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One day a CD mysteriously surfaces on a few neighborhood shop counters. Is it good? Does it rock? Who knows? No one seems to have ever seen the band live. All there is to go on is one shrink-wrapped, ten dollar CD. A helpful shop owner offered, “It’s on my home stereo;” notably, he didn’t offer to play the CD in his store. Apparently some members of the band are associated with a local hardware outlet. That’s about all the back story available. One can’t even tell if “Officer Down” is band name, album title, or merely a hope.

I mentioned this project to a friend in New York City. “Only in San Francisco,” he said, “would anyone still care about killing cops.” The suggestion that police as pigs, punk rock, and San Francisco are all anachronisms sadly has truth. The chance that any one of these will change the world has certainly diminished. But that’s not the point.

Officer Down’s lamentation against officialism is slathered on both sides by dual creamy hard-panned rhythm guitars. These twin independent interpretations of the beat underscore the lyrics of J. Mills with a lovely envelope of youthful rebellion and punctuated urgency. One feels safe inside this womb of sound. The immersive energy of this punk metal four-piece easily transports listeners to that goal of Rock’n’Roll, the vaunted “happy” place where the outside world no longer matters. It is to the great credit of this effort that Mills refuses to let us languish inside his band’s obvious love of sound. For in that frisson between harmony and hell, between the band’s trance-inducing unity and Mill’s tirade against political modernity, this band shines.

The recording is best when the two-guitar dialectic is focused on rhythm. The rare solos are a disappointment, not because of any failure on the part of the instrumentalists; rather there seems to have been a lack of attention paid in the after-tracking process to generating a solo spectral richness equivalent to that achieved for the rhythm guitars. There are a few other inconsistencies. . .

The black and white cover presents a swashbuckling pirate scene. With arms securely bound, a plank-walking, sad-faced cop—who is, incidentally, standing up, not down—is drawn larger and more prominently than everyone else around him. Dangerous brigands scurry about the background, but it is the officer who is shown closest to us. We see this is his last moment. We feel a sense of pity for the poor cop, who is obviously about to be martyred.

The back cover may be more on target. Here an empty staircase leads up towards Russian Hill, perhaps a hill climb toward the gallows suggestion of the opening track, “Hang ‘em High.” Officially, and since officers are the named concern of this band, officialdom is a good place to start; officially, the first words of this first song are, “Wasted my time.” I know this because the lyrics for each song are thoughtfully hand-lettered inside the eight-page booklet; before I even shoved the CD in the slot, I found this opening three word prognostication. I feared the worst. The worst came; it proved to be our dear President Bush whose candid thoughts are collaged in as intro for the opening track. In “Hang ‘em High,” Mills asserts that the “protesting game” is “wasting my time.” It is easy to agree with Mr. Mills both that voting is a waste of time and that it’s not just Bush; there are a number of warmongers in our current administration that need to be hanged. I keep getting hung-up on the ironically recursive idea that this song is just another example of the “protesting game” Mills laments.

In spite of the occasionally hypocritical lyrics—such as having hip young males complain that it’s the cops who are “armed by testosterone”—this album works consistently in every one of its anarchic tracks. Be warned that there are three or four filler tracks in the middle of this work that waver from Mill’s anti-establishment rage into the singer-songwriter territory of moralizing and story-telling. Ignore them. They’re not the message. You’ll find that what you crave is Officer Down’s mesmerizing political spunk.

I just had my first math class in over thirty years. Math for artists. I know you have no pity. It doesn't sound challenging at all. The instructor said as much, "I know the only reason you're here is that Math's a school requirement. Don't worry, it won't be hard."

My last attempt at math was a failed first-year calculus class. I'd thought it would be just like high school--no need to study. Oops. Yet that experience did not sour my appreciation for the occasional mathematical amusement. I've always thought of myself as math-friendly.

So the instructor's disclaimer frankly left me cold. Why should I be paying three thousand dollars for a class for boneheads? He let us out early--it was just the first day of class. I wandered aimlessly for a few moments trying to figure some way I could argue with the administration that I deserved an exception to the math requirement. "I already like math. Isn't knowing how to use a computer good enough? Can't I take something useful?" But I knew I'd never actually ask.

Then I realized that that's exactly what I needed to do. Go back in, before the instructor left altogether, and ask a few questions. Not those fake questions designed for avoidance, but the real questions I had from the day's lecture, for starters. Half an hour later I left the lecture hall again. This time with enthusiasm for the course.

The point here isn't his claims that philosophy is less than mathematics or that numbers are just the tip of the iceberg or that critical theory is bunk. The point here is that by taking action, by going back to ask the professor, I fed myself motivation. This may be a far more valuable lesson than learning that 5, 12 and 13 is second in the set of common Pythagorean triples.

Google (as one example) has a sophisticated and widely-adopted free blogging system. I could have used it. But no. I have to write my own. Why? Freedom.

4Brainstorming.com is free of Google-inserted ads. 4Brainstorming.com is untainted by the increasingly political decisions a giant corporation like Google is forced to make. Profit-driven corporations are legally obligated to make their shareholder's investments blossom, so it is no surprise they bow to the requests of foreign governments to hide certain search results. 4Brainstorming.com is, perhaps more by virtue of its minimal market penetration than by the fact that the code is hand-rolled, free of such external pressures.

It's paradoxical, perhaps, that this freedom I tout comes only at the steep price of hard, hard work--slavery, essentially, to the craft of cobbling code. Freedom always has such a cost. The failing of so many of our age is that they pay, with their lives and dreams and sweat, not for freedom, but for its exact opposite; they work all their lives to be slaves to fashion or TV or tattoos or petroleum-powered contained-explosion transportation cubicles. I propose self-imposed slavery to one's own cause is always a better choice.

Thirty-seven years ago Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon, arguably the greatest technological accomplishment of Mankind. This political proof that America was the world's Almighty was quickly eclipsed by social revolution at home and unsuccessful counter-revolutionary misadventures in Vietnam. America had no idea what to do with Space, no plan beyond the headline, and so, in 1969, though the reach of man was permanently extended, Mankind’s vision proved, once again, sadly shortsighted.

Mine, too. I graduated from Federal Way High School that June without a plan. I failed to apply to a single college. To avoid responsibility I signed up for classes at Highline Community College. I limped through several undistinguished quarters. A few years later I tried academia again and actually got admitted to the Honors program at the University of Washington. Yet, there too, I quickly lost interest.

Now, after the bulk of my life, I am back in college, a junior in the Class of 2008. I could have graduated 35 years ago. My peers did. Whatever. I chose a different path. This time it's working; I love being here now.