The assassin left his bullets on the breakfast counter

Someone named Anis Shivani got some column space on the Huffington Post web site for one of those grousing name-writer round ups in which the erstwhile essayist attempts to consign his choices to the gaping dustbin of history. The piece on the 15 Most Overrated American Writers  has entertainment value, to be sure, and the intent is provoke an argument  with large number of readers. We are in time of of blogs and well written, if unexceptional views--some opinions, like some novels, are more interesting than others from the chorus. Shivani has standards, he has tastes, he has grievances. Welcome to the club.

An interesting read, although I have to say that the summaries of the respective writer's sins are hasty and owe much to what others have remarked; the comments on Vollman and Ashbery are evidence of contempt without much inspection of the work. As for Collins, Gluck, Grahame, more or less spot on; being easily understood or hard-to-get are successful only if you're a good writer with a surface quality that makes the respective obviousness or obliqueness worth the time to read them.Well, it is bullshit, and it's a practice that goes back aways in our contemporary literary history. Mailer wrote "Some Children of the Goddess" and "Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room" where he spoke of his contemporary...es--Jones, Styron, Updike, Burroughs--in mostly dour terms, the main being, it seems, that they all, excepting Burroughs, liked genius. Gore Vidal opined on a host of PoMo writers like DeLillo and Pynchon in his essay "American Plastic", which had nothing nice to say about the youngsters taking up the pencil. Tom Wolfe wrote a manifesto after he published "Bonfire of the Vanities", saying we need a return to the Social Novel, and that He, Tom Wolfe, was the novelist to show everyone how. Jonathan Franzen, Dale Peck and a host of others have written minor key manifestos of their own to varying degrees of response.

What they have in common, this five decade self indulgence, is that no one, no where writes very well, and what gets said is an assemblage of straw arguments, points that once may have been salient at one time but are now so hackneyed and over repeated that the description is even more formula and stale than the writing their trying to be a corrective to. The targets are indeed too easy in this piece, with the intent seeming to be more to insult book sellers than to give a heads up to unsuspecting readers or to Speak Truth to Power. Shivani sounds like an addled bookseller himself, becoming ...uncorked at a store party after he's heard one more boilerplate praise for a so-so writer. It's a small world with a circuitous stock of conversation topics; the problem with being a bookseller , if Shivani did, in fact, ever happen to be one, is that one reads to keep pace of who's new on the scene; you tend to stop reading for pleasure.

This was my experience when I worked at Warwick's Bookstore in LaJolla, California, when I was reading up to four novels a week; power down, develop a sales pitch and a shelf-talker blurb, go on to the next book. After I left, I stopped reading fiction and read history and criticism instead, saying absolutely rude things about those I had previously praised, all these up and coming scribes. My remarks were, of course, unfair and bitter, and so I suspect that Shivani is a similar state of detox. It would have been more interesting if he'd gone after some recently deceased writers with big reputations--Norman Mailer, John Updike, David Foster Wallace--or had tackled living writers who are frequently mentioned in articles as naturals for the Nobel Prize for Literature, like DeLillo, Joyce Carole Oates, Philip Roth. The collective reps are a hornet's nest of contention, to which Shivani's remarks would have been more compelling , given the enormity of that suggested task.The Huffington Post squib, alas, was too easy to write, too, too easy to assemble. Something braver would have made the diversion more memorable.

