Today's Stories

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Kim Nicolini
Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

March 27-29, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Fall Guy

Arno J. Mayer
Too Big to Fail?

Michael Hudson
How the Scam Works

José Pertierra
Gesture for Gesture: How to Free the Cuban Five

Andy Worthington
A Letter to Obama From a Guantánamo Uighur

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Hog Wallow

Winslow T. Wheeler
What Does an F-22 Cost?

Souad N. Al-Azzawi
Iraq: Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves

Dave Lindorff
A Financial History Lesson

Ian Masters
The Zombie Presidency

Barbara Rose Johnston
Water Culture Wars

Jami Tarn
Smearing Tristan Anderson

Diane Farsetta
The Nuclear Industry Targets Wisconsin

David Ker Thomson Against Democracy

Ramzy Baroud
Netanyahu and the Future of the Peace Process

Rannie Amiri
Saudi Shiites' One-Word Demand

Wajahat Ali
Writer as Fighter: the Genius of Ishmael Reed

Nick Egnatz
Whatever Happened to the Fierce Urgency of Now?

Gregory A. Burris
The Insolents Abroad: a Defense of Iceland

Missy Beattie
This Land

Stephen Martin
The Broken Stone of Corporatism

Charles R. Larson
Obama, Smoking and Me

David Yearsley
How They Built Bach's Face (Is the Bard Next?)

Ben Sonnenberg
Won't You Please Get Thee Behind Me? Buñuel's Simon of the Desert

Kim Nicolini
The Mafia Without Moralizing: Garrone's Gomorrah

Lorenzo Wolff
Pat Boone Syndrome

Poets' Basement
Four Poems by Paulann Petersen

Website of the Weekend
Ann Coulter: a Portrait by Ben Tripp

March 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis?

Sharon Smith
Another Blow to Labor ... from the Democrats

Neve Gordon
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Shame

Patrick Madden
Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

Gareth Porter
The Big Con on Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Why Do We Need a Health Insurance Industry?

Hannah Safran
The Israeli Resistance: "Ready to be Traitors"

Keith Newell
Will the Cellphone Please Take the Stand?

Todd Chretien
Behind the Green Collar

Nelson P. Valdés
When It Comes to Cuba and the Media Anything Goes

Website of the Day
G20 Meltdown

March 25, 2009

Robin Blackburn
Media Revolution or Mirage?

Conn Hallinan
Europe in Crisis

David Rosen
Sexting: a First Amendment Challenge for Obama

Jonathan Cook
Turkey's Fallout with Israel Deals Blow to Settlers

Dean Baker
Billions More for Failed Banks

Ron Jacobs
Karzai on a String

Russell Mokhiber
Corporate Liberals vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Slice and Dice on Card Check

Dave Lindorff
Geithner's Power Grab

Sarah Knopp
LA Teacher's Sit-In Over Layoffs

Website of the Day
How to Create an Animal Rights "Terrorist"

March 24, 2009

Robert Sandels
Obama and Cuba: Real Change or Minor Tweaks?

Harvey Wasserman
People Died at Three Mile Island

Franklin Lamb
Who Tried to Kill Palestinian Ambassador Abass Zaki and Why?

Michael Donnelly
Obama's Team of Losers

Norman Solomon
Denial and Evasion on Afghanistan

Elizabeth Schulte
The Stark Facts About Violence Against Women

John Goekler
The Most Dangerous Person in the World?

Nicole Colson
Is Justice Finally in Sight for Sami Al-Arian?

Global Balkans
NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia: Ten Years On

William S. Lind
Cat-and-Mouse Off Hainan Island

Website of the Day
Video: IDF Fired on Medics in Gaza

March 23, 2009

M. Shahid Alam
Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims

Uri Avnery
Israel's Most Revolting Law?

