NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(April '02)

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4/7/02

Greetings,

Woke up to the sound of some kind of Mongoose dispute this morning. Seems it snowed last night (just a dusting) and the little guys were arguing over where to hide their breadfruit to keep it from being ruined by the frost. They appear to have settled on an abandoned air conditioning housing directly above my "bedroom" here in the Cheney Hammer Mill, though some residual disgruntlement is evident in their voices as they stack the fruit ten-high. Christ! When will I get a decent morning's sleep?

We're always just one step short of being displaced once again by our friends the Mongooses (or Mongeese), who occupied our previous home during Big Green's brief stint with Dubya's Select Commission on Extraterrestrial Phenomena (check my back pages for more on that). It's not that they're pushy, particularly -- in fact, I'm rather fond of the little critters. There are simply so many of them, they could fill a dozen Cheney Hammer Mills and still have a line at the door snaking back into the parking lot. As Pat Buchanan helpfully points out in his latest racist screed, it's a question of numbers...and we in Big Green are simply not breeding fast enough. We're in danger of (dare I say it?) ....becoming a minority!

When I say "we," I of course mean we the human contingent of Big Green. sFshzenKlyrn, our guitarist from Zenon, now there's another story entirely! Since Zenites multiply via a kind of "budding" process similar to that of Earth's hydra, you might say that our erstwhile cooking show celebrity is kind of a randy little fucker. Like most luminescent deep space phenomena, this unstable collection of charged gases is always "on the job," spinning off little globules of himself every few hours or so, spreading his demon spawn across the better part of this galaxy. I don't think I'm betraying any confidence when I tell you that with a snootful of Zenite snuff, old sFshzenKlyrn's "love buds" become as numberless as the stars in the heavens...and that's no exaggeration. So Pat, my man, if you are big enough to consider sFshzenKlyrn an honorary member of the white male race of America incorporated, we've got nothing to worry about!

Sadly, Matt, John and I moving a bit beyond optimum child-bearing age. That old biological clock has been ticking in vain for more than a decade and a half, now. And well, what can I say except that...I have to watch my figure. 'Nuff said. 

Speaking of weight gain, our Spring Equinox fasting ritual and subsequent potlatch was a smashing success. People from every corner of the island made the trek for the second part, at least. (The tomato puree-only fasting part was not nearly as popular). Like most public functions these days, our feast/party ended up resembling some kind of colonial harvest festival dance, or a spring cotillion at some hyper-patriotic military boarding school. A bunch of people brought flags and streamers. One visitor set up a little table where he sold Wallace bumper stickers and Ayatollah Khomeini dart boards (I think he's been working his way from cotillion to cotillion for the better part of the last thirty years). I had to hire a few of the Mongooses on the roof to help Marvin (Robotron) clear the guests out around 3 AM. 

I think maybe Marvin was a little put out by my request that he participate in crowd control. He's been going through kind of a difficult phase during the week since his construction by Mitch Macaphee. Growing pains. He's starting to show interest in other cyborgs his age -- it's only natural. The other day he brought home this big bruiser of an android whose bloody great head knocked out square holes at the top of every doorway in the Mill. I tried to conceal my distress at the magnitude of this cohort of Marvin's, but I could see that Marvin had surmised my attitude and filed it away in his dry cells. I'm certain I'll hear him announce his intention to bring mecha-godzilla along to our record release party, now that he knows I disapprove of their relationship. You know how kids are. (Don't you?)

The Blitz. One wonders what prompted the reaction. Was it the fact that the Israelis shot and killed an American citizen out driving with her infant son? Probably not, since that has yet to be reported by anyone other than Democracy Now (our flag-waving hyper-patriotic press, so outraged over the death of Americans on 9/11, appears to have given Sharon the usual free pass). Was it frantic entreaties from our allies, including the co-signatories of the Security Council resolution directing Israel to withdraw (virtually ignored by the U.S. press, in spite of its near uniqueness)?

Whatever the cause, the worm turned in Washington on Thursday or so -- that's when my local Gannett newspaper saw fit to run photos of Israeli troops attacking unarmed demonstrators (including the brave folks of Ta'ayush). Not that the shift was dramatic in any way. Dubya spent most of his statement blaming the Palestinians for the pogrom being perpetrated on them, and essentially announcing that it would be allowed to continue for another week. Like Sharon, his speech was peppered with the word "terror," though never in reference to the IDF killings in Ramallah and elsewhere, the house invasions, the attacks on journalists and dissidents, the heinous obstruction of emergency services, the destruction of civilian infrastructure (including water and electrical facilities), or any of the other outrages committed on the West Bank this past week. All supported by U.S. tax dollars -- my money at work. 

Never slow on the uptake, Sharon has stepped up his campaign in the wake of Bush's announcement, cordoning off Nablus and attacking refugee camps with helicopter gunships. (For more on this charming neo-nazi, from his terror raid on Qibya forward, see: http://www.humanityonhold.com/sharon/massacres.html )

This is nothing new, of course. Uncritical support for Israel has consistently run through the last seven U.S. administrations, Republican and Democrat. Seldom, however, has malevolent chauvinism been combined with such utter stupidity as with the Dubya gang. I mean, I've come to the astounding conclusion that these people are just a bunch of fucking johnny-one-note blockheads with no concern for anything other than their own political success and the enrichment of their corporate allies. Indeed, that seems to be their sole strategy, making only tactical moves toward anything that might be considered diplomatic internationalism, then pulling a 180 when the circumstances suit them. Their Russia policy is emblematic -- Clintonian neglect until 9/11, then a broad new alliance to secure crucial cooperation for the attack on Afghanistan. Once that is settled (more or less), it's back to breaking the ABM treaty, identifying Russia as a potential nuclear target, and establishing forward bases around their perimeter (a particular favorite of the Russian military). 

Their particular love for Sharon is understandable, since he, too, is a mega-blockhead who has made such a hash of the Palestine land grab that one wonders if Israel can actually sustain the occupation after all. Because Sharon adopted the same moronic "terrorism" rhetoric that Bush uses, Bush feels compelled to let Sharon be Sharon, bringing the region to the brink of general war before making the inevitable tactical lurch to restrain the IDF rampages, however tentatively. For all their flag waving and parade-ground antics, the Dubya team have done more to endanger Americans than even their ham-fisted predecessors could manage. 

And it's only year two. 

luv u,

jp

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4/14/02

Huzzah,

Well, the long-anticipated interstellar release of our live EP -- Big Green LIVE From Neptune! -- has been delayed due to technical problems in the manufacturing process. Such are the dubious fortunes of working with a mega-conglomerate like Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc.  Let's face it, folks...art and money don't mix (even if it's bad art and blood money).

What's gone wrong? It's a little complicated. Someone in Hegemonic's PR firm explained it to me, actually. You see, we delivered the master to them last Monday using the proscribed method -- oxcart to ore car, then onto a steamer headed for Jakarta. Once it was enmeshed in Hegemonic's "value chain", however, the project became a victim to certain "industry best practices" and the always deadly "total quality control."

To maximize efficiency and control operational costs, Hegemonic devised an odious "just in time" delivery system for our project that involved its being manufactured at an unused tire factory in Sulu (the island, not the Starfleet Commander). While this soaked up some of the label's excess industrial capacity, it was worse than useless where our EP was concerned, since tire manufacturing involves a whole n'other set of tools than CD pressing. I brought this up to the James Baker protégé who was handling our "account" and she said simply that...well...she didn't know how it could work, but she knew it was a good thing. And though I found her explanation convincing, it hardly settled the concerns of my colleagues, who have been eyeing the Zenon release date with particular anticipation. This was going to be our big luminescent splash in the cosmos, and that lousy label of ours blew it. So what else is new? 

