The Longest Yard Sale
Hundreds of Miles of Crap you don’t need, or maybe you do
Welcome to the Invisible America
Burt Reynolds is welcome here
Last year, at a birthday party in the Shenandoah Valley, a friend told me about a yard sale that lasts four days and spans six states and almost 700 miles along the US Route 127 corridor. “The World’s Longest Yard Sale,” it’s called. She and her boyfriend had set out from Michigan and taken on the northern leg the year before. Already, they were working on plans to finish the job. “Tell the story, tell the story,” she prodded, swatting him with the back of her hand. “Oh yeah… okay,” he yielded. “Last year, I bought a stiletto. And the guy told me beforehand, he said, ‘You know these are illegal in a lot of places, right?’ ‘Right,’ I told him. ‘Yeah… I know.’ He didn’t miss a beat. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘that’ll be twenty bucks!’”
Yes, I thought, America the Invisible. And I resolved in my heart to go looking for it.
Now in its 38th year, the “127 Yard Sale” is the brainchild of former …
Keith Jarrett Drags Our Asses to Church
The art of playing the wrong instrument
Somewhere out there in the night is an animal with electric eyes waiting to devour you
Jazz piano isn’t for everyone
As the story goes, Miles Davis once stopped a mid-twenties Keith Jarrett in a jazz club to tell him he was playing the wrong instrument. Jarrett responded by saying he was relieved someone else understood that. The two men went on to play together in stints, with both Davis’s touring band and his early ’70s sextet.
Jarrett played piano when the two met, and he still plays piano now. Davis paired him on the keys with Chick Corea, giving his live tour at the time the kind of bebop backcourt that puts jerseys in rafters. So, as is often the case when it comes to genius, the comment about the instrument wasn’t a comment about the instrument. It was dharma. A legendary moment of game recognizing game.
Jarrett’s career wouldn’t calm down for five decades, and neither would the Lao Tzu-esque anecdotes. One of his personal mantras became, “Don't follow in the footsteps of the wise, seek what they have …
Magic Wand
The heavy art of acid-comedown music
When the lie of youth can no longer be plausibly maintained, enlightenment beckons
Don’t ask me what it all means, man — it’s been years since my last trip
As great musicians approach and then surpass their 30s, they reach an event horizon where the lie of youth can no longer be plausibly maintained. It often happens rapidly, and even drugs start to do more harm than good. Then what? A couple possibilities remain for artists on the brink of creative middle-age, as the seminal year of 1991 still warns us: You can capitulate to whatever got you where you are, or you can start the hard, maybe impossible work of leaving it all behind.
In 1991, Metallica released a self-titled monster of a record that trapped them in a creative morass of mega-stardom that sucked away whatever was left of their younger, infinitely cooler selves. In contrast, the merciless onslaught of time, which panics and flummoxes even the Kirk Hammetts of the world, liberated the ’80s new wavers in Talk Talk, the English trio that scored a moderate hit with “It’s My Life.” Having already …
