A cartoon by Liana Finck

Liana Finck is a comics artist and cartoonist. Follow her on Instagram.

A true New York story

Traversing New York is a series of implicit compromises: to not touch and not talk and not impose on anyone’s space. On Sunday March 10, 2013, a little after two in the morning, some part of that agreement went very wrong — I was hit in the face with a fish while riding the Church Avenue-bound G train in Brooklyn. I was seated next to the door with my back facing the platform. During a stop, as the train idled for just a second or two longer than usual before the door closed, a fish was thrown into the train, and it hit me on the left side of my head.

I’ve told this story countless times and replayed it in my mind many more, but I’ve never felt comfortable ascribing some higher meaning to the act itself. It is a true story, comprising facts and feelings and immediate impressions, and it needs no greater lesson or moral. It is a New York story, of that I’m sure, and it allows for all kinds of symbolic posturing involving gentrification and real-estate prices and the much maligned state of the G train. But why reach when the story itself is so perfect, so ridiculous, so able to stand on its own?

March 9, 2013 was a brisk Saturday. Spring was intimated but not yet present; there might have been snow on the ground in those dirty, slushy lumps. I met a group of friends at the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Museum in Chelsea, where there was an exhibit on high-heels. Then we killed some time on the High Line, had a late-afternoon transitionary meal, and headed to Brooklyn. We drank, we talked, we dawdled, until time came we had to make something of our night. So we went to a bar in Bushwick. It was a blurry night — drinks, dancing, members of the group breaking off at various points for cigarettes or ATM trips.

I left around two in the morning with my roommate. We walked back to the L train and transferred at Metropolitan to the G. The car was crowded with a homeward-heading crew, leaving Williamsburg and Bushwick for Gowanus and Park Slope. I don’t remember which station it was. Definitely north of Bedford-Nostrand and south of Metropolitan — maybe Myrtle-Willoughby. When we were stopped at the platform, the fish literally blindsided me. The doors closed and the train was on its way before I could make sense of what had happened.

When we were stopped at the platform, the fish literally blindsided me.

There is a picture of this moment, of me immediately post-fish impact. It was captured by my roommate, who was sitting directly opposite me. I am sitting down, holding my glasses with both hands slightly removed from my face, which is stuck in a look of disbelief. There was no reason to take off my glasses — I suppose it seemed, at the time, the appropriate physical response to being smacked in the face. Sitting next to me is a lucky woman who would have been in the fish’s line of flight were it not for my face — she is looking down at her phone, which she is holding horizontally, so she can take a picture of the fish on the floor in front of her.

The fish lies there, prostrate, surrounded by streaks of water that mark its trajectory after its path was interrupted by my face. It is a whole fish, clean of any markings or cuts. It looked as though it had been pulled from the iced display of a seafood market only hours earlier. The fish looks to be about ten or twelve inches. It was not a thin fish, like a fluke or flounder, but not hefty or convex like a bass or salmon either. Properly filleted and lightly breaded and cooked in a pan with some oil it would have made a respectable dinner for two. It was silvery in color, with speckles of red along its back, and a red-stained mouth. Based on the picture and cursory Google searches, most agree that the fish was likely a red snapper.

Properly filleted and lightly breaded and cooked in a pan with some oil it would have made a respectable dinner for two.

Other passengers of that train-car joined me in my astonishment; I remember a few “what the fucks” and maybe a “holy shit” or two. When the train reached the next station and the doors opened to let passengers on and off, I picked up the fish by its tail, stepped onto the platform, and deposited it in the nearest trashcan. This was not an act of Good Samaritan righteousness — I think, more than anything, I wanted to mitigate my own embarrassment .

The rest of the ride home was uneventful. When the G train came above ground at Smith and Ninth Streets, I took to my phone to tell my friends about what had happened. An hour ago—less!—I had been in a bar with them, having an ordinary Saturday night. Many were confused by the texts, unsure of what I was insinuating. And how could I have truly conveyed what had happened in short-form messaging? So my roommate sent the me the picture he had taken, which I then forwarded along. That did the trick.

I said earlier that this is a New York story — I don’t mean that being hit in the face with a fish on mass transit is something that could only happen in New York, but rather that, since it happened in New York, the story itself must be imbued with some sort of meaning, some grand interpretation. Nothing in New York happens in a vacuum. There are too many people, too many opinions, too much history. Consider it a quirk of the city — even a truthful thing that happens to you is never really your own.

Since it happened in New York, the story itself must be imbued with some sort of meaning, some grand interpretation.

The story is specific enough, yet simple enough, to invite thoughts of how others might have told it themselves. Imagine the “Seinfeld” episode: it’s George, obviously, who gets hit in the face, and Jerry who stands there listening to the story in his apartment, responding only with his nasal whine. (“Who throws a fish? On the subway?”) Elaine could care less — she’ll get the B-plot in this one — but George schemes some kind of inept revenge, with Kramer’s assistance. (“You need a fish, George? I know a guy at the Seaport. I’ll get you a fish.”) Or try “30 Rock”: Liz gets hit in the face on the way to a date, prompting an embarrassing moment when the date asks about the smell. She eventually tracks the perpetrator down, only to find that it was her dirtbag boyfriend Dennis (“I used to play fish-throw with my brothers when I was a kid. It’s a classic, dummy.”) Better yet, picture Fran Lebowitz telling the story, in conversation at the 92nd Street Y. She would invariably conclude that a New Yorker of her vintage would not be taken aback, would even be expecting something like this to happen, and welcome it as a much-needed shock to the system. I could go on. The story is really a million stories, all told with equal weight.

Imagine the “Seinfeld” episode: it’s George, obviously, who gets hit in the face, and Jerry who stands there listening to the story in his apartment, responding only with his nasal whine.

But when I share the story, the impulse isn’t necessarily to enliven it with artistic embellishment. The impulse is to interpret. Everyone has an answer to the fundamental question of What It All Means. They need to take the story and mold it into a moral. I wish this weren’t the case, but no one gets to hold a New York story to himself, airtight from others’ narratives. And I’m telling this story now, in a public forum, because I accept this reality. I probably don’t agree with your interpretation, but who am I to stop you?

Friends, family, coworkers, that guy from that one party — all have chimed in. The most common imposition of meaning is some variation of The Bloomberg Lamentation. At one point, it goes, not that long ago, New York was a different kind of city. A rougher, more dangerous, and dirtier city, but a city with character, grit, and personality. The fish, in this interpretation, is emblematic of something lost. It harkens to a time before bike lanes, and broken-window policing, and condos, and luxury rentals, and the mall-ification of everything below 96th street. That New York is dead, says The Bloomberg Lamentation, but the fish is a spark of what things used to be like — of danger, sure, but also of everyday art and wonder and hilarity.

The other most common interpretation has to do with gentrification. Recall the journey I was on, from post-gentrification Bushwick/Williamsburg to post-post-gentrification Park Slope. Think about where I was when the fish appeared from the ether — still-gentrifying Bedford Stuyvesant. There I was, a recent college-graduate and knowledge worker, heading from one haven of kitschy bars to another, stuck in between, in a neighborhood where my cohort hadn’t yet completed the process of displacement. This interpretation is political, moral, and marks me as deserving of the incident. This interpretation insists that the fish is a corrective, a physical strike against the forces of capital, against the change being wrought across the city and upending the lives of the working class.

There is truth to both of these interpretations. The fish is a totem of the old New York — an absurd and dirty affront to the boringness of the city today. The fish, and its collision course with my face, is a symbolic gesture, and I do admit my position in the real-estate ecosystem that makes this gentrification possible. The beauty of a New York story is that there is never one canonical meaning. You can take the story of the fish in the face and make it support whatever interpretation you want, within reason.

I do not own this New York story, but, like you, I do get my shot at wringing meaning from it. So here is my take on the incident — call it the null interpretation. I want to contend that the story of the fish in the face is just that. I want to believe that in the early hours of March 10, 2013, while riding the G train home in Brooklyn, I was hit in the face with a fish, and that there is nothing more to say about it. It happened to me, it could happen to you, and, goddamnit, it’s probably happened to someone else since then. New York is vast — the world is vast — and anything can happen at any time. I have listened to so many takes about the fish in the face — most hot, some mild — and the only response I can muster is to deign to take any stance of my own. I simply admit that maybe some things in this world have no interpretation at all.

So I’ll leave it at that. Create the incident in your own mind: imagine me sitting, oblivious, not a care in the world, and then imagine the fish arriving, in slow motion, from outside the frame, rotating in the air as it slaps against my exposed cheek. Savor it. As far as I’m aware, there is no thrower of the fish, no point of origin, only the fish itself, materializing mid-flight as it crosses the threshold of the subway car’s double-doors. The story of the fish in the face, more than anything I’ve ever experienced, is proof that the world is indifferent to us and all our interpretations. Isn’t that such a wonderful thing?

Martin Bergman lives in New York and still rides the G train (with some trepidation).

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.”

Per special request from reader pop style, this week’s list is a little different:

Are you able to post the totals of the albums? It’d be interesting to see the overall standing!

I painstakingly copied and pasted a lot of numbers into a spreadsheet and then sorted them so I could see the ranking of records by lifetime sales rather than just however many they sold last week. “Don’t you have interns for that,” you may ask? To which I would reply, “Aha, but my dream job is to be an intern, I love minutiae—so I let my interns do real work reporting stories instead. Just across from me Rebecca McCarthy is hard at work!”)

It’s pretty interesting, as a snapshot for comparison, and the results are actually sort of surprising? I guess I expected more country in the top ten, given how many country albums are on this chart every week, but maybe we’re just in a country moment. And I didn’t know about Eminem’s fans? Surprised too that Prince hasn’t cracked the top ten; he’s got FIVE different albums on the back catalog right now, but even added up their joint lifetime sales are only 7,874,676 copies.

I’ve preserved the original “ranking” by weekly sales on the top 200, and also added the original release date for context. All together, it gives you a good idea of volume of sales over time, and the rate of change of popularity of different types of music over time. Here are the top ten lifetime sales numbers of last week’s top 200 on the back catalog:

16,386,849 copies release to date (August 12, 1991)

3. METALLICA METALLICA 5,239 copies last week

12,745,799 copies release to date (November 13, 2000)

52. BEATLES BEATLES 1 1,725 copies last week

12,043,000 copies release to date (May 18, 1984)

13. MARLEY*BOB & THE WAILERS LEGEND 2,856 copies last week

11,696,922 copies release to date (January 24, 2011)

5. ADELE 21 4,100 copies last week

11,019,521 copies release to date (May 23, 2000)

57. EMINEM MARSHALL MATHERS LP 1,650 copies last week

10,699,621 copies release to date (May 21, 2002)

9. EMINEM EMINEM SHOW 3,047 copies last week

10,402,820 copies release to date (October 24, 2000)

145. LINKIN PARK HYBRID THEORY 1,126 ­copies last week

10,308,661 copies release to date (March 23, 2004)

165. USHER CONFESSIONS 1,069 copies last week

10,253,733 copies release to date (August 27, 1991)

166.PEARL JAM TEN 1,065 copies last week

9,568,583 copies release to date (October 25, 1994)

21. SEGER*BOB GREATEST HITS 2,508

(Previously.)

And a reminder of a special occasion.

Before we get to the morning’s music I would like to remind you of something so that you can get a jump on making plans with your colleagues: Tomorrow, August 25th, is National Duck Out for a Drink Day. That’s right, it’s America’s favorite holiday, the one where you slip away from work for a drink (or a few). Talk to your co-workers now and figure out when you go and where you’ll be: “NDOFADD Meeting” looks totally innocuous on a shared calendar, so feel free to coordinate that way if you like. We’ll make a much bigger deal about this tomorrow, but I did want to throw it out there today for those of you whose workdays are so scheduled and hectic that you cannot do something spontaneous without planning in advance: You are the people who need National Duck Out for a Drink Day the most!

Now that that’s out of the way, what do we have for music today?

Oh, not much, only NEW THUNDERCAT. That’s right, I’ll leave you to it. Enjoy!

★★★★★ The four-year-old walked out into the shade, in shorts and a t-shirt and sunglasses, and immediately began saying that he was cold. Unraveling clouds flew overhead fast. Daylight made it into the below-grade office of the nine-year-old’s writing camp and gleamed off the murals of bookcases, trompe l’0eil whether they were meant to be or not, till it seemed as if the room were full of smoke. By midday the sun was hot if encountered for prolonged stretches, but the shadows remained deep and cool. The once-dirty summer distance was clean all the way to where Sixth Avenue met the clouds. The light was bright, and even as it slipped away it left things luminous.

In the aftermath of Britain’s decision to leave the EU

Ten days after the referendum, my flatmate Vicky, my boyfriend David and I adopted a cat. We’d talked about it before. We had a mouse problem which couldn’t be solved by humane traps, and we all love cats. It would have happened sooner or later but the Brexit vote, and an ad for a tiny kitten free to a good home were what pushed us to take the step. On the night of the Referendum, I had a watch-the-results party. I was blithe and glib—of course Britain wouldn’t vote to leave. Only we did.

Spiders in the Highest Attics Love to Play at Acrobatics

The following day I felt a spasm, every time I loaded the BBC or Guardian and saw Britain Votes for Brexit, but I couldn’t tear myself from the internet. When I started to clean the debris of the previous night’s party I put on the radio. Tim Farron, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, who let me do work experience in his office back when I was a kid of fourteen and he wasn’t even an MP yet, came on. I turned up the radio to hear his light voice above the scrubbing of pots: ‘And now it turns out that project fear was project massive understatement,’ he said, referring to the label which the Brexiteers had given their rival’s campaign tactics.

I listened to his interview and remembered how my Dad used to call him Timtim, a name that integrated him with the cartoon hero he so closely resembled. We always said he should get a fox terrier and name it Snowy, his sidekick, his deputy. “Tim might be PM one day,” my Dad said when I came in moaning after a day of addressing envelopes, and I laughed at the idea, but now he’s leader of the Lib Dems.

Next there was panel show. A Labour MP was asked if she would continue to support Corbyn. She dodged the question, she had a teething baby, she was tired, she’d been up all night with baby and Brexit. I imagined pacing the room with a small, warm, crying child, and thought maybe the cries would have drowned out the results. The petitions came the first day. The vote could be overturned, it was argued, it was a protest vote, no one really wanted it. A friend posted on Facebook about overhearing two women in Pret a Manger. “I voted out,” said one “so did I,” said the other, “and now we are out. How did that happen?”

The Guardian quoted a man in Wales asking what the EU ever did for them whilst standing in front of a new football pitch and complex of buildings all created with EU cash. The subtext was clear: People didn’t know what they’d voted for.

The subtext was clear: People didn’t know what they’d voted for.

David said, “It kills me, the people who voted for this are the least educated, the poorest, and they’ll be hardest hit.” Later he added. “We don’t have a level of education people have to reach in order to vote, and it would be awful if the government did. I’m just disappointed.” I knocked the crisp crumbs off the EU flag and hung it out of the window, but it wasn’t a protest but a gesture of mourning.

My friend Daniel, who was pro Brexit, offered himself up to Twitter as a punchbag, “A lot of people are angry. Hurt me. I feel responsible,” — but he was happy. A University friend who works for the Conservative Party defended Brexit, and was slaughtered on his Facebook Status. I felt bad for him. The following Pooh and Piglet meme was shared, then quickly changed to this. Brexit had awoken a nastiness in all of us; even Pooh and Piglet weren’t allowed to be happy in a twee meme. I went for a walk along the canal, and I wanted to stop strangers, to console with them, to say, isn’t it awful, like there had been some terrible tragedy. Maybe there had.

Johanna, my Swedish friend, who spoke about being “one of those people who comes over and takes jobs,” was less sad after coffee with a friend. She spoke to some of her friends who had supported Brexit, she sort of understood more, she said but I got the feeling she was still sad and scared. Kirsten, who is from Germany, had joked about “checking out this whole benefits malarkey where the government give you lots of free money” on the night of the Referendum Result, aping the style of the Daily Mail, and making us laugh. She was feeling down the next day.

“Don’t take it personally,” I said.

“Well, as the main issue is immigration it’s pretty hard not to take it personally,” she said. She was worried — EU Nationals in the UK had been told they were OK “for now.”

FUBAR was the term used to describe the political situation. I’d heard it before, on days when we were rushing to deadline at a magazine I once interned for, but it had never rung true. Things had been chaotic, we hadn’t been on schedule, but things were, in retrospect, recognizably Fucked Up.

FUBAR was the term used to describe the political situation.

Suddenly our safe, stuffy politics was gone. The imagined hush of Westminster with leather shoes echoing in stone corridors had disappeared, like an illusion. Cameron fired the starting whistle with his resignation, giving MPs permission to go forth and create chaos. Blond Boris with his eternally good-natured face, threw his hat into the ring, alongside Theresa May, Liam Fox and Andrea Leadsom. About one week after Brexit, Michael Gove, Boris’s pinched-faced pro-Brexit sidekick announced he too was running, and Boris Johnson withdrew his campaign.

Gove’s wife, Daily Mail Journalist Sarah Vine, who had previously written about how she would “never be as glamorous as Sam-Cam” (Samantha Cameron — The Mail needs to abbreviate everything), was said to be behind Gove’s betrayal of Boris. She had “accidentally leaked” a letter a day before her husband’s ambush that strongly implied that Boris was not to be trusted. I was working overtime at the library, but glancing at the papers I felt a buzz. I hated that Brexit was happening, but I was beginning to enjoy it.

I hated that Brexit was happening, but I was beginning to enjoy it.

UKIP leader, Nigel Farage, was next to resign but only after he’d gone to the EU Parliament and insulted everyone. Since then he has grown a moustache. To be fair, it is to promote understanding of male cancers, however it does look a bit of an homage to Hitler. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader whom David compares to The High Sparrow from Game of Thrones, was the only protagonist to hang on, in spite of a vote of no confidence by his party. The conflict for the Labour party is ongoing, and it’s really tragic to see the party of Nye Bevan and George Orwell tearing itself to pieces.

I’m a Labour party member and have been since early 2015, so will get a vote in the leadership. I forgot clean about my direct debit and the party took the last five pounds out of my account on the day after the Referendum, putting me a pound overdrawn. “At least a pound isn’t as much as it used to be,” said David.

Tim Farron stayed put as well. He had no reason to go. The Liberal Democrats lost a lot of support after joining a coalition with the Tories in 2010, but maybe they’ll come back now, and who knows, maybe my Dad was right? Maybe one day Timtim will be Prime Minister.

The weekend after the weekend after the Referendum our friends Matt and Siobhan came to dinner. David cooked lamb shoulder slowly under tin foil so the house smelt savoury and delicious when I came in from work. We talked about the referendum. Matt said how gutted he was. Siobhan said she was thinking of moving to Ireland. We drank wine and I told them how the Labour Party has put me into my overdraft the day after the referendum.

David talked about how he signed the mortgage on his flat on June 23rd (the day of the vote), which caused Matt to suck in his breath through his lips like he’d been burned. We played music, and it got later, and we tried to talk about other things but kept on going back to the Referendum and the interminable summer which lay before us with no Prime Minister, or clarity as to what would happen.

“Wasn’t David Cameron nice,” said Vicky, “wasn’t he such a nice man, and we all thought he was an evil Tory.” She was taking the piss, but there was something in what she said. The uncertainty and horrible choice between various right-wing candidates was frightening, and we longed for the days when David Cameron’s horrible cuts were the worst we were facing.

We longed for the days when David Cameron’s horrible cuts were the worst we were facing.

At some point Enola Gay came onto David’s iTunes, and he started singing Theresa May to the tune, and it fit perfectly, and we were drunk and it didn’t seem weird at all. That was the night we saw ad for the free kitten. A girl had adopted him not knowing her partner was allergic to cats. He was very loved and very young — ten weeks — they hadn’t had him long. He was a small black cat. A witch’s cat.

I replied instantly with a little about us, thinking they would be inundated with people, but they liked our reply. Maybe it’s because I work from home a lot, and have time to spend with an animal. “We can drop him round tomorrow?” said the girl in a text, as David sang “Ah-ah Theresa May, uh-hu.”

Olives, named for his green eyes and large black pupils, was dropped off on Sunday evening at 6p.m. He spent the first two days hiding in the bookcase, coming out briefly to narrow his eyes at us, and blink slowly. On the third day, he went and sat on Vicky looking up at her face, his chin nudging hers ever so slightly in a gentle question. For ages she didn’t stand up, scared she would break the spell.

A week or so later Andrea Leadsom stepped down, and Theresa May became Prime Minister. Her eyes are sad and deep and tired, and her hair is the color of steel. She created a department for Brexit and made Boris Johnson Foreign Secretary. She came to Scotland to meet Nicola Sturgeon, describing some of her notions as “fanciful” despite saying she was willing to listen to Scotland.

The Scots voted overwhelmingly to remain in Europe, while England and Wales voted to leave. It looks like we could get another independence referendum next year, but this time it would lack the innocence and idealism seen in 2014. Will Brexit actually happen? Will we get a trade deal with Europe if it does? Will Scotland remain part of the UK, or did the union die on the night we voted to leave the EU? I don’t know. The news has died down, for now. Our kitten chases flies round the flat and leaps on us in our sleep at 4a.m., and all the mice have long gone.

Hope Whitmore is a writer who lives in Scotland. She shares a flat with another writer and romantic, Vicky Hood. They share many pretty dresses. Hope is writing a novel.

After Shelley

I met a traveller with an Android phone,
Who said — “Five pages deep inside my Moto Z,
You’ll find my old apps. . . . Near them, on its own,
A shattered icon lies, a shame to see,
Away from other icons, it’s alone
It holds itself above its company
It sits there, thinking it will still be played
I’ve long forgotten all its stupid names;
And sometimes I can hear these words get said:
‘My name is Pokémon GO, the Game of Games;
Click on my ball, ye Mighty, and despair!’
No fingerprint upon its face holds fast
The old discarded apps, they molder there
Who thought this stupid trend would ever last?”

And other answers to unsolicited questions.

“My friends are always making me leave my apartment. What can I do?” — Homeslice Haley

Maybe it’s just us, Haley. I’m forty-three and a half years old. Most of the time after work I just want to go home, eat microwave burritos, watch nothing particular on TV, chat with Ben, read some porn and then fall asleep. This is what I would do every night. I would estimate I have done this 200 days of 2016 so far. The only thing that ruins my do-nothing flow is my friends, who from time to time demand my appearance at an outing of some sort. “Nobody Really Cares if You Don’t Go to the Party,” the song goes. But that is decidedly not my experience. Maybe it’s just my friends. But they keep attendance. And when you’re as drunk and insane and loud a presence as I am, you are definitely missed.

I don’t know when we all started to have to hang out for everybody’s birthday, but we kind of do. I like to hide out on my birthday and cry while reading one of the Game of Thrones books. Not because I’m sad, but because I really like to cry. It’s a little like throwing up. You feel like a million bucks once you’ve done it. Birthdays are private affairs, best spent under the covers, far from the shine of the sun. Do I want to hang out with you in a bar? Maybe. When it’s your birthday? Maybe. But I usually just feel put-upon to ever have to leave my apartment. Not that it is so great here. Since Ben has been recuperating in a rehab facility from Total Knee Replacement this place looks like it’s been inhabited by a human-sized racoon.

So it’s not that I’m particularly fond of hanging out here. Except this is the one place where I can be naked all the time and no one (so far) arrests me. Summer is terrible, heat is bad, sweating is awful and nudity is really the only way to live. Here are some of the various ways I have figured out to stay home rather than go out and still keep the bare minimum amount of friends I currently have not totally hate my guts:

Move to New Jersey

This was one of the best anti-social capers I have ever pulled. The greatest trick the devil ever played was convincing the world that New Jersey was a smelly hellhole. You get used to the smell! After a while it fades into the background, like an oreo you dropped behind the refrigerator. It’s probably still there, but why check? Few have ever, since we’ve moved here, offered to come visit us in New Jersey. I have met up with people multiple times on Staten Island, but not Jersey City. The Path Train goes from our neighborhood to World Trade Center in ten minutes. It used to take me longer to get to Manhattan from the North Side of the Williamsburg Bridge. But we met people in Williamsburg all the time. Imagine when the L Train stops running. Your best excuse will be “I live in Williamsburg and don’t know how to leave it!”

People will preface invitations thusly: “Will you be able to make it all the way from New Jersey?” The answer is yes, that would not be a problem. It’s just the mind wall that separates the Empire State from the Garden State. It just feels like it ought to be hard to go back and forth. And so I get lazy and just eat ice cream sandwiches instead. If you move to New Jersey you have the perfect out. If you start wearing track suits and fake gold chains, you’ll be fake golden.

Have Your Roommate Get Surgery

I started using the Ben’s Having Surgery Excuse about a year ago. “Sorry I can’t come to your engagement party. I have to start making ice chips for Ben to suckle on when he gets his surgery.” Ben is the ultimate kryptonite to anyone giving me a hard time about anything. He is so cute and so universally loved, simply invoking his name will get me out of having to do anything potentially elsewhere with anyone. “I may be late, Ben needs me to pick up a case of Squirt for him” means I won’t be coming to your Tupperware Party. In case you were wondering.

“I’m Writing”

I learned this move from my old pal John Updike (well, I only met him once, but that is a story for another time). He blew off some New Yorker magazine 1,000th anniversary party because he “was writing.” The guy wrote a hundred books, of which only like 6 are good enough to pull this on anyone. And he pulled it late in his career, like Memories of the Ford Administration late. There are two problems with this approach. You may get away with it, but people will still think you’re kind of an asshole. And you will at some point have to produce something worth having blown off their get-together. “You blew off my baby’s bris to write this useless derivative nonsense?” Yes. Sorry. Yes I did.

In general I should — and so should you, why not — go out once in a while. I have the best time when I have zero expectations for where the night might take me. So, barkeep, give me your worst tequila and your smallest condoms.

“What the Hell am I supposed to do now that Gawker is gone?” — Ne’er-do-well Nate

Sell out if you can. Move to the suburbs, have a couple of kids and an affair. Take a pottery class. What do real people do? Suffer. I mean, I’ve only read one page of Proust but I’ve read practically everything ever written about Julia Allison. So there you go. Everything dies eventually. Except people’s grandparents who live on invisibly and watch us masturbate. If web sites didn’t die then how would we know we should have been watching TV all along instead of wasting time reading?

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

And what do you think is the “real” version now?

We asked people which cover song they heard first, when they learned it was a cover song, and whether they think of the cover or the original first.

Maria Bustillos, writer

Hrm, definitely “Kill the Wabbit” from the Looney Tunes cartoon feature, “What’s Opera, Doc?” as a very wee young ‘un. I had no idea whatsoever for ten years or more, I’m sure, that Elmer’s furious hunting-song was set to the tune of “Ride of the Valkyries.” We didn’t listen to opera at home; my cocktail-era parents were more into Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Frank Sinatra et al., plus Latin dance music.

I will have been in junior high school when musician friends began turning me on to opera and classical music. What a shock!! Akin to learning, not much later, that ‘d-droogie doan crash here’ had its origins in A Clockwork Orange. The goofily benign influence of Bugs, whose grace under pressure has ever made him my particular role model, has prevented my making any kind of serious study of Wagner for a whole lifetime. All I will ever hear is “Kill the Waaaaaaahbbbiiit, Killlll the Waaaaaaaabit”, etc.

Nicole Cliffe, co-founder of The Toast

Sheryl Crow, “Sweet Child of Mine.” For the first two years of my daughter’s life, I thought it was so empowering and feminist-y for my husband to sing what I FULLY BELIEVED to be a Sheryl Crow song to his child before bed every night. Then one day I commented on it, and the illusion died. It’s still Sheryl to me.

Kelly Conaboy, writer at The Hairpin

Patti Smith’s “Gloria” isn’t strictly a cover. It takes its name and chorus from the Van Morrison song, but otherwise it’s mostly a Patti Smith original, and that is why it is fine and perhaps even correct and cool (!) that as a 13-year-old I thought “GLOOOORIA! G-L-O-R-I-AYYE!” was just a Patti Smith thing, and that anyone playing that song was doing a Patti Smith cover.

I don’t think I realized “Gloria” wasn’t a wholly original Patti Smith song until a few years later, during maybe my sophomore year of high school, when I decided I should get into bands like Them in order to expand my palate from primarily ’70s and ’80s punk guitar guys to also ’60s rock guitar guys. (It retracted soon after, but then, the next year, expanded again to include Radiohead.) Who knew “Gloria” was a Them song, originally? Not me. I assume after finding this out I thought something like, “huh, I guess this song is this guy’s.” And the rest is rock ’n’ roll history.

“Gloria” still seems like just a Patti Smith song to me, which is the correct way to think about it.

Michael Depland, music editor of Uproxx

Growing up in Texas in the ’90s, I was exposed to two different golden eras of music from two genres that couldn’t be more different. As a young black kid in Houston, my radio dial was tuned to R&B/Hip-Hop radio as the tide started to turn for the once-suppressed genres becoming the mainstream, but as a curious listener — and simply by proxy — I was also aware of country music during its most popular time too. Dr. Dre and Snoop Doggy Dogg were running on MTV 24 hours a day, and Garth Brooks was being certified Diamond and playing Central Park — the ’90s were a culture shock to a lot of folks.

Anyway, it was in this time that there was a strange cultural exchange between R&B stars and Country stars performing the same songs. As a sappy young boy, wanting to know what love was (wanting it to be shown to me), I was obsessed with “I Swear” by All-4-One. I had it taped off the radio and would run it back again and again, just knowing some day I’d find that someone. My older sister, however, loathed the song, because she was only familiar with the original version sung by country star John Michael Montgomery. She was forced to slow dance to it at a summer camp and deeply hate the song, not seeing what I heard in it. And this was not the only All-4-One song that the group cribbed from more pastoral pastures: Another huge hit single from them, “I Can Love You Like That,” was also a John Michael Montgomery song. And this had happened the other way around too with the classic Babyface-esque soul ditty “Nobody Knows” by the Tony Rich Project, an R&B act from Detroit, getting covered in the same year by Kevin Sharp and becoming a Billboard Country Songs №1 for him.

To an adolescent me, it was a shock to learn these songs were all covers in some way at first, but then it served as a epiphany. When you’re young, especially grade school age, there’s such a rush to judgment; everything (and unfortunately, everyone) that’s different sucks. That’s the breaks when you’re a kid. But when I learned and heard these two entirely different acts sing this song, I understood that we all want the same thing: we all get our hearts broken, and we all whine to a woman who probably doesn’t want us anyway. Country stars could have a little soul and soul singers could have a little country to them too. It made me feel a little more connected to those who I normally wouldn’t have, and we could all sing the same song with the same feelings and emotions behind it.

“I Swear” will always be by All-4-One for me (the runs are still magic and incredibly fun to sing alone in your car or at karaoke), but “I Can Love You Like That” is owned by John Michael Montgomery. It’s funny how much they owe each other in terms of success, and even funnier that most of their fans haven’t the slightest clue.

Jason Diamond, sports editor of Rolling Stone

I found this pile of dubbed cassettes scattered all over the ground near my school when I was 15. It was a lot of stuff I didn’t care about like Brian Johnson-era AC/DC and Whitesnake, but there was also this one tape case with BOWIE written on in red marker, but no track list inside. I knew a bunch of songs, like all the Ziggy Stardust tracks and some of the Berlin trilogy stuff, but there was this one song about a girl named Emily and weird lyrics about how there is no other way that I didn’t necessarily love, but would get it stuck in my head at the most random times.

I had no idea it was a cover, so about a year later while in a record store, I heard the same song and asked the guy behind the counter if it was Bowie because I wanted to seem like I knew my shit. He replied in that way so many record store workers did when you asked them a question. “Uh, it’s Pink Floyd,” he told me without making eye contact. I laughed and mumbled something like “Pink Floyd sucks, hippie” under my breath because I was 16 and thought I was really cool, but in retrospect, I think that I was there to buy the new Screeching Weasel.

Little did I realize that not only did a lot of Pink Floyd’s albums not suck, but that the song was originally from the band’s first album with Syd Barrett as the chief songwriter, Piper at the Gates of Dawn. An album I would probably put in my top 20 favorite records ever if you put a gun to my head. So I’m sorry to that record store dude for calling him a hippie.

Jen Doll, author of ‘Save the Date: The Occasional Mortifications of a Serial Wedding Guest’

The first song I heard as a cover was on this weird tape (TAPE!) I would listen to in my car on the way to school. It was a mix tape of “alternative music” (purchased in a store, billed exactly like that) and one of the songs was Dinosaur Jr. doing The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven,” and I had no idea at the time that it was a cover (I was a Pixies teen, not a Cure teen), all I knew was from the blurry melodious beginning to the sudden cliffhanger of an end, it SPOKE TO ME.

I don’t know when I figured out it was a cover, I presume someone was like, “Oh, is this a Cure cover?”, and I was probably like oh hahaha yeah of course it’s a cover duh, because it wouldn’t have been cool to act like I didn’t know, because it’s The Cure for goodness sake, and their version is great too. I still like the Dinosaur Jr. cover best, though.

Carrie Frye, editor

The first time I remember this happening — knowing a song really well and later learning, “That’s a cover and, by the way, the original is pretty famous” — was with Joan Jett & the Blackheart’s version of “Crimson and Clover,” which came out when I was in elementary school. I don’t recall the circumstances but I do remember, when I finally heard the Tommy James & the Shondell’s original, thinking that it sounded way too slow and…unemphatic, like it was being beamed from some distant galaxy and was reaching me with weaker rays. (I don’t feel that way now.)

Emily Gould, writer and author

This doesn’t seem like it could possibly be true, but I heard the Smashing Pumpkins version of “Landslide” before I heard the original. My friend Normandy gave me the cassette single of it as a Bat Mitzvah present. I thought it was great and I listened to it over and over, lying on the floor of my bedroom with my head close to the boombox speaker. I really loved Smashing Pumpkins when I was 13, in part because I thought for a long time that Billy Corgan was a girl. This confusion was based mostly on the way he sings “my belly stings” on “Today.” I thought it was feminine, like, menstrual. I guess I thought a lot about menstruation at that time in my life

I liked Smashing Pumpkins a lot less when I found out he was a guy, though I still think Gish is a great album. And now of course I find Stevie Nicks’s Landslide to be the superior version; Corgan’s is so overwrought! It’s an over the top dramatic song and so it hardly needs to be sung dramatically. I’ve heard both versions WAY too often and now when I’m listening to Fleetwood Mac (the album that “Landslide” is on), I skip that track. I’d like to put this song in a vault where no one would have access to it — so you would never randomly hear it in Duane Reade and stand there thinking “Can I? CAN I handle the seasons???” — and then take it out again in, like, ten years.

