Insiders Tips: The Outer Banks

We're what you could call old hands when it comes to vacationing in North Carolina's barrier-island paradise, the Outer Banks. Over the years, we have collected quite a lot of "inside" info on places to eat, things to do, etc. I mean, what do you expect? We'd have to be idiots not to pick up a thing or two after all this time. It's not a big deal. To save other OBX visitors time, I've decided to share some of what we've learned.

You noticed that OBX, I guess. Took us awhile to figure this one out. Pretty cryptic, right? At first I thought it was some sort of Masonic thing. But it's actually an abbreviation for...Outer Banks. You will see this very clever shorthand adorning bumper stickers, t-shirts, signs—and now you're in on the secret.

Before you hit the beach, you'll need to load up on supplies. It's better to just buy them when you're there instead of looking for "deals" back home. You will see some stores called Wings, but hold out for something called Super Wings. They have everything. And every location we've been to has been staffed by the most helpful Russian teenagers. I got a great deal on an XL pair of trunks.

If you feel like a good beach read, drop in on the Sandy Books Bookstore on the Croatan Highway. Their clientele is smaller than what you might find in a bigger city, so their selection is a bit "limited," but root around and you just might come up with something. On our last visit, my wife found Trees and Shrubs of Missouri (beautiful pictures!), and I got a book called My Melancholy Whores, which I'm determined to finish.

The Outer Banks apparently have a very colorful history. We've never quite been able to find any museums, but we did play mini-golf at a place in Nags Head called Mutiny Cove, which has an exciting "pirate" theme. There was a very informative placard about real-life pirates and the twelfth hole is played through a replica pirate ship.

If you're in Kitty Hawk and you're hungry, try the Asian Express. The proprietor—can't quite pronounce his name, but he lets us call him Mort—has a really interesting story to tell. We were the only customers and our kids were next door in the dollar store, and my wife and I listened to him for, well, for I think two hours. I was never totally clear on what country Mort is from, but man, he really misses it! In the same shopping center there is a Food Lion, where you can pick up snacks for later. I was curious if it's any different from the Food Lion back home, but no, it is exactly the same.

If it gets too hot for you on the beach, escape to the air conditioning of the Regal Cinema in Kill Devil Hills. I remember seeing War Horse during our first summer here. This time we saw Ant-Man.

And so on. Like Rome, the Outer Banks was not built in a day. Nor was our long list of things to do. It is an investment, but if you spend enough time in a place, it will reveal itself to you.

Never Let Me Go

This is my second song to tab from the Million Dollar Hotel soundtrack. (The first was "Satellite of Love," a Lou Reed song, of course, but with a different arrangement.) Since tabbing "Satellite," I finally watched the movie. Its opening five minutes are stunning: a crack-of-dawn helicopter shot of downtown LA (accompanied by "The First Time"—U2 at their most Velvety), culminating in the happiest suicide imaginable, a dive off the eponymous hotel with one hell of a view on the way down. Sadly, nothing else in the film comes close to being that good. I'm sorry to report that The Million Dollar Hotel is a barely coherent, unfunny mess. It stars Jeremy Davies, one of the most mannered actors in the world, at his mannered worst. Moreover, that soundtrack, which I'd absorbed over the past decade and half, does not set the mood as I'd thought it would. Much of the music in the film is unfamiliar, and some pieces from the album never seem to show up. In other words, the movie, for me, was kind of a bust.

Ah well. The music remains great, including this sultry ballad, which gives us an idea of what Bono-the-solo-artist might sound like. Joined by that crack MDH Band of Jon Hassell, Bill Frisell, et al, it evokes for me mid-70s Bowie songs like "Win" and "Wild Is the Wind." (Bowie is at the root of a lot of U2's music.) As with the MDH version of "Satellite," I appear to be the only human on the Web who has bothered to tab this thing. (Almost forgot—you'll want to listen to the song, of course.)


NEVER LET ME GO
(Bono/The MDH Band)

Intro
e------------------------
b------------------------
g------------------------
d---------------0-2----
a-4-0-------2------2--
e-----3-2-0----------0-

Em
You take a stranger by the hand
A man who doesn't understand
His wildest dreams
Em
You walk across the dirty sand
And offer him an ocean
Of what he's never seen

            G
Maybe I was blind
    F#m
Or I, I might have closed my eyes
   G
Maybe I was dumb

But what I forgot to say
     F#m
If you didn't know
Em
Is never let me go
    A
Never let me go
    Em
Never let me go
    A
Never let me go

e-------------------------
b-------------------------
g-4-2-0-----------------
d--------4-2-----0-2----
a---------------2-------2--
e-------------0----------0-

You run from love and don't believe
Unless it catches you by the heel
That even then, you struggle

From red I learned to cross the strand
Your footprints still there in the sand
Everything else, washed away

I may not be alone
Oh I, I may have found my home
I may have lost my way
But what I forgot to say
If you didn't know
Is never let me go

Never let me go
Never let me go

Shameless Bid for Blog Traffic

In a crass attempt to attract visitors, I am pasting the link to a stream of the new Atoms for Peace album, AMOK, into this blog post. The AMOK web page has a so-called visualizer—and, reports Pitchfork: "Any site that has the link http://amok.atomsforpeace.info/ posted automatically gets added to the visualizer, which cycles through the sites randomly."

