A short documentary of brief interviews with elderly New Yorkers:

I don’t have answers, even at this stage of the game. I have no answers.

Beautiful and heartbreaking.

(thanks, Chris)

He has come to the most dreadful conclusion a literary man can come to, the conclusion that the ordinary view is the right one.

4. Walk with the devil

Old Delta blues players referred to guitar amplifiers as the “devil box.” And they were right. You have to be an equal opportunity employer in terms of who you’re bringing over from the other side. Electricity attracts devils and demons. Other instruments attract other spirits. An acoustic guitar attracts Casper. A mandolin attracts Wendy. But an electric guitar attracts Beelzebub.

(From WFMU’s Beware of the Blog. Via Brian Beatty.)

Last night demons took possession of someone dear to me. The demons smashed things up, and they cracked up the yarrow stalks I use for I Ching readings.

On my way out the door, I felt the smack of my I Ching volume in the small of my back.

Today I am smiling.

There is a load of yarrow nearby, and the sun is shining. I am cutting yarrow stalks.

The Pig

A reporter invited to a roast pig dinner on a hog farm was amazed to see the main course had three wooden legs. He asked the farmer about it.

“Oh, that was the best pig I ever had,” the farmer said. “A few years back, my house caught fire while I slept. He ran through the flames to wake me.”

“Is that how he lost his legs?”

“And just a couple of months ago, I fell in an alligator-filled bayou. He jumped in and pulled me out.”

“But what about the legs?”

“My friend, a pig that valuable you just don’t eat all at once.”

Somewhere on Wall Street a dog was barking.

If cool is a species of bullshit obscurity, culture is now divaricate enough that we can all be cool. It’s not gold anymore. More like corn.

— name (@georgelazenby) December 28, 2011

Taco Bell be having they shit look good on commercials but that shit is sick!!

— Te-Aria (@PEANUTBIOTCH) December 29, 2011

Fade from black to black.

As cold weather descends on most of the country, we’re asking for winter songs — songs that evoke the season, and the memories that come with them. So far in our [NPR] series, we’ve heard some lighthearted or slightly wistful tunes, but this next song goes to a far icier place. It’s the choice of the celebrated dancer and choreographer Bill T. Jones.

His winter song comes from “Winterreise,” — or “Winter Journey” — by Franz Schubert. It’s a song cycle about a solitary traveler in a savage winter whose heart is frozen in grief. Jones chose the last song in that song cycle: “Der Leiermann,” or “The Hurdy-Gurdy Man.”

“For me, it’s the musical arrangement underneath,” Jones tells All Things Considered host Melissa Block. “It speaks about a bleak landscape. And this bleak landscape takes me back to a day when I was in fourth grade out on the edge of town, looking at a snow-covered highway many, many yards away from my window — I should’ve been paying attention, but I was dreaming.

“And then I saw a lone figure walking across on a very, very cold day,” he continues, “and you know how it is when the wind blows and you have to turn your back against the wind, and I felt so sorry for that person, and then I realized it was my father. That my father, who was completely out of work, had been the director of his own business as a contractor in the heyday of the migrant stream back in the late ’50s, but now that business had died. He was up in the chilly North with family, broke and sick, and he had to get to this very insignificant job in a factory, miles and miles away. A black man with no car, trying to hitchhike, and no one picking him up, and he has to walk that 10 miles to get to the factory. And I’m sitting in this warm classroom, getting educated, not paying attention to the teacher, and suddenly feeling torn between two worlds. And this music, when I hear it, I feel for my father. There’s something about art that can be, yes, depressing, but helps us bear the pain through sheer beauty and intensity.”

I doubt many Christians believe that God is unfairly helping Tebow win games in the AFC West. I’m sure a few hardcores might, but not many. However, I get the impression that especially antagonistic secularists assume this assumption infiltrates every aspect of Tebow’s celebrity, and that explains why he’s so beloved by strangers they cannot relate to. Their negative belief is that penitent, conservative Americans look at Tebow and see a man being “rewarded” for his faith, which validates the idea that believing in something abstract is more important than understanding something real. And this makes them worried about the future, because they see that thinking everywhere. It seems like the thinking that ran this country into the ground.

I don’t think I’ve read such a straight-forward and correct explanation for why I get so nervous in a culture preoccupied more with feeling something than knowing anything. Also, I’m fairly convinced that some of the best writing happening today is on Grantland, the little sports website that could.

Sarah, I tell people to just tell me the end of the movie. I never want to be in a dark theater again waiting for supernatural occurrence and be treated to the ending of “Don’t Look Now.” Yes, it was full of signs and portents, a sightless woman seeing, red hoods and skin cut on glass, flowing blood. A portent reader straight from the woods not accustomed to screens and artifice never saw it coming. The real portents and conclusions are seamless, as natural as twilight moving into night and easing back into dusk. The ones we construct and splash in the outsize are the nightmares.