Ron's View

Unagi in cucumber sheaths

[Ramsay de Give for The New York Times]

When I opened the NYT this morning, I turned straight to Ben Brantley’s review of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark. Had Bono and the Edge salvaged the show since Julie Taymor’s dismissal or was it still a hopeless mess?

You can read Ben’s thoughts yourself and find out. Turning to the weekly dining section, I found myself captivated by a different review, that of famed New York Sushi restaurant Masa by Sam Sifton. Sifton is a fine writer. Even though I’m never going to eat at Masa, when his subject is one of New York’s great restaurants, I pay attention.

Frank Bruni, Sifton’s predecessor, had given Masa the highest and rarest of ratings — four stars — a year after its 2004 opening. Over the course of the past year, Sifton visited and re-visited Masa before deciding to award it three stars. Sifton loves the food, writing of spending his time there “in a fog of pleasure, sitting dumbfounded on the shores of excess.” However, he finds the service wanting.

But extraordinary food alone does not an extraordinary restaurant make. The experience of eating at Masa can clash, sometimes greatly, with the grace, simplicity and excellence of the cuisine on display.

One night I entered the 26-seat restaurant five minutes before my reservation time, arriving before my three guests. The room was empty, save for servers and one occupied table in the dining room. The woman at the restaurant’s front checked my (fake) name off a short list of reservations on a piece of paper on a block of wood in front of her. She took my briefcase and placed it in a closet.

Then: “You may wait outside,” she said. “When you return with your guests, please have your cellphone turned off or on silent.”

[snip]

There are other wrinkles in Masa’s fine silk. At the sushi bar it is not uncommon for the prepared dishes served at the start of a meal, which are brought to the bar by servers, to be placed before customers with no explanation whatsoever. In the dining room it is possible for the same lapse to occur with the arrival of the sushi. It is unsettling, given the luxury of the food, and the question of its cost.

Some will take issue with the fact that Masa serves an enormous amount of bluefin tuna, a fish that some say hovers on the brink of collapse as a species. (The reason is presumably simple: its taste.) Others will cavil at the manner in which Mr. Takayama caters to some guests in the restaurant while ignoring others, in seemingly direct proportion to the amount of money they are spending.

[snip]

Finally, meals at the restaurant end with a clank: you are given a dessert and it throws a switch. Everyone turns away and you will have little contact with the staff until you find someone to give you the bill. Guests stare at one another awkwardly: What do we do now?

Read the full review. And check out the accompanying slide show.

My favorite source of sentences of the week has been the NYT’s weekly Vows column, which is so good at glorifying the mundane. (See this post for example.) Yesterday, the glorifying was being performed on the NYT sports pages, where Richard Sandomir and Ken Belson’s puff piece on hedge fund manager and potential Mets buyer David Einhorn appeared. Sandomir is usually a hard-nosed writer on the business of sports and sports broadcasting. Yesterday he adopted a breezier, less critical style.

The background, as you may know, is that Mets principal owner Fred Wilpon has become ensnared in the Bernie Madoff scandal. He is being sued for a billion dollars by Irving Picard, the trustee for the victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and has been under pressure to sell some of his stake in the Mets to prepare for a settlement. (See Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker article for details.) Einhorn has stepped in and offered to buy one-third of the team for $200 million.

What’s my choice for sentence of the week? It’s hard. Here, have a look at this passage from yesterday’s Sandomir-Benson article and see what you think.

Einhorn’s father, Stephen, a banker who specializes in mergers, and his mother, Nancy, a bookkeeper, have been active in the arts and charities. Through the Einhorn Family Charitable Trust, they donate to educational, religious, medical, youth service and antibigotry causes; the trust also provided money to produce “The Bully Project,” a documentary.

Stephen Einhorn, who spent six years on the board of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, paid to overhaul its Web site so customers could pick the seats they want. “They make sure their dollars are being used well,” said Annie Jansen Jurczyk, the theater’s development director.

She added, “It puts them in a different category of donor, and they do it without any fanfare.”

David Einhorn, whose grandfather had Parkinson’s disease, is on the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, and the Robin Hood Foundation, which fights poverty.

