—MAYBE THE SUN WILL COME OUT TOMMOROW, AND WE WON'T HAVE TO BEG, STEAL OR BORROW 

...This blog is like a messy kid's room--completely imperfect. And I sort of like it that way, because it captures me, all of my uncertainty and mistakes.

…I wish I was a kid. 

...You know how certain mirrors either make you look good, or for some reason, make you look bad? The one at the cinema yesterday made me into a 102 year-old-man. It was not pretty.

 

…This might sound gross, but I’m a guy who doesn’t like to shower because I hate being cold, getting in and out of the stall is freezing. Plus, I pretty much wear the same thing every day, two, sometimes three days in a row if I can help it. So, why the fuck would I ever buy more clothes?

...There's something in that. That's why I need therapy.

...I think I've quoted her before, but this off-hand thing she said once, while we were talking randomly, seems really potent. "Finding a therapist you trust and can share things with is harder than finding true love." Karen Stefano

 

…I’m not a big fan of pragmatic people. I like the dreamers—the ones who bitch and cry and see wonder in things.

 

…I get FOX News alerts (is it really really news?) on my phone, all the time, for some reason. It’s absolutely nuts how they reframe what’s happening. “Hegseth Makes Decisive Move On Pentagon General.”

 

…That’s one way of putting it.

 

…What a gift, to reconnect with S. Mays after all this time, one of my favorite people ever.

 

...I thought I was ready for more but then I saw I was already fully loaded.

 

…That guy is a piece of work, and not in a good way.

 

…Ain’t that America, for you and me?

 

…Dude, if I didn’t have you, I’d be a little bit lost.

If you think about all of our times together, they’re immeasurable. No one’s had what we’ve had.

 

…“Music is probably the only real magic I’ve encountered in my life. There’s not some kind of trick involved in it. It’s pure and it’s real. It moves, it heals, and it communicates. It does incredible things.” Tom Petty

 

…Hey, I’m not Jewish, nor am I Islamic, but I say, Free Palestine now, and Fuck Netanyahu.

 

…You never know what’s around the corner.

 

…Everyone’s dying around me, like every day.

 

…If you’re lucky enough, you get these extra moments and then it’s up to you to decide to do with them. 

 

…I don’t even know what that is.

 

…Dreams both good and bad were coming true.

 

…“Love is such a powerful force. It’s there for all to embrace—that unconditional love for all of humankind.

      That is the kind of love that compels people to go into the community and try to change conditions for others, to take risks for what they believe in.” 

           --Martin Luther King

...The thing I hold onto is, I know I'm a good person.

 

…You can’t take back what’s been done to you.

 

…Just help people. Isn’t that the whole point; you’re supposed to help people when you can?

 

…Why is it always, “One more song?”

 

…Sometimes, like yesterday, I read stuff back that I wrote a while ago and I’ll think, Who the fuck is this guy?

 

…I totally forgot we were back to sharing poems, so I wrote one of the top of my head in two minutes, sent it, and got back, “That’s brilliant.” Really?

Art is so subjective, which is mostly why I love it so much.

 

…Maybe the clouds will at least have silvery lines.

 

…“Can you imagine the reaction from Republicans and so many Christians in America if Obama, a married man, made another woman stand up at one of his rallies and said she had a “beautiful a$$” while he was president?

It would have dominated the news cycles for months. There would be long theological diatribes written and sermons preached about family values and the sanctity of marriage. There would probably even be calls for him to be impeached.

The outrage would have been swift and severe. 

Yet this is exactly what Donald Trump has done. A married man. The one so many republicans and Christians have hailed as their champion of Christian faith and family values for over a decade. He made Nicki Minaj stand, and stated to the entire nation that he thinks she has a “beautiful a$$.” All while the crowd laughed, applauded, and cheered.

We have witnessed intense scrutiny from the religious right towards every democrat in political power. From Bill Clinton, to Hillary Clinton, to Joe Biden, to Kamala Harris. The moral standard they have been held to by the religious right is unflinchingly rigid and unforgiving. When it came all of them, the message was clear: “character matters!”

Not to mention the constant demand for the “sanctity of marriage” and family values to be upheld in legislation over our entire country.

Yet even after Trump bragged about grabbing women by the “p*$$y.” Even after he said that if his daughter Ivanka wasn’t his daughter he would probably be dating her. Even after his name has appeared thousands of times in the Epstein files. Even after he was found liable for sexual assault. Even after he sexually objectifies another woman at his rally. All while being married, there isn’t even half the level of accountability or scrutiny.

Then when anyone dares to talk about this president’s sins and calls for repentance, two central tenets of Christianity, they are condemned by his supporters and told “no one is perfect,” and “you need to pray for him, not criticize him!”

The willful hypocrisy here is absolutely unreal and utterly heartbreaking.

One of the most blatant forms of hypocrisy in our time is Christians holding all ordinary people accountable to an extremely rigid set of moral standards, all while holding themselves and the president accountable to no standards at all.

You can’t complain that our society is rejecting Christianity, that people are leaving the church, and are condemning Christians as hypocrites when this kind of blatant hypocrisy, justification of despicable behavior, and a refusal to hold this president accountable has defined the Christian and republican support of him for over a decade.”- Denise Cosgrove

 

…Former President Obama on Wednesday responded to uproar over a recent campaign trail jab at President Trump’s White House decorations, slamming Republicans for focusing more on the joke than on the economy. 

“They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke, not to inflation, but to that joke,” Obama said during a campaign rally in Georgia. “This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory.” 

 

…From The Daily Beast:

 

Delusional Trump, 80, Invents Approval Rating as Disaster Looms

 

 

…How does this just get buried in the newsfeed? If it was any other President—Obama, Reagan, Biden—it would be frontline every day, but they’ve normalized this:

Former Miss Switzerland Beatrice Keul alleges Donald Trump raped her at the Plaza Hotel in 1993

  

…Jesus, what would Jesus say?

ICE awards new 10-year WA detention center contract to GEO

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement awarded a new 10-year contract to the GEO Group for the immigrant detention center in Tacoma, one of the nation’s biggest.

 

…Okay, okay. Ginger.

…I loved this that someone posted: “I talk a lot of smack for someone who falls over putting on their underwear.”

 

…Earphones are the way you drown out the dogs, but I’m close to being completely deaf.

 

…If you think about it, maybe and maybe don’t mean the same thing.

 

…At the end of a life, nobody gathers around to admire how successfully someone avoided embarrassment. They tell stories. About the ridiculous things they did. The chances they took. The way they loved. Laughter that could fill a room.

Give them some fucking stories.

 

… “It’s a strange thing to watch the world remember someone while you’re still trying to figure out how to live without the people you remember them with.”

    David Bowick on his brother-in-law Matthew Perry

 

…From Cheers:

--Woody: Beer, Mr. Peterson?

--Norm: Little early in the day, isn’t it Woody?

--Woody: Little early for a beer?

--Norm: No, for stupid questions.

 

…If ignorance is bliss, America is Eden.

 

…Who you miss when you’re gone yourself tells you everything about yourself and what’s important to you.

 

…We ain’t got nothing but time, but don’t be late to the fire.

 

…Most times I have no idea what I’m doing.

 

…Well, wait and see. There’s still a chance.

 

…“You sense the reality of time, and you start measuring it. I hated the term ‘bucket list’ because that assumes you’re going to kick it. But you sense choices become more important. How do you stay loving? How do you stay optimistic?” Billy Crystal

 

…If we break down we can hitch a ride with a couple of long-haired hippies.

 

…Wait a minute. What in the hell is going on in Math Class?

 

…Everyone needs a big brother of some sort.

 

…“Psychedelic drugs cause panic and insanity in people who have not tried them.” Timothy Leary

 

…It’s a dog-eat world and I’m wearing Milk Bone underwear.

