NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(January '02)
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1/6/2002
Ahoy and avast,
They say any tour you can walk away from is a good one. Of course, "they" never had so demanding a paymaster as Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc.
Let me start at the beginning. Our return
from Zenon was consummated without the sort of navigational errors that plagued
the final hours of our last interplanetary tour (we didn't hand sFshzenKlyrn
the reins this time). Nevertheless, there was one brief delay as we passed
through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. No, we didn't exactly strike
one of the jagged planetary fragments. You see, sFshzenKlyrn
insisted that we pull over 
so that he could play a brief game of asteroid
hopscotch (very popular in the galactic provinces) and, with Mitch Macaphee at
the controls, we had something of a hard landing. Just a bit of a bump, that's
all.
Okay, call it a crash. In any case, we were stranded on that lousy slab of rock for about 36 hours while Mitch and Trevor James Constable affected repairs and sFshzenKlyrn darted deftly from one planetoid to the other.
Well, that wasn't so bad. Except that the
boys in the band all had cabin fever and couldn't wait to blow the hatch and go
cavort amongst the crumbling remnants of a shattered world. Any of you out there
who have taken long deep-space voyages can understand the impulse for a little
zero-gravity horseplay. And that's all it seemed at first -- just Matt, John,
and Tiny Montgomery playing a friendly game of speedball using whatever object
was handy as the ball. It was only when I came out to join them that I realized
the "ball" was our granite cash box (rendered nearly weightless by the
planetoid's diminutive mass). Before I could take the box out of play, John
chucked a line-drive that sailed right past me and off into deep space. Great
shot! Tiny threw a laser-light on it and we watched the cashbox ricochet off
Ceres and careen off at a 70 degree angle in the direction of 
the
Martian orbital plane.
We all clinked our tea glasses with approval. Well played, indeed.
Then it hit me: travel cash!
No, seriously. That box held our entire take from the Zenon gig -- a whopping 474,392,070 kazaks and change (approx. $427.89 American), 70% of which was due our stern overlords at Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. "This is not good," I said as we lifted off, recalling the various little agonies visited upon us in the past by the goons from our label. We poked about for a while in the vain hope that we might stumble upon the granite box, but of course it was nowhere to be found. There was nothing left to do but return home to the Cheney Hammer Factory and hope that the Hegemonic boys hadn't already come collecting.
The great thing about this split-level
"family size" spacecraft is that it's totally self-contained, and it
has all the conveniences! All we had to do was fly that baby into the courtyard
of the Cheney Hammer Mill and set it down amongst the ironwood trees. No
unpacking necessary...which was good, since we didn't want to draw too much
attention to ourselves. Unfortunately, news travels fast in Sri Lanka and within
a few hours the 
whole island knew of our return. I hadn't even hooked Dr. Hump
up to his fish tank compressor before I heard the sound of an Apache attack
helicopter landing just outside. Word must've gotten to the Hegemonic rep
in Colombo -- the nasties had arrived!
I asked Trevor James to set his Orgone Generating Device on "repel," but he was still consulting with Mitch Macaphee on matters of great gravity -- quite literally. That left me no alternative but to confront the goons head-on and tell them to go. Before I reached the shop floor, however, I heard the helicopter lurch into action. The squad from Hegemonic was leaving....but why?
Yeah, they were gone. But they left a
little memento. A cache of munitions -- shells with those lovely armor-piercing
depleted-uranium casings. It was then that I realized those soldiers weren't
from Hegemonic at all...they 
were from Donny Rumsfeld and our old pal
Dubya. Apparently, during our absence, the U.S. military commandeered the Cheney
Hammer Mill as a temporary arms depot. Heck, there's radioactive shells lying
about everywhere, lighting the place up like a freaking Christmas tree.
Dangerous? Not to worry. Donny Rumsfeld has assured us that any unintended casualties of the great glorious war effort are purely accidental. Man, but it's great to be back home!
New Year. Old War. As I write, our
combined armed forces (largest in the world) are pursuing a one-eyed fugitive
known as Mullah Omar, having apparently given up on Osama bin Laden for the time
being. This personalization of the Afghan operation recalls nothing more than 
Woodrow Wilson's pursuit of Pancho Villa, though we are occasionally reminded by
Rumsfeld that our objective is, in fact, to reduce the risk of terrorism (by
destroying whole countries), impede the recruitment of terrorists (by killing
people's children, husbands, mothers), and so on. With the corporate media
essentially being driven by the DOD, the message and objectives of war shift
almost daily, responding to publicity opportunities like the impending capture
of Omar or that of bin Laden. He's surrounded one day; the next, not. It's a
wild ride.
