Manson rampage than Helter Skelter (which is just a raucous song
about a carnival ride). I've mentioned this before -- think about it.
"Crimson"... blood! "Clover".... on the graves of the
dead! "Over and over"... many dead!NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(June '06)
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06/4/06
Anchors aweigh.
Tell me what I say, right now. Or rather, I'll tell you
what I say right now. And do it right now. See how much meaning there is in even
the simplest, most emotive pop lyrics? Just dripping with meaning... like Crimson
and Clover... the song that, I believe, could have more logically inspired
the Manson rampage than Helter Skelter (which is just a raucous song
about a carnival ride). I've mentioned this before -- think about it.
"Crimson"... blood! "Clover".... on the graves of the
dead! "Over and over"... many dead!
So I say unto you - beware those who read too deeply into pop lyrics.
Anyway, what the hell, things are a little disheveled here in Big Green land (so what's new?). Seems we've gained a Hammer Mill but lost a ... well... lost a wall of the Hammer Mill. A major supporting wall. Not a good thing from a structural engineering perspective, no sir. Our overzealous neighbor Gung-Ho really knows how to put a hole in something. (And if we hadn't been in the midst of our eviction order, that something might have been us.) With a daunting clean-up and repair job ahead of us -- to say nothing of the effort we will need to expend staying ahead of the legal consequences of Gung-Ho's bombing run -- we are giving serious thought to another interplanetary romp, spreading our message of love throughout the galaxy through the universal language of song. You know, on the lamb again.
What about the album? Well, we're close to finished
with that sucker. Just doing some backing vocals, incidental instrumental
parts... then it's mixing time. So I think we can afford to take the old
mastering deck on the road with us. Only trouble is, Mixmaster Marvin (my
personal robot assistant) will probably be staying behind on this trip to
oversee the reconstruction work at the Cheney Hammer Mill (and to soak up all
the love from the local constabulary as they arrive with torches, hoping to put
our heads on pikes). Don't know how that's going to work, exactly. We may need
to have the man-sized tuber sit in for some of the mixing. He can actually push
those faders pretty well with his larger roots. (It's the ears I'm a little
worried about. Namely, he ain't got any.)
Hey, we're used to just feeling our way along around
here, anyway. You know that, right? That's what drives us creatively... grim
happenstance and the usual assortment of animal needs. For Matt and I, that
means assorted 
vegetables and a hard roll. For John, a carton of cottage cheese
(or "cowboy food" as it's known in this manor). For Mitch Macaphee, a
bottle of Riesling and a live circuit board, or one of those Frankenstein-era
arc generators with a big spark flying off the end. See? It's a little different
for everyone.
So next week, expect to see us packing our belongings into the battered spacecraft we use as an interstellar RV. Something to look forward to, eh? Let's just hope the local constables are a little slow on the uptake. (It usually takes a week or two for them to get around to discovering that we're responsible for some disaster.) 'Nuff said.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Brutal Truth. The story of Haditha
is finally emerging in its ghastly entirety, just the kind of tale this sort of
conflict inevitably produces. A war of hostile occupation, fueled by a
generalized distaste and even hatred of the people being occupied; a war with no
discernible strategy or end point, in which soldiers are sent on patrol after
pointless deadly patrol until their hopelessness and anger tears them apart from
within. This is a brutal act, but it's enormously easy for someone like me to
sit safe at home and moralize -- if I were there on patrol, I don't know what
the fuck I'd be doing, and let's face it, neither would you. We are all
responsible for this crime, because we have been unwilling to restrain our
government from 
committing
the larger crime of invading Iraq and compounding that crime with the evils that
have proceeded from the occupation. I say "unwilling" because we are
free to make our voices heard. If we demanded an end to this war, it would be
over.
