainchild of Sam Simon, one of the three names on the television at the end of the opening credits under the "Developed by" credit (along with Jim Brooks and Matt Groening). It seems like from this book, if you like The Simpsons, then you're a fan of Sam Simon's work.

Whether a gruff dad, bratty kids, and a doting mom who filled time and let the audience of a sketch show know the sketch was over could become a viable series on their own was very much in question. Matt Groening had provided the template; Jim Brooks would float in occasionally and add minor touches to scenes that would reinforce the families lovingness and reality (not a small contribution); but Sam Simon hand-picked the entire writing staff. He flushed out the town of Springfield. He gave the characters their now-known characterizations. An accomplished television writer, producer, brilliantly hilarious and quite caustic, Simon was also an excellent cartoonist, and the smoothing out of the characters from the first season into what we, as fans, understand as their final look was done by him.

Matt Groening was more involved in the licensing of the various products that made him incredibly wealthy than he was with the day-to-day operations of the show. Besides, his history working in television was zero, and the skills he brought to the table as a cartoonist were ill-suited for the rigors of 22-minute television-script writing. Sam Simon turned an idea--How about a series about that animated family from Tracey--into the institution it became, and is, today, through one brilliant classic episode after another, full of true emotion, sight gags, subversive wit, and real life situations.

Sam Simon left the show after the fourth season, the relationship between he and Groening fluctuated between non-talking to yelling and screaming, mainly due (it appears) to Groening happily taking all the credit for making the show a success, and Simon being basically ignored. Simon also seemed to feel he got shafted from the financial end of the merchandising. In the end, when he left, he took no severance package and instead settled on future points...it seems he makes about $20 to $30 million a year--still--even while it's been fifteen years since he was running the show.

Simon had been a genius who'd worked on Taxi and Cheers, and Groening was a starving artist riding the bus and searching the shag carpet in his hovel for change to get a burger...which story would you guess would be the one picked up by the major media outlets once the show hit the big-time? Industry Insider makes Good Show a Success, or Starving Cartoonist Hits Jackpot and is King of TV? (That's a paraphrase from the book itself, as someone was trying to console a furious Sam Simon.)

Not owning any seasons earlier than the fifth, I really had no idea that Sam's contribution was as great as it was.