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Show Anting Alone Page 176 hoking their pronunciation up, squatting on their heels on the wooden kitchen floor next to their big bags of brown rice). Their craze for digging the blues back up, for going to blues specialty bars - in these two cities where fully developed jazz bars flourished - was nothing but an expression of their congenital emotional stuntedness, a leftover from the organic wistful wimpy hippy esthetic, like strawflowers, all backward-looking and ball-less. They pretended to be revolutionaries, but they were actually deep-down reactionaries. They wanted to bounce themselves and Axelrad backwards to the good ol' bluesy days, the late sixties, the High Renaissance the days when youth mobilization still seemed possible in the northern hemisphere . They were affiliated predictably with the anthro and econ and psych departments of the local universities, spending their waking hours downward-and backward-looking to monkeys, proletarians, and infants, these soft-souled sentimental romantics. They were Axelrad's little congenital Marxists, and sentimental old toadies in their hearts, and Sam loved them all the same. But they'd been brutalized already by Reagan's eighties, and one of them had started this brawl, no doubt, simply to impress the leader of the blues band (was it Buddy Guy? - if so, this must've been Chicago, not Houston), in whose blues organization Axelrad's friend wanted a weekend job as a roadie or techie or something. These people were, in fact, indistinguishable from Axelrad and from all of Sam's other little Jewish prepschool friends whom Sam had keened for that night with Shannon and Bouncy in the 3.2 bar. These people could've |
