One Missed Parchment Letter Delivered by a Slave

[To Robert Skipwith]

Monticello, 3 Aug. 1771

I sat down with a design of executing your request to form a catalogue of books to the amount of about 50 pounds sterling. But could by no means satisfy myself with any partial choice I could make. Nor could I extort a smile from the face of gravity once a most troublesome tableau manifested to me a providential warning. What virtue, indeed what wisdom lies in this vision? The inquiry has plagued my sleep, such that I could not receive Sally but twice these last severall evenings.

I hold this truth, that everything is useful which contributes to fix in the principles and practices of virtue. When any original act of charity or of gratitude, for instance, is presented either to our sight or imagination, we are deeply impressed with its beauty and feel a strong desire in ourselves of doing charitable and grateful acts also. On the contrary when we imagine any atrocious deed, such as I saw the other night, we are disgusted by its deformity, and conceive an abhorrence of vice.

For in this vision, your face was twisted inward and foul, a sight nearly as deathly and detestable as Benj. Frankl.’s derrière. I saw it but for a moment; — but mortality’s intimation persuaded me of the urgency to communicate it. As Vitruvius noted, death follows its preconception like a good slave to the garden bell. Therefore dear Bob, take caution whereupon Redcoats or agents of the Netherworld are concerned, — and if you receive a threat by letter, do confirm by discourse and study that the message did not come from inside the house.

As regards a gentleman’s proper syllabus, we must begin with memory and imagination. Considering history as a moral exercise, her lessons would be too infrequent if confined to real life. We are therefore wisely framed to be as warmly interested for a fictitious as for a real personage. Thus a lively and lasting sense of filial duty is more effectually impressed on the mind of a son or daughter by reading King Lear, than by all the dry volumes of ethics and divinity that ever were written. — Of Politics and Trade I have given you a few only of the best books, as you would probably chuse to be not unacquainted with those commercial principles which bring wealth into our country, and the constitutional security we have for the enjoiment of that wealth.

Bear my affections to Wintipock clothed in the warmest expressions of sincerity; and to yourself be every human felicity. Adieu.

[Th. J.]

Vaselines reunion

Confirmed? Pitchfork says so, but no mention yet on the official lineup of the supposed occasion, Sub Pop’s 20th-anniversary concerts. Next Friday they are also booked to play Carnegie Hall — not the one in New York, but the one in Dunfermline, Scotland.

Follows rumors.

Pelé

New podcast segment

I’ve begun a new audio feature on Popcast, the Times’s weekly music podcast. It’s a brief interview segment called Artist of the Week, and it will run alongside the CD reviews and other reports. (The full podcast is around 20 minutes.)

The plan is to have an informal conversation with an emerging artist or some musical person otherwise in the news, and so far I’ve been pleased with the results. Last week I talked with Tim Fite, a rapper/provocateur who gave away his last album for free, and this week I interviewed Slug from Atmosphere, whose new album “When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold” opened at No. 5.

You can subscribe to the Popcast here. Or, don’t subscribe, here.

Howard the Duck video journal

More Watchmen: this time it’s a video journal with the costume designer, Michael Wilkinson. The costumes are good, I guess (once again), and other than the 1960s flower children everything seems pretty true to the book.

But why is it that when Hollywood tries to do comic book realism, it comes out looking even more fake and contrived? Is it because comic art is all about fantasy to begin with, that even serious and novelistic books like Watchmen are still unapologetically unreal, with no attempt to fool anybody?

One Missed “Ant’ny”

[Twilight. The sound of an accordion drifts through tenement streets. A voice is heard from somewhere around the corner.]

MA. Ant’ny! Aaaaant’ny!

MR. DiSIPIO. Paulie — get ya bruddah. Your muddah’s callin’ ’im.

MA. Aaaaaaaaant’ny!

PAULIE. MAAAAAAAAAA. WHADDAYA WAAANT?

MA. Paulie! Tell your bruddah Ant’ny! His face is gonna dry up and it’s gonna look like a ginger root!

PAULIE. WHAAA? Ma, whadda you talkin’ about?

MA. Paulie shaddup and listen! Your bruddah! He’s bein’ pursued by the forces of darkness, who have inexplicably singled out Mulberry Street here in 1920 to enter the realm of the livin’! They got no motivation ’cept evil! Way they do it is, first you get the message sayin’ how you’re gonna get it, and then you get it! And this is how they said Ant’ny’s gonna get it!

