★★ People strolled along in sweaters or wearing full winter coats, trapped between the sense that the season had broken and the fact that the day was still colder than not. One man walked along the subway platform in a suit, with a knit hat pulled down tightly on his head and gloves below his jacket cuffs. The light became duller and duller till the afternoon was suddenly dark. Down in the cozy glowiness of the pop star’s relative’s basement eatery, it was confusing where the indoors ended and the enclosed outdoors began.

Vivace AF

I’m not sure what your afternoon is like but I am fairly certain that this will make it just a little bit better. Enjoy.

Bach Trios is out at the beginning of April.

Expounding on the virtues of narrative while pounding bottomless chips and salsa.

February 10, 2017

My residence began at the Chili’s at the Westfield Garden State Plaza in Paramus, New Jersey. But really, it began in Dallas Texas in 1975. It’s hard to imagine this vast casual dining empire is what Larry Lavine envisioned for himself when he founded a Tex-Mex restaurant serving chili, burgers, and tacos, but here we are, uncomfortably close to an On The Border Mexican Grill & Cantina in a parking lot outside of a mall in Paramus, but not the one you’re thinking of.

Why is it called Chili’s Grill & Bar, not Bar & Grill? I tried asking Joey, my waiter, but he just laughed shyly and asked if I’d like a refill on my chips. I did, but I didn’t want to admit it to him, so I just gave him a pained look, and he responded, “Would you like me to wait until your food order is ready?” Yes, I nodded silently. Save me from myself, Joey. It’s only 11:15am.

Joey and I have gotten quite close this past week. He works the lunch shift and then goes to beauty school at night. He wants to be the next next Coverboy, and I told him I think he has what it takes (though he could stand to let his eyebrows grow in a bit more, for that “feathered” look that’s so popular these days). I’ve been coming in at eleven a.m. on the dot every day, because I’m not a night owl, and I prefer the solitude of the slightly too-early lunch crowd. Today I’m starting off slow, with some Crispy Cheddar Bites, as I watch the people come in for their lunch specials.

The thing about eating alone at a Chili’s is it’s impossible. Joey, who doesn’t eat food, only Haribo sour s’ghetti and vitamin water, knows this and sneaks me bites from the kitchen. He makes me a combo plate, if you will: two fried pickles, one Southwestern egg roll, one Crispy Honey-Chipotle Chicken Crisper, and a small cup of Southwest Chicken soup. I’ve still never seen anyone order Baby Back Ribs at this location, but I do hope to try them someday.

February 16, 2017

I don’t know what I expected from the Chili’s Too at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Terminal 3 on Valentine’s Day at 3 p.m.? It turns out that Chili’s, along with the entirety of the terminal, closed back in 2013. No thanks to Yelp for the lack of heads up. But not to worry, I took a Lyft over to Glendale, or what I like to call “Middle Queens” to check out another mall-based Chili’s location.

Happy Hour begins at most locations at 3 and lasts until 7 p.m., and then starts again at 9 p.m. and lasts until close (usually 11 or midnight). What are we to deduce from this except that, compared to the joyous revelry and cheap liquor shared with coworkers, dinner is a time for sadness and loneliness? It is certainly a time for reflection, whereas Happy Hour is a time for forgetting.

This past week, my server was Shelley, a mother of three grown children and a hand-painted ceramics enthusiast. Every day I came, she would bring me a new mug or tchotchke she had made at the Plaster Party Place in Forest Hills. She didn’t work there or anything, she just lived above it, and spent most of her free time there.

Shelley also had this habit of bringing me food I did not order, saying “Oops, looks like we just have this extra Chicken Bacon Ranch Quesadilla!” or “I accidentally put in an order for Texas Cheese Fries even though you ordered zero!” But whenever I asked, “Hey Shelley, could you accidentally order me a half rack of Baby Back Ribs?” she looked at me as though I’d spoken Voldemort’s name, silent-t at the end and everything. Then she’d cackle and nervously yell towards the kitchen, all while maintaining eye contact with me, “What’s that Jorge? Order’s up? Be right there!!!”

February 22, 2017

The Associated Press tells us today is National Margarita Day. Normally, Chili’s offers a 2-for-1 drink special, so today, it’s 3-for-1. I’m too drunk to look at the menu but I’ve memorized it, because Shelley and I ran out of things to talk about so she taught me her mnemonic for memorizing everything on the menu. It’s actually a song, set to the iconic Chili’s “Baby Back Ribs” jingle, except the words are more like, “Sah-LAAAAADS, soups and chill-LEE (soups and chil-LEE)!” Shelley has an amazing range and likes to hit the bass notes on “Lighter Choices.” I miss Shelley.