Mike Whitney
Zombie Economics: Judgment Day for Geithner

Ralph Nader
Bush the Teacher

Brian Cloughley
Tilting at Afghan Windmills

Dave Lindorff
Toxic Bailouts

Amira Hass
The Rules of Engagement in Gaza: Open Fire on Rescuers

Chris Irwin
When Nonprofit Groups Go Bad

Binoy Kampmark
The Celebrity of Celebrity

Michael Dickinson
Tollbridge Over Troubled Waters

Website of the Day
State of the Birds

March 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Edge of the Volcano

Paul Craig Roberts
When Things Fall Apart

P. Sainath
Slumdogs vs. Billionaires

Robert Weissman
Lessons From AIG

Saul Landau
Sliding Down in Anger: If We Bail Out the Banks, Why Shouldn't We Own Them?

David Michael Green
Obama and the Altar of Greed

Greg Moses
Winter Soldiers Come to Texas

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan in Turmoil: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Michael D. Yates
A Nation of Immigrants

John V. Whitbeck
Happy New Year, Iran!

Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Zuhair

Linn Washington Jr.
Supreme Test: the Latest Twist in the Mumia Case

David Ker Thomson
Actions: Things to Do Instead of Hailing the Chief

Laurent Jacque
Is the Euro Doomed?

Rannie Amiri
The Middle East's Jittery Monarchies

Reiko Redmonde /
Larry Everest
The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant

David Macaray
The Myth of the Powerful Teachers' Union

Kenneth Couesbouc
Where has the Consumption Gone?

Martha Rosenberg
Meltdown in the Drug Industry

Alan Farago
The Recession, the Developers and Baseball

Missy Beattie
Still Waiting for Change

Richard Rhames
Invisible But Not Completely Insolvent

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Jets

Charles R. Larson
Impeach Obama!

David Yearsley
On Bach's Birthday

Lorenzo Wolff
Manic Levity

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Gary Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Teachers for CEO Merit Pay!

March 19, 2009

Dave Marsh
Sir Bono: the Knight Who Fled From His Own Debate

Paul Craig Roberts
Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Mike Whitney
Why Business is Hysterical About Card Check (And Why America Needs It)

Sam Smith
The Economy in Two Eras of Democrats

Harvey Wasserman
The Crash of France's Nuclear Poster Child

Binoy Kampmark
Back Into NATO: the End of French Exceptionalism

Kathy Sanborn
Broken Culture: the Desecration of Iraq's Art Treasures

Christopher Brauchli
Taxing Problems

George Wuerthner
Permanent Damage From Temporary Logging Roads

Diann Rust-Tierney
New Mexico Abolishes the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Bailout Plan: "Cross Your Fingers and Hope"

March 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Real AIG Conspiracy

Paul Craig Roberts
Israel's American Chattel

Nelson P. Valdés
Why Obama's New Cuba Rules Violate the Constitution

Jonathan Cook
Bedouin Villages Left in the Dark Ages

John Ross
The Death of the American Newspaper

Yifat Susskind
Where Are We Leaving Iraqi Women?

Dave Lindorff
Who's Calling the Shots Now?

Frances Moore Lappé
The City That Ended Hunger

Richard Grossman
Beware the Madoff Diversion!

Rev. William E. Alberts
On Being Whole Not Holy

Website of the Day
Three Weeks in Cuba: a Painter's Perspective

March 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
Mr. Bernanke Spreads the Fire

James G. Abourezk
Show Business: AIG and the Posturing Democrats

Harry Browne
Ireland's Blast From the Past

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Human Rights Abuses in the War on Terror

Alan Farago
The National Ponzi Scheme

Dean Baker
Getting Lehman Bros. Wrong ... Again

Peter Morici
Cuts for Autoworkers, Bonuses for Derivatives Traders

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Obama and the Empire

Richard Gott
Victory for the Left in El Salvador

Walter Brasch
Dog Mutilations vs. Cosmetics

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Action

March 16, 2009

Pam Martens
Has a Comedian Just Saved America?

Uri Avnery
The Rape of Washington

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Witness Protection Program

Ralph Nader
Americans Want Justice for Wall Street Crooks

Nikolas Kozloff
Down But Not Out: the Latin American Right

John Walsh
Redbaiting on the Left

Ron Jacobs
A Call for Common Sense

Binoy Kampmark
The Case of Tim K

Stephen Fleischman
Coxey's Army Will March Again!

