Ringo Really Is Just A Cool Guy:
Starr has the amiable manner of a goofy, wisecracking uncle who happens to have been in the most successful band in the history of the known universe. After wrapping a photo shoot in a suite at the Sunset Marquis (a hotel he likes, as he said teasingly, “so I don’t have to have the press in me house”), Starr was wearing his signature round sunglasses and a black blazer adorned with white peace signs, layered atop a T-shirt bearing the logo of the streetwear brand A Bathing Ape (“I love them, they’re mad”). During idle moments in the shoot, he had dropped one-liners with impeccable timing, drummed absent-mindedly on a table and occasionally sung an easygoing refrain of nonsense syllables to himself: Doo-dah, doo-dah dae.
When asked about the past, Starr is more likely to offer an artfully evasive Ringo-ism than delve into old emotions. He insists that it wasn’t particularly difficult to be known as the only Beatle who didn’t write songs for much of the group’s existence, and he recounts a story about a notorious moment in his hard-partying days — “I’d shaved my head” — with a good-natured laugh and a shrug.
But he is not reticent when it comes to talking about Beatles memories; his conversations are peppered with them. A recent invitation to join the Nashville musicians’ union, for example, made him recall, with a laugh, “The biggest fear, a long time ago, was that the union was going to make us all read music. Because none of us — John, Paul, George and Ringo — none of us read music. I thought, well, I’ll go play tambourine then.”
Will The A’s Ever Find A Place They Can Call Home? Baseball’s most nomadic franchise may soon find itself wandering in the desert after stays in Philly, KC, Oakland, and Sacramento:
It had just turned 8am on a crystal clear, late June Monday morning, but it was already 85F (29C). Despite the tolerable heat (for the desert), a giant air-conditioned tent had been erected on the former site of the Tropicana, the famed hotel which was demolished in a controlled implosion last October. Athletics owner John Fisher, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred and a gaggle of politicians had gathered on the compact, nine-acre site for a ceremony more than two years in the making: the groundbreaking for the new A’s stadium on the Las Vegas Strip, coming your way in 2028.
On the surface, it was your run-of-the-mill pomp and circumstance: a series of uneven speeches mixed in with a few kids gushing over how much they can’t wait to have the former Oakland and current A’s in Las Vegas. But if you had been following the long-running A’s stadium saga, one which led them to a temporary minor-league residency in Sacramento this season, you didn’t have to look far beyond the rented heavy-duty construction props to see the farce, and you didn’t have to dig much deeper than the dignitaries shoveling into the makeshift baseball diamond to understand what this ceremony really was: the latest stop on Fisher’s never-ending, would-be stadium tour.
“This could be an entire 10-part Netflix docuseries,” says Neil DeMause, editor of Field of Schemes, a site that follows the trials and travails of stadium construction and renovation in North America. “All the twists and turns in all the different places in the Bay Area they looked, and John Fisher throwing a hissy fit and going off to Las Vegas. And now them being in Sacramento but saying they’re going to move to Las Vegas, but still not actually seemingly making any progress. I mean, it’s a lot.”
JC Bradbury, an economist who studies the financing of sports venues, is similarly mystified about what the next step is. “It’s unclear what the endgame of John Fisher is,” he says. “Whether he miscalculated, doesn’t understand, doesn’t care about money, or there’s something I’m just totally missing in all of this”.
Why would Fisher leave nearly a billion dollars for a park on a 55-acre plot, in a top-10 television market in love with its ballclub, for nine acres and a minuscule market with fans who don’t know their A’s from their elbow? We still don’t know, but there are plenty of new questions to try and answer about a process that doesn’t add despite Fisher, Manfred, and the Vegas officials who insist that everything is on time and on schedule.
What we do know is that Fisher has not surpassed the $100m he must spend on the park to unlock the $380m in public dollars; he’s reportedly spent half that on planning and development. We also know that costs of construction are rising. One of the reasons that Stuart Sternberg, owner of the Tampa Bay Rays, says he pulled out of a $600m public subsidy deal is that Hurricane Milton caused a delay to construction of his new stadium, and so he wanted even more public capital to make him whole on potential overruns. Perhaps seeing a future of cash calls, Sternberg is selling the Rays, another team with long-term stadium issues currently playing home games in a minor league park.
Something tells me that this train-wreck may well be studied in business classes for decades to come.
Artist Of The Week–Jack Whitten:
Detail from “9.11.01,” showing mosaic that the artist made from acrylic paint, ash, animal blood, molds of shoes and glass and metal shards — “as powerful a response to an unthinkable event as I’ve seen in art,” our critic said.Credit…Ahmed Gaber for The New York Times
“I’m a product of American Apartheid,” the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It was a vision that propelled and buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. “This is why I get up in the morning,” he wrote, “and go to work!”
And how very lucky we are, at a moment when references to diversity and difference are being scrubbed from accounts of our national history, to have a refreshing tidal wave of a Whitten career retrospective sweeping and scintillating through the special exhibition galleries on the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth floor.
Whitten spoke, with wishful optimism, of wanting to be an artist-citizen of the world, a world in which “there is no race, no color, no gender, no territorial hangups, no religion, no politics. There is only life.” Life is what this great show of his fantastically inventive art is filled with.
Before You Read This, Ask Yourselves–What Would You Expect To Find In A 50-Year-Old Time Capsule?:
Treasures from 1975, sealed inside what the World Record Academy once called the “world’s largest time capsule,” went on display Friday, drawing hundreds from across the country to catch a glimpse of relics from the past.
Thousands of letters, pet rocks, artwork, a groovy teal suit and even a yellow Chevy Vega had been preserved inside the capsule — a portal to another era — for half a century.
Most treasured, however, were letters from parents to their children:
Chris Galen made the journey from Virginia.
“I made a mental note that in 50 years if I was still alive — because I’d be in my 60s then — I would want to come back here and be part of the opening,” he told NBC News.
Despite the thousands of letters that need to be sorted, Galen was able to find one from his mother.
“I hope you had a good education, a happy and successful life, rich in many ways,” he read from the letter.
“I’m hoping as she’s looking down on us from somewhere that I can report back to her that a lot of the things she wanted for me and for my brother came true,” Galen said.
Trish said she believes her father would be very proud of Friday’s celebration and that she’s learned a lot in the 50 years since the capsule was sealed.
“Life is too short. You’re going to hit an age where you want more time and you know you don’t have it,” she said.
Galen said the message goes deeper than artifacts.
“It’s not about what’s inside of it. It’s about what’s inside of us and who we were back in ’75, and who we are today,” he said
What better song to send us off than this achingly-poignant paean to endless possibilities as viewed through the lens of what really happened in the protagonists’ lives? Yes, we’re talking Sondheim. One of my favorites:
