NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(November '01)
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11/4/2001
Lift off, we have lift off...
That's right, kids....Big Green has begun its lopsided journey to a dozen tour destinations in the outer solar system, packed like sardines into a crate that shouldn't even be used for shipping oranges, but that seems to be keeping the weather out, at least. Something to be grateful for. (That deep space weather is harsh!)
With
a cloud of noxious vapor and a deafening poketa-poketa-poketa, our
rent-to-own spacecraft lurched from its moorings in the courtyard of our
temporary home at the Cheney Hammer Factory here in rural Sri Lanka. Though the
hours leading up to our departure were somewhat chaotic, I have to say that this
was the most trouble-free tour kick-off we've experienced in a good many years.
The provisioning was completed on time. I recorded a new phone message and left
a sticky note on the factory to warn the mailman (I think he'll see it). We thought
of everything. Even so, I feel as though I've forgotten something.
Like....like......Tiny Montgomery!
Fuck, I knew this was too easy. We've gone and left our "magic genie" organist back on Terra Firma. He's probably drowning his sorrows at his favorite roadside gin-mill, the lush. How many times have I got to tell these guys? You can be late for prayer service. You can be late for supper. But you cannot be late for lift off. Just ask sFshzenKlyrn -- he'll tell you. As someone who's missed more than his share of interstellar shuttles, our Zenite friend understands the importance of a timely....hey....where is sFshzenKlyrn, anyway?
Oh,
Christ! And he's in charge of security! Just yesterday he was hovering around
the flight deck with a pastrami sandwich in one "hand" and a staple
gun in the other, posting helpful little security handbills that don't amount to
jack without him on board. One of them is about how you can use ordinary
household junk as anti-personnel weapons. It's just possible that sFshzenKlyrn
was so pleased with this particular posting that he may have projected himself over to Washington to share his insights with Tom
Ridge and Donny Rumsfeld. What he probably won't tell them is that only he (with
his internal body temperature of 453 degrees Kelvin) can easily melt an old
lawnmower into a 3-inch howitzer shell. Just wait until they figure out that
little trick -- they'll make sFshzenKlyrn
spacemanus non grata or, in plain English, "Mother of the Year."
(It loses something in translation.)
Anyway, here's our itinerary for the coming six weeks. We've added a few dates and generally made it less comprehensible.
BIG GREEN Interplanetary Tour 2001
November
5-7 Neptune
November 12-17 Uranus
November 20-22 Pluto
November 27 Saturn
November 29 Mars (1 show only)
December 1-3 Titan
December 8-11 Kaztropharius 137b
December 14 Zenon
I know just what you're going to say..."Guys! Those stops are too far apart!" Well, it's true, distance-wise. Time-wise, they're pretty close to one another. Blame our friends at Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., always eager to turn a faster profit. But fear not...once we have Trevor James Constable on board, we'll be able to push this crate beyond the arbitrary safety limits set by Hugo's Rent-A-Rocket. Trevor J. can just set up a gaggle of orgone generating devices around the engine room, let'em rip, and it's so long natural laws!
I
suppose you're as disappointed as I am that Dubya won't be joining us on this
journey. (We probably would have left without him, as well.) Well, as you
know, the boy's got his hands full just now. Too busy for his old partying
buddies, you know. That warrior-prince role is a demanding one, even on such
thin gruel as the current crisis. (I guess if he's Henry V now, that would make
us Falstaff, eh? Perhaps we're a nation of Falstaffs...)
Anyway, stay tuned...I'm sure sFshzenKlyrn, at least, will catch us up in time for our first performance. I'll let you know how it goes. No sleeping until then, okay?
The First Casualty. Welcome to command by press release. I see that DOD-generated language popping up everywhere! You know...no nation has ever tried so hard to avoid civilian casualties....our bombs are precision guided and targeted only on military assets....we regret the loss of life, the destruction of the relief warehouse(s), hospital(s), old folks home(s)....blah blah blah.
This
wouldn't work, of course, without the eager cooperation of the major news
outlets in the US. CNN is perhaps the most remarkably unapologetic about it, its
president directing the network's news correspondents to end each story that
refers to Afghan civilian casualties with a dissertation on how horrible the
September 11 bombings were. It's just that kind of journalistic integrity that
warms the cockles of our "Defense" Secretary's desiccated little
heart. (He does seem to be having a good time, doesn't he?)
Perhaps after this "war" is over (whenever that may be!) we may notice a few scattered items featured prominently on page 13A about how the ration packets and the cluster bombs both just happened to be painted yellow, or how the vast majority of the munitions dropped on Afghanistan were indiscriminate "dumb" bombs, etc. 'Til then, the laptop bombardiers and the media mullahs can all remain comfortably on the same page.
Calling this a "war" is like throwing a quadriplegic in the ring with Mike Tyson and calling it a "fight." Our only problem now is finding enough wheelbarrows to cart around all this excess glory.
Keep well. And open your ration kits carefully.
luv,
jp
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11/11/2001
Guten tag.
Hurtling through the inky void, we've encountered something quite unexpected. A Plaid Stamp redemption center, parked amongst the fragmented worlds of the asteroid belt. What a great harbinger for a successful interplanetary tour!
Though
it took Tiny Montgomery a couple of days to catch us up (his shuttle was delayed
by security concerns), sFshzenKlyrn
was still among the missing as of four o'clock (Mars time) that first
morning...until we stumbled upon the lonely Plaid Stamp outpost. It seems our
trusty Zenite guitarist has been hoarding stacks of those red & white little
suckers since sometime in 1962, and has finally pasted up enough 12-page
booklets to get himself a heated recliner. Sweet!
Needless to say, when we chugged out of Ceres' flaccid gravitational field, we did so with a cargo hold full of designer furniture from the 1960's. That includes a mile-long sofa with matching easy chair, several kidney-shaped coffee tables, and quite a bit more. Did I say sweet? I meant "suite".
Anyway...our friends at Hegemonic
Records & Worm Farm, Inc., the promoters of this interplanetary tour,
added a Jupiter gig onto the 
front
end, pushing back the rest of our schedule a couple of days. I guess it was by
popular demand. Our first night on this largest of the gas giants was a real
bang, with legions of oddly-misshapen listeners pressing into the Great Red Spot
(Jupiter's biggest club) for an earful.
Why so enthusiastic a response? Well, it seems Hegemonic contracted some hot-shot marketing firm on Callisto to promote our appearances in the Jovian system...and let me tell you, Sven, they really went overboard! I mean, our music was virtually unknown on Jupiter, so these guys resorted wholeheartedly to unscrupulous advertising practices. They've been selling us like a new model of lawnmower, hiring some cheesecake spokesmodel they call Lotta Space (who's actually an analytic biochemist with the newly-established Office of Homeland Security) and plastering exploitative posters on every blank wall in the "Spot". Underhanded and dishonest? Yeah...but I gotta' hand it to those Callistans, it brought the pikers in by the hundreds.
Money works. Just ask Michael Bloomberg (I mean, Mayor Bloomberg).
Our first couple of sets were relatively
on, considering the crushing gravity of Jupiter (and the sickening methane
atmosphere). Matt made a cheap tape which I hope to share with our friends back
on the 
good old
"oit". You can't hear Tiny playing his Lowery organ on most of the
cuts because he was still in his bath and didn't actually set foot onstage until
the final encore. Tiny is obsessive-compulsive about bathing -- something about
his childhood, I believe.
His official biopic (produced in 1972 by Quinn Martin) tells how as a boy he spent whole days in the bathtub. He and his dog Sparky would play catch until Tiny's toes turned pruny. He even wrote his first organ concerto in the tub, which explains why you can hear the sound of bubbles popping in the background of the original RCA-Victor recording. It's a sickness he's labored under for a good few years. (And one we'll have to endure for the next six weeks.....arrrgh.)
We'll keep you posted, friends. Have no fear.
Terror Firma. This was a good time to leave Earth, as it happens, because things are getting a little wiggly down there, as I'm sure you've noticed. The amazing journalism-free war is morphing into an unbridled techno-bombfest as the US Military wheels out ever bigger and mo' better weapons from their pricey arsenal (the "daisy-cutter" 15-k bomb being the latest introduction). What started as a campaign against terrorist encampments has become an all-out war to depose the murderous Taliban and replace them with the rapists that preceded them. Dissent at home is being equated with treason, quite predictably, and the Dubya administration is parlaying its favorable polling numbers into a whole range of regressive and reactionary new policies on criminal justice (or lack of same), corporate taxes (or lack of same), freedom of information (or lack of same), and so on.
Most
disturbing, perhaps, is the increasingly frequent invocation of torture as a
legitimate means of extracting information from uncooperative people of color.
Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org)
has posted some articles on this remarkable display of bestiality amongst the
privileged classes. Now it is not uncommon to run across a reference in your
local newspaper to some talking head from the Lexington institute or some other
think tank blandly discussing the option of shipping suspects off to third
countries where the use of coercive methods (torture, threatening family
members, etc.) may be applied without compunction.
Not that we haven't participated in this kind of activity plenty of times before, but talking so frankly about it is something wonderful and new. It's as if they say it a few times to see if there's a reaction, and if there isn't, they bring it up more and more. I guess Americans are becoming totally immune to irony. I mean, threatening suspects' family members...if that isn't terrorism, what is?
Bloomberg's Cash. Well, Green didn't win the race for NYC Mayor, but neither did Bloomberg, really. It was his cash that won -- 50 million bucks worth. So Bloomy's millions should be Mayor, right? Why not? Just put a nice, big stack of it on wheels and cart it around to all those ceremonial functions that have given Rudy such joy for the last eight years. Eliminate the middleman in NYC politics.
Gotta go. Beware of absolutes...they mean trouble.
luv,
jp
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11/18/2001
Avast, ye Earthbound swabs...
Just ten days out of Terra and we're already adopting hyper-masculine sci-fi names like Vance and Steel and...Mitch Macaphee. (I guess he had one already.) There's something about deep space that inspires a sort of hollow chocolate soldier heroism more suited to mono-syllabic grunt-like handles.
It's a pity Dubya's too busy to join us -- we could have called him "Butch."
Here's some good news: Trevor James
Constable is finally on board. He reversed polarity on his patented orgone
generating device so that it would act as a homing signal, and we went right to
him like...like...well, like a rent-a-wreck spaceship to a reverse-polarity
orgone generation homing 
device.
Only trouble was, the thing attracted a bunch of other stuff, too. There were
the usual invisible flying predators, of course. Then there were these strange
metallic entities that appeared on our mess deck, right in the middle of sFshzenKlyrn's
chef salad -- a mother and son, I believe, whom we later dubbed "the
Steels."
The Steels and their little dog Alloy have agreed to do our weather forecasts for the rest of the journey. They've even lined up their own sponsor. Clever devils.
With Trevor James on board, now it really feels like old times. We were in truly high spirits as we approached our Saturn engagement (moved forward two weeks for security reasons). Matt popped the cork on a bottle of Dortmunder Union from the early 1980's. He jubilantly shook the contents out, then John carved off a generous slab for each of us. Down the hatch!
What
a shame this tour is being managed by a bunch of rogues and pirates! I'll tell
you what -- those fuckers at Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., get
us booked into the strangest venues. I mean, the Red Spot was okay, but when we
arrived on Saturn we were directed towards this bottle club that was converted
from an abandoned spacecraft stunt-double. Worse, the thing was made of
polystyrene and stood only 16 inches tall...so we had to undergo gravimetric size reduction therapy (courtesy of Trevor James) in order to fulfill our
contract obligation. Tiny Montgomery complained bitterly about the shrinking of
his organ (the Lowery, okay?), and as the final indignity, the guy taking the
money at the door was dressed in a ludicrous Renegade Robot from Mars outfit.
What a pain in the butt!
Well, that was Saturn. A few drugged up mutants and one disgruntled door-bot who demanded 10% of our take while pointing his clawlike electrodes in our general direction. sFshzenKlyrn obligingly bought the bastard off with a pokeful of Zenite snuff.
You
can see why our official tour promotion poster photo (taken on Callisto the
following day) has us looking so down in the mouth. But believe me, folks, we
rebounded fairly quickly after this brief debacle. To hell with Saturn....It's
Uranus or bust!
Hail Victory! At this writing, the Afghan campaign appears to be turning into a rout, and the bizarre assortment of major network talking heads generally appear surprised, if pleasantly so. Surprise? The world's most powerful military (the only global-class force, in fact), aided by the second and third most powerful militaries, sends a medieval, poorly-armed obscurantist militia packing into the mountains...and someone is surprised?
Perhaps the surprise has come at the
discovery of yet another Afghan War strategy on the part of the Bush
Administration. Strategy one appeared to be: force the Taliban to give up bin
Laden with "precision" bombing in the 
cities,
combined with food drops for the survivors. Strategy two looked like: okay,
force a change of regime in Afghanistan, bomb
the hell out of the front lines, but don't...repeat...don't let the
Northern Alliance take Kabul! Now Strategy Three appears to be: okay, let the NA
settle their usual scores in Kabul and get back to hunting down bin Laden...maybe nobody really cares who runs
Afghanistan after all.