PAULIE. Ma, that’s crazy!

MA. Paulie shaddup and don’t interrupt your muddah! Your bruddah Ant’ny! His face is gonna dry up and look like a ginger root! And then his skull is gonna implode and he’s gonna walk around like a headless zombie!

PAULIE. Ma, that’s disgusting!

MA. Paulie shaddup! Tell your bruddah he’s gotta banish the sleep demons back to da netherworld if he wants his face to stay on like normal! And we all know that ain’t no movie star face to begin with! I swear they switched ’im on me at the hospital! Madonn’!

MR. DiSIPIO. I can’t hear myself think out here!

PAULIE. Ma!

MA. Paulie! Tell Ant’ny I’m makin’ meatballs, just the way he likes ’em! I need green peppers and some more tomatoes! Make sure you smell the peppers before you buy ’em!

PAULIE. All right, all right! Jeez, ma. AAAAAAAAANT’NYYYY! AAAAAAANT’NYYY! C’MAAAAAAHN!

---

The original “Ant’ny.”

Oh Jesus freakin’ Christ

Why, Frankie?

Record Store Day postmortem

So was Record Store Day a success?

Anecdotal reports on the event, which was April 19, suggest that participating stores had good days. Newbury Comics, the Boston indie empire, said: “Our overall store sales were up 85 percent and our margin was up 49 percent. Sales were over 30,000 higher than on Black Friday of last year.” And StreetPulse, which tracks sales for independent retailers, told me:

StreetPulse numbers reveals [sic] Saturday (4/19) as the largest day of music sales for 2008 out selling the second largest day (3/22) by 29 percent. Music sales increased 39 percent on Record Store Day compared to the same time the previous week. The response to Record Store Day increased music sales over 22 percent from same day last year.

Billboard surveys some stores, with mostly good news, and relays SoundScan data saying that while chain-store sales were down 20.8 percent from the same week last year, indies were up 1.6 percent. In most businesses 1.6 percent is flat; in the sad new music biz, it’s cause for a pat on the back.

But will it have any lasting effect? Probably not, of course. New York’s showing in particular was poor. I am aware of only three of New York’s quickly disappearing record stores that had any special activities: Other Music in Manhattan, and Sound Fix and Halcyon in Brooklyn. (Update: Apparently J&R also had something; Ed Christman mentioned it in his column but I can’t link to it.) Other Music was pretty busy, and gave 10 percent off everything in the store. That was nice, but Cortney Harding at Billboard noted a telling detail:

Perhaps the image that best sums up Record Store Day is this: Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach DJ’ing an afternoon set at Manhattan’s Other Music, with two iPods set atop silent turntables.

While the shop was crowded and the register lines were long, Auerbach’s small visual statement seemed monumental. Even on Record Store Day, the record had been supplanted.

Perhaps a good measurement of the success or failure of Record Store Day would be sales for the week that followed.

Mariah’s asterisk

This has been pointed out before, but recent conversations suggest that it still needs to be said.

A few weeks ago Mariah Carey scored her 18th No. 1 on the Billboard chart with the song “Touch My Body,” and it was reported widely that she had thus surpassed Elvis Presley as the artist with the second-most career No. 1 hits. (The Beatles remain in the lead, with 20.)

Cue media/blogger freakout, as haters hated, disputers disputed and contrarians got contrary. What did it mean that cheesy and tasteless Mariah had eclipsed cheesy and tasteless saintly marvel Elvis in this important milestone? Forget soldiers dying on their seventh tours of Afghanistan. Truly this is our civilization’s darkest moment!

There’s just one problem with the debate: the chart interpretation is not entirely correct. Mariah has passed Elvis only by a technicality; an important one, but a technicality nonetheless.

Elvis also has 18 No. 1 songs — but only 17 No. 1 singles. In 1956, “Don’t Be Cruel” and “Hound Dog” were two sides of a double-A sided single, and both songs went to No. 1. (Originally it was a regular one-sided single; it says something about Elvis’s confidence as chart hegemon in those days that he was willing to throw “Hound Dog” away as a B-side.)

