The other day on Facebook I mentioned that I've only bought eight new songs this year—and it's nearly the end of May. My friend Andy, recently of Hanoi, suggested the latest Iron & Wine collection, which I promptly bought, and which includes this cover of the Flaming Lips' song "Waiting for a Superman." It's quite beautiful. You can listen to it here, but, as always, I recommend buying. Support your local artists. Even when they're not local. 

Here are the lyrics:

I asked you a question
I didn't need you to reply
Is it getting heavy?
But then I realized
It's getting heavy
Well I thought it was already as heavy as can be

Is it overwhelming
To use a crane to crush a fly?
It's a good time for Superman
To lift the sun into the sky
Because it's getting heavy
Hell I thought it was already as heavy as can be

Tell everybody
Waiting for Superman
That they should try to
Hold on the best they can
He hasn't dropped them, forgot them or anything
It's just too heavy for Superman to lift

The people working on the next Superman movie should listen to this song over and over. The question they need to answer, to make the movie work, is right here: What's too heavy for Superman to lift?

Answer that and you've got a story.

Oh, and I'm still taking suggestions for new music if anyone's got ideas.

Things Superman can lift: a car, a lion, Goebbels.

"As long as you're grading all the Robin Hood movies by category, don't forget the score. The Errol Flynn version had, to my mind, the best movie score ever written. It was written by Erich Korngold, the greatest musical prodigy since Mozart, who emigrated to Hollywood from Hitler's Germany and didn't do much except write a hauntingly lovely violin concerto."

—Bob Lundegaard, in an e-mail to his ne'er-do-well son, Wednesday.

I don’t write much about music because I don’t have the vocabulary or knowledge to write about music, but I do have a music section on this blog. It’s got the same kind or revolving photos in the upper left corner as the rest of the site, and one of them is of Vic Chesnutt, whom I first came across when others performed his music on the album “Sweet Relief II,” released in the mid-90s, and who died last Friday, Christmas day, from an overdose of muscle relaxants. He was 45.

The “Sweet Relief” albums and charity benefited artists in medical need, such as Victoria Williams, who was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1993, and Chesnutt, who became a paraplegic in 1983 after a car accident. Among the artists performing his work: Madonna and Joe Henry (“Guilty By Association”), LIVE (“Supernatural”) and Soul Asylum (“When I Ran Off and Left Her”).

I came to him slowly but kept coming back. “About to Choke,” his first post-“Sweet Relief II” album, included the song “Little Vacation,” which I listened to all the time on a trip down the Oregon coast in ’97. I also loved this sad, true snapshot from “New Town”:

And a little bitty baby draws a nice clean breath
From over his beaming momma’s shoulder
He’s staring at the worldly wonders that stretch as far as he can see
But he’ll stop staring when he’s older

When a friend’s daughter turned two, I quoted that stanza and added: “My wish for Eva is that she’ll never stop staring when she’s older.”

In the late ‘90s I saw him at a concert in downtown Seattle, a small figure in a wheelchair, opening for someone, and the power and purity of his voice surprised me. Four or five songs in, though, it cracked, and kept cracking, and he grew dispirited, angry, self-flagellating. The Seattle crowd, already a passive-aggressive group, with most waiting on the main act anyway, responded with something like embarrassment. The show petered out.

According to my iTunes application, “I’m Through” from “Silver Lake” was the seventh song I downloaded (uploaded?) into the application back in December 2003. That’s the song with which I almost always closed compilation CDs back then. It fit my mood in 2003/2004, particularly in terms of politics and employment. He sings the song with a mixture of resignation and defiance, but you can imagine the song sung through clenched teeth. Maybe that's how I sung it:

And after everything else you draw out of me
You still expect cute curtsies

And I’m through through through
Carrying you on my shoulders
And I’m through through through
Hiding

Sometimes his songs feel so personal you almost want to turn away:

Dogs are barking
Birds are chirping
The only thing better if
I was squirting
But there’s no one here
To love on me today
Cause the maiden’s
On holiday

Other times it’s as if he’s the third-person narrator of a Flannery O’Conner short story:

Betty Lonely lives in a duplex of stucco
On the north bank of a brackish river
Her ears omit the noise from a nearby airstrip
Her mind floats beyond the snapper boats

But his wicked sense of humor was always close by:

The mirror’s a mirage
No wonder I always look so crummy

The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s Chris Riemenschneider writes, in his tribute, “The L.A. Times has a quote from Chesnutt complaining about his mounting [$70,000] medical bills. It's goes without stating a guy like this—who contributed to society way more than he took from it—deserves decent healthcare, but let's not cheapen his memory with political talk.”

