2010-11-11 - 4:12 p.m.

I like people talking into my ear. It's company, in a manner, and I can pause it. Lately, I fall asleep that way, with Terry Gross asking her smart questions, giggling along with Keith Richards or Justin Timberlake. I fall asleep on my side, and so I use just one earphone. It's soothing, the voices in that one ear. I get halfway through an interview, and when I realize that I no longer can follow what they're talking about, I know it's time to switch off and really fall asleep. It's like a reverse alarm clock.

But that means I haven't been listening to much music. So, yesterday, when I switched to music, a song came on that I hadn't heard in a while, a song a guy sings about a girl who was in a car wreck, and just before the car wreck, she says, "What a great summer night." And it gave me chills, picturing looking over just before this awful thing, and seeing a girl you care about turn back from her window, smiling, saying, "What a great summer night." And that happens all the time with music but I guess what I rediscovered for the thousandth time yesterday is that there's art and then there's not-art, and the two do different things. It'll always be true that not-art tells, while art gives chills.

There is a place for interviews, and there is a place for great summer nights, and there is room for both. Well, shit. What a world.

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