“He’s modestly and quietly trying to make a difference in the world, with the simple thread of trying to help people get along, whether it’s in Jerusalem or downtown New York,” said Mary Gordon, the president of Roots of Empathy, a charity that tries to imbue children with kindness and acceptance of others.

Einhorn, who was a co-founder of the hedge fund known as Greenlight Capital when he was 27 and who declined to speak for this article, quickly built a reputation as a thoughtful and astute investor.

Tom Zucosky, the chief executive of Discovery Capital Management, remembers interviewing Einhorn in the late 1990s when his company invested in Greenlight. Einhorn’s presentations, he said, were lucid and inventive and the hallmarks of a rising star.

Zucosky said that Einhorn could read deeply into balance sheets to understand what makes companies — and teams — tick. “If you’re a hedge fund manager, you understand how to manage risk,” Zucosky said, and added: “He’s not stupid. He’s not going to flush his money down the toilet.”

My favorites are the quotes rather than the Sandomir-Benson writing itself. But they chose the quotes, so I want them to share in the credit. There are some gems. I think I have to go with this: “He’s modestly and quietly trying to make a difference in the world, with the simple thread of trying to help people get along, whether it’s in Jerusalem or downtown New York.” What would the world do without New York hedge fund managers? They aren’t just smart. And wealthy. They are generous and modest beyond compare.

As for the smartness of hedge fund managers, that would appear to be a given. And here I thought mathematicians are the smartest people in the world. I suppose the fact that we make so little money is proof that we aren’t, whereas the fact that hedge fund managers make so much is proof that they are. (Then there’s the example of Jim Simons.) I love the observation that “If you’re a hedge fund manager, you understand how to manage risk. He’s not stupid. He’s not going to flush his money down the toilet.” I’m guessing there are a few exceptions to this assertion.

Like many a native New Yorker, I grew up with the idea that Washington State was frontier territory. Maybe back then it was. However, after moving here thirty years ago, I quickly adjusted, and quickly tired of some of the odd ideas people in the northeast had about us. Such as imagining that we’re next to the Canadian Rockies. Or Alaska.

As Seattle and the state have grown, as Microsoft, Starbucks, and Costco have joined Boeing and Weyerhaueser in putting us in the nation’s business news, I had the notion that maybe we were a little better understood.

Until this morning, when I read Catherine Lutz’s review in today’s NYT of Janny Scott’s just-published biography A Singular Woman:
The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mother. In the second paragraph, I learned that

Ann Dunham … followed her peripatetic parents — a mother in banking and a father in furniture sales — through several states, to an island off Washington State, and finally on to Hawaii, where she met two husbands and got her B.A. and eventually her Ph.D. in anthropology.

Mention of “an island off Washington State” brought me to a stop. For a moment I was puzzled about whether islands “off” Washington are part of Washington. Would we say that Nantucket is off Massachusetts or Catalina is off California or the Keys are off Florida? That seemed odd. Maybe Nantucket is off the Massachusetts coast, and so on. But the larger puzzle was that I couldn’t think of any islands off the Washington coast. Sure, there must be the odd speck or two, but no one visits or lives on them. There are lots of islands within Puget Sound and the adjacent protected salt water inlets of the state. Bainbridge Island. Vashon Island. Whidbey Island. The San Juan Islands. Some are Seattle suburbs. Others are closer to Canada. But they are all some distance from the Pacific, not what one would call “off Washington State.”

Which of these islands, I wondered, did Ann Dunham live on? I suppose I must have read about it before, but I couldn’t remember. i went to the computer, looked her up, and my jaw dropped. Mercer Island! You see, the thing is, Mercer Island is not off the coast. Mercer Island is not in the state’s interior saltwater by-ways. Mercer Island is in freshwater Lake Washington, the lake that runs north-south along the eastern edge of Seattle, with such cities and suburbs as Bellevue, Kirkland, Medina (Bill Gates’ home), and Redmond to the east. (On the map above, you can see Lake Washington between Seattle and Bellevue, with Mercer Island the pink blob in the southern end of the lake.)

