Here. Save Room, off the fall album Once Again.
I like it. The louder and funkier parts don't come across well in these miked one-eared headphones meant for a telephone, but the song overall has this great listenability that's got me excited for the album.
And I know it's still early. In a New York Times story about people turning the children's book classic How to Eat Fried Worms into a movie for the first time.
"Like 'Snakes on a Plane,' the title says it all," explained Toby Emmerich, the studio's production chief.
The bell got me. I was at the bakery tent two Saturdays ago and asked my regular, a chocolate croissant and a butter one. No, the guy said, they couldn't sell it. The bell hadn't rung yet. Apparently there was a 8 a.m. bell that rang to announce the start of the day's sales. I walked off a little annoyed — I'd never heard of this bell before — and headed toward the antiques in the street. Outside of the Blues Brothers statues a few months ago, I'd never seen anything I remotely wanted to buy. But at least it beat rejection over pastries.
Halfway across the courthouse parking lot, the bell rang. We went back. The guy asked the girl if the bell had rung, and she wasn't sure, but I assured them it had. I got my croissants.
Then, last week went worse. I got there late and they were all out of butter croissants. The chocolate one was okay. I also bought some scones from them, and within three days they were no good. Dry by the second day and falling apart by the third. The same thing had happened months before. From the milk tent down the way, I bought a glass bottle of skim. The last bottle hadn't gone so well, going bad quickly, and this bottle repeated the trick, again a few days later. The bottle said whole, the farmer had said, but it was skim inside. Whatever it was, it wasn't any good long before its expiration.
My last stop at the market that day was the Shoebox Oven tent. New to the market this year, the good had drawn interest, including a Post write-up this week. There were always intrigued-looking people surveying the goods. I'd zoomed in a couple times before but had never bought. This time out, I got a package of the Champange Chocolate. I tried it Monday night and didn't like it at first. The taste was flavored chocolate, and I'm a straight-up chocolate guy. Within the exception of the chocolate croissant, I thought the whole market run had been a loss.
BUT.
But the next night I took out the Champange Chocolate and added ice cream. I spooned scoops of Edy's Slow-Churned French Silk on top of it, and it was great. It was better than Batman, also on that night. Shoebox had begun a turnaround for me.
With that finding of combination, my luck seemed to change. When I went back to the market this morning — it's my neighbor up the street — I was not tempted by the milk or the scones. Saving my Shoebox money for next week, with maybe its rum raisin dessert in mind, I stuck with the croissants. The bakery tent had both. "That'll be three dollars, " the guy said. "Are you a vendor?"
"What's that?"
"Are you a vendor here?"
"No, just here every week."
Apparently. He didn't react. Not one for reacting, apparently.
Monday update: My post here gave the impression that I didn't like the Champagne Chocolate. Gotta clarify! Not being a big fan of flavored chocolate, it didn't work for me on its own, but it was great when I mixed it with some flavored ice cream. So I've rewritten that paragraph above. I'd totally buy it for a dinner party. (Or given my studio apartment, recommend it for somebody else's!)
And I've definitely got plans to buy Shoebox's rum raisin dessert this Saturday. For someone like me who doesn't fall heads over heels for vegetables, the stand is an awesome new addition to the market. (How suited is it for me? My mom is the one who e-mailed me that Post story on it.) Check out Shoebox's own website here.
Last year, Tracy alerted me to ChicagoTribune.com's "Find It!" game, a game not unlike "The Chicago Game" pitched to them a few years earlier by a group of eager Northwestern graduate students. This year, this week, Tracy alerted me to the game again. Still no recognition, but I'm glad to see it was an idea good enough to stick around.
Whenever Edward P. Jones writes the fiction piece in the New Yorker, I get a little sneaky kind of happiness. His stories in the magazine are usually based in Washington, with real street names and neighborhoods and schools, and to somebody else it's just another town or a setting, but to me it's sliding in under the eyes of New York with its attitude. This Capital City has more than its bureaucrats, Jones is saying, just like your metropolis has more than its corporate power. The equivalence is obvious, but you don't often see the facts taking shape.
My favorite Jones passage from August's double issue:
Terence was at her door that evening, asking a beaming Hamilton Palmer, who had also gone to Howard, how he was doing these warm days and then asking the father if he might talk a bit with his daughter this evening. Terence and Sharon stepped out onto the porch, and he invited her to a movie and a meal on Friday night. She had had two dates before — and one of those had been with a young man who was brother to her cousin's husband. Sharon was not one to keep a diary, but, if she had been, that meeting of a few minutes with Terence would have taken up at least two pages.
A distraction before a leap. You can read the full story here, with a 2004 interview with Jones explaining why he writes about Washington. And if you read the second half of this issue back to front, you arrive next at John Updike's piece on the waning works of authors and get a challenge added to the Jones story. Updike writes:
Publishing his dreams was for Greene a way of reentering a past that had become permeable and as fascinately real as a dream. Remembrance, always an element in the manipulated data of fiction, is often finally fruitful in purer form, when living presences that once crowded and threatened the rebellious imagination have been rendered by the passage of time mistily distant and legally impotent.
There's arguments to be made about memory here, but the idea of living presences vs. rebellious imagination sits internally and stews. If there's a resolution later, the conflict now seems to be more the issue.
