Hiding in plain sight

Four months after it was published in the New Yorker, I finally stumbled today upon Nick Paumgarten's article on New York's thoroughly strange Governors Island, a 172-acre strip of land in the New York Harbor, where the Hudson and the East River meet. It's only 800 yards away from the southern tip of Manhattan and is even closer to Brooklyn--i.e., within spitting distance of some of the most densely populated real estate in North America--and yet this island has been uninhabited since the Coast Guard closed its base there in 2003.

I first saw it in the fine 2005 horror film Dark Water, and when, a couple years later, I went with the kids on one of those corny river tours the sudden appearance of it intrigued me more than any bridge, any skyscraper, any 100-foot-tall woman holding a torch. I yearned to be there--yearned terribly, the way Van Morrison yearns for Caledonia.

I'm drawn to its obvious ghost-town qualities, that lighthouse-like solitude, its creeping vegetation and overgrown, empty buildings, its impossible quietness and neglect amidst such feverish industry. It has somehow been left alone, in a place where nothing is ever left alone. I'm drawn also to the way it imparts something of the old, I mean old, New York. How Joseph Mitchell would have loved to write about this place. When I read about Governors Island, I think of Mitchell's Beneath the Harbor and that book's waterfront rats, abandoned hotels, and that magical description of a giant sturgeon surfacing in the Hudson.

I could live pretty happily here, but I'll never make it. Neither will you: New York's not sure what it's going to do with the place, but there's a heap of federal and local funding attached to it and part of the deal is that residential development is prohibited. To see what you're missing, here's Paumgarten's video tour.

Like most islands, this one has its own blog.

Listening to music is such hard work

Well, I've sifted through it all, and as far as I can tell the dozen best albums of the decade now ending are (in order):

Brian Wilson, Smile
Radiohead, Kid A
White Stripes, White Blood Cells
The Wrens, The Meadowlands
Steely Dan, Two Against Nature
Kanye West, Late Registration
PJ Harvey, Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks, Pig Lib
Portishead, Third
Bob Dylan, Love and Theft
Arcade Fire, Funeral
Tom Waits, Alice

Honorable Mention (not in order):

In Ear Park (Department of Eagles); Illinois (Sufjan Stevens ); Is This It (Strokes); Middle Cyclone (Neko Case); Vampire Weekend; Sea Change (Beck); Veckatimest (Grizzly Bear); The Blueprint (Jay-Z); Chutes Too Narrow (The Shins); Silent Shout (The Knife); All That You Can't Leave Behind (U2); Send (Wire); The Woods (Sleater-Kinney); Chaos and Creation in the Backyard (Paul McCartney); Tha Carter III (Lil' Wayne); Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (Of Montreal); Frantic (Bryan Ferry); Kala (M.I.A.); Ecstasy (Lou Reed); Twin Cinema (New Pornographers); Fleet Foxes; Vespertine (Bjork); Return to Cookie Mountain (TV on the Radio); There Will Be Blood Original Score (Jonny Greenwood)... plus more albums by Radiohead, White Stripes, Tom Waits, Kanye West, and Stephen Malkmus, too many to name.

Intriguing, but I need to hear them a few more times:

Microcastle (Deerhunter); Kill the Moonlight (Spoon); Bitte Orca (Dirty Projectors); Untrue (Burial); Person Pitch (Panda Bear); Harps and Angels (Randy Newman); The xx

Visit this blog's older, fatter sibling to see my favorite songs of the decade, as well as a pained exploration of why we shouldn't create such lists in the first place.

Thoughts on photo of Typhoid Mary

I just can't make up my mind about her. Again and again they traced typhoid outbreaks back to Mary Mallon; and, each time, she slipped from their grasp and found work in yet another kitchen. She could not stay away. She kept returning to the only thing she knew.

I can't decide if she was psychotic or merely atavistic--a dark angel or simply a confused worker bee told to stop working--but in any case, her powers of denial were profound. You don't see that kind of thoughtless determination in the world anymore.

