"Obviously, Paul Simon’s Graceland is a huge influence on this. I do genre parody..."

"... and this is definitely mostly Graceland.... It’s a stunning masterpiece. But the lyrics are essentially him singing over Ladysmith Black Mambazo and then singing about how he’s depressed because he got divorced from Princess Leia and he’s awkward at Upper West Side parties. It was sort of loosely influenced by that, but he has these elliptical kind of lyrics; they’re hard to pin down sometimes. So a lot of the influence came from the visuals of the 'Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes' video and his performances with Ladysmith Black Mambazo on Saturday Night Live. There were a lot of 'a dorky white guy in front of an African choir' images. And I was definitely influenced by Talking Heads and Peter Gabriel...."

Says Kyle Gordon, interviewed in Vulture at '"Everyone Was Laughing at Me the Entire Time. It Was Awesome.'"

I highly recommend "Under African Skies" "Mr. Jambo":

"Well, I couldn’t speak his language and I couldn’t understand a word / But I knew his meaning was what I decided I had heard."

For reference, here's the 1987 Paul Simon video, "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes":

"The teams totaled 34 hits, and 14 pitchers combined to throw 444 pitches. It was the fourth game in major league history with at least 29 runs and 11 homers."

I'm reading "Brewers outlast A's 15-14 in 12 innings as teams combine for 11 homers and 34 hits in Las Vegas/Andrew Vaughn had four hits and four RBIs, including a two-run double that tied the score in the ninth inning, and the Milwaukee Brewers outlasted the Athletics 15-14 in 12 innings at Las Vegas Ballpark in a wild game that featured 11 homers" (WaPo).

No, I wasn't watching. That game started at my bedtime — 9 p.m.

I just noticed that there's a team now that's just named the Athletics — no city/state in the name. Just the mascot... and it's the most generic mascot. The Athletics. And they played in Las Vegas last night — "at the site of their Triple-A affiliate, the Las Vegas Aviators." They seem homeless. They're not in Oakland anymore, and their normal home these days is West Sacramento, but not enough of a home to become part of its name. Playing a few games in Las Vegas this week has something to do with Las Vegas being its future home. A new stadium will open in 2028.

But maybe you watched basketball last night. I'd rather watch a random baseball game than an important basketball game, but I did pause the movie I was watching and go downstairs to hear the National Anthem and catch a glimpse of Trump. The NYT says "Mr. Trump smiled and saluted in the face of deafening boos when he briefly appeared on the arena’s video board...." I went back to my movie — "A Complete Unknown," now, finally, on HBO — but I did look up the result this morning. I see Trump ruined everything:

Ooh, that Trump. The Knicks lost. Meanwhile, Bob Dylan won. That's what Joan Baez says to him at the end of the biopic: "You won." He's all "What did I win?" and then he rides off into the sunset on his motorcycle. 

Goodbye to Frederick Wiseman.

"Frederick Wiseman, 96, Penetrating Documentarian of Institutions, Dies/He exposed abuses in films like 'Titicut Follies,' a once-banned portrait of a mental hospital, but ranged widely in subject matter, from a Queens neighborhood to a French restaurant" (NYT)(gift link).

And though he denied that his movies had any political agenda, he was no stranger to controversy. His directorial debut, “Titicut Follies” (1967), a harrowing portrait of the Bridgewater State Hospital for the criminally insane in Massachusetts, remains the only film ever banned in the United States for reasons other than obscenity, immorality or national security.... 

What if it were your job to infuse the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight?

As noted in the previous post, President Trump signed an executive order that "directs the Vice President, who is a member of the Smithsonian Board of Regents, to work to eliminate improper, divisive, or anti-American ideology from the Smithsonian and its museums, education and research centers, and the National Zoo."

Now, maybe the zoo is thrown in there because it's run by the Smithsonian. But I had to wonder what the zoo might be doing and what it could do if it wanted to lean into the kind of ideology that the Trumpian vision sees as improper, divisive, and anti-American.

