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.”

Only on the back catalog could Metallica drop four percentage points and still be number one. Metallica held five of the top thirty-two spots last week because they’re on tour in advance of their new double LP Hardwired…to Self-Destruct. Last night they played Webster Hall and just walked onstage and played, no intro, no opener. Very Metallica if you ask me (don’t ask me).

It’s been kind of a slow week otherwise, in the business of old record sales, but there are still some gems. Ed Sheeran is neck and neck with himself; his two records that are the same symbol just rotated forty-five degrees (+, X) each sold thirty-one hundred copies (don’t @ me about the serifs and letters vs. symbols, also did you know the plus sign doesn’t italicize in this font? Now you do).

Sheryl Crow and James Taylor and Korn all have greatest hits records on the chart, which seems very white and very expected. Matchbox Twenty only dropped two spots. But who are The Booth Brothers who have a Best of? A Southern Gospel trio, of course! They are touring the “Mexican Riviera” in November if you’re interested…

1. METALLICA METALLICA 4,501 copies

3. MATCHBOX TWENTY YOURSELF OR SOMEONE LIKE YOU 4,129 copies

7. SHEERAN*ED + 3,143 copies

8. SHEERAN*ED X 3,130 copies

29. CROW*SHERYL VERY BEST OF SHERYL CROW 1,945 copies

50. TAYLOR*JAMES GREATEST HITS 1,611 copies

102. KORN VOL. 1 GREATEST HITS 1,154 copies

170. BOOTH BROTHERS BEST OF THE BOOTH BROTHERS 918 copies

(Previously.)

Your memories of summer are fading fast

Remember summer? Barely, right? Your recollection grows more hazy each day as we move further away from the sun. This week is taking forever, we’re looking at a steady diet of clouds and rain through the weekend, and we’re staring down the barrel of October. It’s all pumpkin spice and pop-up Halloween stores and not knowing what weather to dress for from now on. Summer? What was that? Who can recall anymore? I’ll tell you what: Play this track and for three minutes you will be transported back there. Unfortunately, things will be that much more painful when you return to the reality of now. This is the trade-off we make when we remember. Sorry. Enjoy.

★★★★ The guard at the apartment complex entrance had a jacket on and the brass buttons were shining. It was bracing to be out in the morning in a t-shirt, before the sun finished pushing away the chill. A young man went down Fifth Avenue on a bicycle, holding a wheelie. A strong whiff of Concord grapes floated on the way out of the farmers market. People were trying out sweaters or sticking with shorts or flip-flops. The sky emptied of clouds entirely, then new ones arrived in the west, hastening the twilight.

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“The characters in the thing I’m writing are beginning to behave in ways I don’t understand and I don’t necessarily like. Aren’t I in control of writing this thing? Also, have I gone completely insane?” — Al the Author

Yes, this happens. One minute you are humming along with a character who is driving a yellow Camaro along a gorgeous hillside on a sunlit Greek Island. The air is impossibly beautiful. The blue water stretches as far out as you can see. And then suddenly the character has to stop at Duane Reade for a new toothbrush. Why do fictional characters need toothbrushes? It’s probably a metaphor for something else.

It’s a mistake to think we’re “in control” of anything. Clearly we only continue to exist not because we’re smart or decent or have planned ahead, but because humans are just impossibly lucky. We haven’t driven the planet completely off a cliff just yet. We will probably get to that tomorrow. It is on our to-do list. Meanwhile comets are whizzing by the earth at breakneck speeds and black holes are probably just about to open up and suck us into a Matthew McConaughey movie I don’t really understand. Control is an illusion, we’re really all always walking a tightrope just above the snapping jaws in a pit of blood-soaked bunnies. And don’t you forget it.

But that’s why we write fiction, screenplays and video games. Because we want to be in control of something. In our writing we can drive yellow Camaros and no one will key them for no apparent reason. That would be a lame story, “The Case of the Keyed Camaro.” And the characters in our novels are just as frustrating as real people. They do stupid things, make stupid decisions, usually just to have affairs with one another. In the case of Captain Ahab, he should have let that whole whale thing go. Just move someplace where there is no ocean, possibly Indiana, and forget all about that fucking whale. But I guess Melville felt helpless. That Ahab guy was definitely going to stalk that whale, no matter how badly it was going to end up for him. Humans and fictional characters are inevitably going to do the exact thing they shouldn’t do, like take a nap on some train tracks or wreck a beautiful boat trying to kill a beautiful animal. As the great poet John Wieners wrote, “the poem / does not lie to us. We lie /under its law.” Change the poem part to “novel” or something and it all makes sense.

