It’s Friday the first of July, 2005 but you already know that. PL, PM, and RW work diligently at the bucolic foothill retreat and studio of PM at the edge of Los Angeles. The sun is getting warmer, the sky smoggier. It is summer here in Los Angeles. Real, interminable, Los Angeles summer is dawning.
We are at work comping the tracks for our third full LP. Barrier Reef is comped. Byrd From West Virginia is next. We’re going through the songs alphabetically. We’re organized, damn it. As if we were launching a rocket into space for NASA, we’re utilizing the most severe tools of organization. Yes, we’re using computers. Apples, IBMs, PCs. We’re using all the computers. All of them. Is Paul Laques, in fact, in support of the space program, you ask? No, of course he’s not. He’s exhausted by it just like you, and just like the entire shuttle launch platform. Will Discovery survive its mission later this month? And why is Discovery always used immediately after a Shuttle disaster? It was the first Shuttle launched after Challenger disintegrated on take off, the first launched after Colombia disintigrated on landing. Is it the most reliable Shuttle? Is Atlantis as unreliable as the fools who wander the earth believing in the mythical ocean city from which it gleans its name?
There are still many questions left to answer, my friends. Many questions. Am I talking about the Kennedy assasination? You bet I am. The Magic Bullet Theory, the mysterious circumstances surrounding Officer Tippitt’s death later that afternoon, the witnesses pointing to the train trestle immediately after the shots were fired, the change in the parade route, the improbability of a single gunman operating alone, the drastic differences in conclusions between the Dallas surgeons and those of the government autopsy at Bethesda Naval Hospital, the CIA-Mafia-Cuban Connection and the fallout from Bay of Pigs, Alpha 66, Sturgis and Hunt: Tramps or CIA Assets?, Life Magazine flips the sequence of frames in printing the Zapruder film, Jesus, the bullet changes direction! And where was George Bush Sr. on Nov. 22, 1963 (he claims not to remember). By God, Jack Ruby was a bagman for Al Capone. My sweet Lord, Oswald came back from two years in Russia with his American citizenship renounced and wasn’t even detained by a U.S. intelligence agency!So, back to work. Mandolin or Dobro? Lick selection. Slick election. Self-protection. They’re fighting each other. It’s the Vietnam War acted out by traditional American folk instruments. PL and PM put on the French hats of the Paris Peace Talks, trying to hammer out a deal between those two, tough, trebly cousins.
Paul Lacques says, “When you really stretch out the ProTools wave forms they look really stoney.” We decide that ProTools wave forms, Paul Marshall’s lava lamp, and Mike Stinson will costar in the video for Barrier Reef. Then the computer crashes. The computer! Goddamn it!But, thankfully, full recovery. Session Back Up was enabled and fully engaged. Why is Paul Marshall the only ProTools engineer in the country with this software? We will continue comping, selecting, peace-making. We are mastering the computers bit by bit. Science Fictions threatening the take over of the world by computers forgot one thing: Calisthenics! Yes, through the power of calisthenics we will overcome the machines, my friends. Be strong, be fit, send email.
With summer, as we all know, Paul L’s thoughts turn to impeachment. The 2002 vintage “Impeach Bush” sticker still clinging to his 1988 Mazda hatchback doesn’t seem so alone and hopeless. Another big summer thrill: Denny Moynahan aka King Kukule has a girlfriend, she’s supercool, and two days ago she managed to flip off both President Bush and the First Lady as they were limoing out of the White House compound. This really happened.**Paul M wishes to register his protest at this rude action; he believes in the political system, not
personal attacks.
Paul L, on the other hand, views history as a raw, vicious struggle between those with money and those without, and that the veneer of civility still clung to by the hopeful has masked the greatest transfer of wealth upward in the history of mankind. The Bush administration’s attack on the well being of the planet and its people is not getting the response of moral outrage it deserves. Kill the rich.