THE SILENCE by Don DeLillo

 

The worst thing that could happen to all of us, at times, seems less like a nuclear holocaust that would render the planet a charred cinder than all of us being cast into our own self-designed hells. What if we had to talk to each other and depend on the function of collective wisdom and planning just to exist another day? What if the lights went out, the internet went blank, planes fell from the sky, and there were no distractions to mummify our individual sense of terror?Don DeLillo’s 2020  novel The Silence tells the story of five people gathered in a Manhattan apartment on Super Bowl Sunday in 2022, when a sudden, unexplained global event causes all digital technology to cease functioning. As usual, DeLillo stays in the world he knows and has chronicled so well over the decades—that of privileged white Americans relying on their powers of rationalization to convince themselves that things are fine and normal, even as the various systems that gave them affluence in the first place—finance, science, political skullduggery, technology, college-level obfuscation—fall apart and cease to operate. It might be said that DeLillo’s fictions have always been about the failure of belief systems that once seemed to explain and define the universe his characters inhabit. Just as the advances in science, philosophy, capitalism, ideology, and the rest en masse replaced the gods and became the de facto religious beliefs of the modern era, DeLillo highlights the death of these old-new gods. He shows how individual and collective dedication to various beliefs about how things *should* be leaves us clueless, comic, full of dread—doubling down on convictions that no longer convince anyone, at the core of their being, that anything is fixed in place.The Silence is that tale again, in brief—a terse and lyrical ode to a world that has literally run down, suddenly and seemingly permanently without the power to fuel our commerce and distractions. It is a comedy written on a philosopher’s sketchpad, a setup for a joke that just ends—no punchline. It makes you think, What the hell just happened?—which is the point. I’m inclined to think that’s the wrong question. Rather, we might ask: How long have we been walking in our sleep, earbuds connected to cell phones playing music we don’t even like? Has it all been white noise, in all things? Something worth asking—and a book worth reading from a great American novelist.

 

A MASTERPIECE FROM JOHN CHEEVER

 
The Wapshot Chronicle  is John Cheever's first novel, published in 1957, and it is a timeless masterpiece of expressing the sorrow, the pity and the tragicomic of middle class life .  The titular family consists of eccentrics, all pursuing their varied and impulse driven distractions. The novel follows Leander Wapshot, an aging patriarch and ferryboat pilot in the fictional New England town of St. Botolphs, as he grapples with his eccentric family and fading relevance. His sons, Moses and Coverly, leave home to seek purpose in a world that seems increasingly absurd and disjointed. Moses navigates a series of romantic misadventures and professional aimlessness, while Coverly wrestles with existential confusion and sexual identity. Their cousin Honora, a wealthy and domineering matriarch, exerts control over the family’s finances and future. Through their missteps and revelations.  All such activities show to be vanities and the characters, despite vague assertions and protests from time to time of declaring themselves fully motivated citizens, show themselves to be a rudderless lot, a family in decline, each in their own way sensing that a veil has lifted and the illusion of their own normality is evaporating , but who still maintain that all is fine with their oddball takes on reality. Cheever has one of the greatest, if not the greatest prose styles of his generation, an elegant tone that guides savvy and sympathetic sentences , with an anonymous narrator that never reveals his or her hand, keeping matters in the third person, showing intimate knowledge of the lives of this family and their ideas as such, but withholds any outright suggestions as to how anything resolves . He wordsmithery is a marvel of elegant brevity with  just enough detail, his treatment of seasonal light is brilliant conveyed. Also on display is a sad ruthlessness in how he leads the reader toward the inevitable. The effect is comic, but the laughs are not slapstick but more like a melancholic jolt of recognition, as a reader’s own experience realizes the folly our gathering of the generationally related have embarked on.

SOBRIETY GETS THE HEAT TO THE MEAT

 

So in the nineties I was in a men's intimacy group, a bunch of sober guys who wanted to talk about personal matters, issues, conflictions and compulsions with other sober men on a level much deeper and more personal than what offer up at a standard AA meeting. So this fellow, an alcohol treatment counselor ironically, had just finished a very long monologue on his sexual hang-ups, with a good number of side trips through other subjects that managed to be both gamy and banal, and when he stopped talking, the rest of us rose from our seats, chairs, the two sofas that were crammed in this studio apartment . So this fellow from South Oakland , whose apartment it happened to be, had a TV set hooked up to a VHS player, and a lone, unmarked cassette laying on top of it.