So I asked Grok to assume the job of infusing the zoo with Critical Race Theory, radical feminism, and LGBTQ+ instruction and insight. I told it to write some placards to be posted in front of particular animals and displays. If you're one of those people who won't read things written by A.I., you'd better bail out now, because what follows is 100% Grok:

"I don't know where I'm going/But I'm on my way."

I've kept a Google alert on my name for as long as there have been Google alerts, and this morning one took me to a Wisconsin Public Radio article: "New exhibit explores Wisconsin veteran contributions after military service/'Traditions: Stories of Service of Country & Community' exhibit at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum showcases how veterans gave back after returning to civilian life."

See my name?

 

That's a photo I published back in 2006, and I'm glad I put a Creative Commons license and made it easy to use without needing to ask. I don't check my email that often, and I'm happy to see the photo getting some eyeballs. I photographed things that other people made, some of it art, some of it utilitarian, so it would be especially absurd to be possessive about what part of this is mine. It makes more sense to claim the sunrise. I didn't even have the power to arrange those items. They were arrayed in a glass case.

Anyway. This morning I focused on that "poster" with the vivid line "I don't know where I'm going/But I'm on my way." It struck me as anti-war. If you don't know where you're going, stay put. First do no harm. But I learned that the seeming poster was in fact sheet music. And I think it celebrates willingness to do whatever "Uncle Sammy" has in mind. Read the sheet music and listen:

And I'll do my duty-uty night or day/I don't know where I'm going but I'm on my way....

I still don't know what Paul Simon and Julio were doing down by the school yard, but there's that line I don't know where I'm going/But I'm on my way:

Of course, it's perfectly acceptable, speaking of copyright, for Paul to lift that line from the 1917 song, but who knows if he did? I see that in 1972, Paul Simon told Rolling Stone, he "never bothered to figure out what it was" that Mama saw him and Julio do down by the schoolyard, because it "didn't make any difference to me." And in 2010, he told the NYT the song was "a bit of inscrutable doggerel." So I'm sure he'd give an obscure answer to the question whether he was inspired by that war/anti-war song.

I like that he used it, if he used it. It's the folk music tradition, something Dylan does too. You patch things together, put them in a new context. It's vital and alive. A good thing.

Meanwhile, there are places on the internet that attribute to Carl Sandburg. I suspect that's one of those misattributions. And speaking of famous names... that really is Mickey Mantle.

"Singing Simon and Garfunkel’s 'America' to heal my brain 🧠 In 2017, I sustained a brain injury caused by never treated Lyme disease."

"My first symptom was a psychosis that would make me see horrific images nonstop 24 hours a day for 22 months.... About six or seven months into the psychosis I lost all control of the muscles in my body including the muscles in my face. I lost my ability to speak.... By then it was too late to treat the Lyme disease; it was all about strengthening my brain and getting my ability back. Two years ago, after progressing from wheelchair, to walker, to cane, back to my feet I was still struggling with my speech when I intuited that playing the ukulele could help by doing multiple things at the same time as a regular practice...."

"[O]ur upstairs neighbors acquired an emotional support dog for their teenager. The dog runs back and forth for 30 minutes at a time."

"At least three nights a week, it scratches a bedroom rug, waking us up throughout the night. We have shared our concerns with the neighbors, asking them to crate the dog at night and walk him when he’s rambunctious. They seemed receptive, but the problem persists. How can we balance the rights of people to have emotional support animals with our right to live peacefully?"

A woman who had heretofore enjoyed 37 years of pleasant life in her condo sends a question to the NYT real estate adviser.

I won't quote any of the answer. It boils down to: NOTHING.

I should add that "boils down" was not intended as any sort of reference to the last lines of the previous post. You can do nothing, nothing, nothing about that dog that is scraping at the other side of your ceiling all night long. You should have thought of this possibility when you chose to take up condo life 4 decades ago. Dog people good. Dog haters bad. Bad bad bad haters. You deserve to lie awake all night for your failure to love.

Paul Simon loathes feeling groovy.

I'd seen that clip yesterday, and then this morning, when I was out on my sunrise run, the song came up in a "Daily Mix" Spotify had made for me, which I was listening to shuffled:

Whole Foods is watching me.

