May
04
The new Yankee Stadium
The veteran artist Charles Spurrier and I journeyed to the new Yankee Stadium for the first time last week to watch the Yankees play the Angels. As a boy, Charles used to make drawings of fans at Cleveland’s old Municipal Stadium in exchange for hot dogs and I attended many a classic tilt at the old Yankee Stadium, every year for exactly 50 years.
The theme of the new stadium could well be “It is not about the game,” so many are the detours and distractions, done in the style of Las Vegas, where the layout of the casinos is deliberately disorienting, so that you will quit trying to get back to your room and just sit down and gamble. During a late inning Yankee rally the other night, for example, 200 people waited on line to enter the Yankee Museum on the second deck, which is next to a museum of work by the team’s “official artist,” Peter Max!
The Stadium is laid out like an open air mall. Because ushers check you tickets, the time-honored practice of moving down to unoccupied seats, known as “flopping,” is prohibited, and little kids can no longer congregate in seats near the field during batting practice to catch foul balls or collect autographs (unless, of course, their parents shelled out thousands of dollars for these choice seats).
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Apr
23
The most shocking fact about the new Yankee Stadium in New York’s Bronx isn’t its $1.5 billion cost. No, it was the opening day top single ticket price of $2,625.
If, as leftist demagogues like to say, we’re “two Americas” now, surely one of the divides is between sports fans and non-sports fans.
A non-fan cannot understand how someone could shoot the price of 1,000 shares of General Motors (more!) on a ballgame. In a recession, too. But that’s a non-sports fan. To a sports fan, fighting traffic and crowds to get there on April 16, 2009, was being part of “history.” He or she would also spend the equivalent of a 401(k) contribution on a souvenir jersey.
The world’s most advanced ballpark sets a new standard of some sort. It includes shopping facilities and a team museum, plus what a news report calls “exquisite dining, private clubs, conference rooms, martini bar — and a farmer’s market!” If the game bores you, buy fruit and vegetables. Or hold a conference. Players’ amenities include indoor parking, a sauna, a pool, and at each locker a laptop computer. Read more..
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Mar
27
Jordan Adelson and Robin Peck in Richard Edwin Knipe’s “Schooling Giacomo” at the American Theatre of Actors in Manhattan. (Rick Klein/Sam Rudy Media Relations)
You can take the boy out of the Bronx, but you can’t take the Bronx out of the boy, nor would you want to.
This and many other life-affirming lessons are artfully conveyed in “Schooling Giacomo,” a bittersweet coming-of-age comedy warmly presented at the American Theatre of Actors through April 26.
“Giacomo” retains most of its cast from a wonderful Philipstown Depot Theatre production last year. Read more..
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Feb
26
Teacher Michael Loeb at work at his Bronx school
To reach Michael Loeb’s grade 6 special needs class, visitors must first check in with the armed security guard who sits at the head of the school’s cavernous and windowless ground-floor lobby.
The school’s hallways, also starved of natural light, are a sickly olive green. But Mr Loeb’s fourth-floor classroom explodes with colour - the blue and yellow of his alma mater, George Washington University, forms the backdrop to displays of student work and exhortations to achieve. “Every student will grow a year and a half in reading,” declares one mission statement.
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