NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(February '02)

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2/3/2002

All set?

Well, I recovered rather quickly from the injuries inflicted on me by my personal trainer, thank you very much. And no sooner had I tossed the bandages aside than I started to realize what a tremendous scam this exercise thing is! Here we've been scrambling around trying to find ways to pay off our debts and get our beloved lean-to reconstructed (to say nothing of funding our next recording project) when the answer has been right before us all along. It worked for Jack LaLaine. It worked for the Tai Bo guy. Why not us, huh?

Not that we have the slightest idea how to make an exercise video, or how we would market the fucker. But I figure there should be a lot of demand for fitness videos, what with the war on and enemies lurking behind every rock, bush, and sales display. In fact, John says there should be enough consumer demand to overcome the fact that our video is totally lousy and devoid of any meaningful content. That gave me the confidence I needed to go out and borrow that cheap VHS camcorder from one of our web designers and start producing. 

Hey -- somebody buys just about everything, right? All I have to do is get enough scratch together to run some cheapo direct response television spot on cable a few times a week, and those tapes will fly off the shelves. Just watch.

Manna calucci! Sow one seed and a thousand flowers bloom. As soon as we started working on our new isometric tune-up video, sFshzenKlyrn decided to open a correspondence cooking school. Sure, it's something he's always talked about doing, but we never thought he'd go through with it until we saw sFshzenKlyrn rattling through the utensil bins at "Dollar Tree" and bringing home a 47-piece ladle set. This guy means business!

Next thing we know, some television producer is on our Zenite friend like white on rice, talking him into doing a season on the Home Cooking network. I don't know if he's signed any papers, but he's certainly donned the outfit and now seems to have a publicity thrall buzzing around him. 

But that's not all. Mitch Macaphee told us he's going into the used spaceship business, specializing in RV-like mobile homes like the saucer that took us to Kaztropharius 137b and back. The same day we got the word on that, Trevor James Constable pipes up that he's going to start selling used shoes on the internet -- just as a sideline. Then this semi backs up to the www.BigGreenHits.com command and control center and drops 4,200 pairs of black-market loafers on the loading dock. Ill-gotten goods! There must be a whole lot of 1962-vintage insurance salesmen out there trudging door-to-door in their bare feet. (Trevor James spent that entire night burning the serial numbers off those loafers with his Orgone Generating Device.)

In the midst of all this entrepreneurial activity, only Dr. Hump had the presence of mind (the only thing about him that is present, in point of fact) to notice that the Cheney Hammer Mill's decontamination certificate had arrived on Thursday. He attempted to share the good news with everyone, but we were all so preoccupied he couldn't get our attention. Finally, the good Dr. became supremely annoyed and ordered his cyborgs to cart him off to the airport where he took the next available flight back to the University of Bologna. By the time we had caught wind of his departure it was too late to stop him. Such a waste!

So it was with a heavy heart that we returned to the Cheney Hammer Mill. Our new anti-gravity ante-room would have to be designed without the Dr.'s help. Oh the hardships we endure! Hey...sorry, doc! Come on back! sFshzenKlyrn made a healthy cheeseburger melt while you were away...we'll heat 'er up for you. 

A Little Enron In Everyone. Yeah, sure...you felt bad when those folks in Houston got locked into their failing Enron stock and lost their shirts. But it was that "other guy" kind of feel-bad, wasn't it? Better have a look at your pension fund, friend. When the 2,000 odd companies in 62 countries known collectively as Enron took a dive last year, they dragged a few pensions and 401-K's down with them. New York's public employee pension fund took a $58 million dollar Enron hit. There's plenty more elsewhere. 

Those folks who lost everything will surely find a way to put food on the table. Though with Dick Cheney stonewalling on the release of those Energy Task Force papers, one dish in particular comes to mind. Trifle, anyone?

Meanwhile, Dubya's on one of his proverbial rolls, threatening the "axis of evil" here, defining fetuses as "unborn children" there, opening wetlands to development everywhere. Now he's rattling his freshly-stained saber at those countries-we-love-to-hate, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. He's been keeping up a dizzying pace of reactionary policy changes since grabbing office a year ago. And the bellicosity of his State of the Union address is perhaps only exceeded by friend and ally Ariel Sharon, who this week spoke of his regret over not having "liquidated" Arafat in Beirut back in 1982 when he had the opportunity -- an opportunity he took full advantage of with about 18,000 people in Lebanon and more than 1,800 in the camps of Sabra and Shatila during that awful war. 

