06.29.07
Posted in Jazz Guitar, Music, Uncategorized at 8:23 pm by Administrator
In about an hour I’m off to the Jamey Aebersold Summer Jazz Workshop in Louisville. It’s my fourth year. Theory, ear training, combo rehearsal, master classes, faculty concerts. I know I’ll come back wiped out and fried next Friday.
Jamey’s quite a cat. I’d put him in his mid-sixties. Lifelong resident of the greater Louisville area (on the Indiana side of the river). Studied music at IU, taught privately, did some university teaching and then, about forty years ago, put out the first of the Play-Along instruction books which are now the standard worldwide in jazz education, and also put on the first summer workshop. He’s a wiry little guy, ball of fire. Talks a mile a minute all week, seemingly without pausing to catch his breath.
The faculty is world-class. David Baker, Dan Hearle. Rufus Reid, Dave Stryker, Bobby Shew, Jiim Rotondi, Steve Allee, David Hazeltine.
I’ve met people from all over the world – New Zealand, Singapore, France. I didn’t get around to e-mailing any of my buds from past years to see if they were signed up for the same week as me.
I’m taking one of my guitar students this year, a young man who came to a gig last summer and asked me to teach him jazz. Best student I’ve ever had. I can’t wait to see who he gets for his theory teacher, combo facilitator, etc.
I’d love to see jazz re-permeate American music generally, the way it did from about 1920 to 1955. There’s just such joy in honing your chops to the point where you can participate in that high a level of communication. The best jazz is still really all about the swing. You can’t involve your ego when you’re playing really good jazz. Something much richer and finer about you comes to the fore. You are tapping into a lineage that demands your respect, and the irony is that you willingly give it.
I’ll have pix and stories when I get back. May the vast multitude comprising the BN community have a joyous Independence Day. Play some American music, eat a hot dog and, most importantly, read Mr. Jefferson’s thunderous document.
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Posted in Barack Obama, Culture war heroes, Politics at 1:05 pm by Administrator
The House did its part to nip in the bud this crud about reviving the Fairness Doctrine. Of course, David Obey had to gussy up his vote with a dismissive attitude toward talk radio, comparing its relevance to that of Paris Hilton.
And there are still plenty of Freedom-Haters and Reasonable gentlemen in the Senate spouting that stuff. It’s particularly disgusting when Freedom-Haters cloak their jackbooted totalitarian machinations in the mantle of “old-fashioned” values, like Dick Durbin did.
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Posted in Culture, Human freedom, health care at 1:14 am by Administrator
I just watched Bill O’Reilly on his Fox show, asking Ann Coulter to address the recent dust-up with John and Elizabeth Edwards. Coulter became exasperated and said she felt like she was back in kindergarten, having to explain what a syllogism was, and what didn’t qualify as one. She cracked one of her characteristically acerbic one-liners, saying “I’ve become the illegal alien of commentary, doing the jokes no one else will do.”
I got to thinking about how my view of her has evolved (or maybe devolved?) over the past few years. She’s clearly a stunningly exquisite babe and a first-class brain. She came into the limelight in that post-P.J. O’Rourke environment in which a number of irreverent and razor-witted young righties established themselves. (Another was Jonah Goldberg, with whom she had a notable row over a National Review column shortly after 9/11.) The idea back in the formative years of the rowdy rightie persona was that someone could be a culturally astute libation enthusiast and maybe even have a past that encompassed some other forms of behavioral abandon and still be an incisive spokesperson for, say, free-market economics, gender differences, and a vigilant U.S. foreign policy.
It’s changed now. To continue my musings on Ms. Coulter, it was interesting to hear how her name registered with me as O’Reilly enunciated it going into the break. It hit me like hearing the name of some heavy-metal act. “Ann Coulter” . . . “Ozzy Osbourne” . . . “Pantera” . . .
Actually, there’s a nexus of these worlds. One might think of her as a blonde Ted Nugent with boobs and shapely legs. Ted gets off some great one-liners that I ideologically resonate with.