My favorite thing about this ridiculous song (like: obviously children get older??) that is so dumb and so profound all at once (aging IS crazy) is that Stevie Nicks was so young when she wrote it. She was in her late 20s. She wasn’t even in Fleetwood Mac yet. So it makes sense that it’s a song about the way a young person looks around for answers but only sees her own reflection everywhere. But there’s also something prophetic about it. Time does make you bolder! Also, in some ways, more timid. And it’s never a great idea to build your life around another person, especially if he’s Lindsay Buckingham, though probably worth it for the songs.

Scott Lapatine, editor-in-chief of Stereogum

“Girls Just Want To Have Fun.” One of the biggest and best (IMO) songs of the ’80s and a radio staple for the past three decades, I didn’t realize it was previously recorded by Robert Hazard until 10 years ago or so. Obviously Cyndi’s is the ultimate version.

Jill Mapes, senior editor of Pitchfork

We all go through a Whitney phase, I just got mine out of the way early. She was the first pop star I ever loved, which in my book is a pretty special thing. It was 1993, I was 5, and Whitney was coming off The Bodyguard with all that “I Will Always Love You” heat. Her Dolly Parton cover broke a record for weeks at №1 on the Hot 100, so I suspect I’m not alone (at least among folks my age) in thinking it was her song. Lord knows she sang it like it was her own.

When I was maybe 14, I finally heard the original, probably in some movie I caught on TBS one Saturday afternoon. I must have been able to tell it was Dolly based on the voice, because I remember having this reaction like, Why the hell would Dolly Parton cover Whitney Houston’s super commonplace soundtrack hit all old-timey? And why’s she phrasing the chorus all weird? My dad was all, “Nah dawg, this was a hit when I was in high school.”

For a second my brain was confused about how Dolly Parton could go back in time to cover Whitney Houston — and again, what an odd choice in that circumstance — until I slowly realized that this was not, in fact, Whitney Houston’s song. In that moment I was a lot less impressed with Whitney, though in hindsight I know that is unfair. It’s not like she wrote any of her other hits, and even if she had, the №1 reason to love Whitney is that voice — her usual midrange, that soaring high end, the effortless melisma that made her “I Will Always Love You” distinct.

Caryn Rose, writer and author

I think the first cover song I ever heard — that I actively remember — was “The Loco-motion,” the version by Grand Funk Railroad. I bought the single when that record came out (I am hella old). I found out it was a cover from American Top 40, which I listened to RELIGIOUSLY. I haven’t thought of the Grand Funk version in years, not until your note landed in my inbox. LITTLE EVA 4 EVER.

Tom Scocca, executive features editor of Gawker Media

I have lived on cover songs, from early childhood through the most wrought-up high-school years to middle age. If I get my hands on a guitar now, what’s left of the memory in my fingers will most likely start fumbling not directly through my favorite band’s songs but through either one of their covers of a cover, or another of their covers of a cover. The charged relationship between source and interpretation makes music that can fill me with joy, or with the burning opposite of joy, or with a furious awe at the possibilities of this world. Sometimes I have fallen in love with a cover only to later have the glory of the original overwhelm it; sometimes I love a cover because it destroys the mythology of the original and salts the earth.

But nothing ever hit me the tenth and final song on the second and final album by the band Squirrel Bait, a bunch of teens from Kentucky who’d already broken up by the time I learned about them in the late ’80s via a short review in the Trouser Press Guide (“immense sonic overload”), which was how a person learned about bands then. On the CD package, the name of the track was “Tape To California (Ochs),” a mangling together of the title and songwriting credit that certainly seemed to imply it was some sort of cover. Every song on the record had been exciting but this was something else, desperate and thundering, with haunting melodic lines and strange little hesitations before the drums jumped out ahead of the beat and sent the band stampeding in the chorus.

Information was hard to come by, though, and I’m not sure how long it took or how many dozens of times I’d blasted the song before I had a clean mental citation that the original was “Tape From California,” a 1968 track by the doomed counterculture hero Phil Ochs. Obviously the real thing was something I needed to hear, but it was not until the age of YouTube that I got around to hearing it. It was more than twice as long as the version I knew — in addition to revving it up, Squirrel Bait had chopped out multiple long verses — and the mystical, nigh indecipherable broken lyrics were sung plainly and intelligibly, in storytelling mode, and I could barely stand to listen to it.

I understood, and still understand, that by my own lights the Phil Ochs original has impeccable credentials, not the least of which is that Squirrel Bait had picked this song of all songs to cover, and got the results they did. But when I play it, all I can hear is the rocket boosters of the cover version igniting, the memory of the drums throbbing with the need to go fast and loud and out of here. “Sorry I can’t stop and talk now,” the song itself says. “I’m in kind of a hurry, anyhow.” When Squirrel Bait says it, they mean it. They’re gone.

Maria Sherman, writer

This might not be the first instance of hearing a cover and not realizing it in my development — that’s kind of the great thing about the way music morphs with time, the way new artists can breathe life into new sounds — but I distinctly remember my brother blasting Alien Ant Farm’s rendition of “Smooth Criminal” and thinking it was an original. Their cover of the Michael Jackson classic actually topped the Billboard Modern Rock charts and was featured in ‘American Pie,’ if you were a riff-lovin’ teen in 2001, chances are you loved this song.

I actually brought this up on Twitter last year and was surprised to learn I’m not the only one who held this belief — Devon Welsh, formerly of Majical Cloudz, is an AAF purist, too. When I hear the song now, I think of both simultaneously…and how funny it is that a short-lived nu-metal band can exist in the same thought as MJ.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper, writer

This is a great question though one that I’m loath to answer because I find my answer to be so embarrassing: Nirvana’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World.” Nirvana’s Unplugged album was a Big Deal when I was growing up. The music video for this song was an even bigger deal: a pained and beautiful Cobain swaddled in a frizzy cardigan singing “I never lost control” was so heady that it never occurred to me that it wasn’t an original track. It seemed so confessional and autobiographical.

