hullaba-who?

The war machine looms & thunders overhead. It's a nice weekend to get out of town, but I have to work. This air and sea show, and this Lollapalooza, you see, are great marketing tools for realtors selling timeshares just up the road in Lake Geneva or over across the way on Michigan's W. shore. Your own private beach, folks, to escape straggling mouthbreathers in town to see some ho-hum spectacle for the first time ...

The Lollapalooza thing, yeah, uh ... I keep thinking what a *great* lineup this year's (which also seems to be pretty close to last year's) would have been 15 years ago. You'd get Uncle Tupelo instead of Wilco. You'd get Radiohead when they were just some really good rock band with two really good albums. Then again, when we were kids we weren't really of the $5-for-a-bottle-of-water-to-see-washed-up-acts from-the-mid-90s demographic, were we? I suppose some of us are now, but it's like this account I once read where a guy goes to see Elvis in '77 and opines, "if you half-close your eyes and let your imagination roll, you just might catch a hint of his 1958 self ..." I think I see the devolution of this festival into what it now is as one of the great failures of my generation, or something like that, home in Chicago, the world capital of silver-colored hucksterism.