Moon Landing
Sad Boy Turns 76
Nick Drake’s ‘Annus Mirabilis’
You confided your secrets to an indifferent world that became interested too late. Now you are a VW ad.
You are 23 and you have not given up, not yet. You are the age of Keats when he had his annus mirabilis and gave us the odes, “Hyperion” and “Eve of St. Agnes” with little fanfare. Did you think you were Keats, or did you think you were over? Maybe you were like Keats: You knew you were over before you were over, a posthumous existence, and that’s when — and maybe why — you peaked.
The first Nick Drake album, Five Leaves Left, had Richard Thompson on guitar; the second, Bryter Layter, a thing of beauty and a joy forever, had strings to cushion the blow, not goopy but lush, like Dusty Springfield, but her records actually sold. Altogether, you would sell fewer than 10,000 copies of both albums while you sauntered the earth. How did you get here, before your quarter-life crisis? Your songs are forever, but Nick Drake hadn’t been born yet. Pink Moon, your 1972 swan song, …
Kinky in Dreamland
A member of the Johnson Family tries to climb his last mountain
A white-linen Jew at the Carnegie Deli and a bona-fide cowboy at the Grand Ole Opry
‘Fuck ’em, if they tried to do our jobs they would have OD’d on cocaine ten years ago’
Wallace Creek runs through Echo Hill Ranch, which has been property of the Friedman family for over half a century now. A hundred years before that, the land belonged to “Bigfoot” Wallace, a legendary pioneer and Indian fighter who rode with Colonel Jack Hays and his Texas Rangers. “How’d he get his ranch?” is a common question in Texas. A not uncommon answer, true in Bigfoot Wallace’s case, is “he took it.” There’s a story about Bigfoot Wallace and how he got his name (mistaken identity), and a lesson (myth resists change): Bigfoot wore size nine.
Stories about Bigfoot Wallace, Flacco the Lipan Apache Chief, Stephen Austin, Sam Houston, Jack Hays, and the founding of the republic of Texas are all part of the mythologized history that nourished Richard “Kinky” Friedman growing up on Echo Hill Ranch in the heart of the Texas Hill Country. On the far side of Wallace Creek, across from the lodge where Kinky …
Nobody Knows
Take it from me, Mr. Doesn’t-Know-Anything
Indeterminacy rules, to hell with what the statistics and the rule books say
If you believe half of what you read, and a quarter of what you see, you’re being deceived
How far is it from New York City to Cleveland, Ohio? Nobody knows. Some people will tell you it is a specific number. A satellite measured the New York–Cleveland distance as 465.03 miles, or 739.01 kilometers, but that was before the pandemic — in other words, today nobody really knows.
How long is the Lincoln Tunnel? As it happens, we do know the answer to that. The Lincoln Tunnel is about fifteen hundred miles long — or 1,498 miles, to be exact. But if the Lincoln Tunnel is that long, as we have discovered for ourselves by driving through it many times, how can the entire distance to Cleveland, in a completely different, Midwestern state, be shorter? And how can the width of the Hudson River, which the Lincoln Tunnel goes under, be less than half a mile? The answer to that is: Nobody knows.
One thing that nobody knows is the trouble I’ve seen. It’s my own trouble, and even …