Here in Jersey City, my waiter is nineteen-year-old Stef—like Steph Curry, but with an “F.” He even sports a pair of Steph Curry 2 Lows, and also the Under Armour Training Mask 2.0 to reduce his air flow and get him in a “winded” state of mind, as though he were training at altitude, and not downtown Jersey-City under-sea-level. I appreciate his incredibly fast service. I still don’t understand how he brought me three margaritas in two hands, twice in a row without traveling.

I asked Stef for ribs, literally just any flavor or size of ribs, and he brought me a ribeye steak instead. When I tried to complain, he reminded me that I’d had just finished my fourth margarita, and which of us did he think was more likely to be slurring her order?

“OKAY SO MAYBE I SAID ‘RIBEYE’ BUT STEF, COME ON, CAN YOU JUST BRING ME BABY BACK RIBS? WITH THE BAR BEE CUE SAUCE?”

“I’m sorry, we don’t carry bibs for babies, just high chairs. Maybe I can look in the closet in the staff room to see if there are any extra polo shirts?”

This is how I ended up wearing nothing but an XXL Chili’s shirt with the nametag “Jolanta” on the ferry to Liberty Island while eating a grocery-store, imitation McRib sandwich—still half frozen because I couldn’t find a gas station that would let me use their microwave, which I know they must have back there—the true picture freedom.

Should You Feel Moved to Wax Rhapsodic at the Mall …

Acknowledgments.

Obey these rules for taking a bath, or else. (NSFW!)

Just So You Know: This is about Germans, so it contains full-frontal nudity.

If it’s late February, that means it’s time for what the Germans call Schmuddelwetter. That’s an untranslatable term that our tiny-bespectacled betters use to mean, basically, “grim weather,” but which also has connotations of “dirty” and “grimy”—think, for instance, of that lone, vile, incrementally shrinking, soot-covered pile of plowed snow in the corner of the Trader Joe’s parking lot that’s been there since December and is now mottled with Yoo-Hoo bottles and urine. (Fun fact: Phoebe’s “Smelly Cat” song in German is called “Schmuddelkatz.” Now you know.)

Although it’s impressive that Germans have, once again, found a single word to conjure up a very specific sort of seasonal despair, fear not: There is a cure for Schmuddelwetter: a nice long, relaxing, complicated, pedantic, rule-filled bath, at least according to the highly respected scholarly journal Bild (just kidding; Bild is an unholy amalgam of the Daily Mail and USA TODAY, a.k.a. the most widely read non-Asian publication in the damn world). Yes, says Bild, you, too, can “bathe without risk” — so long as you “obey some rules.” About taking a bath. In a bathtub. Which you have presumably been doing without incident since you were zero years old.

The consequences of disobeying these rules are varied, from mild dehydration — “just like after playing sports or visiting the sauna,” you should drink “sufficient water” after a bath, warns an actual medical doctor Bild consulted for this article—to, I am assuming, jail time, alongside the denizens of Berlin who skipped out on their U-Bahn fare.

Yes, these Bade-Tipps are absurd, and yet they should not be surprising, given how much Germans love rules (or, at any rate, most Germans). The Teutonic propensity for rule-following appears with astonishing predictability throughout centuries of German history, not unlike the “red thread” metaphor Johann Wolfgang von Goethe employs in The Elective Affinities — that thread, woven throughout the ropes of the British navy, he explained, would mark even the smallest cuttings as belonging to the Crown. Similarly, show me a snippet of German culture, no matter how tiny, and I will show you embedded in it a reverence for rules. (Another fun fact: In The Elective Affinities, which is by far Goethe’s shittiest work—and I include Faust II: Bat-Shit Boogaloo in this distinction—Goethe deploys a scientific fad to invent a rule that justifies his middle-aged protagonist’s affair with a teenage girl.)

The reign of rule-following in Germany has certainly brought its share of catastrophe, some of it unthinkable — but I still think the Germans’ Regellust (literally: “rule lust”), as an Austrian colleague of mine once dubbed it, gets a bad Ruf, i.e. reputation. (If you Google “Regellust,” by the way, you’ll get a lot of Reddit-type message boards about having sex on your period, since die Regel means “rule” but also “menses.”) Still, though, so long as it appears in moderation, the (again, typical but not universal) German lust for rightness, justice, and law-abiding — all, unsurprisingly, evoked in the same word, das Recht — can enable not only an admirable coolness in the face of harsh criticism, but also, I’m going to out on a limb and say it makes Germans better friends than Americans. Yes, that’s right: uptight, cold Deutschland eins; folksy, welcoming U.S., null.