History stammers when it repeats itself

U.S.!
a novel by Chris Bachelder


Chris Bachelder is a lovable prankster who likes to turn the nicely fitting glove of literature inside out. while the rest of us are looking for meanings and various forms of significance in the interior decorating of conventional fictional devices--to this day, we all yearn to have poets and novelists to tell us The Truth-- Bachelder prefers to spray paint on the props and show us the cluttered backstage of these settings. And better yet, he rather likes in tying the shoelaces together of the pompous, the serious, the bizarrely sanctimonious. "U.S.!" has him imagining a world where the true believers in an American Socialist Revolution manage, through some vaguely revealed ritual of magic realism, to bring the dead activist novelist Upton Sinclair back to life; back to life the poor, steadfast, solemn socialist does, looking increasingly awful and putrid at the edges, going on the lecture trail, writing and publishing more of his cardboard narratives, trying to convince an amazingly uninterested citizenry the exact nature of what's killing them. Nothing comes of this, as expected, and the intrepid Lewis finds himself talking himself hoarse , only to find himself being killed violently and then ingloriously resurrected yet again. A surreal fish-out-of-water story, Bachelder has a perfect ear for duplicating the static prose of the late novelists, and excels at demonstrating the striking contrasts between those who think that literature can make populations shed their entrenched and deeply rooted versions of Bad Faith and rise to the selfless cause of The Common People; this is a story of where the idea of the progression of history toward a final and just time, intersects with a culture where history does not end anywhere at all. Rather, it splits off into many tributaries, a crossroads every five metaphorical miles.Upton  Sinclair , tragicomic figure he is, stops at each of them, scratching his head as to which road to take

L.A.CONFIDENTIAL

I had the good fortune of seeing this film for the fourth time last night, and I remain with my opinion that this is one of the finest American movies of the last fifty years. If nothing else, director and co-writer Curtis Hanson has turned an dense James Ellroy novel (who's en-jambing attempts to make his fiction seem to the reader that they're actually in the mind of problematic crime fighters makes him unreadable)l into a riveting crime drama. In the midst of a ...city defined by corruption, three cops of varied circumstances find their duty-bound moral centers.The performances of Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey and Guy Pearce are perfectly defined in their respective moments-of-clarity, those culminating incidents that make the jaded, cynical and brutish personalities find common cause in the murders they're trying to solve , and their resolution to discover and reveal the truth regardless of personal consequences, are nuanced and work wonderfully off of each other.There is not a hint of showboating, scene chewing, or mulled over mannerisms.

Dark, serious, peppered with a bitter wit, this film as well has a terrific look, from the editing , which is smooth and seamless , to the photography, which sustains the dark noir tradition while not slavishly trying to recreate the classic look of older films. The dark color scheme and the night lighting in this movie are gorgeous, a glorious thing to see in a macho drama where three hard headed alpha males breakthrough the confines of ego and pride and commit themselves to something bring their skewed universe into balance.

Best yet, Hanson does not attempt to make the resolution too pretty, too Hollywood typical; the carnage, killing and generation of misery that had to be gone in this quest for a simulacra of justice remains conspicuous : the racism , misogyny and homophobia that inhabit this world do not vanish, feelings between offended and offenders are not salved; Los Angeles in the late Fifties remains a corrupt cesspool, with just a hint of  any kind of spirit of reform. This drama is concise and precisely localized, a case of ethics conquering avarice in a single , particular string of incidents. The taste of cruel irony is barely concealed by the movie's end. There is not a false note anywhere.

Ron Silliman shuts down his comments section

It's a sad thing that Silliman felt he had to shut down his comments section, but I understand his weariness with having to act as the lunchroom monitor. The image persists, I suppose, that poets are as a class more sensitive, intelligent, intuitive and respectful of the feelings of others, and that as a class wouldn't be caught dead being intrusive, abusive creeps, but my experience online shows otherwise; a good many, that is to say, too many poets who are drawn to comments blog with a large readership seem uniformly convinced that they, as individuals, are unrecognized geniuses who have convinced themselves that the anger they constantly brew is a righteous call to speak a blunt truth to those whom they've judged as frauds, posers, fakes, or merely mediocre. It's self-righteousness, of course, and the exchanges one might have with the practitioners of unprovoked invective is an extreme test of one's patience.The desire of the sort Silliman is tired of dealing with isn't to exchange views, but only to attack and achieve some perverted pride in proving that their intellect and energy are dedicated to little more than maintaining an unceasing stream of hurtful things to say to people they don't know. There are times when the poetry forums I've participated in more closely resembled the political free for all that are in abundance on the internet. It's a full-time job to maintain order and civility on a forum with a dedicated topic, and I suspect that Ron Silliman has more interesting things to do with his time than keep watch over the willfully immature. Poets and poetry readers are not immune to being jerks. What of the rest of us? Maybe we'll have to turn off the computer and find someone, in the flesh, to talk to these things about. How important is poetry to us, anyway. Significant enough to get out of our seats and go into the community where we live to support poetry by attending readings, buying poetry books, forming live, in person discussion groups about poetry?  Do we care enough about the importance of the work of poets to dare discuss it in real-world circumstances where we would find better, more considered phrases with which to disagree with one another? Or find out how interesting those we disagree with actually are once we take a risk and get to know them as more than an example of an enemy ideology?  Could there be a rebirth of wonder?

