“And love is not a victory march, it’s a cold and it’s a broken ‘hallelujah.’ ” (>>) [MP3]

“My father believed in hard work, and I believe that’s how my father expressed love […] I think for my dad it was about getting up early and working hard and making a better life for his kids, and that’s what this man did. Every Christmas in the post office there was something called ‘The Pressure;’ it’s when the mail started to build up and all the postal workers were working 12-hour shifts all the time and it was a crazy amount of work they were doing […] And he worked his ass off the whole month of December, but every Christmas morning he would wake up with me, and my brother and my sisters and help put the presents together. And he must have been bone tired, but he did it, and he never mentioned how tired he was.” (>>)

“It’s hard enough trying to drink another winter all alone.” (>>) [MP3]

“I just find it frustrating and am pissed off at the latent injustices in our socioeconomic system. And stressed at how much more difficult house hunting is when not just economics and aesthetics but personal values are involved. Knowing that where we live reflect who we are and what we value – and that many of those values will have to be compromised – makes it all that more complicated.” (>>)

“Sort of like Nixon in a Christmas parade.” (>>)

“I don’t want to go the route of carbon dating or dinosaurs or ice ages or tropical plants being found in glaciers, although that is an interesting conversation…especially when someone claims that dinosaurs were placed in the earth’s crust by Satan in order to test our faith in the Bible (and, yes, people actually say such nonsense).” (>>)

“Joe Strummer, the legendary gravel-voiced punk-poet from The Clash, loved to listen to music on the radio. Even as he toured the world with ‘the only band that matters,’ he still had a dream to one day spin records for the BBC World Service, where he heard the latest UK hits over the shortwave band as a teenager in Africa.

“He finally got his wish in 1999, when BBC World Service premiered Joe Strummer’s London Calling. Between then and 2002, Strummer hosted a series of programs with a simple format – one man and his eclectic record collection. His globe spanning playlists included many of the rock, reggae and folk artists that inspired the Clash, plus many surprises.” (>>)

Download all eight one-hour episodes in MP3 format [435MB, ZIP]

Track List

“That’s what was good about punk. If you were ugly, you were in…

“Joe would have more ideas in a rhyming couplet than others would have in their whole fucking album.” (>>)

“At this point, all sense of thrift has fallen away. We grew up in a tightened house, where there was no allowance, where asking for $5 from our father elicited the heaviest of sighs, required detailed plans for repayment. Our mother was far worse — would not even shop in Lake Forest, where everything was overpriced, would instead drive ten, twenty, thirty miles to Marshalls, to T.J. Maxx, for bargains, for bulk. Once a year we would all pile into the Pinto and would drive to a place on the west side of Chicago, Sinofsky’s, where for $4, $5 each we’d buy dozens of slightly flawed rugby shirts, holes here and there, extra buttons, collars ruined by bleach, pink bleeding into white. We grew up with a weird kind of cognitive dissonance; we knew we lived in a nice town — our cousins out East often made that point to us — but then, if this was true, why was our mother always fretting aloud about not having the money to buy staples? “How will I even buy milk tomorrow?” she would yell at him from the kitchen. Our father, who was out of work a year here, a year there, never seemed impressed with her worry; he seemed to have it all worked out. Still, we were ready for and expected sudden indigence, to be forced out of the house in the middle of the night, and into one of the apartments on the highway, at the edge of town. To become one of those kids.

“It never happened, of course, and now, though we are not rich, and there is very little money actually coming in, Beth and I have tossed away the guilt associated with spending it. When it’s a matter of expense versus convenience, the choice is not a choice. While my mother would have driven forty miles for a half-priced tomato, I’ll pay $10 for it if it means I don’t have to get in the car. It’s a matter of exhaustion, mostly. Fatigue loosens my wallet, Beth’s even more, loosens the checkbook tied to Toph’s account. We are done sacrificing, Beth and I have decided — at least when it’s unnecessary, when it involves money, which, for the time being at least, we have.” (>>)

“I think it’s high time we got this whole thing out in the open.” (>>)

“The person who refuses to love doesn’t know the first thing about God, because God is love—so you can’t know him if you don’t love.” (>>)

“Why can’t we just talk like human beings talk to one another?” (>>)

“You know, things weren’t always where they are right now in American culture; we weren’t measured by our ability to consume. We were measured by things like, ‘did we do good work?’ or ‘were we a good father, brother, or son?’ And now, through the marketing of things, we have…and I’ve fallen victim to it, I hope I don’t sound like I’m coming from a high place—but I hope that the song kind of expresses it… you can get caught up in measuring yourself by things that don’t really matter. And this song is kind of just about trying to get connected on who I am as a man and a citizen versus who I am as a consumer. And it sounds like a really big issue, but these things play out in really small ways in our lives, from dissatisfaction and disenchantment with ourselves and with our partners, and it can be pretty noir, you know? But the song’s trying to say that we might need to start turning our back onto some of this and try to find value in our words and our real experiences, not just in the virtual world and purchasing things and keeping up with the latest things. Maybe there’s something richer to be found through real contact.” (>>)