Yesterday, as I was browsing amongst the fruits and vegetables, a voice came over the loudspeaker saying we should check our shopping carts for the sunglasses somebody had, apparently, lost. I heard it, thought about it, but assumed I knew what was in my shopping cart and continued on my way.

Over by the cheeses, as I was standing about 15 feet from my cart, I thought I heard someone call my name, "Ann... Ann..." I glance over and see no one I know and assume, as I've assumed since I was a first grader, that when the syllable that happens to be my name is heard, it's probably not an effort to get my attention.

I do the NYT crossword every day, and often it contains humor, but I had never, not once, until yesterday, laughed out loud.

It was just a small outburst. A "ha." But it was huge, because I've gotten so many clues over the years that went for humor and not one thing had burst through my steely exterior until yesterday. 

I don't want to spoil the puzzle for you, and frankly, I don't want to have to explain the theme, which is a tad complicated. I'll just say: 88 Across. Finally, a crossword answer that made me laugh. 

Do the puzzle yourself, or read Rex Parker's write up, here. 

A little music to puzzle over:

"... Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde’s Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke..."

"... Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing 'Hello darkness, my old friend,' for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance — though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn’t been laughing at them, specifically, he’d just had a fit of the giggles — and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan."

That's from the podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs," "Episode 135: 'The Sound of Silence' by Simon and Garfunkel." 

I've never been much of a Simon and Garfunkel fan, though, of course, I've often enjoyed listening to their songs. They did seem self-absorbedly gloomy, and I completely identify with the people who thought it was funny to intone — out of the blue — "Hello darkness, my old friend." I have a vivid memory from 1965, when "I Am a Rock" was a hit, and I was 14. I was with some of my girlfriends and a boy from our class, walking by, suddenly and, I think sincerely, sang out "I Am a Rock." Oh, how we laughed at him! It still makes me laugh. You're a rock, are you? That's so interesting. I guess if he was a rock, our derision didn't hurt him.

Knowing little of S&G's background, I learned a lot from that episode:

I have adopted an answer to the mystery of the strange photograph: The Phantom Gnat!

You remember this photograph I posted yesterday, an image I was surprised to find among my sunrise photographs and not something I was trying to do:



I had said in the comments: "I know it’s out of focus, but why? And why is the sun a full circle? It was only a quarter of the way up."

Oddly, some people were talking about the "circle of confusion" (a complicated subject in photography) and others were talking about the song by Cyrkle, "Red Rubber Ball" (because, as Paul Simon wrote in the lyrics, "The morning sun is shining like a red rubber ball").

Several commenters usefully brought up bokeh — which I understand — but, as I said in the comments, "I thought the camera would do that in the parts of the photo that were not deemed to be the subject. I've aimed the camera at the sun like this thousands of time and I've never seen it 'decide' that the sun is the subject and everything else should be gently fuzzed — especially with this additional effect of completely reshaping the sun, showing a circle for something that was visible as less than a half circle."

Kylos responded: "It’s actually the opposite. It’s focused on something nearby instead of the sun. My experience is that shooting into the sun can cause autofocus to get confused. Possible a lens flare or glowing dust particle caused the autofocus to think the subject was inches from your camera. Because the sun is also completely out of focus, it’s circle of confusion ends up projecting on top of the darker horizon."

That pointed me at what I declare to be the answer: "Maybe an insect flew by, got focused on, then went off camera as the image was captured. That's my theory! The phantom gnat!"



Interesting to wear a buzz cut in 1966. From the Wikipedia article on Cyrkle:

"That Simon & Garfunkel-referencing track is drawing a lot of attention for the video, which depicts a fictionalized account of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting from the perspective of the shooter."

I'm reading "Eminem’s Juvenile Shock Tactics Ruin Surprise New Album ‘Music To Be Murdered By’" (Daily Beast) and the part that interests me is "Simon & Garfunkel-referencing." The track is called "Darkness," so I'm thinking "Hello, Darkness, my old friend...." Rather than read on about how "Em can’t seem to resist his own adolescent tendencies—and it can make for a muddied listening experience, even on his stronger works," I'm just going to embed the video:

The source of the myth that you need 10,000 steps a day is a Japanese clockmaker that marketed a pedometer called Manpo-kei in 1965.

There's no more science to it than that. Read Marketwatch, here.

Believing hitting the 10,000 number might motivate you to push a little further or to do it every day. Sorry to spoil that for you. But did you actually believe that 10,000 was magical?

Do you have any beliefs involving numbers? Do you know the point at which it deserves to be called "arithomania"? It would be funny if your answer to that last question had a number in it? (It's arithmomania when you've got 10 beliefs about numbers.)

Arithomania is a mental disorder that may be seen as an expression of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD). Individuals suffering from this disorder have a strong need to count their actions or objects in their surroundings. Sufferers may for instance feel compelled to count the steps while ascending or descending a flight of stairs or to count the number of letters in words. They often feel it is necessary to perform an action a certain number of times to prevent alleged calamities. Other examples include counting tiles on the floor or ceiling, the number of lines on the highway, or simply the number of times one breathes or blinks, or touching things a certain number of times such as a door knob or a table....

I'm empty and aching and I don't know why/Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike/They've all come to look for Arithomania....

IN THE COMMENTS: EDH brings up Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour rule and "New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hour Rule." And Limited blogger said "I always thought 10,000 Maniacs was an unusually large number of maniacs." Here's the Wikipedia article "10,000" where you can make many discoveries about the meaning of 10,000. I'll just pick one, from Taoism:

The great Tao covers everything like a flood.
It flows to the left and to the right.
The ten thousand things depend upon it
and it denies none of them.
It accomplishes its task yet claims no reward.
It clothes and feeds the ten thousand things
yet it does not attempt to control them.
Therefore, it may be called "the little."
The ten thousand things return to it,
even though it does not control them.
Therefore, it may be called "the great."

So it is that the True Person does not wish to be great
and therefore becomes truly great.

"Unlike silly songs for children by, say, Raffi, or maudlin songs for parents like Dylan’s 'Forever Young' or Cat Stevens’s 'Father and Son'—two ballads eager to preserve their singers’ sons in amber..."

"... [Paul] Simon had genuinely intergenerational appeal. He shared with us young passengers the joyful and terrible news of adulthood with patty-cake rhymes ('mama pajama,' 'drop off the key, Lee') and jaunty rhythms, scored by a panoply of ludicrous and wonderful-sounding instruments—from the hooting cuíca in 'Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard' to the triumphant parade drums of 'The Obvious Child.'"

From "Paul Simon: Fathers, Sons, Troubled Water" by Daniel Drake (NYRB).

It's interesting, the music a parent shares with a child and imagines suits the child's interests and needs.

I agree that Dylan's "Forever Young" and Cat Stevens's "Father and Son" are not good children's music. And maybe the even both deserve the adjective "maudlin." Especially the Dylan song, which is one of the Dylan songs I dislike. Now, "Father and Son" — that's a great song. Love it. (And commenters: Don't revisit the old topic of Cat Stevens's religion. I will consider it a threadjack and delete.)



No, that's not maudlin at all. It's incredibly brilliant. But not a children's song. Maybe good for a teenage boy and his father, but it's hard to imagine any father and son who could both identify with it and enjoy it together.

"Antifa Broke My Camera."

That's the headline at The New Republic, where, if you click, you'll see a photo with the caption "The author's camera, moments before it was smashed on the ground. Photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk." Thomas Hawk is, obviously, not the author of the article, whose camera got flung by a masked guy wearing a hat that seem to say "Queremos El Rock" (We want the rock?*)

The author is Mike Kessler, who tells us:

Journalists, myself included, held our cameras high to capture the assault as the antifas circled, raising their shields, some decorated with the words “No Hate,” to block our view and push us away.

“Stop filming,” shouted a masked white woman in her twenties, pushing her shield at us. “You know what’s gonna happen anyway.”... Suddenly, from behind, someone knocked my camera out of my right hand.... another antifa picked up my camera, hurled it into the air, and got in my face. “No fucking pictures!”...

