Series of posts

  • Corporate Welfare.9: Markets and Chains

    Today I’m posting a link to an article from the blog CivilEats.com by Adrien Schless-Meier called “Why Grocery Store Workers Are Making Less While Big Chains Make More.”  It’s a topic on my mind because one of the songs on the record I’m working on is about the economics of supermarkets.  The song is called “King Piggly…

  • The Core is Getting Soft.12: Valhalla Freq Echo

    “The best things in life are free.” “You get what you pay for.” If cliches are cliches because they’re true, which one of the above applies to free audio plug ins?  Well, ca depend. When it comes to the Valhalla Freq Echo delay plug in, the answer is definitively the latter.   This gem of…

  • The Core is Getting Soft.11: TouchOsc

    I’ve always been a latecomer to technology.  When I got a fax machine in 1997, someone I worked with said, “Welcome to the ’80’s!”  I didn’t get a cell phone until late 2008, and I didn’t get a smartphone until a few months ago. Continuing this trend, I got myself an iPad last week.  The…

  • Other John Davises.6: John Davis, Shrimper

    Disambiguation:  the issue haunts all John Davises, musical and otherwise. How to reach today’s web surfing music consumer when your name is ubiquitous?  In the record store era, folks had only had to know enough about the alphabet to figure out that John Davis would come shortly before John Denver in the D section.  Know enough…

  • The Core is Getting Soft.10: Madrona Labs

    There are some soft synths or plug-ins I’ve bought where I could have conceivably sprung for the hardware version instead.  But there’s no way I could have ever afforded a Buchla synthesizer – until Madrona labs came out with their Aalto software synthesizer, which is inspired by the designs of Don Buchla, who invented the…

  • Top 40 Over 40.16: Holding It Down

    One possible answer to the question I posed in my post on Reckoning with REM – How come their early portraits of Southern life never said anything about the history of racist violence and forced labor in their native Georgia, even on their album Fables of the Reconstruction / Reconstruction of the Fables? – is that…

  • Impersonal Problems.1: Thanissara

    We’re used to thinking of problems as a word that goes hand in hand with “personal.”  Of course, there are problems in our professional lives.  But when we struggle with things that happen or come from outside of that realm, we tend to look at them as personal.  I’ve been interested in several articles I…

  • Corporate Welfare.8: Twitter Takes

      There’s a new story out today from Julia Wong of In These Times about how Twitter’s headquarters in San Francisco “have become a symbol of gentrification and displacement for housing activists and community organizations in the city. ” I asked a friend of mine who had moved from the Bay Area to New York fairly recently…

  • Top 40 Over 40.15: Bill Callahan – Made For the Stage?

    One of the cliches about aging performers is that they usually have to navigate the decline of their sex appeal by finding other ways to make something happen onstage.  There are some who escape this fate.  Kris Kistofferson was called a sex symbol during an interview with CBS’s Sunday Morning news program well into in…

  • The Core is Getting Soft.9: Ring my Bell

    For many years now, I have been using software in my meditation practice.  In Buddhist meditation, we traditionally open and close each sitting by ringing a bell three times.  One is instructed to follow the sound waves until they subside, providing a gradual transition in and out of the silent state of awareness.  In today’s…