Back-catalog sales numbers of note from Nielsen SoundScan.

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

Elvis’s then-contemporary (1972) gospel record, “He Touched Me,” (no giggles please) enjoyed a bump in sales last week, possibly due to this year’s release of a SIXTY-DISC BOX SET!!!!! Sixty is a lot of discs given that most people these days have zero discs that were not bought after 2006, so wow. Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin are vying for some of the top non-Prince spots, which makes sense because they are right and good—no surprises there. Did you know about the Japanese avant-garde metal band named Boris? Me neither. They sold more records than Lady Gaga’s Fame.

5. REDDING*OTIS VOL.1 VERY BEST OF 5,684 copies

7. FRANKLIN*ARETHA 30 GREATEST HITS 4,797 copies

55. PRESLEY*ELVIS HE TOUCHED ME 1,723 copies

61. MCGRAW*TIM NUMBER ONE HITS 1,653 copies

117. BORIS PINK 1,249 copies

165. LADY GAGA FAME 1,052 copies

199. SYSTEM OF A DOWN TOXICITY 940 copies

200. RICHIE*LIONEL BEST OF/20TH CENTURY 936 copies

(Previously.)

The “I lost my show” song you didn’t know you needed.

Here’s another one from Alex Cameron’s forthcoming Jumping The Shark, which I have previously praised in this spot. The album is the best collection of character songs I have heard in… gosh, I can’t even think that far back, who even writes character songs anymore? In any event, this is my absolute favorite track from the record, and while the subject matter seems an absurd thing to write a song about at first, the more you listen to it the more incredible it becomes. (It does get a little dark at the end but, without hopefully spoiling life for you, all things do.) Have a listen and enjoy.

★★★★ Tiny fish, little black dashes, swam inside the top of a wave. The sun from the east was fierce but not prohibitive; the breaking waves on the outgoing tide had some exciting but not overwhelming ones among them. The four-year-old had been striking surfing or fighting poses as the water rushed over his feet, running away from the bigger surges and immediately circling back again. Now he consented to be carried out past the churning sand and into the clean swells. He bobbed or was bobbed there for a while, half-treading water while holding on, then asked to go back ashore, then immediately asked to go back out. His older brother, more cautious but still sand-spattered, finally agreed to try the deeper shallows too. The sands on the walk back up the beach were genuinely, painfully scorching underfoot. The younger boy dozed away the afternoon, sapped or ailing from his exertions, till he felt refreshed enough to walk down the boardwalk to the toy store, under the pink and blue tinge of oncoming evening. A parafoil kite strained against its ropes over the beach. The clouds inland were slate blue, and before long they were blackening and churning. In minutes the darkness had reached the ocean, hanging low over the water, with one glowing gap remaining. There was lightning and what sounded like thunder but was the first rain hitting the windows. All the eerie topography and shading in the sky collapsed into featureless gray. The greenery and blossoms outside bent and tossed; sheets of rain flapped by. Even as the storm still subsided, glimpses of gorgeous color were caught in west-facing windows for a while before the real night came on.

It’s new to me and it’s very, very good.

Hey, why didn’t you tell me there was a new Tycho track? I mean, maybe it’s my job to tell you that? Maybe I am misunderstanding the nature of our relationship here? Or maybe you did already know about the new Tycho track but you didn’t feel like clueing me in to it because you’ve always secretly hated me and it brought you joy to deny me even the little pleasures of life of which I am so frequently bereft. Maybe you don’t even care about me one way or the other. Maybe you were just like, “If he hears it, he hears it, if not, fuck him.” Well, fine. At least I know where we stand now. See if I rush to tell you about new music from here on out. What? You’ve never liked my taste in music anyway and you hope I just shut up about it altogether? WHY ARE YOU BEING SO CRUEL TO ME? DON’T YOU KNOW I HURT JUST LIKE YOU? God, I had no idea things were this bad between us. Anyway, there’s a new Tycho track and it’s terrific, and I would tell you to enjoy but you have probably already done that already. You bastard.

And shouldn’t the present participle be ‘creepshooting’?

I have been told that Medium is a social network, so I would like to start a discussion, or perhaps definitely an argument. What are the rules about creepshotting—surreptitiously taking a photo of someone else with your phone while pretending to analyze some really inscrutable text message—besides possibly, “Just don’t?” We’ve all done it, we’ve all gotten caught, and I’m sorry to report that we’re all going to do it again. So how do we deal with this glaring contradiction between behavior and opinion?

Creepshots, as you can tell by the inclusion of the word ‘creep’ in the portmanteau, are not very nice. Even when you’re taking a picture of your friend who passed out in the backseat during a roadtrip, it is pretty mean, and an on-purpose kind of mean at that, because your aim is to catch that person in a vulnerable moment. Every once in a while, you creepshoot because you want to remember someone’s cool shoes, sure. But the great majority of the rest of the time, you are totally making fun of the shoes.

