NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(August '02)

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

8/4/02

Hey, there...

Well, the weather finally broke here in Sri Lanka -- broke into a million pieces, all of which chose to fall from the sky as I was walking over to the lean-to construction site. That's right -- rain, buckets of rain, washing down the sides of the Cheney Hammer Mill compound, filling in the shallow tunnel Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his fellow robots dug, making a lake out of our back garden, etc. Anyone for a dip?

The track that led to our building site was like the canals of Mars, and as I sloshed through I was filled with a sense of nostalgia for the red planet. My mind drifted back to the many sojourns we took there in sFshzenKlyrn's company between engagements in the asteroid belt. Our Zenite friend would ferry us over to an all-night bottle club in the shadow of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain as yet discovered in the solar system, where we would drink absinthe and play Pachinko until Phobos was high. We would stagger into our motel rooms well after sunrise, the canal mud caked on our shoes, pockets lined with winnings or turned inside-out by luck. Those were good days...back when we had normal tours to the outer planets.

Of course, as you know, on the upcoming outing we're being kicked downstairs -- forced to follow a punishing itinerary at rathskellers and dives beneath the Earth's surface. And though my experience with inner Earth is somewhat limited (I dug some postholes once about a decade ago), I anticipate few opportunities to kick back and enjoy the ride. No all night Pachinko for this kid. Just a string of one-nighters arranged by some clown in a suit who used to work for a mining company. Jeez-us. 

My duties as the remarkably knowledge-challenged chief geologist for our upcoming "inner-planetary" tour have largely involved chipping hunks off of local outcrops and dousing them with sulfuric acid to see if they fizz. When I went to check the building site, aside from a few soggy construction robots, I found this honking piece of feldspar which I promptly hauled back to my lab at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Aside from the usual battery of tests, I was anxious to test out Matt's new theory that rock will burn if you hold a flame to it long enough. (When I asked him how he had arrived at this theory, Matt simply said, "I remember rocks...rocks bubbling.") 

So I splintered a fragment off of one side, stuffed it into a pipe and lit it up. To my surprise, I found it had a rare, aromatic quality, colored with a hint of raspberry liqueur -- very pleasant. Copped a bit of a buzz, too. Nothing dramatic. For an hour or so after you smoke it, you lisp your esses, and you forget what succotash is. (I think they call the effect "thufferin' thuccotash" or "thylvester's thyndrome.") Pretty potent stuff, that feldspar. 

I don't know if I'll have my geological strata all worked out by next week, but I should at least have our tour itinerary. That is, if our label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., can keep themselves out of court long enough to cob one together for us. (They're really catching some heat for that "available sunlight" scam they ran in California. I guess they had even attempted to bribe the National Weather Service to fake up some cloudy radar for them. When that failed, they resorted to the firebugs. They called that "Operation Big Smokey." That was the CEO's idea. Now he's looking at 8 to 10 years of "Operation Big Pokey.") Those live MP3's are coming, too, if this rain lets up. Keep watching this space, man. No, not there. Right...about...here. 

The Rows Of Sharon. Well, Sharon and his rows of attack-bots rolled into the old West Bank city of Nablus again, demolishing houses and killing several Palestinians, nominally in retaliation for the recent Hamas bombings, one of which killed several Americans. Of course, Nablus has been the site of non-violent civil disobedience by Palestinians over this past week, defying the Israeli curfew and opening up market stalls, doing whatever they can to feed themselves and their kids. Herein lies the crux of this reprisal. Sharon (himself no stranger to hunger) surely views mass civil disobedience as a greater threat than any suicide bomber. Yea, each kamikaze raid on Israelis only provides the Great Bloated One with another mouth-watering opportunity to obliterate Palestinian national life through PR, helicopter gunships, and manipulation of all-too-cooperative global media. No enemy that. But massive civil disobedience? There's something Sharon can't swallow. 

For now, Fat Boy can wallow in the triumph of a successfully thwarted U.N. probe of the Israeli attack on Jenin refugee camp. The recently released "report" from the U.N. could not, of course, refer directly to facts on the ground since they were barred by Israel from actually investigating. With only the existing public record to rely on (including gallons of PR drivel from Sharon's flacks), the report met Israel's key demand -- it "drew no conclusions" regarding the attack on Jenin. It also omitted mention of many IDF abuses and killings of civilians that were both documented and corroborated by those who managed to slip in under the Israeli restrictions. Human Rights Watch called it "seriously flawed" and, in essence, a pointless exercise without access to the camp. Israeli officials and the U.S.'s execrable U.N. Ambassador John Negroponte (himself a war criminal) crowed about the fact that their collusion to obstruct justice had succeeded, and that the deliberately overblown claim that a massacre of 500 had occurred appeared baseless. (Note to Negroponte: absence of a massacre is not a virtue.)