Meanwhile, we're offered the dubious prospect of involvement in any number of festering regional conflicts, as well as the initiation of new ones in places like Iraq and god-knows-where-else. It seems most likely that these will also be low-risk, high-altitude bombing campaigns against people who can't shoot back, since (gratefully) the Pentagon still seems reluctant to risk any large-scale casualties on the U.S. side. Of course, that necessarily means far greater non-combatant casualties on the receiving end of our "War on Terror." Hey -- who's counting? (I mean...besides us?)
Anyway...welcome to 2002. I suppose I'm
foolish enough to hope that this year will see a healthy dose of skepticism and
critical thinking gradually mustered against all this sham hyper-patriotism
that's cheerfully being shoved down our throats so we won't think about the
moral bankruptcy of 
the people who presume to own and operate this country in
their own petty interests. After all, we only give comfort to the militarists by
succumbing to hopelessness and despondency. Not this mo-fo.
Muttered Oaths. Out goes the bad air. Giuliani has finally descended from Mount Olympus to join the lucrative lecture circuit where many nasty questions about Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, and others await him, it is devoutly to be hoped.
In goes the good(?) Michael Bloomberg muttered the oath of office and thanked all those responsible for bringing him to power -- the Lincolns, the Jeffersons, the Jacksons, and especially the Franklins.
Be cool.
luv u,
jp
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1/13/2002
Howdy,
Well, it took a week, but the bills from our nearly 2 months of drifting in space have finally come rolling in like so many evil saints...and so have the goons from Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc.
Hey -- we all knew when we started out that this tour wasn't going to be a big money maker, okay? That wasn't why we decided to go. It was the music, man...that's what it's all about here in Big Green-land. So when we came back empty handed, we just shrugged it off. Who needs money, right? Now if we could only get those fuckers at our label to see things that way. (They're still rather attached to the green stuff -- but that's their hang-up, baby.)
Sure, I know. We shouldn't have
played speedball with that cash box. And letting sFshzenKlyrn
take the company credit card for a shopping spree at the
Mall of the Seven Sisters in the Pleiades star cluster....well, that was
somewhat ill-advised. (There's a charge on there from some guy who sold our
Zenite friend fifty kilos of Yak cheese. Then there's that one from M32
prophylactic emporium...) But we're trying to put that all behind us now,
particularly since a contingent of the Indonesian Kopassus Special Forces
Brigade under contract with Hegemonic has taken up residence in our main
courtyard and are making things a bit uncomfortable for us with their precision
guided shoulder-launched munitions. (Translation: they're shooting the shit out
of us!)
The ongoing mortar barrage wouldn't be nearly so inconvenient were it not for the fact that Trevor James Constable and Mitch Macaphee, with the able assistance of our own Dr. Hump, are extremely close to finding a solution to the zero gravity anteroom we have planned for our new lean-to. The periodic crack of exploding shells is enough to break anyone's train of thought, and after a day and a half of this our engineering team threw up its hands. "How can you expect us to work under these conditions?" said Mitch Macaphee, waving a rolled up blueprint at me menacingly.
Trevor James was still
standing over his latest prototype drawing, shaking his head in resignation.
"It's like a jigsaw puzzle, all one color," he muttered. "No
guide to where the pieces fit." Dr. Hump's cerebellum blew six or seven
bubbles into the saline electrolytic suspension that nourishes him. A shell landed
with a thud in the main shop floor. Somewhere, a dog was barking. "It's
like a jigsaw puzzle, all one color," said Trevor James...
After a few hours of this,
Matt came up with the idea of offering our attackers some of the depleted
uranium shells we were stockpiling (involuntarily) for the U.S. Army; this in
lieu of the money we owed Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm. It wasn't
what you might call a good idea, but it was better than the one I had,
which was, in fact, no idea at all. So we drew straws to see which one of us
would approach the bloodthirsty Kopassus Brigade thugs with news of the deal. I
drew the short one. So we 
drew again. I got shorty again. We drew a third time.
I won't say who lost (again!), only that I stomped all over the straws at that
point and, gathering all my courage, did the only thing a man in my shoes could
do -- get sFshzenKlyrn
to go.
Well...he's impervious to explosives, okay?
Anyway, we sent the amazing man from Zenon to negotiate our way out of this siege, and within moments the mortars went silent. sFshzenKlyrn returned holding a picture of someone smiling (I think it may have been Cyril Connolly) -- his subtle way of indicating that all had gone well. And all was peaceful...until they started chucking those depleted uranium shells at us. (I told Matt it was a lousy idea!)
