Another One Bites etc.

R.I.P. Eric Lee Purkhiser

What a sepulchural tone this year has taken already: from McGoohan to Updike, from Gary Kurfirst to the surprisingly-lamented John Martyn*, beginning of course with the thousand-odd souls in Gaza and running on over to Glendale, CA, where Lux' ticker stopped kicking. Someone could make a killing (zing!) developing a Death Blog™ aggregator.

The Old Guard, no matter how much we've deferred their retirement, is finally keeling over - which means that we'd better start getting our shit together. No more time for thinly-embellished homage or nostalgia; stop with the necrophilic dissection of past cultural pan-flashes. We've got so much slack to pick up it will already take all of us to lift it.

(*) - I ain't saying Martyn's place in the folk pantheon is undeserved. The sudden up-chuck of eulogies - after what's been years since I last saw Martyn's name in print - sound like the reclamatory boasting of candidates for His Best Friend, jockeying around the open bar at a wake. Then there's my admitted bias: listening to Martyn's music, I can feel my inner Red Neck surging past my gums, flicking cigarettes at the stage and screaming for Foghat.

I just don't dig folk music. Sorry. (That one's for you, Ben!)