Two bridges cross the lake. One is just a stone’s throw or two from our house. (Okay, maybe three or four, and maybe with Aaron Rodgers doing the throwing.) The other is the I-90 bridge. Interstate 90 starts on the south edge of downtown, by Safeco Field, and ends 3000 miles later a little past Fenway Park in Boston. A long trip. But its first stop heading east out of Seattle is Mercer Island, just three miles away.

What this means is that Mercer Island is closer to downtown Seattle than any other suburb, and closer to downtown than most Seattle neighborhoods. In what universe, or what terminology, does that put Ann Dunham on “an island off Washington State”? Please, Professor Lutz, look at a map!

Note: I was so flabbergasted this morning that I wrote a letter to the NYT editor. I’ll spare you its text. This is essentially an expanded version.

[Sara Krulwich/The New York Times]

I have long had a soft spot in my heart for Manny Ramirez, despite his at-times-inexcusable behavior, most notably when he gave up on the Red Sox during the 2008 season, only to come alive for the last two months of the season once he was traded to the Dodgers. However selfish, childish, immature, baffling, and mysterious, he was an extraordinary hitter. I have written about him several times. He was, in fact, the subject of my seventh blog post, written on the second day of Ron’s View.

How long have I had a soft spot for Manny? That’s easy to answer. Ever since March 1991, when he was an 18-year-old high school baseball player in Washington Heights and Sara Rimer started writing about him in the New York Times. Rimer no longer works for the NYT, but she has returned for a guest appearance in honor of Manny’s recent retirement. Tomorrow, the NYT publishes her final reflections</a, which are worth a look. See the slideshow too.

Here is her opening:

When I heard that Manny Ramirez had retired, the first person I called was his high school coach, Steve Mandl. I reached him at George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan, where he has coached varsity baseball for 27 years.

He was sad and stunned. I pictured him at the dented metal desk in his cramped office, where a 20-something Manny Ramirez in his Cleveland Indians uniform looms from the autographed poster that hangs on the wall.

“Steve,” I said, “that was real, wasn’t it — the Manny in high school, that swing, his work ethic, all that pure talent?”

“Oh, yeah,” Mandl said, “that was real.”

And then the coach had to run.

I stumbled upon the George Washington Trojans of Washington Heights in the spring of 1991. The high school was bursting with new immigrants, and the 25 varsity baseball players were all Dominican.

Mandl invited me to spend the season following the team. He told me he had a great hitter, an 18-year-old from Santo Domingo who got the bat around faster than any other high school player he had seen.

I knew next to nothing about baseball, but even someone with the scantest technical knowledge of the game or the mechanics of hitting could recognize that Ramirez was a star in the making.

I don’t remember the first time I saw that quicksilver swing. What I remember is what it felt like to be there on that rock-hard artificial surface atop the hill next to the high school, among his euphoric teammates and fans shouting his name, merengue blasting from someone’s boom box in the concrete bleachers behind the third-base line, the major league scouts lined up behind home plate as Manny came up to bat in his baggy black-and-orange secondhand uniform and red cleats and slammed one home run after another, day after day.

Up in the stands Manny’s beautiful 16-year-old girlfriend, Kathy Guzman, would practically be swooning. A vendor in a Yankees cap would push a grocery cart serving pastelitos and the sweet, blended orange juice and milk concoction known as a morir soñando: to die dreaming.

Manny, batting .650, walloped 14 home runs in 22 games. Not one of those home runs was on television or saved on videotape. Mandl could barely keep the team in baseballs and gloves let alone think about videotaping his future major leaguer.

But maybe it’s better that way. Those home runs, the memory of them, are part of the Manny that belongs to Washington Heights. He was the shy, happy-go-lucky boy with the perfect swing who everyone knew was going to the major leagues. The boy who loved to hit more than anything else. The boy who worked harder than anyone else. The baby-faced boy who never drank anything stronger than the nonalcoholic Puerto Rican eggnog from the corner bodega he chugged to bulk up.

That was the Manny who at least seemed knowable, before he disappeared behind the wall of all that surreal major league fame and money. Who is the real Manny? The 18-year-old prospect with everything ahead of him, or the 38-year-old major leaguer who walked away from baseball rather than face a 100-game suspension after testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs for the second time in two years? Who knows?

