"Phenomenal" indeed. The song was inspired by "one of the most haunted places in America," Laura Gibson said in an interview, the Hot Lake Hotel (once the "Mayo Clinic of the West"), where the official video was shot. (West Coast ghost stories are the best ghost stories.)

"beauty will save the world"

The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

"motherfucker"

The New Yorker appears to have finally crawled up its own asshole and died, arising thereby to a kind of shitless heaven, by having its lead feature be....an endless feature on writing for the New Yorker by New Yorker feature writer John McPhee, the gist of which seems to be, he's John McPhee and we're not. (You might well ask why I still subscribe to the thing, then: I do so digitally in order to have access to the online archives, in which there are stories and articles which are actually good. Or, at least, not all by John McPhee, which amounts to the same thing.)

(He also quotes Woolf entirely out of context and makes her sound stupid. Bah.)

"everyone dances"

Holy shit, it's back!

....also yikes, Blogger has really changed its post interface since I've been here.