Eugene David
...The One-Minute Pundit

Saturday, May 06, 2006


Today saw the annual Walnut Street Pain-in-the-A-Double-Scribble Street Festival. Does anyone other than the mayor's PR staff and few businessmen really benefit from these? It's a bunch of people walking and being bored. An extra added attraction was a fight between some Chicago® impersonators and the public pop-rock station WXPN to see who could be more excruciatingly loud. I bought some Chinese food from the restaurant that was better the last time I did it. The girl watching was a little better this year, but that hobby is as profitable as an all-thumbs man building furniture. A oui-oui boutique set up a stand and did what I think was body make-up on several barely-clad women, including someone who vaguely reminded me of Celeste Holm and was quite prominently endowed. I walked away but my eyes wouldn't. When I returned a few hours later they were merely doing make-up.

On a detour to find the City Institute library unexpectedly open I stumbled across Terry Teachout's Commentary article on that superb jazzman "Fats" Waller. Teachout gets a little pretentious writing about pop music, especially people who were in their time considered mere entertainers; but that we more than listen to Fats, we venerate him, a man who died almost 63 years ago, shows the wealth of his culture, and the poverty of ours.

Speaking of -- well, I'm sure I couldn't call it MUSIC, on a trip down to my local A & P (SUPER FRESH!) I passed a park named for the creator of some spectacularly ugly architecture, which had a street festival of its own (well, the weather was nice) and where A CHEAP CHANNEL AUTOMATIC AD PLAYBACK MACHINE was having a contest. I can only hope whenever Fats hears the yowls of our no-talents he can drown them out with deafening blasts on his heavenly pipe organ, which can translate on earth into thunderbolts to zap CHEAP CHANNEL's transmitters.

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