Bill Withers

"Lonely Town, Lonely Street"

Marlena Shaw remix

"California Soul"

Marlena Shaw

"Woman of the Ghetto"

Nina Simone

"Feeling Good." A cool video too.

Beware

In case you don't make it to the bottom of this morning's comment, the writer signs off with the chilling words, "be safe, be well, beware."

Okaay.

Sarah Palin's rapture

One interesting tidbit in Palin's hockey-mom world is the belief that Alaska will be a "refuge" in the "last days." I'm not unfamiliar with the concept. Indeed, in the mid seventies my parents moved us to Northern Idaho for exactly the same reason. The move was brief (the rapture didn't come, after all), but clearly others still harbor this frontier ideal. The YouTube video of Palin and her pastor is here.

What would have been worse? The elite establishment mormon, Mitt Romney, or the backwoods pentacostalist, Palin. Romney probably would have been more benign.

Cake

Covering Black Sabbath's "War Pigs." Cake is from Sacramento (my birthplace), where their studio is apparently powered by rooftop solar panels.

I can't believe I stayed up to watch McCain's speech

John "maverick is just another word for being a dick" McCain's POW experience has all the ingredients of a redemptive tale, but instead it struck me as so much false humility. As Ezra Klein puts it at American Prospect, "Such public declarations of patriotism are not about why John McCain loves this country. They are about why this country should love John McCain."

Republican convention

Firedoglake captures my feeling best. The Republicans are again running a divide and conquer campaign, but one "based on an ideal. That Americans are stupid, base, resentful and bigoted."

Warren Zevon

Literature-space vs. cyberspace

Kevin Kelly's conclusion:

I think literature-space is orthogonal to cyberspace and to reading-space. You can get deep into a book online as well as in paper, and you can skip across ideas on paper as well as online. It is true the medium is a message itself, but what we are now inhabiting is an Intermedia, the media of medias, where one medium flows into another making it hard to define boundaries. The book can be found in cyberspace and in literature space. The book may be bigger than we think. Or smaller than we think. For sure we are in the process of redefining it.