Riemenschneider works for a corporation and I don’t, not here anyway, so I can afford to be cheap. We live in an unChristian nation. There but for the grace of God goes some other guy. Here’s the L.A. Times quote:

“I was making payments, but I can't anymore and I really have no idea what I'm going to do. It seems absurd they can charge this much. When I think about all this, it gets me so furious. I could die tomorrow because of other operations I need that I can't afford. I could die any day now, but I don't want to pay them another nickel.”

I never left Vic but this spring I came back with a vengeance, listening to his songs, just his songs, on shuffle mode, and re-discovering this one. “In My Way, Yes” gives us three stanzas: the first on creativity (“Taking my time/Working on lines/Fingers in clay/Everyday”), then on love, then on life, and the chorus for each is an affirmation, a choosing of celebration over cynicism. Here’s the chorus for creativity. The creativity is his, the affirmation is mine:

(Do you think it makes a difference?)
I say yes
(Do you think it makes a difference?)
I say yes
(Do you think it makes a difference?)
I say yes
In my life, yes
In my life, yes
In my life, yes

"On armistice day
The philharmonic will play
But the songs that we sing
Will be sad"

—Paul Simon, "Armistice Day" from the album, "Paul Simon." And here's a pop-up, audio version. And since we're talking Simon, here he is singing "Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard" on Sesame Street, with a little girl getting WAY into the act. I watched this last night and couldn't stop smiling. If we want to celebrate soldiers and what they died for, well, this is it.

Taking my time
Working on lines
Fingers in clay
Everyday
Head in the clouds
Moving my mouth
Spreading the grout
That's holding it down

(Do you think it makes a difference?)
I say yes
(Do you think it makes a difference?)
I say yes
(Do you think it makes a difference?)
I say yes
In my life, yes
In my life, yes
In my life, yes

Cuddling up
Declarations of love
Squeeze and a hug
A kiss and a rub
Faces opposed
Eyelids closed
Nuzzling nose
Like eskimos

(Don't'cha' feel silly?)
I say no
(Don't'cha' feel silly?)
I say no
(Don't'cha' feel silly?)
I say no
With my love, no
With my love, no
With my love, no

I never ever thought
I'd ever have a life like this
I never dreamed
I'd be alive
I never considered
Such as these surroundings
Effectually pulling it off

Watching the cops go by
Seeing a falcon fly
Reading a history book
Wetting a tiny hook
Driving fast all night
Bursting into song at first light
Sharing breakfast from one plate
Holding hands over loved ones graves

(Do you think you deserve it?)
I say yes
(Do you think you deserve it?)
I say yes
(Do you think you deserve it?)
I say yes
In my way, yes
In my way, yes
In my way, yes

— Vic Chesnutt, "In My Way, Yes," from the album "Silver Lake" 

Last week I watched a film called "Ivan Vasilevich: menyaet professiyu" (translated, in attention-getting fashion, to "Ivan Vasilevich: Back to the Future"), which I rented from Netflix as much for the description as anything:

When his time machine malfunctions, scatterbrained inventor Shurik (Aleksandr Demyanenko) accidentally transports Ivan the Terrible to 1973 Moscow and simultaneously sends small-time crook and apartment manager Ivan Bunsha -- a ringer for the despot -- to the 16th century. Wackiness ensues as Shurik attempts to set things right in this Soviet sci-fi comedy of errors featuring Yuri Yakovlev in dual roles as Bunsha and the czar.

A wacky Soviet-era comedy? Who would've thought? And it is that, although, in the end, more curiosity than laugh-out-loud comedy. It's one part "Les Visiteurs," one part Bollywood, one part "Benny Hill" without the girls. One imagines if the film had gotten out in 1973 it would've gone a long way toward dispensing the notion of the stoic Soviet empire. Yes, even in the middle of detente. But of course "getting out" was always the problem. 

