august

NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(August '00)

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8/6/2000

Yeah, I'm still here.

How are things on the subcontinent? Good question. We've often wondered that ourselves, sitting here in our recently-reconstituted wattle and daub abode. You might say that we of Big Green have found our own little subcontinent within a subcontinent. It's actually more of a subterranean continent, as Matt has taken it upon himself to dig us a basement.

Back before the collapse of our home last month, we would rehearse, record, and swear at one another in our beloved earthen-walled basement. Then the roof fell in. By the time we had returned from town with help, the foundation was full of custard -- runoff from the surrounding hills. (There are tapioca mines up there.) Damn if I didn't spend the better part of the next two weeks with a spatula, scraping that gunk out of our tape machines. And our microphones. And our....well, you get the idea.

Now, in my eternal naiveté, I would never have suspected that this whole thing was some sort of Communist plot. But luckily our friend Colonel Gung Ho (see July 23-30 installments) was here to set me straight. It seems the Communists have been using custard for decades, since Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky discovered its deadly properties back in the 1920's. Since that time, custard has proven an effective antipersonnel device in the big "C's" titanic struggle against the forces of goodness and niceness. Gung Ho told us of the many comrades (so to speak) he had lost to custard over the years of struggle. Not all killed, you understand. Some just driven mad, hopelessly mad. It's not pretty.

In any case, I've asked Matt to take some reasonable precautions as he digs us a new studio. The Colonel has given us some useful tips on custard-proofing (a few of which he observed while infiltrating the V-C's infamous underground tunnels). I don't exactly know where Matt's going to find enough dried apricots to follow his exact specifications, but he's a pretty resourceful guy. We'll all just wait and hope.

Well, it took some fast talking on John's part, but we got Gung-Ho to agree to take off his ranger hat for a head and shoulders photo. He also agreed to drop the flame thrower for a few minutes, while John threw focus. We couldn't get him to put the gun down, though...not unless we agreed to pry it out of his cold, dead hands. It's funny...without his hat on, he looks like someone else entirely. I mean, he loses that hard, military edge and takes on an aura of, well, softness...and sensitivity. Just look at that smile. Now I know what the uniform is all about. Hey -- if the enemy saw these doe eyes coming at 'em, they wouldn't stay "the enemy" very long.

City Of Brotherly Love. Tuned in to random bits of the Republican National Convention in Philly last week. Never saw so many African Americans, Latinos, Women, Sri Lankans...on stage, at least. Out in the convention hall was the usual collection of overfed white property-owners striving in vain to clap in time with Kool & The Gang's "Celebration." All was love and light and inclusion -- children of color learning to play the trombone, children of color gathering around to hear words of wisdom from dubya, teachers of color saying how dubya was good for children of color....I could go on. Then of course, five minutes down the campaign trail, dubya's giving the Nazi salute at brownshirt rallies from coast to coast (see photo).

I guess one should expect such erratic behavior in someone with such a checkered past. Hell, dubya's only recently sobered up from his interplanetary sojourn with Big Green (see our interplanetary tour diary for details). He'll straighten up by November, you wait and see. Now that he's got his chaperone from petroleum country, you'll hardly notice the stale aroma of exotic herbs when dubya mouths the words "partial birth abortion" and "national missile defense."

Keep the home fires burning. I've got to check the custard.

luv,

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8/13/2000

Gooday,

Taking a little break from the ongoing toil here at the newly-reconstituted Big Green lean-to. Things are moving along swimmingly, as they say. Matt and I even managed a recording session this past week. We converted our neighbor's tree-house into a makeshift studio Wednesday evening and continued work on the new song demo.

How does it sound? Like something recorded in a tree house. I have this special device that filters out the sound of the macaws. You can still hear the orangutans and the tarantulas, however. It's not too distracting, at least not on my songs (which are mostly about orangutans and tarantulas anyway).

People have often asked how it is that we are blessed with such magnanimous neighbors. I can't say that I have an adequate explanation. Just lucky, I guess. Our friend with the tree-house -- a nice Venezuelan gentleman -- graciously gave us the run of the place while he took a ride through the streets of Colombo with an old school friend of his (see photo). I think they may have taken a wrong turn somewhere, actually. Here it is Sunday, and he hasn't returned yet. Still....what a generous guy!

Gung-Ho, the Marine Colonel from 1962, has inquired after our Venezuelan friend several times now. He's been very tight-lipped about why. Something about "warehouses full of relief supplies." Gung-Ho has a tendency to mutter to himself -- it can get on your nerves after a while, let me tell you. In fact, if it weren't for the scorched-earth ground-breaking ceremony he treated us to a few weeks back (see July 23-30 installments), I'd tell him to board his Huey and chop himself right off this island.

