I got a blister on my thumb, thanks for asking. Wrong music, though, wrong era. It only occurred to me to cue up some ragtime tunes on Youtube while writing this, a bit of an oversight given that this was very much composed as an ode to that music, going hand in hand with jittery, speeded-up black and white stock footage. An old era is ending and a new one beginning. Mass consumption, mass production, mass entertainment and mass destruction are all a-borning, and Ragtime is an almost jolly ode to the death/birth pangs of the new American Century. It reminded me of One Hundred Years of Solitude, but also Catch-22. Magical realism in high-density storytelling that swoops through time and place and social strata, skipping from person to person, tell-don't-show with more than a touch of satire as the horrific social injustices are set beside awesome wealth and power. Ragtime should be played slow, according to the epigraph, but Ragtime was read fast.