Anyway, they tracked her down one last time and stuck her in quarantine, of course. You can see here there, staring at the camera from one in a long row of beds. And, I'm sorry to bring this up, but I can't help noticing: Typhoid Mary is kind of hot.

I don't mean febrile. I don't mean running-a-temperature hot. I mean just plain hot. Sure, she has the covers pulled primly up to her chest, and she's wearing at least three layers of clothes, including a robe, for god's sake. But there's a fire in Mary Mallon. Some people might think her expression says, Back off. But this is no wilting flower. This woman killed three people and infected fifty more. She is not afraid of life or death. She's been stuck in that ward for weeks and months and years, and she just wants someone to climb on that hospital bed with her, take down that pinned-up hair, pull open that robe, and feast on that comely Irish immigrant's bod.

And don't get me started on that chick in the next bed.

And let's not forget the man who was pulled over for speeding

Partial list of people we're being asked to pray for by the radio station I listened to last week while driving through North Carolina (an organ playing solemnly in the background and an extremely long pause between each):

* The daughter who has been stealing from her mother. We pray that the little girl sees this is wrong.

* The woman who is in a predicament. We pray that she finds a solution.

* The woman who wrecked her car. We pray that her husband has the courage to tell his mother what really happened to the car and that there are no serious insurance ramifications.

* The man who broke his foot.

* The mother who wants to see her son find employment. (Read: When's that kid of Ethel's going to get damn job.)

This program followed a painfully old-fashioned radio play (possibly recorded in 1971, if not 1743) dramatizing the story of Samuel and Eli that had so many pedophilic overtones in it I thought the dial had somehow landed on America's Most Wanted. Such was my incredulity over these proceedings, by the time I crossed the state line I whipped out my cell phone to relay my experience to the folks back home. I didn't pay attention to my speed, nearly swerved off the road as I flew past a cop, and was smote by the Lord with a speeding ticket in Emporia, Virginia....where, by the way, they put the D.C. Sniper to death last night.

Kuroshio Sea: world's biggest aquarium

Ten reasons why the Beatles broke up

They stopped doing concerts.

The band was increasingly less bound by their Englishness. As significant others fell away, their replacements were invariably foreign-born: Yoko, the Eastmans, Klein, Spector, et al. John's future in particular lied in America. The days of hanging out with Mal and Neil and the boys were over; the Liverpool entourage dissolved.

They couldn't figure out how to get rid of George Martin.

John fell in love for the first (and last) time in is life.

Brian Epstein died before they were done with him.

George Harrison had a little brother's chip on his shoulder. From his direct rudeness to Yoko and his dig at Lennon on the "I Me Mine" session to his appearance on the Paul-roasting "How Do You Sleep," George could always be counted on, in his low-key way, to bring some gasoline to a fire.

Paul McCartney vetoed "Revolution" as a single.

Apple Corps: which forced them to be businessmen before they were interested, cluttered their lives, and provided all the battlegrounds you could ever want. (To a man, they eventually became obsessed with business, accumulating the kind of immense wealth you have to work towards--you cannot just fall into it. But that came later.)

Robert Christgau on the break-up: "Three of the Beatles thought they were geniuses, and only one of them was."

There was no route to a reunion.

The dark twin

This blog is the twin of my other blog. I originally meant for the two blogs to be simple mirrors of each other. Just like actual identical twins--who share not only their outside features but also, I presume, the inner (identical kidneys, identical spleens)--the blogs were to have identical content, and differ only in their names. I was even going to dress them the same.

Then it struck me that they should be wholly different blogs--not twins at all (as they were not born at the same time), but merely brothers. They could be different from each other in starkly contrasting ways, even be enemies, like Edmund and Edgar in King Lear. This could be interesting.

But no, I've settled on a third model--namely the Siamese twin. These blogs will be Chang and Eng, speaking with separate voices, seeing things with separate pairs of eyes, each one reaching for his wife while his brother looks the other way and hums to himself, but bound together, the two of them, by a highly unnatural, shared pelvic center. In short, expect some overlap.

The blog title is, of course, taken from one of the oldest examples of mis-heard rock lyrics, Lennon's "and curse Sir Walter Raleigh" line from "I'm So Tired."