the chain I am swinging

Tuesday:
Ravi Shankhar, A Morning Raga/An Evening Raga
MV & EE with the Bummer Road, Play Elias McDaniel's Who Do You Love
James Blackshaw, Love Is the Plan, The Plan is Death and All Is Falling
Scott Walker, Bish BoschDavid Sylvian, Dead Bees on a Cake

Wednesday:
Public Image Ltd., "Public Image" on YouTube, three times in a row
Don Cabellero, Singles Breaking Up and Don Caballero 2
Marc Almond, Mother Fist and Her Five Daughters and Vermin in Ermine

My friend Fred Weaver once wrote a great Don Caballero tour diary for Chunklet. You don't even have to know Fred or Don to appreciate it, but it probably helps.

I'm about to administer my first final exam. I'm sick with power. I'm like that demon on the cover of Dio's Holy Diver, except the chain I am swinging is my students' academic futures.

Speaking of howling demons doing things,  I cannot get into Scott Walker. I don't get why not. It should be right in my curious wheelhouse: brooding, cathartic, angst-ridden, egregiously arty, touched with madness - it is basically the sonic equivalent of my boutique cupcake order, but I don't like his records at all.

I said of Walker's previous effort The Drift:

The songs generally have the lugubrious pace of a coal barge on the River Styx that has broken its moorings, but somehow they pull you in, until they seemingly shit you back out. 

but now I can't even look at some of my old writing long enough to decide if I agree with what it says.

This exam I'm about to give is a Media Writing exam - leads, inverted pyramid, AP-style, etc. - and it has sharpened the lens through which I view my work. I still don't think The Journalism Formula is the One True Way, but a little of it almost always gets the job done. I hope I got that across to the gaggle of students sitting across from me poring over my exam study sheets. Well, not poring. They have them out. See? The power I weild! The chains!