Christian Christensen
A 25-Year Misunderstanding: Springsteen's "Born in the USA"

Scott Handleman
Shooting Tristan Anderson

Website of the Day
Clean, Green, Sustainable

March 13 / 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Parable of the Shopping Mall

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

Diana Johnstone
NATO's Global Mission Creep

David Harvey
Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

Petrino DiLeo
Inside Obama's Housing Plan: Will Millions be Left Out in the Cold

David Ker Thomson
Tender to the Earth

Eric Ruder
Massacre in Slow Motion: an Interview with Haider Eid on Gaza

Fred Gardner
Cannabidiol Now!

David Yearsley
Music Torture

Saul Landau
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name

Laura Carlsen
Drug War Doublespeak

Robert Weissman
We Told You So

John Goekler /
Merle Lefkoff
The Struggle in Saffron

Tom Barry
Imprisoning Immigrants for Profit

Kathy Sanborn
Money Out of Thin Air

Chris Mobley / Leela Yellesetty
Criminalizing Poverty: the Jail Seattle Doesn't Need

David Michael Green
The Perils of Being Right and Wrong

Alan Maass /
Lee Sustar
A Socialist Moment?

Christopher Brauchli
Pity, the Poor Tax Collectors

Richard Morse
Clinton in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Taking It From the Streets: From Springsteen to the Wu-Tang Clan

Poets' Basement
Springate and Johnston

Website of the Weekend
Hear the Buffalo

March 12 , 2009

Sharon Smith
Bottom Feeders at the Trough

Christopher Ketcham
Full Spectrum Penetration: Israeli Spying in the United States

Mike Whitney
Haircut Time for Bondholders

Ray McGovern
Obama Caves to the Lobby

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
The Doublespeak of a Discredited IMF

John Ross
The War is Not Over

M. Reza Pirbhai
Men in Black: Another View of Pakistan

Chris Floyd
Lost Liberty Blues: Prisons, Profits and the Banality of Evil

Steve Early
Why Labor Doesn't Need a "House of Lords"

Quentin Gee
Hiding the Costs of Coal

Website of the Day
Amadee Coral Reef: a Spherical Panorama

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

Nikolas Kozloff
The Death Cries of the Salvadoran Right

Norm Kent
I am Patient Number 380206011

Mitu Sengupta
Reforming the World Bank: Different Image, Same Tune?

Ludwig Watzal
The Structure of Israel's Occupation

David Macaray
The Battle Over EFCA Has Begun

William S. Lind
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Martha Rosenberg
A Merger From the Folks Who Brought You Vytorin

Website of the Day
American Indicator: One in Fifty Kids are Homeless

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

Weekend Edition
April 3-5, 2009

The Musical Patriot

Homage to Moog and Mallards

By DAVID YEARSLEY

Drive north from Ithaca, New York up the west side of Lake Cayuga for seven or eight miles and you’ll come to Taughannock State Park, which encloses the spectacular falls of the same name, said to be the highest east of the Rockies, higher even than Niagara Falls. After passing by the entrance to the park, take the gorge road climbing steeply up the bluffs heading west and after you stop at the lookout above the falls and have a look at the cataract—iced and silent in winter, thunderous in spring, a trickle in the driest stretches of summer unrelieved by thunders storms — you’ll come to the town of Trumansburg.

 Trumansburg has a wide and graceful main street of stately clapboard houses with porches, pillared churches and library, and finishes its protocols of decorum with an ensemble of terraced brick shops.  But for the incipient sprawl to the south and the derelict supermarket and parking lot to the north, the town looks much like it did in the 19th century, and much like it did in the 1960s when the New York City native, Robert Moog, developed his epoch-making synthesizer, hailed by many to be the most important keyboard instrument invented in the 20th century. Moog had come Ithaca to do a Ph.D. in engineering physics at Cornell and after completing his degree settled  his company in Trumansburg to develop his musical instruments.

