To hold season tickets and be able to go to any Yankees home game any time I want and to feel, unlike with other teams I have backed and continue to back, that as long as the Yankees are not behind by double digits there is a chance they can come back and win.
To believe that even on a dreary day and in a dreary game like today's 6-1 loss to Oakland. (After a Yankee win, the stadium sound system plays Frank's version of New York, New York. After a loss, it is a female jazzy version I don't recognize.)
To sit in Yankee Stadium, refurbished twice and soon to be replaced, but still haunted by legendary ghosts and served with the worst selection of concessions in the major leagues -- at least of those stadiums I know -- and where for some reason only light beer is sold in the upper deck.
To be able nonetheless to at least get a hot Italian sausage.
To hear this fan dialogue -- him: "It was a ball, ump." Her (embarrassed): "Please shut up." Him: "I paid $60 for this seat and I should shut up??!!"
To then jog home after the game, a couple beers content, through Harlem to our apartment on Broadway.
Sweet!
Sunday, May 21, 2006
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Three Days -- April 6-8
April 6: We went to see the Rangers beat the Islanders 3-1 in a game notable only for Jagr telling the referee that he did not score the goal that would have given him the single season Ranger goal scoring record. Plenty of games left. The real action, as it often is at Ranger games, was in the stands where DD kept hearing birdcall shouts coming from the crowd. It turns out -- we learned thanks to the Rainman-like commentary from a fan sitting behind us -- that those are supposed to be gull sounds to taunt the Islanders. And another fan sitting beside us gave his version of the origin of the whistle call and the answering chant of "Potvin sucks." Turns out years ago Potvin ended Ulf Nielsen's career by taking him down illegally in a corner and wrecking his knee. The organist that night played the notes that are now whistled to encourage a "Let's Go, Rangers" chant, but instead the crowd responded, "Potvin sucks." The semi-obscenity caused the organist to immediately drop the bit, but the ever-inventive Ranger fans carried it on with the whistles and years later, and Potvin long-retired, the tradition continues at every game. And, since the Islanders had been eliminated from playoff possibilities the night before, for much of the third period the crowd chanted them with "Sea-son's o-ver, sea-son's over."
April 7: Friday night with Neko Case was mediocre, but all around me the rest of the audience seemed to disagree. Webster Hall was off--putting as well, odd layout and at the end of the evening large bouncers blocked one exit and the entire main level audience had to filter down a single narrow staircase. If I'd had my cell, would have called the fire marshal. Highlights of the evening were the a capella first song; Buckets of Rain; a very pretty version of the standard I'll Be Around; Hex; and Neko's wonderful red hair. Lowlights -- inane patter; Neko's apparently inevitable dissatisfaction with sound equipment (I've seen her three times and twice she's spent about the first third of the concert unhappy with the sound. Perhaps it's her way of dealing with performance jitters.); a band less good than the Sadies or New Pornographers; Wayfaring Stranger as the first encore -- who can possibly bring anything new to that song?; and, for reasons that defy all the laws of time, space, nature and gravity, Neko's acceding to an audience request to sing We're An American Band as the final encore. It was an awful song three decades ago and more with Grand Funk Railroad (certainly a Top Ten contender for worst band ever) and the intervening years have done nothing to improve it, not even with Neko.
April 8: Less than twelve hours after Neko we went to the Met to hear a lecture on The Imperial Estates of St. Petersburg. It was a touch like being back in large lecture halls at Cal, catching a few winks here and there, but with the advantage of knowing there would not be a midterm or final exam. Up to lunch afterward in the Trustees Dining Room, an oasis of quiet above Central Park in that most often thronged museum. Although, truly, with a few turns along the Met's corridors and rooms, there are always quiet, empty and cool places to be alone with the art. The rain came hard and steady against the slanted windows, obscuring the newly blossoming trees in the park. Food was expensive and not especially memorable, but it was -- and will be -- a really nice addition to a day at the Met and in autumn or a snowy winter day it should be a lovely vantage point for the Park. Because of DD's interest, we then went to "Hatshepsut From Queen to Pharaoh," making sure to get our audio guides, the best five bucks one can spend at the Met -- or for that matter at any great museum. Hatshepsut is fascinating, married to her half-brother, Thutmose II, and, on his death, regent for her nephew, Thutmose III, who was a small boy when Thutmose II died. At some point, for reasons that are not yet known, she made herself Pharaoh, and co-ruled -- as the senior of the two -- with her nephew for better than 20 years, one of only a handful of female Pharaohs. Then, 20 years after her death, Thutmose -- a greatly successful Pharaoh and warrior in his own right -- systematically set out to erase all traces of her rule. She was only rediscovered in the mid-19th century by a French Egyptologist puzzled at the references to "her" in ruins obviously describing a Pharaoh. The art is varied and spectacular, from large recovered and painfully pieced together sphinxes and statutes depicting Hatshepsut, some disguising her female characteristics, others reveling in them. (When Thutmose ordered the destruction of her existence, all her statuary likenesses were smashed, dumped into a large pit and buried where, ironically, they rested safe from looting until a Met expedition in 1923 or so.) Some of the gold metal slippers and fingernail caps buried on Thutmose's wives are so delicate and well-preserved that they could have made in the last decade instead of 3700 years ago, when -- the show reminds us -- the pyramids had already stood for more than a thousand years. So it's humbling to stand among all this and moving to find similar beliefs and faith -- from the funerary statue of Satepihu, described as a local headman and overseer of priests: "Your heart will guide you and your limbs will obey you. You will prevail over the floodwaters and the north wind that issues from the Marshlands. You will eat bread whenever you desire, as you did when you were alive. You will see Re everyday, and your face will behold the disk when it rises."