One of our biggest problems as a society, in my opinion, is that we let ourselves off the hook too easily. It's part and parcel of the prevailing trend in modern American politics -- separate the voters from the costs of major policy decisions and you will gain their tacit support. This is especially true of anything involving our all-volunteer military. For the first time ever (I believe), our forces have been deployed in a major conflict for an extended period of time without the support of a national mobilization. In essence, the money to fund the deployment is entirely borrowed -- another first. We are just barely aware that there's a war going on, and yet the administration, members of Congress, and political pundits intone Churchillian rhetoric about the long struggle ahead, etc., etc., as if to sell the American public on a flattering image of itself as a defiant, heroic people facing incredible odds (like Britain during the blitz) without the inconvenience of, well, any actual sacrifice... unless you are among the unlucky minority with family members in the military.
And
when the inevitable happens -- when it becomes clear that our soldiers are
cracking under the stress of multiple tours of duty and shooting civilians like
Cheney shoots caged quail -- how do we react? Well, the military begins by
blaming the messengers, calling the journalists who follow the stories traitors
and dupes of al Qaeda, etc. After about 3 or 4 months of that, when they're
forced by mounting evidence to admit to some portion of the ugly truth, it
becomes the individual soldiers' fault. They then apply the dubious remedies of
courts martial and sensitivity training slide shows, while the administration
and its various flacks encourage us to look at the bigger picture (it took an
endless war to get conservatives talking about "context"). But there's
one thing Bush's cousin Tony Snow won't tell us at the daily briefing -- we
are more responsible for those deaths than the soldiers who pull the trigger.
This is the result of a criminal foreign policy, and because we enjoy the
unparalleled freedoms of American democracy, we must also accept the
responsibility for what our elected officials get us into.
Our soldiers have very few options. We have many. If we don't want them to kill, we should bring them the fuck home. Now.
luv u,
jp
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06/11/06
Say what?
Six-eleven. Hell, that's 9-11 turned upside-down, isn't it? Spooky. Strange coincidences abound in the land of the paranoid - a foggy and foreboding place if ever there was one... and there WAS one. Six-eleven. Our fodder who art in heaven.
Guess we've got that old
travelin' blues. Ain't that
how the song goes? (There seem to be a lot of old songs on my mind these days, I
must admit. Please forgive me.) Anyway, you'd have them too if somebody
blew a big hole in YOUR squat-house. Crikey, the whole place smells like
charcoal and old hammer-stock splinters. Old anti-Lincoln can't even make
himself a plate of anti-matter toaster waffles without nearly yakking all over
his stew. Intolerable, I tell you. Just the sort of situation that would drive
normally reasonable derelicts such as ourselves to thoughts of the road... of
performing before throngs of adoring fans (many of which have two or even THREE
heads)... of visiting exotic ports of call in undiscovered galaxies. Of...
of.... of escape, damn it, escape!
Turns out that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is
not all that keen on the idea of being left behind to handle little tasks
like... oh.... rebuilding the mill, buying off the constables, dodging any stray
shells from Gung-Ho's proving grounds (I believe the Cheney Hammer Mill may now
be listed as a legitimate practice target). Minor stuff, but he's balking... at
least to the extent that his programming will allow. 
Robots of Marvin's general
classification don't frown, exactly, but they do have subtle ways of letting you
know that they are not too pleased with what you're demanding of them. Lookit --
when professor Mitch Macaphee builds a robot, it's bound to be more than just a
soulless servo-mechanism. Our Marvin has feelings, you know? And opinions, lots
of opinions. Only thing is, he's programmed to be somewhat reticent, in an
automatonic sort of way. (I keep thinking one of these days he's just going to
EXPLODE. Or join "Captured
By Robots" for real.)
Hey, you can't make everybody happy. Neither should you
try, in my book. (I have a book? News to me.) Still, Marvin is an important part
of our ludicrous entourage, and as such, he is due more than a minimum of
consideration. Truth be told, he has a substantial fan base in his own right. It
certainly rivals our own, particularly in those out-of-the-way corners of the
galaxy run entirely by robots, cyborgs, or the like. I don't think it's entirely
clear to them that Marvin is not a 
musician, as such, though he does pick up an
instrument every once in a while - banjos, guitars, drums, the occasional
bagpipes, etc. As you might imagine, out in the great beyond there isn't always
a whole lot of difference between holding an instrument and actually doing
something with it. (Yeah, that's right. It's a lot like planet Earth.)
