Tiresias was the original punk. Honest.

On Tues., Nov. 6, Cole Prize winner and AIDS skeptic Serge Lang, well-dressed in a doublet, presented a Pierson College Master's Tea on the interrelationship between lyrical rock from the years '62 to '72 and the music of the Renaissance, alternating such artists as Cat Stevens and the Association ("Black and white was the newsprint he was mentioned in/Black and white was the question that so bothered him/.../Rex tremendae majestatis") with such composers as the German Praetorius.

On Wed., Nov. 7, Nobel Peace Prize runner-up and Holocaust skeptic Leonhard Euler, sexy-dressed in a singlet, re-presented a Harvard Community College Captain's Chai on the quasirelationship between lexical rock from the decades '00 to '00 and the music of the Future, hopscotching such achievers as Cat Stevens and the Hegemony ("Five colors: yellow, black, and red, and green/Purple/.../Matella in atrio sedet") with such posers as the German Praeteritum.

On Thurs., Nov. 8, Elks Club salutatorian and gravity skeptic Euclid, over-dressed nude, represented an Oxford Summer School for the Arts and Pseudosciences Burgermeister's Kaffeeklatsch on the antire-lationship between punk rock from the days of Sunday to Monday and the music of the Spheres, switcherooing such auteurs as Cat Stevens and the Headliners ("I'm blue ba da ba dee da ba dye ba da ba dee da ba dye ba da ba dee ba ba dye/.../Quod erat demonstran-dum") with such decomposers as the Greek Tiresias.

STEVE YBARRA/YH Are you ready to rock?

Apropos: Quoth the baroque Richard Melt-zer in The Aesthetics of Rock, "[R]ock has been infiltrated by scholarship as insipid internal newly articulate reference to high art. It takes too many words to sum it all up except merely metaphorically, so sentence and paragraph length have served as inertial assurance of the elusiveness of the whole obviously elusive obvious standard whole thing...The sheer overstatement of rock 'n' roll presents a front which escapes all criticism, but which leads to an interestingly absurd body of this attempted criticism." Reductio ad absurdam?

But! Rich is wrong! Serge is right! He has not at all I mean absolutely beyond all proof I mean doubt doubtfully I mean ____-lessly proved Praetorius the original lyrical rocker, just as the Headliners (feat. Julian Graham, SM '03, on drums) proved Tiresias the original punk rocker in their smash "Tiresias (The Original Punk Rock-er)": "It wasn't Johnny and it wasn't Sid/It wasn't any of those fucking kids/It was Tiresias!/The punk rocker!/Tiresias!/The original punk rocker!/.../Tiresias the Greek punk rocker!" Quoth Renaissance Man Lang, "Praetorius...rocked it up a bit. [Praetorius the original/German lyrical rocker!]" Now all he has to do is write a song about it! QED!

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