Your building's on fire. You're exhausted. Luckily Björk is here

Although I'm very fond of Björk, and firmly in awe of her artistry, I've always found her about as sexy as Tinkerbell. The corkscrew hairdos and floppy swan outfits and the chin resting on the limp wrists, fingertips waving—I appreciate them all as theater, but they kind of disqualify her as crush material. But the photo above opens up other possibilities—possibilities that, as I'll explain farther down, have been there all along. Of course, I realize that the nude and natural Björk in this shot is as much a mask as this, or even this. But she inhabits it expertly, right down to the tongue and the laugh, which makes me think Björk—unlike that robot Madonna—is in on the secret, that the "big time sensuality" she sang about was real to her.

While she projects an image of a voracious, almost post-human creature out to consume the world (“I don’t know my future after this weekend, and I don’t want to!”), there is a tender, highly romantic strain in her work. She falls in love, which sounds like a simplistic statement, I know, but not everybody does. She gets weak in the knees; she crumbles—“unravels,” as one song has it. Her songs dwell in the fleeting but all-consuming stage when things get heavy. “Love is a two-way dream,” one of her songs goes.

My favorite Björk song in this mode is one of her least known. In “Come to Me” the love sounds unconditional; the only rule is to not talk about it—which means that the song, although addressed to another person, is never actually delivered to that person. Which brings up the weirdly lonely aspect of falling hard. It’s that extra dimension that gives Björk’s love songs their heft.

Every once in awhile I stumble upon some song that, even in the digital era of no unturned stones, has never been transcribed anywhere online—no chords, no tabs, nothing. You know what that means: I have to do it myself. (I also clean up the dirty dishes in my house that people leave lying around.) Playing this thing on guitar, I'm struck by the almost Spanish quality of its melody, something that doesn't come through at all in its rather spacey recording. I also have to confess to not knowing the name of the chord that comes after the second word in "You know that I adore you..." and has the effect of the floor suddenly dropping out from under you. You can just stay on the B-flat, that will "work," but I've found that lifting the finger off the first string creates a downshift essential to the tune.

And yet, I have no idea what the resulting chord is. I've looked everywhere for this chord, which in tabs would appear as 0333XX. I've asked no less than three of my more musicologically-astute friends what this chord could be, and they've told me it doesn't exist. I've tried to give it a name. But I've turned up nothing.

Come To Me
(Björk Guðmundsdóttir)

A--------------Bb
Come to me, I'll take care of you
A-----------Bb
Protect you; calm, calm down
A--------------------Bb
You're exhausted; come lie down
A------------------------------Bb
You don't have to explain, I understand

Instrumental: A Bb A Bb

Bb---------B?-------Am
You know that I adore you
Am---Bb----------Am-----Cmaj7-----F
You know that I love you
Fmaj7--------------C
So don't make me say it
C--------------------Bb
It would burst the bubble
Bb---------E-----E7
Break the charm

Jump off—your building's on fire
And I'll catch you, I'll catch you
Destroy all that is keeping you down
And then I'll nurse you, I'll nurse you
I'll touch you

You know that I adore you
You know that I love you
So don't make me say it
It would burst the bubble
Break the charm

END

Feckin' grand stuff

So I turned around the other day and realized that Roddy Doyle has become—and I mean quietly, almost out of nowhere—my favorite short story writer on the planet.

Back in the '90s, when I was living in Holland, I had to pay a fortune for English books, but I used to read all his novels. When I moved back to America, I bought A Star Named Henry in hardback without knowing anything about it (that's how much I trusted Doyle), was surprised to find I didn't care for it, and moved on. Writers peak, I figured. This guy peaked. Show me the next guy!