Halfway through the film, in modern-day (1973-era) Moscow, Ivan the Terrible, who isn't so terrible, turns on a tape recorder, hears music, and smiles. The singer was familiar. I'm pretty sure it was Vladimir Visotsky, whose angry song Baryshnikov danced to in his tennis shoes in "White Nights"— and about which I wrote for an MSN "Top 10 Dance Scenes" piece way back when.

The difference between the time I wrote that piece (2004) and now? It's easy as hell, now, to find footage of the singer. Here he is, for example, on a Soviet-era TV show, singing in his gravelly, impassioned voice. Check it out.

""Anvil!" owes much to Penelope Spheeris’ "Decline of Western Civilization, Pt. II: The Metal Years" and “American Movie.” In all three, the rawness of people chasing -- not living -- dreams is uncomfortable to watch, because they’ve bought the concept that what they do isn’t valid unless they become big stars... Anvil plays gigs, makes records, and has a small but avid fan base. But they always want more, they rarely talk about artistry or what they want to do with their music, and whatever success they have is contingent on how others see them."

— Jim Walsh in his MN Post review of "Anvil! The Story of Anvil."

This gets to the heart of it even if Jim, who's a friend, is, I believe, overstating his case. It could be the boys in Anvil feel that what they do isn't valid unless they make a living at it. And they don't. At 50. That's when you begin to wonder if it's all worth it. But in general I concede Jim's point—for Anvil, for our culture, for me—even if I know that, with me anyway, I'll forever be trapped between doing the thing for the thing and needing a little something in response.

...courtesy of those crazy Belgians.

ADDENDUM: Check out some of the other, less official (if we can even use that term) versions of same. What fun! Best reclamation of a public space — and a public space where people tend to be zoned out, in limbo, not where they were and not where they're going — that I've seen in a long time.

I really like this one.

And here's the official vtm version. Apparently it was basically an advertisement for an upcoming reality show on Belgian TV about casting "The Sound of Music," but... that's my kind of advertising.

Has any film fudged rock n’ roll history as much as this one? How bad of a storyteller are you when, given the long history of white artists stealing from black artists, you gotta make shit up?

It’s not even subtle shit. “Cadillac Records" is mostly about the relationship between Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) and Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody) at Chess Records, and to a lesser extent the relationships between Muddy and Little Walter (Columbus Short), and Chess and Etta James (Beyonce Knowles), but more than halfway through the film, rising star Chuck Berry (Mos Def), who is basically credited with inventing rock n’ roll here, is angry that the Beach Boys’ 1963 song “Surfin’ USA” is ripping off his “Sweet Little Sixteen."

Flags went up. “What happened to the rest of the ‘50s?” I asked Patricia. Then Berry gets busted for transporting a minor across state lines, and, as he’s being led away, he laments the fact that Jerry Lee Lewis gets away with marrying his 13-year-old cousin.

More flags. “Jesus, what year is this supposed to be?” I asked Patricia. “That happened in the ‘50s. And Jerry Lee Lewis didn’t get away with shit. Marrying his cousin ended his career, didn’t it?” Five years later we see Berry getting out of prison, and he sees images of Elvis Presley singing to girls and being declared the king of rock n’ roll on TV.

“Oh, please,” I said to Patricia, who, by now, was getting sick of my yakking. “Are they implying that Elvis became popular while Berry was in prison? That he became king then? I mean, what the hell?”

Some perspective. Berry and Presley, as record charters, were basically contemporaries. Presley’s “That’s All Right (Mama)” was on the air in the south in the summer of ’54, while Berry didn’t go to Chess Records to record “Maybellene” (and “invent rock n’ roll”) until May 1955. Meanwhile, tons of other artists, from Ray Charles to Bill Haley & His Comets, were doing their thing. Forces were at work, and they’d been at work for a long time; and if you wanted to call this thing “new,” and if you wanted to call it “rock n’ roll,” great, but don’t pretend one man invented it — whether that one man is Bill Haley, Elvis Presley or, here, Chuck Berry. I don't know much about music history but I know that much.

More perspective. Berry got busted under the Mann Act in 1959. So why show this after the Beach Boys’ 1963 recording? Why couldn’t the filmmakers show Berry getting busted and then, upon release, have him hear the Beach Boys ripping him off? That’s works just as well with the movie's themes and has the added advantage of being historically accurate.

