NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(May '00)
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5/7/2000
"Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'..."
Can you hear that grungy Neil Young guitar? Does that sound like a Reagan supporter playing that sucker? You never can tell, I guess.
Just a little nod of remembrance here, a day or two after the 30th anniversary of Kent State, and a week after the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. Our local Gannett-owned corporate newspaper spit out the usual spread of nonsense, as I mentioned in last week's column. The response from readers included a fairly predictable assortment of misstatements and regurgitations of decades-old pro-war propaganda. Some blame the media for excessive pessimism -- one of the most oft-repeated deceptions of our time. Go back and look. Most of the major news organizations took their lead from the government. An element of pessimism only crept in when the Johnson Administration started giving voice to its doubts. Even then, the press was generally more positive about the war than either the public or the government.
Truth is the first casualty of war, they say. What they don't say is that it is also the last, as well.
Well, many of the major planets are in alignment, so it's time for Big Green to go on the road again. We're embarking on a recap of the triumphant interplanetary tour we completed the last time the solar system had all its ducks in a row...sometime in the eighties, wasn't it? I forget...
Why do we wait for such an infrequent celestial phenomenon? Simple. It's a little-known fact that interplanetary travel becomes much easier when the planets are lined up like this. Matt explained it to me. You see, the gravitational miasma that surrounds each globe is elongated by the pull of its neighboring worlds. When the planets align, this effect reaches its apex, creating a patented "gravitational shelf" that stretches from Mercury to Neptune.
Using the sophisticated interplanetary conveyance we developed for use in our movie "Destination Space," we can then skitch across this gravitational shelf with almost no effort at all. It's a bit like hanging on to the back of a car on an icy road. You have to wear good shoes. Matt explained it to me.
In other cultures, this is known as "easy travel to other planets." Here in Sri Lanka, we call it "maize." However it's done (I won't bore you with all of the technical details), it enables us to perform on Mars one day, Uranus the next, then close the week on Mercury. When do we plan any Earth dates, you ask? Well...we used to play that joint, but we had some bad experiences and, well...we haven't gone back. Yet.
We're trying to arrange some kind of live feed when we play the Martian Mt. Olympus this summer. I'll keep you posted. And, of course, there will be photos. (According to our tour contract, we'll have to have them processed on Callisto, however, so they could take some time. Be patient.)
That's all for now. I'll send you dispatches from the road!
luv u,
jp
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5/14/2000
(Interplanetary Tour Diary)
Greetings from the asteroid belt!
Spent the night in the Motel 6 on Ceres after a harrowing week on the celestial road, culminating in a late-night concert at the summit of Olympus Mons. Pretty good crowd. Martian food sucks this time of year, though. This obsession they have with greens. And egg salad! Someone stop the madness.
With the first leg of our interplanetary tour complete, it has become manifestly obvious to the three of us that we need to work a bit harder on our zero-gravity chops. Whenever Matt slaps his E-string, the force of the string snapping back sends his bass flying across the hall. And whenever I strike an eight-finger chord, my legs shoot up. I don't even want to talk about how many drumsticks John has gone through just counting off the songs. The only one who's got it together is our hireling guitarist sFshzenKlyrn, and he's from the planet Zenon (it helps to have a couple of extra hands to hold your axe with).
The
oxygen generator didn't work in my room last night, so I ended up sleeping on
John's floor. sFshzenKlyrn
tried to talk me into a couple of hits of
Zenite snuff (similar to terrestrial "Nembutal"), but I wasn't having
it. Somebody's got to keep it together on this trip. As it is, sFshzenKlyrn
got himself so fucked up, he couldn't even make
it to our photo-op in the Martian countryside (see photo). Greens! See what I
mean about these Martians?
Ceres is a pock-marked slag in space, unsuitable for anyone even remotely attached to mundane comforts like heat, air, gravity, etc. Still, Motel 6 has some kind of contract arrangement with Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., our sprawling distribution conglomerate, and they got a good deal on the rooms in exchange for our endorsement of this meteor defense shield venture they bought into. So, yeah...Ceres is a pretty rough place with all these craters. Pity its inhabitants didn't see the value in a truly impenetrable meteor defense shield; the kind you can get from...hey!
It's that old devil greed. Crawled in my ear and squatted down on my brain. My apologies.
