Category: Article

Rick Kahn was in seclusion. Scorned by Republicans and Democrats alike, he wasn’t opening his door or returning calls. T. Trent Gegax picked up the phone and called anyway.

Gegax is a Newsweek reporter from the Twin Cities. The University of Minnesota graduate grew up in Burnsville, but has since lived in Boston, Atlanta, and Washington, writing about politics and pop culture. He was back in his old stomping grounds on November 5 to cover the much-scrutinized Minnesota senate race. Sensing that the Wellstone memorial would turn out to be pivotal that Tuesday, he wanted feedback from the man at the epicenter of the controversy. Did Kahn have anything to say for himself in the aftermath of his speech?

Surprisingly, Wellstone’s close friend and campaign treasurer answered his phone. After a conversation that lasted less than 10 minutes, Gegax published the results that night in an online article. The scoop was quickly relayed across the country through national outlets such as the Associated Press and Fox News, along with envious local media including KSTP-TV and the Star Tribune.

When we talked to the reporter (he returned our call within a day), Gegax claimed no secret strategy for nailing down the elusive interview. Although his father, Tires Plus founder Tom Gegax, was a well-known Wellstone supporter, Trent said his family’s connections to the campaign were never mentioned. “I just cold-called,” he said. “I was very respectful. I tried to say, ‘I understand you’re in a very difficult situation and I hate the fact that I have to call you, but I just want to get your feelings.’” Kahn was reluctant at first. “And then he said, ‘All I’ll say is, this was a public expression of private grief.’ And then he, of course, kept talking, as people often do.”

This was not the first time Gegax has gotten a big scoop. Remember the bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics? He was the first print journalist on the scene for that story, having felt the blast in a nearby press room. A scoop like that can make a reporter’s career. Since then, the former Minnesota Daily writer has covered lots of breaking news, including plane crashes, hurricanes, and school shootings.

“In my job, I unfortunately have to convince people going through serious tragedy to talk,” he said. “I go out of my way to tell them, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to write this piece and I want you to be able to have the first crack at your side of the story.’” The writer was coy about how he got a phone number Kahn would answer. “Sourcing is closely held,” he said.

On the same day Gegax got his exclusive Kahn interview, HBO premiered Journeys With George, a vérité documentary that follows the 2000 Bush presidential campaign from inside the press corps. The film catches Bush in unguarded moments, including his persistent teasing of filmmaker Alexandra Pelosi about her flirtations with a reporter dubbed “Newsweek Man.” The object of Pelosi’s affection was Gegax. “Bush was always kind of nudging us,” Gegax said. “It’s the way he endears himself to other people, especially the press. He gets into their personal lives. He flirts with men and women alike. Sometimes I think it’s genuine. Sometimes I think it’s just a mechanism to get good play.”

For the record, Gegax said nothing serious happened between him and Pelosi (daughter of Nancy, the nation’s new House minority leader). In fact, Newsweek Man is engaged to marry a longtime girlfriend in March. He said he’s amused by the notoriety resulting from Journeys With George, but he hopes to stake his reputation on work like his Kahn interview. “I would prefer to be known as somebody who gets scoops,” he said. “Rather than for coming off as a cad.”

When Senator Norm Coleman takes office in Washington next month, he’ll have some big decisions to make, on everything from war to social security. He may also need to decide on a new dentist, a process that certainly can tax a man’s courage. Norm has already proven himself on that score: In 1999, he underwent a procedure to close the gap in his front teeth. “What’s pain? I’m the mayor,” he said at the time. “I deal with pain all the time.”

Deep down, everyone else is afraid of dentists. The dentistry section in the yellow pages is full of big, bold pleas like, “No Scolding Judgements or Lectures” and “We Cater To Cowards”—selling points that would be bizarre for any other business. Plumbers do not need to run ads that say, “The Plunger Doesn’t Hurt, I Swear to God!”

This is bad. First, it’s bad medicine. Terrified people don’t go to the dentist, or go so rarely that their teeth suffer between visits. Second, it’s a bummer for the dentists. And it’s also bad business. Since insurance companies and government programs pick up less of the tab for your dental work than for other medical procedures, it cuts more deeply into dentists’ bottom line if you can’t bear to have them cut deeply into your molars.

Naturally there’s been considerable effort to change public opinion. “I think in the past, dentists were rougher,” said Jeff Johnson, a dentist in Little Falls. “Dentistry’s kind of a rough thing to start with—banging away and drilling away on your teeth. But if you aren’t conscious of a person’s sensitivity to that, you may not see them again.”