The impact of the Moog synthesizer on the sound of the late 1960s and 1970s is hard to overestimate. Wendy Carlos (then still Walter Carlos) brought out Switched-On Bach in 1968 using Moog’s synthesizers. The LP went platinum and broke into the Billboard top ten. Carlos’ strutting, space-age reading of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 gave that piece a new day-glo grandeur, in whose vibrant reflection all subsequent performances either bask or wilt. Carlos’ version of that over-worked classic-hit Air on the G String demonstrated that underneath the sickly-sweet frosting of too-many wedding performances there was a freshly honed file. Aided and abetted by Moog, Bach made his jailbreak.

A year earlier the Doors had used a Moog for their Strange Days album, and in 1969 the instrument adorned the Beatles’ studio swansong, Abbey Road. Hollywood, too, came calling. In Carlos’s score for Stanley Kubrick’s  1971 A Clockwork Orange the urgent electric energy of Moog’s sound even in, or perhaps especially in, slow moving musical textures captured the artful psychopathy of the film’s violence-loving anti-hero, Alex. The soundtrack exploited that strange something in the Moog’s sound, the siren-song way it rides the knife-edge between ambrosial sweetness and terror.

Of the many other pop and concert music applications of Moog’s creation, however, none equals that of David Borden, whose 12-part Continuing Story of Counterpoint is one of the great works of late 20th-century art music—an ambitious, yet welcoming masterpiece composed between 1976 and 1987, and one which offers its players and listeners perpetually new perspectives on what it means to play and to listen. Borden’s Continuing Story realizes the promise of music both to mark time’s progress and to cleave ecstatically to the moment. Moog gave Borden, then a neophyte on synthesizers, the keys to his Trumansburg studio in 1967. Two years later Moog received his first major patent and that same year Borden formed Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, the first all-synthesizer ensemble. The group gave its first concert in Barnes Hall on the Cornell University campus in May of 1969.

This past Sunday the Mallards returned to Barnes Hall to celebrate the group’s fortieth anniversary.  It’s been a period of commemorations for Borden, who marked his 70th birthday this past Christmas Day. His once-black hair is now gray, but his witty and oracular stage presence is as engaging as ever. Barnes Hall was full even on a wet late-Winter-Early Spring night, the proceedings introduced by Trevor Pinch, who, along with Frank Trocco, has written an excellent book on Robert Moog and others, called Analog Days. http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/PINANA.html. Pinch asked who among the audience had been at the first MMPMC  concert forty years ago. Many hands, attached to witnesses of and contributors to Ithaca’s counter-culture and avant-gardist past, went up.

At this point I should probably acknowledge that I have been in the group for most the last decade. Now we use laptops and keyboards instead of the weighty and sometimes irascilbe analog synthesizers. David Borden brought along two of his classic Moogs and set them off to the side of the stage as tributes to the inventor and to the group’s past.

Borden talked about Bob Moog with real affection and charm, and used the last last synthesizer Moog conceived—a combination of both analog and digital synthesizer and a beautifully fashioned tool that put one in mind of the controls of a jet plane as conceived by Bang and Olufsen—designed shortly before his death from a brain tumor in 2005. Borden used it in dialogue with a vintage mini-Moog for his bluesy tribute to another friend, saxonphone and clarinet player, Jimmy Giuffre who died last year. Giuffre, too, was heard in sampled excerpts commented on by Borden at the last Moog, with keyboard savant Josh Oxford on the mini-Moog, and Borden’s electric-guitar virtuoso of a son Gabriel on an instrument he’d personally assembled from spare parts. Borden offered subsequent ancedotes about Jasper Johns and modern dance legend Viola Farber; Borden’s tribute to her, which featured live video footage of her choreography, closed the program.

Borden is categorized as a minimalist along with  his colleagues Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Like any such designation, this one is as misleading as it is useful.  The Counterpoints of Borden’s Continuing Story are composed in modules, units repeated from two to as many as eight or even sixteen times each.  Repetition is a fundamental principle of construction in these pieces. Borden also draws frequently on arpeggiated lines familiar to us from the music of Philip Glass, and these recur in shifting patterns. Generally all of the three keyboard parts of Mother Mallard trio are moving, at least on the surface level, at the same brisk pace: several notes per second, with one or two of the players occasionally adopting a more spectatorly pace, allowing the music to sweep them along.

