Posted 5:58 PM by Gene

Today I took my weekly South Street constitutional to find a BAND playing atop a restaurant situated near the alleged birthplace of Larry Fine, and another BAND ready to make noise at Headhouse Square, courtesy of a prefab machine-stamped radio station, and somehow I thought of the GREAT WHITE 1-0-0 circuit, one band exactly like the next, playing the identical GHEE-tar riffs, third-rate wannabes and fourth-rate hasbeens, all stinking up the same above-ground dungeons, all waiting for the break that never comes, all reminding us that not so long ago, live music was fun.

And at the local redoubt of the failing Tower Records chain some Vivendi act attracted a horde of stupid youngsters in black T-shirts lining up for autographs. Tonight it's playing a dreary former movie house notable for the weird names on the marquee and the fact that the last prominent act there was Jackie Mason, years ago. Which reminded me, if all today's junk artifacts were just a small part of the total culture, they might be tolerable. BUT JUNK IS ALL THERE IS. In swing music's heyday, a time of zoot suits and strange words like reet, Stravinsky and Prokofiev and Britten wrote concert music, and Hemingway and Evelyn Waugh wrote novels, and Frost wrote poems. The lack of serious mature ADULT culture explains in no small measure why hack morons like Janet Maslin assume the thinker pose at GENIUSES like Eminem, or why scribbling imbeciles like Robert "Over the" Hilburn turn everything they touch into a masterpiece. WHY CAN'T WE HAVE CULTURE FOR ADULTS AGAIN?

This is why I'm so mad at Andy S. and that permanent grad student and their dimwitted notion of SOUTH PARK CONSERVATISM: it advocates that OUR CULTURE NEEDN'T GROW UP. Some time ago a writer in The American Enterprise took Slick AND Newt to task for living in a frozen state of boomer adolescence. The hyperpundits merely reflect them, and SOUTH PARK CONSERVATISM is but another extension of their essential childishness. WHY CAN'T WE HAVE CULTURE FOR ADULTS AGAIN?