A couple of weeks ago, New York Magazine announced that Frank Rich would be joining them in June.

Rich will be an essayist for the magazine, writing monthly on politics and culture, and will serve as an editor-at-large, editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay. He will also be a commentator on nymag.com, engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week.

For those of us who have been reading Rich at the NYT for decades — first as chief drama critic, then as an op-ed columnist — the news of his departure was a shock. In fact, my Rich reading days go back to my arrival at college years earlier. He was two years ahead of me and a bigwig at The Crimson.

Rich’s farewell column appears in tomorrow’s NYT. I was reading it online earlier this evening with moderate interest until I reached the closing paragraph, which took me by happy surprise.

You will recall that I am a huge Stephen Sondheim fan, and that Sunday in the Park with George is “our” musical — the musical Gail and I saw on Broadway when we passed through New York as one stop on our extended honeymoon and whose music has moved us ever since. Having reminded you of that, I’ll now quote Rich’s final NYT words:

Of all the things I’ve done at The Times, there may be none I’m prouder of than, in my critic’s days, championing “Sunday in the Park with George,” Stephen Sondheim’s and James Lapine’s 1984 musical about two artists in two different eras restless to create something new. For a quarter-century now, the show’s climactic song has inspired countless people in all walks of life when the time has come to take a leap. “Stop worrying where you’re going,” the Sondheim lyric goes. “Move on.”

You will find below, courtesy of youtube, Bernadette Peters and Mandy Patinkin singing the song during the original Broadway run of the show. And at top, their reprise 25 years later at Sondheim’s 80th birthday concert. Both versions are glorious. Together they provide an excellent primer on the change the years bring — in appearance, in voice, in interpretation.

[Laura Morton for The New York Times]

I’m still catching up from a large backlog, so this is really last week’s sentence of the week. I reserve the right to write about the sentence of this week. And the winning sentence is actually a perfectly fine sentence. Its failing is a matter of context.

On to the winner. NYT sportswriter Pete Thamel had a piece in the Sunday sports section a week ago about Stanford quarterback Andrew Luck. Luck, as you may know, was the runner-up for the Heisman Trophy in the fall. It was widely expected that if Luck chose to leave Stanford early, he would be the #1 pick in the NFL draft, well ahead of the Heisman winner, Cam Newton. But Luck chose to stay at Stanford for another year, both to play one more year of college ball and to continue enjoying student life at Stanford.

Thamel’s article is a good one. In a short amount of space, he lays out the issues well and you leave liking Luck. (A little alliteration there!) But there’s this puzzling passage, maybe the result of some combination of re-writing and careless editing:

Although Luck’s mind was essentially made up [regarding staying in school], he turned to someone outside the family. With his feet shaking nervously, he called Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, who stayed at Tennessee for his senior year instead of entering the 1997 N.F.L. draft.

Luck recalled that Manning told him, “If you’re not ready to move on with life, it’s the best choice.”

Manning advised him to never second-guess his decision or worry about injuries. He added that his senior year had helped him be better prepared to turn the corner in his second N.F.L. season, when Indianapolis improved to 13 victories from 3 the previous season.

Luck also received texts of support from a former N.F.L. teammate of his father’s, Archie Manning, whose sons Peyton and Eli faced the same decision.

That last sentence is the winner. Um, given the three paragraphs that preceded it, don’t we know already that Archie’s son faced the same decision? Or did we need a reminder?

Well, as I say, maybe it’s just a slip in the editing process. But it made me stop and re-read the passage to make sure I was following the logic of the article.

Alas, further down the article, there’s what now seems to be the obligatory mention of that notorious war criminal, Condoleezza Rice. Is it no longer possible to write a piece about Stanford without mentioning her, or to televise a Stanford sporting event without panning over to her in the stands? Had anyone ever heard of Stanford before she left to join the Bush administration? It would seem not.

On turning to the Seattle Times’ sports section Wednesday morning, I saw a piece about Seattle Mariner outfielder Milton Bradley that opened with the following astonishing sentence:

A former major-league general manager said Tuesday night there would have to be specific language in Milton Bradley’s contract for his arrest on suspicion of making a felony threat to alter his deal.

