S: I hope so. I have to wonder, though, am I observing or participating? Am I playing an important role…or, that is, do I belong to a group that's playing an important role…in all this?

A: Sorry! I was on the phone. Guess what the topic was? Apparently, the police have released a statement to the effect that our friendly neighborhood rapist is only targeting women of color, which elicited some kind of neighborhood sigh of relief, over which some of us are now understandably up in arms. But the crazy thing is I caught myself feeling, like, in some way put down by this latest twist. Rejected. It's like when you're at a reading and there's the Q. and A. afterwards and the famous author doesn't point at you when you raise your hand to ask the clever question you thought up already half-way through the reading. But I digress.

Okay, so the 64 dollar question remains, what do you/we mean by 'all this'. It's like you sense some kind of overall trend at work but don't have the distance yet to say what, precisely. But I have the feeling that about twenty years from now we're going to look back at this period as a turning point. Towards what? For better or worse?

S: A combination of Occam's Razor and Murphy's Law seems to indicate 'worse'. Yeah. It's scary. I completely agree. Whenever I read about the Holocaust in junior High School I always had the terrible sense that I just wanted to yell at the Jews: why didn't you run? Why didn't you get out of the country? Couldn't you see what was happening? But of course, from inside the nightmare, right up close to it, you couldn't see it. You just couldn't. It's amazing how an enormity can sneak up on you.

Born with prescient prematurity in Los Angeles, California, to a handsome and irresponsible jazz disc jockey and a former dancer of great beauty, Shawn Casselle liked his city of birth so much that he left at the age of three, never to return. Between that grand exit (with his rogue of a father but one step ahead of irate concert promoters), and the writing of this blurb, he has lived, worked and loved in Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Saint Paul, Minneapolis, Brooklyn, London, Berlin, Hamburg, San Diego and Stockholm. Passing as quickly as possible through these wonderful cities, he has found the time to meet and sometimes befriend such diverse humans as Black Panthers, globally famous boxer-cum-poetasters, Czech Theater Groups, Art World Luminaries, the Crown Prince of St. Helena, eponymous heroines of culturally iconic folk songs, Grammy winners, house painters, freemasons, undertakers, hair stylists, cover girls, and electric razor repairmen. He has been detained on suspicion of bank robbery, politely applauded by Lillian Hellman at a literary lunch, kissed by an S.S. officer's daughter, and had lyrics to several songs of his praised by Frank Zappa.

'If his music is half as brilliant as his lyrics,' said Zappa, 'he doesn't stand a chance in the music business.'