It’s perfectly true that 18 Elvis songs went to No. 1, but the baseball-stats aspect here demands that apples be compared to apples and singles to singles. If both sides of a single go to No. 1, then that single counts only once, because strictly speaking a single is a piece of plastic, not a song. (Or, in more contemporary marketing terms, a single is one SKU, no matter how many charting songs are on it, and the Billboard Hot 100 tracks single SKUs.)

So for Mariah to truly surpass Elvis, or at least to erase her asterisk, she has to score one more No. 1. Her current single is “Bye Bye.” (A StarGate song.)

Billboard deserves a certain amount of blame for this confusion. Its initial story did not make the song/single distinction clear, and also did not take note of “Don’t Be Cruel/“Hound Dog.” That is partly due to a chart authority conflict, as Billboard’s data guru Geoff Mayfield made note of in his weekly column:

COUNTING ELVIS: Mariah Carey now has more Billboard Hot 100 No. 1s than any solo artist in the rock era, yet earnest Elvis Presley fans and some Billboard chart books insist the King also had 18 toppers. Why the discrepancy?

Joel Whitburn, author of Record Research’s line of Billboard chart tomes, counts the double-sided single “Don’t Be Cruel”/“Hound Dog” as two No. 1s, but Billboard’s charts department and the magazine’s ranking trivia expert, Fred Bronson, assert those two songs comprise but one single, and thus a singular No. 1 shared by the two songs.

The first 10 of Presley’s 17 No. 1s preceded the August 1958 launch of the Billboard Hot 100. From his first topper, “Heartbreak Hotel” in 1956, through “Hard Headed Woman” in June 1958, his chart history began on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores list.

Gawker shocker

I’m shocked and flattered that Gawker, in an item headed “Things We Actually Like,” actually liked my Madonna piece today. Which by the law of blog averages means that they have to hate the next 350 things that I write.

Blog school: Post long, unreadable legal boilerplate whenever possible

Hats off to Rolling Stone for finding a way to combine the immediacy and informality of a pop-culture blog post with the cold, unwelcoming wall of text of a lengthy legal disclaimer.

A post on Thursday announced a contest for an “Iron Man”-themed cellphone with an innovative ratio of natural, casual language to snoozy boilerplate. Of the item’s 960 words, 871 are devoted to the kind of tight, irreverent voice that characterizes the best blogs: “By entering, participants agree to release and hold harmless RollingStone.com, its parents, subsidiaries and affiliated entities, and each of their directors, officers, employees, attorneys, agents, and representatives from any damage, injury, expense, cost, death, loss, claim, action, demand, or other liability that may arise in connection with the Sweepstakes, or resulting from their acceptance and/or use of any prize, their travel to or from any prize related activity, their participation in this promotion, or from any misuse or malfunction of any prize awarded, including, without limitation, personal injury, death, and/or property damage.”

Now that’s good blog.

Full text below, with OMG parts highlighted:

To celebrate the release of Iron Man in theaters tomorrow, we’re giving away one LG gold-plated, limited edition Iron Man phone (check out the photo above). If you live in the continental U.S. and are over 18, send an e-mail to contests@rollingstone.com with your full name, age, address and phone number to enter. All entries must be received by 11:59p.m. next Thursday, May 8th, and only one entry is allowed per person. Read the full rules after the jump, and check back tomorrow for Peter Travers’ summer movie preview.

Official Rules for RollingStone.com’s Iron Man LG Limited Edition Phone Giveaway

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. A PURCHASE WILL NOT INCREASE YOUR CHANCES OF WINNING. VOID WHERE PROHIBITED BY LAW.

Open to legal residents of the Continental United States. Entrants must be 18 and older as of 05/01/08.

How to Enter:

1. To enter the “RollingStone.com Iron Man LG Limited Edition Phone Giveaway,” email your full name, age, address and phone number to contests@rollingstone.com. Limit one entry per person. Sweepstakes begins at 4:30 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time) on 05/01/08. All online entries must be received by 11:59 p.m. (Eastern Standard Time) on 05/08/08.

2. No mechanically reproduced or computer generated entries permitted. Not responsible for lost, late or misdirected entries, or entries containing incorrect or incomplete information. Not responsible for any problems or technical malfunctions of any telephone network or lines, computer, on-line, or Internet systems or services, servers, computer equipment, software, failure of any email or entry or confirmation or winners notice on account of technical problems or traffic congestion on the Internet, problems with the RollingStone.com website, or any combination thereof, including any injury or damage to entrant’s or any other person’s computer resulting from downloading any materials in connection with the Sweepstakes. Entries become the property of Rolling Stone.com and will not be acknowledged or returned.

