Paper Shoes

Pavel Srut's fractured lyrics are often themselves fractured parables about the individual's relation to authority, whether that authority be the state, a colonizing power, the court of public oppinion, a dubious beloved, or history itself. In some of his poems, the wives of Great Men have the last, often hilarious, word on their husbands' accomplishments, and in others a poor Everyman schmuck Novak - the Czech equivalent of Smith, though even more suggestive of ordinariness - bumps his head, again and again, on the iron question mark at the heart of existence.