On an October evening in 1986, I was assaulted by a man shouting an incomprehensible question: "Kenneth, what's the frequency?" Nearly a decade later, R.E.M. wrote a hit song about that attack. Frontman Michael Stipe described the incident as "one of the most bizarre, surrealist acts of the 20th century." I might have said the same thing about hearing that song for the first time. (The assailant, William Tager, was apprehended in 1994 after he fatally shot an NBC stagehand outside Rockefeller Ce