NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(June '01)
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6/3/2001
G'morning...
It's raining moorhen and mongooses here in Sri Lanka, as the saying goes. This monsoon-like weather only adds weight to the morning-after syndrome I'm suffering after having pounded out rot-gut cover songs for weekend revelers last night at a local watering hole -- just another way to help make ends meet in this lean time.
We're all doing our bit to keep out the
rain while that stubborn mongoose family remains in possession of our beloved
lean-to. Of course, you 
remember
our ill-fated balloon ride scheme, a well-intentioned brainstorm of John's.
Well, after our maiden voyage left sFshzenKlyrn
and yours truly washed ashore, John was convinced we needed to employ more
modern technology in our sight-seeing venture. So he acquired a second-hand
bi-plane from a local scrap metal dealer and had sFshzenKlyrn
paint some attractive signs, but
otherwise kept the unintentionally destructive Zenite guitarist away from our
new tourist conveyance. Smart move.
Matt, on the other hand, has busied himself with more terrestrial pursuits. His scheme for fleecing the tourists has taken the form of overpriced tours of local historic landmarks...on horseback. (The tourists, not the landmarks.) This took a little preparation, as Matt is not an equestrian by training or experience. He is, however, a very fair-minded man, and resolved early on to obtain the horse's full cooperation in this new venture.
First he tried explaining
the basics of capitalism, so that the horse (Mr. Tedd) would have some notion of
why he was being asked to carry irritable, overweight German businessmen from
place to place. That didn't go so well. 
Mr.
Tedd kept insisting that the reputed philosophical father of capitalism Adam
Smith had an Enlightenment sensibility and had reviled the powerful for their
"vile maxim" of "all for ourselves, and nothing for anyone
else." He told Matt that such a man would never condone forced labor of
this kind. Frustrated, Matt reverted to the crude tactics of an 19th Century
southern team driver, but as of this writing, the new approach had not yet won
Mr. Tedd's cooperation.
What have I been doing all
this time? Well, it's like I told you. Pounding out-of-tune spinets for spare
change. Spending weekdays at the reclaimed produce stand. Oh, and hawking old
promo pictures of Big Green
during our 
more
flush days...before signing with the pirates at Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc.
One shot has been particularly popular amongst the wash-outs at the British
Consulate in Colombo -- a rare photo of us with sFshzenKlyrn
during our last terrestrial tour, taken with
one of our most enthusiastic fans (Ms. Elgin Marbles, center). As
you can see, the guitar hero from Zenon was just as radioactive in those days as
he is today. And doesn't that sepia toning do justice to his fine
features?
So as you can see, we're all doing what we can to dig ourselves out of this Big Green hole we're in, so we can get back to what's really important. Digging ourselves out of the next big hole.
You
Are Number Six. Not all is gloom and doom, of course. Remarkably enough, our
slap-dash single 41
Times has risen from the
dead and climbed to the top of the Soundclick.com
acoustic/folk
chart...topping off at number six, and hovering around the top twenty
generally. (Overall ranking for the last week in May was #8). This amongst a
field of about 500 songs by signed and unsigned artists.
We parked 41 Times at Soundclick about a year ago, and had assumed that it had run its course into obscurity, as it has elsewhere. Luckily, Canadian Singer/Songwriter and Big Green friend Brett Service gave us a nudge to let us know the song was in the Soundclick top ten. Hey -- it's not exactly the Billboard Hot 100, but I'll take it. And I encourage you to take it, as well...because it's free. You can get the MP3 file at Soundclick or mp3.com. Or if you want a free cassette, email your address to info@biggreenhits.com and I'll send you a copy.
Of
course, we owe this minor triumph to our old pal Rudy Giuliani, without whose
brownshirt policing policies this record would never have been made. Rudy's a
regular one-man Ford Foundation for aspiring artists, providing ample grist for
troubadours, generating wheelbarrows full of free publicity for modern artists
he considers "offensive" in some warped religious sense. I've been
thinking about sending Rudy a copy of 2000
YEARS TO CHRISTMAS in hopes
that he would blow a gasket and tell the world about us and our musical screed
against Christianity.
That's all we would need. Then it's Billboard Hot 100, here we come!
luv u,
jp
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6/10/2001
Avast...
Yes, I'm reverting to late-show pirate speak -- the predictable result of some of these hare-brained money-making schemes my colleagues and I continue to stagger through without success. If it keeps up like this, there won't be any stupid ideas left in the world. (What will the Dubya administration do then?)