Arafat is not enough of a Quisling for Sharon's taste. He wants to choose his own Palestinian leadership to administer the ethnic cleansing operation currently underway in the Levant, an enterprise for which the Bush administration appears more than happy to allow him ample diplomatic cover, what with the great and glorious "War against Evil" under way. 

Terror vs. Terror. Only those bin Laden devotees are mere pikers next to these guys. Let's hope this Enron thing is more than a match for both of them. 

luv u,

jp

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2/10/2002

Hey-yo,

Well, we're back, safely ensconced once again in the bosom of the old Cheney Hammer Mill, decontaminated and declared safe for habitation by elements of the elite Indonesian Kopassus brigade -- the very fellows who irradiated it in the first place under contract to our vindictive label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. How ironic. They bomb us out of the joint for non-payment of royalties, only to render us unable to come up with the cash because our gear was at the Mill, and, well...we'd been bombed out of the joint. It's a formula worthy of the Pentagon. Or, at least, the Rand Corporation.

Now that I'm back within twiddling distance of our humble production console, I can actually get to work on the project we agreed to finish to appease the bean counters at Hegemonic and get them to call off the siege -- the "live" EP. I can't tell you how much work this involves. Matt can tell you -- I can't, because I've never done it before. But I won't let that stop me, dammit. Not when I've got a corporate gun to my head. (But then, haven't we all got that?)

Anyway, the process is relatively straightforward, as Matt has explained it to me. (He is taking a hands-off approach to this project, since it was my stupid idea.) All of our live recordings are on a hard drive in the basement, next to the locker where Admiral Zark keeps his goat cheese. As far as I understand it, I have to transfer the lot of it to 1/4-inch reel-to-reel tape, unroll the spools, clip them into individual song lengths, then throw them all into a skillet with diced shallots and a little grated cabbage. After that, I give three honks on the fog horn, let the Chihuahuas out into the yard, and make a handwritten copy of the first 47 pages of V.S. Naipaul's A House For Mr. Biswas.

With the skillet on medium heat, I then stir in the Trinidadian novel one sheet at a time, raising the mixture briefly to a boil. Now comes the tricky part. I remove the project from the heat after boiling for 7-1/4 minutes, and let sit until all of the Chihuahuas have come back inside. Then, using the original tape cans, I pour the mixture into the cans, making sure to cover the reels entirely, and refrigerate overnight. The next morning I will find my master tapes firm to the touch and ready to digitize, once they've been rolled in toasted cocoanut shavings. Or so Matt assures me. 

Part of the challenge of releasing a live music collection is deciding which takes are the least riven with flubs, coughs, gastric accidents, and other audio artifacts. Out of the hours of performance recordings we have to choose from, any reasonable criteria for sonic clarity would narrow our choices down to about...well...half-a-dozen songs. Call it four. Hey -- what do you want, huh? Four's an EP. I can live with that. 

So at  least I have my work cut out for me, up until the point when I pull the newly congealed songs out of the refrigerator like so many marshmallow squares. I'm glad to report, also, that Trevor James Constable and Mitch Macaphee have arrived at a practical anti-gravity device even without the brainpower of the estimable Dr. Hump. They tried the thing out on sFshzenKlyrn, but since his mass changes at will, the test was not conclusive. Then they tried it on John, and he was soon floating around the "great room," exhibiting anti-gravity behavior as if controlled by the alien intelligences of some UFO. So things are indeed getting "off the ground" here, my friends -- even though it may seem like nothing is happening at all.

Sharon and the Missiles. Israel's execrable Prime Minister hauled his enormous bulk over the Atlantic this week to meet with his scrawny counterpart in the White House (for more on him, see www.whitehouse.org). Ever the masters of the P.R. blitz, the Israeli government heralded Sharon's historic visit with a ludicrous story about a massive buildup of Iranian arms in southern Lebanon -- breathlessly described as 8,000 missiles, which briefly spiked to 10,000, then fell back to the more comfortable 8K figure again. The story was, of course, immediately debunked by the London Independent's Robert Fisk on the ground in South Lebanon, who reported that Sharon's "centre of world terror" was quiet aside from a few Hizbollah militia men and some sleepy U.N. peacekeepers. 

