Tag: american empire
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Pretty Bubbles Turning Into Grime
Michael Hudson has a new book out so I thought it was high time I posted some thoughts I’ve been meaning to write up about his last one, The Bubble and Beyond. I’ve posted before about Hudson’s 1973 classic Superimperialism, whose analysis of the economic strategy of American Empire was followed by a terrific 1977…
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Top 40 over 40.18: Peter Hughes and Dipa Ma
I was once listening to an episode of Car Talk on NPR and heard a woman call in to Click and Clack with the following dilemma: she had a Honda that was running perfectly, and that had proven to be very reliable over the years. Nevertheless, she found the car boring. She found herself eyeing…
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The Residents and the Arctic
I rarely hear an entire record played on the radio. A few months ago, I heard the album Eskimo by the Residents played on WXDU’s stellar Sunday afternoon show, Polyphonic Perversity. I soon purchased it and have really enjoyed hanging out with it since. I know very little about the Residents, so I won’t say…
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Top 40 over 40.17: A Different Kind of Swans Song
Most of the musicians I’ve written about in this series are ones that were important to me when I was younger because of work they did themselves when they were young. I’ve written about records they did after turning 40 that either came close to or equaled the quality I heard in their earlier recordings.…
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Meet the Octopus
I just uploaded a rough mix of one of the tunes I’m working on for my next record on the page of the Kickstarter I’m running to support it. You can check it out by clicking here, or on the photo above. It’s called El Pulpo, a handle I got from the book Inevitable Revolutions…
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Sunday Paper with the BPF: Ahhh, Mindfulness
Well, I don’t really read a Sunday newspaper anymore. Either they’ve been driven out of business by the internet or intellectually eviscerated by corporate centralized ownership. But I’ve been kicking back and checking out some posts on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) website after renewing my membership today. Among them was a piece with a…
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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…
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New Video: The Wrong Tree
Making a video with Michael Galinsky and his family was so nice, I had to do it twice. Here is what we came up with together for The Wrong Tree: Don’t miss Michael’s new book Malls Across America! It reminds me of how nothing makes me think of death more than watching decades old sports…