I don’t go in for Harry Reid’s characterization of talk-radio hosts as “dispensers of simplicity.” Rush, Boortz, Ingraham, Gallagher, Hannity are well-read, well-travelled thinkers who have solid viewpoints solidly based in rigorous thinking. That said, they are usually just a touch below those conservative standard-bearers who mainly work in print. Maybe it’s the matter of having to think on one’s feet in front of a microphone and bank of call-in phone lines vis-a-vis having the luxury of sitting at one’s computer screen until a given thought process is fully fleshed out.
I think the matter of schtick factors in here as well. As someone who does some radio (I do a dining-and-cooking show on our local talk station on Saturday mornings), I know that it’s a thrill to be able to inject your personality into something that’s going out to thousands of people. Clearly that’s what motivated Rush early on when he would do his “updates” on homelessness, feminism and environmentalism.
As was the case in the early years of rock and roll, however, it became obvious that envelope-pushing wouldn’t just arbitrarily find some stopping point. It was inevitable that over-the-top, sweaty, heavy breathers like Savage would come along.
The blogosphere, too, has moved beyond keen discourse spiced with some edginess into in-your-face buzzsaw vibe. It mainly shows up on the left side, but you can find stupid expression on full display on the right side as well.
All this gets to the question of what I’m doing here at BN. I coin some terms here and I use them without apology. I say forthrightly that there’s an outright hatred of freedom not only among our foreign enemies but entrenched in one of our major political parites, and that widespread clueslessness in the other party – what I call Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome – may well spell the end of this noble experiment we call the United States of America. On the other hand, I set great store by decorum. Crudeness has few applications in this world. You can scroll this blog’s archives and probably find no more than five instances of the use of an impolite word referring to a bodily part or function.
I’m not talking here about that “return to civility” shit – how’s that for a deliberate use of a crude term? – you hear wolf-in-sheeps’-clothing Freedom-Haters and their Reasonable-Gentleman accomplices blathering about. In fact, I think we need more forthrightness in our national debate (argument? near-civil war?).
I just want to see my side, those aligned with the worldview I hold dear and would defend with everything I have, bring to bear the full weight of their intellects. I want to see them have their rhetorical chops in such shape that their instincts will prevent them from lapsing into the juvenile. It is, after all, our identity as a refined species vis-a-vis those lower than us on the great chain of biology that we’re really talking about here.
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06.28.07
Posted in Blogosphere, Middle East, National Security, Uncategorized at 9:24 pm by Administrator
Fred Barnes on Lugar’s speech in the Weekly Standard. My senior senator caught Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome many years ago, but it may now have progressed into Hegel’s Disease.
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Posted in Afghanistan, Barack Obama, National Security, Politics at 3:53 pm by Administrator
The Senate couldn’t revive the Kennedy / McCain / W exercise in crass-manipulation-of-feelings-over-principle-and-security.
I started to feel pretty good about it yesterday as various Senators frantically tried to concoct amendments and get backing for them. So much stuff got tacked onto the basic amnesty, pulling it every which way, that the basic patty-cake-with-lawbreakers at the core of the thing could no longer stand the strain and wound up in tatters.
Okay, now all you members of that august chamber: debate the truly important stuff, like the height of the fence and the gauge of the wire on top of it.
Of course, the MSM is playing up the defeat-for-Bush angle. Appropos of my post below, “The Mind of W,” it’s a strange new world when my reaction to such headlines is “And a damn good thing, too!”
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Posted in Music at 7:29 pm by Administrator
In the spirit of my upcoming workshop, herewith some of the musical jokes I’ve accumulated over the years:
A guitarist is auditioning for James Brown’s band. JB asks, “Can you play an E ninth chord?” The guitarist says, “Sure.” JB asks, “Can you play it all night?”
A musician gets a call from his wife on his cell phone in the middle of a tune at a gig. He says, “Honey, can you call me back in about two minutes? The bass player will be starting his solo.”
A band is playing a wedding reception. The groom’s uncle, three sheets to the wind, stumbles onstage and says, with maximum slur, “I f—in’ wanna shing f—in’ Missshhty!” The bandleader, a bit taken aback by the guy’s raw language, nonetheless says, “Okay.” Uncle Sol says, “And I f—in’ wanna shing it in f—in’ 5/4 time!” The bandleader cocks his eyebrow, turns to the others and says, “Can you guys play Misty in five-four time?” They agree to give it a shot. Uncle Sol counts it off and starts singing: “One, two, three, four, five, Look at f—in’ me . . . ”
Know how to get a guitarist in Nashville, Tennessee off your front porch? Pay him for the pizza.
