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The Times Travel section offers a rare budget focus this week--although their idea of cheap travel includes $150 a night for lodging. Still, there's L.A. by subway; Chicago outdoors; and Paris's left and right banks. Plus Monterey (a jazz festival and a tomato festival) and an essay on the mental snapshots that supplement a photo journal.

From the Style section: keeping off the grass, or not, in Central Park.

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There's a new song, kinda, up on the web site. It's called "Shine," and it's actually from December, so a lot of people around here and a few people elsewhere have heard it already, but it hasn't been online before.

A lot of my songs are love songs only by negation--they're about love that's gone away. When my friend Philip asked if I wanted to play anything at his wedding, all those songs seemed like bad omens. So I wrote this one--not about love lost, but about love found and love kept. It's not that my other songs are sad and this one is happy; this one, like most of them, has some joy and some pain in it. But this one's a love song.