No matter. Fisk's words are but a whisper, our deafness a shout, as Ian Anderson might have put it. Sharon's fantasies are routinely passed along by a corporate press all too eager to find further evidence of Bush's "axis of evil," no matter how patently the product of some commissar's imagination such "evidence" might be. Two weeks ago it was the shipload of arms Sharon put down to Arafat on very questionable grounds, to establish a sinister link between Iran and the Palestinian Authority. (Though hysteria over arms shipments on the part of the Israeli government is truly the pot calling the kettle black, their having sustained a brutal 35-year occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem on the strength of an unceasing flow of arms from the U.S., including helicopter gunships and other devices used against civilians in flagrant violation of U.S. law.)

If there were truly any justice in the world at all, Sharon would be sitting in a Beirut jail cell right now. But then Ollie North would be occupying one in Managua, and Kissinger would be on a rotating schedule between dungeons in Phnom Penh, Hanoi, and Santiago. And Dili. And...

Meanwhile, Dubya is ratcheting up the pressure on Colombia, where he has pledged to help protect Occidental Petroleum's oil extraction operations from the interference of those pesky people who live there. Of course, in Colombia our government supports the worst human rights abusers in the hemisphere -- the same unsavory folks Occidental calls on to guard their investments. That's what we're fighting for, after all -- the right to bribe your way into profitable exclusive mineral development contracts without bearing undue security costs. Those costs are socialized via our Pentagon system. And if a few families get blown away in the process, hey...it isn't intentional. 

Shhh. Collateral damage means never having to say you're sorry. 

luv u,

jp

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2/17/2002

Gott be wit ye,

Best wishes, one and all, from your friends, colleagues, and fellow hominids here in Big Green-land. (sFshzenKlyrn sends his non-anthropoid greetings, as well.) As I settle down once again to write these lines, my mind trips back over the years we've been together, the places we've gone, the music we've made, and -- most importantly -- the quarts of Kung Pao Bean Curd we've consumed in crowded bus stations and poorly-heated lorries. Just thinking of it gives me a pang in the pit of my stomach no bromide can expel. Such a long and storied journey!

I suppose it's listening to these old recordings that has put me in a mood for reminiscence. There's a lot of them, and I kind of went beyond the scope of this "live" project in reviewing them. In other words, I cracked open a case of Backyard Ale, sat back in the abandoned barcalounger our local rodent population calls home, and listened to old tapes until the sun popped up over the Arabian sea. sFshzenKlyrn sat with me for a while, but after about a dozen beers he was ready for some miniature golf. (There's an all-night course just up the road from the Cheney Hammer Mill. Convenient!) That left me to roll through the archives in solitude, just me and my beer buzz. 

I'll tell you what, if we were ever to issue a retrospective archival album, it would be one weird-ass collection of tunes. Just a for instance: Big Green's first recording -- a reel-to-reel demo for which only cassette dubs survive -- was a four-song tape we did in '87 on Ned Danison's brother's 8-track Tascam deck. It includes covers of Little Richard ("Slippin' and Slidin"), Taj Mahal ("She Caught the Katy"), and early Beatles ("Bad Boy"), plus one of Ned's songs, "Name and a Face." We had rotating drummers back then...in the days before John and all the rotating guitar players. A session guy named Pete Sweeney played traps on three of the tracks. Dale Haskell did the drums on "Bad Boy." Neither of them were available for the publicity photos we did around then, so our beloved photographer  friend Leif Zurmuhlen stood in, calling himself "Drumbo." 

We've got miles of tape Matt produced on a 4-track cassette portastudio. I don't know how many songs -- scores, maybe hundreds, all original material. That's why I swallowed hard when I saw Trevor James Constable's Orgone Generating Device parked in a corner next to the leaky broom closet where we keep our archival material. Actually, India pale ale spouted out of my mouth like a fountain, and I marched upstairs to where Trevor James had slung his hammock and told him to shift that thing out of there. Hey -- it's not so much the energy it radiates that worries me. It's those invisible flying predators that are attracted to its unearthly glow. Those suckers absorb analog tape like so much linguine, twirling it on little forks and washing it down with invisible flying Chianti. The recorded efforts of a lifetime would provide a modest evening meal for the likes of them. 