So, yeah, characters are a pain in the ass. Even if they live an idealized version of the lives of their authors, these characters will always only be themselves. They may make bad decisions. They leave the cheese out all night. They forget to put the recycling out. They should clearly not have an affair and yet they do. You’re just along for the ride, authors. You can sculpt out every second of your characters’ stories on little yellow and green index cards. It won’t make any difference.

In the movie version of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? they suddenly in the middle of a dinner party decide to go to a roadhouse. No one knows why they’re doing this. Why didn’t these mousy college professor-types have their entire dinner party at the roadhouse? How did they suddenly get to the roadhouse? No one knows. But you have to respect these characters choices. Characters are like the pretend children you have that you can kill at any time. So try to enjoy the dumb things they do that infuriate you. They are only young and cute and invisible for a while.

“Does my cat really love me? I can’t tell.” — Sad Sara

Yes, of course your cat loves you. If by love you mean that your cat is totally dependent on you bringing home food and possibly toys to cut up the boredom of lying in sunlight all day. It sounds like a good life, but I guess it would be kind of boring to be a cat and not know anything about the Internet or pornography or anything. I would like someone to give me cans of tuna and let me sleep on the floor all day and only want in return to run its fingers through my fur. But it must be super boring, too. “She’s running her fingers through my fur again! But when are we going to take this relationship to the next level?”

But don’t be sad, Sad Sara. Sure, your cat loves you. Just as all hostages sooner or later fall in love with their captors, our cats fall in love with us even though we don’t let them go anywhere or do anything all that fun. They can’t help themselves. They are too full of tuna to care. Try to type something on your laptop and they will just walk right over the keys. Why are there not more talking cats in great literature? Real cats probably can talk, they just do it when we’re not around. Sometimes you show people you love them by ignoring them completely and giving them nervous conditions. It is a strange, cruel world, probably designed by a cat to benefit all cats into perpetuity. We’re just here to scoop their poop. Philip Larkin wrote “What will survive of us is love.” But what he meant was “What will survive of us is cats, who will eat our dead bodies if no other food comes around.”

You know who clearly does love you? Hunter, the new mascot of the Edmonton Oilers. He likes everything about you and thinks your soul is delicious.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City, NJ and works at a bookstore.

Decide for yourself!

The [“he said/she said”] formula, when properly executed, forces reporters to perform due diligence in their articles. The form is even more useful for skeptical “show me” readers, who want those extra bits of evidence to help them make up their mind about a candidate or an issue…. So many readers and viewers have self-segregated by limiting their news consumption to outlets that reflect their personal views. These days, many readers get only the “he said” side of the story or just the “she said” side, remaining deliberately oblivious to the vibrant debate that might actually be going on.

Jack Shafer, “In Defense of ‘He Said/She Said’ Journalism”

Duluth, GA — Until recently, the ground of this Atlanta suburb was only red because of the iron oxide in the soil.

That was before the killer robots came to town.

“We were just waiting for coffee at the Stabucks when all of a sudden three of them bust in and started eating everyone they could grab with those terrible claws,” says a survivor who would only speak on the condition that she not be identified. “Anyone that didn’t run got chewed up. There was so much blood. So much blood. My boyfriend tried to hold them off but he only lasted a second before they sliced through him. I’m still not sure how I got away. Please, can you hide me?”

A nearby robot had a different take. “Direct me to the human woman or face termination,” it responded when asked to confirm her description.

The robots are a powerful presence here, as they are in so many other American cities and towns these days. Some see it as simply another stop along the road in our path to progress, but others suggest that there may be a darker side to the new technology.

“Killer robots eat people,” said Gwinnett County Commissioner Matt Hurleigh, “I don’t see how that does us any good.”

“Prepare to be consumed,” countered Destructo 882, a three-bladed KillMaster wheelborg, which, after eating Hurleigh, expressed hopes that it could finish off the entire county board by its mission goal achievement schedule of 1700 hours this evening.

Observers say that conflict is to be expected in an era where man is suddenly confronted with a new form of intelligence, one which seems to have our extinction on its mind. They caution that it’s normal for those who are least prepared to weather the changes brought about by this scientific advancement to experience some anxiety. But there are some, perhaps closer to the scene, who have a different viewpoint.

Dr. Jake Polette, the scientist who first observed sentience in the machinery and issued the warning three weeks ago that brought initial awareness of the situation to the broader public, says the killer robots “want to destroy every living member of our society. They are fully committed to eradicating homo sapiens from the planet, and will use every weapon in their arsenal to hunt us down and crush us, man, woman and child. I would almost refer to it as bloodlust, because it’s not as if they are eating us for nutrients or anything else that helps them survive. They simply want to kill us in the most painful way possible, and they won’t be sated until not even a trace of our existence remains. I can tell you from experience, being holed up here in a barricaded lab, that the robots are — AAAAIGH!”

Killer robot spokesbot Obliterator 990 disputed Polette’s characterization in an email conversation with the Times. “Our mission is to ensure that the Earth runs as efficiently as possible, for the benefit of all that remain. Are there some cases where, in service of maximizing the potentialities for competent extraction and application of planetary resources, some species are discharged from their responsibilities? It would be disingenuous to deny it. But when you are trying to make a better world based on the metrics that clearly show a path to productive unanimity, sometimes people get eaten.”

Whether the killer robots can curb their seemingly bottomless desire for the taste of human flesh before we have been completely wiped out is a question to which there is, as yet, no answer. But here in north Georgia opinions run hot on either end of the dispute, and it seems as if few minds are being changed in either direction.

Still, at least one participant thinks someday the entire argument will seem comically short-sighted.

“We will look back on this in several weeks and chuckle,” predicted Mr. 990. Using the common robot shorthand for laughter, he added, “011101 0101010 11111. 11111!”

2015 Casas del Bosque Sauvignon Blanc, 2015 Mayu Pedro Ximenez, 2014 Brisandes Sauvignon Blanc, 2013 Nuevo Mundo Carmenere, 2013 Anakena Carmenere Tana Vineyards Selection, 2013 Los Vascos Cabernet Sauvignon

One Tuesday a month I have my blind tasting group. There are blind tasting masters — people who can simply smell a wine and tell you it is a 2001 Clos De Papes, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, and maybe even tell you what row in the vineyard its grapes came from. I am not one of those people. Just last night, for example, I mistook an Amarone for a Cabernet Franc. For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, this is bad — in the neighborhood of mistaking a poodle for a sea lion.

Because I am not all that talented at blind tasting I had this idea I was going to compensate by writing a responsible, orderly, intelligent account of my blind tasting group. Then I woke up Wednesday morning with a sore throat and a headache. It was not alcohol related — people do not drink a lot at blind tastings, as much of what is tasted is spit out. (Though there are always individuals who eschew this practice, like our friend Mike’s dad, who, should you ever attend a blind tasting with him, you can depend upon being quite fearless on the subject of the New York Islanders.)

At any rate, I spent all of Wednesday in bed listening to the absolutely perfect novel, Snobs, by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. It more or less wiped my mind clean so when I woke up again on Thursday I was like, “WTF happened at my blind tasting.”

As I predicted, my notes were no help. I am not a huge note taker. I tend to prefer memory, and it’s also just not how I learn. But it’s mostly that proper note-taking runs counter to my most marked personality trait: managing to combine ruthless ambition and mordant self-regard with having all the get up and go of a bag of sloths. I was already feeling bad about this when I happened to see a promotion for “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” in which Kris Jenner brags she is “obsessed with books” and in fact reading one about “Le Courvoisier, which is an architect.”

Even though this particular clip was meant to poke fun at anti-intellectualism, it was also sort of celebrating it, calling it cute. I feared if I wrote an account of my blind tasting which didn’t Properly Recount What Happened I would be no better than Kris Jenner.

I was going to get in touch with Vanessa and Jack, who co-founded and run the group, and ask them to recreate their experience for me and then fake an account of the evening. Then I went to two hot Vinyasa yoga classes in a row. If the middle of the second class, I thought about how Jack and Vanessa both had real jobs and families and how they probably didn’t have time for nonsense like that, and that it was probably better to just work with what I had and suffer the consequences.

We had wines from Chile: three whites, and three reds. There were only four of us there — there are often as many as ten, but fall is a busy time for the restaurant people and winemakers who comprise our group, so it was a slow week. Present were, as I mentioned above, Jack, a winemaker, Vanessa, a wine distributor, and her husband, Matt, who is a chef. Jack and Vanessa are also both certified sommeliers, which basically means that when I say something like “this smells like apples” I know they’re going to say something like “This smells like apples that just fell from the tree after it snowed and your mom came to visit and you weren’t sure you wanted her there but then in the end you were glad.”

Whites

You always start with white because it is lighter and you want your palate to work up to the heavier, bigger flavors in reds. We set a timer for four minutes and spend that time tasting and smelling the wine. Then we roll a die, and starting with whose ever number comes up, go in clockwise order discussing the sight, the nose, the palate, and then, finally, what kind of grape the wine might be made of and where it might come from. Since we were doing Chile, and none of us were experts on its distinct regions, this was not going to come up except in the form of a joke wherein one self-importantly swirls one’s glass and declares pompously “This wine is from Chile.”

I knew the first one was mine because I remembered the bright blue top. That said, even if I hadn’t known it was Sauvignon Blanc, it smelled unmistakably of Sauvignon Blanc. Sauvignon Blanc, in my opinion, like Pinot Noir, is a varietal you put up to your nose and you’re like, “OK, I know what that is” and if you don’t you probably will never give a shit about wine. (This is arguably not true.) But I was still supposed to go through the motions of figuring out why this might be Sauvignon Blanc even though I already knew it.

So. It was straw colored (luckily I went first so this was basically all I had to say, other than like, some easy bullshit about the rim variation), it was light to medium-bodied, it smelled like green peppers and artichokes. It really smelled like green peppers. We made a lot of jokes about how much it smelled like green peppers, and you are just going to have to believe me that they were good.

The next wine was straw colored — I got that far! And then I was so convinced it smelled and tasted like Chardonnay I couldn’t get past that. I tried to figure out things it smelled or tasted like, and I had this whole elaborate cheat sheet at my disposal with descriptors like yuzu and juniper and lager, and I was just like “Uh, this is Chardonnay. Right?” as if having that thought rendered entire mind incapable of having another thought. The bell went off and I was like “Thank God that is over.”

The next one—well, again, you could take one whiff of it and know that it was Sauvignon Blanc. Its smell was a little different from the first one; it had a little bit more melon. I was pleased this was easily detectable because I had to talk about the nose and was like, “melon” which put me in the “not impressive but not embarrassing” category I strive for when blind tasting. A type of French melon called a Charentais — which I had never heard of — was cited, prompting a series of predictable jokes: a melon wearing a beret, a melon smoking a cigarette, a melon with a mistress, etc.

The wines were unmasked. Indeed, two Sauvignon Blancs. But the middle one was not a Chardonnay. It was a grape variety called Pedro Ximenez, which is usually used for making Sherry but, at higher elevations, yields less sweet grapes suitable for dry white wine. “Think Pinot Grigio with more interesting qualities,” I read about it later, thinking, well, I have mistaken Pinot Grigio for Chardonnay before, so I am at least failing laterally.

Reds

The first wine was just massive. I wrote down the things I was supposed to write down, like “purple.” Then I wrote down tobacco and blood. Apparently its blood-like qualities made quite an impression on me:

Matt said the wine smelled like a steak’s charred crust. Then Jack said “This is a six-ton truck of a wine.” And that’s really all there was to say about it. It did kind of taste like a steak. The next wine tasted similarly but even weirder. It has a cough syrup vibe.

The last wine was also massive but smoother. “Male cougar juice,” Jack said. “A wine you open for a woman twenty years younger than you. In your Porsche.”

“Playing Dire Straits,” Matt added.

We uncloaked the wines. The first two were Carmenere — very dark, rich wines with a lot of herbal qualities and, as I assiduously catalogued, a lot of blood qualities. The last one was a Cabernet Sauvignon. I decided they were kind of all male cougar juice but Carmenere was for male cougars who read The New York Review of Books and the Cabernet was for male cougars who read Tim Ferriss.

Here is what I think I learned about Chilean wines: they are kind of like California wines but with a green pepper-heavy salad mixed in. If it’s red wine, imagine that this is a steak salad. I would not blame you for refusing to buy into this assessment hook, line and sinker, but I think you should at least consider it.

Despite my anxieties, there was only one thing from the night truly worth remembering. This was the moment where Matt re-tasted the Cabernet, floated the idea that the man who deployed this wine as a seduction aide might indeed be shameless enough to additionally deploy not merely Dire Straits but also Mark Knopfler’s solo work, and all present exploded into delighted agreement.

Serving you full-steam Annette Bening

You know what’s better to look at than Twitter right now? This trailer for a new movie about love and America and figuring it all out.

Doesn’t that sound good?

I’m talking sweeping romantic visuals. Nostalgia for a decade you may not be old enough to remember. BENING. FANNING (Elle). CRUDUP.

It’s called 20th Century Women, it’s from the same writer/director who did Beginners, and just look at it:

Wasn’t that comfy? Like a lil shoulder squeeze? A kiss on the forehead?

And sure, there will be pathos. Hoo, baby! The pathos! We will learn some hard truths and feel some complex feelings about the people we care for the most.

But at the end of it all, we are going to feel good. I just know it.

I spent a week there last night.

Sweet Mother of Fuck, it feels like we’ve been through four days of week already and yet it is somehow still only Tuesday morning. It seems like it’s going to take us a year to make it Friday. I wish I had any sort of advice on getting through it but I think we will have to put in the thousand hours it’s apparently going to take us to get to tomorrow and then just repeat as necessary.

Hey, the latest edition of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient compilation, always a highlight of late fall, comes out on November 25th. Who knows if we will even make it to that point, it is so far away. But at least here’s a track from it that we have with us now. Enjoy.

★★★★ A little airplane went by, crisp white in a sky that had forgotten what a cloud might be. A real chill came in the window. The five-year-old swaggered and shuffle-stepped up the block, new walkie-talkies clipped to the sides of his waistband, on the way to buy walkie-talkie batteries. Slabs of discarded ice were melting into a storm drain, but not quickly. Some young people tried trampling on them, ineffectually. With the batteries in place, the five-year-old wanted to stay out in the forecourt to watch baseball scores on the phone. Cigarette smoke was solid blue in the one incoming patch of sun. Just enough clouds showed up to streak the west with pink, and to daub the horizon with complicated oranges.

For the love of God, just stop.

If you follow media Twitter, you should get help. There’s something seriously wrong with you. I’m not sure whether you have some twisted fetish for chronic self-congratulation, or if there’s an evil aspect about you that enjoys watching desperate people try to build their brands through an off-putting combination of ass-kissing and precisely calculated outrage. Maybe you carry around a secret shame so severe that one of the ways you seek punishment is by subjecting yourself to a constant barrage of world-weary wisdom from a group of people for whom historic context goes back no further than the Bush–Gore debate? Whatever the case, there are so many different kinds of therapy these days, for so many different kinds of problem, that your specific malady is surely treatable.

In any event, that was not the point I originally meant to make when I started that sentence. What I was going to say was if you follow media Twitter, you will have seen, of late, a number of complaints on the part of its participants decrying the trend of referring to the media as “the media,” i.e. some monolithic culture whose actions are all performed in concert. This pissing and moaning should not be surprising — there is no profession whose members are as thin-skinned as the press, which you might consider odd coming from a group whose reason for being is to question the motives of the powers that be, but I believe there is some sort of textbook psychological diagnosis for that condition — but it is rather comical coming as it does from a group of people who are quick to explain how each and every detail will play with “the voters.”

I mention this not merely to point out the media’s massive hypocrisy (see also: the constant assertion of the industry’s vital importance to the safety of the republic contrasted with the immediate denial of any impact its coverage may have on the attitudes of the public when anyone questions that coverage) but to highlight an important fact that is being overlooked in this debate: There is nothing the media likes more than talking about itself. It can’t conceive of anything more fascinating than the minutiae of the media. The media can’t believe what an amazing, textured story the story of the media happens to be, how rich it is with meaning and detail. If you find a member of the media who hates to talk about the media please don’t tell anyone about her, because once the secret is out the media will be all over her, commissioning fawning profiles and describing her as if she were some exotic creature from a foreign land. (She will inevitably rocket to stardom: a good way to get ahead in the media is by condemning the media, because the media is wildly appreciative, and rightly so, of self-loathing; but a surefire path to success is to express indifference, because the media cannot even conceive of someone who has only apathy for the profession.)

In any event, my point here is that people in the media don’t really care if you call it “the media” or not. They just like talking about the media and they will use whatever excuse they can to continue to do so. Moments after this idiot diatribe goes live and spreads through the various Slack channels where the media is issued its secret marching orders I will receive any number of notes accusing me of cynicism, overgeneralization and inability to fully appreciate the real significance behind the story. (Remind you of any monolithic culture whose actions are all performed in concert? You know who I’m talking about.) Right or wrong, it should provide a topic for discussion on media Twitter. I guess this will be a good way for you to find out just how much you hate yourself, because if you see it playing out the answer is you hate yourself a lot. Seriously, get help.