Anybody know if they still do World’s Fairs? You know those big carnival-parties cities used to throw that generated largely pointless busywork and featured futuristic marvels such as ice cream cones, self-dialing rotary telephones, and I think maybe the Sybian sexcycle?¹ Those. Was the last one the one that serves as backdrop to the excellent The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson? Because that book basically makes The World’s Fair sound like the most uselessly extravagant, wasteful, and resource-intensive way to murder women that has ever been conceived. And that’s in a post-Dick Wolf world, where nearly inhuman effort has gone into developing filmable procedures whose objective is to get a dead lady to lay there dramatically for the dolly-out.

Anyway, wanna know who else likes to kill fancy ladies at World’s Fairs? Evidently, The Felice Brothers. Because in “San Antonio Burning,” off of 2007’s Adventures of The Felice Brothers Vol. I, a protag waxes poetic in the clink about the “long white legs and diamonds” who died from a knife in the back after their date(?) at the San Antonio World’s Fair in 1968. It’s a little difficult to pull for this creep, though. Why should you get morphine, you pervert? You had it made there with full access to swag from the “Unites States of America (Rock Band)” and probably all of the Tower of the Americas tie tacks you could want. But you blew it, and now it’s time for you to sit there and groove on remorse and jealousy…that you no doubt feel because you can no longer walk freely through the Insitute of Texan Cultures exhibition or the Frito Lay tent.

MAPPING IT

This one will go down plum on The Tower of the Americas, built for the fair and these days keeping the dreams of orbital dining and FM radio alive and well.

HEARING IT

“Adventures…” isn’t on Spotify. File.