The trend is cheery coziness, the style is basement rec-room. Dentists’ lobbies these days are “more living-room-like and much more comfortable,” says Kimberly Harms, a Farmington dentist. She cheerfully admits that she herself is “absolutely terrified” of having her own teeth worked on, and says her own tendency toward phobia has influenced her practice’s high priority on patient amenities, including a juice bar and a private garden with birds and flowers. “We’re basically looking at the patient at every part of the dental visit and saying, ‘What can we do to make that more relaxing?’”

A lot of patients are agreeable to visual distractions, especially during long sessions. Dr. Harms and Dr. Johnson both offer “video glasses,” sort of eye-phones that attach to a DVD player or a VCR and bedazzle patients with their favorite movies. (Just a suggestion: Don’t request Marathon Man.)

But if dentists want to make sure you know they feel sympathetic, they also want to make sure you feel numb. “I think certainly the public has a lower tolerance for discomfort in recent times,” said St. Anthony dentist Joseph Osterbauer. “What society might have considered a necessary evil, they won’t tolerate anymore.” Nitrous oxide has become common, and many offices now use computer-aided anesthetic injections to reduce pain. Once confined to major oral surgery, powerful knockout drugs like Rohypnol and Halcion are increasingly used for routine dental work. “Sedation dentistry,” as it’s known, is rather drastic. But if there’s no other way you can face the drill, the ADA’s official position is that they’d rather see you unconscious than not see you at all.

Few artists who paint dogs have found the vision to deviate from the time-honored themes of poker games and doe-eyed poodles on velvet. Armed with acrylics, canvas, and lots of costume jewelry, newcomer Amy Brazil has finally broken the mold. “Best of Show,” a recent hanging at Hopkins Center for the Arts, has people stopping in their tracks. There’s a lot to get their heads around. “La Chasse Auz Papillion” is a profile of a Great Dane giving thoughtful consideration to a crystal-encrusted butterfly mounted on the canvas over a lime-colored background. Others in the show feature more of these unusual jewelry applications. “Hairy Winston” depicts a Boston Terrier on a harlequin-patterned satin background bordered with rhinestones. “Lady Godiva,” a chocolate colored retriever, poses against a background of gold foil embossed to resemble a chocolate wrapper. “Lady Abigail,” an Afghan Hound draped in faux pearls, is painted on black velvet. An initial stroll past these 17 pieces, while enchanting, was also provoking. Why would someone so talented paint nothing but dogs? Why the jewelry? Why aren’t they ironic? Why do I like them so much? I wanted answers, so I called Amy Brazil.

It turns out that Brazil just really, really likes dogs. She started about two years ago with portraits of her own dogs, Jade and Jackson, a Lhasa apso and springer spaniel. She liked the paintings so much that she went to a dog show in search of more subjects. What happened then can only be described as an epiphany. “I went down to the convention center equipped with a sketch pad and a couple of cameras,” said Brazil. “I was just blown away. I was so overwhelmed that day. After that, everything just started clicking.” Since then, she’s wanted to do nothing but paint, and paint nothing but dogs. “I’m doing what makes me happy, and I’m having a great time doing it. If I’m not up by 5:30 or 6 painting, it’s a bad day.”

Yet somehow the resulting work is not precious or sentimental dreck. Brazil said she tries to reveal human equivalents in the variety of character found in canine breeds. Reminded of Sid Vicious by the legendarily ugly Chinese Crested breed, Brazil created a double portrait (“Sid and Nancy”) on a Sex Pistols-themed background. An “obnoxious” (Brazil’s word) Bob Mackey design favored by Cher in the 70s will supply the background for a work in progress of a doberman depicted as Cher. She will be posed with an Italian greyhound. Naturally, Brazil will call him Sonny. There seems to be no limit to the potential combinations Brazil might conceive and paint in the future. She has nonetheless paid the devil his due. With “Lady Abigail” on black velvet, she gave her nod to the kernel of kitsch that will forever be at the heart of this form. Is she also tempted to update the poker-playing bulldogs? “No,” she said. “It’s already been done, and it was done beautifully.”

Most everyone who has stepped into The Purple Onion coffee shop in Dinkytown has noticed William “Bill” Grimes IV, a regular for nearly a decade who whiles away the hours sipping mochas, reading Kierkegaard and science fiction, and “flapping with cats.” You can’t miss him: Grimes is a 6’3”, 170-pound man in his early 30s of half-Bohemian (as in Bohemia, near the Czech Republic), and half-African American descent. He sports an enormous afro, a mustache which extends into the crease of his chin, and oversized 70s-style glasses. He frequently wears a vintage polyester shirt hanging open to reveal his naked chest.