How bad is bad? Let's see. John finally got his bi-plane scenic tour venture in the air, but I can't say that it went any better than our foray into ballooning. He scraped up a paying customer -- a lanky tourist in a straw hat who introduced himself as Grover H. Pendergast III, a native of Borneo we were told. Pendergast handed our John the 25 rupee "short tour" fee and our intrepid partner fired up the old bicycle engine and got his salvage-yard crate airborne.
John was handling his aircraft with
characteristic aplomb and his usual measure of concentration. He brought her up
to cloud canopy altitude, then 
leveled
her off, rolling slightly starboard to afford his passenger a clear view of the
first site on his greater Colombo historic itinerary -- the subcontinent's first
Seven-Eleven convenience store. John then turned to deliver an edifying
narration to his customer, only to find himself speaking to an empty chair. He
had so totally immersed himself in the execution of a perfect takeoff, he'd left
his first (and only) paying customer standing on the tarmac.
Turns out Pendergast was really an official with the Sri Lankan government; an undercover investigator for their equivalent of the FAA. (I should have seen through that Borneo story right off!) When John landed, Pendergast confiscated his joystick and goggles, then filled the plane's cockpit with expired luncheon meat -- a pretty effective tactic for keeping people away, though it had the opposite effect on sFshzenKlyrn, who made a bit of a meal out of it. In fact, he ate the whole plane. So much for that little venture.
I'm sorry to say that
Matt's entrepreneurial experiment with the Mr. Tedd (the philosopher-horse) also
failed to cross the profitability threshold, if you 
will.
Try as he might -- incentives, threats, ugly faces -- Matt just couldn't get Mr.
Tedd on board with the idea of renting himself out as a pleasure vehicle. Only
when Matt told the horse that he would be carrying members of an
anarcho-syndicalist collective from home to a self-managed worksite did Mr. Tedd
agree to let Matt's customers ride. However, in as much as Mr. Tedd is an
anti-industrialist and believes only agricultural work can be truly creative and
liberating, he kept carrying Matt's joyriders into a local cornfield. This, the
customers felt, was not a ride worth paying for. Another one down.
For my own part, I haven't
had a lot of luck selling old promo pictures, 
though
we had hoped to find some renewed interest in Big Green memorabilia in light of
the remarkable resurrection of our single 41
Times on the Soundclick.com
acoustic charts. This week we've bounced about the top 20, from #15 up
to #6, back to #9, then creeping up again. What a roller coaster! It's a bit
surprising for a 2-year-old folk song that was written & recorded in a
hurry, then left to mildew on various servers scattered throughout the internet.
Something (or someone) has been keeping it afloat, with almost zero
encouragement from us or from our fair-weather label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc.
Hey -- if it helps to get people thinking seriously about racial profiling and
military police tactics, I don't care if I sell a single dog-eared photo from
our 1990 Mausoleum Tour. (As desirable as they are....)
"Aye" for an Eye. It
appears at this writing that no one is going to intervene in the pending
execution of one Timothy McVeigh, U.S. military-trained bomber of the federal
building in Oklahoma City. (Right tactics...wrong target. If the Murrah building
had been in Baghdad, they'd be giving him a medal right now.) The Federal death
penalty, having been 
ignominiously
re-invigorated by the Clinton Administration, will soon receive a badly needed
precedent in the judicial killing of McVeigh. This will open the way a
Texas-style bonanza of Federal executions.
News coverage has been, well, predictable. I heard a commercial radio news broadcast last night concentrating with morbid fascination on the logistics -- reporting that McVeigh will "lose his telephone rights" after that evening, that there's "no word yet" on what his last meal will be, that he can have something brought in from a local restaurant "so long as the cost doesn't exceed $20," and so on.
Little attention is paid to the exact nature of "lethal injection," and the fact that it is administered improperly perhaps 40 percent of the time, taking the condemned as long as 45 minutes to die. The newsletter Counterpunch recently provided some insight on the cruelty of this practice and on its questionable legality. Worth reading, though the corporate media prefer the more entertaining "reality television" spin on this issue. Sick.
luv u,
jp
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6/17/2001
Awake!
Riki tiki tavi...mongoose is gone. Or should I say, mongoose are gone?
Well,
just when we had reached the point of despair in our efforts to pay off the
enormous debt we had incurred during and after our brief (and unhappy) tenure in
the Dubya Administration, this momentous news came over the tin horn and string
contraption we've been using for a telephone: our one-time military advisor Gung
Ho had gone on a recon mission over by the lean-to and reported the place empty.
