A push to recognize the statistics of Black players from baseball’s era of apartheid

 

Josh Gibson

“Move over, Babe. You too, Ted Williams. More than six decades after taking their last swings, two of baseball’s top sluggers could soon be dropping down the sport’s most hallowed leaderboards to make room for Josh Gibson, Oscar Charleston and Turkey Stearnes. Major League Baseball is considering giving major-league status to six long-defunct Negro Leagues, where 35 Hall of Famers played during the sport’s segregated era. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ said Scott Simkus, a former Chicago limousine driver who spent much of the last two decades helping build a statistical database of the Negro Leagues by tracking down and chronicling box scores of once-forgotten games. ... ‘Negro Leaguers should be compared against themselves,’ said Larry Lester, a pioneer of Negro League studies and the chairman of the Society for American Baseball Research’s Negro Leagues committee. ...”

LA Times (Video)

MLB elevating the status of Negro Leagues is the problem, not the solution

******NY Times: M.L.B.’s Records Were Never Real. But the Racism Was. Ask Satchel Paige.

Effa Manley fought for social justice and the Negro Leagues

NPR: MLB Recognizes Negro Leagues As 'Major League' — Correcting A 'Longtime Oversight'

NY Times: Baseball Rights a Wrong by Adding Negro Leagues to Official Records

Outside The Confines: The Negro Leagues are finally qualified as major league (Audio)

 

From left to right, the pitchers John Stanley, Frank McAllister and Gene Smith of the Negro National League's New York Black Yankees standing on the top step of their dugout in 1942.

1933-1962: The Business Meetings of Negro League Baseball 

“Although the first organized and sustainable Negro League, the original Negro National League (NNL), founded by Rube Foster in 1920, did not survive the Great Depression, it was the forerunner of several other Negro Leagues. In the 1920s, the Eastern Colored League (ECL) was formed as a counterpart to the NNL. It lasted from 1923 through the early part of 1928, then was succeeded by the American Negro League (ANL) for one year in 1929. The first NNL, largely based in the Midwest, continued its operations into the 1930s, but was replaced in 1932 by another short-lived organized league called the East-West League. Like the ANL, the East-West League survived only one year.In 1933, several events of marked importance occurred: Franklin Delano Roosevelt started his 12-year presidency, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany — and the second NNL began operations. ...”

SABR

amazon: The Negro Leagues Book: Volume 2: The Players, 1862 - 1960

Agate Type

Agate Type: White Racial Violence & the Negro Leagues: The Chicago Riot of 1919

Agate Type: The 1926 Cleveland Elites

Seamheads: Negro League

 

Satchel Paige

2015 March:  Negro league baseball, 2017 May: Negro National League (1920–31), 2019 October: Can the Rebirth of a Negro League Stadium Revive a Distressed City?

Song For A Winter's Night - Gordon Lightfoot (1967)

 

“’Song For A Winter's Night’ (song clip), by Gordon Lightfoot, is one of his most beautiful love songs. Lightfoot recorded Song For A Winter's Night in the studio twice: the first, original recording is on the United Artists album The Way I Feel; the rerecording is on the Warner/Reprise album Gord's Gold. Unlike all his other rerecordings, Lightfoot uses a different guitar and playing style in the rerecording: the original is finger-picked, Travis-style, on his 6 string Martin; the rerecording is strummed on his 12 string Gibson. Both are exquisite, and you will probably have trouble choosing your favorite. Interestingly, Song For A Winter's Night was not written during the winter with the snow falling; instead, it was written in July, during a thunderstorm, in Cleveland, OH! Lightfoot enjoys telling this story, and occasionally does so as an introduction to the song in concert. ...”