Have you read it? Can you make sense of it? Do you have the impression that Bradley was arrested for threatening to alter his deal, and that such a threat is apparently felonious? Is there any other way to interpret this sentence without additional information?

On reading further into the article, I was eventually able to figure out what the writer, Geoff Baker, was trying to convey. Here are the issues:

1. Bradley allegedly made a criminal threat the day before against a woman and was arrested.

2. The Mariners owe Bradley $12 million for the coming season.

3. The Mariners wouldn’t comment on the situation, following club policy.

4. Baker, in need of some further insight about how the team might handle Bradley’s contract, contacted a former GM, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

5. The issue arose in their conversation of whether the Mariners would be able to forgo paying Bradley salary that was guaranteed under his contract: “The former GM . . . said the language needed to convert contracts from ‘guaranteed’ to ‘non-guaranteed’ is very specific. ‘It depends on the guarantee language,’ he said. ‘If the guarantee language includes a felony conviction, it allows the contract to be converted to a non-guaranteed form if that player is convicted of a felony.’”

It’s now possible to return to the opening sentence and see that Baker was, perhaps prematurely, explaining that Bradley’s deal with the Mariners might be alterable in light of the alleged felony, if language in the contract addressed such a scenario. Of course, the location within the sentence of the phrase “to alter his deal” is awkward at best, but one can parse it once one has enough information. The sentence needs re-writing, but more, it needs re-locating within the article. Even the fact that it opens with mention of a former GM is utterly mysterious until later.

I am relieved, in any case, to know that threatening to alter one’s contract is not a felony.

It was a weekend of shocks, brought to me by the NYT. I already wrote about Sunday’s shock, in which I learned from the weekly Vows column that leaving your spouse and kids is cool. The day before, I discovered that I’m a member of the foaming far left. And here I thought I was a moderate. I was once. Then I became a liberal. And now I’m foaming.

The thing is, I never moved. It’s not me who’s changing. It’s our politics, the story of which I hardly need to detail here. We all know that policies Nixon and Reagan once enacted are now considered socialist by the far right, a group better known these days as the Republican Party. Since there has to be a center, and to the mainstream media, that center must sit somewhere between the two parties, I now have the pleasure of learning about my membership in the foaming far left.

You see, Charles Blow explained in his weekly column that

The far left is foaming at the mouth.

The near-apoplectic level of agita within the liberal screeching class over President Obama’s tax-cut compromise has exposed a seismic crack in the Democratic monolith — outspoken liberal Democrats on one side and barely audible moderate Democrats on the other.

Did you catch that? Blow is equating liberal Democrats with the foaming far left. He then asks if the party is “experiencing the beginnings of a purging akin to that seen on the right.” Golly. Liberals whose views don’t differ much from Hubert Humphrey in 1968 are now not just foaming but purging the party of the Democratic Party’s moderates, who are somewhere to the right of the 1968 Nixon. A few paragraphs later, Blow refers to these purgers as “far-left liberals.” Am I to deduce that liberals are on the far left by definition?

What a country. And what a media.

I have written several times of my affection for the NYT Sunday Vows column, each week featuring another love story, sometimes of the rich and famous, sometimes of just regular Joes and Jills (or Joes and Joes, or whatever). Well, this past Sunday’s ventured into new territory. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Do people really want the story told in the national newspaper, in its most prominent social news site, of their meeting (while married to others) at their children’s pre-school, falling in love, and deciding to leave their spouses for each other? Well, in case I wasn’t sure, I know now that the answer is yes. You might think you would rather not know more, but in case you do, check out the full story here.

I’ll share here the story’s climactic moment.

In May 2008, Mr. Partilla invited her for a drink at O’Connell’s, a neighborhood bar. She said she knew something was up, because they had never met on their own before.

“I’ve fallen in love with you,” he recalled saying to her. She jumped up, knocking a glass of beer into his lap, and rushed out of the bar. Five minutes later, he said, she returned and told him, “I feel exactly the same way.” Then she left again.

One more detail:

As Mr. Partilla saw it, their options were either to act on their feelings and break up their marriages or to deny their feelings and live dishonestly. “Pain or more pain,” was how he summarized it.