As jaded as my colleagues can be at times, it is shocking to discover how thin-skinned they are on certain subjects. The Hegemonic tire plant fiasco really seemed to put everybody's nose out of joint. Matt dropped everything and went on a 12-day UFO watch with Trevor James Constable. John has been holed up in the third floor of the Cheney Hammer Mill building abstract sculpture out of discarded hammer handles and drumming on up-ended garbage cans. As far as sFshzenKlyrn is goes, he really took the heat, since Zenon is his home planet and he'd been stoking up all of his friends and family for the imminent release of our EP. The fact is, I don't know where our Zenite friend was going when he stormed out of here. He's been missing for five or six days and, frankly, I'm worried...so I've got the hounds out looking for him. So far no luck, but we're hopeful. 

At first, I thought sFshzenKlyrn might have gone with Matt and Trevor James, but UFO watching is like counting cars to an old nebularian like him. It's more likely that he buggered off to Bahrain for the semi-annual cassava-fest. Or perhaps he evaporated into a cloud of neon mercury-tinged ozone particles (no, wait...that's what he is normally). Though chemical change is not beyond the realm of possibility for our gaseous friend; recall what happened to him in the fallout shelter a year ago...you know, when he had too many....flap.....jacks.....(whoa...sorry!) Anyway. sFshzenKlyrn after flapjacks. Like a rock. And big as a house. But then, if he's so big, why can't we find him?

Anyway, I'll keep you posted on the release date of our EP, which will be simultaneously be made available as an MP3 file on www.Soundclick.com , Amazon.com, and elsewhere. And I'll let you know if Mr. Zenon emerges in one of the more visible states of matter. 

The Scofflaw Army. The Israeli onslaught grinds on into yet another week, and it's clear to the rest of the world that the U.S. is behind this sickening slaughter, even if our leadership "tut-tut's" in public and issues watery calls for restraint and even withdrawal. What doesn't make it to the local newspapers in America is the sale of next-generation U.S. attack helicopters to Israel, now in the works. And though I say "sale," I really mean "gift," since our military aid to that country much more than covers the cost of the hardware. It's worth mentioning that these weapon systems are transferred with the restriction, codified in U.S. law, that they not be used against civilians. But we won't let a little thing like the law get in the way of somebody's good time. 

The moral cowardice and cynicism of our leaders is perhaps most elegantly demonstrated by Colin Powell's lazy, circuitous journey to Israel/Palestine, during which time Morocco's leader had opportunity to ask Powell why he was in Morocco and not in Jerusalem. This "emergency" diplomatic mission was a real coup in the Arab world, I'm sure, since it was so blatantly obvious that Dubya was giving Sharon another week to bomb refugee camps, shoot civilians under curfew, and generally breach every restriction of international human rights law, particularly with respect to interrupting and even attacking emergency medical services. 

So, can my fellow Americans still scratch their heads and wonder why so many Middle Easterners despise us when we turn a blind eye to an Israeli military so wildly out of control? Can they still feel indignant at anti-US demonstrations when the IDF is not only killing, looting, and bulldozing their way through whole West Bank communities, but also destroying property records, legislative archives, and other legal obstacles to Israel's total possession of what they ludicrously term "Judea and Samaria?"

Another bomb went off in Jerusalem a couple of days ago. Who can be surprised? After the events of the last two weeks, the average New Yorker should be gritting their teeth pretty hard right now, as well. (I know I am.)

(For more on the ongoing events, check out www.electronicintifada.net and look at the "Live From Palestine" entries.)

Presto Change-o. President Chavez is out in Venezuela, compelled to resign by an insistent military, and replaced by a businessman very cozy with the Washington-oriented interests with which Chavez was so very unpopular. Is this the hand of Otto Reich at work? Hmmm...