 

…“Everybody has Parkinson’s. You have something that you have to adjust to and you have to learn about, you have to fold into your life. Once you decide what you’re going to do, the rest is out of your hands. I don’t worry about things I can’t do anything about.” Michael J. Fox.

 

…Good looks open doors, but good hair blows them off the hinges.

 

…The only question was when we’d let go, and would let go first.

 

…Even the mundane can be special, if you let it.

 

…I think sometimes because you don’t know the answers, you don’t want to ask the questions.

 

…If you want to figure out what’s going on, you talk to the guy in the back of the bar.

 

…“What do I learn from Parkinson’s? I learn patience, and I learn resilience, and I learn to recognize love and support when I see it. I’ve learned not to be concerned about asking for help. I ask for help. I share what I’m experiencing. I don’t try to hide it. I’ve learned openness, and I learned that just when you think you can’t get worse, it gets better. You just push through it, and you see what’s on the other side of that.” Michael J. Fox

 

…“There comes a point in your life where you are ready to tell your testimony.” Wynonna Judd

 

…I’m not quite there yet.

 

 …“Feeling heard is a deep, human need. It feels great when someone gets you. What’s a better feeling?” Martha Straus, “The Lost Art of Listening: How Learning to Listen Can Improve Relationships

 

…If you can’t tell this is actually all for you.

 

—LET’S OPEN UP A RESTAURANT IN SANTA FE

 

Quotidian

 

I was picking

daisies on the bank

while you were

marking the headstones

of all our lost kids,

a smear of history

we’d never get back.

But then you bustled

and kissed me back

by the hedge where

the crows pecked,

our sorrows naked

and unbidden. You said,

“This is no one’s sad song,”

and for a moment, I believed you,

your tongue a slow corkscrew,

while I remembered everything—

how your skirt flipped,

how I dove in 

between your sweaty thighs,

thinking something as quotidian

as mouth-sex and true love

might just change it all.

 

—DON’T BOTHER KNOCKING

 

Sacrifice

 

My dog pulls me aside one afternoon and tells me we need to talk.

 

What’s up? I ask.

 

I’m not feeling too good, the pooch says.  I’ve been really sick for a long time.

 

I thought you seemed different, I say.

 

Yeah, but you never inquired.  You never made an effort.

 

Shit, I say, I’m sorry.  Work’s been a bitch lately.  My fucking boss hates me.

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, my dog says.  You got problems, I get it.  But what I got is horrible, downright insidious.

 

Cancer?

 

Fuck if know.  All I do know, is it’s killing me and I don’t want to let it win.

 

Huh?

 

I’m saying, I want to win for once.  I’m saying, I want you to kill me before the disease does.

 

Are you nuts?

 

Maybe, but that’s beside the point.  The point is, will you do it?  Will you off me?

 

Off you?  Hell no. 

 

And why not?

 

Because you’re my dog, my pet, man’s best friend and all that.

 

Sheesh.  You are really some thong-wearing excuse for a man.  I ask you for one favor, one, and you buckle under some kind of contrived sentimentality.  

 

But is it really that bad?  I haven’t even taken you to the vet.

 

Exactly.  And now it’s too late.  I could go under before midnight.  The pain is horrendous.  Jackhammers everywhere.  I can’t even believe I have enough energy to talk to you.

 

This is just, just, so sudden.

 

For you maybe.  For me, I’ve been being skinned alive month after month after month.

 

That’s horrible.

 

I know!  Goddamnit, I know.  That’s why you have to do it.  Kill me.  Let me go out on top, having exercised agency for once.

 

It’s just…killing an animal, a dog, my dog.

 

Fucking, snap out of it.  Who are you all of a sudden, Mother Teresa?  You’re just lucky that boss who hates you hasn’t found out how much you’ve embezzled from the firm.

 

Shhh!  Keep your voice down.

