LUDIC LOG

The passage of a year marks many things to many different people. To one such as myself (the "such as", here, being purely a gedanken-experimente, as none such as me can be found outside the walls of my cozy little atelier), it means a new throng of freshmen on which to impress my transcyclopaedic knowledge of contemporary music theory and praxis; it means another futile attempt by those wrong-headed me-firsters in the Women's Study department to unseat my tenure by means of a trumped-up sexual harrassment suit; it means a fresh batch of royalty checks from the sales of my seminal mandatory assigned text Dale, Clark, Crickets: Our Dicks, Their Rock. For others, it means spending time with their family or friends, traveling abroad, indulging the creative impulse, or some equally unfulfilling activity. For Pedro, the Belizean who empties my trash-bin of its daily accretion of inadequate term papers, threatening notes from Professor Milliken about the parking space, and invalidated Kleenex, it means a Hallmark card at Christmas accompanied a personal check for five dollars and a note saying there is no need to thank me, particularly in that mestizo jibber-jabber of his.

But for the contemporary musicopologist, it means the obligatory (not to mention obliteratory) task of preparing a Top Ten list for the year which has just noisily expired, hemorrhaging its vital fluids like a neighbor-dog which was foolish enough to venture where it can never be proved to have visited. It is not that the preparation of toptenditure is necessarily a wasteful endeavor in, of, at and on itself; it focuses the mind, tightens the sphincter, and provides an oft-needed refresher course in counting upwards from one. However, its terrible burden often proves too weightful for even the shoulders of giants: the necessary distance to properly evaluate the scope of one's own genius is sometimes so far that you fall off the edge of the table and into the wastebasket, waiting helplessly for Pedro. I like to call this a "critical miss", a term I have adopted and adapted with resolutely un-post-irony from the weekly games of Dungeons and Dragons I conducted with my fellow undergrads in McFilthy Hall back in my pre-institutional days.

The latest titan of musiatry to fall victim to Top Ten Disease is the esteemable McChesney Duntz, respected arts commentator. In a misguided though profoundly remunerated attempt to rank and file his finest writing of the year of our Mary Lou Lord 2003, he has rolled the dice and come up double-zeroes, proving that even the most insightful Cyclopes of the tune-poking trade may know when to hold 'em but fail abjectly in knowing when to fold 'em. Do not mistake me, oh my darlings: for I come to parry Duntz, not to braise him. I, a mere dibble-dabbler before this Gargantua who is to music theocriticismry what le grand Le Petomaine was to rectal tootlery, am but a kinky Kinbote to his half-opened Shade. I would no more deny the man's genius than I would deny the paternity of Professor Jubal's infant son if it were in fact mine which I hasten to remind everyone the tests proved it was inconclusively not. No, my quarrel is not with his importance, his brilliance, his suitability for inclusion on a rocket ship containing our best and brightest; for I would sooner perish in a nuclear hellstorm than live on a new world where I was unable to hear a truly in-depth analysis of why the struggle for worker's control of the means of production is a futile and hollow charade unless it is accompanied by the strains of Finnish spork-jazz dodecatet Jaap-Paan. Is Duntz brilliant? Unimpeachably. Is he iconoclastic? Decorrodibly. Is he essential? Postdestructibly. The issue with which I stain this tissue is not whether he produced ten short-sheets of monumental greatness in the last calendar year; the beef in my teeth is which ten he chose.

Where is "What Happens to a Dream De-Furred?", his blistering treatise on the so-deep-underground-it's-being-assaulted-by-Morlocks subgenre of plushie-rock? Where is his inky, inchoate hand-written article featured in the May edition of Back of a Box of Honeycombs Review in which he discovers that an effect identical to the storied synchronicity of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album and The Wizard of Oz can be had by playing the White Stripes' Elephant and Gus van Sant's Elephant at the same time? Where are the excerpts from his soon-to-be-self-published rock operanovellaletta It Takes a Nation of Millions to Cash My Check? Where is "The Sensitive Side of Satan Deathfuck Peniscramp", surely the most coherent intervew with a black metal bassist ever to appear in New Music Expatriate? Can we honestly be expected to accept at 'faced value an end-of-year accounting that does not include his scalding, fearless reaction to the Iraq invasion that appeared in For Men-Children Only under the title "I Have a Large Collection of Rare Vinyl Free Jazz for Anyone Who Will Trade Me Plastic Sheeting and Silver Tape"? I think not. I think very much not.

Mr. Duntz, I implore you. For the sake of every man, boy, and I suppose theoretically girl and dog on the planet Earth who values your inconsolable insights: reassess your top ten, or at least expand it to fifty. Like the finest muscatel, not a drop of your talents are to be easily forgotten.