John Lydon (alias Johnny Rotten) describes his final epiphany

I was at Borders on this warm Martin Luther King Day in Music City, perusing the 20th anniversary issue (Dec. 2009) of Clash, a hip British music & fashion magazine, when I read something that made me laugh. It came at the end of an interview with punk pioneer turned butter pitchman John Lydon (Public Image Ltd., The Sex Pistols). That old sneering pseudo-anarchist rock 'n' roll rogue now lives in posh sunny Malibu (California), where he seems to have caught the dreaded American self-improvement virus. At least he's kept his sarcastic English wit about it. This is what he said:

Lydon: "I'm trying to improve myself all the time."

Q: Do you think you'll ever get there? Will you ever be satisfied with who you are?

Lydon: "It'll probably be the day I get run over by a bus. I'll have an hour and a half of contentment . . . In a weird way that would be a good life. Anything. Even ten seconds of going 'Ah! There it is! The ultimate wisdom!'"

Q: The final epiphany and then SPLAT.

Lydon: "Yeah. But it'd be a shame, though, if you got it wrong."

Indeed, man. Nothing worse than a misleading epiphany.

Flashback record tip of the day -- L.A. freak-folk hipster Devendra Banhart (Vetiver & solo) claims in a recent Rolling Stone feature that this album saved his life when he was homelessly down & out in Paris: Ms. Veshti Bunyan's 1967 psychedelic Brit folk album "Just Another Diamond Day." Hard to find offline so far.