The New Thesis, take 1
The corporate media has decided that the downturn is the fault of all the evil working and middle class people who were part of an evil conspiracy to take out bank loans and credit lines they could never afford to pay back. It's YOUR FAULT PEOPLE is the message I see seeping from the corporate media I catch out of the corner of my eye.
I have another perspective. Corporate America has pursued a set of catastrophically destructive strategies since the beginning of the new millennium. Some would say twas ere so, but the cost removal policies that drove the outsourcing boom, the establishment of law and legal concerns as the primary skill set for the executive class, and the strategy of making money by floating cashflow and other financial engineering tactics have left most businesses merely hollowed out shells. Now that the opportunity to make money with money has dried up, corporate America can now be characterized as a metastatic body committed to strategies that have no connection to combining capital, labor, and other infrastructure into products and services that are demanded now, and into the future. They are still looking for ways to make money by floating cashflow into the giant Ponzi system that the Ibanks and insurance companies had devised, and are hunkering down to generate income by suing. This is what they have left.
The Dow is down, and will continue to sink, becuase the future cash flows of these reckless, smoldering hulks will continue to sink. Big business largely divorced itself from its underlying productive capacities, and as a result will flounder in a new environment that is diametrically opposite to what it is set up to achieve. Companies with lawyers as their CEO will continue to crash and burn. Companies who elevated financial engineers to key spots will shrink into oblivion.

That Prince of Foods
"...Bruce Fowler on trombone, Napoleon Murphy Brock on tenor sax and lead vocals, Terry Bozzio on drums, Tom Fowler ob bass, Denny Walley on slide, George Duke on keyboards, Captain Beefheart on vocals and soprano sax and madness. Thank you very much for coming to the concert tonight, hope you enjoyed it. Goodnight Austin Texas wherever you are!"
I llistened to this song for the nth thousand time at the gym yesterday. No matter how many times I hear it, I always want to match the energy and intensity screaming through. FZ and the band were on that night at the Armadillo World Headquarters in May 1975. Wow. The Flyers were playing the Sabres on their way to their second Stanley Cup. I was in 8th grade at St. Barnies. It's sometimes interesting to go back in time to think about what you were doing in your life when a live recording was made.
Muffin Man is really tow songs, I think. The spoken-word studio intro, with the processed piano and kazoo, and the live section; essentially the with same phrase repeated twice, and then the solo.javascript:void(0)
I think Zappa once said that he always played the same solo. In his Project/Object universe that's probably totally valid. Having listed to a lot of his work, there's certainly a lot of resonance among his soloes. But this one benefits from Bozzio's muscular drumming underneath--Terry Ted's work throughout that Bongo Fury record is a pretty singular statement in rock drumming. To the extend that it drove FZ's wailing, cutting, smashing solo on that song again validates Zappa's belief in teh importance of the accuracy and discipline fo the drummer as being the key to playing his music correctly.