Through the infinite wisdom that is the OMC overlords, we have ourselves a 3 day weekend this weekend to observe Martin Luther King day. So instead of like, sleeping or something, I'm just pulling myself away from the Roxbox and hitting the hay. I've tried to shake up my workflow a bit to help jog some new ideas. I made a whole shitload of 16 track audio files with varying drum beats, tempos, and so forth. Then I just jam away and pick out riffs/sounds that aren't throwaways. Prior to this, I built drumbeats around riffs and I think that leads to shit sounding less natural and contrived. This is somewhat like what I did in the late 90's when I'd jam against presets in an MC-505 until something usable came out. It sorta worked. I always did what I thought was the strongest shit when I'd jam something out with Ryan. So this is sort of my way of putting Ryan in a box (and now he never overplays! har har har). I did a lot of downtempo shit tonight and maybe something useful will come of it. Definitely felt like there were some things floating around in there that could turn into something.
In other news, Roly got his ass back to the US soil after being in the UK for the last month or so. So we celebrated that by getting retarded drunk the past couple days in various bars/clubs throughout Chicago. That went well....I guess...can it ever go bad?
McCain took South Carolina, which I think is a good thing. If Huckabee can't rally there (although he had a close one), he's going ot have a tough time on Super Tuesday.
I had an epiphany this week on the whole political landscape (at least with young yuppie liberals). The talking heads are all saying the big issues for voters this year are going to be the economy and Iraq. Yet, the big things that get hammered on are things like a candidate's views on gay marriage, their 'moral compass' and other (arguably) not-as-pressing stuff.
I believe when people can't see how things affect them in front of their face, they pay more attention to the novelty issues (and yes, to me, whether or not gay couples can get married is a novelty when compared to the health of the economy, our troops in Iraq and the health care situation). The net result is that the conversations had on the left don't seem to be straight-talk (to borrow one of McCain's buzzwords). They throw out buzzwords and pie-in-the-sky solutions without any evidence to back them up. SRSLY, even a glance at what Obama is proposing for federalizing health care shows that its entirely unrealistic and, if ever actually implemented would be a bureacratic nightmare. Any reasonable person could look at how NAFTA has been huge for promoting international trade and see how absurd John Edwards call to repeal it is. And all the leading candidates on the left that seem to think we'll "pull all the troops out of Iraq" in a year after being elected are ignoring the physics of war our 200+ years as a nation has taught us. While they're at it, maybe they can get around to getting us out of Korea and Europe since we're still holding a presence there because of wars that ended over 50 years ago. No the REALITY (that is, the one a single president doesn't have the authority or capability of altering all that much) is that we've entered a situation in Iraq where we'll always have a military presence there. The dialog needs to be about how that is going to be shaped, and less about nonsense ideas like how we're just going to 'pull out' of there. Any talk of pulling the troops entirely out as some sort of 'end goal' within a year is nothing more than pandering to people who really don't understand the situation. this same thing happened in the 04 elections with democrats too. It's like I -want- to be one of the cool hip liberal yuppie kids and support somebody like Obama because he's not a homophobe...but unfortunately, him accepting gays or not has very little to do with his position on things that have much larger effects on the future of our country. And, unlike the whole hollywood/liberal camp, I have a little bit better handle on how those bigger not-sexy issues will affect my daily life.