Another Hollywood Ending

I remember perhaps a half dozen cheesy sci-fi movies I saw when I was a kid that ended  their paper mache melodramas with the words "The End?" , with that big fat question mark hanging there like a  chewed thumb hitching a ride a to Endsville. Other clever sign offs for the post-nuke operas was a flimsy variation, "The Beginning?". One of these gamy contrivances even went so far as to have two survivors, a man and a woman, go through their paces without revealing their names until the final scene. Their names? If you don't know this, turn off your computer and get a library card: Adam and Eve.

New Greil Marcus

I look forward to reading the new Greil Marcus book on Van Morrison and I expect to experience the familiar aggravations and exhilarations from the critic's writing yet again. The pay off in reading Marcus is that he does, at times, write remarkably well , with the ability to be a key witness at various cultural situations otherwise invisible to the interested reader and create a sense of the gut-feeling, winging-it verve that makes for art. Think of the longish description of the Sex Pistols recording "Johnny B.Goode" in which Marcus nearly convinces you that this wasn't just a random batch of thugs butchering a Chuck Berry classic, but rather a moment of transformation, of the song, themselves, the moment in history. Each item Marcus chooses to talk about in his far ranging discussions,from punk rock, Elvis, Dada, Cabaret Voltaire, the rise of Situationism, are all made to seem epochal. As in the subtitle of his tome "Lipstick Traces", the critic is obsessed with secret histories of human conduct, and is determined to use pop musicians as the epicenter for the loud mashing together of materialist forces.

The downside of Marcus is that he too frequently a lazy inquisitor of his materials, a maker of broad statements based on anecdotes, newspaper clippings, things he bookmarked or highlighted with yellow pen.The aggravation Marcus causes is easily seen in his book "Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads": he throws every wacky idea and reference he can at the slim information regarding the writing , recording and release of the Dylan... masterpiece, and seems curiously enfeebled in his attempt to make us think that the song is more than what it is. This habit, a trait a good editor would have blue penned out of existence, is what makes me loathe to think about how he'll come to treat the work of Van Morrison: a writer who is not satisfied to make their points, but rather to write a philosophy. Musicians are not politicians or philosophers, though, and Marcus is not  Toynbee. The songs remain songs, bombast or no. As brilliant as any of the best art , literature and music in history, Marcus cannot get it straight that the masterpieces are the results, among many, froma cultural tumults, not the cause of  them. You really can't blame academia for Marcus's increasingly dense meanderings, since even h...is glory days I always found him striving for the Grand Sweeping Statement. His problem is that he has never put forth a comprehensible thesis on which to hang his abstractions; he assumes , I think, that what he's getting at is implicit, and this causes him to skip over the niceties of making himself understood. Marcus is the victim of subject bloat, a malaise he's had since Rolling Stone. He does, as I said, still manage extended bits of insight in glorious prose--his talents are as a journalist, not a theorist.