I admit that this may seem counterintuitive. When people find out I have a PhD in German, the first thing they often say is: “That language sounds so mean.” Here’s a secret: it’s not the language. Germans actually are yelling at people, all the time. If you’d like to test out this scientific hypothesis, simply enter any grocery store in the Federal Republic, and attempt to pay for an orange without first weighing it yourself, on a special scale in the produce section whose only purpose is to spit out self-service price tags for fruit.

Of course, those without access to German supermarkets who still wish to see Regellust in action need look no further than Notes of Berlin, a delightful repository of epistles typed, printed out, and often affixed with liberal amounts of tape to bannisters, doors and walls all over the German capital. In one, an irate neighbor in the bourgeois district of Charlottenburg decries the activities of a Falschparker — someone who has blocked the driveway with his car. “I hope that you and your young family have a life-or-death emergency, and the fire department can’t get in,” says the note — using, of course, the formal “you,” Sie. (These people are not intimate friends, after all, so politeness is a must.)

The Notes of Berlin are actually the latest in a grand German literary tradition of righteous (and often petty) indignation in the face of injustice. Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas, for example, is about a horse trader, a victim of a bureaucratic mishap — who, in reaction, sets most of Saxony on fire. Kleist would be delighted to learn that today, at least, contemporary Germans seem to have mitigated their cultural Regellust into more positive avenues, such as making sure everyone knows the correct temperature for a bath is between 35 and 38 degrees (95–100.4ºF), god dammit.

So, why, again, are we supposed to look to these people for their expertise in interpersonal relationships? How could anyone who finds it necessary to remind you that under no circumstances should you rub yourself dry after a bath possibly be any fun to hang around with?

Because, my fellow Americans, being obsessed with rules and Recht means that Germans are always criticizing and being criticized, and thus not as prone to fits of passive-aggressive seething hatred poorly camouflaged by chirpy outward fake-friendliness, a.k.a. the American Way, a.k.a. one of the many reasons most of us over 30 have approximately zero real friends. Germans have shit-tons of real friends, and abject proof of this is the dulcet sound, ringing off every cobblestone and throughout every Bierhalle, of the explosive ch and guttural rolled r sounds that echo forth from the never-ending arguments over the right way to, oh I don’t know, take a bath.

But that insufferable pedantic streak in almost every German is worth it. For since the constant need to be right and just often outweighs any pretense toward shallow civil niceties — to which Germans are averse anyhow — they are free to fight with each other until the wee hours, about whatever they please, and still remain BFFF, and that actually makes them easier to hang around. (They also really like bathing naked in public, bringing all of my interests here together, in a sort of Faustian parallel structure.) For while a nice hot bath surely helps, I don’t think I’m alone in suspecting that the real cure for Schmuddelwetter is something else. Something, perhaps, that does not necessarily require aromatic oils or constant temperature monitoring: the company of an actual friend (Busch optional).

West Elm is offering “a full refund or replacement of orders placed in the U.S. and Canada after July 2014.”

A few days ago, I wrote a piece for the Awl about West Elm’s “Peggy” sofa—a couch that hundreds of people have bought over the three years of its existence on the market. I knew, when I wrote the piece, that quite a few former Peggy owners were disgruntled with the sofa’s poor quality, but in the days after the article was published, I heard from possibly hundreds of readers who had bought the same couch and had almost identical experiences. People sounded off in the comments about their own bittersweet Peggy memories, and sent me beautifully composed pictures on Twitter of their tragic button collections.

Why Does This One Couch From West Elm Suck So Much?

@HezelAnna @morninggloria I am also a survivor and I really, REALLY agree

 — @SarahOakes

Former West Elm employees speculated about the company’s poor manufacturing standards, and a few professional furniture craftsmen and craftswomen offered advice about buying antique pieces and having them refurbished.

One person kindly calculated how many Gold Bears one could eat for $1200 a year. Someone wrote to me to say that I should stop referring to the Peggy as a couch because it is technically a sofa — a piece of semantic information that I can’t wait to pull out some day when I want to make someone feel inferior.

