Bumper sticker on an old fridge door: Friends don't let friends drink milk. In dream, one can rework the past at one's leisure, as if constructing a puzzle composed of desire (I'm seducing Ms. Laura Bailey who hasn't aged one minute in the intervening 33 years). Television replays the crumpled Mercedes endlessly (at the Super Fresh, by the checkout line, the Enquirer still blares, page one "Di Goes Sex-Mad: I Can't Get Enough")....
Think of the changes that have gone on in painting or music over the past 50 or 70 years. Think of Bing Crosby as the first singer to understand the dynamics of the microphone, the Jimi Hendrix of that experience, “crooning” where his predecessors had simply blasted out lyrics as if to reach the back row of any auditorium – Crosby is a contemporary with William Carlos Williams, a man whose work still looks unrecognizably avant-garde if we use the kitschmeisters of new formalism as our testing point, and still more than contemporary if we consider the remnants of what used to be the Iowa School of Emoting. In the era of Rova, Counting Crows, and MC Paul Barman, you can still find poets and critics who would object to the equivalent of Bing Crosby. It’s literally nuts.
