from Books&Culture:
from the article by Mark Judge "Please Flush"
"But rock critics will often contradict popular opinion about a hot band, as the frequency of three-star (out of five) reviews in Rolling Stone attests. What the writers and editors won't do is contradict the libertine ethos that guides the music press, if not rock music. And—as many of them have conveniently forgotten—one of the things that made Lester Bangs great was that he did precisely this."
and this...
"Bangs then goes on a magnificent digression about the problem of seeing the miracle of each human life, and how doing so can almost be too much to bear:
As I write this, I can read in the Village Voice the blurbs of people opening heterosexual S&M clubs in Manhattan, saying things like, "S&M is just another equally valid form of love. Why people can't accept that we'll never know." Makes you want to jump out of a fifth floor window rather than read about it, but it's hardly the end of the world; it's not nearly as bad as the hurts that go on everywhere everyday that are taken so casually by all of us as facts of life. Maybe it boils down to how much you actually want to subject yourself to. If you accept for even a moment the idea that each human life is as precious and delicate as a snowflake and then you look at a wino in a doorway, you've got to hurt until you feel like a sponge for all those other [expletive's] problems … so you stop feeling. But you know that then you begin to die.""
"This was a tonic wrote Bangs, because 'the self-destructive undertow that always accompanied the great sixties party had an awful lot of ankles firmly in its maw and was pulling straight down."
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