As a general rule, taking someone’s photo without their permission is pretty sneaky and bad. Sometimes it is very painfully and obviously bad and wrong—a “Wholebrity” named Dani Mathers was reported to the police last week for creepsnapping a nude woman in the locker room at her gym. But there are obviously exceptions for when it’s kind of okay, like if someone is doing a crime and you are recording that fact, or actually, yeah, I’m not sure when else it’s okay? A media lawyer can probably sort this out better than I can. Something-something two-party consent, public and private spaces, hidden cameras, etc.

Rate the following shots on a scale of one to citizen’s arrest: Taylor Momsen on the 1 Train, the guy riding Boston’s green line while wearing and using a VR headset, the now-deleted Instagram picture that Michael Bublé’s WIFE took of a woman at their gym, every picture ever taken of Jake Gyllenhaal on the subway. Do you weight these on how famous the subject is? Is it actually creepier if the person is not rockstar famous and is just trying to read the New York Post in peace on her commute (Jill Abramson)? How about if the subject is sitting with his legs and arms crossed, finger gently holding his chin, and staring DIRECTLY into the camera (Ray Karpovksy)? What if it’s EXTREMELY FUNNY, like a picture of a man in an elevator at 30 Rock, wearing a tux, his chin scrunched into his bowtie as he’s typing furiously into his phone and it’s completely apparent there is NO ONE ELSE in the elevator except the creepshot-taker (Lorne Michaels)?

I think even if you are creeping with good intentions (???), like I guess catching someone in a lie, it still seems technically wrong. Have we all just become citizen paparazzi, snapping and shooting each other for our own personal amusement? Did I just argue myself into a very British understanding of privacy? No, because privacy is an illusion, and we will never be able to regulate creepshots. But it is sweet to think of some bleeding-heart neo-Libertarian bro covering his phone’s camera with a swatch of tape.

For today, I would prefer instead to tackle a slightly easier topic: creepshots of dogs. First off, are they even creepy? I think not, but I’m not a dog owner so I’m not legally allowed to say. Or are they largely understandable? I mean, like kind of weird, sure, but relatable, right? I’m not even going to get into cats because it seems like cats belong to no one and also what about bodega cats? It’s the cats’ world and we just live in it, I’m told by the cat owners.

Dog owners: do you hate it when strangers take photos of your dog on the street? I bet dog walkers probably care less than dog owners. Is it especially annoying because it’s only highlighting and amplifying how people mostly only look at and interact with your dog and not you when you’re out walking? Or do you not mind it so much as long as your dog is not immediately before, after, or in the act of taking a shit? Is it more acceptable when you, the creepshooter, have your own dog in tow? Asking for a friend.

Please like and share and add your opinions below.

Or when people cared about whether books were true?

I was in a bar in the early afternoon a few weekends ago and the place was mostly empty so the bartender had some kind of “Law and Order” marathon on the television in the corner. There was an episode playing that had been RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES about the JT LeRoy story, which I guessed meant it was from 1929 but apparently had actually only transpired about ten years ago. It was certainly the first time I’d thought about JT LeRoy in the many years since all that craziness surrounding the character’s true identity. Was that the last time authenticity meant anything, before everyone decided that from now on we weren’t really going to distinguish between fiction or memoir anymore, and we would call it one thing or another based on what the marketing department decided would move more merchandise? Does it even matter? Clearly whatever time we have left here will be spent in the post-factual era, which is nice because everyone can feel better about the stories they tell themselves.

Anyway, when the trailer to this documentary came out yesterday I asked the young people with whom I work if any of them remembered it. A surprising number of them did, poor things. One of them even said, “I’m just happy that JT LeRoy and James Frey killed reading and social media came in to take up the space,” which is terrible because it is true and also because I had mostly forgotten about James Frey too. It’s a good reminder that whenever I despair about the death of literacy I should recall what the fuck literacy was even ten years ago. Everything is lies and bluster. We’re probably better moving on to an all-emoji world.

AUTHOR: THE JT LEROY STORY is in theaters this September. See it instead of reading a book.

Forget just how awful the rest of life is for a few moments.

What you have here is an hour+ of bears being bears, with a couple of Katmai National Park Rangers giving you a play-by-play of their activities. I would recommend bookmarking this page for when it all gets to be too much and you need to clear your head of everything that is terrible about the world, but it might make more sense just to keep the tab open, because when will that not be true? Thank you for being you, bears.

Let’s Republican Party!!

The two best times to arrive in a city are midnight and the crack of dawn. You have the city to yourself, the streets are empty. No one seems to notice that you have no idea where you’re going, you’re walking in circles. But no one sees or cares. You can just be lost. All cities are beautiful at midnight: lit up, beckoning out to every direction out. At the crack of dawn a city is laid starkly out. The sun greets us harshly along all possibilities. And, in my case, arriving in Cleveland this weekend at the crack of dawn, I got to see a ton of cops go to a Starbucks.