I feel compelled to point out that I am also a fan. I also feel compelled to point that a.) rather than the advertised "visualizer," the link appears to bring one to a black web page with neither text nor links, necessitating one to access the stream through the Flash player on the Pitchfork page, and that b.) having listened to the stream, I think the new album exposes Yorke's David Byrne fixation rather neatly. (He once seemed to wish he'd created the White Album; I now think he wishes he'd made Remain in Light.) Of course, the music also resembles The Eraser, not to mention the last Radiohead release, King of Limbs, a record which—like Talking Heads' Naked—was a conspicuous fall from previous heights, as each band gamely followed its respective frontman down a new and, I'm sorry, less fruitful path.

Hey everybody, meet my new friend--Carolina Jones

Email I received earlier today from Lithuania:

How are you? I'm Carolina, I want us to become friends so that I can share my life privacy with you & send you my pictures. I hope to see your mail take good care of your self.

Yours,
Caro

An Only Child

Ten things——besides that five-string open-G tuning everybody mentions—that I learned from Keith Richards' memoir, Life.

1. Both his father and stepfather are called Richards. Keith doesn't seem to be impressed by the coincidence (if that's what it is). His mother was from a family of seven daughters, and if you've ever wondered about the hardiness of Keith's constitution, you should know that most of his aunts are still alive.

2. London streets used to be full of animals. Keith: "When I was growing up, it was heavy fog almost all winter, and if you've got two or three miles to walk to get back home, it was the dogs that led you. Suddenly old Dodger would show up with a patch on his eye, and you could basically guide your way home by that. Sometimes the fog was so thick you couldn't see a thing. And old Dodger would take you up and hand you over to some Labrador. Animals were in the street, something that's disappeared. I would have got lost and died without some help from my canine friends." (The roughly 60 pages of childhood stuff is probably the book's high point. Effortlessly evocative, it reads at times like some long-lost Dickens narrative, with asylum escapees on the heath, army deserters hiding in the woods by the Thames, a dead tramp found covered in bluebottles, street bullies, even a fatal explosion at a fireworks factory. He sometimes took a shortcut behind the factories and paper mill, past an "evil-smelling creek": "every chemical in the world had been poured into this creek, and it's steaming like hot sulfur springs. I held my breath and walked quicker. It really looked like something out of hell.")

3. Had a mouse and a cat for pets. The mouse went to school with him in his pocket. His mother had the cat put to sleep, and Keith shoved a drawing of a cat under her door with the word "murderer" written beneath it.

4. The winter that Keith, Mick, and Brian Jones shared a flat was London's coldest since 1740. The flat had a pay heater—they had to keep feeding it coins.

5. Keith not only wrote the bulk of the music for most of their best songs; he often came up with the lyrical angle as well: "Satisfaction," "Gimme Shelter," "Wild Horses" (I could go on) are all concepts that Jagger simply (albeit brilliantly) expanded on.

6. While Mick was fooling around with Anita Pallenberg on the set of Performance, Keith had revenge sex with Marianne Faithfull (and fled through a window when Mick came home). I've thought of Mick and Keith's friendship as fairly up and down, but the best way to describe it, for thirty years now, would be simply nonexistent. Interestingly, there are more entries in the index for Mick Jagger than there are for Keith himself. (My favorite: "Jagger, Mick and giant inflatable cock, 12-13, 485").

7. In the late '60s in the UK, if your physician registered you with National Health as a junkie, you could receive heroin pills plus an equal amount of cocaine (the idea being that the coke would counteract the opiate effect of the heroin). This was the purest heroin and the purest, May & Baker pharmaceutical cocaine. Definitely no MSS (that is, Mexican shoe scrapings—Gram Parson's term for low-grade street smack).

8. Injuries sustained: finger squashed when he dropped a flagstone on it, earring ripped from his ear as he slept, passing out after nine days without sleep and falling headfirst into an amplifier, finger burned to the bone by stray lump of phosphorous from stage pyro, punctured lung (after falling off ladder), cracked skull (falling from tree).

9. When I was fourteen I found an old copy of Oui magazine in, of all places, a deer blind in the hill country of Texas. ("For the man of the world"—yeah, that was me all right.) One of the models was a dark-haired German who, in one memorable shot, drank water from a see-through garden hose. And now, all these years later I find out her name is Uschi Obermaier, a long-standing crush of Keith's. When he learned of Gram Parsons' death in '73 he was in Innsbruck; on a mad impulse he drove to Munich in the middle of the night to hunt Uschi down, although he barely knew her. He miraculously found her, woke her up, broke the news, got a single sleepy kiss for his trouble, and left. 

10. Towards the end, the book starts to simply mark time—this is his manager, this is his guitar technician, these are his neighbors in Jamaica, this is the snapping turtle Keith caught in the pond at his house in Connecticut, etc.—and it begins to sound like an acceptance speech at the Grammys. The lesson is that everybody's life eventually winds down into routine, even for an outlaw like Keith Richards. And so this is the tenth thing I learned:

When you're cooking bangers and mash, you've got to use a cold pan, no preheating.

