If you want to visit a good Wikipedia page—and I know you do—might I recommend Grieg’s music in popular culture? Out of context, it might be a little confusing, but that’s why I’m here. Grieg is referring, of course, to Edvard Grieg, a Norwegian late 19th-century composer, whose most notable work, his first Peer Gynt suite, has completely saturated pop culture. It’s okay if you don’t know it by name: you definitely do know it, though. Here’s my favorite example in semi-recent years, but maybe you have another one. Like I said, it’s a good Wikipedia page.

Peer Gynt, which comprises a total of two suites (though the first is significantly more known than the second, the second is still excellent) was initially a play written by Henrik Ibsen (of A Doll’s House fame, among numerous other plays, and one of the fathers of Modernism) for which Grieg wrote the incidental music. It was from this accompaniment that he comprised the two suites, now more performed than the initial play. Peer of Peer Gynt is a mischievous little protagonist from Norwegian fables who lies and tricks and womanizes his way through society (a much more devious antihero than our friend Petrouchka from Petrouchka). Ibsen, however, was interested in the earnestness of Peer despite his being a bad person, as men are often compelled to do in their art. Whatever, it’s not my play. It’s because of this brighter outlook on Peer’s story that we have this extremely colorful representation of the drama depicted in Peer Gynt.

Holger Czukay, who founded Krautrock legends Can, has died. “Czukay is also celebrated for his experiments with sampling before the advent of digital samplers, cutting up and splicing tape into recordings. He also pioneered what he called ‘radio painting’, using shortwave radios to record random snippets of sound and pasting them collage-style into recordings; ‘rhythm boxing’ was his description of how he used drum machines.” Czukay was 79.

Are you looking out the window at the rain* and thinking it’s a sign to go back to bed and start not only the day but this whole week again later? Well, too bad. It’s after Labor Day and everything counts now. Sorry. None of us likes it. There are no do-overs anymore. At least the new Kölsch comes out in a couple of weeks. Here’s a rare track with vocal accompaniment. Enjoy.

* It was raining when I wrote this, I don’t know if it is right now.

★★★★★ From the very first glimpse of the glow coming in around the blinds, the light looked good. The texture of the asphalt glittered wetly at the edges of the fast-receding puddles. If the sidewalk crowd was sparse, it was augmented by sharp-cut shadows and bright reflections on the glass and water. Knees and shoulders were out again. Helicopters gleamed like beetles. The neighboring roof deck lay in shadow but a couple squeezed together on a chaise anyway. A spot of sun glowed on the back of a hanging traffic sign; glazed bricks shone between third-floor windows of an ugly building; roof ducts and high windows flared. Uptown, high behind one shoulder, a white cloud moved against the blue, bright and small and solitary as the moon.

JARED is sitting in the White House basement. It used to be storage space. Now, like the administration upstairs, it’s mostly nothing. Once, Ronald Reagan wandered into the room and couldn’t find his way out for three hours. Before that, the space functioned as the first OSHA. There are still blood-borne pathogen workbooks strewn about. Michelle Obama didn’t have time to turn them all into compost.  

JARED feels tired, scared and useless. He is wearing a cardigan again and a t-shirt imprinted with the Sriracha rooster. He is scrolling through Instagram. It’s just pics of swimming pools and Lebron hanging out with friends plus Drake. GARY COHN, in gym clothes, enters.

GARY COHN [impatiently]: Why are you dressed like a rapping school teacher?

JARED [deflecting]: Where have you been?

GARY COHN [fake snoring and lying]: Tax reform with Mnuchin.

JARED [shrugging]: I’m just tired

GARY COHN [truthfully]: It’s a job, Jared. Not—I don’t know. I don’t get tired anymore after the stuff Pete Carroll sent me. Which was the stuff Bill Clinton sent him.

JARED [reading his phone]: Did you see this? Another fucking email from John.

GARY COHN [mocking Hamilton]: Here comes the General.

[JARED stares blankly but not to neg GARY COHN. He doesn’t understand why his mentor is singing.]

“I used to like watching football, but I’m having trouble because of the preponderance of concussions. What should I do?”—Pigskin Pat

You probably shouldn’t let your kids grow up to be football players, it’s true. Maybe let them be punters. That seems maybe the safest. Field goal kickers, too. But if your kids are sports-inclined, incline them into some other sports. I thought they would have figured out a cure for concussions in football by now. Lasers. That’s generally the cure for everything I imagine. But probably some different kind of helmet. They went from leather helmets to these hard plastic ones because everyone had broken craniums. Not a great thing to get. But concussions are pretty bad, too. Football players endure tons of hits to the head over the course of even one game. Get one concussion and the next one is easier to get. Get a bunch and you are forever changed.

By watching football, are you complicit in its crimes?

If New York is a city built on Pretend then the biggest lie we tell ourselves is that summer ends the second we get back from Labor Day. While summer technically lasts another two weeks, and you will still be sweltering well into October—no one remembers this now because it seems like it happened in another lifetime, but for the last few years the days leading up to Christmas were routinely in the low ’60s—we’re all complicit in the lie that it’s already autumn and we need to focus on our very important jobs so we can make money to see the groundbreaking cultural performances and eat at the exciting new restaurants and buy the dazzling “new” phones and generally throw ourselves into all of the other activities we embrace to help us forget our lives are largely meaningless. Anyway, good morning. Presumably you are now addressing your end-of-summer inbox and feverishly attempting to fool yourself into believing that it’s fall, the best season that we have here in New York. As skeptical as I am of almost all human endeavors, on this occasion I cannot bring myself to mock your deluded desire to invest what you do with significance. Once winter descends all hope you have will be extinguished for many months at a minimum and even if you make it through, the other side you come out on will see you scarred, sadder and less likely than ever to find the strength to convince yourself that any of it was worth the anguish. So go ahead, pretend that things are important. It won’t make a difference but there is only a little while left to you to imagine that it will. Anyway, here’s music. Enjoy. [Via]

★★★★ The morning looked and felt like autumn but it was heading somewhere warmer and thicker, and going there fast. Children were setting up a lemonade-and-cookie stand in the forecourt, for hurricane relief. Sweat rose as the skin tried to catch up to the rising temperature. The midday clouds were big enough to cut off the sun for interludes, so the heat could recede. On the radar, a tiny clump of heavy storms sped by just off the tip of Manhattan. The sun came back and the clouds were moving fast. Stubby oval clouds lay side by side, angled in a row, like dinner rolls on a baking sheet. To the west were silver coins and fish scales and the pebbly surfaces of broken metal ingots. From upstairs, it was all cut by brilliant orange streaks, crossing at oblique angles. The night air currents made a closed interior door creak and rattle till it was opened.