Word: schoolyard
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...while we're at it: What did the Mama Pajama see Julio and his friend doing down by the schoolyard? How come we can call you Al? And in this new song The Obvious Child, what is the cross doing in the ball park...
...self-reflection -- self-immersion sometimes -- and knows how to undercut and play against it, as anyone who's seen him larking around on his producer pal Lorne Michaels' Saturday Night Live shows over the years can instantly attest. The man who wrote Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard and You Can Call Me Al and 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover knows how to have a good time with a lyric, but only Paul Simon could write a tune titled Have a Good Time that's a deliberately dippy paean to incidental ennui and spiritual indifference...
Wideman is best when he is most personal: a description of a schoolyard basketball game, a grieving meditation after a telephone call from a son in prison. Or this bitter college recollection about feeling as if he were in a test tube from an uncertain liberal experiment: "I was walking down the street with this cute little white coed, thinking we're minding our business, strolling to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee, and blam. Run right dead into the glass wall." To Wideman, the stares seemed to say "Wait a minute, boy . . . You still in the tube, nigger...
Even on radio, where the most common four-letter vulgarisms are verboten, a host of popular "shock jocks" consider giving offense is Job One. Their humor is guy talk, kid division. The victims of their gags are familiar from the schoolyard: racial and sexual minorities, scheming females, body parts and bodily functions. A few years back, a D.C. radio host was censured for observing, on Martin Luther King Day, that "killing four more" would get + Americans the rest of the week...
...Cambodian crossroads town, and TIME correspondent Stanley W. Cloud went in to report the story. But within moments after a helicopter dropped Cloud and his photographer to the ground, they realized that the bullets were still flying. The pilot panicked and flew off, leaving the journalists in a schoolyard for two days while U.S. fighter-bombers "wasted" the area with napalm and explosives...