On a warm day last May, Neo Silva was baptized in a glorious Italian church on Carmine Street in Greenwich Village, in the presence of his parents, Celia and Altenir. Seven-plus months later, in summer in Rio, Neo encounters the new statue of Antonio Carlos Jobim near the beach in Ipanema. No matter what hemisphere you are in, Feliz Ano Novo, with special thanks to Brazil for being the permanent heart and soul of Jogo Bonito, the beautiful game, and the source of Tom Jobim and La Garota de Ipanema. Wanna feel warm? One thing I have noticed: when you don’t watch football,
Your brain does not become concussed. I have not watched a down all season, And don’t plan to start now. Best thing about retirement Is not having to trek to the Meadowlands. Unchurched on Sundays, I thank the maker for sweet entire liberated days. One Saturday we were enjoying barbecue in Red Hook, And a college game was blaring over my shoulder. Somewhere in the South. Alabama. Ole Miss. Whatever. The cadence was familiar. Run-pass-kick. * * * I think I could still love basketball, But that is impossible In a city of new pencil skyscrapers And Carmel Anthony. I cannot believe Phil Jackson took that job Without permission to unload him. The Knicks are currently 5-and-26. I would have thought with a gunner like Melo They would at least Be 6-and-25. * * * Soccer helps, but it comes at the wrong time of day. I need to write in the morning. Still, Boxing Day. I love that name. Rooney and Stevie Gerrard and even that vile John Terry. There’ll always be an England -- Maybe into the knockout round of the World Cup. * * * My dream (see Tim Rohan’s piece in the Sunday Times) Is that on the first warm day of spring I will slip into the vast empty steppes near the food court, With a mozzarella hero from Mama’s, In the presence of other hard-core lifer true believers, Who are not there to take freaking selfies. Entire sections for each pilgrim, We separately watch Lagares go back on a fly ball, (“He’s got it,” I reassure my wife, when we watch at home), And DeGrom’s hair and arms flap in the spring breeze. And the two kids strut out of the bullpen, And earnest Daniel Murphy (the Peepul’s Cherce). That sustains me Through the winter of bad teams and ugly new buildings. The glow of the galaxies, during the longest nights of the year up north? Celestial Hanukkah candles perhaps or star of wonder, star of night?
This could be a job for Neil deGrasse Tyson. I called Anjali, our grand-daughter. "What is that?" I wondered if she had been fiddling with some supra-lens, up in some observatory, aiming toward the night skies. "I was hungry," she explained with a giggle. "I was making some mashed potatoes in the microwave." Okay. She used a glass plate to cover the dish. When she took out the plate, there was condensation on it. "I went outside and got some leaves and put them on my table. Then I put the plate on top of it." She usually takes about 15 seconds for a photograph. She points her iphone 5s and knows something will come of it. No re-takes. She just knows. "I was just messing around," she said. So life is not a fountain, as the guru maintained. Instead, life is a plate of nuked mashed potatoes. Happy solstice. Happy carbs. Happy comfort food. Happy New Year. Happy mysteries. * * * For more photos by Anjali, please see: http://www.photographybyanjali.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=43010&AKey=M235PYD5 8 Comments Mendel 12/25/2014 10:04am Got yourself quite an improvisor there, George. Happy Holidays! Reply George Vecsey 12/25/2014 11:32am Dear Mendel, thank you for noticing. We just put away our menorah, all is well. Happy Holidays, GV Reply Alan Rubinlink 12/25/2014 11:21am Anjali has a wonderful combination of imagination and a keen eye. Thanks for the link to her web site. We do not have to depend upon your occasional postings to enjoy her work. Reply George Vecsey 12/25/2014 11:35am Dear Alan, thanks for the nice words. She gave us actual photos of 20 of her best....Our best to you both up north. Happy Holidays, GV Reply Sad Quoteslink 12/27/2014 1:53am Really interesting article!The quotes here you mention about happy new year messages for friends are really great and i like it.Thanks for sharing the article about happy new year messages for friends and happy new year in advance:-) <a href="http://dailyhindisms.com/happy-new-year-2015-sms-messages-in-english/">happy new year messages for friends</a> Reply Thor A. Larsen 12/29/2014 10:31pm Dear George Enjoy this relaxing post-Christmas period and encourage your very talented grand-daughter Anjali to keep them coming! I love her beautiful, imaginative creations! Very Best Wishes to all for the New Year. Reply Brian Savin 12/30/2014 9:35am Figured it couldn't be a golden sun shining through dense leaves at this time of year -- pretty cool. But inasmuch as we just cleaned up 22 multi-course place settings over two days of holiday