Gordon Lightfoot - “Song for a Winters Night”

W - Song for a Winter's Night

Google - Lightfoot By Nicholas Jennings

Robbie Fulks Dives Headfirst into the Strangely Messy World of Gordon Lightfoot

YouTube: Song For A Winter's Night (Live)

2013 September: SS Edmund Fitzgerald

The Magnetic Fields - André Breton and Philippe Soupault (1920) Image

“Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields) is a 1920 book by André Breton and Philippe Soupault. It is famous as the first work of literary Surrealism. The authors used a surrealist automatic writing technique. The book is considered Surrealist, rather than Dadaist, because it attempts to create something new rather than react to an existing work. Les Champs magnetiques is characterised by rich textured language that often seems to border on the nonsensical. This is considered a "normal" result of automatic writing and is considerably more logical than the output from other Surrealist techniques, such as ‘exquisite corpse‘ (a method whereby each of a group of collaborators, in sequence, adds words or images to a composition). ...”

Wikipedia

from The Magnetic Fields - André Breton and Philippe Soupault

NYRB

2016: DADA Companion, 2016: The Growing Charm of Dada, 2017: How Baudelaire Revolutionized Modern Literature, 2017: The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology - Mary Ann Caws, 2018 May: Europe After the Rain: Watch the Vintage Documentary on the Two Great Art Movements, Dada & Surrealism, 2020 October:  What is Surrealism? (1924), 2020 November:  No Walk Is Ever Wasted, 2010 February: Philippe Soupault

 

The First Christmas Meal

                                           David Teniers the Younger, The Twelve Days of Christmas No. 8, 1634-40

“These days, British and American Christmases are by and large the same hodgepodge of tradition, with relatively minor variations. This Christmas Eve, for example, when millions of American kids put out cookies and milk for Santa, children in Britain will lay out the more adult combination of mince pies and brandy for the old man many of them know as Father Christmas. For the last hundred years or so, Father Christmas has been indistinguishable from the American character of Santa Claus; two interchangeable names for the same white-bearded pensioner garbed in Coca-Cola red, delivering presents in the dead of night. But the two characters have very different roots. Saint Nicholas, the patron saint of children, was given his role of nocturnal gift-giver in medieval Netherlands. Father Christmas, however, was no holy man, but a personification of Dionysian fun: dancing, eating, late-night drinking—and the subversion of societal norms. ...”

The Paris Review

                                                       Jacob Jordaens, The Feast of the Bean King, 1640-1645

Inhuman communication: Søren Kierkegaard versus the internet

 

“The story is, by now, a familiar one: some person ― whether a celebrity or a relative unknown ― says something racist, misogynistic, or just plain stupid online. We see it, we're angry, we tell them so. Within hours, they've received thousands of replies, ranging from the politely critical to the clearly abusive. The perpetrator then either lashes out defiantly, issues an apology (whether sincere or not) or simply withdraws from the social media space altogether. This is what's called a ‘pile-on.’ Now, you might be one of those people who thinks the ‘victim’ of a pile-on had it coming. Speaking and writing are, after all, actions, and actions have consequences; free speech doesn't mean freedom from being called out. ...”

ABC Religion & Ethics

2011 July: Søren Kierkegaard, 2013 April: Repetition (1843), 2013 December: The Quotable Kierkegaard, 2014 October: Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard (1843), 2014 December: The Dark Knight of Faith - Existential Comics, 2015 July: I still love Kierkegaard, 2015 October: The Concept of Anxiety (1844), 2016 October: Cruel intentions, 2017 July: Søren Kierkegaard Newsletter, 2018 January: Either/Or (1843), 2018 November: The Seducer’s Diary (1843), 2020 July:  Søren Kierkegaard’s Struggle with Himself, 2020 November: W. H. Auden - The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (1952)

Socialism Informs the Best of Our Politics - Michael Harrington

American democratic socialist, writer, political activist, and political theorist Michael Harrington (1928 - 1989) speaking in Boston in 1977. 

“... Is social­ism rel­e­vant to the late 20th and 21st cen­turies? And if so what does one mean by ​‘social­ism’? In any case, why iden­ti­fy as a social­ist in the Unit­ed States where the very word invites mis­un­der­stand­ing, at best, and a fran­tic, igno­rant rejec­tion at worst? Final­ly, giv­en all of these prob­lems why build a social­ist orga­ni­za­tion in this country? First, the social­ist cri­tique of pow­er under both cap­i­tal­ism and Com­mu­nism is not only sub­stan­tial in and of itself; it also makes a sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tion to the cause of incre­men­tal reform as well as to a rad­i­cal restruc­tur­ing of society. ...”

