http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/samgrahamfelsen/gGBbrc

i don't know what to say, i've never heard a political speech so unflinching. i don't know if this will sink Obama's ship or save it, but i think that if his candidacy for president ends here, today, he will have secured himself a place in American history for speaking truth to power, for describing the social situation in the US with regard to racial issues as it really is, in frightening clarity, and addressing the elephants in the room directly.

hello there, mr. elephant, you've been here a while, haven't you? we're going to have to ask you to leave. thanks.

wow.

of all the good, bad, fucked up, wonderful, bizarrely strange and utterly pedestrian things to happen in the world and to me of late, none have drawn me to my keyboard to tell you about them...

until today. what stirred me from my torpor this evening was finding out about the impending demise of No Depression magazine, a publication that I can credit with fostering and expanding my love not only of alt.country music (whatever that is) but of music in general, turning me on to so many of my favorite artists and truly educating me about the history and culture of music in this country. While I've always been one to embrace the ascendancy of digital culture, downloadable music, music review websites and mp3blogs, it pains me to see my favorite independent ink and pulp pubs becoming less and less viable. The loss of intelligent, thoughtful and caring voices like No Depression and the late Punk Planet are a bitter downside to all the wonderful things that this series of tubes does for us.

Cheers, ND, and thanks for the words and the music.

Let's all improve our paper collections and make it a mission to keep McSweeney's , The Believer, Giant Robot, High Fructose, Juxtapoz and whatever other independent magazines are still out there making paper interesting alive, shall we?

i had a mardi gras. see?

happens every couple of years. i walk home from the quarter. it's a choice: streetcars only run once an hour that late, and I don't like taking cabs. it's not that bad of a walk, actually - nice straight shot down St. Charles, relatively safe, and it only takes about 45 minutes or an hour or so. If only it had been a little warmer tonight...

holy hell. penn gillette is someone i greatly admire for his...

okay, let me start over, since blogger apparently ate most of my last post. I like Penn Gillette because he has always seemed to me to be an authentic person, for a celebrity - unvarnished, lacking in artifice. you get the feeling that he's probably very much the same in person as he is on camera - larger than life, intelligent, cynical, opinionated and unafraid to state and support what he thinks.

Which is why I was tickled to find that he's started something like a videoblog, called "Penn Says". Despite being sponsored (rather brazenly) by Sony, it seems pretty rough - unscripted and unedited - and pretty entertaining so far.

i'm not much for the metaphysical, but sometimes things happen that make you wonder how exactly everything is connected, deep down, in the undercurrents. sometimes intuition takes you a little farther than you expect; or maybe not, maybe it's just an illusion, a trick of the light, the imagination of order in chaos. your mind fucking with you.

ever know that a letter is in your mailbox before you get there? go to the mailbox just to see if you're right? ever know who it's from and what it says before you open it? of course you have - that's not ESP - you were expecting it, on one level or another, consciously or otherwise. but how did you know it was there now, today?

who gets letters anymore anyway?

i can't stop listening to the sound of streetcars running down saint charles avenue in front of my building this morning. after two long years of silence, the streetcars are back this week, with that familiar ringing rumble, building and fading as they pass. for the first time since the storm it sounds like home.