Television - “Little Johnny Jewel Parts 1 & 2” (live)

Television - “Little Johnny Jewel Parts 1 & 2” (live)I just finished Cool Machine, the final volume of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem trilogy, and I can’t emphasize enough how much I’ve loved these books. Perfect NYC period detail from the 1950s through the 1980s, fantastic and complex characters, genre-specific thrills that never devolve into cheap, lurid zones … if you haven’t checked it out, you gotta. And as if Whitehead was writing just for me, Cool Machine features a beautiful digression on Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel.” Here’s some of it: You can’t put into words why you like art sometimes. A painting or a song or a phrase painted on a wall. Why you like a person. Say it and you kill it; the feeling has to suffice. The way she figured it, “Little Johnny Jewel” was about finding the secret haven underneath it all. The three descending bass notes — doom doom doom — were the sound of your footsteps as you lowered into the City, you had to take the old stairwell down, rough stone…