Also something from Jon Brion’s Paranorman score. A song called L.S.D. Partie from Roland Vincent. And a song called Free Man from the Ethiopians.

We Write Threnodies, We Write with Explosions by Storm and Stress (which is a great, great song).
Then a couple of different John Fahey pieces: Improv in E Minor and Unknown Tango
Then JD002, a pice of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s soundtrack to the Derrida doc. (There’s also a tiny tone from swiped from somewhere else on that soundtrack that get’s used over and over again throughout this episode, but I lost track of from where it was swiped).
A piece called Time Hole on the score to The Master that moves into a piece from the Lincoln score.
Then there’s a thing from Sakamoto’s Babel score.
Song at the end is Prizewinning by Julianna Barwick. That record is rad.

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).

-If you hear a Memory Palace piece on the radio (they pop up on public radio now and then, here and there) write to the station or program on which you heard it. Tell them you liked it. Tell them you’d like to hear more.

-Write an review and rate it on iTunes. iTunes rankings work not off raw numbers of downloads or listens or whatnot but off activity (I’m told). The more people are downloading and subscribing and rating and writing reviews the higher a podcast moves up the rankings. The higher a podcast moves, the more prominently it gets displayed, the more just-curious listeners it gets. Virtuous circles and all that.

-Donate. On this site or over on the Maximum Fun site.

-Follow me on Twitter and/or Facebook. There are gatekeepers out there for whom how many followers someone has really, really matter.

-Hire me to create a Memory Palace audio-tour for your museum or historic site. If you happen to have one lying around. It’s just something I’ve wanted to do. That’s all.

The song I talk about is “A Girl’s Tool-Box,” by a band called Tattle-Tale. It was Jen Wood [url]http://www.myspace.com/jenwood\[/url] (who’s got a bunch of solo records) and Madigan Shive in a cello punk band thing called Bonfire Madigan http://www.bonfiremadigan.com/ that I saw a few times back in the day. There’s a version of the song on their Kill Rock Stars full-length but it’s faster and kind of indie-popped out in a way that is perfectly acceptable but kind of bummed me out when I heard it, having thought I’d found the song I’d been looking for. You can google around and found the cassette version on your own, if that’s the way you want to play it.

Score wise:

It’s “Bible Silver Corner” from Rodan’s album, Rusty, which was about all I listened to for months on end in 1994.

Some version of Debussy’s Sarabande II (or II. Sarabande, I don’t know how those things go) comes next and circles back for a sec at the end.

A piece called “Arm Drawing” from the 500 Days of Summer score (chopped up and looped and whatnot) does a lot of the heavy lifting.

The opening theme of Please Give, the (very good) Nicole Holofcener movie has become the memory palace’s unofficial theme for anytime PT Barnum shows up in a story.

OH: the thing under the intro is “Old New Bicycle” by Helvetia. It’s often the music under show intros.

There’s also a snippet of Beatles in there that I don’t know if anyone else will actually be able to hear.

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

Music: Two pieces here. Both straight out of a favorite summer of mine, maybe 1999. First (and last): “Another Sunday” by Tara Jane O’Neil and second, “Every Day a Sunrise, a Summer Every Year” by Telegraph Melts.

Music: Just two tracks this time. A loop from “In the Devil’s Territory” by Sufjan Stevens. Then “You’d be so Nice to Come Home to,” off of Nina Simone’s Live in Newport album. Incidentally, this track is one of my very, very favorite things that exists in the world. Also, it’s the second time i’ve used it in an episode. First time was the first one. A long time ago.

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.

Notes: This episode was originally commissioned for the fine, fine design and architecture podcast, 99% Invisible. Hear a shorter version (and discover more about said fine, fine podcast, here). Also note: 99% Invisible is produced by my friend, Roman Mars. Until he was modestly internet-famous, Roman’s image was nearly impossible to Google-image as you’d just get a bunch of Roman statuary.

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.

The Footnotes: I read a bunch about Joice Heth but, it turns out, I really only needed to read one thing: The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum’s America by a dude named Benjamin Reiss. It’s pretty kick-ass.

The Footnotes: Since this episode was a total bear, I read a lot about and by Sidis while trying to wrestle it into submission. There’s a perfectly readable, proper biography called The Prodigy that’s out of print but probably at your local library. Turns out the Sidis fanatics (and they are legion) think the author is pretty harsh on W.J., but, you know, sure. To dive right into the deep end: run, don’t walk, to Sidis.net, a lovingly curated compendium of most things Sidis. Scans of many of his books and articles. Links to outside articles. It’s not one stop shopping, but it’s like the directory at the mall. Don’t be scared off by the fact that the web-design looks like someone clicked on the “Crazy Conspiracy Theory” template. It’s really well put together.

The Ephemera: If you do read some of his actual writings, Sidis comes off rather well. However singular and odd his interests and, I suppose, obsessions, are he writes clearly (he’s not raving) and he’s often kind of funny in a super-dorky way. “Notes on the Collection of Transfers” is unreadable. But that’s only because no one can care about transfers as much as the author does. I defy you to. But, that said, Sidis comes off like a genial, almost charming tour guide to the world’s most boring museum. It’s hard not to like the guy.

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

A version of this story was originally commissioned for an exhibit at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in 2009. (Note, if you have a museum and want some audio that isn’t super boring, drop me a line).

Meanwhile, if you happen to be in Australia on August 1, A: lucky you, and B: you can hear episode 16, Secret Kitty on ABC’s history show at 2:00 p.m. local

There’s a lot written about Weyman. The most fun things to read are the original newspaper accounts (there’s a fun one from the Milwaukee Sentinal on google books; you can find his obituary on NYtimes.com). But the most comprehensive thing I read was from a New Yorker profile from 1968 (which, incidentally, spends pages on literally psychoanalyzing Weyman).

There’s plenty of great stuff written about the Fox sisters, including a book-length take (Talking to the Dead, by Barbara Weisberg) which appears to be all that. I’ll recommend a dynamite book called Occult America: The Secret History of how Mysticism Shaped Our Nation, which despite its hyperventilating, Dan Browny spoooooooky conspiracy title, is great and readable and scholarly at the same time. Great context. And, this is sort of an standing order: go to the NYTimes’ pre-1981 archive. There are some vintage stories about the Fox Sisters there.

I’ve read a lot about the ’04 Olympics (in order to write this article for Slate). I’ll recommend two things: a book about the anthropological exhibits called Anthropology Goes to the Fair. But most fun is a first hand account by one of Hick’s coaches that’s available in all of its absurdity here: aafla.org/6oic/OfficialReports/1904/1904lucas.pdf

I’ve also added a “donate” button to a new page (“Spare a Dime” at the top of the main page). People have asked for it. Really. IIII know! Who’d want to donate? Crazy right?

There’s a ton about Jones’ body (incidentally, this is the story I’ve gotten the most “I knew this story, but I like how you told it” sorts of emails about). For some reason, I was particularly charmed by a webpage straight out of Portsmouth, NH (R.I.P Yoken’s). They’ve got pictures of the preserved, dead Jones there too.

You can read the original articles in their entirety in several places online. (Why not go to the museum of hoaxes website to find it? it’s a fun site). The articles, incidentally, are wonderful. Really a work of genius of a particularly lovely sort.

You can read lots and lots about Minik Wallace. (So much so that I felt a little lame about doing it). There’s even a quite good American Experience documentary. However, special commendation has to go out to Kenn Harper, a First Nations author (I believe) from up Canada Way, who not only wrote the (seemingly) definitive Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of MInik, the New York Eskimo” and was the guy who got Minik’s father Qisuk’s bones repatriated. Amazing.

I love this story. I think my version’s pretty good, but the I love the story of John R. Brinkley. So much good stuff had to be left out to keep this podcast tight. There was a big biography that came out a few years ago called Charlatan that is very comprehensive. But I’d like to give a special shout out to a book called “Border Radio: Quacks, Yodelers, Pitchmen, Psychics and Other Amazing Broadcasters of the American Airwaves.” Hell, I’ll even give it an Amazon link. Because it is good (and tells all about Brinkley and the other people who followed his lead and broadcast from Mexico) and because one of its co-authors, a guy named Bill Crawford, gave me one of the best days I had in the last several years when he and a friend/colleague drove me down from Austin, past Brinkley’s Mansion in Del Rio, and down across the border to Acuna (where I interviewed the blind, current manager of a station that descended from Brinkley’s). Then back later that day through the high desert where we came up around this bend and I looked out and saw herds of animals grazing at sunset and learned that they were all Indian and African gazelles and Ibix and whatnot brought in to be hunted–turns out only native Texas animals are included in seasonal hunting laws. After which, I no longer mess with Texas.

Check your local listings here.

Episode 21, “a gas gas gas,” will air on Halloween on KUOW in Seattle.

I have finally succumbed. The memory palace is on twitter. Follow it if you like @thememorypalace

There is obviously tons and tons written about Poe and his death. The single most useful thing I found, however, was this sort of literature survey put out by an outfit called the Edgar Allan Poe Historical Society. m.

The Hoover Dam is rad. The sculpture is rad. The star map is super rad. And super ridiculous. Go see it. If it’s been awhile since you’ve gone to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s website, here’s an article about the sculpture.

This piece was premiered (if you will) as a live reading at Issue 2 of Pop Up Magazine in San Francisco. It was very fun.

Couple of notes: first, this escape inspired the movie The Great Escape. They of course, made it an allied escape. And, having produced this episode, I can relate: not only does no one want to sit through an hour and a half about clever Nazis, I found it a little weird empathizing (for the purposes of writing the podcast) with homesick members of the Third Reich–but I just love the thing about the river. I love that they screw themselves. Other thing: the captain in the story was eventually caught in Phoenix, though he lived successfully on the lam for some time. The kicker, however, is if you drank a St. Pauli beer back in the heyday of their questionable/skeezy “you never forget your first girl” ad campaigns with the buxom german barmaid, you helped pay Captain Wattenberg’s salary. He was the head of the St. Pauli brewery for decades.

Accounts of Sam’s life vary pretty wildly and can be pretty tricky to sort out. One of the best accounts (it’s gotta be the most comprehensive), it seems, is Paul E. Johnson’s book, Sam Patch, the Famous Jumper.

1. the memory palace cracked the iTunes Podcast Top 25 for the first time today. Pretty cool.

2. if you happen to be University of Illinois adjacent on Saturday at 6:00, you can hear episode 13, “high above lake michigan,” on their public radio station, WILL, a.m. 580.

I also had a story on Morning Edition that’s vaguely memory palacey. It’s about a big prop shop out here in Hollywood that’s shutting down.

You can read about Acoustic Kitty (yes, that’s actually what they called the project) all over the place–there were lots of news articles when the files were declassified several years ago. However, my favorite thing on the web is an actual declassified document. Even after the cat dies and the mission’s a total failure, the scientists clearly feel pretty awesome: despite being “convinced that the program would not lend itself to [their] highly specialized needs,” they declare victory in the quest to train a cat to go short distances, even if they can’t control to where, and proclaim it “a remarkable scientific achievement.” To which I say: way to go. You spent millions of 1966 dollars. Sliced open live animals. Inserted wires and microphones and zapped them with electrical charges and now they can go short distances. U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!

Episode 12, “these words, forever” will air on 94.9 KUOW in Seattle at 2:00 P.M. on Monday, 7/21/09

Best thing I read about Walker? A book called “Fillibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates” by Walter Oscar Scroggs, written in 1916. Thank you Google Books.

I ran across the Ellen Craft story twice recently, most powerfully in James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (which turns out to be a good audio book, incidentally).

A couple of more radio announcements coming soon…

I’m a full-on Columbian Exhibition of 1893 nerd. Have a ticket to it framed on our dining room wall. For all of your Chicago World’s Fair fact-needs, The Devil in the White City is the place to go. For your heartbreak and beauty needs, go to Jimmy Corrigan: the Smartest Kid on Earth, by Chris Ware.

I’ve loved this story for years and years. I was spurred into doing it for the podcast after flipping through David Milner’s book, Perfecting Sound Forever.

I’ve read about the Booths in several places (you kind of can’t avoid them), but I think I fell for Edwin’s story during the visit Sarah Vowell takes to see his statue in Gramercy Park in “Assasination Vacation.”

My friend, Tony Field produces a show called “Backstory with the History Guys.” A version of this story airs on their mother’s day special. www.backstoryradio.org

I first heard about the British fear of Franklin when I interviewed a Harvard Professor named Joyce Chaplin about her book The First Scientific American for a public affairs show out here in L.A.. It’s archived: http://www.scpr.org/programs/zocalo/index.html

For the second episode in a row, my plans got thwarted by facts. Bad Jobs #1 was supposed to be about these boys who sat in the dark in a tunnel dug into the seabed beneath Narragansett Bay between Newport and Jamestown, Rhode Island. The boys were working for the Navy during the War of 1812, sitting in the muddy tunnel in the middle of the night listening for subtle shifts in sound inside the narrow passage. If the sound changed there was a British Ship trying to slip into Newport Harbor under cover of night for a sneak attack. This story has fascinated me for at least a decade, since a friend told me about the boys one beautiful afternoon tooling around Fort Wetherill, an abandoned WWII gunnery on Jamestown (where they once looked for ships trying to slip into Newport Harbor for a sneak attack). Problem is, the story’s not true at all. Total fabrication, according to the folks at the Fort Adams historic site (well, not a total fabrication; it’s actually a couple of less-interesting phenomena conflated and enhanced with a healthy dose of freestyling). That’s the long way to say: tip of the hat to my friend Mose, who had an entirely true tale of other kids in tunnels at the ready while sitting at the movies the other day, waiting to be disappointed by The Watchmen.

I first read about the sad, sad Pierces in a book of Presidential profiles I got at a used bookstore. The book, upon further research, got a key detail wrong. I SO wish it were right, though: the way I first learned the story, Benny Pierce gets killed on the way to the inaugural. So, they’re on their way from New Hampshire; Jane is convinced that they are tempting the wrath of God; the train stops in Baltimore and Benny dies, proving it; she gets off the train; Franklin has to keep going because he’s about to be inaugurated as President of the United States. An epic, if apocryphal, story. Damn facts…

Most of the details in this one come from Pretty-Much-the-Greatest-Book-Ever, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro. If you read only one thirty five year old, thousand-some-odd page biography of an urban planner this year, make it that one.

Second song is “Berlin by Overnight” by Max Richter.

The song under the nun story is called “Swiss Ex-Lover” by Fight Bite.

Also fantastic? The New York Times online archives from 1849. I can nerd out on that biz for hours.