Late at night, when the work in the studio is done and Aaron Copland is playing into my soul from the monitors, I let my mind and heart wander. Tonight, after a slug-fest with a song, in multiple time signatures, that shows real likelihood for kicking my too-creative-for-my-britches arse, I listen to THE AARON, and humbly feel the world around me here, near the base and in the shadow of Mt. Tom: Coyotes, sage, skunks, sleeping humans, a thin-but-bright autumn moon, the upper elevations on the Sierra Crest, a few miles away and ten thousand feet above, still being tickled by flurry-remnants of the early-season system that moved out this morning. The stars… the amazing infinite.

And the shift in the political wind is as tangible as any other thing in the natural world around me.

On this Halloween’s eve, in a country perched on the brink of salvation or of oblivion, as my brilliant daughter prepares to go home from a hard day’s work to have a Halloween party one day early with her college student friends—like too many full-time college students these days, her friends are all working tomorrow […]

Regarding the illegal and unconstitutional arrest and imprisonment of American journalists outside the RNC in the last couple of days, and the raids on their rented accommodations to confiscate their gear and recordings:
I got an email from my good friend C., a smart guy, a fellow liberal involved with the campaign, who said he’s confident […]

Whoever decided to call this country, specifically, “The United States of America” was truly prescient. They were on it enough to see the potential for divisiveness in the future (maybe owing to slavery), and put that word “United” right there in our very NAME. Thanks, whoever did that; we probably owe you our […]

Don’t tell the thought police, but I wonder sometimes what the world might look like had Beethoven and Stravinsky simply been piano players and not composers. If Abe Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t had the gift of writing… hell, what if Tom Jefferson had had his heart, ideas and ideals, but was […]

You know, I gotta say, everyone knew this would happen; it wasn’t a question of “if.” We as humans have this amazing ability to ignore instinct, and not learn from the past.
I lived in that part of the world for 23 years, and every fall these horrible, wind-driven fires would take out a […]

Over-saturation. Awash and armpit-deep in the slag that runs downstream from American consumer culture like toxins from a copper mine, floating on the surreal slime of propaganda that drools from the corporate news everyday, I find solace in headphones. Listening to the simple American truth and substance of Aaron Copland, I quell the dizziness.

CNN is selling the DUI trial of some hotel heiress as more important than what concerns the land and its people, the same day that Glenn Beck (CNN doesn’t define his show as ‘editorial’ on the promo) goes on the air defending political conservatism—and Mormonism. God bless America, indeed.