Last Week I Was Cold, But Not Too Cold To Type

Continuing my tradition of breaking news, last week I covered the shocking development that it is no fun to be cold at a baseball game.​ Seriously, though, it was goddamned freezing:

How cold was the stadium on Sunday? The weatherman says 54 degrees with winds gusting as high as 44 miles-per-hour. To get a sense of how that felt, try this: encase your genitals in ice, dangle them in front of a battery of leafblowers, and see if you feel like watching Lucas Duda stumble after fly balls.

Despite the gale, the upper deck was crowded, because the Mets had spent the week giving away tickets on Twitter. No strings attached—follow @Mets on Twitter, get a ticket to watch the actual Mets play the Marlins. The unpaid crowd got its money's worth. Dressed for a sunny spring day, they found instead that they had joined the Shackleton expedition. Children shivered through plastic hats full of ice cream. Whirlwinds of garbage swirled ghostly across the infield. Pigeons fought to stay aloft. It was baseball in April, and that is what it’s like.

​Check it out if you want to shiver a little. Amazingly, as cold as that game was—and it really was awful, the coldest I've ever been at a sporting event—the Mets are currently a bit chillier. They nearly got snowed out in Minneapolis last week, and are now in Colorado, a famously warm place. Last night they got snowed out, today they might get snowed out, and if they are able to play at all, it could get down to as little as 9°. Jeepers!

Five Decades On, "Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?" Is Still The Best Chronicle Of History's Worst Team

​The nice thing about writing for a weekly paper is that your work is featured for more than the Internet's customary fifteen seconds. Since last Wednesday, I've been smiling about the fact that the twenty or thirty people silly enough to buy a copy of the New York Observer​ at the newsstand held in their hands a few hundred words I wrote about my greatest affliction: the New York Mets. Specifically, a few hundred words abou​t Jimmy Breslin's Can't Anybody Here Play This Game?​, a slim, bracing story of the Mets' 120 loss first season. It came out five decades ago this week, and remains (I assert) a must-read, not just for Mets fans, but for anybody who's ever failed at anything. A sample:

In the summer of 1962, New York fell in love with a man named Marvin Throneberry. A subpar first baseman who had washed out with the Yankees, he was sliding toward early retirement when he was rescued by the fledgling New York Mets. As thanks, he played worse than ever before—once getting called out on a triple for failing to step on first andsecond base—but each time “Marvelous” Marv came to the plate, the city chanted: “cranberry, strawberry, we love Throneberry!”

It was a third-rate chant for a third-rate player, but in the Mets’ first season, it didn’t take much to make the fans cheer. The team was on its way to 120 losses—a baseball record that stands to this day—but with the Dodgers and Giants five years gone, New York was desperate for something to scream about. Throneberry’s Mets were more than lovable losers—they were spectacular. “Name one loyal American,” writes Jimmy Breslin, in Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game? (Ivan R. Dee, 128 pp., $12.95) “who can say he does not love a team which loses 120 games in one season.” Published 50 years ago this week, this beautiful little book remains the ur-text for Metsian blundering. Here is the franchise’s origin story, writ in Mr. Breslin’s trademark barroom prose and cast with enough devils, heroes and clowns to fill out a pantomime of Faust. They are gamblers, toughs and crusty baseball lifers whom Mr. Breslin rallies in opposition to “the era of the businessman in sports,” when America’s postwar success led to a “dry and agonizing” focus on the bottom line.

Even in 1963, Mr. Breslin’s style was a throwback, a nostalgic echo of sportswriters who were chomping cigars and torturing metaphors before he was born. His New York is deliberately larger-than-life, as though he is trying to mold the modern city into a Damon Runyon story, and his prose is sweet enough to make the ’62 debacle an American epic.

There's a whole lot more, and I'm pretty pleased with it.​ Check it out if you have the time. And if you don't, take in this anecdote about Babe Ruth. It's my favorite from the book, but because it has nothing to do with the Mets, I couldn't let myself force it in. Here it is, reprinted in full:

In fact, in eighteen years of being able to look at things and remember what I have seen, the only sports legend I ever saw who completely lived up to advance billing was Babe Ruth.