And Mariah flakes. What do you do? St. Petersburg Times music writer Sean Daly finds the answer.
Still nursing the wounds from my first full season following American Idol, I have come to a painful, altogether head-splitting conclusion:
Mariah Carey is, without a doubt, the worst thing to happen to amateur singing since the karaoke machine.
Cop uses Facebook to bust U. of I. junior. "I had no idea that old people were wise to Facebook. I thought they referred to it as a doohickey that kids play with," the junior says. "I got bone-crushed."
Three lines from Ryan Adams' Magnolia Mountain:
It's been raining that Tennessee honey
So long I got too heavy to fly
Ain't no bluebird ever gets too heavy to sing
Song for today
Nirvana, Come As You Are, because it's a better driving song than it seems when you're not driving.
I know people talk about making mixes of their favorite artists to give to their friends and hook them, but I'll admit I can't do it with Springsteen. I can do themes of Springsteen maybe — maybe songs with big drums or songs about depression — but nothing overarching. Put a gun to my head and say, "Your mix or your life," and the story ends in the old joke. If anything, if you're super menacing, I'm taking Mary Queen of Arkansas into Wreck on the Highway into Mansion on the Hill into Cautious Man into all of the Ghost of Tom Joad album into Lift Me Up into my escape while you're wondering what the hell that falsetto's all about.
It's an awful mix, but you're the one with the gun. If you put it down (or don't have it to begin with), I suggest picking up Greatest Hits or the Born to Run album. The sampler and the masterwork do fine. And if you want any other artists, I can probably do better. But I can't promise much. The Marah sampler I made a few months back, thanks for a couple coworkers who got me into the Replacements, it's a mess.
On Rolling Stone's site this summer, they pare down The River from a double-album to a single. The results, as you might expect, are disastrous. "The record's themes come through even more strongly: desire, the responsibilities that come with it, and over and over again, the death that follows it," the writers say. Then they go and cut The Price You Pay, a slow-burning, final-blasting assault on desire, responsibilities and death — simultaneously — and put on Roulette, an amazing song … about nuclear threat and government paranoia.
I tip my hat to the act of editing, but damn. Recent Springsteen boards show lots of people trying to do better, with many succeeding. There's applause for a guy who says the best editing of The River would make it a triple. A sweet baseline in all this is how Springsteen's own site lists the songs in a row without album or side breaks.
I say all this because I've somehow edited down my copy to a single album as well. After a month of vacation loading, car cleaning, apartment cleaning, music shuffling, and stereo examining, if you remember where I left disc one of The River, please let me know.
If you're keeping score at home, On Deadline hit the 60,000-comment mark last week and the 4,000-post mark this week. Also, as we move into our seventh month, prime-time blogger Steve Rubel has some nice things to say about us ("USA Today, with On Deadline, is changing journalism and with it PR").
Rubel is big on the power of writing short but strong, and you know I can't throw out a New Yorker without reading the front-of-the-book event listings. If you're interested in the same thing, you should check out Jack Shafer's piece about the art of the New York Times TV writeups. Gawker half-mocks it, and I like it too….
Speaking of
July 24 New Yorker, "Now playing" listings:
ORANGE LEMON EGG CANARY
Rinne Groff's latest play is a love story about a magician and his beautiful assistant. Directed by Michael Sexton. (P.S. 122 at 150 First Ave. 212-352-3101.)
I'm intrigued. I'm a sucker for magician stories. Not novels about the dark arts, but looks at the everyday lives of magicians.
After growing up in the area and never hearing about any magic shops — and I collected baseball cards and once went to a non-Union Station model-train store with my dad for some reason — a Post story a week ago about a magic shop possibly on the verge of closing still has me wanting to go there.
And a musical connection
The same New Yorker issue, in a feature on the year's Mozart anniversary, discusses dissemination and piece-by-piece recreation:
The festival has also commissioned an audiovisual installation by the Open-Ended Group, in which colorful abstract images generated by the coda of "Jupiter" will be projected onto ten screens in front of Avery Fisher Hall. Every half hour, computer software will set about "learning" the music, pulling out melodic and harmonic patterns and playing them through speakers, until Mozart's sixty-four-bar coda is heard complete; then the computer memory is erased, and the process starts again.
I read that one night and saw this article on News.com the news day, "One man's spam is another man's art." About the computer artist involved, the story says:
He recently completed a project in music visualization called Extrusions in C Major. The project creates images from Mozart compositions. To do this, the software analyzes the note characteristics of the music, including the tempo of various instruments, and then pairs them with colors: white for piano, yellow for violin and blue for cello.
But where he's going now is deeper into the word realm.
For the last several years, the Romanian-born computer artist has applied techniques in computational modeling and information visualization to invent a new form of artistic expression. One of his more notable projects involved creating what he calls Spam Plants. He wrote algorithms that analyzed various text and data points of junk e-mail to produce "organic" images of plantlike structures that spontaneously grew based on incoming spam.
Now he's working on a software agent that can "write" experimental graphical novels based on a melange of text culled from thousands of like-minded blogs across the Net. When finished, the agent, called Blogbot, will include algorithms that apply computational linguistics to the blog text, so that it extracts meaning from the text. That way, the graphical novel might strike on profundity.
Hemingway gets note. I'm curious to see how short sentences draw.