“The part that’s hard for people to believe is we didn’t have an affair,” Ms. Riddell said. “I didn’t want to sneak around and sleep with him on the side. I wanted to get up in the morning and read the paper with him.”

I had to head to my office Sunday morning to grade or I might have written about the Vows story then. In the meantime, the publication of the story has turned into a story in its own right. At Forbes, Jeff Bercovici wrote yesterday:

In addition to strong condemnation from numerous bloggers and many of the paper’s own commenters, the article, as a first of sorts for the Times, invited a number of questions. Why were the ex-spouses of the newlyweds not mentioned by name in the story? Did the reporter call them for comment, as basic journalistic practice would dictate? Why did the Times open up the comment board when most Vows stories are off-limits? And above all, what were the couple thinking in telling their story in a space normally reserved for feel-good, soft-focus meet-cute tales?

“We did this because we just wanted one honest account of how this happened for our sakes and for our kids’ sakes,” Riddell told me. “We are really proud of our family and proud of the way we’ve handled this situation over the past year. There was nothing in the story we were ashamed of.”

You really should check out the full Vows piece. I dare not even think of what awaits us next.

Alex Pareene has a brilliant series at Salon on what he calls the War Room Hack Thirty, his “least favorite political commentators, newspaper columnists and constant cable news presences … . Criteria for inclusion included writing the same column every week for 30 years, warmongering, joyless repetition of conventional wisdom, and making bad puns.”

Pareene has revealed his choices one at a time, from #30 to #1, building suspense. I was disappointed when Thomas Friedman turned up at #3. I had him pegged at #1. But he did finish ahead of David Broder, just barely, with Broder at #4. This afternoon, #1 was revealed: Broder’s fellow Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen.

Pareene on Friedman:

He’s a silly, simple-minded man whose success leads a cynic to the conclusion that the world is run by similarly silly, simple-minded men.

Repeat offenses: Conflation of wealth with virtue, horrible jokes, repetition, warmongering, easy generalizations in lieu of research or analysis, cabdriver-on-the-street columns, mixed metaphors, generally awful prose, random capitalization of Certain Words when he’s Trying to Coin a Catchphrase.

On Cohen:

I sometimes ask myself, who is the intended audience of a Richard Cohen column? Who reads a Richard Cohen column and thinks to himself, “Yes, I agree with this”? I don’t write “thinks to herself” because I cannot fathom the existence of a woman who’d respond approvingly to this defense of Clarence Thomas’ vocal appreciation of large breasts. I think Ginni herself would say it does Justice Thomas no favors to have the support of this guy. And what does Cohen leave out of his defense of Thomas? That he was accused of creating a hostile work environment himself, for making inappropriate comments to a 23-year-old editorial aide in the late-1990s.

There’s no subject on which Richard Cohen is not completely inessential. The looming debt crisis? Caused by kids today and their tattoos and hippety-hop music! The financial collapse? Did you know that Richard Cohen went to high school with Ruth Madoff? ‘Cause that’s all he’s got.

Richard Cohen is the worst hack in the country.

At the bottom of Pareene’s list, just squeezing in at #30, is David Brooks, the great generalizer and pop social psychologist. Pareene gets right to his essence:

Brooks is singularly unsuited to be an opinion columnist, because he has no strong beliefs. He shows, rarely, flashes of genuine wit, of critical thinking skills, of acknowledgment of his own ridiculousness. But mostly he just sort of rambles on about kids these days, about how things used to be different, about how the Elites are so out-of-touch.

Occasionally he writes something exceptionally stupid or surprisingly vile, but mostly he just plays his part as a PBS Newshour Conservative.

Repeat offenses: armchair sociology, easy generalizations in lieu of research or analysis, boringness.

Representative quote:

“The magic is not felt by a lot of people. It’s not felt, obviously, by a lot of less educated people, downscale people. They just look at Obama, and they don’t see anything. And so, Obama’s problem is he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who could go into an Applebee’s salad bar, and people think he fits in naturally there.”

(Note: Applebee’s does not have salad bars.)

Read about all thirty hacks. How do some of these people keep their jobs?