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Posted in Arts & Culture, Culture war heroes at 4:02 pm by Administrator
This will be the first time in seventeen years of marriage that I haven’t spent Independence Day with Mrs. Cue. It feels weird already. I put the upcoming holiday up there with Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas. It marks a singular moment in human history – the founding of a nation-state not on geographic or ethnic happenstance, but rather an idea, that idea being human freedom, and freedom as being a creation of God.
It draws on a lineage of thought in the development of Western civilization that includes Plato’s Republic, the Magna Carta, the documents and occurrences that came out of the 1688 Glorious Revolution on both sides of the Atlantic, and John Locke’s notion of natural law and the sovereignty of the self. It paved the way for the uniquely Western notion that slavery was reprehensible.
I’ve always read the Delcaration of Independence to her on July 4, usually before she gets out of bed, so I’m sure I have a captive audience. Certainly no later than when she’s brushing her teeth. Maybe I’ll call her from the workshop and read it to her. Actually, I doubt if I’ll have time.
We also have liked, for the past several years, to put my custom-compiled CD of classic American party music on the boom box on Independence Day morning. Some of the tunes on it are listed on last year’s ID BN post. Should I take it with me this year or leave it for her and my step-daughter and granddaughter, who are coming to visit that week?
I wonder if Jamey does anything special at the workshop to commemorate ID. Jazz is about as American an art form as there is. Surely there’s some kind of tie-in.
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Posted in Politics at 1:36 pm by Administrator
Jonah Goldberg has a Townhall column today on how, while Cheney is a cool guy on the level of principles and policy, he’s clumsy as hell when it comes to consensus-building, something you gotta do in Washington, at least to some degree.
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06.26.07
Posted in Human freedom, Middle East, National Security, Politics at 10:11 pm by Administrator
Appropos of the previous post, particularly my harping on the cluelessness of Western leaders, I’m at another one of those junctures at which I wonder just what makes W tick.
I understand that he comes from the Bush family, known for its foreign-policy “realist” friends like Scowcroft and Baker, and that his father was prone to bouts of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome, one of which proved politically fatal (when he sent Richard Darman to Capitol Hill to work out a budget deal with the Freedom Haters, who ate him for lunch and picked the meat off the bones and made Bush 41 wind up negating his “read my lips; no new taxes” vow).
I also understand that he was a fairly aimless dude until the age of 40, at which time he became a resolute Christian and started thinking about the role of taxation in economic vitality (which bostered his supporters’ confidence that he wouldn’t make the same mistake his dad had made).
But, jeez, how does a guy who lowered our taxes and offed the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the Baathist regime in Iraq drink the Kool-Aid with such regularity? I won’t recite the litany here. (It includes steel tariffs, the prescription drug expansion of Medicare – oops, there I go; said I wouldn’t rehash the old stuff.) The latest two examples suffice aplenty: his enthusiasm for the amnesty bill, and this teaming up with Olmert to shore up Abbas.
Theories abound. His mind is fixed on the daily threat matrix. His faith gives him a big idealistic streak. He’s Jeffersonian. He’s Wilsonian. (Never mind the moonbat theories. Go read HufPo and Daily Kos if that alternative universe is where you live.)
As I say, he was kind of all over the place and not very good at the stuff he dabbled in until he was solidly into middle age. He does seem to have been pretty much drawn to the business world, though.
There are a lot of business people out there whose hearts are in the right place on the broad questions – free-market economics, strong defense, traditional values – but show themselves to be a bit underbaked when it comes to policy specifics. Maybe W is sort of like that.
It’s clear he’s principled and a man of integrity. Maybe he has a well-fleshed-out world view and he’s just lousy at articulating it.
It’s a shame. He had such a great first two years as prez. I guess he’s a case study, by way of negative example, in the need for a leader who’s a total package, like Dutch was.
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Posted in Middle East, North Korea at 8:54 pm by Administrator
Two American Enterprise Institute scholars each have columns in major dailies today on the theme of yet a wider conflagration in the Middle East. One is in the Wall Street Journal and one is in the Washington Times.
Two main themes run through both pieces:
1.) The ever-wackier moves on the part of the various radical players in that region, and
2.) The seeming cluelessness of the Western leaders who should have the most courage, keenest vision, and just plain common sense.
A post like this probably doesn’t have the sex appeal of some fresh new take on some little-observed slice of life. Granted, it’s big-picture and about a theme that gets discussed here and in like forums frequently. History will show this, however, to be the most important conversation of our time.
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06.25.07
Posted in Music at 8:36 pm by Administrator
The university is going to have me teaching blues history this fall, and it’s none too early to think about how I’m going to structure the course. I’ve taught it a few times before, but I think I’m going to make some changes this coming semester.
I want to do a better job of imparting that there are two main ways to look at the blues.
On the one hand, it’s merely a structural device in American music. In its most basic form, it’s a I chord for a measure, a IV chord for a measure, the I chord for two measures, the IV for two, the I for two, the V chord for one, the IV chord for one, I for one, and a V for one. (That last measure is called the turnaround.) The 12-bar, I-IV-V blues. There are variations on this, but very few of them stray outside the 12-bar format. There is also a blues scale that, while not necessary to apply to this form, does add to the bluesiness of the resulting sound. You can stay perfectly diatonic and technically still be performing a blues. Blues, as seen from this standpoint, shows up in all kinds of American music. Everybody from Gershwin to Hank Williams wrote blues.
Then there’s the perspective that sees blues as a genre. I think that’s what most people are expecting to learn about in a blues-history class.
Both models have the legendary scene at the Tutwelier, Mississippi train station as their starting point. Sources vary, but at some point between 1892 and 1905, the black minstrel-show bandleader W.C. Handy was standing on the platform when he heard another black man, clearly, as indicated by his dress and demeanor, much more countrified and with far less formal musical training, slouched against the building, sliding a knife up and down the strings of a guitar, creating ghostly bent notes with both his instrument and his voice, singing something about the place “where the Southern cross the Dog,” the Southern being the Southern Central Freght railway line, and the Dog, or Yellow Dog, being the Yazoo line. Handy was so entranced he began researching this exotic music and found out it was called the blues. He became the first composer to write blues tunes and sell the sheet music, garnering big hits with “Beale Street Blues” and “St. Louis Blues.”
It’s the other guy in the story, though, who really serves as the prototype for blues as a genre. In past semesters, that’s where I’ve begun my tracing of the genre’s development, looking at the barn dances and fish fries at which the country blues performers honed their craft, as well as the tent shows and urban theaters where the classic women blues singers of the 1920s, generally coming from a black-vaudeville background and enjoying the accompaniment of the top jazz musicians of the day. From there we go on up through the Chicago scene of the 30s – Lester Melrose, the barrelhouse pianists, the harmonica honkers and all that, and then the development of the electric guitar and so on.
It’s so hard to impart to the students in these classes, particularly the young ones, the sociocultural forces at work in the development of the blues. It’s important to me to stick with specifics – flesh-and-blood people and particular dates and places – and not lapse into some cartoonish surmising about one group’s status as beleagured strugglers and another’s as oppressive bigots. Blues, as a genre, for instance, was always something of an embarrassment to middle-class blacks. The market for records by Blind Lemon Jefferson circa 1927 was not the same as for discs by Duke Ellington. Bessie Smith’s demographic fell somewhere in between. Let us also remember that some of the most important people in the development of black music were white: the aforementioned Lester Melrose, John Hammond, and, later on, Syd Nathan, the Chess brothers, and Jerry Wexler.
So blues was considered raunchy and maybe a little cornball – to paint with a broad brush, perhaps the black equivalent of what hillbilly music was for whites. This became even more the case over the next twenty years, by the time you got to the chasm between Nat Cole, Billy Eckstine and Lena Horne on the one hand, and Howlin’ Wolf, Guitar Slim and Big Maybelle on the other.
