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Showing posts from May 29, 2016

Jamming.

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Let's try that again, once more from the top. What's that? You want to take it from the bottom? How 'bout we compromise. One more time, boys, from the middle. That's the ticket. Whoa, man, I'm totally out of practice with this band rehearsal business. It's like I need rehearsal rehearsals. You forget, sometimes, how much you need to know in order to know what you need to know. And once you know that you know what you need to know, you know that you're going to forget it. Why? That may be unknowable. Am I making myself clear? Good. Okay, so what got us on this band practice kick again? I think it was all that watching and listening to archival tapes over the past few weeks, when I found myself with some time on my hands. There was a brief period when we were playing with the very amazing guitarist Jeremy Shaw that we seemed to record everything we did, from rehearsals to gigs to auditions. Just running through that stuff, I realized that I had forgotten o...

The end, again.

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Troops are rolling into Fallujah once again, under the cover of our air force and whatever deadly ordinance it's dropping this time around. Last time, during the "second battle of Fallujah," our arsenal included depleted uranium and white phosphorus. Fallujah was one of the first points of resistance to our 2003 invasion. U.S. forces rolled into town and set up shop in a school building. There were protests about their presence as well as their use of the facility and on April 28, 2003 and again two days later, members of the U.S. 82nd Airborne fired on the crowd, killing 17 Iraqis. (See this synopsis in TruthOut , drawing on reporting by Jeremy Scahill.) That was the start of a long and beautiful friendship. Today, the Baghdad government is ripping Fallujah yet another new asshole. It's worth recalling that the ISIS militants they are fighting in that unfortunate city are mostly disaffected Sunnis, the most senior of which were probably part of Saddam's army, t...