Robert Dean Lurie

That is to say, after much effort, expenditure of treasure, and a brief, tantalizing glimpse of the desired utopia at gunpoint, the whole thing collapsed into violence, corruption, chaos, and intimidation

This history would seem ripe for lyrical exploration, and yet, if there are any actual references to the Reconstruction era on Fables of the Reconstruction, they are deeply buried.

Fables are not history, nor are they meant to represent all aspects of a culture

The Black Book:

Lost, all lost; the fruiting of green figs, apricots. Lost the grapes, black yellow, and dusky. Even the ones like pale nipples, delicately freckled and melodious, are forgotten in this morning, where our one reality is the Levantine wind, musty with the smell of Arabia, stirring the bay into a muddy broth. This is the winter of our discontent

the ideal entry point into the R.E.M. catalog for someone new to the band

neither party had any interest in synthesizers, gated reverb, or any of the other production gimmicks that were then in vogue

And rarely again would his words be difficult to discern

Walls motions me to a seat, produces a bag of weed and a pipe, and asks, “Do you smoke?”

This sort of question always puts me in a quandary. I’m not overly fond of pot, but I’ve learned that it can be a good icebreaker in interviews. So I say, “When it’s offered to me.”

Whatever Emily Post’s rules of pot etiquette may be, they apparently prevent Jeff from reaching down and grabbing the pipe for himself. My host’s act of beneficence is inadvertently spurned, and so here we sit

It might seem easy to accuse the band of hypocrisy here: For all its emerging sensitivity to the plight of the oppressed in South America, for instance, the band and its entourage (along with most rock acts of the day) seemed relatively untroubled, as Jeff Walls observed, to be bankrolling South American drug cartels via their cocaine consumption