The mongoose family had abandoned the shed in advance of the impending rainy
season. (Smart move.)
This was welcome news indeed following the collapse of John's bi-plane tourism venture (a federal indictment is pending) and the abject failure of Matt's "history on horseback" enterprise (thanks to Mr. Tedd's refusal to submit his equine self to wage slavery). The used vegetable stand had turned out to be the only money maker for Big Green over these grim weeks, and then only because we were picking up the produce for free--and when I say "picking up," I mean off the road. (Don't tell our customers!)
Needless to say, as soon as I put down the
tin horn we scrambled over to our beloved domicile whose interior we had not
seen since the 
Clinton
era. It was, of course, necessary to cut through the connecting yards of the
modular housing that those nefarious mongooses had constructed in concentric
rings around the lean-to during our absence.
Man, did those fuckers ever trash the place! Matt's room was probably the worst -- they made a beaded doorway out of snake rattles and replaced his Adirondack chair with some kind of overstuffed menace that looks like Barney the Dinosaur. Momma mongoose had made short work of the kitchen, as well. The room was gutted and my beloved Viking stove replaced with a black marble-topped center food prep island. (Some big fat doofus was standing there next to a stack of empty pizza boxes, dipping bread into a boiling crock of spaghetti sauce.) The whole first floor of the lean-to has been refitted with recessed lighting and slide-dimmers. I'm telling you, it's enough to make even Joann Leibler puke.
It was then that I realized the full
gravity of what had befallen our dear homestead. Those mongooses had done more
than merely redecorated it. With their extensive media connections, they managed
to put our 
lean-to
on Designer Challenge, and then chose the worst out of three
possible interior decorators to do the redesign! And because they wanted a
"retro-suburban look" inside and out, they hired an army of
contractors to come in and build thousands of ticky tacky houses! Panicked, we
left it to Gung Ho to set things straight. In retrospect, that was probably a
mistake, as his solution was a little over the top. But it did clear away some
of those pesky prefab double-wides, with only minor blast effects and a very
tolerable level of residual radiation (something sFshzenKlyrn
was quite pleased about -- nuclear explosions work like an antacid in his ample
extra-terrestrial gut). We took the Edward Teller-approved precaution of
standing behind a tree during the actual explosion. Worked like a charm. (Anyone
seen my retinas?)
Whoever said "to destroy is creative" has probably seen her/his share of home decorating shows. I think Gung Ho may have set a new standard in this regard, and for this...we thank him. Now back to work!
Rank Has Its Dividends. Got your income tax refund check yet? Me neither...but it's coming, folks! And there'll be some ma-honking savings down the road for a few lucky contestants in our game show economy -- or so head quizmaster George Dubya has promised. We've got a special dividend for those folks in the top 1% of wage earners -- a whopping 38% of the Dubya tax cut flows directly to you lucky contestants! Hey -- how's the air up there? Ssssweet!
What
do we have for the cabinet, Johnny? Dick Cheney, Come on down! You made a
modest $36 million last year -- at that level your Dubya tax savings would be
$1.7 million. No more goin' Dutch with Lynne -- now you can pick up the tab!
Paul O'Neil, Come on down! With earnings of at least $60 million last
year, your divvy this year would be in the neighborhood of $3.2 million. Comes
in handy around the holidays! Donny Rumsfeld, Come on down! Don't be so
glum that your income tax savings would be less than Paul's and Dick's (only
about $600,000 on $17.3M income) -- because you've got nine-figure assets, you
stand to reap nine-figure savings in our special Estate Tax Repeal bonus
round!
Of course, in every game there has to be some losers. Like the 21% of Americans who will get no relief at all. But hell -- they don't have much money to begin with. What would they do with it, anyway?
(For a more fullsome review of the savings Bush cabinet members would stand to reap under the new tax game, check out this chart at The Nation online and the accompanying article. Then complain. Loudly.)
luv u,
jp
P.S. -- 41 Times has been at number eight all week on the acoustic charts at www.Soundclick.com. With a bullet! (Forty-one of them.)
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6/24/2001
Heeeeey...
Gung Ho's solution worked, though it'll have cost us a bundle once the smoke clears. Seems you can go home again, no matter what anybody tells you. So long as you're willing to pay the price.
The
"price" we've paid for returning to our beloved lean-to has been
twofold. First, there's the question of rebuilding the place. A veteran of the
massive counterinsurgency campaigns in Vietnam (see photo), Gung Ho found it
necessary to incinerate the neighborhood in order to save it. Unfortunately, the
resulting conflagration consumed what was left of our recently-vacated domicile.