News from Earth: Last week (and the week before) I mentioned a certain Vietnam War retrospective that appeared in our local Gannett paper on the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. I also made reference to a page of letters sent in by readers the following week in response to that retrospective. Turns out that these letters were all written by the very editor who put together the retrospective and wrote its most bizarrely distorted passage -- a long editorial on the American war.
In a somewhat unexplainable effort to generate the illusion of reader interest, this editor actually fabricated 11 identities (according to the newspaper) and submitted an entire page of bogus letters discussing the previous week's columns, some of them agreeing with the editor's column, some not -- but all within the boundaries of rabid vindictiveness on the right and pragmatic opposition on the left.
The guy was the paper's Associate Editor (Russ Davis), and he was fired immediately for having violated basic standards of journalistic integrity, blah blah blah... Yet in a way, this may turn out to be Russ's single greatest achievement as a newspaperman. He certainly gave us a bird's eye view of what the Associate Editor of this monopoly newspaper considers the "full range of opinion" on a politically controversial subject. Fascinating!
One example. The Vietnam Retrospective included a brief piece by Hamilton College Prof. Maurice Isserman, defending the integrity of anti-war protesters. Editor Russ Davis invented a letter of support for Isserman from an imaginary woman named "Kelly McDonough," which read, in part:
Mr Isserman should have said that protesters have clear consciences, but that people like Russ Davis who try to jam faulty history down gullible readers' throats will have to pay one day for their crimes.
Wow. What is this, quasi-Maoist retribution? Has another alumnus of the Weather Underground been found? Or is this an involuntary plea on Davis' part to have his deception uncovered? (Stop me before I forge again!) My vote is for the former, since Davis has consistently slandered anti-war protesters with accusations of verbal attacks against veterans, etc. The suggestion of intolerance and latent extremism fits his rhetoric perfectly.
Wow. Strange days! Talk to you soon.
jp
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5/21/2000
(Interplanetary Tour Diary, second installment...)
Hellooooa! Is this thing on?
I thought so. How is everyone? Well, this is turning out to be an interesting tour. I can't believe the reception we've been getting, pretty much everywhere we go. Our satellite dish antenna works like a charm, even on Janus. Could see every electrifying moment of "Eyes Wide Shut" on pay-per-view...no static, no dropouts, no nothing. (And no charge! What a deal. Any idea what in-room movies cost on Janus? Don't ask.)
We did a bad, bad thing.
How have the audiences been, you ask? It's a little hard to tell, here in the outer solar system. Pretty much everywhere you go, the methane gas is so thick, you can barely see what sort of room you're playing to, let alone who the patrons are, how many legs they have, etc. This is our sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn's old stomping ground, so to speak (he doesn't have much to stomp with, you see), and he doesn't recognize a single hideously misshapen head.
Still,
even though we're not making a lot of new friends in the audiences, we have
hooked up with a few notable celebrity hangers-on. In fact, we have quite a cast of
luminaries tarrying around with us from planet to planet. You can see my
illustrious brother Matt in this photo, spending some quality time with the
renown Dr. Hump, who was kind enough to put his lecture tour on hold so that we
might benefit from a little Reichian analysis in between shows. (He even brought
along an Orgone generating device he borrowed from Trevor James Constable, and
that has helped us a great deal, though it does tend to attract invisible flying
critters.)
It
took a while, but we also convinced Presidential hopeful George W. Bush to join
us for a few stops beyond the beltway (the asteroid beltway, as it were).
Old "Dubya" thought it might be a good primer for this fall's
campaign, in case any questions come up about what order the planets fall in.
George was most particularly looking forward to visiting Mars, where (as Dan
Quayle has informed him) "if there's air, there's water...and if there's
water, life." It was my sad duty to inform the Texas governor (through his
press agents) that Mars is, at present, "inside" the asteroid belt
and, therefore, not on our itinerary in the coming weeks. To which he reportedly
replied, "Did I say Mars? I meant to say Juniper."
Invisible flying predators. There seems no other possible explanation for such phenomena.
I'm not exactly certain how the sleeping arrangements are going to work out. Matt had suggested having sFshzenKlyrn bunk in with Dubya, then I could share with John, and Matt could stay with Marcia, Jan, and Cindy. (Greg and Peter have their own rooms now, of course.) Only I don't think the secret service entourage is going to let someone from another solar system share Dubya's pre-presidential air. They may let him sit in on our next performance of "It's Time To Change," however.
