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Posts published in “Essays”

Election Monkey Business

As I write this on Thursday night, little more than a week after the Nov. 3rd Election, events have transpired exactly as I predicted this past Spring. I said back then the Presidential Election would…

Anderson Valley Vistas

Sometime in the nineteen seventies, after I had started running my own sheep band at the home ranch, Sam Prather and I began exploring a partnership to purchase and run a larger band somewhere suitable in…

Campus Pandemics, Then & Now

I’ve been teaching a music journalism class here at Cornell this semester. On Tuesday and Thursday mornings over the past eleven weeks I’ve joined eight students for an hour-and-a-quarter in a windowless rehearsal room in…

When There Were Gods

I walked off the basketball court tonight and I knew I would never win again. I’m 52 years old with bad ankles and I have something in my neck that my chiropractor describes as a…

COVID Update

As the news media reports a surge of new COVID cases, there is also optimism as two vaccines for COVID have just been approved...

Red Pill, Blue Pill

In the spring of 2020, while the world stayed indoors to suppress Covid-19, arsonists attacked mobile phone towers in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. They set fire to nearly a hundred towers…

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

Whatever the outcome on Tuesday, November 3, the next day, November 4, will be the first day of the rest of my life and a day of reckoning. Maybe it will also be the first…

Bach and the Poll Worker

Bach would have been an excellent poll worker, even if in his professional life as a musical functionary he bristled under proto-democratic institutions and civic authority, preferring instead to work for enlightened despots. The musicologist…

Coincidental Killings

The Tran case had been on hold for more than three years when it finally went to trial in the fall of 2000. The corporate media used the occasion to remind readers that Terence Hallinan…

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