These things in barely 36 hours, where else this variety?
April 7: Friday night with Neko Case was mediocre, but all around me the rest of the audience seemed to disagree. Webster Hall was off--putting as well, odd layout and at the end of the evening large bouncers blocked one exit and the entire main level audience had to filter down a single narrow staircase. If I'd had my cell, would have called the fire marshal. Highlights of the evening were the a capella first song; Buckets of Rain; a very pretty version of the standard I'll Be Around; Hex; and Neko's wonderful red hair. Lowlights -- inane patter; Neko's apparently inevitable dissatisfaction with sound equipment (I've seen her three times and twice she's spent about the first third of the concert unhappy with the sound. Perhaps it's her way of dealing with performance jitters.); a band less good than the Sadies or New Pornographers; Wayfaring Stranger as the first encore -- who can possibly bring anything new to that song?; and, for reasons that defy all the laws of time, space, nature and gravity, Neko's acceding to an audience request to sing We're An American Band as the final encore. It was an awful song three decades ago and more with Grand Funk Railroad (certainly a Top Ten contender for worst band ever) and the intervening years have done nothing to improve it, not even with Neko.
April 8: Less than twelve hours after Neko we went to the Met to hear a lecture on The Imperial Estates of St. Petersburg. It was a touch like being back in large lecture halls at Cal, catching a few winks here and there, but with the advantage of knowing there would not be a midterm or final exam. Up to lunch afterward in the Trustees Dining Room, an oasis of quiet above Central Park in that most often thronged museum. Although, truly, with a few turns along the Met's corridors and rooms, there are always quiet, empty and cool places to be alone with the art. The rain came hard and steady against the slanted windows, obscuring the newly blossoming trees in the park. Food was expensive and not especially memorable, but it was -- and will be -- a really nice addition to a day at the Met and in autumn or a snowy winter day it should be a lovely vantage point for the Park. Because of DD's interest, we then went to "Hatshepsut From Queen to Pharaoh," making sure to get our audio guides, the best five bucks one can spend at the Met -- or for that matter at any great museum. Hatshepsut is fascinating, married to her half-brother, Thutmose II, and, on his death, regent for her nephew, Thutmose III, who was a small boy when Thutmose II died. At some point, for reasons that are not yet known, she made herself Pharaoh, and co-ruled -- as the senior of the two -- with her nephew for better than 20 years, one of only a handful of female Pharaohs. Then, 20 years after her death, Thutmose -- a greatly successful Pharaoh and warrior in his own right -- systematically set out to erase all traces of her rule. She was only rediscovered in the mid-19th century by a French Egyptologist puzzled at the references to "her" in ruins obviously describing a Pharaoh. The art is varied and spectacular, from large recovered and painfully pieced together sphinxes and statutes depicting Hatshepsut, some disguising her female characteristics, others reveling in them. (When Thutmose ordered the destruction of her existence, all her statuary likenesses were smashed, dumped into a large pit and buried where, ironically, they rested safe from looting until a Met expedition in 1923 or so.) Some of the gold metal slippers and fingernail caps buried on Thutmose's wives are so delicate and well-preserved that they could have made in the last decade instead of 3700 years ago, when -- the show reminds us -- the pyramids had already stood for more than a thousand years. So it's humbling to stand among all this and moving to find similar beliefs and faith -- from the funerary statue of Satepihu, described as a local headman and overseer of priests: "Your heart will guide you and your limbs will obey you. You will prevail over the floodwaters and the north wind that issues from the Marshlands. You will eat bread whenever you desire, as you did when you were alive. You will see Re everyday, and your face will behold the disk when it rises."
These things in barely 36 hours, where else this variety?
New York Now
We live in New York now. I've been telling stories about it to friends. Some of them encouraged a blog. Why not?
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