Times like these make us long for the road again. It's been a difficult season, to be sure. First the collapse. Then the custard. Then the falling out Khrushchev and Malenkov had over creative differences (i.e. how to apply the custard), which took everyone a little bit by surprise...including Malenkov, if this photo is any indication. Even Burl Ives (right) traded his trademark plaid vest for a dark suit back on that troubled day in 1954. Who could countenance such hardship in so stoic a manner? Who, I ask you, who?

Well, anyway...we miss the trials of interplanetary travel more than any of us would have suspected a few months ago. If you do too, visit Big Green's interplanetary tour diary for a little dose of the good times...before the awful things.

Golden Hovercraft. Looks like Dick Cheney's getting a sweet retirement deal from Halliburton, where he's been making $1.3 million a year as CEO. $20 million retirement package for the man who, as Bush Sr.'s Defense Secretary, drummed up lucrative contracts for the firm. Halliburton cleaned up Kuwaiti oil fields after Cheney's Gulf War. (Or was that the Exxon-Mobil War?) After joining the company in 1995, according to Counterpunch, Cheney cut more than 9,000 workers from the company payroll. The question is, is $20 million really enough? Shouldn't Halliburton offer Cheney a sum more in keeping with the wonderful work he's done on their behalf, to say nothing of the high office he now seeks? Besides, with Bush Junior at the top of the ticket, it's a little embarrassing to pull down less than nine figures for cleaning out your desk.

Dueling Reformists. Anyone see the Buchanan Reform party get-together? Interesting roll call procession. Between the strains of racist anti-immigration xenophobia and anti-abortion fanaticism, you can hear fragments of the truth about the assault on working people, the war against Yugoslavia, etc. All the important issues are left to be interpreted by scoundrels like Buchanan, one of the principal apologists for the Reaganomic fragmentation of labor and the unbridled use of American military power. Today, he's the workingman's hero. Pull the other one.

They've finally done it. Now we've got three republican parties. Watch for the "Democratic" version this week.

Have fun,

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8/20/2000

Is this Sunday? Yeah...feels like it.

It was a pretty run-of-the-mill week here on the sub-continent up until about Thursday or so. That's when we got a call from our old friend and cohort from the planet Zenon sFshzenKlyrn, who had some exciting news for us -- viz., he had booked a pick-up job for Big Green on the planet Venus. In his somewhat breathless way, sFshzenKlyrn told us that we'd be opening for one of the most popular groups in the Large Magellanic Cloud -- a band whose actual name is wholly unpronounceable (by me, at least), but whom terrans may refer to as Mortadella.

Gigless (and penniless) as we've been since the collapse of our lean-to some weeks back, we were happy to receive this news, though a great deal of work lies ahead. For instance, sFshzenKlyrn informs us that Mortadella normally insists on having their opening bands "break bread" with them prior to the show. That sounded harmless enough, until he reminded me that beings from Mortadella's particular district of the Large Magellanic Cloud only eat plutonium. And they eat it in large quantities. With a spoon.

Though he seemed anxious to keep the information from the boys at NASA, sFshzenKlyrn told us that the...um...things in Mortadella were responsible for the disappearance of those pricey little Mars probes a few months back. Some of them carry plutonium reactors, you see, and to Mortadella, that's like getting lunch flown in. They just grab every probe that comes by on the off chance that there's something tasty inside. Space mariners beware!

Still, we're trying to stay positive about the whole thing. A few bucks in our pocket wouldn't go amiss. Of course, transport will also be something of a problem. Getting air passage to points extraterrestrial is still kind of difficult here in Sri Lanka. Even those bound for Earthly destinations must hail a passing B-29. And as you can see from this photo, there are usually a few people ahead of us at the air-taxi stand. (Traveler's tip: the ones with their wing lights on are looking for a fare.)

As you can see, one or two problems need ironing out. sFshzenKlyrn suggested we invite Dubya along for old times' sake, but I explained that he may be otherwise engaged. I think he's got tickets for Brooks & Dunn. (Matt thinks it's Hank Williams III, but I assured him there's no such thing.)

The Third Republican Convention. You saw part I (Philadelphia) and part II (the Buchanan Bash). Then it was over to the Staples Center in LA for the third iteration of the 2000 Republican National Convention. So we've got (conservative) Democratic Leadership Council alumnus Al Gore and DLC Chairman Joe Lieberman heading up the Dem version of the Republican ticket. Creeping ever further to the right, the Democratic Party sanctified their odious nominees with an on-air fundraising event that looked like some ponderously scripted daytime talk show, hosted by "liberal" congresspeople distinctly more conservative than Eisenhower Republicans. This business of pushing "lesser-of-two-evilism" to previously unimaginable limits shows the utter contempt with which these "champions of working people" look upon their traditional constituencies, whose priorities have been pushed almost completely off the platform pages.

