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 Posted: Thu May 12, 2005 1:59 pm Post subject: |
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Shoot Pool
Hardcover
By Ian Pannell
We are truly rising to the challenge of English and draw and perfecting both our top- and back-spin after this thin, illustrated (with both drawings and photos) how-to manual. A must-read for anyone serious about the game.
We especially liked the section on basic pool rules, which ought to be in neon for the yobs at our local establishment:
| Quote: | * Never obstruct you opponent's game. Stand back from the table and leave your comments until his innings is over. Some house rules will actually award the game to your opponent if you cause him to miscue or foul stroke.
* Never deliberately play out of turn.
* Never play a shot when the cue ball or any other ball is in motion.l Again, some house rules will award the game to your opponent.
* Never smoke over the table or leave your drink balanced on the rails. If you spin a coin to decide the first break, spin the coin away from the table. (-- p. 114) |
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| Posted: Mon May 30, 2005 7:30 pm Post subject: |
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Life With Mother
Hardcover
By Clarence Day
| Quote: | What with Father's intolerance of the old family furniture, and his criticisms of old family ways, and his pounding determinedly night after night on his piano, Grandpa began to get restive. But Grandma, to whom Grandpa was silently but deeply devoted, interceded for Father every time things came to a head and managed from one day to another to smooth Grandpa down.
Grandpa tried to be patient, on the theory that his son would soon marry. Father seemed to be planning to propose to a cousin of his who lived in West Springfield. They must have had some understanding between them because he gave her a ring and a watch. But they soon had a quarrel. They decided they had made a mistake, and the ring was returned.
Disappointing as this was to Grandpa it did not interrupt Father's program; it merely changed a little the order of the steps he was planning. He joined a club and went there regularly to see other men and play billiards. He disliked to visit ordinary billiard parlors. He had made up his mind they were low. As to drinking, he took wine with his dinner, and beer or ale with his lunch, but he didn't drink at bars or between meals because that was a poor way to do it. (From Mother and Father Meet at pgs. 4-5). |
What a charming world so mercifully devoid of squalor by this wonderful American Wodehouse whose screen memoir, Life With Father, still makes us roar.
Life With Father
DVD
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| Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2005 10:27 am Post subject: |
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Wodehouse
A Life
Hardcover
By Robert McCrum
| Quote: | | It was a male world. There were no girls, apart from the housemaids or, if the housemaster was married with children, his daughters. Girls rarely appear in Wodehouse's early fiction, and then usually as an unfathomable embarrassment. Without the civilizing influence of women, the extracurricular life of the public schoolboy tended to revolve around either the authorized rough-and-tumble of the sports field, or the illegal drainpipes and open windows. In The White Feather, the boys break out to play billiards or smoke Turkish cigarettes, while in Mike, the eponymous hero expresses his disaffection by sneaking downstairs to listen to his housemaster's gramophone in the small hours. The incipient anarchy of this society was channelled into organized games, and when sports failed, would be regulated by the house prefects, who had the power to cane miscreants with a swagger-stick, a process known as 'touching up.' (From 'The Boy, What Will He Become?' at p. 28) |
Indeed:
| Quote: | | ... Speaking of Dulwich, Wodehouse himself never lost the English public schoolboy's instinctive of grasp of such class distinctions. 'It was,' he said, towards the end of his life, 'what you would call a middle-class school. We were the sons of reasonably solvent but certainly not wealthy parents, and all had to earn our living later on. Compared with Eton, Dulwich would be something like an American state university compared with Harvard or Princeton. Bertie Wooster's parents would never have sent him to Dulwich, but Ukridge could very well have been there.' Dulwich may be been petit-bourgeois and suburban; it was also literary and artistic, with a higher proportion of writers than most public schools, including the best-selling writer Dennis Wheatley, who hated the place and was expelled; Raymond Chandler, who was there shortly after Wodehouse; C.S. Forester, author of the Hornblower stories; and, much later, the novelists Michael Ondaatje and Graham Swift. (-- p. 27) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 1:07 pm Post subject: |