White interest in the blues, which really burst wide open when the Butterfield Blues Band played the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, changed everything abput the way blues fit into the cultural landscape. Ironically, that marked the point at which black America pretty much moved on from the blues, with – yes, yes, I’m well aware – notable exceptions.
Today, interest in the blues parallels that of jazz in a few key ways. There are the seekers of blues as entertainment, those who frequent places such as the House of Blues, or, here in Indy, the Slippery Noodle, and associate blues with “shredders,” guitarists who overdrive the gain knobs on their amps and go for the searing flurry of rapid-fire notes, as well as the harmonica honkers in the Butterfield – Charlie Musselwhite mold. Audiences viewing blues in this manner generally expect to see some sunglasses on their favorite performers. Then there are the earnest young scholars, who scour the back roads of the Mississippi delta with their maps and books, looking for particular plantations, gravesites, prisons and trains depots. As I say, this would parallel the wine-bar crowd and the collector of King Oliver CDs, respectively, in the jazz world.
I find something about the earnest young scholars heartening. It is they who will keep the door open to factual accuracy and new revelations. I just hope they grow past their lionization of particular figures – Robert Johnson being the most obvious example – and into an embrace of context. Otherwise, they may be tempted to do their learning about Johnson through the lens of his being the Prototypical Shredder.
I guess another way of saying it is that I hope there’s a sufficient experiential framework for them to see the profound difference in the upbringings of Robert Johnson and, say, Stevie Ray Vaughan.
So that’s what I want to be more effective at getting across this time.
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Posted in Food at 1:05 am by Administrator
Nancy Rommelman at Pajamas Media gives her tips for making sure that classic dish indigenous to the Last Best Hope of Man On Earth – fried chicken – comes out juicy and crunchy.
I won’t be around this Independence Day – I’m doing the second week of the Aebersold workshop this year (see previous post and upcoming posts) – to wax rapsodic about American food, so I’ll either have to do my drooling about hot dogs, hamburgers, barbecued ribs, biscuits and gravy, potato salad and cucumber salad before I go or after I get back.
In any case, let’s get started with this.
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06.24.07
Posted in American military, Jazz Guitar at 11:27 pm by Administrator
From 1965, the singularly sublime Wes Montgomery.
I know, especially if you’re a guitarist, your temptation will be to watch what his left hand is doing, but pay occasional attention to his right hand. He’s doing all that shit with his thumb! All that thirty-second-note stuff – oh, man! Also look at the offhand way the experience of elan shows up on his face. It’s obvious he’s immensely grateful to his creator for the opportunity to be expressing this, but he’s so supremely cool about it.
Last year, when I did my Sunday-afternoon audition for the Aebersold workshop (which I’ll be attending again next week; more on that soon), the main faculty member who scrutinized me had me do some runs while he played a few II-V7-Is. Afterward he said, “Why don’t you use a pick?” I gave him some mealy-mouthed answer, when the truth was that I’d just plumb forgotten to bring any with me. He said that in jazz one generally is going for a legato feel to one’s lines, and that a pick is generally used. (He did say he liked what I’d played, but that he’d be interested in hearing what it sounded like with a pick.) I wonder if he’s ever seen this stuff.
Wes, man. The best. Not dissing Django or Burrell or Tal Farlow or Barney Kessel or John McLaughlin, but there’s those cats and then there’s the man from the Missile Room.
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Posted in Congress at 9:59 pm by Administrator
A comment under a recent thread links to a new New Yorker piece by the ever-excitable Seymour Hersch on something related to the shenanigans a couple of years ago at Abu Ghraib.
Yo, Mr. Hersch: Here’s what real human rights violations look like.
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Posted in Contact at 3:03 pm by Administrator
It’s not often that The Washington Post speaks for me with perfect alignment, but such is the case in this morning’s editorial on where we stand vis-a-vis North Korea.
It’s a bit like the excitement the W administration seems to harbor over sending aid to Abbas in the West bank.
When administrations become rudderless, why does the process so often start at the State Department?
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06.23.07
Posted in Culture, Food, Free-market Economics at 7:05 pm by Administrator
Later today, Mrs. BN and I are going to head over to Bloomington, Indiana, and do some grocery shopping at the biggest locally-owned, independent (co-op) health-food supermarket around these parts.
