Happy Land, off of Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’ score for The Proposition. (Which is a great western).
Becalmed, off of Brian Eno’s Another Green World. (Which is a great, great record).
Charu’s Theme. Which is from a Satayajit Ray movie and, I just realized, from The Darjeeling Limited score (which might be my favorite Wes Anderson movie. Deal with it).
Arthur R. Kelly’s Five Moods for Two Bassoons as played by Dong-Yun Kwon & someone else (but I don’t need to tell you that, bassoon fan).
Malice Afterthought off of Calexico’s soundtrack to a movie called The Guard, which I haven’t seen but I like to imagine is an indie-rock Paul Blart Mall Cop.
and finally:
Wolkenschatten, op. 136: I Tranquillo by 2-Chainz muse, Gebreuder Ohrentaub from the album, Four Brothers (which also features a four tuba-version of Ebony and Ivory, the Ebony is represented by the brass keys of a tuba, the ivory is also represented by the brass keys on a tuba).

Hi,
As of today, July 11, 2012, the Memory Palace is part of the Maximum Fun family of podcasts. Maximum Fun is a network of sorts, but I think of it as a collective. There are a bunch of podcasts. A guy named Jesse Thorn (whom you may know from his own podcast and public radio show, Bullseye, nee The Sound of Young America, or any number of other fine cultural whatnots) has brought them all together under one umbrella. It’s all rather punk rock (in economic sense of the word; it is decidedly un-punk rock in most others).

People donate throughout the year. Once a year, like your local public radio station, there’s a fundraiser. Listeners Like You throw in a few bucks and the people who make the shows get some of those bucks. Meanwhile, Listeners Like You get to comment and interact and ask questions/troll me on the new Memory Palace page on MaximumFun.org. Please head over there and poke around. Try out some of the other podcasts. There is a lot there to like.

So, what does that mean for you, Memory Palace listener?
Well, the best thing is that it means you’ll be getting a new episode at least once a month. Which is great. And I do think the web community, commenting, sharing, etc. will be cool for a lot of you. Maybe there’ll be T-shirts. I don’t know. I haven’t figured it all out yet.

But, podcast will stay the same. There may be a different promotional message tacked on to the front but the Memory Palace will remain the Memory Palace. The same odd little stories. The same format. The same heart on the same sleeve.

Nate

This and future Civil War Stories (their title, super catchy) episode will appear as a standard memory palace episode through standard memory palace channels two weeks after the Slate release, which sounds more complicated than it is. In the meantime, there’ll be other memory palace episodes on other topics sprinkled in. Including a foray or two into personal history. So, update.

nate

Now, some of you have been asking what the hold up has been with the new episodes.

A: Thanks for asking.
B: Sorry about that.
C: I’ve been spending most of my time writing much of this book (oddly enough). It is due to come out in October. It is funny. And weirdly memory palace-y in several parts.
D. More episodes soon.

*An earlier version of this post referred to the show as “Shut up and Listen.” It was a mistake. But a much better name.

Anyway, the podcast is still up and running, but has in fact been gummed up a bit by a couple of (paying) projects with looming deadlines. Both of which you will likely enjoy, assuming that you like the podcast, but neither of which I can talk about at the moment. Mysterious.

I will keep you posted and will continue to post here on the blog and poke away on new podcast episodes.

thanks
nate

Anyway, cleaning out some drawers here at The Memory Palace, I came across a CD of a radio documentary I did a few years ago about the history of music programming on the radio that I hadn’t thought about in awhile. It is no exploding pen, but some of you might like it. Link is here.

*Yes. This is my favorite moment in the movie. Even considering the ski chase.

“See that little stream — we could walk to it in two minutes. It took the British a month to walk to it — a whole empire walking very slowly, dying in front and pushing forward behind. And another empire walked very slowly backward a few inches a day, leaving the dead like a million bloody rugs. No Europeans will ever do that again in this generation.”
“Why, they’ve only just quit over in Turkey,” said Abe. “And in Morocco —”
“That’s different. This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”
“General Grant invented this kind of battle at Petersburg in sixty- five.”
“No, he didn’t — he just invented mass butchery. This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle — there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”
“You want to hand over this battle to D. H. Lawrence,” said Abe.
“All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,” Dick mourned persistently.

A large public works project that I first saw in “someday the city will like look this” illustrations in the Providence Sunday Journal when I was boy, change the course of the Providence river. They dredged the channel. They removed a road that covered it up (and that I’d always been told was, technically, the widest bridge in the world). They gave it a left turn into a basin, around which they put an amphitheater, and in the center of which they put a slightly anemic fountain. It was the kind of Big Public Works Project that is nearly impossible to get done these days without graft and corruption.

Luckily, this was Providence, Rhode Island, a city in whose veins graft and corruption run like coffee milk.

And, truth be told, the river looks great now. Urban renewal through aesthetic revival.

Anyway, one night, between my freshman and sophomore year of college, a high school friend and I were walking around downtown, exploring the construction site. She and I were extremely close back then. We’re not now. No story there. Just the way things go. The next morning, she and I were going drive to my ten year old Chevette across country. It was to be a Great Adventure (and it was). It was to be a friendship cementing experience (and it was, for awhile). But that night when we were walking around we came upon the city’s memorial (1929, granite column, carved stone at the bottom representing the different service branches, female embodiment of Peace on top) to the 612 young Rhode Islanders who’d died fighting World War I.

It used to be in the middle of a roundabout in the middle of the formerly-widest bridge in the world. That night, they were nearly finished moving it to its current location in front of the courthouse. They had dug a trench underneath it into which, I assume, they were about to pour a new cement foundation for the memorial.

So my friend and I took pieces of paper and wrote messages on them to commemorate the night, and that moment in our lives and in our friendship. Words that we wanted to live by. And we threw those messages into the hole beneath the WWI Memorial so they would be sealed underneath forever. So our young selves would be memorialized there too.

And I have absolutely no idea what I wrote.

Check back.

Tell a friend.

Share.

Let me know what you think.

Sincerely,
Nate