But for the past decade (maybe not even that long), Doyle's been drifting back to me through his short fiction, which he publishes regularly in the New Yorker and McSweeney's. The stories have been uniformly excellent; a few, like "The Dog" or "The Bandstand," take your breath away. Many, although not all, of the stories feature immigrants (from Poland, Nigeria, Rwanda), because the influx of foreigners into Ireland has been one of the two profound transformations in that country over the past decade or so (the other is the head-scratching, and possibly vanishing, turn towards prosperity). The remainder of the stories follow his typical middle-class Dubliners—characters who never telegraph their next move because they don't know it themselves, who drink and fuck and argue without a comeuppance from the author, and who "can't remember life before the children."

Which writer I'm digging these days shouldn't be important to anyone but me, but I bring all this up because, with the exception of a few pieces that found a home in Doyle's lone short fiction collection, The Deportees' Club (2008), this work has never been collected anywhere, so unless you're prone to keeping old magazines around you probably aren't reading any of this stuff. I would guess these stories will eventually fill out a collection or two, but until then, here are the ones I've been able to find online:

"Recuperation" (2003)
"The Joke" (2004)
"The Photograph" (2006)
"Teaching" (2007)
"The Dog" (2007)
"Bullfighting" (2008)
"Sleep" (2008)
"Ash" (2010)

These are all from the New Yorker. His McSweeney's stories are not online, but they were first serialized in the Dublin paper Metro Eireann, on whose site you can find some of them (albeit broken up into weekly chapters).

UPDATE (9/7/10): Well, no sooner do I bet the farm on Doyle than he publishes a new story in the just-out McSweeney's, and it turns out to be a dud. In "Local," Chidimma, a Nigerian immigrant, is recruited by the Fianna Fáil party to run for a council seat. While I'm amused by the way the Minister of Trade and Communications is depicted as an attractive, young-ish woman who has vodka for breakfast and keeps turning up at her recruit's home drunk and sobbing, the story just has too much "you go, girl" sentimentality in its treatment of Chidimma, not to mention a reliance on shtick that, in light of Doyle's usual gravitas, comes across as weirdly flip. In his recent crop of serialized stories, Doyle has literally made things up as he went along; it's an admirable high-wire act. But in this case I think he fell off the damn wire.

Hey everybody, meet my new friend--Victoriya

Email I missed while on vacation...

SUBJECT: Girls are feminine and emancipated

Good Morning.

I Dream to meet you. I am 30 years.
I am serious and cute. This is easily seen. My real profile and my photos you see here [link]. Call me. Hoping.

Victoriya.

How Can I Be Sure Of You

Harry Nilsson just might win the pure-talent sweepstakes, and there's evidence that this would-be Sunday child was even a hard worker (at sixteen he was already writing songs and supporting himself with a bank job). His catalog offers a trove of impeccably crafted works; but, perhaps due to a restlessness that was manifested most famously by a weakness for months-long binges with depressed ex-Beatles, he only achieved a sustained perfection once in his career—on his lone great album, Nilsson Schmilsson. One of the finest records of the '70s, it's tougher than Nilsson's earlier, occasionally somewhat twee, albums, but it has a drive and a sense of fun that his later albums mostly lacked (issued, as they were, during his long and sorrily inevitable decline). I'm not trying to write an all-encompassing Nilsson piece here, so you'll have to go elsewhere to read about his childhood or the Lost Weekend or his cursed London apartment. I'm just going to write about one song.

Nilsson's label, RCA, was not always supportive of him while he was alive, but they've been nicer about him since he's been dead. When they got around to reissuing Schmilsson in 2004, they unforgivably relocated the photograph of the inside of Harry's refrigerator—possibly the best back-cover-art in the history of pop records—to the inner booklet, but otherwise they got it right: the new edition of Schmilsson, in addition to improved sound and some good notes, has valuable bonus material, including an unused track from the Schmilsson sessions that I've become a little obsessed with: "How Can I Be Sure of You." I feel that it's a top-shelf, vintage Nilsson ballad (go ahead, listen to it), and yet, somehow, I'm the only person in the world who knows about it—a situation I kind of enjoy but feel I must correct.