Meanwhile, Negroponte's boss continues to run from his own ethically-challenged past by beating the drum for war against Iraq -- an exercise that has most of Washington's political class rippling jaw muscles, flexing biceps, and comparing dicks to see who is the mightier. Thankfully, it's time for all of them to go home for a month's (paid) leave. Dubya will take his usual August booze and snooze, but with the "war on terrorism" underway, an automated facsimile Dubya (built by the mad scientist that invented Al Gore) has been drafted to serve as commander in chief while Dubya's quaffing martinis and launching divots. 

Now don't you feel safer?....(click)...safer?....(click).....safer?....

luv u,

jp

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

8/11/02

Over here, Huey....

That's right. Swing that drill bit out this way. Oh...it's you. My apologies. I'd mistaken you for one of Marvin's rent-a-bot excavation crewmembers. I hope you don't find that insulting. Some of those automatons are actually quite good looking. And they drive snazzy cars, to boot. 

Perhaps I should explain. Frankly, I was getting tired of the roadblocks we'd run into over our lean-to construction project and this upcoming "inner-planetary" tour, so I decided to take the law into my own hands. Now I've got the foreman's hat on, and I've combined the two projects into one. Our journey to the center of the "oit" will begin at the location of our new home. We'll just have an extra-deep basement, that's all. More room for stowage...and geothermal heat in the winter. What-ho!

Of course, we've had to commandeer a larger-than-average excavation drill for the purposes of boring our own personal volcanic vent into the mantle and below. That took some doing, and more than a little fast talking on the part of our resident scientist Mitch Macaphee. It seems the gifted inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) once worked as an engineering consultant for Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc. When I griped to him about our lack of appropriate technology, he got on the phone to an old crony over at Hegemonic and convinced the guy to ship over one of their larger drills. Truth be told, I was a bit taken aback by the size of the thing, but there's no question that it's the right tool for the job. (John wants to see if we can make the Earth whistle with it, but brother Matt says we should leave that to the Bush administration.)

Back at the Cheney Hammer Mill, Marvin has obligingly lent me a hand with my demo project, laying down a drum track for my song, "Good Old Boys' Round Up." I'll bet you picture him sitting down at a drum kit and chewing gum while he kicks out the jam, but no -- Marvin's got a drum module baked right inside of him. I just hook a set of XLR cables into his patch bay and send the signal to my recorder. He even reads my crude charts...he's one funky automaton. (Sometimes he breaks into this odd interpretive dance while we're recording and pulls his leads out, but I can manage that.)

Our BIG GREEN LIVE From Neptune EP is now being shipped to the distant worlds that welcomed us during our last interplanetary tour, most notably Zenon (sFshzenKlyrn's home planet) and Kaztropharius 137b (that strange upside-down world where Big Green is top of the mast). While we insisted on having at least a few dozen copies of the EP on hand for our terrestrial fans, the saber-toothed bean counters at Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., insisted on shipping the lot of the m to where they might command the greatest remunerative value. (They need the cash flow, what with their recent legal troubles.) That has put us in the odd position of bootlegging our own EP, which we will soon offer as a self-published CD-R. 

In the meantime, I have taken to posting the MP3 versions of the songs to the Web. This is taking some time, as my Internet connection is rather slow (I have to liquefy the songs in a blender, add raw egg whites, then pour the mixture into a funnel at the end of a DSL cable.) Then there's the long and complex approval process at sites like MP3.com -- they just want to make certain I didn't upload the Cuban National Anthem or the coordinates of Dick Cheney's latest undisclosed location (actually, he's on an undisclosed vacation in Wyoming right now, only you didn't hear it from me). 

Anyway, here's the preliminary itinerary for our upcoming "inner-earth" tour, courtesy of Hegemonic Records and the rest of it:

Aug. 31           Departure

Sept. 3-4        The Upper Crust Theater

Sept. 6-7        Pat Boone's Cano-A-Go-Go

Sept. 9-13      Mickey's Mantle Inn

Sept. 16         The Su(b)duction Zone

Sept. 19-21    Irwin's Power Core

After that, it gets a bit sketchy. 

