These Dreams of You

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The national anthem of dreams deferred, sung from the grave by a ghost who doesn’t know he’s dead. “Everything else,” Zan goes on, “was for the kids. The hip-hop manifesto about brushing the dirt off your shoulder, that’s for my twelve-year-old son who’s gone gangsta lately, though at this point I’m sure he thinks the song is impossibly old-school, being as it’s more than half an hour old. And the really old-school one about the lovers at the Berlin Wall—‘What’s the Berlin Wall, Poppy?’—who get to be heroes just for one day? That’s for my four-year-old Ethiopian daughter, who I guess can’t get enough of British extraterrestrials in dresses.”