We don't know who will win this November. We just know he'll be a white Republican.

Commandment Performance. Public school officials in Chicago (including some joker named "DeJesus" who shows up to news conferences wearing his priestly dog collar) are on record as "enthusiastically supportive" of an effort to distribute book covers emblazoned with the Ten Commandments to school children. Paul Vallas -- the school system's "CEO" -- describes the Big Ten as "history's value statements," and he considers them "certainly universally accepted." Hmmm. He may be overstating that a bit. I suppose next we'll see the Lord's Prayer being distributed on lunch pails, with CEO Vallas characterizing it as "history's mission statement." Marketing jargon and missionary work -- what a great combo!

Be good to yourselves,

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8/27/2000

Aloha-hooey,

I'm just pulling myself together after a pick-up performance in front of a parochial school reunion for the Class of 1960. Is powder-green a color? Well...if it wasn't, it is now. Forgive me. My typing chops have been stretched to the breaking point after 3 hours of pounding out the ossified remains of ex-hits like "Louie-Louie" and "Hang On, Sloopy."

Yuk.

It happens that yesterday was also the illustrious birthday of the illustrious Matt Perry, co-founder of Big Green and discoverer of the Space Warp. We celebrated with fragments of hard tack and some moldy tea-jam John found inside his bass drum. As you can tell, life has been a little spartan here in Sri Lanka just lately. We're conserving our resources in anticipation of the job sFshzenKlyrn booked for us on the planet Venus, opening for the terrifying titanic triumvirate from the Large Magellanic Cloud, the artists known as Mortadella.

It seems we will have to come up with the front money for our passage to the misty planet ourselves. Our label Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm refused to underwrite the costs, since they don't get any payola...I mean...since they don't have any exchange of service agreements with Venus-based record outlets, radio stations, etc. This, needless to say, is something of a hardship, since the technology required to fulfill the contract with Mortadella has not yet been invented on Earth.

You see, the Plutonium-eating Mortadellans bring with them a veritable miasma of radiation potent enough to alarm Edward Teller. We haven't yet worked out how to survive sharing a stage with them. sFshzenKlyrn's been a lot of help -- he keeps telling us to take atabrine tablets. And to exercise regularly. Luckily, our old friend Gung-Ho runs an aerobics class at his local death-squad training school and has been gracious enough to let us "sit-in". Though as a drill instructor, he leaves something to be desired. A little demanding. And the class sizes...well, you almost never get any one-on-one instruction. But we'll hang in there, if there's any chance the added agility will help us dodge errant Plutonium electrons, as sFshzenKlyrn suggested.

The gig's only a few weeks away. I'll let you know when advance tickets become available. (You may need to pick them up on Ceres, but if you carpool, it shouldn't be a problem.)

Better Living Through Chemicals. The dreaded mosquito-borne West Nile Virus -- the most terrifying threat to public health since the black plague -- is at this very moment bearing down on the defenseless upstate New York communities that lay within the borders of Oneida County. Luckily, our heroic and forward-looking leaders (the hon. Ralph Eannace, County Executive, and the dis-hon. Tim Julian, boy-mayor of Utica) have lighted upon a solution -- spray the entire county with the insecticide Anvil. That'll show em!

Of course, the active ingredient in Anvil -- the chemical Sumithrin -- has been shown to disrupt human hormones and increase the growth of breast cancer tumors, according to research done by Dr. Mary Wolff at Mount Sinai Medical School. But, hell -- West Nile killed nearly 8 people last year! How many die annually from breast cancer? (Figure not available in County Health Press Releases.) Not to worry. The good ol' boys at the County are saying "ha-rumph, we gotta protect our phony-baloney jobs, gentlemen!" And thus we are assured that Anvil is no worse than "anything under your kitchen sink," that it kills mosquitoes instantly upon contact, and that if mosquitoes hide from the spraying under foliage, "their legs fall off." (I'm not making this up.)

So hey -- that's good enough for me! And when those planes fly over, we'll all be out there cheering them on, with our mouths open wide and our backyard barbecues sizzling away! And when they're finished, there will never be any mosquitoes, ever again (except maybe a few legless cowards). And the people in the kingdom lived happily ever after.

The end. See you in the morning, kids.

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