Vox test.

Hmmmm. That doesn't sound quite right. Can you put a little more reverb on it? No, no ... not just the plate. I mean generation reverb. Make me sound like I'm at the bottom of a well. Yeah, like that. Nope ... nope, still no good. Bugger.

Oh, hi. Just caught us in the grips of an artistic quandary - the kind Big Green gets caught up in all the time: How to make a track not suck too badly. I just did a vocal on one of Matt's songs an I'm not crazy about it. Sounds a bit too nasal for my tastes. Just try to sing like a full-throated Mitt Romney, and with that I say good luck to you. I'm at the point of auditioning ghost singers, kind of like what the Monkees used or the Partridge Family used to do ... you know, the Partridges would move their lips and you would hear the mellifluous voices of some unknown bird-named stock singers; perhaps the Loon Family, down on their luck. Yeah, well ... maybe we gotta get some of that shit.

Trouble is, when you live in an abandoned hammer mill and you have no money, putting out an open call for auditions is not an option. Ergo, we try to draw on the talent we already have. Like anti-Lincoln, for instance. I thought, inasmuch as he is the antimatter doppelganger of our great emancipator, that he would be endowed with the exact opposite of his namesake's reedy voice. I imagined booming, pear-shaped tones emanating from that bearded gob, but no dice, my friends, no dice. Apparently that's one thing that stays the same in the antimatter universe - we all have the same voices, even if we eat corn on the cob vertically instead of horizontally.

Next up in the internal audition queue was, well ... Marvin (my personal robot assistant). This didn't go very well either. Picture that scene in Room Service when the Marx Brothers are trying to pass customs with Maurice Chevalier's passport, attempting to imitate him convincingly. Marvin was like Harpo with the phonograph strapped to his back. He's got a bunch of scratchy recordings stored in his internal hard drive (or tape drive - he is getting a little long in the tooth), and when he sings he selects individually sung words from that entire library. It's great if you want a mashup, but .... I don't.

So, back to the drawing board. Or the singing board, more appropriately. Me-me-me. Who's on the hook this time? Me-me-me.

A worthy vessel.

Well, it happened again ... the neocons and the Petersen Institute have lost their candidate. The only real pleasure I derived from last Tuesday's primaries was to watch them have their asses handed to them yet again, this time with even greater finality. They really don't have any even marginally viable candidates left. Cruz makes some of the right noises for them, but he's from a different stream of reactionary politics and no one can stand the guy. Kasich is basically finished, unless he discovers some way to earn 110% of the remaining GOP primary delegates. Rubio was the last worthy vessel for that extremist clown car, and that fucker and his retrograde cold war revival worldview is out. Good riddance.

With that out of the way, I am sure the imperial war machine party is looking for another tin car to drive around in. It's quite possible that they would settle on Trump. Someone, after all, is going to populate his foreign policy establishment - thousands of them, keeping the gears of empire turning day by day. That's kind of what makes him dangerous, though not so much as a Rubio or a Bush. It is also just conceivable that the neocons at least might begin to look favorably on a Clinton presidency. She is bellicose, obviously, and her differences with the Bill Kristol crowd on regime change are relatively minor. They might not overtly support her, but I could see them not vehemently opposing her if the alternative is Trump.

Many of the folks I know who have been involved in the Sanders campaign found Tuesday night to be very discouraging. I really think that, aside from the fact that Sanders would make a good president, an important function of his campaign and the movement associated with it is to push forward progressive policy positions that have never really seen the light of day in the institutional Democratic party. Win or lose, he can accomplish this, and it may be our best defense against neocons and paleo-imperialists (like Kissinger) looking to find a new political home. I support Sanders's decision to continue fighting for that reason as well as the simple fact that a Bernie victory is still mathematically possible (unlike Kasich, though it's hard to discern this fact from the news coverage - neither MSNBC nor any of the other cable outlets played Sanders's speech Tuesday night, though they did cover Kasich's).

So, fight on, Bernie people. We owe it to the country and to the millions around the world who are sweating out this scary superpower election.

luv u,

jp