The Cosmos

Odd characterization of McClinctic Sphere, named after Thelonious Sphere Monk, legendary and "iconoclastic" (according to a practice SAT test I took in high school) piano player who pioneered a style called, curiously, BEBOP. Oddly, Thelonious sounds like he can't play, but he sounds clumsily good. Because turns out he really can play and his pretending not to able to is his way of asserting his dominance, as if to say, "I could play like a virtuoso for you if I wanted. Instead I'm going to try and make music." So McClintic, on taking his practice SAT test so as to get into a good college so as to acquire universal admiration manifested in a collective pat-on-the-back that knocks him over, so as to, indeed, so, when he reads this practice question he doesn't answer anything else, for he realizes his birthright, his namesake, so to speak, which is to be musically legendary and iconoclastic. That's when he starts playing his saxophone ad nauseam. He goes away into a sort of hiding, stops bathing and dressing for the most part, and toots away in the woodshed that is his bedroom, skipping school, first learning from the past masters but then going his own funny way --- not funny as in ha-ha, but funny as in peculiar --- until he sounds like a perverse mix of Ornette Coleman and a cricket. Indeed, according to him, and to the other few visionaries in the world, this IS music, and he makes it without joy or despair, as if he is making a dinner of rice and beans. And to those that spurn him, he says, "Fuckin' A!"