Letter to Logan

There was a moment thirty years ago when "I can tell by your clothes you're from the other side," fell apart.

Sure, Logan, it's cool your uncle is Jim Dandy, and you break bread with Ted Nugent, and all, but how does that, by itself, entitle you to the legacy?

We all should've known better (Mr. Young was right) when Skynard sang "we all did what we could do" for the Guvnor that they weren't talking no Southern abolitionism.

How did a generation's disassociation become so prevalent, it allows for your fellow collegian at the multi-cultural street festival last Saturday to stand behind a "God isn't White" sign and dually confess membership in a Anglican mission church?

"Honey, it's African, but it's still homophobic!"

Tolkein writes, "a small quantity of history depresses us with the sense of the ever-lasting weight of human inquity but as long as we cling to the Good, we can finally prevail."

--and so it is at the next booth -- buying the King/Obama calendar -- agreeing with the proprietoress, "now we're getting somewhere."

Protestors outside Fonda's new play in New York aren't getting anywhere: 'hey, we were right about the Immoral War. We aint apologizing no more. We mourn your dead and our own'.

Even so, Van Dyke Parks is right to question upon the demise of Buffalo Springfield drummer Dewey Martin, "considering the collectivism and socialist ideals that inspired the group, it baffles me that the discrepancy in fortunes of each of them aren't somehow an issue."

(Query: when Clive Davis signed Dylan/Joplin to Columbia, what side was he on, now we see he's 'evolved' to Idol impressario?)

Of the living Dead, David Cavanagh writes, on how they perform "a theory of geometric musical complexity applied so subtly as to obfuscate the abstract-concrete distinction; and our way of life," to which Rock Scully adds, "most of our history has to do with sociology not music."

(Phish/Metallica crack down on merchandisers/downloaders; the Dead sanction tapers.)

Although Jay Garrick admires Barry Allen (FL-1) as "the man who refused to blur the line between good and evil," we agree more with I. Murdoch, and this is really important, Logan, for purposes of this discussion, that "good art (more than technical virtuoso alone, mind you) may resist bad purposes more successfully."

Such absolutism costs deeply, as even Allen admits, when he "ran into the speed force and joined it, it was like shedding my identity. I completely lost any concept of who I was. My individuality vanished. My connection to Iris, my family, my friends."

I know, Logan, all too well, how hard it is to resist a colorful display of regional authority -- when Prankster chides Supes for his "overblown sense of righteousness," I must confess, seeing the abstraction of the uniform never fails to stirs deep realms of Kentian family values and nationalism--

--which only goes to show, warns Bryan Magee, "there is simply no way in which value judgments can not be structural to the writing."

Despite an encyclopedic knowledge of the relevant arcana, it's surprising you aren't familiar with Waits (although he arrived on the scene in the late 70's, strictly outside classic parameters) of whom Barney Hoskyns writes, he "turned himself into a work of art that blurred the distance between the private and professional selves," which is what we did, Logan, and are, by doing what we do in opposition to the likes of Wallace, racism and war.

Tolkein tells us, it's through myth that a world exists which is "essentially truer than the one we think we see around us everyday."

A truer world, my friend, propelled by, indivisible to, the music which births it.