The Hard Life of the Hard-Boiled Writer

Aside from the debatable choices of the content itself, the Library of America's two-volume Crime Novels is not big on editorial intrusions, but it does allow itself a fairly detailed biographical note on each of the authors. Reading over these I was struck by some trends that might best be illustrated through a list. (I've stolen the format from An Incomplete Education,where a similar chart was used to compare Leonardo and Michelangelo. I figured if it would do for the architect of St. Peter's Basilica, it would do for the author of I Married a Dead Man.)

JAMES M. CAIN

Book: The Postman Always Rings Twice... Background: Born 1892, Annapolis, MD. Father a university president... Journalist? Sure was. Wrote for Baltimore Sun, Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker...

Military:

Served in France, World War I...

Other Jobs: Trained as a singer. Also taught school and worked as screenwriter... Married: Four times, including marriages with a movie actress and an opera singer... Politics: Accused of being a communist when he established American Authors Authority to protect authors copyrights. Alcoholic?

No... What else should we know? That rare thing, a long and successful life among noir novelists. Followed Postman up with the classics Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce. Lived to be 82 years old.

HORACE McCOY

Book: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?... Background: Born 1897 in Pegram, TN. Moved to Texas... Journalist? Yep. Sportswriter for Dallas Dispatch and editor of the Dallasite... Military: Texas National Guard, then served in France as bombardier, awarded the Croix de Guerre... Other Jobs: Actor, screenwriter (worked, uncredited, on King Kong), lettuce picker, bouncer... Married: Three times, if you count the annulled second marriage to Dallas socialite; followed it up with marriage to daughter of wealthy oilman... Politics: No information... Alcoholic? Not as far as we know... What else should we know? Enjoyed a bestseller in 1952 with The Scalpel; died of a heart attack three years later.

EDWARD ANDERSON

Book: Thieves Like Us... Background: Born 1905 in Weatherford, TX... Journalist? Naturally. On staff of Rocky Mountain News, Los Angeles Examiner, Sacramento Bee, Fort Worth Star-Telegram... Military: None... Other Jobs: Radio writer, screenwriter, freight-hopping hobo... Married: Three times, twice to the same woman... Politics: Extreme right-wing views, informed somehow by his Swedenborgianism... Alcoholic? Yes, which might partly explain his recurrent transient's life...What else should we know? Thieves Like Us made into two classic films, by Nicholas Ray (as They Live by Night) and Robert Altman, but Anderson didn't benefit much, having sold the film rights for a quick $500. There are eight Edward Andersons with a Wikipedia entry; this Edward Anderson isn't one of them. Talk about sinking like a stone.

KENNETH FEARING

Book: The Big Clock... Background: Born 1902 in Oak Park, IL... Journalist? Reviewer for the New Yorker, later in life a Newsweek staffer... Military: None... Other jobs: Nothing of note; all he did was write, including several volumes of poetry... Married: Twice, both ending in divorce... Politics: Investigated by the FBI for being a communist... Alcoholic? Yes, and died in poverty at age 59... What else should we know? The Big Clock made into a film in 1948, but Fearing made little money from it. Also the basis of the 1987 film No Way Out.

WILLIAM LINDSAY GRESHAM

Book: Nightmare Alley... Background: Born 1909 in Baltimore, MD... Journalist? Book reviewer for Evening Post (New York) and crime magazine editor... Military: Medic with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain... Other jobs: Greenwich Village folk singer, copywriter... Married: Three times. He and second wife, poet Joy Davidman, deeply influenced by ideas of C. S. Lewis, although Gresham eventually drifted away from Christianity, dabbling in Zen Buddhism and Scientology. Following his divorce from Davidman, he married her cousin, while Davidman married C. S. Lewis... Politics: Member of Communist Party... Alcoholic? Yes, and sometimes made him violent... What else should we know? Committed suicide with overdose of sleeping pills after registering in New York hotel under false name. He was 53.

CORNELL WOOLRICH (aka William Irish)

Book: I Married a Dead Man... Background: Born 1903 in New York City... Journalist? Never... Military: Nope... Other jobs: None... Married: Married for three months to daughter of filmmaker J. Stuart Blackton, after which he traveled through Europe with his mother and then moved into her Upper West Side apartment, where he remained for the next 25 years. Woolrich, if you haven't guessed already, was very gay... Alcoholic? Yes, which contributed to drastic slowdown in productivity and two decades as a recluse... What else should we know? The good: Also the author of Rear Window (filmed by Alfred Hitchcock) and The Bride Wore Black (filmed by Francois Truffaut). The bad: in 1961, two years after death of mother, his gangrenous leg had to be amputated; he died of a stroke ten months later at the age of 58.

Hey everybody, meet my new friend--Philomena Joy

Email I received earlier today...

SUBJECT: Hello

Hello my name is philomena joy, i am interested in you for good relationship, if you feel the same you can as well contact me at [no link] for a better introduction.

Thanks

philomena joy

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.

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.