feasting, your granddaughter just gave me an idea......a very bad idea...... George, it might be of interest to take your granddaughter to see something we just saw week before last at the Met Museum that blew us away. They recently created a room to house the Thomas Hart Benton mural he had painted for the New School. What a incredibly moving story it tells of our country during the depression years. An inspiration piece! Reply delhi vidhan sabha chunav parinam votes gintilink 02/07/2015 3:44pm Here is Delhi election survey opinion exit polls results seats vidhan sabha CM candidates date prediction news assemble announcement manifesto aap vs bjp final party budget chief minister government Reply The glow of the galaxies, during the longest nights of the year up north? Celestial Hanukkah candles perhaps or star of wonder, star of night?
This could be a job for Neil deGrasse Tyson. I called Anjali, our grand-daughter. "What is that?" I wondered if she had been fiddling with some supra-lens, up in some observatory, aiming toward the night skies. "I was hungry," she explained with a giggle. "I was making some mashed potatoes in the microwave." Okay. She used a glass plate to cover the dish. When she took out the plate, there was condensation on it. "I went outside and got some leaves and put them on my table. Then I put the plate on top of it." She usually takes about 15 seconds for a photograph. She points her iphone 5s and knows something will come of it. No re-takes. She just knows. "I was just messing around," she said. So life is not a fountain, as the guru maintained. Instead, life is a plate of nuked mashed potatoes. Happy solstice. Happy carbs. Happy comfort food. Happy New Year. Happy mysteries. * * * For more photos by Anjali, please see: http://www.photographybyanjali.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=43010&AKey=M235PYD5 Myrtle Avenue. Even before Saturday, the name made me hear the terrible sound of police knuckles against steel lockers in the back room of the station house, the curses and the cries and the helplessness.
That memory is from the dark days of January of 1973, when a police officer was killed on duty under bisecting elevated trains at the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway in the Bushwick neighborhood. Last Saturday it happened again, four blocks away at the corner of Tompkins and Myrtle, in adjacent Bedford-Stuyvesant. Two officers were assassinated as they sat in their car. It never ends. In 1973, Officer Stephen R. Gilroy was killed during a botched robbery at a sporting goods store, when four young men, caught up in an American Black Muslim rivalry, had tried to arm themselves. For two days, the Bushwick neighborhood was shut down, power to the El cut off. But no more shots were fired because one of the great cops of New York, Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Ward, used modern siege tactics to wait out the men inside. At 1 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, promised they would not be gunned down, the men surrendered. As part of the huge Times contingent that weekend, I was posted at the station house when three of the men (one went to the hospital) were booked, as officers pounded their lockers in frustration. I also covered Stephen Gilroy’s funeral a few days later. To this day, I cannot hear bagpipes without thinking of the family coming out of the handsome old church in Brooklyn. This year Americans have learned about senseless deaths in Ferguson, Mo., and Staten Island. I’ve read the stories, seen the videos, heard the interviews, parsed the testimony, second-guessed the grand jury work. My conclusion is that the tactics that Benjamin Ward espoused – patience, logic, fairness, rules, and, yes, toughness – would have kept Michael Brown and Eric Garner very much alive. Benjamin Ward later became New York's first African-American police commissioner. I thought of him this summer when I visited the intersection of Myrtle and Broadway. Somebody is doing a reprise of the siege, and I was dredging up my memories, as one of the younger reporters on the scene that sad weekend. In late August young (white) people were clumping down the steep staircase from the El, lugging roller suitcases, moving into Bushwick, to rehabbed houses on side streets. I had lunch in a hipster place where they served crispy kale. The sporting goods store is now a peluqueria – a hair salon. All 12 chairs were busy on a summer Saturday morning. Life was going on. In the wake of Brown and Garner and other needless deaths, most protests have been peaceful, as if people had heard of Gandhi and King and John Lewis, but on the nearby Brooklyn Bridge somebody threw a garbage can at police and others jumped cops who were keeping the peace. All I know is, Violence begets violence. When I was in Cuba in 1991, aging baseball fans asked about the old Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox.