3. Winner(s):

One (1) Grand Prize winner will be selected at random by RollingStone.com staff. Grand Winner will be notified by e-mail or telephone.

4. Prize(s):

Grand Prize winner will receive one (1) LG gold-plated, limited edition Iron Man phone. Approximate Retail Value (“ARV”) of Grand Prize: $1300. Actual retail value of the Grand Prize may vary. Certain restrictions may apply. RollingStone.com reserves the right to substitute a prize of equal or greater value.

General:

5. Employees of RollingStone.com, its affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising or promotional agencies, immediate family members and/or those living in same household are not eligible.

6. No substitution or transfer of prize permitted except as provided herein. Prizes are non-redeemable for cash. In the event of unavailability, Us Weekly may substitute a prize of greater or equal value.

7. All federal/state/local taxes are the sole responsibility of prize winner.

8. Potential prize winners must execute an Affidavit of Eligibility/Release of Liability/Prize Acceptance Form within 10 days of notification. Noncompliance/return of prize notification as undeliverable will result in disqualification and selection of an alternate winner.

9. By entering, participants agree to release and hold harmless RollingStone.com, its parents, subsidiaries and affiliated entities, and each of their directors, officers, employees, attorneys, agents, and representatives from any damage, injury, expense, cost, death, loss, claim, action, demand, or other liability that may arise in connection with the Sweepstakes, or resulting from their acceptance and/or use of any prize, their travel to or from any prize related activity, their participation in this promotion, or from any misuse or malfunction of any prize awarded, including, without limitation, personal injury, death, and/or property damage.

10. Acceptance of any Prize constitutes consent to use winner’s name and likeness for editorial, advertising and publicity purposes in all media, whether currently existent or hereafter derived, without additional compensation, except where prohibited by law.

11. RollingStone.com reserves the right to disqualify any person tampering with the entry process, the operation of the Usmagazine.com website, or who is otherwise in violation of the Official Rules. RollingStone.com further reserves the right to cancel, terminate or modify the Sweepstakes in the event the Sweepstakes is not capable of completion as planned, including infection by computer virus, bugs, tampering, or technical failures of any kind. In the event of a dispute as to entries submitted by multiple users having the same email account, the authorized subscriber of the email account used to enter the Sweepstakes at the actual time of entry will be deemed to be the entrant and must comply with these Official Rules. Authorized account subscriber is deemed to be the natural person who is assigned an email address by an Internet access provider, on-line service provider or other organization which is responsible for assigning email addresses or the domain associated with the submitted email address. CAUTION: ANY ATTEMPT BY ANY PARTICIPANT TO DELIBERATELY DAMAGE THE ROLLINGSTONE.COM WEBSITE OR TAMPER WITH OR UNDERMINE THE LEGITIMATE OPERATION OF THE SWEEPSTAKES IS A VIOLATION OF CRIMINAL AND CIVIL LAWS. SHOULD SUCH AN ATTEMPT BE MADE, ROLLINGSTONE.COM RESERVES THE RIGHT TO SEEK REMEDIES AND DAMAGES FROM ANY SUCH ENTRANT(S) TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW INCLUDING CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.

12. By participating, entrants agree to be bound by these Official Rules and the decisions of RollingStone.com, which shall be final and binding with regard to all matters relating to the Sweepstakes.

13. Any dispute arising from this Sweepstakes will be determined according to the laws of the State of New York, without reference to its conflict of laws principles, and the entrants consent to the personal jurisdiction of the State and Federal Court located in New York County and agree that such courts shall have exclusive jurisdiction over all such disputes.

Winner’s List:

For name of prize winner, after 05/09/08, send a separate, stamped, self-addressed, No.10 envelope to: “RollingStone.com Iron Man LG Limited Edition Phone Giveaway,” Attention RollingStone.com 1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104.

OMG!

Press release of the day: Unwarranted reunions, Part II

“NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

Joey McIntyre, Jonathan Knight, Donnie Wahlberg, Jordan Knight, Danny Wood

All Together Again On One Stage”