Hammer Mill Days

  So, wait a minute. You say the Chicago tuning is like the top strings on a guitar? Is that so? What about the standard plectrum tuning? Oh … and I think I turned the peg too many times … unless it’s supposed to sound like that. My bad. Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a session. No, it’s not the kind of session we usually have here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted squat-house in upstate New York) – something a bit more prosaic. As always, Big Green is making do with whatever is around us at any given time. When we made 2000 Years To Christmas , for instance, we were short on effects, so we had to use the mill’s steam HVAC system to get some decent reverb. Then, when faced with a shortage of horn players during the sessions for International House , we had to retrofit the mill’s HVAC system so it could be used as a brass section. And when our mastering deck broke down in the middle of mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , in a ...

Congress approved the 1.9 trillion-dollar COVID rescue package this week, and while the final version didn’t include everything I would liked to have seen in the bill, there’s some decent stuff in there. What’s more, it is generally on a scale that approaches that of the problems we face. This is a departure, and one would hope a trend, away from the post-Reagan neoliberal consensus and towards a broader notion of what government may be called upon to accomplish on behalf of ordinary people. We have often heard pundits spin a false dichotomy between “big government liberalism” and “small government conservatism” – the fact is, conservatives and the right more generally are all in favor of big government, so long as it serves the interests of the powerful. The fact that the rescue package turns this on its head is an indication of how far we’ve come in recent years, despite all the resistance. We’re overdue for that sort of turn, frankly. We’ve been living in the Reaga...