How was Bob Feller? How was Al Lopez? They were polishing ancient memories the way they maintained vintage 1950’s cars. They loved the game itself, debated the strategy of their national teams, held on to the history of the old banished professional clubs like Almendares of Havana. This was their national sport, brought there in the 1860’s by Cubans named Guillo who had worked in Mobile, Ala., and nourished by Esteban Bellan who played for Fordham University and the old professional Troy Haymakers. Later, Americans came for the Spanish-American War and played baseball in their leisure time. Baseball is now part of the patrimony. In the inescapable age of the Web and videos, information crackling over the narrow sea between Florida and Cuba, fans know that Yasiel Puig and Aroldis Chapman have made it big in the major leagues. Is there more where they came from? This is the first question people ask of a sports columnist who went to Cuba for the 1991 Pan-American Games and has kept up on it ever since. Perhaps the national baseball treasures would be the most desired product in Cuba (although, as Rachel Maddow pointed out, Cuban-trained ballet dancers are in demand all over the U.S.) The level of potential major-league talent may be very thin. Plus, it’s really not important. What matters is that Cubans have been starved by the block-headed policies of Fidel and the follies of American leaders. Now President Obama is bringing rationality to half a century of mutual apartheid. Cubans have been living in many forms of poverty. I got the feel in 1991, including a trip to the Bay of Pigs. *- I discovered I could buy items like shampoo – shampoo! – in a dollar store to which I had access because of my journalist credential for the Pan-American Games. *- A well-placed Cuban, volunteering as a journalistic resource, admitted to not minding a hot shower in a hotel. *- Our interpreter, who spoke perfect English, had to wait for two straggling buses to get home after a 12-hour day. We had to persuade her to take a cab we provided. My talented new friends were strangers in their own land. Never underestimate the anger in the aging Cuban-Americans, who lost so much. But life goes on. Surely, there are more players like Minnie Miñoso and Tony Pérez in Cuba. But more important, there are people who need nourishment and work and hope. And shampoo. And visas to travel across the narrow sea -- not in a flimsy boat like Orlando Hernandez, El Duque, but in something safe. Baseball is the least of it. Totally by coincidence, I am reading the wonderful biography by Robert K. Massie, “Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman,” and happened upon her very strong opinion of torture.
Catherine was one of the most intelligent monarchs in history – a minor Prussian princess imported to Russia as a wife for the insipid heir. She read and spoke French fluently and educated herself from lovers and advisors; she communicated with Voltaire and Diderot and other philosophes. And she soon took over the crown from her dangerously helpless husband, Peter III, who quickly died at some remove from her. In 1765, as empress, Catherine wrote series of “guiding principles” (Massie’s words), a Nakaz, which suggested changes in Russian laws. Even an empress had to run them past ministers and parliament, and she saw her thoughts whittled down considerably, but on July 30, 1767, she issued: “Instruction of Her Imperial Majesty Catherine the Second for the Commission Charges with Preparing a Project of a New Code of Laws.” One of the strongest passages was about torture. Massie, writing about the 18th Century, makes no link to the 21st Century, but he does note her words: What right can give anyone authority to inflict torture upon a citizen when it is still unknown whether he is innocent or guilty? By law, every person is innocent until his crime is proved…The accused party on the rack, while in the agonies of torture, is not master enough of himself to be able to declare the truth…The sensation of pain may rise to such a height, that it will leave him no longer the liberty of producing any proper act of will except what at that very instant he believes may release him from that pain. In such an extremity, even an innocent person will cry out, “Guilty!” provided they cease to torture him…Then the judges will be uncertain whether they have an innocent or guilty person before them. The rack, therefore, is a sure method of condemning an innocent person whose constitution is weak, and of acquitting the guilty who depends upon his bodily strength. Massie adds: “Catherine also condemned torture on purely humanitarian grounds: ‘All punishments by which the human body might be maimed are barbarism,’ she wrote.” I note from the Internet that several people have noted the link between her Nakaz and current events. (Catherine also condemned many facets of serfdom, or slavery.) She continued to rule with dependence on force and undoubtedly things went on (like the mysterious death of her husband) that were not unlike what took place in the dungeons of the KGB – or the interrogation pits of the American government. Nearly 250 years later. Catherine’s common sense and ideals still ring true When I was in grade school, whenever I had spare time, I would take out “Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels,” about his adventures around the world.
Halliburton was a daredevil writer who once swam the Panama Canal – took him 10 days – and paid the toll -- 36 cents. He jumped 70 feet from the Sacrificial Altar for brides in Chichen Itza, Yucatán. He rode an elephant, just like Hannibal, across St. Bernard’s Pass in Switzerland. His writing was more than about his stunts. He loved cities, expressing awe at the bridge spanning the Golden Gate, raving about the skyscrapers of New York City, describing the border between Europe and Asia -- Istanbul. He gave me wanderlust. I sat in the classroom in leafy Queens and dreamed about all those places, hardly as an adventurer but maybe a grade up from tourist – a journalist who could drop the surging tide at Mount St. Michel or the graffiti at Pompeii into his work. Halliburton’s life was hectic, and short. In March of 1939, he and his companion, Paul Mooney, tried to sail a Chinese junk from Singapore to the Golden Gate, and were never heard from again. (I have always thought it bizarre that two of the writers who touched me the most, Halliburton and Thomas Wolfe from Asheville, N.C., died months before I was born.) The other day I discovered that Halliburton also made a movie in 1933, called “India Speaks,” a cross between a documentary and a drama. (The drama part was filmed in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.) It sounds a little hokey in the New York Times review of 1933, but because my wife has been to India more than a dozen times and we love the culture, I was eager to find a copy, somewhere. I toggled around on the Web and discovered on the IMDb site these saddest of words: “This film is believed lost. Please check your attic.” Got a lot of National Geographics in the attic, but no old movies. I do have a faded copy of “Book of Marvels: The Occident” on my shelf of honor with James Joyce and Wolfe. The final chapter is about Istanbul, the water and the minarets. We finally got there a few years ago, one of the great cities in the world, and I thought about Richard Halliburton. Wish I had his movie. Kathleen McElroy used to be the deputy sports editor at the Times. She was calm and smart and knew her sports, including the one called foo’ball. She is, after all, from Texas.
She was running our Olympic bureau in Atlanta in 1996 when the bomb went off after midnight, and she took charge, dispatching us into the darkness and the confusion. Later she moved up at the Times, editing the Sunday and Monday editions. She was the duty officer when the Columbia exploded in 2003. Somewhere along the line, she became part of our family, either my third sister or my third daughter -- not that she lacks for family, with sisters galore and the memory of Lucinda and George McElroy, both formidable. Kathleen’s middle initial is O. Not everybody knows that it stands for Oveta, as in Oveta Culp Hobby, who operated the Houston Post for decades – and under whose leadership George McElroy became the Post’s first African-American columnist. We always figured Kathleen was one of those out-of-towners who arrive in New York, scout out the restaurants and shops, discover a nice apartment, and stay forever. They are some of the best New Yorkers. But foo’ball may have been a tipoff. She is a Southwestern person. Kathleen chose to leave the Times, earning a scholarship to the University of Texas. This fall she defended her dissertation -- "Somewhere Between 'Us' and 'Them' -- Black Columnists and Their Role in Shaping Racial Discourse" -- and received her Ph. D. She is now teaching journalism at Oklahoma State University, with emphasis on the African-American experience. The other day Kathleen sent me a text message that said, “I want to make a difference.” We miss her at family gatherings, and expeditions around the city for the perfect barbecue or the perfect curry. She will make a difference. Ugly and expensive.
That applies to the grotesque transit station foisted upon New Yorkers at the World Trade Center, described by the civic asset David W. Dunlap in Wednesday’s Times. Or it could apply to the hideous World Trade Center now looming at the bottom of Manhattan, critiqued recently by another vital journalist, Michael Kimmelman. But the toxic telephone poles, perpetrated by government in Port Washington, Long Island are downright bad for health. These new poles tower above the tree line, foisted upon the populace after Hurricane Sandy took down many existing poles two years ago. Something had to be done. Governor Andrew Cuomo arranged for a power company to take over for our incompetent locals. He reached across the river to the state of his partner and pal Chris Christie, the bridge guy, and imported the Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), which describes itself as “a publicly traded (NYSE:PEG) diversified energy company headquartered in New Jersey, and one of the ten largest electric companies in the U.S.” In the wake of the storm, utility crews from Canada to Mississippi to the Midwest did an admirable job restoring power, but somehow thousands of healthy-looking trees were cut down, giving the impression that crews were paid by the tree trunk. The utility then installed poles 80 feet high, twice the height of the previous poles, and our local government bunglers forgot to arrange for taking down the old poles. So now we have double sets, a blight on the entire peninsula. Bad enough. But it turns out the new poles are also poisonous – treated with Pentachlorophenol, known as Penta, “a PCP chemical produced by mixing and pressure-treating wood with lethal phenols, chlorine and F9-HTS biodiesel fuels. Penta preserves the wood from rot by killing any living organism in, on or up to eight feet around the pole,” according to one environmental web site. The site continues: “With that chemical cocktail, Penta poles leach carcinogenic poisonous gases and liquids that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says shouldn’t be encountered without protective clothes, gloves and masks.” Belatedly, PSEG began putting aprons around the lethal poles, and putting signs every few poles, but the poison still leaches into the aquifer. As the price for being poisoned, Long Islanders are receiving rate increases of 27 per cent from PSEG this fall. I am sure the PSEG shareholders are happy about the rates. I am also sure Gov. Cuomo is proud of his import from across the river, which reminds me of lyrics by the great Tom Paxton: Our leaders are the finest men And we elect them again and again. And that’s what I learned in school today, That’s what I learned in school. Meanwhile, on their way to school, don’t let the kids near the PSEG poles. I’ve been privileged to interview some fascinating people over the years:
Lance Armstrong. Martina Navratilova. The Dalai Lama. Loretta Lynn. Jackie Robinson. Casey Stengel. Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street. I petted Secretariat once. (Somebody smuggled a sugar cube or two, and Big Red rumbled over.) On Thursday, Dec. 4, I will be talking about some of my favorite interviews, at the Amsterdam Harborside in Port Washington, Long Island, from 2-4 PM. The Amsterdam Harborside is a residence high on a bluff overlooking Hempstead Harbor. I’m eager to see it myself. I’ll be signing my World Cup book and a few other books of mine, courtesy of the Dolphin BookShop. For information, please RSVP via: http://www.theamsterdamatharborside.com/event/meet-renowned-new-york-times-sports-columnist-george-vecsey/ |
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