It was a hot summer afternoon, and the Babe, sweat dripping from his jowls and his shirt stuck to him, came off the eighteenth green at the old Bayside Golf Club in the borough of Queens and stormed into the huge barroom of the club.

"Gimme one of them heavens to Betsy drinks you always make me," the Babe said in his gravelly voice. 

The bartender put a couple of fistfuls of ice chunks into a big, thick mixing glass and then proceeded to make a Tom Collins that had so much gin in it that the other people at the bar started to laugh. He served the drink to the Babe just as it was made, right in the mixing glass.

Ruth said something about how heavens to Betsy hot he was, and then he picked up the glass and opened his mouth, and there went everything. In one shot he swallowed the drink, the orange slice and the rest of the garbage, and the ice chunks too. He stopped for nothing. There is not a single man I have ever seen in a saloon who does not bring his teeth together a little bit and stop those ice chunks going in. A man has to have a pipe the size of a trombone to take ice in one shot. But I saw Ruth do it, and whenever somebody tells me about how the Babe used to drink and eat when he was playing ball, I believe every word of it.

​Yes—I've already printed that once before. But it's my blog.

For Coney Island's Mayor, A Long, Ugly Winter

Since November, I've been working on a long feature for Narratively about Dick Zigun, self-proclaimed "mayor of Coney Island," and his arts group, Coney Island USA. Best known as the man who invented the Mermaid Parade, Zigun is a charismatic, bombastic and occasionally divisive figure whose life's work was mangled by Hurricane Sandy. I was turned on to the story by Ginny Louloudes, of ART/NY, and spent the next few months hanging around the Boardwalk, interviewing artists, and devouring the unbelievably readable Coney Island: Lost And Found.

Want the lede? I'll give it to you for free. The rest of it, well, you can get that for free too.

Dick Zigun was ready for a two-foot flood. In three decades at Coney Island, every hurricane he had seen blew through like a tourist passing the boardwalk on its way up the coast—and he was not afraid of Sandy. Rather than evacuate, he spent the night at home on West Fifteenth Street, a few blocks from the water, his pick-up parked outside in case of emergency. By the time he realized emergency was here, it was too late to run.

“When the flood came, it came fast,” says Zigun. “When I saw water pouring in under the door, over the sandbags, the water was already knee-high in the street.”

Fearing the flood might knock him over, he waded across the road to take shelter in a friend’s second-story apartment. From the second floor, they watched the water—three feet high and rising. Four. Five.

Dick Zigun, the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Coney Island”

When the tide ebbed after midnight, Zigun, a grizzled fifty-nine year-old, went home to grab something he’d forgotten in his hurry: his cat. He found Buddy floating on his mattress, safe and dry, but “a little freaked out.”

“He saved my expensive goose down comforter,” Zigun says. “He had gathered it up around him, so it wasn’t soaking wet, and he was warm. I grabbed the cat, grabbed my prescription medicine, grabbed my iPhone charger—you know, the essentials of life.”

For a moment, Zigun wasn’t thinking about Coney Island USA, the arts organization, sideshow and museum he founded in 1980. Since then, he has thought of nothing else. Long one of the most visible artists in South Brooklyn, the self-proclaimed “mayor of Coney Island” rules from Surf Avenue, where he has turned a ninety-five year-old restaurant building into the artistic heart of the amusement district. But since the storm, where once stood a bar, a theater and an ice cream parlor, nothing remains but “a big fucking mess.”

At 3,700 words, the resultant story is the longest journalism thing I've ever written, and I think it's turned out pretty well. (The second-longest was the time I spent two weeks pretending to know enough about the legal system to cover a very colorful court battle in Long Island. It sneaked onto the cover of the Observer because it happened to run the week the editor in chief got fired. Timing is everything!)

The pictures above don't have anything to do with the story, but I took them a couple of weeks ago, on my last day doing interviews at Coney. The one of the guy with the metal detector makes me so happy, you can't even imagine.