More than a few stuffed shirts suffer from Grimes-envy, or at least admiration. This fondness is most often construed in what Grimes calls “differential treatment,” demonstrated through free admission to concerts (comped by various bands including Fat Lip and Greazy Meal), a free trip to Chicago with the Honeydogs (a gift of a bar owner intent on having Grimes’ mere presence at the band’s show), and, most strangely, an autograph request from another audience member at a Jimi Hendrix tribute show Grimes attended. When a bemused Grimes protested, iterating his mere fan status, pointing out that he wasn’t in any of the bands and noting that he didn’t even play an instrument, the clean-cut, suburban man became insistent. He wanted Grimes to sign his Hendrix poster.

Grimes suspects it’s the hair that commands the initial attention. So much so that his life’s timeline consists of “before hair” and “after hair” experiences. But it would do Grimes an injustice to attribute his charisma merely to the massive afro, which is often adorned with a peacock feather above his right ear. People were drawn to him even in his Army Reserves days, when his head was shaved. They were baffled by how he could stay up all night reading John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and chain-smoking in the latrine. They were astonished by this 18-year-old Minneapolis kid who had been “tricked” into joining the reserves, by the man who would grow up to claim on his census form that his race is “Nietzsche’s übermensch.”

It is not surprising that Grimes is a font of progressive thought. Although soft-spoken and even introverted, he is forthcoming with his ideas. He wrote a book documenting his beliefs. The Mystified Sojourn: Resurrection of the Meaning of Spirituality and Religion is an exploration of alternative spirituality and capitalistic conundrums. At 189 pages, the self-published tract is dense enough to rival a semester’s worth of discussions in an entry-level cultural studies class, and original enough to have sold 270 copies.

Some people admire his derring-do. Others, like one Purple Onion regular who has repeatedly complained to employees that he caught Grimes “looking at him,” seem unaccountably threatened by him. Grimes cannot help but be amused. After all, he’s always looked different, from the days of his gangly, buck-toothed adolescence to his still-gangly, retro-stylin’ self. He says any attempt at conformity always fails, regardless of his hair.

You were a world-class hairdresser from Austria. You settled in Minneapolis and became a world-class party animal. You got deathly ill, and decided to heal not only yourself but the world. You sold Aveda for $300 million. Meet your Rakish readers, HORST.

Horst Rechelbacher is filthy rich. He’s also a pure soul, spending as much as seven hours a day in serious meditation and yogic practice. The 61-year-old stylist, photographer, entrepreneur, and activist has long made his home in the Twin Cities.

Horst arrived in Minneapolis when he was still a young man with a rich Austrian accent. Having become a world-class hairdresser at the tender age of 14, he had already toured most of the world before he was an adult. In 1965, he was passing through the area when he was involved in a nearly fatal automobile accident. He spent several months in the hospital, and by the time he got out, he was saddled with what seemed like a lifetime of medical bills. He decided to set up his own hair salon here, and the rest is history.

But what a history! Through the 60s and 70s, he maintained his platinum reputation as a stylist, while experimenting with his own cosmetics and hair-care supplies. At the same time, he’d become interested in Eastern philosophy and religion. It was a fast-paced, jet-setting lifestyle. Ultimately, in the mid-70s, it all caught up to him and he had a physical breakdown he describes as being “completely zapped.” His mother, an Austrian apothecary, came to Minnesota and helped nurse her son back to health. At about this time, a light went on. He saw with clarity new connections between his spiritual interests, his business ventures, and his personal history. He suddenly became interested in his mother’s traditional herbal infusions and preparations, and sensed a connection to some of the Eastern philosophies he’d been exposed to in India, Nepal, and Tibet.

Horst began to see that “the human body and the planetary body are totally symbiotic.” He studied and received a degree in Ayurvedic medicine, the traditional Indian approach to healing that uses 175 essential oils prepared from plants and flowers. He started meditating on a regular basis. He began to sense that his industry was ripe for a revolution—and he was right. In 1978, he launched Aveda—a Sanskrit word meaning “all knowledge”—to engender his new principles about personal and global renewal, while trying to eliminate the use of toxins and petrochemicals in personal care products.