Chavez was no radical. He just wasn't cooperating with the U.S. agenda on the "War on Terror," OPEC production quotas (Venezuela currently heads OPEC), and general globalization issues. Word has it that Venezuelan business elites and trade union bosses, very pro-western types, were conducting a classic destabilization number to which Chavez was vulnerable because of his failure to address poverty issues and build real loyalty amongst rank & file Venezuelans. The recent demonstrations at which several were shot by the armed forces were, in fact, confrontations between military elements loyal to Chavez and armed police loyal to the opposition business leaders. Chavez dropped out when he knew the military had abandoned him. 

Did Dubya and Bill Casey protégé Otto Reich have a hand in this coup? Don't know. But something sure smells fishy...and it ain't the deli downstairs. 

luv u,

jp

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4/21/02

Still here, baby...

With our live EP still lost somewhere in the labyrinthine recesses of Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc.'s global manufacturing empire, I turned my sights toward finishing the construction of our new lean-to, itself a project of monstrous proportions. I can no longer get Hegemonic to agree on a timetable for our EP release (one that is expressed in days and weeks, rather than months and years), so rather than beat my head against their compound wall, I made my way over to the construction site to kibitz with the hardhats. 

When I got there, those hardhats were easy enough to find. They were all hanging up on hooks inside the construction trailer. Not much I could tell them without their human hosts to animate them and give them reason. It appeared as though I had come at a time coincident with some sort of job action. And though I generally am all in favor of that sort of thing, in this case it was stopping progress on our lean-to...I mean, workers rights are all well and good in the abstract, but when they involve some measure of inconvenience to me personally, well....that's outrageous!

Hah! Turned out it wasn't true after all. Imagine my embarrassment, having cursed those construction workers loudly enough for the mongooses to hear. My militant neighbor Gung-Ho was over in the next field trying out some newly-procured anti-tank devices when he overheard my outburst. He obligingly informed me that the construction crew had all gone out to the local discount building supply outlet to pick up some of the fixtures we had ordered for the new lean-to. I guess I had just flown off the handle a bit, having been left alone to manage things...what, with Matt and Trevor James still on their UFO watch (they've been sending back some interesting pictures, incidentally) and John having left his top-floor redoubt for some international flapjack festival in Bonn, where he and Mitch Macaphee hope to find traces of the still-missing sFshzenKlyrn. I mean, I'm left here to mind the store, so I get a little jumpy, okay? It's just a good thing we've got neighbors like Gung-Ho. (Though he's eyeing those UFO snaps pretty suspiciously...)

Back at the Cheney Hammer Mill, my automatonic personal assistant Marvin was leafing through catalogs trying to find a chandelier for our new dining room. I asked him to look up the bathroom fixtures we had ordered -- the ones being retrieved by the hardhats. Marvin promptly rolled into the kitchen and returned with a bowl of steamed fiddleheads. (There are still a few bugs in his programming that Mitch hasn't had the time to iron out.) As distinctly as I was able, I said "Marvin, I do not want steamed fiddleheads. I want the photo of our new toilet, please." He flashed and whirred and clanked for a moment, then went back to what he was doing before I came in. Some time later, I saw him clicking through the website for the band Captured by Robots with great interest. 

I guess this fascination with so nihilistic a group is a predictable response to his sense of powerlessness and class subordination, and should be viewed as healthy, or at least normal. Still, with the others away, I now find myself looking around corners and leaving way too many lights on. Because, I mean, when you've been captured by robots once already, you can never quite get back to living a normal life again. I'm sure you know what I mean. 

So here I am, cloistered in the Cheney Hammer Mill belfry with my books and my guitar and my crank-phone, waiting for the others to return. And they will return, I'm certain of it. Unless of course....they've been.....captured....by......ROBOTS (gulp)!