Three days after my article came out, I noticed that all traces of the Peggy (including the Peggy chair and the Peggy sectional) had disappeared from West Elm’s website. BuzzFeed received conflicting stories from stores across the country why the couch had gone missing.

I asked a West Elm representative about it. She replied:

Feedback, such as yours, is the one true source of information necessary to allow us to address areas where we are not meeting our goals.

I want to assure you that this information is taken very seriously. Every inquiry received is reviewed and submitted to our executive team and buyers in the specific area. It’s important to know that not all situations are like yours and we handle each of them case by case. We take necessary measures, internally, as we see fit. In this case Ms. Hezel, we deemed it was best to remove the Peggy sofa from our website.

This afternoon, though, I heard from another West Elm PR representative with some news. West Elm is now offering owners of defective Peggys “a full refund or replacement of orders placed in the U.S. and Canada after July 2014.”

Go forth and get your money back.

(Customers should contact the special support number (888) 922–7870 or email support@westelm.com.)

Now we don’t need to make hard choices about the terrible things we’re doing to the Earth!

Just this morning I was worrying about “the ecological predicament of the 21st century” and a change in the climate that “promises a different sort of death from the petty disasters of war, famine, and pestilence — it promises near-total species collapse.” So I cannot tell you how excited I am about this:

Not just one, but seven Earth-size planets that could potentially harbor life have been identified orbiting a tiny star not too far away, offering the first realistic opportunity to search for biological signs of alien life outside of the solar system. The planets orbit a dwarf star named Trappist-1, about 40 light years, or about 235 trillion miles, from Earth. That is quite close, and by happy accident, the orientation of the orbits of the seven planets allows them to be studied in great detail. One or more of the exoplanets — planets around stars other than the sun — in this new system could be at the right temperature to be awash in oceans of water, astronomers said, based on the distance of the planets from the dwarf star.

I just hope we can get out there to start fucking up all these new environments before the damage we’ve done to the shithole we live on now catches up with us. Get off your ass, Elon Musk, the clock’s ticking!

7 Earth-Size Planets Orbit Dwarf Star, NASA and European Astronomers Say

What does the downfall of a New York Times critic say about… something?

The battle lines in the Isherwood–Brantley turf war were familiar to anyone even mildly interested in New York theater. They had carved out their respective beats: Brantley would handle London plays and all the big Broadway shows, while Isherwood stalked regional theaters. If a play he had reviewed transferred to Broadway, he would follow it there. But Brantley always had first pick…. To make matters worse, last year Isherwood asked culture editor Danielle Mattoon for a promotion to co-chief theater critic, an arrangement the art and movie critics share. He was turned down and wound up storming out of the office.

Are you someone who is even mildly interested in New York theater? Or the New York Times? Workers’ rights in the face of increasing electronic surveillance by management? Whatever! This piece on the termination of drama critic Charles Isherwood is the kind of gossipy media reporting that no one does anymore and that some of us, mostly old people, remember fondly from an era back before everything was terrible all the time. It’s great because it’s all about people who hate themselves and each other and none of them are you. Enjoy!

Why Was Times Theater Critic Charles Isherwood Fired?

The never-ending mania of feeding a body.

The worst it ever got for me was the spring of 2009. At the time, I was living in an unfurnished apartment in downtown Saigon and basically erasing myself from existence. For weeks, I never went out but to scuttle downstairs for cigarettes and whiskey, never spoke, and made as little impression on the world as is humanly possible.

In the four or five months I’d been living in Vietnam I’d lost more than 40 pounds, entirely changing my metabolism in the process. Without any insulation I was all wires, nervy, more anxious even than normal, junk-yard-dog-feisty. In truth, I had been eating, with some regularity, and widely throughout the country’s great cuisines. But my flight from Los Angeles, from home, from the known, from work and life and friends and family had something of a vision quest about it, or so I flattered myself to think, and so I drew out my fasts between meals, withdrawing, awaiting revelation or renewal. Consequently I smoked, to bury my appetite and, to borrow from Shantaram, because like everyone else in the world who smokes, I wanted to die as much as I wanted to live. To be reborn, I guess. I binged on coffee and drank like a punk, whittling myself down to the bone — trying, I suppose, to shuck myself form the husk of who I’d become to create someone new, someone else.