As for Morrison, I agree wholeheartedly that Astral Weeks is a brilliant album. On the subject, though, he will be writing in the shadow of Lester Bangs, who's chapter in the "Stranded" anthology on the album, and particularly the song "Madame George", is one of the greatest pieces of emphatic,inspired, gorgeously rendered rock criticism of all time. It is a masterpiece of subjective criticism, something I would assign students to read along with examples of other brilliant critics like Manny Farber, Joyce Carole Oates,Randall Jarrell, Frank Rich (when he wrote theater reviews) and Gary Giddens. What I dread is that Marcus may consider himself in competition, Harold Bloom style, with the late Bangs and may attempt to top him with even grander , hastier effusions. Reading the new book will , as usual , a mixed bag of fresh fruit and stale donuts.See MoreThat being said, it is this determined wrong headedness that keeps me reading him and , in turn, keeps me thinking of new ways of complaining about his method.

The James Brown Revolution

James Brown released an album decades ago who's title announced the 70's ethos in screaming , feel good disco beats:

"IT'S A BRAND NEW DAY, SO LET A MAN COME IN AND DO THE POP CORN!"

Man oh man, I thought when I first came across that disc, flipping through albums at a Wherehouse Records somewhere in the San Diego beach area, this brother was about to implore us all to forget the past and to live for the moment and and create a path to a rosy picture but was overwhelmed, shoe-tips to  fingered pinky, but a core primal nature the refused to let himself get preachy beyond a few monosyllables. Forget everything else, forget the revolution, the high interest on easy credit loans, the lack of money when the bills are paid, the unjust wars,the lack of gasoline, the ugliness of buildings staring down on your gaping mouth as you look up toward the cloud with the wondering of when will it rain money, it was time to dance, to frolic, to make the groove paramount in how one conducted themselves.

Dancing trumped every concern, and one didn't conduct themselves in any fashion, as that implies a measured, contrived and controlling manner of being in the world our spirits were forced to endure--it was a script, false, predictable, tested in the laboratories of predictability. James Brown always of using that microphone as a weapon when he was self-inducing one of his performance nervous breakdowns--right at the point when he was on his knees and his valet put the retirement cape over his shoulder--I'd seen this act a few times on television shows during the mid to late sixties--one wished he'd break the habit of the scripted break down and seize the moment with some genuine, crazed, hyena-eyed storm-bringing: GRAB THAT MICROPHONE AND SLAM THE BASE INTO THE VALET'S GUT! UTTER SOMETHING PROFOUND AND BASIC AND FREE OF VALUE TO AN AUDIENCE THAT EXPECTED TO BE ENTERTAINED IN ALL THE CONVENTIONAL DISGUISES FOR DISGUST.

"

Brothus and sistahs, wonez upon atime in a cassle so fine erwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwHHHHHHHHHHHgggggggggggggggggggggdigittty DooooRannnnnnygumption, yeahhhhhhhh, heh, hit me, hit me gain, up onna bridge, bidge, yassuh, a manz gotta slop sum stumbling facehangdown groanfactgor yassuh! Hitme again, yeabh ,babbybabybaby, eewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeh, heh!"

We might assume that there are cameras at this mythical point in JB's career, this point where his harnessed intensity broke beyond the conceretized limits of language and propriety and made him into a garroting example of what happens when the last brick finally falls from the last wall between chaos and organized ennui. The cameras would follow the crazed soul singer to the parking lot , where he screamed about magpies under a yellow, sodium street lamps. He would get into a car and then drive off , at once, at eighty, ninety, a hundred miles an hour, careening for a hundred miles, blasting the classical station and screaming the words of "It's a Man's World" while the static-prone station filtered a guitar quartet plucking out Bach organ solos while every abandoned furniture factory and machine shop in the Midwest sped by. State and local police, of course, were in close pursuit, and the result of all this confusion was a big dance party at the end of the highway, in the empty lot by the Piggly Wiggly and the TuVu Drive in, where Farrah Fawcett was on the screen in the film "Sunburn". The commotion, caused by car engines, car radios and James Brown screaming, yet again, into a bull horn about Teddy Kennedy and the Boat, caused the movie to burn and melt as it shown on the giant screen. Car horns galore blasted as drink cups and boxes of pop corn dotted the night sky.