Have I mentioned lately how hungry I am for summer? I've been checking this website so often, it might as well be my homepage.

At An 'Elf' Matinee, I Must Have Done Something Good

Regular readers may have noticed that, for all its high points, Astor Place Riot is not known for crusading journalism. I'm generally more interested in writing about celebrity Christmas trees and infant thieves. But this month I started writing for the lovely new website Narratively—a longform publication more interested in my reporting ability than my gibberish-typing. "Very well," I said. "You want non-gibberish? I'll give you non-gibberish!"

I'd always been heart-warmed by the Autism Theater Initiative, a program of the Theater Development Fund that has, at matinees of The Lion King and Mary Poppins, specially tailored productions to meet the needs of those on the autism spectrum. It's a feel-good charity that's actually good for everyone involved—producers included—and thinking about it gives me that warm, fuzzy feeling that writing about theater usually does not produce. 

The story went online this morning, along with a spectacular short video by photographer/videodude Emon Hassan. (Whose web series The Third is creepy and excellent, btw.) Here's the lede:

At a matinee of the Broadway show “Elf” on January 5, the audience was oddly restless. When the curtain rose, revealing a rosy-cheeked Wayne Knight wearing a white-and-red suit, a girl screamed, “Hi Santa!” followed by a boy’s cry of  ”Quiet!” During the first dance number, as a line of elves popped off tiny little kicks, a child ran down the aisle and pelted a squishy toy at one of the dancers. Without missing a step, the elf made a one-handed catch. Throughout the first act, the audience grew increasingly noisy, but the actors, impressively, remained locked-in.

“There’s no sound like a theater full of autistic people,” says leading elf Jordan Gelber. “It was non-stop, except when there was music or a song. Then it was like all the sounds died away.”

This audience, made up entirely of people on the autism spectrum and their families, was there because of the Theatre Development Fund, a sprawling charity whose Autism Theatre Initiative has been producing afternoons like this since 2011. Several times a year, TDF turns a normally staid Broadway house into an autistic child’s paradise. Once you get used to the noise, you realize this is the happiest Broadway audience you’ve ever seen.

If you liked those words, there are about 1,300 more of them waiting for you over at Narratively. I'm proud of most of the work I do, but I'd say this is one that I feel extra-good about. Read it! Reread it! Tell your friends! And if your friends don't care...make them listen.

Stupid Stuff I've Done, Illustrated!

A site I've been doing some work for, Narratively, solicited their writers this week for stories about all-nighters. I picked over my brain, looking for memories of all the times in college when I partied 'till dawn, and was finally forced to conclude that partying 'till dawn was just not something I did. 'Till 3, maybe, but seldom dawn.

But then I remembered—all night stories don't have to be fun. In fact, it's better if they aren't! So I sharpened my brain-pencil and got to work telling the story of one of the dumbest things I've ever done, which started with an all-nighter and ended in anguish on the Jamaica LIRR platform.

No matter how neatly they rhyme, don’t trust friends who say, “Early flight? Stay up all night!”

Leaving New York after my freshman year at NYU, I booked an eight a.m. flight and was foolish enough to let my best friend turn my ordeal into a party. With the graceless vigor of those young enough to still have a metabolism, we threw ourselves into an all-nighter fueled by Talking Heads, lamb gyros and the world’s worst Manhattans—an abominable mix of Canadian whiskey and dry vermouth that only a freshman could love. But my friends fell well short of greeting the dawn.

“It’s past two,” they whined. “We’re going to bed.”

Half-drunk and fully alone, I put aside my wistfulness and whirlwinded around the apartment, cramming my crap into any bit of luggage that could hold it. Just before dawn, I staggered out of my dorm for the last time, dragging two rolling suitcases, a three-ton duffel and a Duane Reade bag full of sneakers. Unable to carry my Totally Awesome dorm room posters, I left them behind, and my dorm rooms were never Totally Awesome again. I hailed a cab for JFK and slipped into sleep.