In These Times

2016 May: The Other America  (1962)

Warm Up 2020 | MoMA

 

“Warm Up wherever you are and celebrate NYC’s music communities online and outdoors. MoMA PS1 presents an all-day streaming edition of Warm Up to support New York City’s music communities in light of the COVID-19 pandemic with eight hours of continuous music streamed live from MoMA PS1’s iconic courtyard. Tune in for 12 DJ sets and live performances by artists who represent NYC’s expansive music community, framed by stage design created by New York-based artist Cécile McLorin Salvant. ... Broadcast globally in partnership with music streaming platform Boiler Room, this one-day-only program will also stream at outdoor music venues across the city, allowing audiences to patronize the open, outdoor cultural spaces in their neighborhoods. ...”

MoMA (Video) 8:11:57

Boiler Room (Video)

John le Carré, Best-Selling Author of Cold War Thrillers, Dies at 89

 

“John le Carré, whose exquisitely nuanced, intricately plotted Cold War thrillers elevated the spy novel to high art by presenting both Western and Soviet spies as morally compromised cogs in a rotten system full of treachery, betrayal and personal tragedy, died on Saturday in Cornwall, England. He was 89. The cause was pneumonia, his publisher, Penguin Random House, said on Sunday.Before Mr. le Carré published his best-selling 1963 novel ‘The Spy Who Came in From the Cold,’ which Graham Greene called ‘the best spy story I have ever read,’ the fictional model for the modern British spy was Ian Fleming’s James Bond — suave, urbane, devoted to queen and country. With his impeccable talent for getting out of trouble while getting women into bed, Bond fed the myth of spying as a glamorous, exciting romp. Mr. Le Carré upended that notion with books that portrayed British intelligence operations as cesspools of ambiguity in which right and wrong are too close to call and in which it is rarely obvious whether the ends, even if the ends are clear, justify the means. ...”

NY Times

2019 November: ‘Point me and I’ll march’: Mick Herron re-reads the novels of John le Carré

A food vendor’s Christmas on 14th Street in 1904

 

“Ashcan school painter Everett Shinn gravitated toward New York’s underdogs: the lonely, the lost, the dreamers, and those who appear to be battered by life’s elements. This food vendor pushing his flimsy wood cart during the holiday season appears to fall into the latter category. Painted in 1904, ‘Fourteenth Street at Christmas Time’ gives us a blustery, snowy street crowded with Christmas tree buyers and other shoppers beside the lights from store window displays. Our vendor, however, stands away from everyone, his body crouched to avoid the frightful weather. His cart glows with the warmth of hot food cooking…but he has no buyers.”

Ephemeral New York

2017 January: 34th Street (1903), 2019 September: The fantasy of window shopping in New York City

The Irishman - Martin Scorsese (2019)

 

“The Irishman (titled onscreen as I Heard You Paint Houses) is a 2019 American epic crime drama film directed and produced by Martin Scorsese and written by Steven Zaillian, based on the 2004 nonfiction book I Heard You Paint Houses by Charles Brandt. It stars Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci, with Ray Romano, Bobby Cannavale, Anna Paquin, Stephen Graham, and Harvey Keitel in supporting roles. The film follows Frank Sheeran (De Niro), a truck driver who becomes a hitman involved with mobster Russell Bufalino (Pesci) and his crime family, including his time working for the powerful Teamster Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino). ... De Niro, who also served as producer, and Pacino were confirmed that month, as was Pesci, who came out of his unofficial retirement to star after numerous requests. Principal photography began in September 2017 in New York City and in the Mineola and Williston Park sections of Long Island, and wrapped in March 2018. ...”