Needless to say, with those depleted
uranium shell casings smoldering all over the place, the old Cheney Hammer Mill
was becoming quite nearly uninhabitable (except for sFshzenKlyrn
, who could burrow through a super nova without breaking a sweat). The decision
was made to move everyone up the road a couple of miles to the massive
industrial complex that generates this web site. It's mostly office space, but
there's room to pitch a sleeping bag or two, and it will simply have to suffice
until we can hire a hazmat team to clear out the Hammer Mill. It's always something,
isn't it?
That's my Bush. War. Recession. Massive layoffs, including 35,000 at Ford just yesterday. $100 billion deficits with nothing to show except some slightly fatter rich folks and a few more useless weapons systems. Can you tell there's a Bush in the White House?
Not
just any old Bush, you understand, but a genuine bomb-chuckin', noose-swingin',
hack-hirin', oil-guzzlin' Texas Bush, whose administration brings fresh
joys daily, like yesterday's recess appointment of Otto Reich, one-time head of
the Office of Public Diplomacy at the Reagan State Department -- a taxpayer
funded source of ludicrous propaganda (see poster, left) to provide cover for
that administration's terrorist wars in Central America. Reich's nomination had
been put on hold in the Senate, partly due to his penchant for misleading
members of that august body back in the Contra war days.
So...now with Enron having collapsed so spectacularly,
the young Warrior-King Dubya's shining armor has been stained with scandal --
bad luck! Now questions about who was invited to Dick Cheney's energy policy
summit are being asked in a somewhat louder voice. And now the ultra-paranoid
Bush damage control machine is in top gear. Just a for 
instance:
to press corps questions about a series of phone calls Enron Chairman Ken Lay
made to various senior administration officials, there was the usual indignant
and terse response. Enron was just warning Secretary O'Neil about potential
problems in the energy sector was the story from the White House. They
were just doing their civic duty. That lasted a day. Next day, we hear that
Enron was fishing for federal intervention with their creditors -- not
surprising, given the amount of money they've poured into Dubya's campaigns over
the years.
Stonewalling can only work so good. Good thing the boy's got those military tribunals. He may need them now.
luv u,
jp
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1/20/2002
G'day, all...
Greetings from a particularly dusty corner in the Art Department of the enormous industrial complex that generates content for www.BigGreenHits.com. After six nights of crashing here, my back is bent like a deadly pretzel, but that beats radiation poisoning any day of the week (and twice on Sunday).
If
this is the first time you've read this ludicrous column, it helps to know that Big
Green's temporary home at the
Cheney Hammer Mill outside Colombo, Sri Lanka, has been rendered temporarily unlivable
by a fairly persistent barrage from elements of Indonesia's dreaded
Kopassus brigade, acting under contract with our label Hegemonic Records
& Worm Farm, Inc., to whom we owe money -- proceeds from our recently
concluded interplanetary tour. Having no other recourse, we were forced to apply
for refugee status here at the BigGreenHits.com
Development Center, at least until the depleted uranium shell casings are
cleared away from the mill.
As inconvenient as it is for us to sleep under the water cooler and brush our teeth over a scummy mop bucket, this at least gives us an opportunity to give you a glimpse of the effort that goes into putting this ambitious web site together. Sound exciting? Folks? HELLO?!!
Let me tell you, it's a considerable undertaking. Why, the energy bills alone are enough to make an Arthur Anderson auditor start shredding papers nervously. Naturally, we have to import our juice from the mainland of the subcontinent, since our island home couldn't possibly generate enough electricity to keep www.BigGreenHits.com imbued with such enormous power. One whole hydroelectric complex is dedicated to the needs of this center, with 3 individual turbines needed to keep just this column online and available 24 hours a day. And then there's our Freakishly Unanswerable Questions. Talk about power hogs!
Luckily, we've got a crack
web development team on the case -- a collective of new media experts who can
handle any demand we put on them. They operate the colossal machines that keep
our hyperlinks running smoothly. They perform the graphic design miracles that
make this site the envy of the music industry. Their due diligence ensures that
this column gets posted every week, on time, rain or shine, flood or pestilence,
in sickness and in health, and so on. They even let sFshzenKlyrn
commandeer their drink cooler so he can store his yak cheese while we're camped
here. Now...how generous is that?