But now I was craving the foods I’d missed — bread, olive oil, tomatoes. Tearing myself away from my picture-window view of an open sewer, I made little sorties to the market to buy spaghetti, the makings for red sauce, wine. I bought breads and patés and deli ham. I bought cheese and thick, fatty meat to cook to smithereens in a braise. And I ate. Not everything at once, but close to it. And then I regretted it. After the feasts, I drank pint after pint of brackish water to cleanse myself. I was a psychological bellows, swelling and squeezing. Rinse, repeat. If this had indeed been a vision quest, my Lakota name would have been Sitting Bulimic — and I failed miserably.

The oddity of this neurotic meltdown happening five thousand miles from home, far from the mass media we love to blame for our body ideals, was not lost on me then, nor is it now. For all the diagnosable disorders I was touched with at the time, now I have Instagram and body issues brought to me in real time on 4G. Now I am a bachelor in New York with extreme Omnivore’s Dilemma.

In life and in the kitchen, I am entirely lacking in balance. Self-control is a fantasy. Concepts of maturity, like portion-control, and planning-ahead, are abstractions gone poof while I eat pizza in bed in my bathrobe, night after night. Then in the morning I am delivered a scroll of perfectly grooved and tanned underwear models to compare myself with. Fitspo, or fml, these are the bodies we aspire to, the impossible abs with which we grade our own. I mean, I don’t want to look like Marlon Teixeira or anything. I want to look better, obviously.

In the last few years, I’ve been to see a gang of nutritionists, have sought the advice of specialists of every stripe — including that of my late spiritual guru, Jim Harrison, whose mock motto, “Eat or die,” was pretty much the end-all of advice. But still I struggled. What to eat, when, how much? How not to eat? To juice, or not to juice. To cleanse, or not to cleanse. Four days using a calorie-counting app made me suicidal. The more I thought about it all, the more nuts I got.

One of the greatest of Warhol’s many witticisms was his claim to have been “deeply superficial” — a seeming contradiction which is as apt as any description for our era of extreme polarization in belief, and behavior. These days we know no moderation — all or nothing, go hard or go home — and our interest in superficiality is unfathomably deep. In a governing body, this sort of deferral to appearances, lacking proper checks and balances, can result in authoritarianism. In the body politic, we might flit about between entertainments, distended unto distraction. In the corporeal, I’ve begun to think of vanity the way I would a sweet tooth: the mind, like the body, doesn’t always, or even all that often, seem to crave that which is good for it, what is most nourishing, fulfilling. I consume all the worst shit with grotesque, Henry VIII-style gluttony.

But beyond the handy metaphorical link between our modes of consumption — be it our “media diet,” our various “digital detoxes,” or “having the stomach” for this or that horrific news — what, if any, correlation exists between our behavior at table, and in life? Does my bingeing on a Netflix show, for instance, correspond to the way I consume Seamless sushi while… bingeing said Netflix show? Does the mania of our righteous protesting (and resulting social media fugue state) make me a manic-depressive eater? My purges at least — of closets, and colons — seem to coincide. (Before that trip to Vietnam, I gave away every book and kitchen tool I owned.)

If the behaviors are related, can best practices in one arena affect than in the other? If I maintain a calm and orderly lifestyle (regular sleep, moderation in social media intake, moral outrage in doses), will I behave with any more conscientiousness in the kitchen? Or vice versa?

In thinking about all of this — how we ought to live, how we ought to eat — this one deceptively profound little line from one of those flouncy movies John Cusack made in the ’80s, The Sure Thing, keeps coming back to me. The movie has something to do with him trying to get laid… I don’t really remember. What I do remember vividly is his professor telling her class of horny, exhausted college students simply to eat when they are hungry and sleep when they are tired. That’s all. Even when I was a kid this seemed like a glimmering pearl of wisdom — an earlier version of Christopher Guest’s great line from Best in Show, “If you’re tired, pull over. If you’re hungry, eat something.”

It’s not like I was raised by wolves, but still such simple permission to do as (and only as) the body requires, was liberating to me back then, and is so again now (shout out to Epicurus). It’s not a cure-all, sure, but neither is it a trend, a fad, a diet. It’s a mantra that, even when I fuck up or botch it, I can still aim for the next time around. It is a prescription and a promissory note. It’s a way forward. Which is helpful because eating is, well, everything. Eating is autobiography in the making. You may not be literally what you eat, but you’re certainly the composite of your intake and the body’s responses to it. In what other arena of life are we made to wear our misdeeds as a fat suit — an actual fat suit made from actual fat?