Speaking of modest evening meals, I did in fact get around to doing the prep work on the master tapes for our live project. Though due to my somewhat gin-soaked state of mind, they came out a little extra crispy. (I may have left the Chihuahuas out too long.) Even worse, while I was sleeping off my hangover, sFshzenKlyrn mistook the masters for Cumberland Farms glazed donuts (a favorite of his) and devoured them with a carafe of joe. That's the thanks I get for dragging him down memory lane.

I know what you're thinking -- "what, no good news again?" Well...the foundation hole has been dug for our new lean-to, and skilled architects are poring over the site now, looking for somewhere to take a piss. (Their annual picnic is being held in the next field over, and someone forgot to call Port-a-san.) Something tells me we'll have that hole filled up in no time. 

Job Well Done. You gotta' hand it to him. Just one evening of contrived rhetorical flourishes, and the patient work of a decade is almost totally wiped away on both sides of the Asian continent. The policy implications of Dubya's incoherently belligerent (though "muscular," according to some press commentators) state of the union address has pulled the rug out from under a generation of reformers in Iran, who have worked tirelessly for years, defying the clerics, risking (and often losing) life and liberty to gradually move their country towards greater openness. As always, the press focuses on the leadership -- Khatami, who they say is "sometimes referred to as a reformer." True, Khatami has done a lot, but only with many thousands of ordinary Iranians behind him, taking the real risks and pressing the limits set by the country's religious conservatives. 

Then came Bush's speech. And now the activists in Iran can be attacked as being "soft" on the U.S., which has clearly singled their country out for attack. Immediately, the western news media pointed their cameras at angry crowds in Teheran, demonstrating a level of hyper-patriotism (or "anti-Americanism" in the press) that recalls nothing so much as what we've seen in the States for the last 5 months. Because these are some of the only pictures we've seen from Iran in years, it seems to confirm the stereotype that most Americans have held regarding Persians since 1979 -- a prejudice Bush is eager to exploit. Anyone who has been paying attention to their struggle against the mullahs know that this is a major setback for the cause of human rights in that unhappy nation.

Then there's that other "Axis" power, North Korea, about whom there's been much breathless chatter emanating from the NSC and Condy Rice regarding their use of "glossy brochures" to hawk their primitive missile technology all over the world. Setting aside for the moment the plain fact that their missile test of several years ago was a failure, to see press reports of Americans decrying others as unprincipled arms merchants is a triumph of Orwellian media relations. For Christ's sake, the President's father (and, I believe, his brother as well) shill for the Carlyle group, which sells investment interests in U.S. defense technology overseas. I mean, we are the biggest arms dealers in the world, are we not? And we're pointing the finger at a wrecked country where the primary occupation of the armed forces is figuring out why their superannuated trucks don't run? Puh-lease!

Of course, Bush's comments have South Koreans deeply concerned, as well. They do, after all, share a country with the North. One can hardly attack North Korea without causing devastating consequences in the South. And, again, after years of patient, gradual efforts at reconciliation, this idiotic policy direction  -- clearly calculated to justify "missile defense" -- is a slap in the face.

Ever the man in form, Dubya had this comforting bit of wisdom to offer on the eve of his Asian tour:

"We, the free world, must make it clear to these nations they have a choice. I will keep all options available if they don't make the choice."

I think that about says it all.      

luv u,

jp

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2/24/2002

Akita! Akita!

How is everyone? Is it possible another week has slipped past us? This tired old world just keeps spinning faster all the time. Perhaps if we adopted Mitch Macaphee's old idea about putting up gigantic braking fins all along the equator, it might make the day last a little longer. Sure, it would be the most massive undertaking of human engineering ever devised (perfect job for Enron, if only...), transforming vast tracts of territory and displacing many millions of people...but it might add as much as 4.7 seconds to our diurnal rotation. Think of it! 

Well, I've wandered a bit. It's probably because I'm already tired of this "live" disc project I promised to finish for our label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., so that they could have something of ours to hawk in those remote regions of interstellar space where we are well beloved. Any excuse to get my mind off the settings on the antique mixing console we've got here in the Cheney Hammer Mill. Those big, crusty, bakelite knobs turn like a ship's wheel, sending forth electrical noises stolen from a 60-year-old Frankenstein movie for the sole purpose of making me insane. I can hardly wait for Dr. Mitch and Trevor James Constable to get the work crews in motion on our new basement studio over at the lean-to building site. We're talking state-of-the-art gear...that's what we're talking, anyway. We'll be using cheap digital gear, but anything's better than the medieval junkpile I've got to work with over here.