Because so many big chains in the field, such as Whole Foods and Wild Oats (which, I guess, are merging), have encroached on the hometown stores, something in me kind of roots for this place to prevail and enjoy another twenty-five years of robust commerce.
The fact of the matter is, though, that, for all the ways it looks like the big vs. small issue that characterizes so much of the business world, particularly the retail sector, there’s another set of factors at work here that show the big and small health-food outlets to have more in common than they do things differentiating them.
This set of factors can be gathered under the rubric “countercultural impulse.” The main selling point on which they count to set them apart is that “We’re not Kroger; we’re not Albertson’s.” In other words, their mission transcends “corporate values.”
I remember reading somewhere a while ago that the founder of Whole Foods got an eye-opening lesson on the limits to New-Age-style capitalism as his chain experienced its rapid growth. Groups representing do-gooder causes hit on him regularly, expecting him to pony up, since he believed in a green and just world and such. He began to see that in order to have a charitable-contributions line in his budget at all, his first order of business was to make a profit.
Still, it’s apparent that his organization is still an Aquarian enterprise at heart. As with all these places, both local and chain, one indicator is the magazines they offer on the stands by the checkout counter – periodicals for the feminists, Buddhists, political “progressives,” practitioners of communal living, and vegetarians among us.
There’s more than a little of the feel of a parallel universe in those places. You go up and down the aisles and notice that the products they offer are, for the most part, what you’d find in “conventional” grocery stores – pasta sauces, paper towels, wine, meat, fish and poultry, produce, cleaning products. A lot of the items cost more, but that’s becuse they’re either made with organic ingredients or they lack preservative chemicals an therefore have a shorter shelf life. Some aren’t much different from their “conventional” counterparts at all, such as the breakfast cereals. The main difference between the puffs and flakes purveyed by Kashi, Health Valley, and Barabara’s on the one hand and General Mills and Kellogg on the other is that the consumer perceives the former to have been manufactured by groovy hippies rather than greedy white males.
The health-nut impulse in our society predates the beatniks and hippies, actually. I recall some character in Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel The Fountainhead making fun of “vegetarians and nudists.” In fact – and this is hugely ironic – the whole breakfast-food industry got its start up in Battle Creek, Michigan at the sanitorium of Seventh-Day Adventist founder Ellen White, who consulted with Dr. John Kellogg and C.W. Post about toasting sheets of ground grain in order to efficiently comply with the persnickety health practices her reading of scripture convinces her were required.
On the bulletin boards these places put near the entrance and exit doors, one finds announcements for all manner of gluten-free support groups and meditation retreats and lectures by environmentalists. I recall a couple of years ago seeing an announcement at the store where we shop for an upcoming book-signing by a lady who’d written a tome called I’m In Recovery From Western Civilization.
And that pretty well sums up what is kind of poignant and touching about these places. They cater to a segment of the public that, because of the vast general affluence and freedom in American society, can make the choice to lead insular little tie-dyed-and-dreadlocked existences. There’s something sweet about their vision of human living, if one overlooks the perilous obliviousness to the ever-present evil that history shows us is part of the package for our species.
I kind of dig shopping in these places, purely from the standpoint of the availability of some stuff you don’t find elsewhere. I actually like tempeh, for instance. I cut it into cubes and saute it with some Bragg’s Amino Acid (kind of tastes like soy sauce, and is packed with protein, as is the tempeh). This particular place has made-on-site spicy Chinese noodles in the deli counter that are truly rockin’. Their baba ganouj and stuffed grape leaves knock me out as well.
But for my meat I’ll head across the street to Marsh. It’s regular old meat instead of that free-range stuff, so it’s far less pricey, and tends to have more fat on it, which is important to me.
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06.22.07
Posted in Culture war heroes, Politics at 3:59 pm by Administrator
I sometimes wonder if my term “Freedom Haters” is too purple and over-the-top. I really am trying to uphold standards of well-thought-out discourse expressed with clarity and maturity here at BN.
Then I come across a development like this and I know the designation Freedom-Haters is spot-on.
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