Having spent a few days with them, I feel
I've gotten a more complete sense of how they do their jobs. Matt was fascinated
by the immensely detailed filing system they maintain which of course supplies
their research department with the facts and images that support the highly
reliable news you read right here. There's a place for everything and everything
in its 
place. For instance, we opened the drawer marked "K" and looked
under the section for "Kars." In there we found a large expando-folder
marked "Ford," which was subdivided into a plethora of categories. We
picked one at random -- "piano lessons" -- and searched that folder
for specific images. One envelope was marked "Dung teaches Ford
chopsticks," which sounded interesting, so we opened it and voila! See
how simple it is when you're organized?
In the midst of this journey of personal
discovery, we barely noticed when a representative from our disgruntled label
Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., appeared in the pressman's lounge.
Having exhausted all of their locally-available supplies of ammunition, the rep
was proffering a truce proposal. Our label was willing to forgive any
outstanding non-receivable proceeds from our tour (as well as the substantial
costs of their military operation to extract said proceeds) if we would agree to
release a live album for distribution on Kaztropharius 137b
(where our 
most devoted fan base thrives).
Anxious for any opportunity to stall for time, my band brothers and I agreed to these terms -- though I felt compelled to admit to the rep that any recordings with Tiny Montgomery's distinctive Lowery organ on them would be exempt, since Tiny had abandoned us in the midst of the Kopassus barrage and has since forbade us from using his performances or his likeness on any of our promotional or artistic releases. Sorehead!
Out of curiosity, John asked the rep how Hegemonic
could afford to write off a whopping sum like the $347 we owed them. The rep
told us that the global conglomerate had just landed a sweet deal with a
consortium of American tobacco companies to promote a new more patriotic image
in the wake of the September 11th disaster. Those wily bean counters at
Hegemonic really know what they're doing, because the program they developed is
just a recycled ad campaign from 25 years ago, which just happens to depict the
Twin Towers in all their 
original glory. The rep explained that by equating
smoking with patriotism, the public might forget that cigarettes kill several
times more people each year than were killed in the WTC bombings. Sounds like a
good plan to me. I'm wondering if they can sell the same idea to Detroit. Sweet!
Now that we've signed the deal for the live CD, the Hegemonic rep said he would hire a hazmat team to clean out the Cheney Hammer Mill so that we could get back to...to...to whatever it was we were doing. I suspect he's just going to put those Kopassus boys in pressure suits and have them pick up after themselves, but in any case, at least the siege is over and we're back in business again. High time, too.
Pretzel Logic. Did you hear the one about Dubya and the killer snack? Man! There's only so much stupid you can conceal behind endless repetition of 3 or 4 pat sentences and tightly controlled public appearances. I wonder if the boy's on a soft diet now? (How long before we hear about his being ambushed by a bowl of oatmeal?)
I must admit -- when they first offered an
account of what had happened between the pretzel and the President, I felt
certain it was a crock just because of the cagey way they handle everything,
giving either way too little detail or way too much. Too little and it seems
like they're hiding something; too much and you're almost sure they're making it
all up. I mean, was that old devil beer involved in any way? (Goes great with
pretzels!) After all, Enron had just tanked all over Dubya's fairy-tale
presidency. So did he get tanked in response? Just wondering...
Meanwhile, back at the posse...the boys still haven't rounded up Osama bin Laden or Mullah Omar, but they have decided to move on to the Philippines and get all snarled up in that little regional conflict. Maybe bin Laden is holed up in Las Vegas, like that tabloid said a few weeks ago. Or maybe he and Tom Ridge are doing a time-share in Barbados or somewhere. I mean, has anybody seen Tom Ridge lately? You don't expect to see Cheney, but Ridge...did they forget about him?
Maybe he and the Homeland Security posse are on the trail of that nasty "Rold Gold" gang. (He's got the right name for it).
luv u,
jp
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1/27/2002
Velcome,
Perhaps I've been sleeping under the water cooler far too long, but I'm beginning to develop an appreciation for the Spartan pleasures of our temporary abode at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now undergoing intensive hazmat decontamination as per our truce agreement with our label, Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc. It's all a question of perspective, friends. (My bed may have been nothing more than a discarded peg board, but it was a bed of sorts...and mine own.)
Aside from that, camping out at the
headquarters of www.BigGreenHits.com
has wrought havoc with our meticulously 
maintained health regimen. Take Matt,
for instance. Over the past decade and a half, I've never seen him depart from
his crude breakfast of wheat germ and wood chips, garnished with pine saw dust
and a healthy dollop of rubber cement as a sweetener. Just yesterday morning,
after about ten days' exposure to the licentiousness of our Web designers, I saw
him dunking a Persian into a cup of cheap coffee. (No, he didn't eat the
oversized confection, but dunking is the first step down that evil road.) I
myself have more than once succumbed to the dubious pleasures of the
Web-designer's canteen. (Those overstuffed deli sandwiches are hard to put
down.) John's been living on sponge cake.
