I dropped a penny in the river, back in the days I lived in New York. The
idea came from a song by Ike and Tina Turner. Im Blue shoobedoobe. I
could not sleep. I could not sleep in rooms of spilt gypsy rose wine.
Not when I was remembering the wind and wondering was it a friend. But
there was no wind in the city. And I lived in an underworld there,
unable to act. Frying my brain in August. City that consists of well-placed pretensions. I read the papers and bopped
around too. I had entered the island sanatorium. At the Mercer saw
Ahmet Ertegun with Jackie Kennedy on his arm. And thought: This is a
dangerous time for those not chauffeured. Cause it was a city of
strange phantoms. Tic Tic Tic. My brain was cogitating. Addicted were
the people of night – mugs, zombies, appearing in their time. Walking
down the street was cause for alarm. You had to be there. You must
remember this: think of your eyes as you look at the police. You will
scurry to the door with its periscope eye hole when you hear the bump in
the hall. You omnivorously eye the streets you walk and, dexterous,
never fumble for door keys. The violence is in the papers. It stalks
you peripherally. When you are in the club you are safe for an hour.
The penny in the river is dated 1972.
Saturday, June 23, 2012
Tuesday, June 12, 2012
Saturday, June 02, 2012
Moneyball: Walkoff homer of the mind
As a child, Jack Kerouac's personal fantasy baseball league
was byzantine, elaborate and imaginative. The great writer as a young tyke
type-writ correspondence that accompanied trades and acquisitions. And rosters
and box scores. "He charted the exploits of made-up players. He collected
their stats, analyzed their performance..." writes NYTimes reviewing a
curation by New York Public Library's Isaac Gewirtz. ( “Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy
Sports and the King of the Beats)
Like the author who runs a world, or the collector who conjures
one in a bottle, many a modern baseball fan wants to create their own team or
league, and the Internet has super-enabled this rotisserie spirit. At the base
is the drive to call the tune. It is the motive in the heart of Oakland Athletics'
general manager Billy Beane, as depicted in Michael Lewis' Moneyball. It
depicts the flowering of a statistically-centered approach to baseball player
strategy that has been trending up in recent years. It is a new way of figuring
out “what will happen.”
This was a very good film with very able Brad Pitt. The film’s
producers and Pitt very wisely made Beane a real dramatic hero, while in the
book he is more an example of way of thinking about predictability. Vis-à-vis the
film, the book is less a story, more a collection of scenes, in the form of New
Journalism, Lewis is embedded in the Oakland Athletics front office. In
episodes he tells what he saw. He gets inside Billy Beane's mind. Well, Billy
tells him stuff and then he presents it in the form “Beane thought…”
Highlights:
Bill is … “the guy who knows wha’s going to happen even
before it does…” - p. 191
“If you have twelve different pitchers you have to speak twelve
different languages.” – p. 252
“The Internet was good at gathering people together from different
places with common interests.” - p. 235
Page numbers refer to Norton paperback, 2004 edition?
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