 

One last time—Will you do it?  Because if you decline, I’m going to hang myself with that dental floss you never use.

 

Oh, God.

 

You don’t believe in God, remember?  And by the way, you might want to rethink that decision, considering there’s grace and forgiveness and all.

 

Am I that horrible?

 

Do you really want me to answer that? 

 

All right.  Okay.  Fuck it.  If you insist, I’ll kill you.

 

Excellent.  Let’s do this before your gonads shrink and end up swabbing your tonsils.

 

So crude!

 

 I dragged a shovel out into to the back yard, under the rotting hemlock you should probably have cut down sooner than later.

 

A shovel? 

 

Snow shovel.  Nice and flat.  Heavy.  Four or five good slams should do the trick.

 

Are you kidding?  Bludgeon you to death, with a snow shovel?

 

Do I look like I’m joking? my dog asks, baring yolk-yellow fangs.

 

All right.  Okay.

 

I open the sliding door and follow Sparky out into the yard where, true to his word, there sits a snow shovel I can’t remember ever owning.

 

Just do it quick, Sparky says.  No practice swings or anything like that.

 

You sound so casual.

 

My strategy is to not give death any credence.  Death already thinks it’s the shit.

 

So…

 

So, you grab that shovel and take my life and I win.  Fini.  End of the film.

 

You win?

 

Good grief, stop whimpering.  You sound like my brother, the one that got smothered when Mom rolled over asleep and didn’t notice the twitching hump under her.

 

Oh, God.

 

God again?  Stop, for God’s sake and just swing.

 

I do as my ailing dog has asked.  I hoist the shovel over my shoulders and bring it down in a mighty swoop, shutting my eyes in the process, anticipating the smashed melon sound of Sparky’s skull against metal, only there’s nothing.

 

When I look down, Sparky’s humping my leg, his tongue lolling like a manic tapeworm.

  

What the hell? I say.

 

You did it.

 

No, I didn’t.  You’re still alive.  You’re humping my leg.

 

Yeah, sorry, Sparky says, unlatching himself.  It’s sort of like a nervous tick, nothing sexual.  Remember, you had me spayed at six months.

 

I’m confused.

 

Nah, you’re not.  You’re the best.  You’d have killed me because I asked.

 

I’m still confused.

 

It was a test, dipshit.

 

Now I’m a dipshit?

 

Nah, not that either.  You’re the best.  I just wanted to be sure how much you cared.

 

And I, uh, passed your test?

 

With flying colors.

 

So, you’re not really lethally sick after all?

 

No, but you might be.  I mean, you’re the one talking to a dog.

 

—TRYING TO GET THE FEELING AGAIN

 

…Hey, hi. Today, Friday, is something different: I won’t comment about how the T administration is arresting “non-citizens” (who actually arecitizens) for illegal voting to try in an effort to thwart the onslaught the Republicans are about to face, and I won’t mention that “Special envoy” Steve Witkoff called PUTIN a (fucking) “humanitarian” this week, and I won’t mention how the monster said he should have received both The Nobel and Pulitzer Prize, and I won’t mention how the CEO of Goggled declined the monster’s suggestion that the Atlantic Ocean be named Trump Ocean,  just as I won’t mention all of the other despicable things our government has done or tried to do. Instead, it’s just, Good News Friday…

 

Nathan Heller—The New Yorker

 