All of this bears more than a passing resemblance to the Administration's anti-anthrax campaign -- chaos. Lurching from posture to posture, covering for their purely opportunistic approach to the application of deadly force. Naturally enough, there's unbridled support for every zig and zag amongst the mullahs of the corporate media...mainly because this war is good business. Perhaps Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, Bob Novak, and others will now adopt more heroic, grunt-like names as well, since they appear to be moving far deeper into the void than we ever dreamed of going in search of an audience.
Take care out there. And lift those ration boxes carefully -- they could be cluster bombs.
luv u,
jp
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11/25/2001
Warning! Danger!
Well, our rent-a-wreck space ship really lived up to its name, earning its place in the annals of interplanetary travel by becoming the first modified deep space probe to lose both engine power and navigational control on the same run. Piece of shit! I should never have trusted that cologne-dunked shyster who proffered such favorable lease terms on such a ramshackle transport. (The hastily painted-over quarter panel should have tipped me off.)
I
partly blame an over-zealous engine room crew for what happened on our approach
to Uranus. Unfamiliar with the sluggishness of our rent-a-ship's controls, those
young Turks were a little too free with the course adjustments, lurching her in
directions she just plain didn't want to go in. After one particularly abrupt
maneuver, all the indicators went dark and we knew we were in it...but good.
John volunteered for the space buoy and spent a solid six hours working on the
retro stack, to no avail. (Even Matt's idea about spraying them with WD-40
didn't work.) Done for!
It's times like these when you fully
appreciate the value of having such a diverse (if drunken) entourage of
hangers-on around you. I'm referring to the rich scientific contingent we have on
board, including Dr. Hump, who had 
only
just arrived the day before disaster struck. Serendipity. The good doctor's
brain started bubbling like a pot of Ramen noodles, and before any of us knew
it, he had the solution laid out before us like it had been there all along.
Sheer genius.
When after 48 hours it became clear that AAA wasn't going to show up, we decided to give Trevor James a crack at saving us.
With characteristic aplomb, Trevor James
reversed polarity on his patented orgone generating device, which then dragged
the lifeless hulk of our rent-a-craft back along its own radioactive contrail to
that miniscule converted spaceship on Saturn where we performed last week. Once sFshzenKlyrn
had chased the owners away with some radioactive cobalt 
from
his lunchbox, Trevor James, Mitch Macaphee, and our own Johnny White went to
work on the tiny vessel, first bringing it up to scale with a hefty barrage of
M-rays, then fitting it out with some fresh ion-drive engines that Dr. Hump
ordered from Martha Stewart Living.
Within a few hours we were on our way to our delayed engagements on Uranus once again, flying the cush split-level space-RV we borrowed from those folks on Saturn. See -- I told you how valuable these hangers-on can be! If only I could get The Steels to work a little harder on their weather reports. (That poor kid can't even spell, let alone read a weather map. Home schooling...what can I tell you?)
Anyway...the least I can do is give you an updated itinerary, since the whole bloody tour's been pushed back. Here it is:
BIG GREEN
Tour 2001
November 27 Uranus
November 29 Neptune
December 1-3 Titan
December 6 Pluto
December 8-11 Kaztropharius 137b
December 14 Zenon
December 20 Jupiter
Catch us where you can. Only if you follow us to Zenon, be sure to bring your Hazmat suit.
United We Suck. Though it somehow didn't make my hometown newspaper the other day, US planes killed about 150 unarmed Afghan civilians in the town of Khanabad near the Taliban redoubt of Kunduz -- this according to the London Independent's Justin Huggler. Carpet bombing has become so commonplace in the heroic Afghan campaign, this was considered enormously un-newsworthy, no doubt, by the editorial staffs of many a local newspaper.
What
is more newsworthy than streets littered with dead kids? Plenty, these days.
Just today a front page story in that same hometown newspaper featured a yuppie
mom with her daughter at the local mall, both loaded down with colorful consumer
items. The photo headline was a quote from mom: "Call me a patriot. I'm
here to buy."
Talk about easy virtue! In Dubya's America, you may be considered a "patriot" by simply wearing a flag, not asking a lot of questions, and spending like a sailor -- in other words, nothing out of the ordinary for a great many people. Meanwhile, Dubya's setting up the administrative framework for extra-constitutional military tribunals to try, judge, and convict unsavory foreigners -- a handy thing when evidence of wrongdoing is in short supply.
So look how far we've come. Carpet bombing of an impoverished and defenseless people. Summary justice meted out by military tribunals. Indefinite detention of "suspects" with little or no evidence. Military personnel doing police work. Sounds like a coup d'etat to me. But don't let it bother you, folks. Just keep shopping!
Be cool. And don't...don't fly over the Vincennes!
luv u,
jp