But if food is an intolerant and inflexible god, she is also capable of such lyricism and excitement. Food is so obviously the seat of enjoyment and nourishment in our lives — literally and otherwise — that to remove it, or life-hack it out with Soylent, is a kind of spiritual and social castration. Food electrifies us, the vessel for the most transporting sensual experiences outside of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Food is life, bruh. Which makes the outright renunciation of food, Anorexia, look like the death wish it is. Bulimia is having your cake and then not having it too.

Basically, I try to think of my habits as though I were in a fairy tale. Eat too much of any one thing and I risk growing dependent, making the house of proteins too powerful in my culinary chart, so to speak. So I balance with variety, spreading my custom among all the glorious plants and beasties. Decadence and severity, though, are always there, tractor beams I always feel the pull from.

So once again, I find myself in an eating crisis. My love affair with food has gone all Dick-and-Liz, and I, for one, am afraid of the Virginia Woolf at the door. I don’t know what to eat, and therefore don’t know who I am. Food has become my enemy, and eating — deciding what to eat, when, where — a trial. But eating is the only thing I do every day. So the problem lingers, demands constant attention. Much as I’d like to renounce it entirely, I just keep coming back for more. Eat or die. So it goes. What’s for dinner?

Soundscan Surprises, Week of 2/16

Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

The definition of “back catalog” is: “at least 18 months old, have fallen below №100 on the Billboard 200 and do not have an active single on our radio.”

Who is Joy Villa, asked only me, the one idiot who didn’t watch the Grammys or see the flood of tweets about the lady in the Trump dress. According to Forbes:

Villa is an independent artist who has shown up on the Grammy red carpet for the past three years (it’s relatively easy to get a ticket, if you’re wondering) in outlandish outfits, hoping to drum up press for her 2014 EP, I Make The Static. Villa’s Pro-Trump outfit immediately began trending on social media last weekend, leading tens of thousands of Trump supporters to download the EP and flood iTunes’ review portal with pro-Trump messages.

In the end, more than 26,500 Americans shelled out $4.95 to buy Villa’s EP on iTunes or Amazon. (100% of her sales are from digital retailers since no physical stock was available.) Had Villa sold even one copy of her EP in the preceding two years, this jump would have represented one of the largest percentage-wise in chart history. However, digital sales prior to last Sunday’s Grammy Awards (from July 2014 through February 2017) were zero.

And according to The Daily Beast, she is also a vegan bodybuilder and Scientologist who also goes by the name “Princess” and was a Bernie supporter. She arrived at the Staples Center wearing a white sheet (A FUCKING WHITE SHEET) and then tore it off on the red carpet to reveal a truly wild dress that says RUM in the back.

Joy Villa, Pro-Trump Grammys Troll, Is a Hardcore Scientologist Who Backed Bernie

WOW OKAY well then here is her Scientology spotlight/ad:

Now that you’ve made no sense of that, on to the rest of the surprises. I couldn’t find a reason for the Frank Sinatra jump, but then again I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with one—no explanations necessary. The Fifty Shades of Grey soundtrack obviously got bumped because of that bangin’ Zayn and Taylor Swift song, I mean, the Fifty Shades Darker movie.

What else? Al Jarreau died, 21-year-old former Voice contestant Melanie Martinez is expected to release an album this year, and Gary Clark Jr. is a young blues guitarist from Austin, Texas who performed “Born Under A Bad Sign” with William Bell at this year’s Grammys.

I’m genuinely not sure what explains the 999% jump in sales for David Bowie’s Station to Station except perhaps the Canadian artist David Tycho’s upcoming exhibition of paintings paying homage to the album. The Red Hot Chili Peppers played Madison Square Garden last week, and MercyMe is a Contemporary Christian band are expected to release a new album titled Lifer on March 31st. Religion sells!

1. VILLA*JOY I MAKE THE STATIC 26,545 copies

10. SINATRA*FRANK NOTHING BUT THE BEST (REMASTER 4,609 copies

18. SOUNDTRACK FIFTY SHADES OF GREY 3,424 copies

39. MARTINEZ*MELANIE CRY BABY 2,181 copies

45. JARREAU*AL VERY BEST OF: AN EXCELLENT ADV 1,984 copies

65. CLARK*GARY JR. BLAK & BLU 1,596 copies

74. MERCYME WELCOME TO THE NEW 1,523 copies

135. CLARK*GARY JR. GARY CLARK JR. LIVE (2CD) 1,173 copies

143. RED HOT CHILI PEPPERS STADIUM ARCADIUM 1,145 copies

197. BOWIE*DAVID STATION TO STATION 963 copies

(Previously.)