What a sad movie. It takes a meaty subject — all the talent that congregated at Chess Records in the ‘50s and ‘60s — and makes weak broth out of it. Lord knows I love Jeffrey Wright, but there’s something minimalist in his approach, something that refrains from the spotlight, that makes him seem wrong to play one of the great singer/guitarists of our time. He gets eaten alive in the battle with Howlin’ Wolf (Eamonn Walker). He disappears as the movie progresses. Maybe that’s the point. But something feels missing. The performance works and then it doesn't.

But at least when it works, thanks to Wright, it really works. The same can't be said for the rest of the film. I don't get any sense of Leonard Chess: What makes him tick, what keeps him alive. Whether he was ripping off artists or aiding them. Or in what ways he was ripping off artists and in what ways he was aiding them. The portrait's nothing but smeary — as if both enemies and loved ones were involved in the creation of it.

Worse, once the movie starts fudging its history, you don't know what to believe. Chess hires Etta James as a prostitute, then hears her singing in the bathroom? Please. Chess dies of a heart attack two blocks from Chess Records after selling it in 1969? Pretty please.

Admittedly it’s a tough story to tell. So many lives, so many larger-than-life characters, all in one spot. So couldn’t the focus have been the messiness of those lives creating works of near-perfection? That tension? Told without the bullshit and easy answers and finger-pointing? Hell, why not just focus on the heyday? Chicago, 1950-54. Make drama out of that. End with the arrival of Chuck Berry and something “new.”

Wouldn’t that be enough?

"He'll cry
Through the best of times
Then he'll ask you
Where do all the good times go?"

— from "Some Champions" by Joe Henry

There’ve been times that I thought
I couldn’t last for long
Now I think I’m able
To carry on

It’s been a long
A long time coming
But I know
Change gonna come
Oh, yes it will

— Sam Cooke, "A Change is Gonna Come." Great use of this song, by the way, in Spike Lee's "Malcom X."

ADDENDUM: The New York Times editorial on the inaugural speech.

"Idiot Wind" is a startlingly good song for the way the McCain camp has attacked Obama this fall. Line after line hits home:

The following column was written by my friend Jim Walsh a year after the death of Sen. Paul Wellstone in Oct. 2002. It was a bad time. Our country gave into fear, it gave into lies, it set us on the path we're currently on. How does that path feel now? In two weeks, we may be able to begin to get off this path. We may be able to elect a leader who offers smarts,and hope, and unity; a leader who can make friends out of our enemies rather than enemies out of our friends. But it's still two weeks away. The McCain camp is stirring up old fears, promulgating new fears, disseminating misrepresentations and outright lies. They're throwing whatever shit they can against the wall and hoping some of it sticks. 

Here's to not giving into fear and lies. Here's to hope, and smarts, and unity. And here's to Joe Henry, Vic Chesnutt, Dan Wilson, the Tropicals, Prince, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Green Day, Jenny Owen Young, Leonard Cohen, Guns N' Roses, Nirvana, Joan Armatrading, Randy Newman, Loudon Wainwright, Rufus Wainwright, Jonathan Richman, Teddy Thompson, Antony, Iron & Wine, R.E.M., The Beatles, Paul Simon, A3 and Nina Simone. And here's to the Mad Ripple.

An E-Proposal From Me to You
By Jim Walsh

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis, in front of a silver monument that looks like a heart, a broken heart really, and I am thinking about how wrong the world has gone, how Minnesota Mean it all feels. I’m thinking about how much everyone I know misses the man I’ve come to visit, how sick I am of sitting around waiting for change, and about what might happen if I ask you to do something, which is what I’ll do in a minute.

Like most Minnesotans, I met Paul Wellstone once. It was at the Loring Playhouse after the opening night of a friend’s play. He and Sheila were there, offering encouragement to the show’s director, Casey Stangl, and quietly validating the post-production festivities with his presence: The Junior Senator from Minnesota and his wife are here; we must be doing something right.

The year before (1990), I’d written a column for City Pages encouraging all local musicians and local music fans to go vote for this mad professor the following Tuesday. He won, and, as many have said since, for the first time in my life I felt like we were part of something that had roots in Stuff The Suits Don’t Give A Shit About. That is, we felt like we had a voice, like were getting somewhere, or like Janeane Garofalo’s villain-whupping character in “Mystery Men,” who memorably proclaimed, “I would like to dedicate my victory to the supporters of local music and those who seek out independent films.”