What's your opinion? We'd like to know. Send your suggested sleeping arrangements to jperry@biggreenhits.com and they will receive due consideration.
We're closing in on the halfway mark for this unprecedented tour. Crucial days ahead. (I hear Neptune's a tough nut to crack.) Stay tuned.
Back on Earth: Well, Rudy has dropped out, leaving New Yorkers with one bonehead to choose from for US Senate, instead of two. But it's not all bad. Now Rudy can go back to concentrating on stuff that's close to his heart, like calling for the elimination of free prostate screening for New Yorkers with no insurance. (Good thing he's got benefits.)
Funny how politics often yields to home economics. Rudy really needs to stay home; he's got all those bad boys in blue to keep track of. The only thing Hillary has to watch is Bill, and he's pretty hard to miss.
Keep those emails popping! We'll be in touch.
luv,
jp
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5/28/2000
(Interplanetary Tour Diary, installment three...)
Houston, do you copy? (BEEP!)
Greetings, earthbound souls! Well, there've been one or two bumps along the rocky interplanetary road this week. Not anything seasoned professionals such as ourselves would be unable to cope with, you understand. Just those minor annoyances that crop up when you can't find enough water, or air, or protection from meteors...that's all.
Our space barge started taking on water,
so to speak, just as we were pulling into Saturn's general 'hood. It wasn't so
big a problem for the first few days, so we didn't really pay a lot of
attention. But just as we approached Neptune, John noticed that sFshzenKlyrn's
exoskeleton was taking on a purplish hue...a sure indication that the oxygen
content of our artificial atmosphere was dropping dangerously low. That
meant an explosion was imminent, since oxygen (as every chemistry student knows)
is the only thing that will inhibit the neutronium in our fuel canisters from
igniting. Sadly, I chose that moment to accept sFshzenKlyrn's
kind offer of Zenite snuff, and when I struck a match...well, see photo.
With our engine room blown to atoms and major hull breaches fore and aft of the mess cabin, we opted for an emergency landing in one of the planet's larger liquid Methane oceans. We then abandoned ship when it became clear that Matt, in his agitated state, had finished off the last of the Necco wafers. There was nothing else we could have done.
So we are essentially without transport, some five gazillion miles from home, on a world with no oxygen, no potable water, and no Necco wafers to speak of. And the meteors! Big as Bengal Tigers! They creep into your tent at night and carry you off to where they can pummel you at their own leisure. Vicious world. Life expectancy here is less than that of an African American male driving a Mercedes on the Garden State Parkway.
With a string of
important gigs awaiting us on the other side of this vast, gaseous world, there
is little we can do but hold our breaths and wait for a lift. But there is a bright side to all of this
-- at least George dubya's getting a little extra practice identifying his
planets. We're all very proud of the progress he's made (see photo). And when he
stands across the rostrum from Al Gore this Fall (assuming they condescend to
having a public "debate") and ticks off those gas giants one by one,
your friends in Big Green can
call dubya up and say, "Now you can find Uranus with both hands, thanks to
us. Where's our cushy ambassadorship?"
Anyway, I'll let you know how it turns out. If you want to reach me in the interim, email me at jperry@biggreenhits.com and it'll get to me with a bullet. (We may not have food, air, water, or life support, but at least we've got email).
We have been getting some rehearsal in, of late, for lack of anything better to do. We're working out the preliminary list for our upcoming recording project. Matt has cut our songlist into little inch-long strips and thrown it into the air. It's my job to reassemble them, so that John can call the songs. We all work together, you see. There's a lot of love here. Even sFshzenKlyrn has a role to play in all of this. He soaks up all the ambient radiation so that we can practice without losing body parts. (The stuff may be deadly to you and I, but sFshzenKlyrn eats it like peanut brittle.)
Home Front news. I read in our local-yokel newspaper (sent to me in the great beyond by a helpful FOBG) that John McCain (born-again "reformer") is going to help the Republican's new Senate hopeful Rick Lazio (born-again "moderate") campaign against Hillary Clinton (ex-Goldwater "liberal"). Hey -- isn't anybody in (and from) New York state interested in this race? We've got one big drip from Arkansas and a Keating scandal alumnus from Arizona sparring over this seat. The only native is Lazio, and he's a Gingrich clone. If this is a choice, I'm the capital of Peru.
Hey. Maybe I am the capital of Peru. I've never seen us photographed together.
See you in Lima,
jp