Wikipedia

New Yorker: Remembrance of Kills Past in “The Irishman”

TIME: The True Story Behind the Movie The Irishman (Video)

Variety: Robert De Niro and Al Pacino on Reuniting for Netflix’s Costly Oscar Hopeful ‘The Irishman’ (Video)

NY Times: ‘The Irishman’ Review: The Mob’s Greatest Hits, in a Somber Key - A.O. Scott (Video)

Criterion, amazon: The Irishman (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Jeremiah's Vanishing New York: Robert Herman

 

“The man who jumped to his death from the 16th floor of his Tribeca apartment building on Friday night has been identified as photographer Robert Herman. He left a note that read, ‘How do you enjoy life?’  Since the 1970s, Robert was one of New York's consummate street photographers, capturing the day-to-day life of the sidewalks with his camera and, most recently, with his iPhone. I met him once or twice, we had a similar love for the city, and he was always lovely and kind. He will be missed, along with all the photographs he will never get to take. What follows is an interview I did with him here in 2013, on the publication of his beautiful book The New Yorkers, a vivid collection of his work from 1978 - 2005. ...”

Vanishing New York  (March 2020) 

2013 June: The New Yorkers - Robert Herman

The Champions League’s New Twist: Injury Roulette Image

 

For Kylian Mbappé and other stars, injury looms as a formidable Champions League foe.

“The procession was nearly over. Ninety-five of the 96 games that constitute the group phase of the Champions League, six weeks of phony war that largely serve to check boxes, cross Ts and dot Is, were complete. Most of the heavyweights had long since advanced to the knockout rounds. As is so often the case, there had been precious little drama. The whole exercise only served to fuel to the flames of those who would revamp the competition or abandon it altogether. Bayern Munich and Manchester City dropped only two points. Juventus, Barcelona, Chelsea and Sevilla qualified with two games to spare, Liverpool and Borussia Dortmund with one. And yet, with five minutes of injury time still to play in the one game outstanding, it felt a little like everything was on the line. ...”

NY Times

1960s Dial-a-Poem

                                          John Giorno at Dial-a-Poem in 1969

"On any given night in 1970, a teen somewhere in rural America could dial a number and hear the radical wisdom of Patti Smith, John Cage, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Bourroughs – the list of poets was long, and painfully hip. One needed only the ten sacred digits of 'Dial-a-Poem,' a revolutionary hotline that connected millions of people to a room of telephones, linked up to an evolving selection of live-recorded poems, speeches, and inspired orations. And frankly, we’d kill to dial up that hotline right now. It all began in the 3rd floor Manhattan loft of the hotline’s founder, artist, and activist, John Giorno, who also happened to be Andy Warhol’s lover at the time. John was on the phone one morning with someone and feeling cranky. ...”

Before the Internet, there was the 1960s Dial-a-Poem Hotline (Video)

W - Dial-A-Poem, W - John Giorno

John Giorno’s Archives

NY Times: Dial-A-Poem Enters the Internet Age (April 2005)

On Dial-A-Poem

YouTube: "You're a Hook"—The 15 Year Anniversary of Dial-a-Poem (1968-1983) full album, UbuWeb: Giorno Poetry Systems / Dial-A-Poem Poets

2012 June: The Dial-A-Poem Poets: The Nova Convention, 2014 March: The Dial-A-Poem Poets (1972), 2015 January: Dial-A-Poem Poets - Big Ego (1978), 2018 November: I ♥ John Giorno and So Should You, 2019 November: John Giorno – the New York radical who broke art and poetry's boundaries

Tri-Cornered Baseball Game

 

“The Tri-Cornered Baseball Game was a three-way exhibition baseball game held at the Polo Grounds on June 26, 1944, among the Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and New York Yankees. The game, a Second World War fundraiser, was played with a round-robin format in which each team batted and fielded during six innings and rested for the other three. The Dodgers won by scoring five runs in their times at bat; the Yankees scored one run, while the Giants were unable to score. The game came 20 days after the Normandy landings in 1944. It was devised by the War Loans Sports Committee as a method of selling war bonds to aid in the U.S. war efforts. ... New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young described the event as ‘the wackiest diamond battle ever conceived.’ ...”