In 1997, he sold Aveda to Estee Lauder for $300 million. Frustrated by the constant pressure of running a business that had outgrown him, he decided to focus on the things that mattered most to him: meditation and activism. And yet, before long he’d had another idea for a new enterprise: Intelligent Nutrients, a progressive food and supplement retailer. It seems that no matter how retired or wealthy the man becomes, he grows restless to be involved with either a noble cause, a global business, or (ideally) both.

In October, Horst launched a new personal adventure: an art gallery in Northeast Minneapolis, just down the road from the Aveda Institute. Horst Galleries will feature Eastern and emerging artists, and profits from the gallery will benefit charitable causes like preserving traditional medicine and promoting awareness about cancer. His first show featured the work of Romio Shristha, a Tibetan who paints thankgas. These are beautiful, highly detailed, traditional medical illustrations. It was the perfect debut for Horst, combining his love of fine art, his personal interest in Eastern spirituality, and his professional involvement with the traditional, indigenous medicine of Asia.

We met with Horst while the paint was still drying on his new office walls, and Shristha’s show was being hung. Horst is a centered man, he laughs easily and uproariously, and he is genuine about his passions. Like anyone who has cashed out the way he’s cashed out, he knows what he likes, and has no problem demanding it from those around him.

In Russian, “bolshoi” means “grand”—in the word’s fullest sense of being both huge and fine. In every other language, the word has come to be associated with the fabled excellence and grand spectacle of the dance troupe. When the Bolshoi Ballet Company arrives here for two rare performances of Swan Lake and four of The Nutcracker, Twin Cities audiences have every right to believe they will live up to their prestigious name.

“These are big, traditional productions, with a full corps de ballet,” said David Eden, who co-produces the Bolshoi’s current U.S. tour with fellow Russian producer Sergei Danilian. Among the 144 members of the traveling team are 102 dancers, a conductor (who works with local orchestras in each of the eight cities the Bolshoi will visit), and a full technical crew necessitated by six elaborate stage-sets.

A quick historical primer: Classical grandeur has been the hallmark of the Bolshoi since the 19th century. But the company traces its roots back to 1776, the same year John Hancock put his, erm, John Hancock on the Declaration of Independence. From its earliest days, Russian ballet included folk dance elements in its choreography, and had a vigor that distinguished it from European dance. In the latter half of the19th century, a great cross-fertilization in style happened, as choreographers worked across national borders, and the eminent French choreographer Marius Petipa came to Russia. During the next 60 years, Patipa codified classical ballet.

When Petipa arrived in Moscow, the Romantic Period was in full swing. Dances were typically built around plots that were heavy on traditional mythology—spirits from the natural world interacting with mortals, that kind of thing. By the time the Frenchman was operating at the peak of his powers, he collaborated with the Russian composer Piotr Tchaikovsky. Together, they developed precise scores designed specifically for ballet. These were unprecedented for their richness of melody and mood.

Petipa adopted Russian folk-dance elements into his choreography, and introduced to Russian dance a new expressiveness that worked more closely with the music. He choreographed more “pointe” work into Russian dance. (An “en pointe” ballerina literally dances on the tips of her toes in those specially blocked dance slippers. En pointe is, of course, technically and physically challenging. But it gives a gloriously delicate and elongated line to the leg.)

The Swan Lake that comes to Northrop is Yuri Grigorovich’s revised interpretation that uses some of Petipa’s original 1895 choreography. In this version, Russia’s greatest native choreographer dropped the happy ending that had been tacked on in the 1930s to meet Soviet demands. Only by the whim of political history do we see Grigorovich’s Swan Lake here; it might never have seen the light of day if the USSR had survived.

The Soviets supported the Bolshoi because it showcased the high quality of Soviet arts—an excellent source of positive propaganda. Dancers were among the privileged elite, like Soviet-era athletes. But the party controlled the Bolshoi’s artistic content with an iron fist. Under Communism, sad endings were forbidden. In the Soviet-endorsed version of Swan Lake, the prince always gets his girl.

But Grigorovich returned to Tchaikovsky’s original idea that the two bad characters—Rothbart and the black swan—represent the dark sides of the hero and heroine, and he re-choreographed the ending to match the inescapable sadness in the music. “At the dress rehearsal in 1969,” remembered Eden, “the minister of culture was in attendance. Grigorovich had taken some liberties with the narrative and had given it a melancholy ending. That was contradictory to socialist realist ideas, and the minister banned it.”