Cold War Redux Dept. Can you believe this Venezuela thing? I mean, did I doze off and wake up back in the eighties sometime? What the fuck! Here Chavez opts to go along with the nice machinegun-toting coup leaders to keep them from shooting up the place, and the next thing you know, almost every major newspaper in the developed world is reporting that the man had resigned the presidency. A reporter for the Guardian debunked that with about two phone calls to ministries in the Venezuelan government. Apparently the big lie got picked up pretty fast, with very little in the way of fact-checking at the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and so on. 

The leader of the US-oriented business consortium massively overplayed his hand during his one day as Venezuela's new absolute leader, cobbing together the ultimate in political "one-stop shopping" for US-based multinationals and an American military obsessed with Plan Colombia and its phony "war on terror." When thousands upon thousands of Venezuelans demanded Chavez's return, he was back, accompanied by Ari Fleischer's bizarre hopes that Chavez had learned something about democracy from all of this. 

Now, the Bush administration had initially admitted to meeting with the coup leaders well before the coup (they later backed off of this). They claimed to have told the anti-Chavez Venezuelans that the US would not support a coup, though in fact, that is precisely what they did the moment it took place. (It is testament to the sorry state of journalism in America that a public official can so blatantly offer contradictory statements without challenge -- that they can feel confident the press will swallow such hogwash!) But this is like one of those old-fashioned cold war destabilization campaigns, only conducted by the "gang that couldn't shoot straight," thank god. The Bush boys wanted Chavez out, and they thought they could leverage their inflated popularity to pull it off, Bill Casey style. 

Good old Reagan-style foreign policy, conducted by good old unreconstructed Reagan-era cutthroats like Elliot Abrams, Otto Reich, and John Negroponte. Who says you can't go home again? We're there!

Jenin Carnage. If you want to read about the bloody mess Israel left behind in the squalid Jenin refugee camp on the West Bank, look up Phil Reeve's articles on the London Independent's web site (under the Middle East section) and read back over the last few days' entries on the "Live From Palestine" project at the Electronic Intifada. I'm simply appalled at the fact that this has been done with our support, and I encourage you all to complain loudly to your government representatives. Repeatedly. 

luv u,

jp

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4/27/02

Om...

Who's that? Don't come any closer, or I'll set the sofa on fire! 

Oh...it's you. My apologies. I've been confined to this storage room in a strategic corner of the Cheney Hammer Mill (my "undisclosed location", as it were) for the better part of a week in anticipation of a kidnapping attempt by associates of my robotian personal assistant Marvin. After days of being cramped behind a few mean sticks of furniture -- just me, my guitar, and some cheap explosives -- you get a little jumpy, y'know? Nothing to be concerned about. At least...I don't think it is... 

As I mentioned last week, Marvin was showing an unhealthy interest in the activities of the band Captured by Robots, which naturally led me to believe that some kind of mechanized mayhem was imminent -- namely the kind we experienced at the aluminum alloy hands of those desperate androids that took us hostage some weeks back. So far no one has made a move. But I'm standing ready with the Zippo lighter I borrowed from Gung Ho, which I will set to the threadbare fabric of this abandoned sofa I've been sleeping on, should there be any sign of trouble. C'mon, robots -- ahm ready! 

Hel-lo?

Quiet up here. Maybe the entire gang of mechanical brigands is busy with my fellow Big Greenians. Lord knows they've been missing long enough. I did hear from John and Mitch Macaphee, and they have seen no trace of sFshzenKlyrn at that flapjack festival in Bonn...though they did spot some marvelous specimens and, I believe, may have consumed a few stacks, judging by their jovial demeanor. 

Of course, that's only conjecture. By the sound of it, this event they're attending is not so much a festival as it is a scientific seminar on the phenomenon of the flapjack. Interesting. It seems that all modern-day terrestrial flapjacks are descended from a relatively small number of deep space proto-jacks, which may have grown in number to the size of a viable breeding population around the time of Christ and the fishes. From that time forward, they moved though space like a plague, overcoming sapient life forms and commandeering their vessels, hopping from system to system on warp-driven pogo sticks. So in a relatively short span of time -- a mere 2000 years -- they have spread through much of the galaxy, leaving their spawn to intoxify and enslave generations of unwitting victims, including yours truly. 

