Hammer Mill Days

What are you going to do, play on garbage cans? That works for some songs, but how long can it possibly hold up? We need a more permanent solution to our problem. (Did I say that?) Okay, so ... this will come as no surprise to any long time followers of Big Green, but we make recordings using technology roughly equivalent to stone knives and bear skins, as the late Leonard Nimoy once put it. (My guess is that he had 1000 times the resources when he cut "Mr. Spock's Songs from Outer Space," but I digress.) We are plagued by technical glitches and the spotty performance of superannuated recording equipment, including a first generation digital workstation with no practical means of exporting song data or sound files (namely a Roland VS-2480 from the year 2001). It is choked with projects and ready to keel over. Now, don't get me wrong ... we have invested in newer technology. Mitch picked up a new blender last week. Great for daiquiris (I hate daiquiris!) and it ma...

Hard to find the words to describe how I feel about the video of Walter Scott's murder at the hands of an officer of the law. I think the thing that impressed me the most about it was the craven disregard for the victim's condition, as well as the casualness of the officer's actions and apparent demeanor. I am inclined to suspect that the police department was telling the truth when they said, prior to the emergence of that video, that the officer had followed proper procedures. That this represents standard operating procedure comes as no great surprise. The question I have is, why didn't the Eric Garner video prompt a similar self-examination within the NYPD? Of course, the North Charleston Police Department would likely have stuck to the police officer's original story if the video hadn't surfaced; that Scott had grabbed the officer's taser, that he had posed a threat to the officer's life, that the cops had administered CPR in some kind of timely ...