And while we're grateful for Gung Ho's assistance, his liberal application of
jellied gasoline and high explosives has created something of a clean-up problem
for us. It isn't so much that the fragments of our belongings have been flung
far afield by the blast. It's more the fact that they now radiate a temperature
of 467o Kelvin that makes piecing our lives back together a
challenge.
Still, they're only possessions. It's the contaminated air that's getting up my nose. I hate to seem picky, but it helps to be able to breathe while you're picking up heavy, molten objects and trying to reconstitute them. Gung Ho had assured us that the thermonuclear device he used to clear out the mongoose-built subdivision was of the most modern design available at the arms fair. "Minimum rads, maximum burst potential," he informed us before the detonation, and yet here we are a week later and the entire neighborhood is still shrouded in a miasma of plutonium-charged vapor. Very distressing.
So
we've had to adjust our lifestyle, somewhat. To say nothing of our wardrobe! And
while the surplus respiration devices supplied by Gung Ho tend only to improve
my appearance, they make Matt and John look like mutant pachyderms on radical
low-carb diets. Or expatriate mosquito-men from the planet Antrovatruskus 12.
Freakish! (I am thinking of capturing some of our garden hose-enhanced breathing
sounds for use on the next album...that would be so cool.)
Hey -- all this carping makes me sound ungrateful. Believe me, I'm not! We've got our lean-to back...or fragments of it, anyway. We've got our neighborhood back -- no trace of those ugly ticky-tacky houses. And that horrible redecorating job left by the mongooses (and the folks at Designer Challenge) is now just an unpleasant memory.
Of course, with the
lean-to now leaning decidedly "fro" and a massive clean-up underway,
we've had to depend to some degree on the largess of our surviving neighbors for
help and sustenance. Matt's been sleeping over at our neighbor's treehouse,
where we stayed last year in the wake of our 
interplanetary
tour. John found himself a hollowed-out piece of ground back in the
garden, using cardboard for cover. My arrangements are more similar to John's,
except for the cardboard part. (Q: How do I keep the rain out? A: What
rain?) Meals have been a challenge, though sFshzenKlyrn
seems to have found himself a solution, staking out a permanent place in the
chow line at the local Russian Orthodox church. (They appear to have accepted
him, though he does tend to make their pirogies glow.)
It's always something. But this whole ordeal has given us a unique opportunity (or nearly unique, anyway...) to wipe the slate clean and start fresh. And isn't that what Big Green is all about, anyway? Isn't it? No...this isn't a rhetorical device. I'm asking! If you've got an answer, email it to jperry@biggreenhits.com. I'm dying to know.
Mail Drum. Well, I promised you folks another swipe at the old mail bag. Never let it be said that I left my readers disappointed. Wait...wait...Come back here and read these!!
That's
better. The fact is, we don't really have a mail bag anymore, because
that was incinerated by Gung Ho along with the rest of our commie pad and a few
local trade union leaders he had some grudge against. Be that as it may, we've
replaced our traditional mail bag with leak-proof barrels designed to
contain the most toxic reviews ever formulated by ordinary listeners. (We keep
all reviews by professional critics encased in a concrete bunker at the
bottom of the Bay of Bengal.)
Anyway, here's a little nugget from a listener of ours at Garageband.com...a fellow named "buckybradley" from a place called "Minnepaolis, Minnesota," who reviewed our song Strange Christmas:
stranger than strange. it seems to be trying way too hard. Special Award: Stupidest Song I've Ever Heard
Hey, buck...when you're right, you're right! We are trying wa-ay-ay too hard on that one. And we've got a "Special Award" for you -- a copy of our hardworking CD, which you can have for free if you give us your address in "Minnepaolis".
Here's
another Garageband.com--guided missive from a person named "nehein"
who says of Pagan Christmas:
confused
.. verry confused --
please .. it sounds like the late
Now, "nehein"...you're being far too generous here. "Confused," yes...but not "verry confused" -- that's more than we could have managed! It's a good thing Matt put a male vocal on this one. (I, for one, told him to try a woman's voice.) Thanks, "nehein"...and no fear about the day job. It quit me!
Well...guess we'll put the lid back on for another month. Talk to you soon.
luv u,
jp
P.S. -- Anyone who cares to observe the mercurial fortunes of our single 41 Times may do so at www.soundclick.com in the Acoustic/Folk charts. All you need is a Windows media player and a mouse to click with. Hurrrry!!!