After the election, Wellstone’s aide Bill Hillsman told me he believed my column had reached a segment of the voting populace that they were having trouble reaching, and that it may have helped put him over the top. I put aside my bullshit detector for the moment and chose to believe him, just as I choose at this moment to believe that music and the written word can still help change the world.

When I introduced myself to Wellstone that night as “Jim Walsh from City Pages,” he broke into that sexy gap-toothed grin, clasped my hand and forearm and said, with a warm laugh, “Jiiiiim,” like we were a couple of thieves getting together for the first time since the big haul. I can still feel his hand squeezing my forearm. I can still feel his fighter’s strength.

For those of you who never had the pleasure, that is what Paul Wellstone was--a fighter—despite the fact that the first president Bush said upon their first encounter, “who is this chickenshit?” He fought corporate America, the FCC, injustice, his own government. He fought for the voiceless, the homeless, the poor, the little guy—in this country and beyond. He was a politician but not a robot; an idealist, but not a sap, and if his legacy has already morphed into myth, it’s because there were/are so few like him. He was passionate, and compassionate. He had a huge heart, a rigorous mind, a steely soul and conscience, and now he is dead and buried in a plot that looks out over the joggers, bikers, rollerbladers, and motorists who parade around Lake Calhoun daily.

Paul and Sheila Wellstone and six others, including their daughter Marcia, were killed in a plane crash on October 25, 2002. I remember where I was that day, just as you do, and I don’t want to forget it, but what I want to remember even more is October 25, 2003. So here’s what we’re going to do.

We’re going to start something right here, right now, and we’re going to call it Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. It will happen on Saturday, Oct. 25th. On that day, every piece of music, from orchestras to shower singers, superstars to buskers, will be an expression of that loss and a celebration of that life. It will be one day, where music—which, to my way of thinking, is still the best way to fill in the gray areas that the blacks and whites of everyday life leave us with—rises up in all sorts of clubs, cars, concerts, and living rooms, all in the name of peace and love and joy and all that good stuff that gets snickered at by Them.

Now. This is no corporate flim-flam or media boondoggle. This is me talking to you, and you and I deciding to do something about the place we live in when it feels like all the exits are blocked. So: First of all, clip or forward this to anyone you know who still cares about grass roots, community, music, reading, writing, love, the world, and how the world sees America. If you’ve got a blog or web site, post it.

If you’re a musician, book a gig now for Oct. 25th. Tell them you want it to be advertised as part of Paul and Sheila Wellstone World Music Day. If you’re a shower singer, lift your voice that day and tell yourself the same thing. If you’re a club owner, promoter, or scene fiend, put together a multi-act benefit for Wellstone Action! <http://www.wellstone.org> . If you’re a newspaper person, tell your readers. If you’re a radio person, tell your listeners. Everybody talk about what you remember about Wellstone, what he tried to do, what you plan to do for Wellstone World Music Day. Then tell me at the email address below, and I’ll write another column like this the week of Oct. 25th, with your and others’ comments and plans.

This isn’t exactly an original idea. Earlier this year, I sat in a room at Stanford University with Judea and Michelle Pearl, the father and daughter of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was kidnapped and murdered by members of a radical Islamic group in Pakistan in February of last year. After much talk about their son and brother’s life and murder, I asked them about Danny’s love of music. He was a big music fan, and an accomplished violinist who played with all sorts of bands all over the world. Unbeknownst to me at the time, Pearl was also a member of the Atlanta band the Ottoman Empire, and his fiddle levitates one of my all-time favorite Irish jigs, “This Is It,” which I found myself singing one night last fall in a Sonoma Valley bar with a bunch of journalists from Paraguay, Texas, Mexico, Jerusalem, Italy, and Korea.

The Pearls talked with amazement about the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day <http://www.danielpearl.org> , the second of which happens this October 10th, which would have been Pearl’s 40th birthday. I told them about attending one of the first Daniel Pearl World Music Day activities at Stanford Memorial Church, where a lone violinist silently strolled away from her chamber group at the end, signaling to me and my gathered colleagues that we were to remember that moment and continue to ask questions, continue to push for the dialogue that their son and brother lived for. I vowed that day to tell anybody within earshot about Daniel Pearl World Music Day, and later figured he wouldn’t mind a similar elegy for Wellstone, who shared Pearl’s battle against hate and cynicism.