I've actually managed -- even with these impediments -- to narrow the field down to four takes. The performances are drawn from a gig we played on Neptune during our previous interplanetary tour in 2000...you know, the one when we broke down on...Uranus...and, well, lost our way...home...that...triumphant...tour. Anyway, they made the "final cut" for several reasons: (a.) they were the first songs I could listen to without retching, (b.) they weren't eaten by either sFshzenKlyrn or by invisible flying predators, and (c.) there is no third reason, I just like putting things in series of three. By virtue of this ironclad logic and my unerring instinct as a first-time producer, I plan on using these cuts on the final master...if I can make them sound like something other than dogshit. 

Where are my bandmates in this hour of trial? One may well ask. Matt has disassociated himself with this project for reasons I've mentioned before, preferring to put all his considerable energies into overseeing construction of our new lean-to. John is working closely with Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James on the configuration of our anti-gravity rec room. Apart from providing a process of "natural selection" for my recordings, sFshzenKlyrn has been busy producing new episodes of his cooking show, "Zen-on the menu!", which has become quite a hit in France, for some bizarre reason. Our guitar (and now hash-) slinging extraterrestrial friend has been admitted to that pantheon of French media heroes shunned by their home countries, taking his rightful place alongside Jerry Lewis. Of course, he's had to make a few adjustments to the show to make it more palatable to the Metropolitan French audience, but they are relatively minor concessions to the cause of stardom. Now if he can keep the thugs at Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., from demanding a piece of the action, sFshzenKlyrn will be king of Paris' restaurant scene, raiding every icebox from Sacre Coeur to Viroflay. 

In the meantime, I've been fudging around with CD cover designs, poking through our waterlogged photo file, looking for images to grab and enhance. Pretty slim pickings, if you want to know the truth. My inclination is to use something from our last tour, but I'm on the point of indecision over this seemingly simple task. What do you think? Let me know at jperry@biggreenhits.com. (Maybe we can do a little unscientific poll next week...who knows?)

Deja Vu All Over Afghan. Forgive me for using this tired old Yogi-ism, but it seems ideally suited to what is happening in Afghanistan right now. I seem to remember some dire predictions, all ignored, warning of massive starvation and a return to petty warlordism should we bomb Afghanistan to rubble once again; conditions that closely reflect those suffered by Afghans at the close of the last "war on terror" in the late 80's, early 90's. Well, here we are, friends. Since the installation of our Northern Alliance-based regime, we've seen persecution and displacement of ethnic Pashtuns, pirating of relief supplies, rising malnutrition and hunger-related mortality, in-fighting between factions, and generally a situation Rumsfeld describes as "not a pretty picture."

No, it's not pretty. But it is predictable. And a picture he -- and all of us -- helped to paint. Of course, there are the usual bleatings in the corporate press about how this amounts to "Afghans being Afghans" and so on, as if our mounting a major attack against an impoverished and unstable nation should not be considered a factor in its subsequent disintegration. Indeed, the ensuing "chaos" spoken of in the media seemingly descends upon Afghanistan from nowhere, like a bombing with no claim of responsibility. Such reporting is built upon a mountain of tacit assumptions communicated to the reader through a variety of means; assumptions left over from colonial days about the mind of the foreigner; assumptions about the rightness of our government's cause, whatever that cause may be at the moment; assumptions about American exceptionalism and our immunity from responsibility for any of the predictable consequences of our actions; and so on. 

Now, as thousands of Afghans suffer and die out of camera-shot, the Bush administration is opening a "second front" in the bogus "war on terror" -- this one in the Philippines, to take up arms against about 200-300 armed fighters of the Abu-Sayyaf group, whose main claim to fame in the Pentagon is that one of Bin Laden's many brothers-in-law (the brother of one of his Filipino wives) gave the group money once in the early 90's. That's why we're there. Oh...and they're easy to beat. Or so it seems, anyway. Who's next?

Name That Fanatic. What famous hyper-religious nutcase made this observation? 

"Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you."

That's right...it's Attorney General John Ashcroft, as per fellow nutcase Cal Thomas. The Nation's Katha Pollitt offered my favorite rejoinder:

"Not to get too wound up in theology here, but if the Christian God sent his own son to die doesn't that make him, according to Ashcroft's definition, a Muslim?"

luv u,

jp

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