FRESH AIR
Pro golfer John Daly [pictured, above, with unnamed Girl Gone Wild] has won tournaments on five continents, including two of the PGA tour’s four majors. He’s also gambled away a couple of fortunes, trashed various hotel rooms, houses and cars, married four times, and downed enough booze to land himself in a string of emergency
rooms and rehab clinics. These days, he says, he lives on Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. “I guess you could say,” Daly writes in his recent memoir, that “I’m not exactly a poster boy for moderation.” Daly’s behavior has earned him fines and suspensions from the PGA, but fans adore him — in part because he’s a plain-spoken Arkansas boy who doesn’t try to cover up his flaws. Also because people love to watch him hit a ball: He’s a huge bear of a man blessed with the flexibility of a fencer, and when he turns his shoulder into a swing and releases his power into a golf ball, it travels eye-popping distances. In addition to that memoir — titled My Life In and Out of the Rough: The Truth Behind All that Bull**** You Think You Know About Me — Daly has just published a golfer’s guide. The title, characteristically, is Golf My Own Damn Way: A Real Guy’s Guide to Chopping Ten Strokes Off Your Score.
THE WORLD CAFE
Vampire Weekend has emerged from the fertile New York indie-rock scene: All four of its members met while attending Columbia University. Still, they stick out of the crowd for two reasons. First, their endearingly wordy lyrics make Vampire Weekend’s songs sound collegiate in the best possible way. And second, their unique sound inventively mixes contemporary American indie-rock, Western classical music and South African traditional music. The band strived to capture its Afro-pop fandom in its songwriting, and it did well: Stylish songs such as “A-Punk” blend ska and woodwinds, while “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa” invokes African dance music, not to mention lyrics about raging hormones. Listen Now
VAMPIRE WEEKEND: Mansard Roof