I came to Cleveland mostly out of an on-air dare on our weekly WFMU show “Sportsytalk” by Station Manager Ken Freedman way back in April a few days before whatever deadline it was for us to try to get press passes for what we imagined would be a brokered and historic Republican National Convention. The last political convention WFMU covered was, yeah, the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The one where the police went into the crowd with batons and beat protesters. I think we imagined this election was going to be some kind of reboot-sequel to that one. As the new “Confessions of a Republican” ad released by the Clinton campaign suggests, we are dealing with the very same brand of wacky this year.

I imagined a road trip, a few days of eating Polish boy sandwiches. Blowing some vacation days in the great Midwest. I also didn’t imagine we’d get credentials in the first place. We’d gotten credentials to the Superbowl Media Day in Newark a few years back. We had a nice day of me reading haiku to a bewildered Wes Welker, me asking Richard Sherman whether he’d make a better Batman than Ben Affleck. You know, my wheelhouse: being kind of goofy. This election does not particularly need goofy coverage. But this election has gotten and given all kinds of things it did not particularly need.

Cleveland right now has almost every kind of police, state trooper, public safety, and crime fighter imaginable. They have cops from in-state, out-of-state, space, the future, the past. Time cops. I’m staying in the basement of a friend of a friend. Nice enough to put a grubby poet up for a week, he’s been making sure I don’t leave without carrying an apple around with me as I travel from Midtown to Downtown, where all the action is happening. I goofed around the first night, wandering around with all my clunky radio equipment and somehow bumped into the Mayor of Cleveland, Frank Johnson and the police chief, Calvin Williams. I’ve seen Chief Johnson two nights in a row, working long days. He used to be a cop on patrol in on the Upper East Side. He smiled widely.

The events in Baton Rouge have cast a pall over Cleveland. I hear it in the things people say to me, unbidden, in monologues I am presented with because I am so obviously an outsider. Police are nervous, always looking over their shoulder, many in an unfamiliar town. I say good morning, I say hello. But people are tense. Everyone’s been sending me articles for the last two weeks that are like “The 45 Reasons Why Going to Cleveland to Cover the Convention Will Get You Murdered in the Streets Like a Dog: #23 Will Double Murder You.” I can hear it in the voice of my mom when I call her to let her know I am OK. I tell her I’m OK. She doesn’t believe me.

Everyone in Cleveland is still wearing Cavaliers’ championship gear, looking as fresh as the moment they bought it. It is a town transformed by winning, and I am happy to report that Cleveland is getting cocky. They think the Browns have a chance now. I’ve been wearing my Jets’ Tim Tebow jersey around, getting teased relentlessly. I hope he still might come! So far celebrity speakers have been Scott Baio and a guy from Duck Dynasty. Don King was hanging around. I saw Triumph the Insult Comic Dog and Trevor Noah. Wolf Blitzer’s beard is very impressive in person.

Like you, I am getting most of my news from Twitter, except I am in the Quicken Loans Arena, all the way at the top, with my phone plugged in for power. I keep trying to cover protests, but everything either goes very smoothly or kind of peters out right in front of the barricades. I am but one poet amid all these waves of politics, adrift and bobbing. Certainly I am horrified by many of the things that people are saying in speeches. But some of the speeches are pretty good. I get why some Republicans feel the way they do. I went to a tony Prep school, I get it. For the next few days, you may see me circling, head down, looking at my phone to tell me something I need to know. Possibly texting my mom to let her know I’m OK.

Jim Behrle lives in Jersey City and works in a bookstore. He is reporting and Periscoping for WFMU at the GOP Convention in Cleveland this week.

This might be the most serene experience you have all day.

I have been waiting for years for anyone to do anything almost as pretty as the prettiest part of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s IBM 1401, A User’s Manual. This, from the man himself, isn’t quite that, but it is pretty enough, and if you consider the week we’re going to have — if you consider every week we’re apparently going to have from here on out — you will take whatever pretty you can get wherever and whenever you can get it, because wow are you ever going to need it. Enjoy.

★★★ The flip-flops outside the back door were soft and hot to step into, not long after they’d first been put there. The ocean was banded in light and dark indigo, and there was more of it in view than there’d been a year ago, before the big winter storm. The air felt as if it were smearing a salty paste onto exposed skin. The walk to the bicycle shop and the brief ride back was enough exertion for the nine-year-old; the four-year-old wanted to take one more lap around the parking lot, but only one. With the lights kept off against the heat, the failure of the wifi was a mystery until a neighboring renter knocked to ask if the power had gone out at both addresses. The near part of the ocean had turned cloudy jade in midafternoon, with ink-blue out in the distance. The chilly shock of the water was gone halfway through the third wave running over the feet. If anything, the air felt cooler than the water, as a breeze buffeted damp clothing. The four-year-old, confidence fortified by a part-completed swimming course, decided that he was ready to attract the waves with a boogie board and was flung down in the surf. Young swimmers’ heads vanished and reappeared in the shallows, and visible sand hung inside the waves as they broke. It took three different stages of rinsing to get the sand back off the children.