Hammer Mill Days

I don't know. Do you really think it's that insulting? Not sure why anyone would take it personally, frankly. Unless, of course ... they have a particularly hate-able face. A hate-friendly face, if you will. Oh, well. Yeah, here we are, in the midst of one of our summertime projects. Always something to do here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, even if that something is virtually nothing. You could say this entire blog - all 17 years of it - amount to virtual nothingness, am I right? In any case ... we're just hashing out what the rest of the season is going to look like. We've got some archival material yet to go through; the kind of stuff that accumulates over three decades of playing and writing and recording together. A mountain of ... something. Give it a listen, then you pick the descriptor. This week's "Wayback Wednesday" release was another selection off of our 1993 video demo - just us playing our set list live in front of a madman's ca...

Another week of national convention television, this time, the Democratic party. Different from last week, to be sure. Less venom, less doom and gloom - in some ways, more similar to what Republican conventions used to be. That's not surprising: the Republicans have officially vacated the hyper-nationalist territory they have occupied pretty much my entire life, heading decidedly off to the reactionary end. So now, Democrats are a mixture of Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan Republicans, with some elements of center-left muddle in the middle politics and labor-left sensibilities. The most energized base is certainly on the left, but from what I'm seeing this fourth and final night of the DNC, they are shooting for these centrists and disaffected Republicans. This is not a great strategy. They're risking turning off some of their most ardent activists with the bluster, the hyper-patriotism, the parade of military officers, etc. Chants of USA, USA, USA! It's pretty horrifying on ...