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Django
The Life and Music of a Gyspy Legend
Hardcover
By Michael Dregni
| Quote: | | Even as a youth, Django was a fool for games and gambling. He would wager on anything, anywhere - cards, dice, and especially billiards. Whith his winnings, Dango sometimes treated himslef and Nin-Nin to a movie. Or better yet, they found a way around buying tickets. Django was drawn to the cinema like an innocent to the inferno. At the grand Luxor movie palace in Barbes, Django and Nin-Nin were regular gate-crashers. The afternoon matinee featured two films, separated by an intermission when the audience mingled in the lobby to buy treats. Django and Nin-Nin slid in among the crowd to watch the second feature, and their ploy worked well for weeks until one day when Le Luxor held a showing for a nearby school. Among the freshly scrubbed and uniformed schoolchildren, the two grubby Gypsy boys were easy marks and the cinema manager collared them. But he struck a deal with Django and Nin-Nin: If they set up the movie posters in front and performed odd jobs arund the cinema, he would grant them gratis admission. With their modest labor complete, Django and Nin-Nin found seats and roared with laughter at the antics of Charlie Chaplin. They thrilled to cliffhanger serials and for 90 minutes lived the life of pirates sailing before the wind, dreaming of crossing rapiers with D'Artagnan against Richelieu's guards and hiding their faces in horror as Famtomas hatched his nefarious plots. From the cinema, Django learned how to walk with a gangster's swagger. He learned of honor among thieves and codes of chivalry. And he learned how to tilt his fedora over the eye just so. (From the chapter, Awakening, at p. 12) |
A sentimental, overwritten yet oddly enchanting biography of this amazing musician and his fascinating Gypsy roots as he travelled as a child with family by roulotte throughout France.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Jul 29, 2005 9:43 am Post subject: |
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Mordecai Richler On Snooker
The Game and the Characters Who Play It
Hardcover
By Mordecai Richler
| Quote: | Pool tables were also available here and there in our neighborhood. However, while we considered such a crude game simply dandy for American ruffians, it was unacceptable to St. Urbain Street sports like us. Pool is for bangers. Played on a ridiculously small table with outsize pockets that beckon rather than reject a less than accurately aimed pot. A pool table measures a risible 4 1/2 feet by 9 feet, while a regulation snooker table is 6 feet by 12 feet. Checkers cannot be compared to chess, nor pool to snooker, a far more subtle game wherein tactical skills count for as much as potting ability.
If I zigzagged between Baron Byng and our cold-water flat after school was out, a seven-block hike even if I avoided the Rachel, I had to run a gauntlet of two other poolrooms: the Mount Royal Billiards Academy, where we could sometimes watch a real pro, "Atomic" Eddy Agha, practise, and the Laurier. So I seldom got home before six p.m.
"Where were you?" my mother would demand, her manner indignant. "I'm sitting here afraid to use the phone in case you've been run over by a car or got into another fight with those French kids, rickets is too good for them, and Bessie is waiting for me to call her with my marble cake recipe, as if she won't ruin it no matter what I tell her."
"Why, that anti-Semite, Mr. Hoover, made me stay in after classes."
"He should be reported to the authorities."
"Things will only get worse if we make trouble."
I went on to enjoy a brief, only fitfully successful stint as a teenage poolroom hustler...(-- pgs. 6-7) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed Sep 28, 2005 7:55 pm Post subject: |
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Inventing the Hawk
Paperback
By Lorna Crozier
| Quote: | He owns the pool tables in the beer parlor at the
Legion. Every Saturday morning he cleans the felt
and collects his quarters, rolling them in strips of
brown paper at the breakfast table. Though he's got
cataracts and can't raise his arms above his head (it
was all the arm wrestling, my mother says), no one
can beat him playing pool. The young guys wait to
challenge him after he's had a few beer, but he only
gets better. His eyes seem to clear and maybe he for-
gets how old he is.
(Stanza 18 of Facts About My Father, p. 75) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Wed Jan 25, 2006 3:13 pm Post subject: |
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The New Yorker
Magazine Subscription
The Current Cinema
Battle Lines
"Go for Zucker" and "Why We Fight"
By David Denby
Jan 23 & 30/06
| Quote: | | Jaecki Zucker (Henry Hubchen), the hero of the German comedy "Go for Zucker," loses his family when the Berlin Wall goes up, in 1961. His mother and his brother, Samuel, leave East Berlin for Frankfurt and capitalism, while fourteen-year-old Jaecki, ne Jakob Zuckermann, stays behind, drops his Jewish identity, settles in as a Communist, and eventually turns himself into a celebrity sports announcer. More than forty years go by, Communism has collapsed, and Jaecki is out of a job. He has become, in his own words, a "reunification loser" - he just gets by on his skills as a pool hustler. Widely described as the first Jewish comedy made in Germany since the Second World War, "Go for Zucker" was an enormous hit there last year, and part of the reason must be that Jaecki, a liar, a drinker, and a gambler, has so much life in him that he's impossible to dislike. (-- p. 96) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Sat Jan 28, 2006 3:18 pm Post subject: |
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The Pirate Coast
Thomas Jefferson, the First Marines, and
the Secret Mission of 1805
Hardcover
By Richard Zacks
| Quote: | An edginess seemed to infect the entire party. The restless Americans passed the time gambling, playing billiards, drinking, visiting brothels. A 42-gallon cask of Madeira and a 72-gallon cask of wine showed up the expense account for Cairo.
On the night of December 29, in a run-down billiard hall, as outcasts from a dozen nations looked on, Robert Goldsborough of the U.S. Navy and Richard Farquhar, the ambitious Scot, played several games of billiards; the bet was a half-pint bottle of attar of roses, a perfume easily available in Cairo.
Goldsborough, a cocky young man from a prominent Maryland family, had arrived in Cairo to deliver a query from Hull and had stayed to await a definitive reply from Eaton. The two billiards players, both drinking, argued over the tally in the game; they insulted each other. A choice word from Farquhar provoked Goldsborough, who threw the first punch. Standing toe to toe, they exchanged blows, with each man receiving a black eye. The Farquhar wrestled Goldsborough to the floor and began pounding him. The crowd, apparently deciding that the American was in the wrong, was ready to let the Scot "break his bones" as one witness later put it. But Selim, the jack-of-all-trades Janissary hired by Eaton, jumped in and rescued the young American officer.
Eaton was not at the billiard hall and so only learned of the "fisticuffs" the following morning. Eaton interrogated various officers and found out that Goldsborough was probably guilty of much more than one single brawl. He was accused of cheating at cards at "the most respectable Christian house in Grand Cairo," and also of drunkenly wandering the streets of Cairo lifting the veils of women. (It's a minor miracle that a jealous hasuband or brother hadn't killed him.) (From Chapter 11, Reeling in Hamet, at pgs. 151-152) |
Notable for the story only, not for the quality of writing and definitely not for reliable historical fact.
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Feb 16, 2006 3:16 pm Post subject: |
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Smithsonian
Magazine Subscription
In Search of the Roots of Genius Mozart
On the 250th anniversary of the composer's birth, the author scours Salzburg and Vienna for traces of the master's mischievous spirit
By Edward Rothstein
February, 2006
| Quote: | ... Mozart's music is not powerful because of where it was written. It created a place; it did not evoke one.
But we celebrate the places in which Mozart composed because they give us something to grab onto, some way of grasping the relationship between our mundane world and Mozart's ethereal one. A sense of place also reminds us that even transcendent music does not really transcend. If we treat it divorced from this world and its experiences, we are missing some of its resonance, some of its opposition and some of its jest.
This is why it is so intriguing to gaze out from Mozart's marbleizedc room on the second floor and look straight down on narrow Blutgasse. The composer lived above ... Blood Alley. There is no agreement about how Blutgasse got its name: Was it the site of medieval executions or the butchering of animals? At any rate, could Mozart not have been aware of the irony? Here is the apartment where he played billiards, enjoyed evenings of music making and acclaim, but one look outside could bring him back to earth. Mozart's triumphs often have that kind of doubleness, as when, at the peak of his success, he invited his father to visit...The concerts, dinners and flow of money, both in and out of Wolfgang's coffers, dizzied Leopold. (-- pgs. 94-95) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 9:25 am Post subject: |
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Harper's
Congo's Daily Blood
Ruminations from a failed state
By Bryan Mealer
Magazine Subscription
April, 2006
| Quote: | | Bunia had been drastically transformed since I'd seen it last. The UN mission had tripled in size, and there were no longer any teenage soldiers in wigs and painted fingernails, prowling the streets with rocket launchers. Several new restaurants and hotels had opened, including an enterprising Indian joint at the Hotel Ituri that catered to Indian and Bangladeshi troops, plus the massive influx of international press and foreign aid workers. There was a lopsided pool table in the bar of the Indian restaurant, and every night a dozen Italian aid workers would line up to play two hefty Congolese girls who'd established themselves as local sharks. The two girls played for bottles of beer, knocking back one after another, yet they never weaved or staggered, and I never saw them lose. (- p. 57) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Thu Dec 14, 2006 3:30 pm Post subject: |
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Sweet and Lowdown
DVD
Directed by Woody Allen
| Quote: | The larger-than-life and, in fact, mythical jazz guitarist Emmett Ray is again late for his opening at the ubiquitous roadhouse joint, where he is the star entertainment. No surpise to management, he is in the back, in the poolhall, losing miserably. He nevertheless leans confidently over the felt and takes his shot. We last about 10 minutes.
Other player: That's fifty bucks more you owe me.
Emmett: Alright. I'm not going out of town....Another one?
Other player: I think you got some visitors.
Emmett: I'll be back. |
There is some good cartoon writing here by Allen and a few classic gags - Emmett's crescent moon descent into the orchestra on stage, for instance, but none of the actors understands comedy or comic timing so the thing droops like Monday's washline.
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2630#2630
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| Posted: Thu Dec 21, 2006 11:12 am Post subject: |
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War Made New
Technology, Warfare, and
the Course of History
1500 to Today
Hardcover
By Max Boot
| Quote: | More effective than land-based fighters were those that flew off U.S. and British aircraft carriers that ventured near the coast of Japan in the summer of 1945. They took to bombing and strafing to complement the work of the big bombers. For the most part, however, they were simply making the rubble bounce. By June 1945, the Superforts had razed Japan's major cities so completely that they were able to move on to medium-sized cities, those with populations under 300,000, and destroy them, too. They were so sure of their domination of the skies that, like a pool player calling his shot, they dropped leaflets warning Japanese civilians which cities would be next on their hit list, confident that was nothing the Japanese could do to stop them.
Nor could the Japanese retaliate against the American homeland, since they lacked a long-range bomber of their own. The best they could do was to load thousands of hand-made rice-paper balloons with small incendiary devices and send them wafting across the Pacific. Some actually reached North America but the damage they caused was negligible -- a few minor forest fires in the Pacific Northwest and a total death toll of six people in rural Oregon. Even as these comically ineffectual devices were drifting eastward, a weapon of unimaginable magnitude was coming from the west.
...On August 6, the world learned its secret when a B-29 known as the Enola Gray, piloted by (29-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Paul) Tibbets, dropped an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, leaving a mushroom cloud and utter annihilation in its wake. Three days later, a B-29 named Bock's Car dropped another A-bomb on Nagasaki. The former raid killed at least 130,000 people, the latter more than 60,000. (Radiation poisoning would increase the long-term death toll.) The unleashing of this unprecedented firepower finally forced Japan into surrendering. (From The Second Industrial Revolution, Superfortress and Firebombs, at pgs. 292-293) |
Link to this entry
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| Posted: Fri Jan 19, 2007 1:34 pm Post subject: |
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Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo
By Brooklyn PR wildman Martin Espada
Read nicely by the author
CD Audio
| Quote: | Now the Dead Will Dance the Mambo
Achill Island, Ireland, June 200
Last night the shadow of a cloud rolled off the bare mountain
like a shawl slipping from the shoulder of a giant.
