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Stuck Inside Samsara With the Karmic Blues Again
I’ve managed to fulfill one of my new year’s resolutions – to start this blog and website. But I don’t put a lot of stock in the whole new year’s ritual. If I did, I might be posting “Getting Better” by the Beatles or “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” by Fleetwood Mac, instead of the…
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MLK Day: What I Didn’t Learn About Jim Crow in School
Today on the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., I would like to recommend two books that helped me view his work in a larger context. The first is Slavery By Another Name by Douglas Blackmon, and the second is The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander. The former taught me a lot about the…
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I fought the law, and I won
A former babysitter of mine just posted this as his profile picture on Facebook. I’m waiting for a follow up picture of the seagull pooping on the sign a minute later.
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Who Really Wins on Super Bowl Sunday?
“America has succeeded in forcing other nations to pay for its wars on a systematic basis, something never before accomplished by any nation in history .” – Michael Hudson I’d like to recommend two books I just finished reading, Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson and Super Imperialism: The Origins…
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Subliminal Messages
Every once in a while I try and find something weird having to do with my past on the internet as a lark. This is a YouTube video some young women in Prague made of a shopping trip to Ikea, using Free to Go by the Folk Implosion as a soundtrack. Their conclusion at the…
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Pick a Bela Bartok
This week I am listening to a few records by Béla Bartók, (1881-1945,) a composer from Hungary I got interested in after hearing that he influenced my two favorite musicians, Ornette Coleman and John Fahey. (Check out Ornette’s violin playing on the Town Hall Concert, for example.) I don’t usually listen to much classical music,…
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He’s got 48 pages
I recently finished reading Autumn of the Patriarch by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, which features the longest run-on sentence I’ve ever read. It takes up the entire final chapter of the novel. It is 48 pages long. In Lorrie Moore’s novel A Gate at the Stairs, a student at the University of Wisconsin is smitten by…
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“A good cognitive dissonance, like a man.” – Charles Ives
I told a friend of mine I was thinking of picking up a pair of Yosemite Sam mud flaps for my car on eBay. He said, “I don’t think you can put those on a Corolla.”
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Goldsboro Goldbugs
“The Goldsboro Goldbugs topped the Greenvielle Greenies and Ayden Aces in the standings, in the battle of alliteration. The Coastal Plain League was mired in controversy in 1938, due to several clubs’ use of ineligible players. Many games were forfeited.” The above quote and image come from the website of Ebbets Field Flannels of Seattle…
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It’s Only Right and Natural
Following up on the last post about Han Bennik and Peter Brötzmann: I mentioned that most animal sounds that appear on records are samples. We used multiple tracks from this disk on the Folk Implosion song Serge – they all have different characteristics. Both the tracks, and the frogs, I mean. They remind me of…