Swan Lake tells of Prince Siegfried, who longs for the ideal of pure love and avoids the girls vying to catch his eye at his coming-of-age soiree. As the party winds down, he becomes aware of a shadow at his elbow, the evil Rothbart. Rothbart leads him to a magical lake, where Siegfried meets—hold on tight here—the beautiful swan-maiden, Odette. He swears eternal love to this gorgeous bird, but tricky Rothbar later presents Odile, the black swan, and she’s a dead ringer for Odette. The very moment the prince announces he will marry Odile, the true Odette appears. But it’s too late for Siegfried to undo his error.

“The struggle is within the Prince,” Eden said. “Rothbart is an extension of Siegfried’s own personality, and there’s a parallel with Odette and Odile. The atmosphere is brooding and pessimistic, but poetic. This Swan Lake has great psychological depth and insight.”

Closeted behind the Iron Curtain after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Bolshoi burst onto the Western scene in the 50s, when the Soviets allowed the company to travel to London. English critics raved about the dancers’ dramatic flair and technical excellence, in moves like the male dancer’s one-arm lifts, and the 32-revolution flouté, in which a ballerina balances en pointe on one leg and pirouettes with the weight of her other leg.

“The dancers have visceral, bold movements,” Eden said. “We call it the ‘bravura technique.’ In the Soviet era, they learned very big, bold jumps, techniques that stretched the dancer’s physical limitations and that evolved more and more toward drama and spectacle.”

The same acrobatics and drama infuse Grigorovich’s Nutcracker. Tchaikovsky based the ballet on a tale by the 18th-century romantic storyteller E.T.A. Hoffmann. Nutcracker is also a coming-of-age story, but this time the love object is, oddly, a nutcracker. At Christmastime, young Marie receives a nutcracker doll from the mysterious Drosselmeier and dreams that he becomes a handsome prince, whom she is on the point of marrying when she awakens.

Early choreographers struggled with the apparent contradiction of Hoffman’s fanciful children’s story and the often-tragic tones of Tchaikovsky’s music. In Grigorovich’s choreography for Nutcracker, Marie wakes among her toys and expresses in dance her grief for her lost childhood and unrequited love.

Both ballets feature the Bolshoi’s much-admired corps de ballet, the large group of superbly trained dancers who operate within a ballet rather as a Greek chorus operates within classical drama. So precise is the presentation of the corps that directors select dancers for uniformity of size as well as for their ability.

Linda Shapiro, affiliate faculty in the U of M dance department, can’t wait to see the corps de ballet dance as the mass of swans in Swan Lake. “For my money,” she said, “the Bolshoi is more about the corps; it’s a force in itself.”

“They’re all strong dancers, all traditionally trained,” Eden said. “Their arabesques are effortless, their lines perfect. We place great emphasis on the lyricism of the upper arms. It’s expressive and beautiful.”

During Soviet times, more emphasis was placed on technical excellence than on creativity. The Bolshoi existed in isolation, cut off from the genre-changing innovations of the great neo-classical choreographer Ballanchine, in New York, who divorced ballet from large-scale story-telling and embraced shorter, abstract forms.

Now, Eden acknowledges, the Bolshoi faces a challenge. “It has to become creative,” he said. “To be art, ballet must develop and evolve. It cannot be a fixed product.”

The tension between tradition and innovation exists in all art. But Shapiro believes this is a rare opportunity for the small, chamber dance companies of the Twin Cities to revisit the noble tradition. “This is the heart of ballet,” she said. “Everything else riffs off this classical form. It’s wonderful for us to see grand, poetic, fully-realized productions of major 19th-century ballets. It’s like seeing opera by the Met. These are brilliantly done bal
lets filled with fairy-tale legend and magic.”

Lise Houlton, artistic director of Minnesota Dance Theatre, gives her contemporary ballet dancers a classical training. “A classical training is essential for contemporary work,” she said. “The grounding in technique provides the point of departure for all styles of dance.” Arriving as it does, right in the middle of the local pre-Christmas Nutcracker season, Houlton admitted that the Bolshoi represents competition but, she said, “It’s wonderful they’re coming. It will help us build a larger audience for dance in the Twin Cities.” Judith Brin Ingber, a professor of dance history at the University, said, “I’m excited to see the Russians. They are the keepers of our tradition.”

Bolshoi Ballet Company’s Swan Lake, December 3-4, at 7:30 p.m. The Nutcracker, December 6, 8 p.m.; December 7, 2 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Dec. 8, 1 p.m. Northrop Auditorium, $26-$66. (612) 624-2345.