It gets a lot dumber from there. There are nine or so other stories on that page, and they're all doosies. Mine is at the bottom presumably because it provides the kind of moral weight that you want to close a piece with.

The neatest thing, really, is that the good folks at Narratively solicited an illustration from a woman who works at Hatch Show Print, a letterpress shop that can only be called a Nashville institution. I fantasize about one day having a play produced in Nashville—Dark Horse theater producers, if you're reading this, call me—and to see my name in Hatch's big, beautiful, blocky letters. Being illustrated by a Hatch employee will tide me over for now.

For Once, I Wrote Something Serious

A friend of mine at the Observer, unaware of the fact that my normal prose style is blithe foolishness, asked me to write something about escapism and national tragedy, in response to the Newtown massacre. Comedy is more my beat than tragedy, but escapism I understand.

It did not take long for me to turn off Twitter, to shut down Facebook, to ignore NYTimes.com. The Internet can be marvelous—for real-time presidential debate snark or instant updates on the latest Lindsay Lohan trainwreck—but for tragedy, it is entirely too small. I could not bear to watch the reported death toll rise, to see the hand-wringing that came when the press realized it had misidentified the shooter, or to wade through the now-predictable howls for stricter gun control. So I did the natural thing. I turned off my computer, and started watching movies.

I watched Harper, a middling Paul Newman P.I. flick, the ever-delightful Shop Around The Corner and, at my girlfriend’s stern insistence, Love Actually. During the intermissions, I glanced at Twitter for news of the impending R.A. Dickey trade, taking pains to avoid reading about anything of actual importance. For seven or eight hours, Paul Newman chewed gum, Jimmy Stewart sold music boxes, Hugh Grant made puppy dog eyes. And the outside world stayed far outside.

If your hunger for gravity isn't sated, read on. Or just scroll down and read more about The Simpsons.

Why Do I Still Watch The Simpsons? Well, I'll Tell You

It's been a horrifying week, eh? Well, I'm all for taking refuge in escapism, and for me, there's no place more comfortable than Springfield.

One of the most pressing questions of The Simpsons‘ 24 year run—besides “Why has Homer not been arrested for child abuse?”—is, “Why hasn’t Marge ever asked for divorce?” It’s possible her husband is the dumbest man in the universe. He’s certainly the least sensitive. Just off the top of my head, he once gave her a bowling ball for her birthday. When she got interested in folk art, he smashed his car into her popsicle stick sculptures. She cannot have a party without him getting blind drunk. In fact, she can’t get up in the morning without him getting blind drunk. And yet, she never clears out.

When a show runs for 515 episodes (and counting!) it’s impossible for there to be any reasonable continuity. As such, there are lots of different versions of Homer and Marge’s relationship, and different reasons for why she sticks around. In the weakest episodes, she is won over by a grand, last-minute gesture—something sweet that might make up for the horrible thing that Homer did today, but does nothing to explain away the 514 things he’s done before. In the best, the writers manage to show that for all Homer’s catastrophic imbecility, these two have a bond of genuine love.

If you'd like to know why I love Homer too, well, click here, ya numbskull.

What Do The Wilpons And Congress Have In Common?

Every time I turn on the radio or look at my newspaper—yes, I live in 1975—I'm bombarded with tedious, repetitive, non-news news articles about the current state of the fiscal cliff negotiations. Every time I turn the sports page, I see a new story about stalled negotiations with R.A. Dickey, and I experience a tinge of Vida Blue. I mean deja vu. You get the idea.

Even when the negotiations began, we knew they were just for show. These talks aren’t about getting results—they’re about posturing. Pleasing the base. Flexing muscles. Rattling the saber. Measuring dicks. Since then, talks have been utterly stalled, but both sides keep releasing leaks and press releases trumpeting progress, in a transparent attempt to make the other side look more petty, more greedy, more vain. It’s an ego contest, plain and simple. And when the stakes are this high, that’s the kind of contest no one can win.

