Hammer Mill Days

I don’t know. Why don’t we just toss it out into the street and see if anyone happens upon it? Wait … that was our original marketing strategy? Did it work? Huh. I thought not. Oh, well … maybe twice is the charm. Oh, hi, silent majority of Americans who read this blog on a regular basis. I didn’t recognize you at first with that mask on. You just caught us in the middle of a marketing strategy session – we’re trying to shift more physical and digital copies of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas , a full twenty years after its release. (I’m sure you’ve noticed the banner. Yeah, that was us that put that there.) We’ve got discs stacked in the basement of the hammer mill, discs serving as ashtrays and drink coasters, discs nailed to the walls of the bathroom in a psychedelic mirror-room kind of effect – freaky! We’ve handed them out, tossed them out, used them as Frisbees, table hockey pucks, sacred amulets, etc. Everything but sold them. Yes, as capitalists, w

We’ve reached a moment in American life when blindness is no longer an option. When I say “American life”, I’m referring to the world of relatively comfortable white people, a world I inhabit. A lot of the people in this world were skeptical of the notion that racism is a feature of our society, not a bug. Many still are, I’m sure, but not as many as at the beginning of this year. We’ve seen race-based murder on the part of police and vigilantes many times in the decade prior to January 2020, but like mass shootings, they never seemed to move the needle on public opinion. And again, by “public opinion”, I mean the views of relatively comfortable white people, whose preferences and sentiments drive public policy (not as much as corporate power does, but to some degree). In July of 2014, Eric Garner was choked to death by a New York City cop. It was an arbitrary, racist killing shockingly caught on video, and yet very little happened as a result. The cop was eventually