Hammer Mill Days

Turn which knob again? That one? I already turned that one, for crying out loud. Turn it again? Shut the front door! All these knobs, all these switches... Hey, that's a good idea for a song. All of these knobs, all of these switches, keep this up and you'll need stitches, uh-huh. Okay... not a good idea for a song. I'm getting punchy, and small wonder. Matt and I are hip deep in mixing Rick Perry's new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick ... being a collection of songs that arose from some strange sensory phenomena our dear cousin experienced over the past year. You know how when sometimes you have a little too much to drink or a bit too much .... well, whatever, and the world around you gets all fuzzy and weird, and then the next day you find yourself freighted with all these unexplainable memories of odd behavior, like something your fevered mind cooked up in a dream? Well.... Rick wrote some songs about that. We've been putting rough mixes of thes...

The trouble with writing blog posts at the end of a week is that, more often than not, you find yourself on the wrong end of the news cycle, when every blogger and talking head has had more than his/her say. So what the hell - I'm going to comment ever so briefly on a few things and then be quiet for a stretch of days. You're welcome. Embassy attacks. Been watching the awful scenes from overseas. Trouble is, it's always that way for ordinary people in many of those countries. Think of what life is like in Iraq still, with the economy and infrastructure still in a shambles and bombs going off regularly, killing people at random in large numbers. We almost don't even give it any notice unless the death toll reaches north of fifty or so. And yet, I tune in to Talk of the Nation and get to hear Fouad Ajami, formerly known as George W. Bush's favorite Arab and a strong advocate of the Iraq invasion, talking about what Arab peoples need to do to join the community of c...