Wikipedia

SABR -June 26, 1944: The Tri-Cornered War Bond Baseball Game

Various Apocalyptic Scenes from the Prophetic Messenger (ca. 1827–61)

“These colored lithographs, labelled as apocalyptic scenes by the Wellcome Collection, were printed in conjunction with the astrological magazine the Prophetic Messenger, aka Raphael’s Almanac, which ran from 1827 to 1861. Raphael, a pen name, was intended to invoke the power of the archangel Raphael — traditionally linked to Mercury, the messenger of the gods. It was used by several British astrologers in the first half of the nineteenth century, who together contributed to the revival of astrology. While the lithographs are difficult to interpret on their own, they do give us a sense of how Raphael’s astrological predictions differed from the ones generally found in newspapers today. ...”

Public Domain Review

The Incredible Lightness of Being

Brest téléphérique from station atop a historic stone building

“After the Emirates Air Line fiasco, most people in the UK had written off cable cars as a valid public transport mode. But reading about the official gondola proposal for Vancouver’s Burnaby Mountain university campus as an ideal solution, this mode warrants another look. Niche transport modes are ideal solutions, but only for specific geographic transport problems – funiculars, catamarans, hydrofoils, and cable cars. The key is not to fall for the salesperson’s or politician’s pitch, but to apply them appropriately. Cable cars are increasingly being constructed to connect topographically constrained urban areas in an inexpensive and quick manner. ...” 

London Reconnections

                                       Two stations, Vieux Port and Notre Dame, with a supporting pylon

Nights of Ballads & Blues - McCoy Tyner (1963)

“Pianist McCoy Tyner is best known for being a member of the John Coltrane Quartet beginning in 1960. During those years, Tyner re-invented the piano as a highly percussive, stirring instrument that churned the waters for Coltrane's abstraction and spiritual solos. For some strange reason, in late 1962 and the first half of 1963, Tyner was commissioned by producer Bob Thiele to record more straightforward jazz albums as a leader. These albums included Reaching Fourth, Today and Tomorrow and McCoy Tyner Plays Duke Ellington. But the finest of these after-midnight piano recordings was Nights of Ballads and Blues. ...”

All About Jazz (Video)

W - Nights of Ballads & Blues

Discogs (Video)

amazon

YouTube: NIGHTS OF BALLADS & BLUES, SIDE  ONE, SIDE  TWO

Brian Eno - Film Music 1976-2020

 “... Eno is now putting out a compilation called ‘Brian Eno (Film Music, 1976-2020),’ though he admits he just as well could have called it ‘Music That Has Found Films.’ These 17 tracks comprise only a fraction of his music that has appeared as scores or on soundtracks: ‘There are quite important pieces, in terms of my film music career, that are missing from this album,’ he said. ‘But they just wouldn’t fit in this particular version.’ ... Across two video interviews this fall Eno promised new (but different) work to come, and spoke thoughtfully about technology, composition and the odd drift of music through a listener’s everyday life. These are edited excerpts from the conversations. ...”

NY Times: Brian Eno’s Music for Anxious Times (Video)

a closer listen (Video)

Brian Eno Soundtrack Collection, ‘Film Music 1976-2020’ Set For Release (Video)

amazon

When Sun Ra Went to Egypt in 1971: See Film & Hear Recordings from the Legendary Afrofuturist’s First Visit to Cairo

“Sun Ra died in 1993 (or he returned to his home planet of Saturn, one or the other). Twenty-seven years later his Arkestra is still going strong. ‘No group in jazz history has embodied the communal spirit like the Arkestra,’ writes Peter Margasak at The Quietus. ‘Their hardcore fans are the closest thing jazz has to Deadheads.’ We could further compare Sun Ra and Jerry Garcia as bandleaders—their embrace of extended free form playing against a background of traditionalism. Folk, and country in Garcia’s case and big band swing in the work of the man born Herman Poole Blount in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914. ...”

Open Culture (Video/Audio)

Inside Sun Ra’s 1971 trip to Egypt (Video)