War In Peace.  If the threatened mega-campaign against Iraq has done nothing else, at least it's gotten Joe Biden and Jonah Goldberg on the same page. (Has either ever carried a rifle in this man's army? I dearly doubt it.) A couple of days in hearings, and one would think the Senate would have come up with something that might even remotely be considered justification for a new war against an old enemy (and an even older friend). But in the style of the true one-party state we've become, the hearings provided public testimony from a string of witnesses who agreed with the committee's foregone conclusion -- we should attack Iraq "pre-emptively," without any factual or legal basis for dong so, damn the consequences. The Bush team, supported by equally opportunistic Congress members of both parties, appear to want only to establish the principle that we can attack anywhere, anytime, anyone....so lookout!

I doesn't appear to strike anyone as peculiar that there was a much more spirited -- if still somewhat superfluous -- debate in the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, and that that took place  when there were thousands of Iraqi troops standing in occupation of Kuwait. No such pretext now. Why the blood fever? Ex U. N. weapons inspector Scott Ridder said it best -- domestic politics. The first Gulf War (actually, it was the second, but who's counting) was a big winner for Bush I, and now Dubya wants some of that shit, since the air has been steadily hissing out of his "War against Terror" tire for some time now. (The continuing chaos in Afghanistan is testament to its failings.)

Dubya's administration has been so maniacal and single-minded in their pursuit of this war that even America's most compliant allies and client states -- including Great Britain -- want no part of it. The Foreign Ministry boys at Whitehall have muttered publicly that their counterparts in the U.S. government "appear not to have considered" the fact that this war would have ruinous consequences with respect to the region's other festering conflicts. This go-it-alone approach fits the Bush team pretty well, though, with their unvarnished disdain for any international agreement that doesn't elevate corporate power to a level above that of national governments (NAFTA=good, ABM=bad). 

Welcome to the era of the rogue superpower. Don't like it? Tell your Congressional representatives. Fast. 

luv u,

jp

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

8/18/02

Ho, there, big fella...

You know, I hate to be the one to point this out, but we've got to be just about the only band in the solar system that spends more time with picks and shovels than with drums and guitars. Possibly not, but I pity the fuckers who have us beat on this particular ratio. This mining thing is like having a real job!

Our artificial volcanic vent is coming along gradually, though we're paying for every yard with the sweat off our brows. Oh sure, that king size drill we borrowed from Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc., does most of the work, boring a Holland Tunnel-size hole to the caramel center of this loopy planet we call home...but the detail work is left to us. On Mitch Macaphee's suggestion, we're carving a spiral staircase in a descending corkscrew pattern around the edges of the great hole, chipping the steps out of the living rock. Our ultimate aim is to install a set of stair-o-vators that will carry us in extreme comfort to our initial destination. (Hegemonic's tour planner instructs us to "follow the limestone" from our first gig at the Upper Crust Theatre until we reach "a vast chamber of molten ferment," then "ask directions" to the mantle. Useful.)

With so little support from our corporate label, we've needed to rely rather heavily upon the talents of our various friends, cohorts, and hangers-on. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been of great use, particularly with traffic control at our building site (he's brilliant with those traffic cones). sFshzenKlyrn has applied his unique abilities, as well, focusing his magneto-nutronium inner core into a fine heat beam that bakes the walls of our tunnel to a hard gloss finish, like porcelain. Neighbor Gung-Ho has obligingly supplied us with stocks from his surplus cache of plastic explosives, which we have used to blast a wider opening at the top of the vent, as well as spaces for rest stops along the way down. Even Trevor James Constable has agreed to train his orgone generating device down the tunnel to keep it clear of invisible flying predators. So you see, everybody's pitching in. 

Meanwhile, our LIVE From Neptune EP is being shipped by common carrier to the distant worlds where our music is more in demand. Because Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., is such a hive of cheapskates, the discs will probably take six weeks or more to arrive in music stores on Kaztropharius 137b (The shipping firm Hegemonic uses is, of course, another graft-riddled subsidiary that uses antiquated spacecraft and subcontracted crews from underdeveloped planets). I'm beginning to think it'll take at least that long for MP3.com to "approve" our LIVE cuts for terrestrial consumption. Tired of waiting, Big Green fans? Email the suits at MP3.com and tell them "I want my LIVE Big Green...or I'll start the new music revolution in earnest!" 

