Excerpt from 'The Uncluttered Mind of the Uncouth', September 15, 1998, The Harvard University Arts Revue, with music editor Dean Howell.

D.H.: Would you agree that comic books are to Picasso what Burt Bacharach is to Bach?

D.C.: I suppose it depends on what kind of mood you're in.

D.H.: Let me say it another way. Popular music, more accurately rock and roll, is both a low-end pursuit and accomplishment, second only to country music in its primal appeal to ill-educated minds. If we accept art as metaphor, then rock is immediately disqualified on the grounds of its mundane, obvious lyrical intent and overt manipulation. Further, if the success of contemporary industry and culture is founded on our ability to access learning - and thereby enhance the best thoughts of our predecessors - then rock, which has evolved little from its shallow roots - and in fact repels erudition - is at best an infantile diversion, akin to the soporific monotony of a baby's rattle. Would you agree?

D.C.: I am not an educated man. And I really haven't been a happy man since Roy Orbison died, but I do get enjoyment from shaking that baby's rattle, so to speak, even though I am aware that it's just a baby's rattle. You dig Einstein?

D.H.: Oh yes, I dig.

D.C.: And if I was stranded on a desert island, I'd rather have Burt Bacharach with me than Bach because Bacharach goes to my heart and Bach just goes to my head. In the same way, I'd rather take Pamela Anderson with me to the desert island than one of the brainy mutts I saw hanging around your office because Pam looks like a lot of big dumb fun to me, and that's all I've ever wanted. That gives me peace.

D.H.: So you're not a culturally ambitious man?

D.C.: Culture to me is a straightjacket. Culture attracts people who want to be thought of as creative, but aren't. It attracts people who want to be thought of as special, but don't realize we're all the same. These people don't see that culture is created by people just like me, just a guy singing on a stage that some intellectual critic suddenly likes, then everybody takes it all real seriously. Are you interested in my giving an example of this or are you just going to sit there with that shit-eating grin on your face?

D.H.: There's no need to be rude, Mr. Carr.

D.C.: Okay then. I got a memory for dates, even though they say that booze clouds up the memory, which it doesn't in regards to important stuff. Anyway, in August, 1966, I was incarcerated somewhere, I forget exactly where, and some guy who's been listening to a radio comes and tells me that Lenny Bruce is dead. You heard of Lenny Bruce?

D.H.: Most certainly - an iconoclastic comic who exposed the virulent hypocrisy of post-war America through scathing, if not scatological sermon-like vignettes.

D.C.: Right. Well, when I met Lenny nobody had yet recognized his 'exposing of post-war America'. they just thought he was a dirty-mouth comic. But one of you writer guys - one of the educated elite, who wanted to seem hip because a lot of young, hip people liked Lenny - well this writer wrote glowing, intellectual things about him. I knew Lenny Bruce, and Lenny just laughed at you guys. And right now, if I took you out of this dumb office to some nightclub and showed you a new Lenny Bruce, you wouldn't be able to recognize him, because you intellectuals have got no balls, you stick together like a bunch of frightened children in a haunted house.

D.H.: Is that so.

D.C.: Yes, that's so. And that's because deep down you realize that unlike me and Lenny, you will never be able to get up on a stage and entertain people. All you can do is just snicker at us from the sidelines. And that's why you, Mr. Blueblood Harvard Newport Kennedy Hair, have to interview guys like me, and not the other way around. Now tell me Leonardo, is there a 'smoke friendly' environment anywhere on this campus or do we all act like children and munch on lollipops?

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