THE AQUARIUM by Jeffrey Yang: Wet lyricism

The Aquarium
poems by Jeffrey Yang

The book's conceit, an appealing one, is to write a series of poems on the fish and other ocean creatures one would come across in an aquarium, in alphabetical order. It's a sort of involute indexing of whims and amusements that would soon get ragged with repetition in heavier hands, but Yang's touch is light and varies his approach, creature to creature, and what his musings land on, of course, are continued inquiry into how we know the world.

We mirror, we model, we mimic, we claim credit for all the nobility that happens in domains that are, in fact, alien to our cities, countries and cultural ambiguities that Yang has the pleasure of gentle yanking our chain. As usual, the real issue isn't so much the wonders of sea life as exhibited--and the phrase ''exhibited underscores the problematic nature with which human languages address the external world as if it depended on our giving it narration--as it is something else altogether.

There is great appeal in the work of poets who can artfully contain a series of ideas in a brief piece of verse, the goal is to turn philosophical precepts into the glittering surface of a poem’s allure and still address an issue quite beyond the more comfortable subjects of beauty or an aesthetically constrained idea of Truth, capital “T”. Jeffrey Yang’s first collection, An Aquarium (Graywolf Press) is a series of poems that at first seem like they concern themselves exclusively with ocean life; indeed they do, but the author is shrewd in seeing what other areas, outside the aquarium tank, these creatures touch upon. Yang offers up a view on how we think about things. Here, in the poem" Parrotfish", the creature is nearly lost as the poems start like the first sentence of an encyclopedia entry and quickly turns into a bit of cocktail chatter seeming between artists, secret agents, and critics, all of whom sacrifice the subject in favor of extending their rhetorical devices.

Parrotfish

The life phases of a parrotfish

are expressed in colors.By day,

the parrotfish replenishes coral reef

sands, and by night spins

its mucous cocooned-

room. Is this art's archetype

abstracted from politics?

Picasso thought abstraction a cul-de-

sac. The CIA loved Abstract

Expressionism. Hockney: "I

don't think that there is really such a thing

as abstraction." Langer:"All genuine art

is abstract."

What do you think parrot-

fish?

I think the aim is to undermine the insidious intent of rhetorical questions that frame ready-made political assumptions. The question in "Is this art's archetype abstracted from politics" forces agreement from the reader through it's disingenuous appeal to a person's vanity, from which an argument may be made for agendas that have little to with art, parrot fish, or life in general. This is the use of language that treats the things in nature as if they were symbols, real or potential, for great oppositions at war in an unseen metaphysical realm.

Yang seems aware that there is a very human tendency to regard the world outside our senses as though it were a linear narrative being played out, with virtues reducible to good v evil, beauty v vulgarity, honesty v criminal intent being the principle extremes in play. The narrative form, the storyline, is a convenient way of making the raw experience comprehensible, but taking a cue from Heidegger's work in phenomenology, Yang would have us be aware that the parrot fish and its environmental niche are not abstractions of anything but rather expressions of their own life. "Back to the data", as the man said and, in the choice phrase of the confounding Ezra Pound ," the natural object is already the adequate symbol".