I sure hope that EP sells like hotcakes in the great Magellanic cloud, because we're going to need some cash to clean up after this "inner planetary" tour tunnel-digging bonanza. All kinds of toxic sludge has been bubbling up from down below, sitting in stagnant pools around the pit and frightening passers-by with its palpable stench. I fully expect the Sri Lankan authorities to rope off the area very soon if we don't implement some kind of clean-up. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if they rope each of us off, as well, if we procrastinate much longer. And who can blame them?

So, hey...Hegemonic! Where's da money? Cough it up, sleazeballs!

Real Danger. A friend of mine whose spouse works for the still-burgeoning military industrial complex shared with me a chilling email that came through whatever alert channels our military avails itself of, warning about impending terror strikes, naming specific classes of targets and specific points of origin, etc., etc.  There were no public "terror alerts" that day, but still...it certainly had my friend upset, and understandably so. I walked around with clenched teeth for the next few days (much as I have done since Reagan was elected president) and waited for something to happen, which -- of course -- it didn't. 

Well, wait...no, something did happen. The corporate press reported on the large brown killer cloud of pollution that's been hanging over Asia for years, killing thousands with respiratory disease...only now the cloud is worse than before and will probably kill millions before it's through. The deadly cloud is, of course, the result of human activity -- about evenly divided, they say, between under-regulated industrial activity and smoke from the wood-fueled fires of Asia's desperately poor. Both preventable causes, if we display the political will to do something about it. 

So let's see. On the one hand, you've got retail (non state-sponsored) terrorism that, aside from 2001's elevated 9/11 death toll, claims maybe hundreds of lives a year, depending on how you choose to define it. Then we've got the big brown cloud that has killed many thousands and promises to kill millions more. Which would you declare war on first?

The thing is, we're all used to the idea of acceptable losses caused by phenomena that, though controllable, are treated like immutable forces of nature. Hunger, common (curable) disease, and pollution kill millions worldwide for no reason other than the sheer greed of those who possess the resources to alleviate them. (That's totally aside from the deaths contrived by our military and the regimes we support throughout the world.) In the U.S., where thousands die on the roadways each year, the newspapers put West Nile Virus all over the front page (death toll: 11). And while staggering numbers perish in our hospitals as the result of medical blunders, I have yet to see any frantic emails about it. 

Meanwhile, down at the ranch, the consensus at Dubya's economic summit is that everything is going great!  Hey...so long as Cheney is safe and well-fed, that's all anybody should really care about. It just wouldn't be the same Ford Administration without him. 

luv u,

jp

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

8/25/02

Hy-ya-toe-ah!

There's a hearty space Viking greeting for you...straight from the creative mind of Irwin Allen, the patron saint of bizarro American science fiction. 

I'm here to tell you, this little "oit" of ours is getting to be a lot like the Preplanus of Lost In Space's opening episodes -- remember? The orbit of that crazy globe was shaped like a flat ellipse with the sun at one end, so it would get mega-cold at apogee and molten hot at perigee (at least for the first few weeks of the show). Ain't that just like home? (And ain't Dubya a lot like Dr. Smith, trying to figure some angle by which to profit from our misfortune?)

Speaking of profitable misfortune, our "inner-planetary" tour is getting closer by the moment, its ghastly contours now fully visible in the late August haze. Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., has added a few dates, as you'll see from our newly-updated itinerary:

Aug. 31           Departure

Sept. 3-4        The Upper Crust Theater

Sept. 6-7        Pat Boone's Cano-A-Go-Go

Sept. 9-13      Mickey's Mantle Inn

Sept. 16         The Su(b)duction Zone

Sept. 19-21    Irwin's Power Core

Sept. 28         Levantine's Lava-Rama

Oct. 4-5          Base Camp Alpha

Oct. 8-13        Val's Hallah

Oct. 14           The Upshaft Ginroom

Oct. 15           Return (via Krakatoa)

That's the list. After that, we've been promised a short stint across the interstellar void for performances on Zenon and Kaztropharius 137b, these to promote sales of our LIVE From Neptune EP, which sFshzenKlyrn knowledgeably informs us have been brisk, at least on the former, his home planet. 

That's the part we're all looking forward to -- back to space and the comforting silence of an interplanetary passage. Frankly, as we have dug the hole deeper for our musical journey to the center of the Earth, the idea of going through with it is starting to make us, well, puke. We just got a look at the protective clothing we'll have to wear at those core gigs -- they're like asbestos-lined hazmat suits. John put one on and he was walking around like Marvin (my personal robot assistant), only a bit less gracefully. How we're supposed to play instruments is beyond me.