As a recovering jackaholic, the very mention of them produces anxiety. Unfortunately, I mistook my jack-jones as a sign that Marvin and the nasty-bots were approaching. Just to be on the safe side, I flipped open the Zippo and got the sofa burning real good. That thing was not exactly flame-retardant....I can't believe I was sleeping on it for the past week, nervously smoking Gitanes and butting them out on the arm. At one point, the flames licked the ceiling and I had to open a window -- this brought the local fire brigade, which backed the No. 7 Hook and Ladder up to the mill and directed a powerful fire hose at me and the sofa. 

Actually, the charred remains of the sofa offer some interest from an artistic point of view. Maybe Big Green should break into the world of fine art, since our nefarious label is still sitting on our live CD project. Hell, I can't press discs, but I can burn sofas to a crisp every day of the week and twice on Sunday. Just ask me. 

Peacemakers. One hardly need comment on Dubya's idiocy, calling Sharon a "man of peace" (a man both loved and hated because he is, beyond argument, an agent of war and death). More worthy of our attention, perhaps, is the slimy way Dubya's professional assistants (i.e. the people who run the country) regurgitate the Israeli government's PR bilge and repackage it as premium pâté. Their shameful spin on the destruction of Jenin refugee camp is that it was (a.) not a massacre, and that (b.) the IDF did everything possible to minimize (regrettable) civilian casualties, of which they claim there were very few. 

If these claims weren't rendered ludicrous merely by the context of Israel's attack and ongoing military occupation, one might need to resort to the ample evidence of atrocities -- e.g.  half the homes in the camp destroyed; half the dead found thus far clearly civilians; nurses, children, and disabled people shot and run under IDF vehicles; etc. (for details, see Phil Reeves, Justin Huggler, and of course Robert Fisk's articles in the London Independent). There's no need to bother, of course. Still, ludicrous as they are, Israeli PR claims receive plenty of column space in the U.S. press...and plenty of support from the U.S. government. 

Take Powell (please!). Tel Aviv's line on Arafat is that the onus is on him to stop the "violence," since -- according to them -- he is behind all of the suicide bombings. Until Arafat complies, they will hold him hostage in his powerless, waterless Ramallah compound. In short, classic blackmail. The great statesman Powell, after letting Israel have their way in West Bank cities without any serious protest, now opines that Arafat "has to make a strategic choice now...to move away from a path of violence or terrorism onto a new path." Translation: Surrender, Dorothy! Agree to every demand of the invading/occupying power, and we'll let you continue to play "Chairman." 

Having taken the side of the aggressor, once again, we can join the chorus of Israeli-led opprobrium when the inevitable attacks occur against the most obvious targets -- like yesterday's shootings at the Israeli settlement at Hebron. I have to think this is just what Sharon wants, because now he can say it's Arafat's fault, and hence, all Palestinians must now pay yet again. 

Sharon's attack was, of course, planned out well in advance of the bombings said to be its instigation. The target was every aspect of Palestinian civil society, right down to the level of grade school classrooms. As Edward Gargen reported this week in an excellent article for Newsday:

After a three-week military campaign designed to fight terrorism, according to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Israel has essentially destroyed the ability of Palestinians to run their own affairs. Across the West Bank, not only have schools been wrecked, but so have banks, postal services, hospitals, transportation, law enforcement and basic commerce. [for full text, click here]

One wonders how Powell might explain to 15-year old Sabrine Wadir why the U.S. is paying to have her 8th grade classroom wrecked, her classmates' pictures destroyed, their musical instruments stolen, and obscenities scrawled on the chalkboard. This I'd like to hear.

luv u,

jp

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