While it has crossed my mind that the song is addressed to Dylan, who in 1971 was in the middle of a creative free-fall that was almost as traumatic for the rock masses as the Beatles' recent breakup—and, after all, it was Bob who broke the news about the sun not being yellow ("it's chicken")—I suspect the lyric isn't so much a veiled message as simply a bit sketchy, which may be why such a gorgeous song failed to make the album. Another reason the song went onto the scrap heap may simply be that it uses a C/Cadd9 intro and Nilsson had already deployed those chords in the opening to "The Moonbeam Song." The intro to his cover of "Without You" uses a similar device (albeit in the key of E rather than C). So "How Can I Be Sure" might have been deemed one song too many with a "major chord plus its add9" introduction for one album.

As the keeper of this excellent Nilsson site pointed out to me, Harry eventually returned to the song, reworking it into "Good for God," which appeared on his 1975 album Duit on Mon Dei. Take a listen and you'll see that the earlier lyric's verses have been turned into a god-is-dead dialogue, and the "always changing" chorus has been completely jettisoned in favor of a rather stock singalong section. The performance is rushed and ragged, and, despite the delirious atmosphere, not particularly fun. What I'm saying here is, he ruined the song. These things happen. It's not the first time I was excited by a great early draft, only to be deflated by the final product.

When I said I'm the only guy in the world who even knows "How Can I Be Sure of You," I was of course exaggerating: Nilsson fans are utter diehards, and I'm sure they all turned this particular stone over long ago. But my impression of its being undiscovered isn't based on just nothing. If you Google it, information on the song is almost nonexistent; and while you'll naturally find its lyric in a few places, there isn't a single set of tabs, chords, what-have-you for the song to be had, anywhere. I have now corrected this.

The transcription below is for guitar, although this is really more of a piano number, but the chords are correct, the pianists out there can easily adapt, and this is the only place on the entire Internet where you can learn this thing. Get it now, before RCA—or Saruman the Gray or Steamboat Willie or whoever owns the rights to Nilsson's songs these days—comes after me with a cease and desist order.

How Can I Be Sure Of You
(H. Nilsson)

Intro: C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9 / C / Cadd9

C-----------G---------------C
The other day a friend of mine said
---------------Fm---------------G#
He said, the sun's not really yellow
--------------G-------------C
He said the sun is really red

C-----------G---------------------C
I said, My friend what do you mean?
----------------Fm-------------G#
You read that in some magazine
--------------------G--------------------C
Next thing you'll say the earth's not green

e -----------------
b ----------------
g ----------------
d ----------0-1--
a -- 0-2-3------
e 3--------------

[notes above]----------E-------E7
How can I be sure of you any more
----------------------------F
In a world that's always changing
--------Bb
Re - arranging
---------F-----------Bb
Always changing, changing

e 3-1-0----
b ------3-1
g ----------
d ----------
a ----------
e ----------
[landing on intro's C chord]

I said, My friend how do you do
And what you're saying isn't true
Next thing you'll say the earth is blue

He said, My friend you're in a dream
And things are never what they seem
No, things are never what they seem

Repeat chorus (How can I be...)

END

Hey everybody, meet my new friend--Ms. Juliet

Email I received this morning...

Hello
I'm Ms juliet, I saw your contact and i feel that you are an interesting person.i don't think that age appearance is so important.The most important is what is inside you and how you feel about life.i will send my photo and details to you, i have a very important thing to tell you, i hope for your reply,
have a pleasant day,
juliet

All things are possible

I know we're moving toward a world in which there will be no undocumented moments, ever, anywhere, but I'm still analog enough in my bones to be a little blown away by the way concerts I attended in my (often distant) past have resurfaced one by one on the Internet to be played again before my confused senses.