Anyway, so once we've got the rent-a-spacecraft in shape, we can start thinking about little details like, where the hell are we going? and what the hell are we going to do for money? One thing at a time. Don't ask more than that of us, my friends. Too damn taxing.
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Irony: still dead. Somebody - I
don't quite remember who - opined recently that irony might still be with us,
albeit just barely. Well, I'm here to tell you that rumors of its demise have
not been greatly exaggerated. I'm referring of course to Rumsfeld's Asia trip.
Yes, the "Omega Man" of the Bush administration visited the region
with which he is truly obsessed - more so, I'll wager, than with the middle
east. Recall that prior to the 9/11 attacks, there was that somewhat exciting
stand-off with China over one of our spy planes, covered
with typical disdain right here in Notes. Rumsfeld is a poster child for
that faction of the Republican party that still has the 1954 map of Red China
tacked up on its situation room wall; the folks that fueled the Wen Ho Lee spy
controversy during the Clinton administration, which resulted in a bogus
trial-by-media of Lee, incarceration, and subsequent retraction of the most
serious allegations. (I forget which 
genius
it was, but one Congressional Republican was so worked up in a lather about the
Chinese menace that he fulminated over Clinton state department nominee Bill Lan
Lee for some time without realizing he had the wrong Chinese guy.)
While in Singapore, Rumsfeld made some ludicrous statement about China's military spending, which I believe comes in at around $35 billion U.S. per annum. Last I looked, that's about eight percent of what we spend annually, if you leave out the intelligence budget and various extras. It should surprise no one that China is spending more on defense than it used to - this is a quite predictable response to our massive increases in military expenditure, particularly our stated intention to deploy "missile defense" (which, in truth, amounts to an offensive capability) along the Pacific rim. There is also a little thing called the Bush doctrine, which incorporates "preventive" (i.e. unprovoked) war and the development of a new generation of nuclear weapons. This has got Russia spending more on its military capabilities as well, which provides yet another stimulus for the Chinese, provoking India and Pakistan to follow suit. You can't really call this an arms race, since we're so far in the lead... but it's something similar.
As
remarkable as this East Asia performance may have been, never has irony been so
sorely missed as in the wake of Zarqawi's death. There was Rumsfeld at the
podium, earnestly commenting on how, in all the world, no man had been
responsible for the deaths of more innocent civilians than the late Jordanian
jihadist. I could only ask myself, how many people watching this are thinking
the same thing I'm thinking? That, in terms of lives extinguished, no jihadist
on Earth holds a candle to the rap sheet of mssrs. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
partners. That's another league entirely. A member of Rumsfeld's press entourage
described the defense secretary's mood on the plane as ebullient and optimistic
about the future of the Iraq enterprise. No surprise there - visions of sweets
and flowers still dancing in his tiny head. Back in the real world, it seems to
me this execution will have two effects on the insurgency. For the foreign
jihadists, it will provide a new martyr - a rank far higher than that of
regional commander, to be sure. And for the vast majority (85%-90%) that
comprise the native Iraqi resistance, it removes what can only be described as a
major obstacle to their success - a mad dog bent on killing civilians, one they
themselves would ultimately have had to put down.
So someone has something to cheer about today. The question is, who?
luv u,
jp
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06/18/06
Achtung....
No baby on that. I'm off pop songs this week, friends. Had it. Mention one and it's with me all day, like those little transmitters they plant in your head when you're in the mental institution. You know what I'm talking about, don't you? No? Where did I hear that? Well.... let's just say a little voice told me.
Okinawa! (Another island entirely.) We are getting
closer to the goal of launching our ad-hoc interplanetary tour. How much closer?
