Sad, sad day. (Yesterday, actually, but I only found out this morning. Thanks Ben.)

Thank God we knew it was coming, or I would be crushed right now. Warren Zevon was one of my all-time favorites. I got Excitable Boy the month it came out--my junior year of high school--and I believe I reviewed it for my high school paper. I quickly went back to grab the one previous album, Warren Zevon, and could scarely believe it was even better. There was nothing left to mine, so I had to wait real time for each new release.

Really like obit in the Washington Post, aside from the cliche at the end of the lead. (AP here.)

He (Richard Leiby, in the W Post) also slips in a quickie review of the new album:

As the years rolled on, he released some good albums that not many people bought, and that's too bad. But he isn't the type to tolerate phony praise or pathos, so we'll offer none for "The Wind."

The album is uneven, offering only echoes of the artfulness we've come to expect from Zevon, who penned such classics as "Poor Poor Pitiful Me" and "Hasten Down the Wind." Still, let's give the man a break. During these sessions he was numbed by morphine, his voice strained by pain, his body wasting away. He had to tape a couple of songs at home when he grew too sick to make it into the studio. It's as if he willed himself to finish "The Wind" to fulfill a pledge he made in song long ago: "I'll sleep when I'm dead."

Sadly, I was getting ready to write something similar here, though I wanted to listen a few more times just to make sure. And I wasn't sure I had the heart to do it, but Leiby figured out a nice way, didn't he. There's no "French Inhaler," "Carmaleta," or "Desperatdos Under the Eaves Here." And certainly not a rocker like "Lawyers Guns and Money" or "Looking for the Next Best Thing."

There doesn't have to be. He's already got a catalogue full of them. If you're a longtime fan, The Wind is a really sweet goodbye, with every song suppused with secondary meaning. If you never heard of him till he got sick, get the first album* and find out what all the comotion is about. He never quite matched it, but he tossed us quite a few more gems before giving out.

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* There was also an album recorded in the 60s, not released because it was so bad, called "Wanted Dead or Alive." After he had some success, the company owning it was going to release it over his objections, so he agreed to try to improve it. But he considered it basically failed demos from before he was ready. At least that's how I remember the story.

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Coincidentially, the series "Inside Out," which chronicles him making the album, premieres tonight on VH1. Don't miss it. Update: That info was from the W Post, but my Tivo guide says the Warren episode is not on until Wednesday (maybe they moved it up?) And if you're searching it's "InsideOut," with no space.

The dream is always running ahead . . . To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that is the miracle.

Quotes streaming through my head tonight.

That one's from Neil Young, "Unknown Legend" on Harvest Moon:

She used to work in a diner
Never saw a woman look finer
I used to order just to watch her float across the floor . . .

What a sweet sentiment, what a beautiful image, what an amazing opening.

My dirty little secret of Nabokov is I can never decide whether Conclusive Evidence is really my favorite book or not. Best writing, for sure, by a landslide, but my heart always wants to go this other way.

I used to keep this printed on a page up above my monitor. Now there's only air above my monitor, which is just far too hard to adhere paper to:

Anyway I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around -- nobody big, I mean -- except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff -- I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy.

No one should be allowed to write that well. Who could ever do that again?

Well, John Edwards is serious about the presidency. There was this sticky situation of running for the Senate and the Dem nomination, in an R state where the party needed to get to work on a replacement if he wasn't running. The more he hedged and refused to rule out the Senate re-election, the less serious he looked about the pres race, especially since his campaign was nowhere.

(Personally, I think the latter is retarded, and the press made way too much of it. Of course he would hedge his bets: he's one of nine, what fool wouldn't keep a fallback position? The question about the party was more relevant.)

So after 11 p.m. tonight, too late for a lot of papers, and while editors were busy scrambling to wrap up Bush's speech coverage, his campaign released a letter with the announcement. Can't say I understand that. I'd have thought they'd like a little publicity, and would pitch it as a show of resolve that he was dedicated to the pres race. Must be something going on I haven't thought of. Feel free to enlighten me in the comments.

I'm sad to hear the decision. I was hoping he would see how hopeless the pres race was looking, get out early to narrow the field a bit and save his Senate seat for the Dems. Can't blame him though: anything can happen in politics. His campaign looks like a big loser right now, but you never know what could happen. I'm pretty worried about that Senate seat, though.

NYT story here.

Interesting piece here from Slate's most interesting writer of late, Chris Suellentrop:

John Edwards may be the future, but can he be the present?

He opens with a litany of all the beltway boys christening Edwards the golden boy most likely to run away with the nomination this year. " All the adulation hasn't done much for Edwards, however, other than demonstrating to him the powerlessness of the national political media," Suellentrop responds.

Exactly. And not at all. It demonstrates once again how pathetic the national press is at divining what the public will respond to, and they complete inability to shove a lousy product down our throats. What they are very good at doing, however, is marginalizing the interesting people, so we have nothing but dufi left to pick. Luckily the electorate seems to have run an end-run-around them this year with Dean.

That's not the main point of his piece however--just a point that jabs at me, so I felt the urge to highlight it.

He goes on to present an interesting take on why Edwards campaign. The heart of it:

In the two days I follow Edwards through northeastern Iowa, everything about his campaign proves to be just fine. The candidate is fine, the message is fine, the crowds are fine. The problem for Edwards is that fine doesn't appear good enough to topple the growing Dean juggernaut. Edwards' events aren't soporific like Joe Lieberman's, but they're also not energizing like Dean's. They're perfectly pleasant affairs, not unlike a summer movie that fades from memory on the drive home. 

The nice writing, huh? The great thing about reading Suellentrop's work is that it's so captivatingly readable. It's actually a pleasure to read, and he seems to nail his subjects time and again as well.

You might want to put him on your must-read list for politics. Right after Joan Walsh at Salon. She's still the master.