Hammer Mill Days

That doesn't sound right to me. Twist the knob a bit further. No, no - not that knob! The one below it. Give it a good twist. Wrong way! That sounds horrible. Try the next knob down. Oh, man ... these sound consoles are so confusing. All those knobs and buttons and sliders and levers, each one doing a whole different thing. And then there's the analog/digital thing, so a lot of the knobs and switches are assignable, which means they do DIFFERENT things for DIFFERENT people. Holy shit, that's complicated. My brain hurts. You see ... that's the trouble when you spend most of your life writing and playing songs and very little of your life learning the complex technologies involved in putting those songs across. Like most musicians, our reaction is ... you mean I have to learn TWO things? That's outrageous! Double duty, indeed. (As you can see, we are truly in the mainstream of American thought and sensibility.) I think about this every time I listen to old tracks ...

A couple of comments about the Democratic primary debate this past week. First of all, CNN is an amazing crapfest. Why the hell do we allow corporate media to turn this process into a property to be marketed like some cheap-ass reality show? And reality show it was, in both its tone and its production values. The ridiculous opening sequence, with hyper-dramatic music, the rumble of drums, and introductions torn straight out of some WWF bout or America's Top Chef. The only thing missing was a fully loaded clown car (though they did have that at the G.O.P. match-up). Okay, that was a sobering sign, to be sure. Even more infuriating than the sideshow atmospherics was the framing of the questions, delivered for the most part by Anderson Cooper. While the Democratic field is decidedly to the left, at least from a rhetorical perspective, of where they were even eight years ago, the corporate media questioners proceeded through the lens of Reagan's America. The signal example of thi...