Shirts on the clothesline sagged in rain.
We burned turf, fists of earth blackening in the fireplace,
room full of poets' books leaning rumpled, half-asleep.
All night a radio sang in Irish, tongues sod-hard with lament
or celebration. The the BBC news, and the announcer's lips
pinching the name: Tito Puente, The Mambo King, dead in New York.
I would listen to Tito's records and see my father years ago:
black hair shiny as the spinning disk, combed slick
before the dance. I learned to spy on his mambo step,
drummed the pots and kitchen tables of Brooklyn.
I saw Tito Puento too, hammering timbales on the Jazzboat
in Boston Harbor, brandishing drumsticks over head
to scatter the malevolent spirits that grabbed at his hair.
Guadalupe pushed backstage to return with Tito's drumstick,
splintered from repeating, always repeating the beat of slaves.
Here, on this island, I rehearse the Irish word for drum:
bodhran, gripped by hand like the pandereta,
circle of skin and wood for the grandchildren of slaves
to thump as they sang the news in Ponce, Puerto Rico.
Again today the rain grays the graying stones.
We shake away drizzle in the pub dwarfed by mountains.
In brown Guiness light we squint to see
the posters of their Easter dead: James Connolly
bellowing insurrection the Citizen Army,
the year 1916 ablaze above his head, numbers torched
like the pillars of an empire's monuments to itself.
The bartender says Connolly eyed the firing squad
strapped to a chair in the stonebreaker's yard,
gangrene feasting on his wound so he could not stand.
I tell the bartender that Puerto Rico has its Easter dead:
a march on Palm Sunday, colonial police intoxicated
by the incense of gunsmoke, Cadets of the Republic
painting slogans on the street in their belly-blood.
That was Ponce in 1937, and Rafael still says:
My mother left in a white dress and came home in a red dress.
Tito Puente is dead, and we are in a pub on Achill Island
plundering the jukebox, flipping between the Wolfe Tones
and the Dubliners til we discover Tito's Oye Como Va.
The beat is a hand slapping the bar, heads nodding
as if their ears funneled a chant of yes-yes, yes-yes,
and when we shoot a game of pool in his memory
the table becomes a dance floor at the Palladium,
cue ball spinning through a crowd of red and green.
Now James Connolly could dance the mambo,
gangrene forever banished from his leg.
(Also published in the author's collection, Alabanza,
at pgs. 205-206) |
| Quote: | Alabanza
Paperback
By Martin Espada
|
PokerPulse favorite Tito Puente recording:
Calle 54
DVD
Ay, caramba!
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=2695#2695
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editor
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| Posted: Mon Jan 21, 2008 1:20 pm Post subject: |
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One of the darker poolroom bets:
Frida Kahlo
The Brush of Anguish
Hardcover
By Martha Zamora
| Quote: | A bus happened by, a brightly painted new one with two long benches along the sides. Frida and Alejandro (Gomez Arias, charismatic leader of Cachuchas) felt compelled to catch it. The driver, rushing to cross the busy city on the way out of town, boldly tried to pass in front of a turning streetcar. He didn't succeed: the heavy streetcar moved forward and collided with the bus, pushing relentlessly into its side and pressing against the benches where the passengers sat.
... At the moment of the accident, Frida was more concerned about the loss of her new toy, which had flown out of her hand, than she was with the seriousness of the collision. Alejandro found her bathed in blood, without her clothes, virtually impaled on the rod of a metal handrail. A bag carried by a passenger had spilled gold powder all over, and Frida's bloodied body was sprinkled with it. Curious onlookers cried, "Help for the little ballerina!"