He follows the erring assumptions to an unusual but logical conclusion: the symbol of beauty and abstraction must surely be brilliant intellectually, and so must, by default, have an opinion of the matter. He places us in witness to an absurdity: intelligent men, seduced by their nuanced sophistry, asking a fish for an informed opinion. Yang seems to me to be making fun of the way we call things either "beautiful" or "abstract"; for all the sophisticated and nuanced reasons critics, theologians and agents of intrigue approach the subject, the competing philosophies all fall short, far short of articulating something truly tangible. The irony is that the embodiment of all this speculation, the lexicon-heavy guesswork to a thing's essence, is not aware that it is beautiful, abstract, or is somehow an embodiment of a set of ideas that are meant to change the world. The parrot fish isn't even aware that it's a parrot fish, which is entirely the point--it is too busy being part of the rest of the underworld. Unlike human beings, who are continually trying to separate themselves from nature so that they may subjugate it a little more

Thrive as we might, we are lost in our self-consciousness and cherish the sort of autonomy one might perceive in the creatures swimming their currents, inhabiting their niches, living survival and death in the same fluttering of a gill. But beyond this, Yang streamlines his erudition--these aren't lectures, these are lyrics that are broadened or collapsed as the idea determines. An admirable effort by a writer with a composer's ability to embrace the ambiguity of form with a coherence of flow.

Sometimes two is better

Another controversy involving Vladimir Nabokov is about to ensue, Slate magazine's Ron Rosenbaum informs is, when his publisher issues a stand alone publication of the titular poem from the novel Pale Fire. More than a few tempers will flair, more than a few words will be shot over the figurative bow.The controversy from a few years ago, involving the publication of the index cards comprising the first draft of the unfinished The Original of Laura, is different than the impending ado over releasing the poem from the novel Pale Fire by itself. One wasn't even a finished piece of writing, something that had existed as reed thin sketches that might later be fleshed into a work worthy of Nabokov's esteemed reputation.

I was among those argued for the destruction of the "manuscript", such as it was; I suspected that the endeavor was to compel us to further stress our credit limits and credibility in the same instance, to make money on slim offerings and, indeed, to see the Nabokov faithful fawn and fall over themselves raising the skeletal notes to absurd levels of desperate praise. The issue was that I am generally against the posthumous publication of rough drafts by famous writers; I generally assume that there is a good reason why the works weren't published in the author's life time. A good writer would know when they 're writing with less than a full tank of gas. An interest in an unpublished manucript is warrented, I think, provided that the tome is, more or less, a complete work , or in a state of near-completion; though lacking the fnal grace notes a note late writer might have provided, the finessing that creates the signature tone, it remains a fairer idea in comparing the posthumous publication with the ouvre that came was produced during an author's productive years. The Original of Laura, though, is rather too skeletal an artifact . Considering a finished work, as a few critics have done, borders on literary necrophilia.

The new issue is something different, as the poem in Pale Fire, titled "Pale Fire", is a strong work on it's own terms, separate from the meta-narrative that surrounds it. It highlights the writer's brilliance with English--the flowing musicality, the lyric wordplay, the seduction of the senses that gives lust and obsession a rationale, a heartbeat. No one, I suspect , would be embarrassed by reading the poem as a stand alone object. I think this could the start of a interest exercise in meta-texting; Kinbote's annotations to the fictional Shade's epic are themselves a poetics based on the assumptions of a inquisitor who's credentials , it turns out, are fictional, and that the whole novel turns out to be a a tightly knot of considerations premised, it seems, on what the commentator needed to exorcise. The poem published by itself could be reinterpreted by a generation of new critics intrigued with the prospect of reviving a form of Freudian criticism, investigating ideas on the supposition that Nabokov was engaging issues he wasn't aware of on the waking level. And it's not as if the original novel is being replaced by the unchained poem--it will be available as long as readers care about how beautiful, sly, musical, sexy, and hilarious prose can be .

LOUD

I like loud and distorted guitar the old school way,in the form of jamming power trios, those guitar-bass-drums shoot outs where the downbeats started at debated counts and the length of improvised middle section was undetermined and unpredictable. Improvisation, riffing, vamping, monochromatic chord mongering, the center portions of this species of spontaneous noise took it's stylistic cue from several generations of black American blues geniuses and took their clear, elegantly expressed formulations of anger, pain , dread and joy and tweaked the pentatonic elements to a narrowed strain of white male rage, performed at volume levels beyond endurance levels , with the nimble, simple, eloquent rhythms and solo configurations of guitar , harmonica, banjo being replaced with a waves of distorted notes bent to their furthermost pitch of emotional credibility.