Worse than that, we're supposed to learn some bogus song to play for the tenth anniversary celebration at the Lava-Rama club, which happens to coincide with our gig there. The song is called "Limestone, Dear Limestone" and it's written for calliope and sousaphone. I guess I'm elected to learn the calliope part. sFshzenKlyrn says he knows how to play sousaphone, but frankly I think he's mixing it up with another kind of "phone" (from a distance of 400 or 500 parsecs, the two look identical). 

News of this particular obligation made us curious as to what else had been written into the tour contract by the demented space aliens over at Hegemonic. Matt pored through the thing from ear to ear and found some interesting items: a ceremonial folk dance in the ante chamber of Mickey's Mantle Inn on September 11th, a parrot and peg leg competition at The Su(b)duction Zone, and (most chilling of all) a flapjack eating contest at Base Camp Alpha! I thought, that last idea had to be a mistake. Those fuckers know of the deadly addiction we all share, and they surely remember that last flapjack binge that left sFshzenKlyrn big as a house and twice as...well....big. Those fuckers.

Why do I get the feeling they don't want us to return? Just a hunch. Marvin has indicated his suspicions, as well, and has obligingly penned our obituaries, post dated to mid October. such a time-saver, that Marvin. What would I do without him? (My obit is interesting. Did I really sell cassava husks to help pay for my college education? I don't remember that at all...)

Hey -- MP3.com has finally posted some selections from our LIVE From Neptune EP. They are now available as free downloads at www.mp3.com/biggreen -- thanks for waiting! You can also get them gratis at www.soundclick.com/biggreen and at the music downloads section of Amazon.com (just search "Big Green"), so hep yo'seff. If you prefer a disc, just drop me an email at jperry@biggreenhits.com and I'll put you on the priority list. Uncle Joe'll hook you up, no problem-o.

Climb Down? May we safely assume that any battleship too wacky for uncle Scowcroft to climb aboard will be judged unfit to sail? Too early to tell if this is a principle by which Dubya's foreign policy may be organized. As soon as I think I have them figured out, they lurch over to another position. This week, the boy genius started sounding a cautionary note on his coveted Iraq war...then, before the echo died on that, Rumsfeld was talking about how certain Al Qaeda leaders -- names we would recognize, according to him (though they, of course, cannot yet be revealed) -- have taken refuge inside Iraq, as Rumsfeld's comments were reported in the British press. Damning proof of Saddam Hussein's support for international terrorism! Harrumph! Harrumph! We're goose-stepping in circles again!

About the only point of consistency in this bizarro administration is their general desire for war and confrontation. They keep pushing the limits, backing away, then doing it again, etc. And fate, being fate, has provided them with enormous opportunity in the form of the 9/11 attacks (that is, fate assisted by a remarkable level of incompetence on their part -- the kind that would have had Bill Clinton hanging from his pudgy little toes). I am convinced, however, that we would have been at war at least once by now, anyway. They want war. They need war. And they shall have it...and so shall we all.  

That is not to say that resistance is futile, however. It is likely that significant domestic opposition to a unilateral attack on Iraq is one of the only things holding them back. At the very least, it makes them range around for ever more ludicrous justifications for action -- the Al Qaeda connection is, of course, a popular recourse, one they tried months ago with the somewhat changeable cooperation of the Czech Republic's intelligence service. (Never mind that Bin Laden wants an end to secular dictators like Hussein probably more than Dubya does). We can expect more of this, even though the "six degrees of separation" method puts Dubya a lot closer to old Osama-boy than anyone he condemns. 

Perhaps this is the best time to introduce the Big Green plan for regime change in Iraq -- one that would make everybody (who counts) happy, including uncle Scowcroft. Ready? It's simple -- just have a reconstructive surgeon go in there and give Saddam a new face, then fake a story about his ouster and replacement by a new strong man -- one as compliant to U.S. wishes as the pre-August 1990 Saddam was. Call him Maddas Niessuh. Then the U.S. would have just what it really wants -- an oppressive thug keeping a lid on the populace while ensuring a steady flow of oil to the enrichment of U.S.-based corporations. Then Saddam (or Maddas) can have all the chemical weapons he wants again, even use them against the "right" people (just as he did against Iran with our tacit support between 1983-1988). And we could drop the ludicrously implausible calls for "democracy" -- something we've never supported in the Middle East, and in fact, consistently worked against. 

So there you have it. Poppy Bush would be happy. Uncle Scowcroft would be happy. Bob Friedman would be happy. Glad to be of service, Dubya! No charge, man!   

luv u,

jp

Click here to return to Table of Contents.