No surprise that, when I returned home from a rainy Radiohead show at Nissan Pavilion a couple years back, I could dial up youtube clips and audio files already the next day. I'm getting used to this. But what especially excites and unnerves me is the appearance online of events that took place in a world without the Web. It's strange to listen now to an April 1992 U2 concert in Austin and know that I am out there, sitting and breathing and listening inside the arena whose walls the music is bouncing off of (along with my girlfriend of a few months, whom I later married, plus a number of friends whom I must have been already pretty estranged from because I haven't talked to any of them since).

Also slightly stunning for me to listen now to the Clash playing the Majestic Theater in San Antonio in May of 1983. I'm routinely disappointed in my younger self, but there must have been some small pocket of terrible hipness in me because the standard fare in my hometown was REO Speedwagon and Styx, and here I was taking in "Straight to Hell" and "Tommy Gun." I'm also impressed to see, as I consult one of the numerous gig logs available online (like the one linked above), that later the same month the band went to the US Festival—immediately after which Strummer and Simonon ganged up and fired Mick Jones, in effect ending the group. So I was there at the near-tail-end and didn't even know it.

My latest find is a recording of my only Pavement concert—at the 9:30 Club in Washington, D.C., in July of 1999. When the group rolled into these parts, my MFA colleagues had just graduated and dispersed, my wife was out of town, and my other friends—most of whom I'd met through my toddler daughter—had no interest in Pavement. I'm afraid what I'm getting at here is, I didn't have anyone to go to the show with. And yet, I could not stay away. Couple days before the concert I called the club, and the girl I spoke to said yeah they had one ticket left and did I want it. To this day it's the only concert I've ever gone to alone—and I won't lie to you, that does compromise your fun—but thank god I went.

Because nothing these days can remain hidden, I naturally found FLAC files of this show online, which I dutifully converted to WAV files, which I in turn converted to AAC files and installed on my iPod. (That sentence, by the way, would have been incomprehensible in 1999). Experiencing that night for the first time in eleven years, I'm drawn to the stage patter and changes in lyrics at least as much as I am to the performances themselves (although, musically, it's surprisingly strong). Stephen Malkmus, with absurd blandness, introduced their opener as "a Pavement song." He made a grotesque little switch to the lyric of "You Are The Light"—

Watch out for the gypsy children in electric dresses—they're insane/

I hear they live in crematoriums and smoke your remains

—so that, instead of smoking, the gypsy kids shoot your remains. And, after he changed up the lyric to "Folk Jam," singing, "Irish folk tales scare the crap out of me," he said to bandmate Bob Nastanovich, "Bob, I said crap instead of shit for your parents."

The weird thing is that I remember all these little moments, quite clearly, although you would think that my memory banks would have dropped some of this stuff after the passage of eleven years. I mean, in order to navigate the remainder of my days, do I really need to know that Bob Nastanovich's mom and dad were in the house that night? The most mysterious memories are not those that we consciously carry around with us (although those are plenty mysterious), but those that have to be woken up—the ones that were lying there all along and just needed a nudge to fall back onto the radar. Mr. and Mrs. Nastanovich have been hidden away in my brain, unbeknownst to me, since that night eleven years ago. And now, I fear, I will never get rid of them.

Audio files to come.

An historic meeting

As Pierre Garcon of the Colts and Pierre Thomas of the Saints prepare to meet each other in the Super Bowl (so to speak--they're both offensive players), I want to share with my many readers a little series of numbers.

There are roughly 25,000 people in America named Pierre. In a country with 300 million people, that makes the odds of being named Pierre 125,000 to one. And you know, come to think of it, I have never known anyone named Pierre. I've known a couple Federicos, two Galens, a guy named Trip, another named Trig. I knew a dog once named Puh. I'm no stranger to unlikely names. But I have never met a Pierre.

Now, there are currently about 1,600 players in the NFL. If you apply the already-scant odds of being named Pierre to that population, things start getting a little astronomical: the odds of an NFL player being named Pierre are 156,000,000 to one. I guess the lesson here is that we should cherish this two-Pierre Super Bowl.

Needless to say, you get dramatically different numbers on all this if you try it in France.