Some music writers noted the 77th birthday of the great songwriter and troubadour

Warren Zivon earlier this week.

Zivon actually died two decades ago, age 56, another one of my dubious heroes that I've outlived, hooray, both in final age and in linear time, which is the only time we can measure.

I don't know about anybody else, but I maintain a background awareness of these things. I guess it started when I was

young, noticing how many of my musical and poetic heroes died young. A whole bunch were gone

before they turned 30, Hank William Sr senior especially, age 29, with his best and most

lasting work done in those last years of his 20s, which is sad to realize when he get to 30.

Hank Williams, why are we talking about Hank Williams? Because he was immensely gifted and blessed by the poets' muse, the hillbilly Shakespeare, they called him.

But we were talking about Warren Zivon, anybody who knew me in the late 1980s through to the late 1990s,

knew I usually had a Warren Zivon disc in the five CD changer or stacked up on

the record player.

His 19 and 96 collection, I'll sleep when I'm dead, has Frank and Jesse James, desperado's

under the ease, rolling the headless Thompson Gunner, hastened down the

wind, the live version of Muhammad's radio, accidentally like a martyr of Carmelita,

two and a half hours of beautifully performed and recorded songs, pulled off his 10 albums he put out

by 19 and 96.

But by 2003, he had passed on, which made me realize that 20 years have now passed

since a strange time when lots of people were suddenly crazy about weblogs, blogs.

Blogs.

At the height of the weblog hype, which was mostly self-congratulatory,

there were parties for bloggers.

And Brian Lens, an independent movie producer and blogger himself, had a party at his house

...