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 […]

I ran across this very interesting interview with John Perkins, the author of the New York Times Best Seller, Confessions of an Economic Hitman, on mediachannel.org. This book has been on my “To Read” list for some time now; I’ve got a lot of books on that list (so little time to read complete books […]

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 […]

I stumbled across this new track by Randy Newman on iTunes, and I think it’s a perfect followup to the previous (much more serious and ominous) article by Chalmers Johnson, now that we’re on the subject of Empire. (See below.)
Randy […]

By Chalmers Johnson
[Reblogged from TomDispatch]

History tells us that one of the most unstable political combinations is a country—like the United States today—that tries to be a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist. Why this is so can be a very abstract subject. Perhaps the best way to offer my thoughts on this is to say […]

“We are the people who run this country. We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous. Make our troops know we’re for them and trying to […]