Wellstone didn’t lead any bands, but he led as musical a life as they come. He lived to bring people together, to mend fences: Music. When he died, musicians and artists were some of the most devastated, as Leslie Ball’s crest-fallen-but-somehow-still-beaming face on CSPAN from Williams Arena illustrated. Everyone from Mason Jennings to Larry Long wrote Wellstone tribute songs in the aftermath, and everyone had a story, including the one Wendy Lewis told me about the genuine exuberance with which Wellstone once introduced her band, Rhea Valentine, to a crowd at the Lyn-Lake Festival. Imagine that, today.

So ignore this or do whatever you do when your “We Are The World” hackles go up. I’d be disappointed, and I suppose I wouldn’t blame you; in these times of terror alerts and media celebrity, I’m suspicious of everything, too. But I freely admit that the idea of a Wellstone World Music Day is selfish. That day was beyond dark, and to have another like it, a litany of hang-dog tributes and rehashes of The Partisan Speech and How It All Went Wrong, would be painful, not to mention disrespectful to everything those lives stood for and against.

No, I don’t want anyone telling me what to think or feel that day, or any day, anymore. I want music that day. I want to wake up hearing it, go to bed singing it. I want banners, church choirs, live feeds, hip-hop, headlines, punk rock, field reports, arias, laughter. I want to remember October 25, 2002 as the day the music died, and October 25, 2003 as the day when people who’ve spent their lives attending anti-war rallies and teaching kids and championing local music and independent films got together via the great big antennae of music and took another shot.

I am standing in the northwest corner of Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis. In front of the silver broken heart, three workers stab the fresh sod with shovels and fumble with a tape measurer. Flowers dot the dirt surrounding the statue base. I pick up a rock and put it in my pocket.

The sprinklers are on, hissing impatiently at the still-stunned-by-last-autumn citizens who work and hope and wait and watch beyond the cemetery gates. The sprinklers shoot horizontal water geysers this way and that. They are replenishing patches of grass that have been browned by the sun. They are telling every burned-out blade to keep growing, and trying to coax life out of death.

Swimming like there's no tomorrow
Living like there's no regret
Looked up and saw the sorrow

Too far out
Too far out
This is what they said would happen
We were warned
We were warned
We were too far out

—from the song "Too Far Out" by The Tropicals

This thing is so beautiful it made me cry. It made me want to travel and dance. Check it out. The video usually plays best when you pause it, let it fully load, then play.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

The first time I watched it, smiling at the goofy dance but more at the joyful way Matt does it, I thought about my own world travels, particularly when I was younger. However, as the locales in the video piled up (Australia, Zanzibar, the Netherlands, Mexico), I wondered, first, “Wow, where’d he get the money for all this travel?” and, second, “So did he always dance alone? Did no one join him? Didn’t he want anyone to join him?” Almost on cue, there’s that mad rush of people into the camera, culminating, as the music soars, with that ecstatic pile-up in Madrid. Tears began to well in my eyes at this point. Traveling isn’t just about seeing new places, it’s about making connections. At a time when most of us haven't been, here's someone who has. Life can be this way: big and together and uninhibited. If it's wish fulfillment, it still beats any wish-fulfillment fantasy coming out of Hollywood. But I don't think it is wish fulfillment. He made it happen, so can you. So can I. 

The music is gorgeous, too.

Favorite moments: The shift in colors from the deserts of Australia to the red tulip fields of Lisse, the Netherlands; the barking dog in Kuwait City; dancing in front of all of those guys in Turkey; the kids in the Solomon Islands and the Philippines and Mali; the DMZ; the girl in the red skirt in Warsaw; how absolutely HAPPY Matt looks in Papua, New Guinea; the wave in Tonga (of course); and Nellis Airspace, Nevada. But my absolute favorite moment is in Gurgoan, India. That's so wonderful. So much fun.

What about you? Favorite moments?