Am I talking about the fiscal cliff or the New York Mets? I have no idea.

It goes on from there.

I'm a serous fan of R.A. Dickey's, partly because he's amazing, partly because he's from Nashville. I saw him speak last month at my dad's high school—they're both alumni—and found him to be exactly as charming as expected. I even shook his hand! But as much as it would bum me out to see him traded, I'll survive, so long as the Mets get something worthwhile in return. The Mets don't have much in the way of prospects right now—either literally or figuratively—and hope for the future is something worth trading for.

One more thing. Writing that article reminded me of this short Times piece about Dickey's bats, which he names after mythical swords—one reason that, if he must be traded, I hope to god it's for a National League team. It's a five 'graf story that yielded the best correction I have ever seen in a major newspaper. Reprinted here in full:

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 8, 2011

An item in the Extra Bases baseball notebook last Sunday misidentified, in some editions, the origin of the name Orcrist the Goblin Cleaver, which Mets pitcher R. A. Dickey gave one of his bats. Orcrist was not, as Dickey had said, the name of the sword used by Bilbo Baggins in the Misty Mountains in “The Hobbit”; Orcrist was the sword used by the dwarf Thorin Oakenshield in the book. (Bilbo Baggins’s sword was called Sting.)

Patrick Stewart Is A Magnificient Tree-Owner

I've been living in Park Slope since February. It's a nice place, but a little bit stuffy—a bit like how I imagine the Upper West Side was at the start of its slide into a tedious landscape of naught but bank branches and crummy Italian restaurants. Park Slope isn't UWS bad yet, but I feel like it could go that way in five or so years.

A possible savior arrived this summer, though, in the grizzled form of Patrick Stewart. His Time Warner Bashing, Brooklyn Nets Liking ways have been well documented, but yesterday he outdid himself. He bought a Christmas tree. And it was amazing.

It’s well known that Patrick Stewart is a big goofy goofball. But since his recent, well-publicized move to Park Slope, he’s made his adorable side public. Whether drunk tweeting or squinting at a cappuccino, he seems to be having exactly as much fun as a retired Starfleet captain deserves. But yesterday he took it to the next level, in a three part photo-essay that every holiday-weary Brooklynite can relate to.

Part 1: Patrick Stewart buys a Christmas tree.
Part 2: Patrick Stewart struggles with Christmas lights.
Part 3: Patrick Stewart is proud of his tree.

It’s a heartwarming story, full of pine needles and overcoming adversity. Stewart isn’t featured in the final picture, but we feel his smile beaming from every light on his petite evergreen. Frankly, the script writes itself.

Picard: Mr. Data. Lay in a course for Christmas cheer. Make it so.

Data: Sensors detecting a four foot tall evergreen, sir.

Picard: Mr. Worf, lock on target with twinkly Christmas lights.

Worf: Target acquired.

Picard: Engage.

There's more, but that's really the best part. No need to click on this, frankly.

Never Be Opening———The 'Glengarry' Switcheroo

I really liked Charles Isherwood's story in the Times about the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross and their cynical decision to hold the show's opening, so I wrote a thing about it. 

Times theater critic Charles Isherwood caused a stir this week with an essay about the craven behavior of the producers of Glengarry Glen Ross, who used Hurricane Sandy as an excuse to postpone the official opening of their show by a month. While some imaginative conspiracy theorists have fantasized that this was simply a ploy to give marquee star Al Pacino a bit more time to learn his lines, Isherwood paints a more cynical picture, of producers selling high-priced tickets to something that is a preview-in-name-only, allowing them to rake in around $1 million weekly without having to face potential critical wrath.

When news came this week that Mamet’s other show on Broadway is closing—something his plays have done a lot of lately—hiding from critics suddenly seemed like a bright idea. Reviewers hated The Anarchist—a turgid think-piece about, sigh, the nature of evil and truth and stuff—and so The Anarchist died. But Glengarry might be a special case: a serious play that doesn’t need to be reviewed, because the critics can’t affect it at all.

Read it! Read it, you fools!