To be clear, there’s no equivalence between white supremacists and antifas. One has a message of hate, and one seeks to stop that hate.... Conflating the two groups is a way for whataboutist conservatives to play down the racist rot that is spreading on the right....

For what it’s worth, I’m a middle-aged white guy. The young man who snatched my camera was also white. I looked at him and shook my head. “Seriously, man!? Is that really necessary?” It was all a bit of a blur, but I think my next words were, “Dude, I’m on your side”—meaning the side that finds white supremacists repugnant....

Hey, journalist — you call yourself a "journalist" — how about not being on any side? Have you completely forgotten that idea? Sad about your camera, but what about your ethics? Did somebody grab them too and smash them on the pavement? Or is it still possible to scrounge back somewhere in your head and find them?**
_________________________

* I couldn't find "We Want the Rock," specifically, in English or Spanish, but I did find "We Want a Rock":



There's also "I Wanna Rock":



"Wanna" can be "want a" or "want to." The song title "I Wanna Rock" is, without more, ambiguous. "Rock" could be a noun or a verb. Spoiler alert: It's a verb. In the They Might Be Giants song, you can see from the title that "rock" is a noun, but it's nevertheless hard to guess what they want. They want "a rock to wind a string around."

What does that mean? "This sounds really abstract, but in order to begin wrapping a piece of string around itself, you need something to start with. Like a rock. I guess you can make a ball of string starting from nothing if you just make a tiny loop at the end of the string. But it seems theoretically impossible. It's a metaphor for getting started." In other words, you don't need a rock.

But you can be your own rock. And here's Paul Simon singing what Art Garfunkel told him was his "most neurotic" song, "I Am a Rock":



Speaking of being your own rock, there's The Rock, Dwayne Johnson...



... but don't think he's called "El Rock." In fact, I think "el rock," in Spanish, means rock music. (The little stone is feminine, "la roca.") So after all this, I'm going to nail it down: The camera-flinging masked man wants rock music. So it's pretty much the Twisted Sister video.

** Since I'm doing song lyrics in footnotes this morning, let me indulge myself with something from "Desolation Row":

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody’s shouting
“Which Side Are You On?”...

"He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be..."

"... but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.... Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped picking up and leaving.... Long, slow days passed.... Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a stoic, noble sleep.... I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a low cliff.... A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he told me of a dream that he had hoped would never end. 'He dreams of horses,' I told the lion. 'Fix it for him, will you? Have Big Red waiting for him, a true champion. He won’t need a saddle, he won’t need anything.'..."

Patti Smith writes about Sam Shepard (in The New Yorker).

It was interesting reading that today. I love both Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, but I was just reading — also in The New Yorker, the July 31st issue — an essay called "Can Poetry Change Your Life?" by Louis Menand that said something pretty mean about Patti Smith's writing:

A writer with a playlist of culture heroes must also have a list of the undeserving, the fake, and the fallen, and [Michael Robbins, in "Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music."] does not disappoint us. He writes of the poet James Wright, “It is easy to feel that, if fetal alcohol syndrome could write poetry, it would write this poetry.” He suggests that Robert Hass “has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery.” Of Charles Simic: “If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear.”

He calls Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” “wimpy crap.” He says that Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is “highly acclaimed despite her apparent belief that serious writing is principally a matter of avoiding contractions.” His reaction to Neil Young’s memoir is “It’s depressing to learn that one of your heroes writes like a composition student aiming for the earnest tone of a public service announcement.”

I don't know what you think of that writing in Smith's tribute to Shepard, but I think there are about 13 contractions in that short essay. If I were in the mood to imitate Smith's lofty, arty style, I'd blithely, slyly drift from talking about contractions of the 2-words-are-one-word type to an earnest metaphor involving the contractions of childbirth. But I'm just about never in that mood. I'm more in the mood to look up "the sleeping lion of Lucerne" and see if I can get it in Google Street View.

Yes. Here it is:

50 years ago today: It was Day 1 of The Monterey Pop Festival.

"Music writer Rusty DeSoto argues that pop music history tends to downplay the importance of Monterey in favor of the 'bigger, higher-profile, more decadent' Woodstock Festival, held two years later. But..."

