Culture

to go outside for lunch.  For those not in the know, it doesn’t really matter how cold or rainy the weather is, outside almost always looks like a better option than the cafeteria of a New York City public school.  Grab your coat, take the brown bag your mother packed, and head for the great outdoors. In the Bronx it’s mostly paved. No matter.  We used those lunch hours to talk about sports and music, to play football (two-hand touch), basketball, or whiffle ball, and to watch other kids fight. Richie, myself, and several other youngens ended up forging a long lasting friendship during those lunch hours, both at 141 and later at John F. Kennedy High School. One of the things that first brought us together was a love of sports.  Early forays into gambling on it were complemented by endless discussions about it: in class, during lunch, after school, in the bowling alley, at the pool hall, or just walking down the street.  When you grow up in New York, you do a lot of walking down the street.

It really is that simple.  If the Knicks are groovin’ me, and I’m groovin’ them, then it’s a night of hot passion.  If not, we lead our separate lives and don’t bother each other.  You might be tempted to call that front-running, but they haven’t won a championship since I was five, so whatever. What it’s really about is the team having charisma.  I still think Bernard King’s over achieving Knicks of the early 1980s were more fun that Latrell Sprewell’s almost-champion Knicks of the late 1990s. And on some level, it’s also about not being that inclined to follow basketball on a daily basis.  Why? Because while basketball is a really great game to play, I think the NBA is highly flawed as a spectator sport.

In terms of social decorum, I think it’s high time we stopped exalting caffeine and started treating it like any other legal drug. Just as the days of pretending alcoholism as cool are in the past, we need to put an end to glorifying addiction to caffeine.

Ad Reinhardt, “Red and Blue Composition” (1941)

I like to play poker. And not because I got drawn into the highly edited drama of Texas Hold `Em at the World Series of Poker on ESPN, or because I saw some big breasted pin-up playing in a celebrity heads-up tournament.

I like playing poker because I’ve always liked playing poker. I began as a small boy, playing War, Old Maid, and Steal the Old Man’s Bundle with my immigrant grandmother; I got initiated into the harder stuff when my father dealt me a game of 52 Pick-Up; and I learned the holy trinity of poker from him shortly thereafter.