Loudon Wainwright III (M*A*S*H alumnus, father of Rufus and Martha) has a nice song called "Sunday Times" that I've included in more than a few mixed CDs over the years. Although the cost of that paper has gone up four-fold, the song basically reflects my views on the Sunday Times:

    Well I’m trying to read my Sunday Times
    It cost a nickel and twelve dimes
    Bought it late Saturday night I’m almost finished but not quite
    It weighed a ton it seemed to me that each one of them must take a tree to make
    And also I should think it takes about a gallon of ink

Loudon then goes through the various sections of the newspaper — bleak section one, fun A&E section, boring Business, plus the Magazine ("the crossword will keep you up late/ And there's camp if your kid's overweight") — but the song's main point is that it's so big how can anyone possibly read it all?:

    Well it’s Tuesday and I’m still not done
    With Sunday’s Times — son of a gun
    Monday and Tuesday’s still unread
    I could’ve read War and Peace instead

So for those who are reading War and Peace instead, here are a few good articles from today's Sunday Times.

David Mamet has a great piece on the sad wisdom of fighters in movies, including Stanislaus Zbyszko from the great noir, NIGHT AND THE CITY, Kola Kwariani from Stanley Kubrick's THE KILLING and my man Takashi Shimura from SEVEN SAMURAI and IKURU. I had an analysis of SEVEN SAMURAI on my previous site but it was among the 50 or so reviews I dispensed with in making the transfer here — it wasn't worthy of the film — but Mamet has some great descriptions of a couple of keys scenes. It's a beautiful read.

Further in the Arts section, Geoffrey Himes writes about the many versions of Randy Newman's song, "Louisiana 1927," and its popularity in post-Katrina New Orleans. At the breakfast table, Patricia mentioned how she always loved the line, "Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline." I immediately downloaded both Newman's and Aaron Neville's versions. Listening to them as I write this.

In the Week in Review, there's Elisabeth Vincentelli on the popularity in France of a fish-out-of-water, city-man-in-the-country comedy, BIENVENUE CHEZ LES CH'TIS (WELCOME TO THE STICKS), and what its popularity means for France and Pres. Sarkozy as France tries to find itself in a global economy (as we all do, as we all do). Then of course I went to my man Frank Rich and his take on how the prolonged Democratic primary really isn't bad for the Dems. The ending, in which John McCain uses prison help to set up tables and chairs for a private fundraiser in Selma, Ala., has a BRUBAKER quality to it. 

Finally, there's Elizabeth Edwards, wife of John, on the awful, need-for-narrative, where's-the-beef? campaign coverage of this year's presidential election by the mainstream media. One can say her point is obvious, that everybody knows the media's dropping the ball, but as someone who's been accused of stating the obvious before, I tend to believe that it's the obvious and effed-up things that need more talking about, not less. Besides, Mrs. Edwards had a front-row seat for much of all this and has sharp things to say. I particularly like her thoughts on Joseph Biden (whom I've always liked) and how he was dismissed almost from the get-go by a media who felt they knew where the narrative was heading. She writes:

[That] decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

Bless her for that "honestly!" And one wonders: how is it that media momentum is built up in this fashion toward the inconsequential, the wrong-headed, the just plain stupid? Until we can answer that obvious question, we will always be a less-than-serious country in a very serious world.

Everyone knows I love Joe Henry, so this NY Times blog from Rosanne Cash, about her collaboration with Mr. Henry, was fascinating and touching and I can't wait to hear the song.

For those who don't want to read the entire blog, here's what they've got so far:

I lost two friends, each one alone
One by the hand of God, one by his own
Oh, I loved them both, that same God knows—
And so it goes,
So it goes

Wisdom and madness go hand in glove
One falls to the other, like need into love
I want you in ways that nobody knows—
And so it goes,
So it goes

We have in common an uncommon grace
Taught us by time, revealed by the face of
Beauty in even the worst that we know—
And so it goes,
So it goes

(Sung as a bridge?)
There’s No one who drives me like I drive myself
Once more around before I rest on the shelf
Home is just one step beyond what I see
And darkness the thing one step behind me…

Many years pass, and so many friends
And none of us ever may pass here again
The last of us standing the first one who knows—
So it goes, so it goes
So it goes, so it goes

Somewhere Kurt Vonnegut smiles.

Also check out part I of Rosanne's blog. In it, she talks about her recent brain surgery, the death of her friend John Stewart ("But where's the madness, Rosanne?"), the death of her friend Eric Wishnie, and the problem with a particular brand of Christian fundamentalism (like “looking at the ground with a flashlight when the whole universe was around you waiting to be noticed"). Her blogs are exactly what I want. They're personal, deep, quiet. They take you inwards, into contemplation, rather than outwards, into argumentation. They give no answers, they just make you wonder.