With perfect sincerity and a suitable amount of head wagging, a musician acquaintance of mine, reflecting on the death of Julius Eastman, lamented: “What a waste of talent.” At the time I found the remark so astonishingly beside the truly tragic point that I could scarcely speak. The very idea of tallying the talent, and then separating it from the life and the death, seemed nothing short of blasphemous. And yet I was soon to hear that sentiment echoed over and over again in one form or another: a waste of talent, an abuse of talent, a persecution of talent—the permutations were endless, whether the thief was conceived of as an internal or an external one. But where in all this lamentation and accusation was the sense of marvel at a talent and a life so perfectly and maddeningly attuned; so deliberately and defiantly crafted? Where was the respect that this man, who so fearlessly controlled his own surrender to his own fate, demanded of us with such infuriating consistency? What a burden of talent—that seemed the more fitting lamentation. Indeed, in the relatively short but intense period during which I knew Julius, he seemed more than anything else intent on shedding that burden of talent—and not out of laziness or irresponsibility, and not out of plain orneriness (although it may have seemed that way to many of us at the time)—but in order to test it, subjecting it to a series of alchemical tortures in order to purify its coin of all counterfeit, ultimately dragging what was leftof the gold in it all the way from hallowed halls to mean streets, for one final trial.

Perhaps it is not absolutely necessary for someone listening to a performance of Julius Eastman's If You’re So Smart, Why Aren't You Rich? to know that he chose to spend one autumn afternoon at the men's shelter on East Third Street in downtown Manhattan giving pedicures to some of the residents there—not under the auspices of any particular organization, mind you, but on his own highly eccentric initiative—and with, I would not be at all surprised, no more than a pair of kitchen scissors.