"Let's TAKE A BREAK AND RELAX, FELLAS."

So the guy from South Oakland grabbed the cassette and shoved it into the video player. So then the fellow from treatment with the curated sexual hang-ups looked up to the screen . Then you could nearly hear his jaw drop. Imagine a rusty creak, a loud , rasping scrape of severely oxidized metal.

Porn stars flashed on the TV screen, wherein guys in seventies porn mustaches were putting their engorged presences anywhere the actresses would allow. Mod Squad music, cheesy fuzz tone guitars and Farfisa fantasias, poured from the TV's tinny speaker. "Yeah" Mr.South Oakland muttered,"Get that, hit that, fug, this is the stuff…" The room filled with cigar smoke and reeked of coffee left on the burner too long, as both porn movies and comatose confessions of sexual impropriety filled the room.

FROM WONDERFULLY VAGUE BUT EVOCATIVE TO MUMBLING AND MUDDLED

Greil Marcus has a gift for crafting poetic, wide-ranging essays that explore rock and pop music, popular culture, and the unexpected intersections between songs and the historical forces that shape our lives. At his best, Marcus opens our eyes—urging us to listen more closely, to dig into the motivations of artists, and to sharpen our senses in a quixotic hope of nudging humanity toward some kind of upgrade.  His finest work remains Lipstick Traces, a 1989 doorstop of a book that ambitiously surveys what its subtitle calls the “Secret History” of the 20th century. Marcus argues—though never too directly—that the century’s art movements formed scattered, often chaotic pockets of resistance to the numbing status quo. These movements, whether intentional or accidental, pushed back against a system designed to keep industrial populations distracted and docile while the powerful consolidated wealth.  For Marcus, it’s all connected: surrealism, cubism, Russian cinema, Cabaret Voltaire, blues, bebop, Coltrane, Elvis, the Sex Pistols, Bob Dylan. Lipstick Traces is a whirlwind of baroque poetics and intellectual hyperbole. It doesn’t offer firm conclusions so much as it suggests, hints, and gestures toward meaning. Like Ken Burns with a sharper edge, Marcus assembles a dazzling collage of names, dates, and trends, then lets the implications hang in the air, unresolved. He writes as though perched outside of history, watching the ambitions and failures of brilliant men and women unfold. The result is part prose poem, part critical impressionism—a book that invites readers to construct their own narrative from the fragments he presents.Years later, Folk Music  arrives in the same style: a Burnsian drift through five essential Bob Dylan songs, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “Murder Most Foul.” But this time, the magic falters. Without a clear thesis or guiding argument, the book feels like a compressed mashup of dates, names, songs, controversies, and half-remembered cultural moments. The connective tissue is thin, and the absence of a coherent line of inquiry robs the book of momentum or purpose.Marcus has written five other books on Dylan—many of them insightful, often beautifully written. But Folk Music reads like a retread, as if he’s run out of fresh things to say about the former Mr. Zimmerman. It’s hasty, clumsily structured, riddled with awkward transitions. At times, it resembles the ramblings of a once-brilliant mind hoping that if it keeps talking long enough, something profound might emerge. This time, it doesn’t.

(An early review of a Dixie Dregs concert at San Diego State University, 1979, originally published in the UCSD Daily Guardian).

 Progressive rock—once a bold experiment in stretching the boundaries of popular music—has largely faded into a relic of its own ambition. What began as an earnest attempt to fuse rock with classical complexity and conceptual depth often collapsed under the weight of its own excess. Bands like Kansas and Styx, with their theatrical bombast and overwrought arrangements, helped steer the genre into a cul-de-sac of self-importance. Today, prog survives mostly as a niche curiosity, more admired for its audacity than its relevance—less a living movement than a museum piece, endlessly referencing itself. Right? Am I right? 

Hardly.

While progressive or “art rock” is often marred by overwrought theatrics and uneven execution, some bands continue to uphold a high standard of musicianship and creativity. Chief among them is America’s own Dixie Dregs, whose May 2 concert at SDSU’s Montezuma Hall was a striking reminder that this genre, when approached with discipline and imagination, still has something vital to offer.

The performance demonstrated that five musicians—guitarist Steve Morse, bassist Andy West, drummer Rod Morgenstein, keyboardist T. Lavitz, and violinist Allen Sloan—can reinvigorate a form many have dismissed as obsolete. Their music didn’t just impress; it engaged, challenged, and ultimately reaffirmed the value of instrumental rock when it’s crafted with purpose.

What sets the Dregs apart isn’t just their technical command—though they possess that in abundance—but their commitment to structure and clarity. Where many progressive and fusion acts rely on flashy displays to mask thin ideas, the Dregs, guided by Morse’s compositional vision, achieve a rare sense of cohesion. Their pieces unfold with logic and momentum, allowing their virtuosity to serve the music rather than distract from it.

Drawing from a wide spectrum of influences—classical, jazz fusion, funk, hard rock, and bluegrass—the Dregs don’t settle for superficial genre-blending. Instead, they weave these elements into intricate, interlocking arrangements that feel deliberate and unified. Their music avoids the disjointedness that plagues lesser acts and, refreshingly, sidesteps the burden of clumsy lyrics altogether.

Steve Morse stands out as one of the most distinctive voices in modern guitar. His playing blends the precision of Julian Bream, the agility of Roy Clark, the intensity of John McLaughlin, and the tonal inventiveness of early Jeff Beck. His solos are unpredictable yet coherent, moving fluidly through classical harmonies, rock dynamics, rapid-fire runs, and country-inflected phrasing—all executed with astonishing clarity and control. Among his contemporaries, only Allen Holdsworth rivals him in technical depth.

Yet Morse doesn’t dominate the spotlight. He shares it generously, allowing his bandmates to contribute equally to the group’s dynamic interplay. West and Morgenstein form a rhythm section that’s both agile and grounded, handling the band’s complex shifts with precision. Lavitz and Sloan, meanwhile, match Morse’s energy with their own inventive flourishes. Their exchanges—at times reminiscent of the Mahavishnu Orchestra—are full of momentum and wit, building to moments of exhilarating intensity.The Dixie Dregs aren’t preserving a relic—they’re redefining what progressive rock can be. Their music is intelligent, skillful, and deeply attuned to what makes instrumental rock compelling. For a taste of their vision, listen to _Night of the Living Dregs_ (Capricorn) or their latest, _Dregs of the Earth_ (Arista).

BOMBAST :APOCALYPSE NOW

 "...What I'm getting at is this: a native village is bombed and the bombs happen to be beautiful when they land. In fact, it would be odd if all that sudden destruction did not liberate some beauty. The form the bomb takes in its explosion may be...a picture of the potentialities (of the thing) it destroyed. So let us accept the idea that the bomb is beautiful..." ---Norman Mailer, 

 The quotation in question is classic Norman Mailer, circa 1963—an era when he often offered wild-eyed metaphors to drive home a point. To be fair, the passage is taken out of context from a dense, metaphysical discussion, and Mailer certainly wasn’t endorsing destruction for the sake of aesthetics. Yet the quote underscores a persistent issue of aesthetics, one that’s vividly present in Francis Ford Coppola’s *Apocalypse Now*. In many ways, Coppola seems to have embraced the idea that “the bomb is beautiful,” crafting a Vietnam War film brimming with explosions, firefights, and death—so visually arresting it could hang in a gallery. Its spectacle is breathtaking, but that very scale becomes its undoing, preventing *Apocalypse Now* from achieving the deeper film it aspired to be.

Coppola and screenwriter John Milius draw heavily from Joseph Conrad’s *Heart of Darkness*. The story centers on a CIA assassin named Willard (Martin Sheen), who, drowning in existential despair while holed up in a seedy Saigon hotel, is recruited for one last mission. His target: Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a brilliant Special Forces officer who’s gone rogue in Cambodia, establishing a cult-like kingdom in the jungle. Willard’s assignment—coldly phrased by command—as to “terminate his command,” sends him on a surreal journey upriver with a small patrol boat and crew. As in Conrad’s tale, the river voyage becomes a metaphor for descending into madness and cultural dislocation. The deeper they venture, the more rationality dissolves. The film unfolds more as a series of stylized set pieces than as a tightly woven narrative. A beach assault, led by a surfing-obsessed officer (Robert Duvall), is staged with ludicrous bravado in the midst of chaos. Later, a surreal USO show floats in on a game-show-lit barge, and a riverside Army outpost—bombed senseless—houses a platoon of shell-shocked soldiers firing at ghosts. The jungle slowly devours Willard’s crew as they drift further into absurdity and detachment. Rather than exploring themes through character or dialogue, Coppola leans into visual extravagance. The result: a film that loses grip on Conrad’s psychological and political critique. *Heart of Darkness* used plot and prose to evoke the horrors of imperialism, *Apocalypse Now* substitutes spectacle for coherence. 

At its best, the cinematography (courtesy of Vittorio Storaro) renders warfare with a haunting, sculptural beauty. But therein lies the issue—battle becomes an aestheticized experience, numbingly detached from blood, pain, or moral weight. Coppola’s Willard is a blank slate, conveying little emotion or transformation, which leaves the viewer distanced rather than absorbed. Even the climax, where Willard finally reaches Kurtz’s compound, falls flat. Brando, shrouded in shadows, mumbles cryptic musings on horror, judgment, and moral dualism—statements that lack coherence or impact. Kurtz, seemingly ready for death, offers himself to Willard, who kills him during a simultaneous ritual slaughter. The moment echoes Conrad’s “The horror! The horror!” but Coppola fails to translate its visceral terror to the screen. Efforts to tether the film back to Conrad—via narration written by journalist Michael Herr—are uneven. The voiceover swings wildly in tone, from literary to slang, often contradicting itself. In contrast, Conrad’s Marlow subtly evolves throughout the narrative, pulling the reader with him into darkness. Coppola’s Willard drifts unmoored. In the end, *Apocalypse Now* is worth seeing not for its insights, but for the sheer audacity of its vision. Coppola’s talent remains undeniable—films like *The Godfather* and *You’re a Big Boy Now* cement that. *Apocalypse Now* also benefits from standout performances: Martin Sheen is convincingly haunted, Robert Duvall is gloriously unhinged, and Dennis Hopper crafts a gonzo archetype of the wartime hippie. As for Brando, his Kurtz borders on parody—whether it’s willful defiance or minimalist genius is debatable, but the final scenes are undeniably inert. For all its noise and ambition, *Apocalypse Now* ultimately falters under the weight of its own spectacle. It’s a masterclass in cinematic technique, but a muddled meditation on meaning.

---

THE BOUNTY OF "BEING THERE"

 

With a flurry of hype preceding its debut in San Diego, it’s understandable why someone might approach director Hal Ashby’s new film, Being There, with a “show me” attitude usually limited to citizens of Missouri. The film, based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski (who also wrote the screenplay), had opened three months earlier in New York and Los Angeles, and the advance reports from taste-making critics sounded like a chorus singing the same old tune: Being There, they harmonized, was indeed a comic masterpiece—a work of art, proof that American filmmakers can make movies that do more than satisfy an audience’s urge for the cheap vicarious thrill. Feeling burned by what I thought was payola-influenced propaganda for Kramer vs. Kramer—and the irrational rush of national and local film writers to reaffirm the majority opinion—I expected a downright drag. The new TV campaign announced, “…this time the critics are unanimous.”  I approached Being There with my own case of “show me.”

Well—surprise. Being There is, in fact, a good film that gives the audience a rare dose of “something to think about” while supplying a constant stream of funny stuff. Even more surprising was Kosinski’s screenplay, with which he, to use an arcane adjective, miraculously salvages what worth there was in his weakest novel and retools it to fit the medium like a nut and bolt.Kosinski’s novel concerned the doings of a gardener with intellectual disabilities named Chance, whose worldview is limited to tending a garden and watching unwholesome amounts of TV. He’s forced to leave the only home he’s known when the old man who cared for him dies. Nattily dressed in a suit from the old man’s wardrobe, Chance meets Eve Rand, wife of Benjamin Rand—a dying multimillionaire industrialist and kingmaker courted by presidents, senators, and foreign dignitaries. Chance’s name is eventually misconstrued as  “Chauncey Gardiner.” When a Soviet ambassador recites his favorite Russian poet, Chance simply smiles and nods. His vague, uncertain replies—rooted in television and gardening metaphors—are mistaken by others as visionary truths. These desperate elites, hungry for a voice of optimism in a world of money, power, and deadpan cynicism, cling to his half-wit utterances as if they’re the insights of a poet.

Ashby must have had a long talk with Kosinski and given him some needed pointers. Gardener is taken to be a man of supreme taste and intellect. He impresses Benjamin enough to earn an introduction to the President. Asked what the country should do to stimulate economic “growth,” Chance draws from the only field he knows—gardening—and delivers a homily about strong roots and springtime renewal. From there, he’s catapulted into national celebrity. The President, enchanted by “Chauncey Gardiner’s” unique philosophical optimism, quotes him (with due credit) during a televised State of the Union speech. The President, impressed by "Chauncey Gardiner's" philosophical optimism, quotes him during a televised State of the Union speech. Chance attracts attention from a leading business magazine, appears on a talk show, is investigated by the CIA and FBI, and impresses a Soviet ambassador who thinks he is a genius.

Kosinski’s novel was a shaggy dog story. Once the punchline landed, readers had to wade through too many pages watching the same joke play out in minor variations. Kosinski, dealing with a genre—the comic novel—that didn’t suit him, couldn’t quite develop the premise. His real strength as a novelist lies in grim fatalism. His best characters—cast-iron, post-existential types brutalized by life—navigate bleak and violent encounters with an eerie grace. His prose, terse and distanced, has elevated novels like Steps, The Painted Bird, The Devil Tree, and Blind Date.

But in Being There, his detached tone left the humor dead on the page. Fortunately, Ashby coaxed him into adjusting that tone for the screen. The dialogue remains spare, but the lines carry greater weight. Ashby pulls powerful performances from his cast, bypassing Kosinski’s subtleties and translating them into broader comedy.

Peter Sellers, like Chance, is magical. Where the novel’s character was flat and abstract, Sellers brings him to life as a wide-eyed, well-meaning idiot savant—an uncomprehending soul riding the wave of events that lift him ever higher. Shirley MacLaine as Eve, Melvyn Douglas as Benjamin, and Jack Warden as the President all flesh out their roles with an unerring sense of closed-system gullibility. Ashby wisely avoids buffoonery. He has his actors treat their characters’ quirks as givens within everyday interaction. There’s a matter-of-factness about the film that I admire. Being There manages to be funny without descending into slapstick or drawing-room farce. This perspective reflects Kosinski's belief that life consists of random events—hence the name "Chance"—that influence the course of history in ways humans think they control.

 

 

Woody Allen's "Manhattan"

 

A vulgar comparison, perhaps, but it’s possible to think of writer/director Woody Allen as a latter-day Jerry Lewis. As with the usually denigrated Lewis, Allen's film persona is a paranoid who finds the world he knows conspiring to put him in the worst light. The bumbling Everyman, where social ineptitude is first nature, a superpower that benefits no one.  As with, Lewis, Allen’s characters are variations on a theme of failure, bad posture, poor self-esteem, is someone so lacking in finesse, agility, or aptitude in the well-heeled that most attempts to emulate sophisticated manners are inevitably catastrophic. This theme runs throughout all of Allen's films, with a central preoccupation with sex. Allen rarely gets any, and when he does, it never comes off as the instruction manuals or the Playboy philosophy promised. Allen presents himself as a victim of the sexual revolution's propaganda, he is Norman Mailer’s “ prisoner of sex” someone furiously trying to make his relationships with women adhere to a set of rose-hued promises.

Allen’s themes are deeper than what one could extrapolate from Jerry Lewis and Allen, long our favored conspicuously intellectual filmmaker, expanded his theme into a murkier tableau. Manhattan, comedy, is something of a treatise on what's wrong with modern man: a lack of moral certitude, the silence of God and man's attempt to fill the void with his own concepts, the meaninglessness of language, the obsession with surface. and the lack of spiritual reflection. All these strands, culled from the books of Tolstoy Sartre. Burroughs, and especially the films of Bergman, are all touched on during the film. Luckily, Allen, the writer and director, has developed a perfectly coherent visual style and a sense of dialogue that makes the film less foreboding than it sounds.

The story revolves around someone named Isaac Davis (Allen), a high paid writer of a trendy TV comedy who quits his job so he can work on a novel exposing the spiritual vacuity of the denizens of Manhattan. He is divorced from his bisexual wife, who left him for another woman, and who is writing a memoir that reveals the touchiest aspects of their relationships. Davis has taken up with a seventeen-year-old girl named Tracy (Mariel Hemingway), a bright teenager who loves Davis but whose love he rejects in the interest of a writer named Mary (Diane Keaton). who is currently dating his best friend. the already-married Yale (Michael) Murphy), on the sly. Davis waits for the two to break up before he makes his move. Mary and Davis finally get together, Davis breaks the relationship with Tracy but, after two weeks, Mary and Yale are seeing each other again. leaving Davis in the cold. Davis rushes. to catch Tracy, on her way to England to attend school, and the two rekindle their relationship. That, fundamentally, is the plot from beginning to end. Though the particulars don't promise much at first, Allen's Memorex ear for dialogue makes Manhattan one of the better serio-comic films in years. The characters are well-educated professionals, mostly writers, who walk around New York City's haunts Central Park, Greenwich Village. uptown publisher parties-rattling off vague utterances that sound nice, but which evaporate under close inspection. At a pro-ERA benefit, Davis listens to a novelist who tells the theme behind his new book to an audience of enthralled listeners.

"This woman has never had an orgasm," says the writer, "she suffers from the quintessential emptiness of the age. She meets a man who is all essence. They make love. She has an orgasm. and then she dies." "I had an orgasm once," pipes in a comely but vacant-eyed blonde, "but my analyst told me it was the wrong kind…."  "That's never happened to me," says a bemused Davis, "even the worst one I ever had was right on the money."

Manhattan is the best made of all of Allen's films, and may establish a standard by which his future ms will be judged. Gone is the distressingly artificial intellectualism of the previous Interiors a film so text bookish that it was inseparable in content from any recent Bergman offering. The camera shots are spare and well-framed. basically, a series of medium close-up static shots that uses the screen as a kind of stage and allows the actors maximum leeway for effective facial expressions The cast is generally superb. but the biggest surprise is the young Hemingway, whose portrayal of a bright teen is remarkably unforced and natural. The black and white photography by Gordon Willis leaves something to be desired. though. The texture is too stylized, unnatural and washed-out in vocation of grays that have the resolution of a newspaper photo. Likewise. Allen's use of Gershwin archly-romantic music, intended no doubt as an ironic counterpart. is too much. The music doesn't underscore or suggest irony. but rather points to it. The film's point is clear enough without the ironic counterpoint the music might provide. The material is strong enough.

a note on Tom Petty's Damn the Torpedoes

Tom Petty has had problems with his image from the start. A thoroughly enjoyable and likable mainstream rock and roller in my book, Petty and the Heartbreakers first emerged on the scene with the sudden glut of arty New York New Wave bands like Television, Talking Heads and The Ramones, and was mistakenly categorized as being a punk outfit. After some exposure to his first record made it obvious that the Heartbreakers had little to do with the aesthetics of American punk posey (American new wave, like it or not, is loaded with semi-tough intellectuals who compromise a new generation of native "art-rockers," a dread thought to many who think being dumb somehow places you in a state of grace and frees you from good manners, healthy diets,and other conventions of everyday life: the classical artists' conceit), one too many critics made note of the similarity between Petty's nasal, braying voice and that of old Byrds helmsman Roger McGuinn, and concluded that the Heartbreakers were a band stuck in emulating the pop-rock shtick of the 60s. Petty, thankfully, is a feisty counter-puncher with enough good sense to ignore what others, aware, want him to be. Damn The Torpedoes, his new record, clears the ground, and should at once establish that Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are their own men who play their own kind of rock and roll in a way that's all too rare: straight ahead, with conviction and feeling, without affectation or chest-thumping baloney. At the risk of sounding as though I'm over-reaching for a comparison, I consider Petty to be the closest thing to a Graham Parker that America has. Like Parker, Petty's lyrical persona is of someone who's overwhelmed by the vicissitudes of everyday life who, through a visage of someone scratching his head in a state of anger, confusion, and frustration, achieves a kind of calculated artlessness in his expression. There is little in Petty's words one would consider the equal of some of rock's better wordsmiths: nothing on the par with the Zen-like ambiguities of Steely Dan, the colloquized surrealism of the late Lowell George, the compounded paradoxes of Elvis Costello, or the sublimely etched ironies of Randy Newman. Rather, Petty's main lyrical strength is his directness. Like Parker, Bob Seger (when he's not being morose) or Garland Jefferies, Petty demonstrates that he can cut to the cause of disagreement, emotional snafus where equal combinations of anger and self-loathing make an ugly tattoo on a young man’s thin skin.

A TAKE ON JETHRO TULL , IN GENERAL

Jethro Tull was a band of superb musicians who played music that was decidedly more work than pleasure to bear with. There's no denying that leader and chief composer Ian Anderson could cook up artful and impressive ensemble pyrotechnics for this or any number of the other versions of Jethro Tull to blaze through. The leader's ideas were limited, however, and one-note throughout the band's peak and into their decline. English folk traditions wedded with baroque fussiness, wheezy flute solos over craggy hard rock interludes, much of it seasoned with the admittedly agreeable sweet and sour fills and riffing from longtime guitarist Martin Barre. Skill and discipline aside, though, the plentiful progressive/art rock elements of JT's music were directionless. This flaw worsened as soon as Anderson responded to the grandiosity of Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer by going for the long format of single-song projects such as Thick as a Brick and Passion Play. Bits and pieces create sparks and actually ignite on both discs, but soon enough you're in a maze of a tricky time-signatures and agitated changes that are less inspiring and moving thematically. It was at this point in their career that Tull became a cure for insomnia. I'm the first to admit that Jethro Tull had "pretty parts", but I would reserve that classification for those musical moments where a shining bit of ensemble work actually clicked and highlighted a fine band raging happily along with some problematic time signatures. In that vein,

I rather like the Martin Barre—composed introduction to "Minstrel in the Gallery", a masterpiece of quirky transitions and sculpted dissonance that rises to actual art. Compression and brevity are the keys to those instances when JT catches my attention, but as often as not Anderson refuses to move from his signature amalgam of styles he likes and provides them is needed, or even effective, in the then-mistaken belief that length of composition and promiscuously convolutions of theme equals serious art. I was always one who preferred their progressive rock not to drag along the road. Lyrically, principle songwriter Ian Anderson is not so stunning; he had an effective light touch with imagery in the early work like "Living in the Past" or the particularly riveting tune "Nothing to Say"; 'though perhaps guised in a fictional persona, Anderson, all the same, connects with a convincing humanity as matters of being alive without certainty are sussed through impressionistically and, yes, concisely, closer to true poetry. The man had a knack, in the day, of getting to the point and getting you to think about things other than material gain. That wordsmithing, I think, has been far less in evidence since their career took off, from 'Aqualung" onward.

 Their   body of work exhibits more than enough eclectic ingenuity to confirm that Ian Anderson is a man of solid musicianship. And kudos to him for maintaining one of the tightest and best disciplined group of musicians I've come across in a musically busy rock band. That said, Anderson wanted some extended suite  glories that were the sweet spot for  Zappa, Yes and Genesis (quality varies according to taste, of course) so he wrote this, a two-sided song meant as a serious piece of concert/theater music. What draws this down fatally is the sheer cement thickness of the lyrics, which seem to be going about something grave and scandalous but which are rendered in language so oblique that a reader/listener feels neither gravity nor is scandalized and likely couldn't care less. In     between all the verbiage are the instrumental parts, some of them fine, very fine, some even brilliant in the playing, drawing on old English and Celtic influences, the classics and certainly some hard rock intrusions; much of it , however, is musically unconnected, much of the      instrumental passages devolve into longish riffy filler , and then Anderson appears again , braying more and more about this matter he can't be clear about. I listened to it once when it was released and was impressed but the sheer effort, the workman like professionalism. Maybe I thought it was good. A second and third try to get through TAAB merely   told me that this was one of the dullest albums of the decade.

ANDY EDWARDS DECLARES WAR ON JAZZ SNOBBERY

 Andy Edwards is a manic YouTuber , a retired fusion drummer, music educator who presents the public with a wild assortment of critiques about nearly all things music; the depth of his love , no , let us say passion for music is obvious, his jeremiads are full of distractions, meltdowns, excoriations and self-recrimination, but his knowledge of the genres he concentrates on is incontestable. His the kind of music buddy you want to have, a contrarian who can make a good argument for his against-the-grain views. I can't stand his opinions most of the time, and I can't get enough of him most of the time. He is a Brit, he is Brit centric and proud, and he's a hoot,

On this posting in 2024, he insists that jazz has become an elitist music, the ad-libs of snobs and the snot-nosed.  So jazz has been absorbed by the mainstream and is now considered High Culture. It's a tendency that is , in many cases, inevitable. If the form as any resilient character as it gains popularity, it will be canonized and presented to the world from that point as being among the best things that society is capable of, elegant, inventive, beautiful. This happened with Theater, a wholly disreputable art form intended for lowlifes, beggars, fish merchants, the rabble in general, dealing with popular themes of lust, betrayal, revenge, always revenge, and expressed in loud and exclamatory terms to an audience that was in large part illiterate. Shakespeare wrote his plays to enthrall, distract, beguile, amuse and overall entertain an audience with it in mind to make a living, not create art that defined Literature as we understand it. History seems to have an unpredictable irony, as the elevation of art forms originating in the lower and marginalized quarters of society being elevated, after generations of changing standards and fresher habits of analysis, to the become something associated with a more sophisticated class of humanity.

Being in- the -moment is what jazz is about, but not the only thing, since brilliant improvisors required a musical super structure on which to create their spontaneous counter-compositions. Interesting that a body of chord-heavy songs with fleet, rhythmic melodies became the initial properties jazz players based their explorations upon. So composition, IE, composing music for improvisors, is no less a part of making it possible for soloists to be brilliant. The composed piece, setting the mood, establishing harmonies, rhythm, gives the soloist a more diverse field of expression. The metaphysical beauty of "in the moment" hasn't been destroyed, but in fact exists when the improvisors first states the melody as written and then essentially recreates it in the solo space he's given.

What possessed jazz in the beginning has perhaps moved onto rap, I suppose, but as any art that survives the faddish conditions of their origins and remain somehow credible generations from their starting point, the nature of that art changes with the prevailing conditions of overall culture of the time and that art becomes institutionalized, i.e., classified, historicized, studied, defined, given a set of formalized aesthetics . It becomes the stuff of graduate programs, references used in political and philosophical discourse. This certainly happened to jazz as it ascended to High Art, it happened to the great vulgarian enterprise of rock and roll ( it went from being the expression of confused, angry, impatient and passionate youth to being a branch of literature), and one can see it happening with rap and hip hop: the spontaneity of each becomes mythology. So where is jazz now? As it happens, there is quite a lot of exciting work being created by established artists , and a good number of younger improvisors emerging from across the world who are keeping a jazz tradition alive by insisting on their native voices being wedded to the musical form. Jazz as we understand is becoming jazz as we don't understand , which I regard as signs that there remains much to be created, much to be heard, much to learn. Where is it now? Not standing still, that's a fact.