Does the Shuffle function on your iPod know what key songs are in?

This morning I was on the train and, instead of my usual frenetic clicking through the songs Shuffle picks in search of something satisfactorily fitting for my mood,  I decided to just let it choose things for me.  There was this song by Okkervil River, really more of a tone poem (please excuse the improper use of that term if you are reading this in a conservatory), all rustling leaves and autumnal hum, called “A Forest,” which my iPod followed up with Cassandra Wilson’s smooth, velvet and perfect cover of “Time After Time” (you know, the Cyndi Lauper song).  The mix was perfect, and I swear on all sacred texts, that version of “Time After Time” is like a massage, a loyal glass of Scotch in a lonely hotel bar

Pop

I just went around the corner to the deli to pick up some soda and water, and “Drops of Jupiter” by Train was playing.  This is one of the worst songs ever, mainly for its manipulative simpleness which manages to be so damn catchy at the same time.  I thought I was over “Drops of Jupiter,” but got ensnared in the trap of its emotional crescendo towards totally vulnerable honesty, and found myself wanting it all over again.  It reminds me of the summer of I guess about five years ago, post 9-11, when,

Happy New Year!

So my wife and I decided to celebrate the Sunday night before President’s Day with some passionate eating out.  We went to this one down-home comfort foody-place, but then I whined that the 15-minute wait for a table was too long.  It was just too ass-cold to wait outside and I was in a prissy mood and didn’t feel like standing inside the tiny box of a restaurant, looming over the people who are already seated and whose tables

Alice Munro is a good short story writer

I have a book of Alice Munro short stories that I bought two years ago one the way back from a one-night jaunt to a bed-and-breakfast up somewhere in the pretty, non-NYC-suburban part of Connecticut.  I have never opened it.  I have, mind you, read at least a few of her stories before, and was somewhat jazzed about getting into her stuff after Jonathan Franzen wrote a cover story in the Times book review about her a while back.  But this particular volume is relegated to the place on our bookshelf reserved for unactualized best intentions.  Tonight would have been a perfectly good night to crack it open, have a couple beers, and

Welcome to my website!

Hello—welcome to my website!

Wait a minute-that wasn’t directed at you–why are you reading this? This is my own entirely private collection of thoughts and musings. Do you think I would just give it away, to you, a stranger cloaked in cyber-anonymity, for free?  You think this is some kind of one-night stand?  Like we just met at a bar, and you caught me a little sullen and sad because I was marinating my self-doubt in rivers of Campari, and you saw my weakness, and set out to knock me off my feet with your dashing charm,