Does anyone read anymore? Every few years brings a new flurry of concern that books are a thing of the past. Look closely at the numbers, though—and talk to booksellers, editors, and young readers, as I did for my latest story—and you find evidence of a startling sea change. Deep in the digital age, people are tiring of their screens and their feeds, and they are rediscovering books (the paper kind!). This wasn’t supposed to happen.   For this week’s issue, I profile James Daunt, the most important man in bookselling. Daunt is the chief executive of both the largest bookstore chain in the United States, Barnes & Noble, and the largest in Britain, Waterstones. His operating theory has been simple: make bookstores good again, and people will come back. Barnes & Noble added sixty new stores last year alone.   I found Daunt a fascinating figure to stand at the center of this renaissance. He is now a suit (he oversees nearly twenty thousand employees and presides over some four billion dollars annually in sales), but before leading Waterstones, starting in 2011, he had spent more than twenty years on the floor of his own famous, independent bookstore in London, Daunt Books. There, he studied how people navigate a bookstore—how they browse, what they pick up, how their attention travels, what they buy—and became a quiet innovator in techniques to make his shops seem more inviting. Since coming to Barnes & Noble, in 2019, Daunt, a very English Londoner, has had the curious experience of successfully remaking the book business in places like Wichita, Kansas, and Cheyenne, Wyoming.   Concern about reading decline, it turns out, is really a battle about the primacy of taste. Universities today are filled with professors who say that their students struggle to get through assigned texts. At the same time, booksellers with whom I talked across both Britain and America reported young people lining up for midnight releases; publishers detail sales rushes not seen in decades for authors such as Rebecca Yarros; and individual BookTokers have followings in the millions. To many, not least the young, both literary culture and the world of bookselling are beginning a great new climb, calling into question many presumptions about the digital century and the market models that sustain it. As the actor Bill Nighy (a longtime Daunt Books regular) observed to me, “It is made more delicious by the fact that books were dead, officially, about ten years ago.”

 

 

The Good List, Melissa Kirsch, NYT:

 

I have never actually availed myself of a Little Free Library, those quaint schoolhouse-shaped boxes on the sidewalk where you can take a book, leave a book. My night-table stack is so tall that I have had to enact a law forbidding any accidental discoveries from passing the threshold. But I love to see what’s circulating, to consider the barely touched paperbacks my neighbors have abandoned.

How handy to have this world map of Little Free Libraries where you can check out the designs and even some of the inventory at the time the photos were taken. Or go on vacation without a book and decide you’ll pick up whatever’s available near your Airbnb.

I had no idea there were boxes of other little free things around until a reader alerted me to the existence of Free Little Art Galleries, where you take and leave stuff you make. (Here’s a map of the galleries.) There are little free pantries outside churches! Little free collections of miniature cars! Yarn! Seeds! Tinned fish! What is little and free that’s not being joyously exchanged? Well, apparently someone has been leaving “grungy, sharp mussel shells” and “asphalt chunks” at a trinket library in Massachusetts. No one wants those things, even if they are little and free

 

 

Trevor Rainbolt became famous for being exceptionally good at GeoGuessr, a game where you’re given a photo from Google Street View and have to figure out where in the world it is. He spent four years helping a woman figure out exactly where a random childhood photo of her and her mother was taken, and I spent one hour and 26 minutes watching a video about how he did it. I didn’t expect to watch the whole thing, but so fascinating was the tale of how Rainbolt and his team used patience, persistence and fearsome forensic sleuthing to solve the mystery, I couldn’t stop.

 

One exciting thing about the buzz around the thrilling new documentary “You Can See Everything” has been the evocation of Ross McElwee as an influence on the work. McElwee pioneered a personal style of documentary, complicating the relationship between filmmaker and subject, as Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim do in their examination of the disgraced blood-testing start-up founder Elizabeth Holmes.

McElwee described his style of nonfiction filmmaking to The Times in 1993 as “an approximation of the truth that’s also of interest to someone other than yourself.” You can see this in full bloom in films he made, like “Sherman’s March” (1986), which starts out as a nonfiction examination of a devastating military campaign but quickly veers to become a diaristic essay on the search for love.

If you’ve watched “You Can See Everything” and find yourself yearning, as I did, for more of what our critic Manohla Dargis described as its “wily, disturbing, self-aware exploration of the relationship between documentarians and their subjects,” try McElwee’s oeuvre

 

…In 1959, a seventeen-year-old boy from Freeport, Long Island, was admitted to Creedmoor State Hospital in Queens. His parents had made the decision. The doctors had a solution. The solution was electroshock therapy — administered several times a week, with more than two dozen sessions in total, intended to suppress what his psychiatrists had labeled his homosexual tendencies and control behavior that his family could not accept.