Though the compositions are notated with utter elegance and specificity, there is no governing time signature. Each of the three keyboard parts pursues its own metrical path through the modules, a typical piece having between thirty or forty of these in total. In each module a single harmonic aura tends to prevail: never has pure diatonicism been so alive. Encompassing consonance is the rule.

The notes race along with metronomic precision, but the lockstep surface does not draw the attention, or only does so intermittently. Instead the three keyboard parts seem to move in and  out of phase according to the perceptions of the listener.  One hears different things in the music with each performance: different rhythmic and melodic profiles emerge momentarily then merge with others or are suddenly eclipsed; a line sheers off into the distant background, only to reassert itself in a new guise moments later or after a lengthier interval. The more things stay the same, the more things change.

In some cases individual keyboards part may be carried over to a different Counterpoint entirely. Yet their contexts change. We might recognize the lineaments of the transferred part, but be astonished by the recasting, perhaps against type. The frenetically alternating open fifths that open Counterpoint 5 in the Player One part ultimately usher in the jubilant funkiness of Module 23, one of my all-time favorite musical passages, that makes me smile just thinking about it.  In Counterpoint 7, Player One plays the identical part, but the new surroundings give it a slightly darker cast, a meditative quality that defies its high speed.

A string of modules may take up residence in a given key area, and then suddenly move house between heartbeats over the bar-line to the next module.  If this is vivifying for the listener, it can be both bracing and utterly terrifying for the player. Indeed, if one player gets seduced by the rushing beauty, quirky eccentricities, or momentary glint of another part, and notices for the first time a suddenly different scansion, the trace of new and fascinating musical shape, the whisper of ghostly voice, or a the witty chiding of a musical memory coming from the music, one risks loosing the slip stream of the music.  Finding your way back into its rush is one of the most difficult tasks in the history of chamber music.

This integrity of the individual parts and the permutations of perceptual combination that each module fosters, allows Borden to experiment with peeling off one keyboard, leaving new shapes to emerge from the two that remain.  I joined Blaise Bryski, one of the widest ranging and expressive keyboard players there is, a master of the bravura and even more of cantabile style from Mozart to yesterday, for  a two-piano rendition of Counterpoint 8, written in 1979. With the two concert grands nested into one another I heard many new things in this classic and always-compelling work, though I didn’t relax for a slit-second.  There is nothing harder than making the synchronic precision of this music release its larger diachronic message.  Even resisting the mesmeric beckonings of some of the modules one can begin to doubt one’s memory: “Is this the seventh or eighth time I’ve played this module.” In such moments one must revert to a deeper level of memory, and draw on the larger cycles that you have been unconsciously perceiving, even while attending frantically to each individual beat. In the event, Blaise and I did land on that last glinting sixteenth note—one of thousands in the piece—precisely together, and then suddenly gone like a drop of water on a duck’s back.

For Borden, then, counterpoint is the way the sonorities and rhythms of each part cooperate but retain their identity, contributing to the larger musical goals yet retaining their integrity. The paradox exploited by Borden’s genius for energizing a piece that in other hands might succumb to its own inertia is this: each Counterpoint is instantly recognizable yet always yields a different piece, a unique hearing.

In this sense the comparison to Bach and his counterpoint is an apt one, for in that music, too, both player and listener can always hear something new, the elegant course of a contrapuntal voice, the suddenly bold gesture of a countersubject somehow never noticed before. Counterpoint in Borden and Bach—and I hope neither blushes at the comparison—is a way of reveling in the nowness of life while recognizing the ever-changing beauty of the way it passes by.

Forty years on Mother Mallard is as new as the day she first ruffled her wings.

David Yearsley teaches at Cornell University. A long-time contributor to the Anderson Valley Advertiser, he is author of Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint His latest CD, “All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London”, has just been released by Musica Omnia. He can be reached at dgy2@cornell.edu   

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont