THE HERO AND THE FOOL

 

PICASSO AS PUNCHLINE?

 

Gadfly Patrick Marlborough offered a 2023 sorta-kinda-basically fence-sitting  defense of Australian quasi-comedian Hannah Gadsby's critical and creaky post-feminist takedown of Picasso with a piece claiming to detail what Americans are missing about her show. It's because Americans are unfamiliar with the Australian vernacular, goes the article's claim. You might expect a brief linguistics lecture to be offered here, since it couldn't be anything as obvious that Gadsby isn't really all that funny. 

It's clear from the outset that Gadsby's has no love for the artist, and is committed to debunking his myth and exposing his misogyny with a late comer's vigor. (I remember quite a few books and magazine articles about Picasso over the decades that hanged him in effigy for being a brute and all-purpose lout, but no matter). If enough people “miss” what an artist is trying to do or attempting to tell us / teach us/ lecture us about, and if it takes a nervously apologetic essay in a major online platform to direct us to the wisdom that was waiting for us, it's a safe bet the artist flubbed the chance to do anything interesting at. 

It's impossible for every misunderstood artist to be an anonymous genius. The odds are not good for even most of them to be any good as visual artists.  The more I think about, it seems to be the case that most artists striving to make big statements in abstract fashion are muddle-headed fools who have the talent, none of the less, to secure grant money to fund their projects and pay their rent. Her worst sin, it appears, is the smug obviousness of what she's up to with Picasso. Naming this project with the anemic and obvious pun “Pablo-Matic” previews a level of banality that is ironically break—taking. Is this comedy? Criticism? Post-feminist grave digging? Is this any sort of attempt to get us to see Picasso differently through a specifically focused lens? It is none of these things. Worse, it's none of the things in any interesting way. It's a shrug of the shoulder, a flat punchline, a cocked head, a side glance, another shrug, another try at irony.  All gesture, no ideas. 

New joy from an old jazz release: Arthur Blythe's "Lennox Avenue Breakdown" (1979

 Lenox Avenue Breakdown -Arthur Blythe (Columbia) 

Arthur Blythe, whose alto saxophone has cut through the New York jazz scene with both clarity and conviction, is a musician of rare vision—someone who, having honed his craft with the likes of Chico Hamilton, now stands among the most compelling forces on his instrument. Where others are content to settle within the boundaries of a single idiom, Blythe gleefully subverts expectations, refusing to be hemmed in by genre. His playing on "Lenox Avenue Breakdown" is eclectic without being diffuse, drawing on hard bop’s muscularity, the searching spirit of the avant-garde, and the agile inventiveness of post-bop—yet always rendered in that unmistakable, burnished tone that is wholly his own.

There’s a robustness and melodic inventiveness to Blythe’s lines that calls to mind the lyricism of Joe Farrell or Phil Woods, but he is equally at home with a technical bravura reminiscent of Sonny Rollins. Blythe reaches for the farthest corners of the instrument: he employs multiphonics and overblowing not as mere embellishments, but as integral tools for coaxing out gritty, timbrally complex sonorities reminiscent of the early experiments of Pharoah Sanders or Gato Barbieri. His phrasing can turn on a dime—from the buoyant, dancing lines of a Charles McPherson to sudden angular leaps and unexpected rhythmic pirouettes. Blythe is no imitator; he is an assembler of influences, forging a style where everything is filtered through his idiosyncratic imagination—a style marked by sharp melodic invention, surprising intervals, and an elastic sense of time.

The ensemble that joins him here is nothing short of remarkable: Jack DeJohnette’s drumming, Cecil McBee’s bass, James "Blood" Ulmer’s taut guitar, and a coterie of equally adventurous colleagues. Together, they construct a rhythmic architecture that is as supple as it is forceful, alternately locking into tight, syncopated grooves and exploding them into polyrhythmic freedom. The rhythm section does not simply accompany; it prods, colors, and challenges—shifting modes, slipping in chromatic asides, building up layers of texture that serve as a launchpad for Blythe’s exploratory journeys.Nowhere is this more apparent than on the title track, which unfolds as a shape-shifting, restlessly evolving soundscape. The pulse mutates, cross-rhythms collide and resolve, and the ensemble’s timbrel palette expands and contracts with painterly precision. Blythe rides above and within this maelstrom—darting with dazzling runs, scaling the saxophone’s upper reaches, and developing motifs with a dramatist’s sense of tension and release. The structure is loose enough to invite collective improvisation, so that every soloist is woven into the conversation, each voice adding to the album’s layered rhythmic and tonal density. "Lenox Avenue Breakdown" is, in the best sense, a jazz record that refuses the comfortable formulas so often mistaken for innovation. It teems with risk, vitality, and raw energy—a bracing affirmation of jazz’s capacity for surprise and renewal. For those who hunger for music that is both grounded in tradition and wild with invention, Blythe’s album is indispensable.

TWO SLAMS AGAINST 1980

 Two hot-take record reviews from the 1980s. I admit that I hadn't listened to either Mahagonny Rush or Gentle Giant in depth , the reason being that at the time I was at the end of my Hendrix worship and given up the quest to find someone who could carry on in the style Jimi invented after his too-early death in 1967. And second, I was never a great fan of progressive rock no matter how superb the musicianship , mostly for reasons that remained the same from Yes to Jethro Tull to Emerson Lake and Palmer to Kansas: solid composition and dazzling arrangements abounded hither and yon for all these bands, but the albums they made were an overcooked meal , a structural mess, a tinker toy cacophony of odd time signatures and gratingly naive and even idiotic lyrics. Some bands get a pass , mainly Zappa, King Crimson and the more proggy aspects of  Return to Forever and Dixie Dregs. But Gentle Giant just pushed me into the ground with their big, grandiose thumb, and despite all one can point as to their superb chops , they were just the thing to dampen a healthy sex drive.

Legend has it—a story so straightforwardly American it practically begs for a Norman Rockwell illustration—that a young Frank Marino ( a fine Canadian fretster actually), felled by too much LSD, was given a guitar by benevolent doctors who must have believed in the curative powers of a well-strummed G chord. Miraculously, Marino, who previously had never so much as toyed with a guitar, rose from his psychedelic ashes playing as if the late Jimi Hendrix himself had taken up residence in his fingertips. Interviews abound in which Marino, with all the sincerity of a Method actor, admits to being possessed by Hendrix’s wandering spirit; the prodigy self-anointed, baptized in the holy distortion of the electric guitar. This is the narrative—admittedly charming, undeniably absurd, and, let’s face it, comfort food for fans who relish a good yarn with their riffs. Accept the fable or not; the fact is unavoidable: Marino sounds uncannily like Hendrix, but only if by “sounds like” we mean an enthusiast’s copy—saturated in retro adulation and resistant to the winds of creative change. Rather than pushing the music forward, our protagonist remains firmly anchored in the late 1960s, serving up a stew of rage, reverb, and echo, but somehow missing the subtlety and elegance that occasionally graced Hendrix’s own take on the blues. The problem with Marino and his band, Mahogany Rush, is simple: they can’t, for all their technical fireworks, stitch together a truly memorable song. What we get instead is an endless parade of solos—the musical equivalent of drowning a delicate soufflé in ketchup, offending both taste and decorum. Marino’s technical flair, while impressive, wears thin with repetition; what starts as style soon surrenders to sameness. What’s Next, their latest effort, feels custom-built for the crowd that treats Hendrix like a household god and flinches at the idea that better guitarists might have come along since. One suspects Marino imagines himself as the fretboard’s messiah, the Second Coming of Stratocaster—a fantasy as American as a slice of pie at a state fair.

On to Gentle Giant’s release Civilian, then. There was a time when dabbling with classical motifs in rock identified you as a pop intellectual; Gentle Giant, to their credit, maintained a rare sense of structure and discipline. Now, as trends shift, they appear to be courting mainstream approval, watering down their complexity in a bid for broader appeal. The result is a pale shadow of their earlier work, teetering dangerously close to parody. The compositions tread cautiously within the lines of mediocrity, giving innovation a wide berth. Aside from a few pleasant group interludes, the music plods along, lacking verve. Derek Shulman’s vocals—a plaintive, diluted cry—never soared, and the lyrics, steeped in existential angst, are less soul-searching than mere poetic brooding. Such lines inspire not empathy, but the urge to offer a brisk, corrective nudge—not necessarily below the belt, but somewhere more likely to wake the spirit.

Slow Train Coming

 Slow Train Coming -- Bob Dylan (1979)

Consider Dylan’s born-again phase, and the insistent pulpit pounding of Slow Train Coming—a friend tried to convince me it’s full of conviction and creative worth, but I’m not buying. Dylan’s biblical borrowings aren’t new currency; he’s been strip-mining scripture since day one, patching together Old Testament thunder and parched gospel imagery, whether he’s riding the tide in “When the Ship Comes In” or picking at spiritual scabs in John Wesley Harding. Dylan isn’t just a magpie for sacred texts—he’s the master of turning tired idioms inside out, his voice always straying somewhere between prophetic and profane. At his best, he traffics in existential uncertainty, never content to hand out answers, always inviting you into the labyrinth knowing you’ll never find the center.

Slow Train Coming, though, is a different beast. Masks off. Subtlety gone. Instead, you get blunt-force dogma, Dylan as Sunday school disciplinarian, rallying the troops with “You gotta serve somebody” sermons and threats of damnation for the unconverted. Gone is the sly relativism, replaced by the flat certainty of the freshly saved: you’re either in or you’re out, no questions, no shades of gray. If spiritual crisis was once the engine of his art, now it’s just a flag waved in your face. Sure, maybe faith gave him a ladder out of whatever existential sinkhole he’d fallen into, and I won’t begrudge the man his lifeline. But what’s missing is any trace of introspection—he’s no Eliot or Greene, no Lewis, just a preacher at a tent revival, voice all brimstone, the ambiguity left to rot behind the altar.

Let’s be clear: Dylan burned bright in the ’60s, then spent the following years outrunning the shadow of his own genius, sometimes with pyrotechnic self-destruction (see: Self Portrait). Slow Train Coming feels less like a second coming and more like a warning flare. If you spend all your insight on one revelation, what do you have left for the long road ahead? Dylan’s latest incarnation is the saddest of all: a legend gutted by the weight of his own myth, now stuffed full of the easy certainties of the converted. In the end, it’s a cautionary tale for anyone tempted by answers that come too easily—listen closely, even if the tune’s gone flat.

 

BARAKA

 (The late poet Amiri Baraka, née LeRoi Jones, gave a talk and a poetry reading in 1979 at the University of California, San Diego. Even though he was booked as part of a usually well attended poetry series at the University, publicity was sparse at best, and the attendance was smaller than what this great, if problematic writer deserved. I went to the talk and reading and took notes, a write-up of which appeared in the UCSD Daily Guardian ).

“People and their life are always the primary principle,” Baraka asserted—but is this not also the initial, anguished recognition of existence, the first trembling encounter with Being that Jean-Paul Sartre would urge us never to elide? Each work of art, then, is not a mere artifact, but a project: a condensation of the lived, the suffered, the willed. Amiri Baraka, both poet and witness, stands at the confluence of individual facticity and collective becoming. His address to the clustered students of Mandeville Center was not simply instruction, but an invitation to reflect on the conditions which make art—and, by extension, meaning—possible.

Baraka’s opening echoes Sartre’s dictum, “existence precedes essence.” Art does not descend from a Platonic sphere, nor does it impose itself as an immutable structure; rather, it is wrought from the raw, unrepeatable experience of persons cast into the world. “The art comes as a result of the people and not the other way around,” he intoned. Here, art is revelation, not origin: literature and music are the sediment of the people’s labor, their trembling anguish, their fleeting joy. To create is not to escape reality but to return to it, to bear the responsibility of rendering the particular as universal. Baraka’s own trajectory—emerging from Beat bohemia, burning through black nationalism, arriving at a Marxist-Leninist commitment—is the story of a consciousness grappling with the imperatives of authenticity and social engagement. His works do not merely reflect the world; they interrogate it, laying bare the structures of alienation and the conditions for freedom.

But what is it to be black in America, to be thrown into a history not chosen but endured? Baraka’s reflection on slavery—Africans uprooted, languages severed, gods silenced—is not merely historical; it is existential. In the crucible of terror and endurance, a new being-for-itself emerges: Afro-Americanism. “Afro-Americanism developed as a new culture—the result of many African nationalities coming together under slavery, creating a culture in English and influenced by Christianity.” Here, alienation is origin, and meaning is never given, but incessantly forged against the absurdity of history. The slaves' experience is the paradox Sartre locates at the heart of freedom: that in the moment of greatest objectification, the possibility of authentic self-creation still flickers. The “practical elements” that survived—work song, spiritual—are not mere residues, but acts of defiance, the irruptions of subjectivity where only objecthood was intended. The black church, at first a mechanism of control, becomes a forge for revolt; it is within this site that the consciousness of freedom stirs, and the word—sermon, song, narrative—becomes a weapon.

The dialectic of institution and resistance is always tense, always incomplete. The church is simultaneously locus of discipline and sanctuary for the oppressed—a Sartrean situation par excellence, where structure and freedom collide. “Nat Turner was a preacher,” Baraka offers; every sermon is an assertion of transcendence against the facticity of chains. The soul tradition, the literature spoken in churches, refuses to let pain be mere suffering; it transforms anguish into speech, into music, into revolt. This is not mere survival, but creation—a reclamation of the right to define oneself, to make meaning in the teeth of nullification.

As the narrative of black existence moves, so too does its music—a living chronicle of contingency and choice. “Afro-American music reflects what the people themselves are. It’s gone through great changes because those changes reflect the changes of the people.” The blues does not merely “come up the river”; rather, it is carried by the existential migration of bodies seeking meaning, seeking escape, seeking a place to be. The music, like the people, is condemned to freedom—to invention, to adaptation, to endless negotiation with a world that is neither chosen nor wholly hostile. In New Orleans, the synthesis of African rhythm and European instrument is not a harmonious blending, but a confrontation, a surpassing of given essences toward a new, richer mode of being. The music does not precede the people. It is their residue, their echo—an affirmation of existence in the face of nothingness.Baraka does not merely celebrate these acts of creation—he interrogates the machinery that seeks to erase them. The exclusion of black, Native, Chicano, and women’s voices from the anthologies of academic power is not an oversight but a strategy. The anthology is a site of bad faith, a curation of history that seeks to mask its own contingency. “A person who puts together such an anthology isn’t necessarily ‘the bourgeoisie,’” Baraka observes, “but he’s obviously one of the bureaucrats—a little group of dudes who reflect the group that runs things.” This is the Sartrean “group-in-fusion” turned inward: a bureaucracy concerned with preserving its own legitimacy, its own narrative, and thereby denying the authenticity of voices that threaten its stability. The artist, then, is called to expose this bad faith, to rupture the serenity of the status quo with the anguish of the excluded and the cry of the Other.

To speak of jazz, disco, and authenticity is to revisit the grueling anxiety about the cooptation of freedom. Baraka names those who, in pursuing “truth rather than profit,” resist the temptation to become objects in the spectacle of commercial culture. The “fusion” jazz and disco that he critiques are not merely musical forms; they are the signs of alienation—music as commodity, as endless repetition, as narcotic. “They don’t give you a break. I have nothing against dancing—I like dancing—but I can’t dance forever. I have to take a break and use the other part.” The “other part” is consciousness, reflection—the refusal to let oneself be dissolved into the endless now of consumption.

Baraka’s poetry reading, a “blend of gurgles, howls, and dramatic word divisions,” is not mere performance. It is Sartrean action: the transformation of the word into deed, the refusal of the artist to remain safe within the boundaries of aesthetic distance. His language, at once surreal and political, exposes the structures of capitalism, the violence of history, and the absurdity of domination. There is no comfort here, no false reconciliation; only the raw assertion of existence, the laughter of those who know the contingency of power and the necessity of revolt.

Baraka is not merely a writer—he is a consciousness in motion, a restless adventurer among the possibilities of American identity. Like Sartre’s engaged intellectual, he refuses the safety of detachment, accepting instead the burden and possibility of responsibility. His work, evolving in style and tone, stands as a challenge and a promise: that to write, to sing, to speak, is always to choose, and that each choice reverberates in the world. Someday, perhaps, America will recognize in Baraka not only the anger of the dispossessed, but the existential grandeur of one who dared to wrest meaning from absurdity, and who, in doing so, rendered the world more free.

(This originally appeared in a different form in the UCSD Guardian, 1979)

FINALE:a one paragraph short story

 

Dolphy was goosing the low end notes from his bass clarinet , a solemn, fluid tone that swam between the other fragments of drums, bass and teen-dream pianistics, a pulse that made the speaker cones rattle and the juice in the glass Blue poured form himself to shimmy sensually in the water glass that held it. Blue needed to go the store for some birthday candles because his girlfriend had the idea that if they burn down the house with a simple incendiary device, a short candle in a roll of toilet paper in the hall closet where the hand towels and cleaning products were stored, they could collect the money from the insurance money she thought Blue had taken out on the four poster disaster where she slept next to him every night in a room with no windows, on a mattress with no springs. The sagging in the center of the mattress meant backaches by the boatload. Blue, though, didn't buy any fire insurance for the house, thinking it was silly to do since neither of them smoked. He was in no mood to be yelled at, though. He turned up the Dolphy record, scraping guitars and abbreviated saxophone copulated in every molecule the room contained, his head was swimming in terms that amounted to wishful amnesia. He would go to the store and get the birthday candles, they would set up the incendiary device and the house would burn down, a glorious blaze that would light up the night air in this criminally insane neighborhood, and then he would tell her the truth, point-blank, blunt and cruel, honey, I never bought insurance for this house and there are no checks coming our way. But on the way to the store he stopped by the Velvet Hammer lounge for a quick snort, maybe two, two that became twelve; the next thing he knew he woke up behind the wheel of his car, which was going near 80 miles an hour over the Mission Bay Bridge. They found his car in the bay later that night, but they didn't find him. He was never seen again. "All he did was play that atonal shit" his wife told police when they talked to her. She showed no emotion. "I said either this shit comes off the stereo our you hit the road. Dumb fucker."

GOOD PROSE IS NEARLY BULLET PROOF

 A good page of prose remains invincible, or so says one of my favorite writers John Cheever, but invincible against what? Not against how generations interpret the words long after the sentences were crafted in proper rhythmic order and committed to a blank page. What was once comedic and relevant to easing dread and frustration can be seen later as cruel and idiotic, worse, old fashioned. What was dramatic, tragic or moving in one era can be abstract and incoherent the following. It's only been centuries of professional explainers that have saved Shakespeare's reputation as an endlessly relevant bard by creating whole theoretical fictions that provide strained analogs with timeless human conditions ; they attempt to make his language clear and obvious and make the reader feel less than bright if they need explanations as to how the Bard's freighted references are current, concise and precisely what the universe requires. A fiction defending another fiction that on its own would otherwise be incomprehensible and quaintly creaking in cadence and candor. All the while the day outside the walls one finds themselves behind carries on, if that's the term, with its own agenda, which is no agenda at all, which is to say that its entirely raw phenomena , happenstance that comes with no atlas or tourbook.

BRAGGING AS SELF-SHAMING

 

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What’s kept the Rolling Stones endlessly fascinating isn’t just their music—it’s their refusal to apologize for who they are. From the start, they’ve been the embodiment of a certain kind of English sleaze: not the Dickensian gutter, but the aristocratic rot that festers behind velvet curtains. They didn’t care what the clergy thought, or the critics, or the women they sang about, or the politicians who tried to tame them. They were shit heels, and they knew it. More importantly, they knew we knew it—and they made that knowledge part of the show. They weaponized the bad boy image, not as rebellion but as ritual. Their songs—so many of them—are exercises in moral ambiguity, in the seduction of the unacceptable. And Mick Jagger, ever the louche libertine, occasionally pulled back the curtain not to confess, but to clarify. “Back Street Girl” is one of those moments. It’s not a love song. It’s not even a lust song. It’s a transaction, set to a waltz.

The Parisian accordion drifts through the track like perfume in a brothel—romantic, yes, but cloying, almost mocking. Against this backdrop, Jagger’s narrator lays out his terms: you are not to call me at home, you are not to meet my friends, you are not to exist outside the shadows. It’s cruel, but it’s clean. There’s no pretense, no illusion of equality or affection. Just the cold arithmetic of desire and discretion.

And yet, the song lingers. It’s not just the melody, or the irony, or the performance—it’s the precision. Jagger doesn’t sermonize. He doesn’t wink. He lets the character speak, and in doing so, reveals the machinery behind the mask. This isn’t the swaggering misogyny of “Stray Cat Blues” or the nihilism of “Under My Thumb.” It’s something quieter, more insidious. A man who knows exactly what he wants, and knows exactly what he’s denying.

“Back Street Girl” is a character sketch, yes—but it’s also a mirror. It shows us the kind of man who thrives in the margins of respectability, and the kind of society that lets him. It’s brutal, but it’s honest. And in that honesty, there’s a kind of grace. Not redemption, but recognition. Jagger, for once, isn’t trying to charm us. He’s trying to tell the truth. And that, in the world of rock and roll, is the most subversive act of all.

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MORE MISCELLANEY YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

 

Sobriety, if I may, is a singular emancipation—an event that arrives not unlike a telegram in the dark hours, bearing tidings, ominous but anticipated. Thirty-eight years prior, the crowning stone was placed atop a life dedicated to spontaneous mischief, and thus commenced an arduous, intricate pilgrimage toward a more measured existence. It was a time of blundering, of tentative exploration—one learned, not by precept, but by doing, by colliding against the furniture, as it were, of one’s own limitations. The classic narrative, as recounted by the devotees of Alcoholics Anonymous, is almost quaint: one pledges, with a grimace of resolution, to remain unsullied by drink, to accept—unflinchingly—the consequences. “No matter what,” they intone, as though the phrase itself were a talisman.

Permit me to observe: the consequences, whether clutched in sobriety or inebriation, are not so much a departure from chaos as a clarifying of its contours. It is as though the fog of dissipation lifted, not to reveal a new Eden, but the same labyrinth, rendered in sharper relief. Providence, in its inscrutable wisdom, kept certain hands from the tiller, for the early years of sobriety—while an improvement over the bibulous epoch—were something akin to a private demolition derby. The world was navigated with a map drafted by a dipsomaniac, the roads serpentine, the landmarks woefully misleading.

The detritus, of course, was self-generated—a concatenation of dilemmas, each demanding redress. The restoration was neither swift nor glamorous: it meant crafting apologies, reconstructing battered relationships, and at long last acknowledging one’s role in the parade of misadventures. The labor was Sisyphean, the pain stubbornly persistent, the repetition dreary. Gradually, the realization dawned: the proper aim was not to force the world’s multifarious phenomena into coherence with obsolete, mangled logic; rather, the challenge was to conjure coherence within oneself, to become someone who might make sense in the world as it stands.

Those old tempests—rages, fits of irritability, the paroxysms of the “dry drunk”—were but variations on a theme, all performed by the same maladroit orchestra. They never succeeded in persuading people, events, or circumstances to conform to parochial expectations. It was a misbegotten amalgam, a cacophony, devoid of melody. Authentic transformation, the kind that allows one to breathe with a briskness unknown to the bemused, is fundamentally a reversal—a relinquishment of the urge to conduct, a willingness instead to find the rhythm, to improvise as befits the evidence at hand. Only then, I submit, does the music begin truly to swing.

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Now, as regards Billy Joel’s “Piano Man”—the archetype of the self-conscious balladeer, casting pearls before a self-conscious audience—it is, in its early measures, almost parodic. The harmonica, wheezing and plaintive, seeks resemblance to Dylan, but achieves something more akin to a department-store simulacrum of “Like a Rolling Stone”—sufficient to lure the casual listener, but never to stir genuine sentiment. The lyricism, striving for Cheever-esque gravitas, is overwrought, mistaking theatricality for insight. Harry Chapin performed similar feats, with perhaps more adroitness, if such is your proclivity. The composition traffics in a kind of pre-packaged melancholy, offering despondency in digestible portions to those who would have their sadness delivered in five-minute increments.

Yet, a salutary transformation occurs. Joel eschews literary excess in favor of conciseness, a fidelity to the architecture of pop. The ear, now privileged over the ego, becomes his guide. The melodies grow nimble, the words—pruned of superfluity—convey emotion with economy. “Uptown Girl” sparkles with retro bravado; “Just the Way You Are”—sentimental though it be—remains a respectable ballad; “Big Shot” delivers its pleasures without apology. Even as he flirts with the ponderous (“You’re Only Human,” the history-light “We Didn’t Start the Fire”), his mastery of tuneful fabrication deepens. This is, after all, the triumph of the craftsman over the would-be artiste—an inversion, rare and blessed, of rock’s penchant for pretension.

 

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It was at this juncture that my own trajectory bent irreversibly: I procured, with some ceremony, a rapid cable connection to the internet. The ancient ritual of dial-up—those extraterrestrial chirps, the static, the benighted anticipation—engendered a distinct excitement. The slow reveal of a web page, the jerky procession of videos via RealPlayer, were, in their way,
exhilarating.

But the internet then, I hasten to add, was primarily a textual commons—one could read essays, articles, and, in so doing, become edified in realms previously unimagined. High-speed, however, ushered in a new era: articles shrank, graphics proliferated, and the corporate hydra seized dominion over the spaces frequented by users. It became a Babel of advertising, an unremitting parade of commercial enticement. Alas, the technology that once promised deliverance from solitude began, ironically, to entrench it. A tragedy, but one, I suspect, of our own devising.

Ray Stevens * Mr Businessman

 It's a dubious proposition when a compulsive jokester like Ray Stevens --Guitarzan, The Streak, Ahab the Arab--attempts to play catch up with trends and commence writing songs of a critical, scolding nature. Witness here his two-dimensional denunciations against the easiest of straw men targets, the American business executive. You can see that Stevens brainstormed over the wordplay in the lyrics--he was a clever rhymester if nothing else--but his judgment is shallow, let us say..shallow. But it sold, the public was buying, placing the song in the Billboard 100 where it reached number 28. But truthfully, the fad for topical songs passed quickly enough and to be honest no one, virtually no one, mentions this tune when Stevens is brought up in conversation. The song is painful to revisit, basically because it severely reminds me of what a naive and jerky student radical I tried to be in high school. I remember every stupid proclamation I said or printed in the school paper, and Stevens' lyrics echo the cardboard morality. But, to be sure, even pop geniuses make fools of themselves when they attempt to say socially relevant things in their music, an example being the Beatles emulation  of Dylan with their grating put down Nowhere Man. Had the tune been written and performed by a band from the Jersey Shore, critics would have crucified them for their horrible assumption that they had anything worth listening to. But the Beatles were the Beatles, after all, and got a pass and another hit on the radio.