Remarkably enough, our usually insatiable Zenite guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has shown tremendous restraint amongst the towering stacks of empty calories, though Trevor James Constable tells me sFshzenKlyrn borrowed one of his contraptions to draw the bioplasmic energy out of a Philly cheese steak. So much for will power!
The upshot of all this, of course, is that
we are all gradually losing our Olympian physiques -- a fate worse than
obscurity for MEN in show business. Just as pop music women must all have the
same bodily proportions down to the micron, we MEN, to remain relevant, must
maintain a punishing standard of physical excellence. With all this cheap 
comfort food lying around, we started getting very soft (except for sFshzenKlyrn,
who was very soft -- even gaseous -- to begin with).
When the problem reached a point of noticeability from space, one of us -- I think it was John -- got hold of our old friend Gung-Ho, who was preparing for a little trip to the Philippines, hoping to squeeze off a few for God and country. We asked him to take a few days' sabbatical from his latest imperial adventure to give us some pointers on getting back into shape, which he was only too glad to do.
With the help of three particularly
obliging assistants, Gung-Ho put us through the paces of a vigorous isometric
exercise regime -- one that made us grunt in unison for the first time since our
Saturn gig. Pretty soon, Trevor James and Mitch Macaphee were joining in along
with us. Even Dr. 
Hump started bobbing up and down in his jar of spirit, blowing
hypothalamus bubbles in time with our cadence. You know, I've always despised
sports, but these team-building exercises are contagious. Now I want to do
EVERYTHING in lock-step with about 20 other people. In fact, when our third
exercise session was over, I kept right on involuntarily aping the movements of
Gung-Ho's lead instructor as he put his dumbbells into his duffle bag, rubbed a
towel over his head, checked his watch, gave me a dirty look, told me to stop,
shook his fist at me, called me a "big fat fucker," pounded me into
the earth's crust...
That snapped me out of it. It also
snapped me into casualty for a couple of hours. Now I've got a cartoon-like cap
of bandages on my head, and I can't 
participate in isometrics for a couple of
weeks...but that's okay. I get plenty of exercise lifting those overstuffed deli
sandwiches. (Mmmmm-boy!)
War On Skepticism. "There's a man goin' 'round, takin' names," sang Leadbelly. He might have been singing it to anyone who criticizes the glorious crusade against terror, particularly those who teach at publicly-owned universities. One organization affiliated with Dick Cheney's saw-toothed bride went so far as to compile the names and offending comments of over one hundred academics who were overheard criticizing the "war" effort. Whether we are witnessing a full return to the COINTELPRO-era harassment of dissidents by the FBI remains to be seen. What is certainly happening is a nation-wide resort to a kind of armchair "patriotism" that says "I'm all for war, so long as it involves no inconvenience for me, personally." Like a made-for-television World War, this conflict glosses over all of the nasty parts, keeps it simple (good vs. evil), and makes for enjoyable, cost-free family entertainment. Who can argue with that?
If polling numbers can be believed, it seems to follow generally that the less you are at risk, the more gung-ho you are. Take the draft (please). A vast majority of people over draft age are crazy about the idea. Support drops off rather dramatically amongst the (young) people who would be required to report -- substantially less than half support the idea. And according to some recent polling by Zogby, only about 3% of young people want to volunteer for military service in this time of supposed national crisis. I suspect if the 45% or so who want the draft were actually subjected to it, their attachment to the idea would quickly approach that 3% mark. And understandably so.
But if we're so gung-ho, why do we leave
the fighting to someone else? Really....what does it mean to support a conflict
you're not willing to pitchfork your own well-being into, forgoing all
plans for the future? That's a bridge too far for most of us, even in this age
of high-tech, impersonal warfare and conflicts so fantastically lopsided in our
favor that the greatest 
danger is
presented by our own munitions.
Again, the key to the prevailing American mindset is keeping it simple. No complicated explanations or inquiries. No troublesome entanglements to interfere with the shining path of consumerism. Not even a rudimentary knowledge of one's own history. Just sit back and let the poor fight your war for you. And that mass of humanity in the underdeveloped world, looking back at us through the chain-link barriers -- their lives are meaningless, their suffering unknown to us, not because the information is unavailable, but because it is simply too complicated for most of us to want to bother with.
Not a pretty picture. Time to start painting a better one.
luv u,
jp