Well... I've got a hat, a baseball hat, and it says Big
Green Tour '06 on it. And we've got suitcases. Hey, it's closer than
we were LAST week, okay? What am I, a machine? That's Marvin (my personal robot
assistant)'s role, not mine. For those of you who have been wondering
(particularly you fans in the greater cyborg community), we have relented on the
topic of bringing Marvin along on the tour. We simply can't do it without him
and expect the kinds of flies... um... crowds we've been drawing the last
few times out. Looks like the task of running interference back on old terra
firma will have to fall to someone else. Man sized tuber, perhaps? Hmmmmm....
No, seriously - we have made progress. For one thing,
we've settled on a name for our tour. It's going to be called BIG
GREEN'S GET
OUT OF TOWN FAST! SUMMER TOUR 2006... for obvious reasons. There are also some
less than obvious reasons, like our perpetual need for additional cash. Can't
beat the revenue of an interplanetary tour, especially when - like us - you
remain unhappily obscure on your home planet. (Just barely moving the needle
down here on Earth, friends - I'll be frank with you. And don't call me Frank.)
And with all these (ahem) unexpected rebuilding costs, damn it, man! That
scaffolding is going to be up for months on end. Do you have any idea how much
masons charge in our neck of the woods? They have to import all the bricks from
Madagascar, for 
chrissake. We need to make hay, gentlemen, make hay. Cause as
we've learned from Edward G. Robinson during Israel's captivity in Egypt...
can't make bricks without straw. Nyeaah. Where's your Moses now....?
So there you have it. Don't delude yourself that we are
only in this for the sake of "art", or that we make music for reasons
of "peace" and "love" and "pastrami". No, look...
the utilities don't take crystal necklaces in lieu of a check every month, no
matter how hard we try to polish them up and make them look nice. No dice! Money
makes the world go round. (Pop music again!) Anyway, like anyone else who wears
pants and eats sandwiches, we gotta have it, and if we can't find it here on the
good oit, we've got to go out in space and rake it up. Necessity breeds
invention - we have posi-Lincoln inventing the tour for us right now, working
the phones, sending interstellar e-mails to 
the usual venues, mailing out
contracts. He's actually pretty good at it, though he does tend to write
everything down on ancient pieces of paper that have already been written on.
One of them had his old address on it - guess he lived in Gettysburg once. Who
knew? Damn his habits of thrift! Not the most efficient filing
system, but hell... it's better than mine. (Mine was bombed out with the mill,
thankfully.)
We'll be setting dates real soon and making them public, so if you're planning to be somewhere in the vicinity of the Ursa Major in the next six or seven weeks, leave some space in your calendar. And bring an appetite! Mitch Macaphee plans to handle the catering this time out. He's supposedly a really solid cook, as most chemists are. (I hear he has over 100 recipes. He calls them "elements." Funny guy.)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
Looking busy. This is a white house
desperate for good news if I ever saw one. Just as public attention was
beginning to light on Haditha and other similar incidents, a one-two punch of
"progress" saved Dubya from another bad round -- Zarqawi killed and a
new Iraqi government fully manned within the same news cycle. Eager to
capitalize on this... well... not bad news, Bush convened a round table
of top advisors at Camp David -- Rumsfeld, Cheney, Rice, etc. -- to discuss the
Iraq project. I'll just bet a lot of new ideas were tossed around that
room. And if anyone needed convincing that Karl Rove was back on top of his
game, they weren't kept waiting very long. Dubya affected to retire, then padded
off to a waiting aircraft (so the story goes) for a surprise visit to Baghdad's
green zone, where he met 
with
the new Iraqi Prime Minister. A little theater for the folks back home, whose
attention need not be drawn to the fact that Baghdad remains so dangerous after
3 years of "nation building" that the President of the United States
still has to scurry in and out of there like a rat. That's progress.