It was perfect for the smoky ballrooms I went to in the late 60's, where the likes of Cream, Blue Cheer, Sir Lord Baltimore and Mountain belched, groaned and assaulted a beleaguered audience of addled brains with their instrumental abuse; on some nights the commotion and clamor reminded you more of a demolition derby instead of a unique engagement with a fleeting muse. Impact was more important than configuration.

There was joy when , in Detroit where I lived, I came upon the MC5 and the Stooges. The 5 were every car Detroit had manufactured being tossed off the top of the Penobscot, the tallest building in down; they had a speed and power only the fury of a accumulating gravity could provide, and half the fun of watching these guys batter, abuse and flail their instruments while the wiggled and wrenched themselves in hip-thrusting deliriums was the expectation of their metaphorical car crashing, smashing into the hard, metal strewn concrete below.

The Stooges were, on the other hand, the guitar that was tossed off with a violent fling at a bad rehearsal and left on, still plugged into the amp, humming and crackling the whole night; Ron Ashton's guitar work was perfect, imperfect, with a wood-chipper rhythm, a perfect three and two chord background for Iggy Pop, who's psycho-sexual explorations into the outer areas of teenage impatience would make you think of a zombies severed arm. It still twitches across the blood, the hand is still making grasping motions for your neck, you realize that even death cannot stop this force that requires your attention.

Nothing doing in anyhow town

Perhaps we should use our Internet like it were a telephone; use as needed, but only in helping us navigate the community we live in or the communities we might visit. Hard to do, though, as in the death of book stores and record stores displays; a good many of us prefer spending our money from our desktops rather than go to town. Going into a shopping center used to be a useful time killer, an activity that had attractions other than the assortment of utility -based commerce,like drug stores, hardware stores, supermarkets; one could browse a bookstore shelves and decide what to take home after inspecting the completeness of scattered topic territories, you could listen to and buy music at a record store and perhaps experience new ways of making melody and improvising on a theme that hadn't yet been in your experience, you could see a movie at a theatre and maybe, just maybe be privy to a foreign release on the aggressive cognoscenti are aware of.

Movie theatres are hanging onto their turf in the public sphere, of course, but there is less reason to dwell , walk around, to visit the town center further. It was recently like this, when I worked as an agent at a call center for an Internet company, who had their headquarters in a new industrial park on the far fringe of the developed land in North San Diego County. I would take the bus to the mall nearest the complex and would then walk for fifteen minutes to take my seat in front of phone console, waiting for the first irate client to call in. It used to be that every mall I went into had a Wherehouse or a Tower Records, a Walden or a Doubleday Bookstore; now it's empty windows covered in long , brown sheets of butcher paper, kiosks selling sunglasses and cell phones, clothing , bath, and electronic stores with one, maybe two browsers per store, if they were lucky, with no sales being closed by hapless sales clerks. There was nothing , nothing at all I wanted to buy, nothing I wanted to see, nothing in the name of anything interesting I wanted to inspect, pick up, make mine, even if I had the time.

Walking to the office building where I worked, down those long, wide avenues with cars by the hundreds heading for the freeway, away from the city, was more inviting than killing time where the spirit of life had been murdered.  In short order, I would have my headset on, talking to people who listened to Rush Limbaugh responding to an ad he'd just read on the air, an offer they couldn't refuse. Credit card in hand, they wanted to make an order with me, or complain in technicolor language about an order they placed with someone else wearing a head set like mine. Life had gotten smaller, lazier, and  small wonder that it seems everything we thought was certain is now a pile of platitudes and the recrimination of morons; we can't get in our cars, get on our bikes, get on a bus and spend our dwindling resources in the town we live in; mean people are too lazy to harass the hired help in person.

It's pathetic.