On the Spot

[cbertsch]

Last night's keynote Jonathan Lethem at the Experience Music Project's annual conference was really good. But the Q+A was another matter. This year's conference is free to all concerned, thanks to a corporate sponsorship. That's great, in theory. But it also makes it more likely that queries will be, um, idiosyncratic. I couldn't figure out whether the guy in the back who wanted to know whether Lethem believes that Kurt Cobain was murdered was being ironic or not. And that tells you all you need to know about the nature of the discussion that followed the keynote. All of a sudden, I vividly remembered going to events at the Maude Fife Room in UC Berkeley's Wheeler Hall, where that sort of thing would happen. Given the choice, though, I'd rather deal with conspiracy theories than the performance of political correctness that invariably intrudes on scholarly gatherings about popular culture.