Now, I'm a music critic again...Aaron Copeland wrote, it seems to me, about common people--cowboys, rodeos, Saturday night partiers, people who had simple gifts. But he wrote music of utter majesty about these common people. IMHO, nothing could motivate such work but a feeling of love for folks like us. I feel it each time I listen to "Fanfare for the Common Man" and my favorite, "Appalachian Spring." It gives me such a lift!

Now I'm a music critic...
I have always loathed country-western music, except for the Drive By Truckers.
"My Sweet Annette" is a tune filled with pathos, soaring slide guitars, and sharp lyrics with a bittersweet punch. Skilled musicians, they found a song they seem born to sing. Their licks are done with finesse; it rocks and twangs and you don't know whether to laugh or cry!

Flu Screwup...While the rhetoric of politics can devolve to the nonsense of " hard linkage" and the justification for war, there is not a whole lot of doubt that someone really screwed up when the supply of flu vaccine was cut in half yesterday, with apparently no remedy to the problem.

Christian terrorism...A friend of mine, a public school administrator, told me the story of a school principal convicted some years ago of sexually abusing students, boys and girls, in his school. "He always picked the most vulnerable ones", he told me, "the ones with family problems or low self-esteem." While this is all too common a story of late, it may be of interest that our conversation grew out of the fear campaign being waged by the cadre of fundamentalist preachers who are, nationally it seems, telling their flocks how the good guys, i.e., Republicans, are the only hope for the salvation of America, terrorising their parishes with dire threats of divine retribution and natural catastrophes which are to be the result of electing the bad guys, i.e., the Democrats. This kind of preaching is just another seduction of the vulnerable, as loathesome as any other con game, seeming to offer security, comfort and approval, while the the truth is a cruel disappointment.