…Monterey Pop was a seminal event... featuring debut performances of bands that would shape the history of rock and affect popular culture from that day forward. The County Fairgrounds in Monterey, California … had been home to folk, jazz and blues festivals for many years. But the weekend of June 16–18, 1967 was the first time it was used to showcase rock music....

On the first of the 3 days, the headliner was Simon & Garfunkel. It looked like this:



Beautiful!

The other performers on the first day were The Association, The Paupers, Lou Rawls, Beverley, Johnny Rivers, and Eric Burdon and The Animals. I don't remember The Paupers and Beverley.

I'll post on Day 2 and Day 3 separately, so hold off on mentioning Janis, Jimi, etc. etc. 

ADDED:

David Bowie, "America."

From the Concert for New York City (after the 9/11 attacks):


david bowie simon and garfunkel america concert...

I encountered that this morning by chance, just after writing about the Bernie Sanders "America" ad. I'm reading the NYT, and the Bernie Sanders ad was discussed in an article about the political ads of 2016. The David Bowie performance came up — via "The Most Read Styles Stories of 2016" — in "David Bowie: Invisible New Yorker." Bowie lived in NYC for a long time — in SOHO from 1999 until his death — and he was never recognized on the street.

He was always in a sharp suit or tux. Regularly at the Met Gala or the Council of Fashion Designers of America Awards to support his wife [the model, Iman]. Never caught stumbling out of the hot club at 4 a.m. He’d already been to a lifetime’s worth of parties.

Iman once described Mr. Bowie as a “homebody”; The Onion imagined him as a “pansexual alien” staying in to “do lasagna for dinner.” He led a pretty normal-seeming life. He shopped for groceries once a week at Dean & DeLuca. He loved the chicken sandwich with watercress and tomatoes at Olive’s on Prince Street. He liked to rise at 6 a.m. and get his “buzz” by walking the still-empty streets of Chinatown.

He read a lot. He collected art. He painted. He and Iman socialized with the parents of their daughter’s friends at school. He spent his remaining time meaningfully and productively, and largely here.

I wonder what he read. And he wasn't always in a sharp suit or tux. He was also like this...

Forever my favourite latter-day Bowie pic. pic.twitter.com/M8uM6eVExo

— frozen reeds (@frozenreeds) January 13, 2016

... another man in shorts. No wonder you wouldn't know it's him. If we know you as the man in a suit, you can attain invisibility, dressing in the most ordinary way possible.

Ah! And I did find out what books he read:

"With the chill barely out of his bones, Cohen took in the horseshoe-shaped harbor and the people drinking cold glasses of retsina and eating grilled fish in the cafés by the water..."

"... he looked up at the pines and the cypress trees and the whitewashed houses that crept up the hillsides. There was something mythical and primitive about Hydra. Cars were forbidden. Mules humped water up the long stairways to the houses. There was only intermittent electricity. Cohen rented a place for fourteen dollars a month. Eventually, he bought a whitewashed house of his own, for fifteen hundred dollars, thanks to an inheritance from his grandmother. Hydra promised the life Cohen had craved: spare rooms, the empty page, eros after dark. He collected a few paraffin lamps and some used furniture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a writing table, chairs like 'the chairs that van Gogh painted.'... He alternated between extreme discipline and the varieties of abandon. There were days of fasting to concentrate the mind. There were drugs to expand it: pot, speed, acid. 'I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,' he said years later... Here and there, Cohen caught glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian woman. Her name was Marianne Ihlen, and she had grown up in the countryside near Oslo. Her grandmother used to tell her, 'You are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold.'"

His grandmother... her grandmother....

The quote is from the New Yorker article about Leonard Cohen that I've already linked to at least twice. But that passage came back to me as I was reading the NYT editorial tribute to Cohen which plops this sentence...

Many people place Mr. Cohen in a musical trinity, with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon: writers who sail in deeper waters, beyond the chop and slop of the usual pop, filling their notebooks with words and our heads with songs — cryptic, surreal, original, unforgettable.

... which just disturbed me for about 5 reasons but then the Times eds serendipitously linked to that New Yorker article and made me want to show you that room.