http://www.democraticunderground.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:33:20 Tue, 18 Jun 2013 21:33:20 Maybe you remember that I participated in this big anti-war extravaganza recording project back in the spring. The song was called End War Now, written by T. Max, publisher of The Noise, and he called in just about every marker he had out to make a big splash with the project. Among other things, th... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/30 Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:48:28 Don't get too used to doing that trick with your thumb to make a G chord, as in the post above. Yeah, Hendrix did it, but he was a mutant.

The real goal is not to learn the absolute easiest way to play each individual chord, but to learn a suite of chord shapes that minimizes the effort of changi... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/29 Fri, 05 Jan 2007 09:31:42 Except I do so all the time, and I'm not gonna stop now :-)

The Genesis/Purple comparison applies most strongly on the earliest stuff, specifically Trespass and Nursery Cryme (I don't remember Revelation well enough), and extra-specifically to the way the organ and the guitar work together. I thi... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/28 Thu, 04 Jan 2007 12:39:41 While I agree that Deep Purple were extremely influential-- especially the mega-gritty organ sound and the acrobatic vocals-- I don't think they were as powerful as the Who. The only song of theirs that really gets me pumped is "Highway Star," and there are dozens of Who songs with that much adrenal... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/27 Thu, 04 Jan 2007 09:13:12 but I think their coalition was unstable anyway-- certainly at the dysfunctional and corrupt point they were at by now.

Rove stitched together three groups that didn't really have much to do with each other, or with the classic country club Republican brand, who we could think of as the Nixon Rep... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/26 Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:17:25 the Watergate affair was the exception, rather than the rule, for the American media.

For most of our history, newspapers have been extremely partisan. (Horace Greeley, one of my favorite goofball presidential candidates, was a newspaperman before he was a candidate.) Whenever there was an intere... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/25 Fri, 27 Oct 2006 09:33:10 What I'd like to see is exactly what the wingnuts imagine the New York Times is: accurate reportage, a liberal editorial slant, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.

It's so far from the reality that I'm not even sure I can describe it convincingly. What power there is in a pap... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/24 Mon, 03 Jul 2006 19:53:13 Tonight notmyprez and I saw Dweezil's Tour de Frank, a/k/a Zappa Plays Zappa. It started out slow-- they started with some stoopid modern rock sounding piece that none of us could recognize, then did fairly cartoony versions of "Hungry Freaks Daddy" and "Let's Make the Water Turn Black" and "The Idi... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/23 Wed, 14 Jun 2006 00:36:30 First of all, why do you take Luskin at his word? Spinning is his job.

Secondly, think about how Fitz does *his* job: he gets underlings to flip, and rat on their bosses. If he got Rove to cop a plea, it can only mean that Rove will spill the beans on somebody above him in the White House heirarc... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/22 Tue, 13 Jun 2006 14:45:04 I'm not such a great fan of Ligeti's music, but this is a shame.

Seems to me the sparse and atonal is more important to understanding Ligeti than the rejecting classical forms. Actually that whole generation rejected classical forms because there was no reason to retain them. Functionally, I beli... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/21 Tue, 13 Jun 2006 05:48:29 The idea that the best security would be for America to act less insensitive and arbitrary should be obvious to everybody, but apparently it isn't.

Also the motivations of the criminal cabal running things-- saving their asses is possibly the best they can hope for by now. (And better than they d... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/20 Mon, 22 May 2006 10:20:51 Watergate was the high water mark for the American press corps. Unfortunately, it was also something of an anomaly. The American press has a long history of carrying water for nasty administrations and other evil actors. Remember Pulitzer telling his photographer, "You supply the pictures, I'll supp... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/19 Wed, 03 May 2006 09:54:21 Maybe I can post something serious in this thread. I saw on Digby's blog that there's a wingnut site selling this on a tee shirt: "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required."

I am totally flabbergasted at that. Obviously these are the people that think the librul media is somehow responsible... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/18 Thu, 27 Apr 2006 09:12:40 He wasn't even a militarist. He was a proud alumnus of the military, specifically the Navy, and he was pissed when they wouldn't let him re-enlist to help fight World War 2. (Is the desire to defeat Nazi Germany a common characteristic of fascists in your experience?)

Nor was the government in th... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/17 Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:30:55 we made mahjoun, which is a Middle Eastern fruit compote flavored with cannabis. (We knew a guy whose summer job one year was to clean about 80 lbs, and they let him keep the seeds and stems, and he knew we could use it. This was long ago in a galaxy far away.)

Clarify a pound of unsalted butter.... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/16 Thu, 20 Apr 2006 20:43:43 I journaled my response to sasquatch's thread, so I won't recap it here. (But I invite you to read it, I think I made good points, which sasquatch largely ignored.)

Hippiedom for me was all about mind expansion. I wanted to know many things, both book learnin' and real world experience (that last... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/15 Thu, 20 Apr 2006 09:56:30 a limerick?

There once was a dude named McClellan
Whose tales grew large in the tellin'
But then he got fired
When the press corps got tired
And his lies were no longer compellin'.... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/14 Thu, 20 Apr 2006 09:00:28 The eminently snarky blogger Tbogg has a post up today about some new consortium of erstwhile liberals who have purportedly seen the light and signed on with the war party. I got to the part about apologizing for the excesses of Stalinism and Maoism, and I said to myself, the reason we ended up with... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/13 Mon, 17 Apr 2006 12:18:20 repetition defines form, together with harmonic resolution, in most musics.

There's a practical reason why modern music (other than minimalism) doesn't need as much repetition as older stuff: we have recording technology. Composers before the 20th century had to figure out how to emphasize the im... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/12 Thu, 13 Apr 2006 14:05:15 I got to talk to Bill Bruford about Topographic. Of course he wasn't on it, having already decamped for King Crimson, but he told me that when he got to hear it, he recognized a lot of bits off of Jon Anderson's Revox that had been rejected when they were writing Close to the Edge.

Several years ... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/11 Thu, 13 Apr 2006 09:05:25 (oversimplification follows) stereotypes like the ones you're indulging in have let it all get undone.

I considered myself a hippie then-- I wore long hair and bell bottoms and beads, but I also wanted to get "hip," i.e. knowledgeable. I confess that I wasn't ready then (and probably still aren't... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/9 Tue, 11 Apr 2006 12:38:04 This is inspired in part by the Starship Troopers thread, but there's a larger issue. The consensus seems to be, even among those who hate the book, that the filmmakers took way too many liberties and turned it into a leather cartoon. So that's one way for cinema to ruin a book: distort or ignore th... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/8 Tue, 11 Apr 2006 09:01:48 I would like to check out that Fuzzhead record. (It was a trick question anyway-- Binary System, which is Roger Miller's current project between Mission of Burma reunions, does "A Call for All Demons.")

The 5's take on revolution was ultimately no better and no worse than Jefferson Airplane's, or... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/7 Mon, 10 Apr 2006 13:51:13 Great song. Especially interesting to me is the "wrong notes" they wrote the introductory riff out of, with the prominent tritone (C# in the key of G) and other dissonant intervals.

My theory is that heavy metal is the specific ethnic music of alienated suburban high school kids, and to make the ... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/10 Mon, 10 Apr 2006 06:50:36 Tom DeLay is leaving, but not so fast that the door won't hit him in the ass.

And of course nothing that has befallen him is his fault. He trusted staffers who turned out to be corrupt and steered him wrong. And anyway, the prosecutor who indicted him is motivated solely by partisanship-- despite... http://journals.democraticunderground.com/Squeech/6 Tue, 04 Apr 2006 10:43:37