July 2005

Los Lobos is the best American band since the Band. They can play “My Generation,” “Not Fade Away,” “Bertha,” “Sklar,” and “Waiting in Vain” and make them all new again, fresh again. Their medleys in concert are awesome: they brought Billy Stewart’s “Sitting in the Park” into their own “This Time.” The singing is beautiful; they can be loud without distortion; they can do it all, and they’ll play three encores.

Band names: Steel Syrup, Melancholy 88, Hot Reeking.

My father is wondering about the sexual urge. Why, he asks, did God put it in us? And he thinks that when men age (he’s 70), they will wonder what all the fuss was about. “You don’t marry a woman thinking of children, family, raising kids—you do it for the sexual urge, and it carries you into the rest. Darwin can’t explain it. You have to look at Job: why did God put this sexual urge on us? Just to propagate the species? One of my teachers said the sexual urge was given us after we were riven (‘male and female created He them’), to make us whole.” We were sitting at a concert or play when my father was telling me this, during intermission. He looked over and saw an old, very fat man touching his wife, who looked still older, with his gross, fleshy hands. “It disgusts me to think that this man still has the sexual urge. You know, the Pope just told the Italians to have more children.”