The treatment left him with lasting damage to his short-term memory. He would later write a song about the experience called "Kill Your Sons." He never completely forgave what had happened to him, or the people who had consented to it on his behalf.

His name was Lou Reed, and what they did to him in that hospital is where the story begins — not because trauma was the whole story, but because understanding what he was handed at seventeen makes everything he created afterward extraordinary.

He was born Lewis Allan Reed on March 2, 1942, in Brooklyn, and grew up in suburban Freeport in a household that had very clear ideas about what a son should be. Lou had very different ideas. He played guitar with a ferocity that rattled the walls. He was bisexual, which in the 1950s was not something a middle-class family on Long Island knew how to understand. By the time the doctors completed their course of treatment and his recovery was over, he had spent more than a year losing and slowly reclaiming himself — uncertain of what remained and uncertain of who he was expected to become.

What he became was one of the most important artists of the twentieth century.

He arrived in New York the way people arrive when they have run out of alternatives, and he never really left in any way that mattered. By 1965, he had co-founded the Velvet Underground with John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and drummer Moe Tucker, with Andy Warhol providing the platform — his Factory scene, his art-world connections, and his particular gift for recognizing something dangerous and making it visible. The band was not commercially successful. They barely sold records. It didn't matter. What the Velvet Underground brought into the world was a new vocabulary — music that looked directly at addiction, sexuality, and people living on the edges of a society that had no language for them, and said it all plainly, without apology.

Brian Eno famously observed that only thirty thousand people bought the first Velvet Underground album, but every one of them started a band. The actual number was probably higher. The influence was certainly impossible to measure.

Reed's solo career stretched across five decades and contained multitudes — "Walk on the Wild Side," the Berlin album, the noise-drone experiment of Metal Machine Music, and the late masterwork Magic and Loss. He was difficult and visionary and infuriating and irreplaceable in roughly equal measure. He moved through the world as though the experience of that hospital at seventeen had given him permanent permission to reject every convention that did not serve the truth. He wrote about what he saw, what he felt, and what he survived, in a voice that was conversational and bleak and sometimes transcendent.

Late in his life, he found Tai Chi.

He found it the way some people in later years find the thing that centers them — not as an escape from who they had been, but as a deepening of himself. He practiced the 21-form daily with the same discipline he had brought to music for fifty years. His wife Laurie Anderson, the experimental artist and musician whom he married in 2008 after more than two decades of friendship, practiced alongside him. She called him a Tai Chi master. The description was not hyperbole.

In the final months of his life, Reed was battling liver disease — complications following a transplant that had briefly seemed successful before it began to fail. He didn't give up, Anderson later wrote, until almost the last thirty minutes of his life, when he suddenly accepted it — completely and all at once, in the way that only certain people can.

They brought him home from the hospital. On the morning of October 27, 2013, he went outside into the light to look at the trees.

Laurie Anderson was holding him when he died. She wrote about it afterward in Rolling Stone in a tribute that became one of the most extraordinary pieces of writing about death and love. She described watching his hands move through the air in the water-flowing 21-form of Tai Chi. His eyes were open. He was not afraid. She had never seen, she wrote, an expression as full of wonder as his as he died.

The boy who had been strapped to a hospital table in Queens at seventeen, subjected to more than two dozen sessions of electroshock therapy because the adults around him could not accept who he was — that boy died at seventy-one in the morning light, looking at trees, his musician's hands moving through the air in a form that required nothing but presence, breath, and the willingness to let the body know what it already understood.

He had spent his whole life refusing to be controlled. At the end, there was nothing left to refuse. There was only the light, the trees, and the hands moving through air that held him gently, all the way to the end of the world.