I’ve been doing some work lately that’s forced me to become at least casually reacquainted with pop music, a reunion that distresses me as if I were being dosed with booze after a happy stretch of sobriety. For the past three or four years, I have sheltered myself from developments in music, and have enjoyed the isolation. Before, I was a self-confessed record geek, the kind of emotionally arrested, obsessive collector lampooned in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. In my early 20s, I allocated 90 percent of my post-rent budget to record-store binges, leaving just enough ready cash for one Totino’s Party Pizza and a Diet Shasta per day.

But as I approached 30, and my wife and I started talking kids, I became concerned for my future. I had a nightmarish vision of a father-son chat from my vinyl-hoarding tomorrow: “Son, I need you to be a man about this and sleep on the couch so I can move the jazz section to your room.” But before I could enroll in a twelve-step program, the addiction loosened its grip without coaxing. To my occasional sorrow, my diehard rock-and-roll ideals began to quietly erode. I was slightly disturbed to discover that my non-conformist instincts, my passion for records, fanzines, and nightclubs ebbed in my late 20s, at about the same age most regular folks, by which I guess I mean the non-non-conformists, lose touch with youth culture. My response to this loss of faith was to become a pop ostrich, avoiding exposure to new music as much as possible. Music couldn’t suck, I reasoned, if I sealed myself in a vacuum.

Just a few years ago, dissecting the music scene and tirelessly surfeiting my lust for records was so self-defining that I couldn’t imagine my interest fading. But along the way, band profiles and record reviews began to interest me about as much as the copy on a box of Honey Nut Cheerios. Soon I started to bog down in the middle of 100-word concert previews (“Oh God, when will this end, and what are they talking about?”). I reduced my record-store visits from three or four times a week to once or twice a season. Hearing a good song on the radio became an unexpected day-brightener, rather than a call to action; for the first time, I felt approval of a record didn’t morally obligate me to own it. I started leaving the (eternal, infernal) gaps in my collection unfilled, tuned in NPR, and dropped out.

For most people, the golden age of music conveniently climaxed when they were about 18. Having danced and moped and cruised and groped to (depending on their generation) Benny Goodman, the Beatles, Boston, or Public Enemy, they find it especially difficult to tolerate what they regard as the vastly inferior effluvium being spoon-fed to kids today. I’d like to think my neglect of new music is not driven by this kind of cranky nostalgia. I’d like to think my tastes weren’t so rigidly formed in my youth that I couldn’t see the merit in the cream of today’s crop. If I immersed myself in it, I could judge the newfangled on its own terms. I figure the aesthetic quality of pop music is fairly constant, that there is always at least a small percentage of great stuff being made. Sure, particular genres and even particular musical values wax and wane. But for the kids—the abstract, mythical kids—I suspect the music has the same transcendent, liberating, intoxicating wallop it has always had. Ever the populist optimist, I cling to the idea that if the “kids” think it’s great, then it possibly is great.

At least that seems like a reasonable theory, but one I haven’t tested too rigorously as of late. And that’s why, when I learn, for example, that Nelly and Nelly Furtado are two different people, or that the Hives are helping resuscitate garage rock, my curiosity is tempered with fear. It makes me want to hear their music, and I don’t want to hear their music. If curiosity gets the best of me, and I blow my next paycheck at the record store, I might find the music uninspiring, perplexing, boring, trite, rehashed, juvenile. It’s too risky. The chasm between youth culture and my own increasingly bourgeois world-view could suddenly yawn in front of me. I could start to feel old, cranky, and sentimental, like a white-flannel-trouser-wearing beachcomber, when all I want is to be the eternal pop fan on an indefinite leave of absence.

And so the irony (you’ve undoubtedly heard how much my generation loves irony) is that in the midst of trying to dodge a buzz-band-induced buzzkill, the opportunity has arisen to earn a little cash by writing about pop music. And I guess there’s some rule about “journalistic integrity” that requires the critic to actually listen to the music before evaluating it. So I’m hearing new music again, and it doesn’t seem worse than when I left it a few years ago, but my relationship with it, once so intimate, now feels long-distance.

A few weeks ago, I heard the new Missy Elliot single, “Work It,” as I pulled into my garage, and I waited in the car until it finished. I love it, but I feel I’m enjoying it out of context. I want to hear it in a club, or at a party, or with a carload full of stoned friends. But I can’t stand clubs anymore, and parties start too late, and it’s dangerous to drive stoned. Still, I bought the twelve-inch. On some level, I’m back.