The Way the Music Died, by Elayne Riggs
The older I get, the more there is to keep track of. I realized this some time ago; part of being a grown-up, particularly if you’re on your own, is making hard choices. When I moved out of my parents’ house, I suddenly had to consider expenditures like rent, food, cat litter… and something had to give.
It wasn’t going to be my zine, INSIDE JOKE was my baby and my outlet and my connection to like-minded folk, and I knew that’d take up the majority of my disposable income. (See, in those days you couldn’t self-publish for free like you can do today with blogging and so forth, so those of us who tended to be responsible about our hobbies knew enough to apportion x-amount of dollars that we knew we’d never see again due to printing and postage costs, even if we charged subscribers the requisite buck or two for each issue.) And I couldn’t give up my books, I needed something to do on the subways. I just can’t stare into space, even wearing a Walkman. So music was what went by the wayside. Not kicking and screaming, just sort of fading away.
I’d chosen my hobbies. And reading and writing are activities for which I need silence, which is why to this day it irks me when religious wackos and wandering troubadors come traipsing through the subway car in which I happen to be sitting. (Why do I always get the ones with the bongos? And honestly, religious wackos with bongos are just not going to convert a lot of people, ba dum bum.) Music seemed too important to be treated as background; it demanded my aural attention in the same way reading demands attention from my eyes and imagination. And I just couldn’t spare the awareness any more. (more…)
As much as I’d like to use this column’s title to segue into a discussion about Beijing and Tibet and Stephen Spielberg and so forth, that’s not my chosen subject matter this time. Although I reserve the right to swipe my own header again once the XXIX Olympiad gets going. No, the title refers to the phenomenon of all kinds of different people believing, and loudly proclaiming, that systemic discrimination against the particular group with which they identify (and sometimes, if they’re "concern trolls," against a group of which they’re not a member but with which they’ve chosen to sympathize to the point of condescension) is "the last acceptable prejudice."
So as I was saying last week, by the time I hit college I went full-force into my first round of Beatlemania. I must have frequented my share of Beatlefests (as noted in the comments to last week’s column, there’s one coming up 
Last week we were casting about, as usual, for something interesting to watch in the 100-200 channel range of our cable system. The local PBS stations were hip-deep in pledge drives, which meant 20-minute breaks between segments of shows that would otherwise have been enjoyable but which we’d mostly seen anyway by this point. (Did anyone else think it just a tad disconcerting that WLIW, the Long Island-based PBS station, could afford to send its two high muckety-mucks out to broadcast from Innsbruck during the pledge breaks for 
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