May 2012
April 2012
“Of course, having a president who recognizes this, and who celebrates it, and who even occasionally participates in it is nothing more than having a president who recognizes something very essential in the fundamental character of the nation he purports to lead. This would seem to me to be as unremarkable as having a president who golfs or who throws out the first pitch on opening day. But a president with soul, a president who knows his way around the blues, seems to shake the comfort zone in a very different way. And, yes, most of it has to do with race, alas, but I think it has to do with race in a very unique way. First, we had the paradox of a country that generally oppressed black people still allowing black people to entertain it. Then, we had a country in which a lucrative industry sprung up among (mainly) white people who at least partly pillaged that entertainment for profit and left the entertainers begging for scraps. It’s much better now, of course, but that hidden historical debt is still there. Much of what the world loves about America was provided by Americans who America didn’t much love for most of its history, and when the music began to batter down the mental walls we’d thrown up between black citizens and white citizens, it was a powerful covert operation that couldn’t be beaten back with police dogs, or fire hoses, or the entire legal, political, and social architecture of American apartheid. And this president knows that, and the people who are sniping at him now know it, too, and it’s driving them around the bend. Because the president knows, as we’ve all come to know, one simple truth that binds us all as Americans, even though it’s not always self-evident — that the blues is about salvage, about a carrying forward, and about recognizing the common hellhounds that stay on all of our trails.”
—Charles P. Pierce AGAIN
“I’m Mitt Romney, bitches, and I’m all you got left.”
—Charles P. Pierce nails it again VIA
Don't Do It (studio version)
The Band
the band - don’t do it
Play
“When the zombie-eyed granny-starver meeps about the Buffett Rule as “pixie dust” — and this from a man who has based his “budget” on mathematics apparently designed by the Keebler elves — he is placing himself and his party in the path of what may be a powerful movement in the opposite direction. Ever since Wall Street trashed the world economy and stole what was left, the inchoate public rage always has had as its source a vaguely defined conviction that somebody, somewhere has cheated the rest of us out of our country.”
—Charles P. Pierce via
My Morning Song
The Black Crowes
the black crowes - morning song (live in amsterdam 7/18/11)
make my haze blow away
Good Friday
The Black Crowes
the black crowes - good friday (live and acoustic in amsterdam 7/18/11)
perhaps the last good friday ever? and we were there!
