History

  • Data.1

    Today I’m starting a new series of short posts on data I pull from things I’m reading, listening to, or watching online about history and politics. Right now I’m listening to the podcast Millenials Are Killing Capitalism where they interview Michael Hardt, who teaches at Duke here in Durham. Hardt has a new book out…

  • 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…

  • Read Robin D.G. Kelley on Ferguson

    This is simply to refer folks to an excellent article about Ferguson by Robin D.G. Kelley I read on the Counterpunch website after it was posted by Imani Perry on Facebook. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/11/25/75039/ Please consider a subscription to Counterpunch as well as checking out Kelley’s excellent books. In musical circles, Kelley is most known for his biography…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • World on a Wire

    As I keep track of the unfolding struggle over the FCC’s proposed creation of a corporate “fast lane” on the internet that would regulate non-corporate media to second class status online, I’m reminded of the film World on a Wire by Rainer Fassbinder, which I watched on DVD a couple of months ago.  Despite being…

  • 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…

  • Top 40 Over 40.13: Weird Al’s “Party In the CIA”

    I can think of few more unlikely candidates for creative growth after 40 than Weird Al Yankovic.  Back when I was in grade school, he came on the pop culture radar with “Eat It,” his parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.”  His string of similar Dr. Demento style hits willfully sucked all of the sexual…

  • Corporate Welfare.1: Blackwater’s Warfare Welfare

    (This is the first in a new series of posts about how corporations that claim to generate profit in the private sector are heavily subsidized by taxpayers in ways that I could only wish fields like education and healthcare were.  For an overview on that, see “Free Lunch:  How the Richest Americans Enrich Themselves at…

  • Secrets of the Temple.2: Double Dutch

    (This is a follow up to the post Secrets of the Temple.1: More Than a Doorstop, dated 1/13/13.) As I wrote in my first post on William Greider’s history of the Federal Reserve board, one of the aims of “Secrets of the Temple” is to question whether Ronald Reagan really was the primary source of…