Actually, they're probably quite pleased with how things are going. After all, they've got an Iraqi government that wouldn't even think of repealing Bremer's various decrees and executive orders virtually (and illegally) transforming the Iraqi economy into a free market free-fire zone. They've got kleptocrat Ahmed Chalabi in charge of the oil ministry, at least on a temporary basis. They've got the "Salvador" option -- indigenous death squads -- in full swing, bumping people off left and right as the ghost of William Colby (mentor of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam) smiles down approvingly. Check it out -- that mess is success in their anti-matter world, just like New Orleans after Katrina washed away so many of those inconvenient poor people and left the Big Easy whiter, richer, and more Republican than before.
The only wrinkle for them is that the
people are not with them -- neither here at home, in Iraq, nor anywhere else in
the world, it seems. Of course, all they even marginally care about is domestic
opinion, and that they feel they can probably game enough to stay in complete
control, particularly now that it appears Rove (a.k.a. Turd Blossom) 
won't
be indicted for pig-fucking a CIA agent. They will attempt to prevail by
visiting upon their opponents the death of a thousand cuts -- baiting elections
with hot-button issues like gay marriage and immigration, having their allies in
the state election apparatuses depress turnout and limit access to voting in
opposition districts every way from Tuesday (see Ken Blackwell), discard as many
ballots in minority precincts as the law will allow, and so on. It may be just
enough again this year... or something else might happen. People might just turn
them out. So after a certain point, all they can really do is just look busy and
hope for the worst.
Battle Lines. Israeli prime minister Olmert says Israel will not go back to its 1967 borders because they are "indefensible." Funny - that's just the word I would use to describe almost forty years of denying an entire people national rights, basic dignity, and in many cases, life itself.
luv u,
jp
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06/25/06
Eldorado....
Can you talk any faster? Me thinkst not. Even if you could, I can't type any faster, so it wouldn't do any good. That's what I've become, after seven years of this. Stenographer to assorted denizens of cyberspace. Can I stand the strain? Well, no.
I'm sitting on the landing gear of our
rent-a-spacecraft, killing time as my cohorts continue their preparations for
the upcoming Big Green GET
ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE interstellar tour. Yes, we did change the
name -- thought better of it. I think this is a bit more descriptive than the
last one, wouldn't you agree? There's a greater urgency, a more definite sense
of momentum. Just wait a momentum, please. WATCH THAT CRATE! THOSE COMMEMORATIVE
VASES COST A FORTUNE! Okay, sorry. Hard to get good help these days -- very
hard... especially when you don't have any money with which to pay them. We just
hope to bugger off before they expect compensation. (Hey... I told you
the new name was more appropriate.) JUST LET ME KNOW IF YOU NEED A HAND,
GUYS!
As I mentioned last week, Marvin (my personal robot
assistant) will accompany us this time out, as he has so many times before. This
decision was taken by popular demand on the part of Marvin's enormous cyborg fan
base out yonder. (So if you're listening out there... he's coming, damn it! Stop
e-mailing me, you obsessive cyborgs!) Yes, we will have the full complement on
board the imitation J-2 space cruiser; a regular who's who of Notes From Sri
Lanka lore. We got your man-sized tuber, your sFshzenKlyrn,
your Trevor James Constable (complete with orgone generating device; additional
T.J. Constable accessories sold separately), your Mitch Macaphee, your posi-Lincoln
and anti-Lincoln, and even your Dr. Hump right here. I've seen each one of their
crates being carried on board whilst I've been sitting here, relaxing. (Yes,
we're keeping them all in crates. Why not, eh?)
Who will be keeping an eye on the mill while we're
gone? Well, this is where the clever part comes in. Frankly, I didn't have the
heart to leave tubey or any of the others behind to face the hostility of an
entire community, still bent out of shape from the bombing run that Gung-Ho
treated them to on our behalf. (Well... they all flatly refused, for one thing,
and let's face it -- there are more of them than there are of me.) So we
commissioned our scientific cohort Mitch Macaphee to rig up the equivalent of a
baby monitor system... our "eye from the sky", as it were. That's the
more clever half. The slightly less clever half involves cardboard cut-outs of
ourselves strategically positioned at all the windows. This will give the mill
the appearance of occupancy. What purpose does that serve? 