An overall-clad worker, whom Alejandro though he recognized as an employee of the Prepa, looked at Frida and said, "That has to be taken out of her." With no more ado he pulled the metal rod out of Frida's body to the terrible sound of breaking bones. Alejandro, horrified, carried her to a pool hall across the street, put her on a table, and covered her with the shreds of his ruined coat. They waited for an ambulance as Frida screamed in pain.
...A description of the wounds Frida suffered in the accident was compiled by her doctor in a clinical history years later: "Fracture of the third and fourth lumbar vertebrae; pelvic fractures; fracture of the right foot; dislocation of the left elbow; deep abdominal wound produced by a metal rod entering through the left hip and exiting through the genitals. Acute peritonitis, cystitis with drainage for several days."
... Frida suffered grim periods of relapse, questionable medical treatments, a long series of confining plaster and metal corsets, and numerous operations. The backwardness of medical technology at that time in Mexico resulted in some grotesque therapy.
She wrote to Alejandro, "This Friday they put me in a plaster cast and since then it has been a real martyrdom; there is nothing to compare it with. I feel like I am suffocating, with a terrible pain in my lungs and in all my back; I can't even touch my leg, and I can hardly walk, much less sleep. Imagine: they had me hanging, just from my head, for two and a half hours, and afterwards I was propped up on my toes for another hour, while the cast was being dried with hot air. But, even so, when I got home it was still damp...I'll have this martyrdom for three or four months and if this doesn't make me well, I sincerely want to die, because I can't takle it any more. It's not only the physical suffering but also that I don't have the least distraction, I don't get out of this room, I can't do anything, I can't walk, I'm completely without hope now, and above all you're not here." (-- pgs. 25-27) |
Not a bio - or an artist - for the feint-hearted.
Link to this entry
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editor
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| Posted: Sat Jan 26, 2008 11:58 am Post subject: |
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The Chess Artist
Genius, Obsession and the World's Oldest Game
Hardcover
By J.C. Hallman
| Quote: | My family had a pool table in the basement when I was a boy. I spent a lot of time down there. I didn't really play pool so much as use the table as a kind of fortune-telling device. If I broke and ran off nine balls in a row, I thought, good things would happen. Much later, in my chess research, I learned that the chance mechanisms of many games - dice, lotteries - had their origin in religious rites. As a boy attempting to participate in my own oracle, I acted out an age-old transition from pagan augury to ancient ritual.
In college, I played pool for money, which approximated another transition of chance mechanisms - from organized religion to gambling. Gambling inaugurated for me a fascination with games that was half indulgence half anthropological investigation. I became competent in poker, gin, bridge, and pool.
It was my interest in games that eventually led me to seek work as a casino dealer - another subculture to investigate, another seamy facet of my personality to indulge. I went to dealers school, received "degrees" in several gambling games, and started work in Atlantic City. It was fallacy. Whatever hypothesis I had thought to test mutated so badly that it needn't have existed at all. Play was fiction, I came to learn. Play was alternate space. Puppies and children know intuitevely that play matters, and to mature is to simply confuse play with nonplay, to assign seriousness to that which is still whimsical. Casino dealers understood this, I learned. They appeared to be playing but were not. They occupied the same space as players, but were wholly outside the universe of the game. (From Chapter 3, Writing Sonnets in Public, pgs. 25-26) |
| Quote: | ... One of the men waiting had recognized me as a chump and came on to me with his beggar's manner. He wore jeans and a denim vest, and the white stubble on his face stood out like the trees of a tiny forest scorched to ash.
"Excuse me, would you like to play a few games?"
I put up my hands. "No, thanks. I'm not a player."
The man shrugged. "Something cheap. Dollar a game."
This tactic I knew from poolrooms: When you mark seems intimidated, lowball them just to get them playing, then worry about the bet later. The gambling of chess was different from the gambling of pool, though. For chess players - as with Chepukaitus - hospitality was part of the con. (From Chapter 9, The Chess District, p. 106) |
Link to this entry
http://pokerpulse.com/news/viewtopic.php?p=3459#3459 |
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