A decade went by until I “discovered”the Bowie original. I was floored by how sterile and strange it sounded, especially with the drag of the rasp stick (a sound usually reserved for a samba!) and Bowie’s higher pitched and more far away vocals. This version sounded much more like a character Bowie was playing, a persona, or more like a narrator. Ultimately just removed. I love both versions but it will always play as Nirvana song to me because the stripped-down richness of the unplugged version and the emotional impact it delivered.

Lindsey Weber, writer

One of my favorite songs I first heard without realizing it was a cover was Sam Amidon’s “Relief” — a gorgeous, string-laden song hidden amongst originals on Amidon’s album, I See The Sign (which is not, despite my thinking, a take on Ace of Base). My memory is hazy on what actually happened, but I believe that I had to change computers and lost a bunch of my .mp3s and when I went to find the .mp3 again (remember downloading .mp3s?) the new one had “(cover)” at the end. And I was like, “Wait, that’s a cover? …Of what?” and discovered that it was originally an R. Kelly song — of what Google tells me is an unreleased album called 12 Play: 4th Quarter.

It wasn’t the strangest revelation, my favorite R. Kelly song at the time was “Step in the Name of Love (Remix)” and Kelly’s of “Relief” (although far more downbeat) does mention stepping: “Now let’s step to a new tune /Cause everything is OK /You’re alright, and I’m alright /Well, let’s celebrate.” Despite that, Amidon’s rolling acoustics take it in a totally different direction than Kelly’s steady spiritual R&B; it’s easy to forget they’re actually related. Now when I hear the song, it’s pretty much always Amidon’s version — for a few reasons: to me it’s the original and, like many, my love for R. Kelly’s music will be forever conflicted. But, damn, it’s a beautiful song.

Nadia Chaudhury thought The Get Up Kids originally sang “Close to Me,” not The Cure.

Our guide to what you’ll eat, drink, read, see and hear this autumn.

DINING: You will once again fall for outrageous hype that even people who are paid to act excited about these things don’t really believe. You will spend more money than you should on food that you will forget about a few days later and even the pictures you put on Instagram will fail to fill the emptiness you feel inside. A small insistent voice in a tiny corner of your brain will never let you live down how much you paid for carrots and cauliflower. Carrots and cauliflower. You will be right to be embarrassed.

BOOKS: Even though there are enough established classics of world literature that you have not yet read that were you to make a project of filling the gaps you would have a library of choices to last you the rest of your life, you will wind up reading another fucking story about hyper-literate people in Brooklyn confronting what it means to live in late capitalism and wondering why their emotional fluency is so inferior to the articulacy they display in every other aspect of their lives, although it is probably because of something that happened in their childhood and blah blah blah etc. You will also buy a book that is a highbrow popularization of a complicated scientific discipline, but you will get no further than the introduction and it will stay on your nightstand until the shame is too great or another highbrow popularization that you also won’t read replaces it.

THEATRE: Have you seen Hamilton yet? I know you haven’t, because if you had you already would have told me about it. I have come to the conclusion that the only way we can stop hearing about Hamilton is for all of us to see it so that the people who feel so superior because they bought a ticket to a musical no longer have that to lord over everyone else. So your mission this fall is to see Hamilton, otherwise you want to stay far away from Broadway, it is still a nightmare up there.

MOVIES: Did you know they’re making a sequel to Bad Santa? I mean, Bad Santa was perfectly adequate. I remember even chuckling at parts, back whenever it came out, which Google tells me was 2003. But has there really been a decade-long clamor for a further installment of this story? Were people so desperate to find out what the characters were doing now that production needed commence on the next chapter? Or is it just one more sign of the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood and its craven desire for marketability over any semblance of originality? To ask the question is to answer it, I guess. Anyway. You’ll see a bunch of movies but you’ll be looking at your phone most of the time. At least now that Woody Allen films come out in July, all the people who use them as an opportunity to tell the Internet just how they feel about Woody Allen will have exhausted themselves on the topic and found something else to share their very important opinions about.

TELEVISION: I tend to dismiss television since it’s mostly a lot of garbage and even though we should all know better we have decided that we are somehow living in a Golden Age because higher production values and actors who would have previously shunned the form in favor of film help disguise the essential soap-operaness of everything we are now comparing to Shakespeare. But whatever, what do I care? If you need to tell yourself that TV is the new literature to make yourself feel better about the fact that you spent eight hours of your Saturday watching something that would have no reason to exist if it hadn’t draped itself in ’80s nostalgia, go crazy. It’s not like you’re reading actual literature these days anyway. I mean, soon enough who is going to know what that word even meant before it was used to signal “classy”? The good news is the elf incest show doesn’t come back until the summer, so you’ve got a nice long stretch before people start going on about that again.

ARTS: You will go to whatever the most buzzed-about exhibit is. You won’t really get it, but you’ll go. You’ll pat yourself on the back for doing something cultural, and at least the pictures you put on Instagram to show your friends what an exciting life you lead will crowd out those pictures of expensive carrots and cauliflower you put up earlier. Do you ever feel like you’re some kind of terrible parody of urban sophistication? That you’re essentially a fraud, compelled to do things you don’t actually enjoy because all the prompts you pay attention to tell you that this is how you need to define yourself? Is it possible that the self-loathing you can barely keep at bay is at least in part a result of your inability to do anything different from what everyone you know does? Just a thought.

DRINK: Yeah you will.

MUSIC: There will actually only be two bright spots this year: music and the election being over. Even the end of the election will bring with it an ocean of unavoidable analysis and bloviation from a bunch of pasty guys in wrinkle-resistant khakis who think that their recapitulation of what everyone else is saying is somehow superior to that of their colleagues because it is coming out of their own doughy faces. So, really, music is all you’ve got. The new Angel Olsen album that comes out next Friday is terrific, in a better world it would be a number one hit. Lambchop’s FLOTUS, arriving November 4th, manages the amazing feat of going in a new direction while maintaining everything that is great about the band. And the brightest spot of every year, Kompakt’s Total compilation, is released this Friday, make sure you get it. Those are just three things to look forward to, but since the only way to get through fall will be with headphones on I recommend grabbing everything you can.