Not sure. Fact is, we
set them up before really thinking through what the effect of doing so would be.
So rather than let all that good work go to waste.... we left them there. And we
mounted one outside the front viewing port of our space craft. Call it a hood
ornament... or a baby monitor.
Anywho, Mitch set it up so that we can talk back through those monitors and, hopefully, intimidate any intruders into abandoning their nefarious designs. I thought that was a nice touch. And as I sit here watching people work, I can only applaud Mitch's initiative in devising this "solution", as they say in the corporate world (where thesauruses are as rare as hen's teeth).
Hopefully when you hear from me again, it will be from somewhere in outer spaaaaaace. Somewhere with breathable air and a positive gravity. (Hey... we wrote it into the contracts this year, so no surprises, right?)
(Note to readers: for those of you only interested in my political ravings, start here. For those who only wish to inspect my band-related ravings,...well...you get the drift.)
More war. Congressional Republicans
and Democrats were tossing non-binding resolutions at one another this week,
with members from both sides of the aisle babbling about some conflict that just
barely resembles the one grinding on in Iraq. Not a very heartening spectacle to
see the legislative branch being just as delusional as the executive. There
were, of course, exceptions whose reasonableness cast the lunatic position of
the majority in stark relief -- Murtha, Feingold, a few others (Kucinich, of
course, and McKinney, still swinging away). It does make one wonder how many times
the war party can hash out the same lame points. We're fighting 
them
there so we don't have to fight them here. It's America or Al Qaida. When the
Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down. The ludicrous John McCain was on a morning
show, using words like "frustratingly slow" and "painful",
and claiming "No one said this was going to be easy." (Uh... yeah,
they did. And you agreed.)
For chissake, gentlemen, even Jalal Talabani -- a Kurdish leader and president of Iraq -- is calling for a timetable for U.S. withdrawal! Did any of these imbeciles check with the Iraqis to see what they want? Instead, we get sanctimonious speeches from the majority about how, if Murtha's plan had been applied to WWII (an identical circumstance to the current war, apparently), we'd all "be speaking Japanese now". (That's adapted from the old classic that used to end with: "...we'd all have slanted eyes, now.")
Of course, the week didn't begin and end with Iraq alone. There was also a great deal heard about the other "axis of evil" members. As always, Iran was all over the news, with fresh accusations that Tehran is behind some elements of the insurgency in Iraq. Now that's a particularly ironic piece of hysteria. (Imagine the gall of those Iranians, interfering in the internal affairs of another country!) Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iran: accept our terms or suffer the consequences. Quite frankly, he reminded me of the declaration of martial law read by Kodos the Executioner, governor of the planet Tarsus 4, on Star Trek. Too obscure? How about Margaret Hamilton on her broomstick high over Oz, threatening Dorothy et al. with some remarkably readable skywriting? No? Anyway, it was grimly amusing to see Bush and the German Chancellor stand up there and deplore aggression. Seems to me neither Germany nor the U.S. has a lot of credibility on that topic, but anyway....
Then
there was the dreaded North Koreans and their mighty missile of death. The way
the administration talks, you'd think it was the only ICBM on the planet. Jesus,
how many times have we test-launched missiles capable of reaching North Korea?
And while you're working on that one, think about the likelihood that more than
a few of our thousands of nuclear tipped ICBMs (all on launch-ready status) are
targeted on Pyongyang. This is not idle speculation or paranoia -- this is a
very real danger from their perspective, made worse by 1.) our general
bellicosity 2.) our deployment of "missile defense" batteries around
the Pacific rim, and 3.) the fact that we flattened North Korea entirely once
before within living memory. Pyongyang's nuclear arsenal, on the other hand,
consists of maybe one or more bombs (and maybe none at all), plus a missile the
last version of which failed during a test in 1998.
In truth, by foaming at the mouth over this missile test, we are only helping Kim Jong Il further convince the subjects of his hermit kingdom that he's making the West tremble.
luv u,
jp