NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(May '02)

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5/5/02

Yo-ho!

Nothing like a little controlled burn to shift a shut-in from his hiding place. My ritual sofa-immolation last week accomplished just that, dispelling the dark cloud of uncertainty and suspicion that had enveloped me in my isolation and driving me headlong into the cold light of reason. 

Once released from my self-imposed imprisonment, I could see my delusions for what they were -- the paranoid ravings of a sleep-deprived hermit. There was no fiendish plot in motion against me! My robot-assistant Marvin hadn't colluded with any band of mechanical ne'er-do-wells to take me hostage and hold me for ransom. In fact, Marvin had spent the last few days of my exile cloistered in another wing of the Cheney Hammer Mill, polishing his collection of brass doorknobs. 

That's where I found Marvin, sputtering and clanking his way through the roomful of doorknobs he'd acquired god-knows-where, buffing them with what looked like rubbing compound but was, in fact, an old tube of Pepsodent. (I've tried to speculate how he'd amassed such an enormous collection in the few short weeks since his construction by Mitch Macaphee. My guess is that there are a whole lot of dysfunctional doorways out there somewhere.) No hint of evil robotian conspiracy there.

With that enormous weight lifted from my shoulders, I was eager to see what progress, if any, had been made on the new lean-to during my confinement. I walked over to the building site and found that the excavation had been expanded, not because the architect had decided to add a guest room, but because one of the construction workers had found evidence of an extremely valuable mineral deposit known as Velveeta. Apparently, a sizeable vein of the popular cheese-food runs right through the foundation area of our future dining room/mud room suite. I hopped down into the foundation hole and saw the distinctive yellow-orange virgin ore for myself, typically sandwiched between two boundary strata of toasted Wonder bread. Numerous squares had been cut out of the layers, indicating some kind of luncheon party. It was clear something had to be done to protect this rich find before word of it got around. 

I did what anyone would do under those circumstances: I had my personal robot assistant Marvin call Kraft Foods to have them appraise the value of the lode. After all, they have the expertise and the resources to exploit the deposit, right? While Marvin was on the phone, he handed me a day-old letter from our land agent. My jaw dropped...apparently word of this discovery had gotten around the entire island in the past ten days, and the land agent was reminding me that our mineral rights to the property are limited to gold, silver, platinum, petroleum, and certain varieties of pâté. Neither Velveeta nor any other brand of processed cheese-food is covered by the deed of title. We'd been screwed!

It gets worse. The next time I dropped by the building site, someone had constructed a makeshift railroad spur to facilitate the mining operations. I noticed the ore cars bore the logo of Hegemonic Total Resource Extraction, Inc. -- the sister company of our pirate record label! Turns out that Hegemonic is the Halliburton of cheese-food mining, "harvesting" about 40% of the Velveeta in Asia and more than 90% of the Cheez-Whiz (the latter requiring drills, derricks, pumps, tankers, and massive refineries, of course). Those fuckers bought the cheese-food extraction rights for the entire nation of Sri Lanka. They plan to strip mine the Velveeta, removing the toasted Wonder Bread as well for crouton conversion. 

Hopefully when Matt, John, et al get back later this week, we can get a restraining order (or at least forge one) to keep them from ripping our property to shreds. 'Til then, I implore you...use only genuine cheese or soy alternative squares on your grilled cheese sandwiches! Boycott cheese-food until Big Green is justly compensated! Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike!

Mopping Up. Such a familiar pattern. First the Israeli government agrees to a U.N. probe of Jenin, saying they have "nothing to hide." Then come the predictable objections to the mission's make-up and mandate (they insisted that the mission be forbidden to "draw any conclusions" based on what they discover). Then they exercised the now well-worn colonial prerogative: bar the U.N. probe entirely. An illegal act? Sure, but that's okay. Dubya and the boys cut some kind of extortionary deal on the Ramallah hostage situation that will deliver on Israel's core demands in exchange for limited mobility for Arafat, so he can survey the ruins of Jenin while bodies rot unseen and undiscovered beneath the rubble. Same old same old.  

So Israel's P.R. line of the week might go something like: "take comfort in our restraint." You've almost got to admire the gall of that position. And with the full cooperation of the mainstream press and the unbridled sympathy of every branch of the U.S. government, Israel's story gets so much play it hardly matters that it bears virtually no relationship to the facts on the ground. By narrowing the focus of public inquiry to just the question of Jenin and whether or not there was a "massacre" there, they effectively reduce consideration of the entire heinous operation to a single, zero-sum issue: no massacre = no crime. It is very easy to limit the understanding of the American news consumer under these circumstances, making the matter as clear cut as flipping a light switch on or off. In the mass marketplace of ideas, comfortable fiction is always preferable to the vexing complexity of truth. 

Every bit as important as the grisly facts of this most recent IDF rampage is the context within which it occurred -- a brutal 35-year occupation that has sought at every turn to obliterate Palestinian civil society and marginalize that people to an extent that might make the architects of apartheid blush. This is not a narrative you are likely to hear from the media, nor from the clown in the White House. But the history of this ongoing crime is out there, if you are willing to dig for it. I've mentioned some web resources before. There's an excellent four-page essay by Noam Chomsky on the history of Israeli-U.S. rejectionism at Z magazine's site. There's also Edward Said's many essays. 

It is also useful to take a look at some recent maps of the occupied territories -- ones that show the cantonization of Palestinian lands by the Oslo "peace" process, as well as the proliferation of Israeli settlements, now numbering about 170, I believe. Don't look for these maps in your newspaper. I've found some fairly recent (1999) ones online. Here's the West Bank; and here's the Gaza Strip. Here's one that shows the roadblocks around Jerusalem, with Israeli colonial settlements shaded in blue. Check out the May 6 issue of The Nation for updates of these, plus a map of Israeli settlements in the occupied Golan Heights. Puts things into some perspective, at least. 

luv u,

jp

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5/12/02

Hoh-nah-hah-nah,

Okay, you can start eating processed cheese-food again. The freaking boycott is over!

The fact is, our moratorium on Velveeta and Cheezwhiz was an abject failure. Worse than that, it backfired in the most remarkable way. During the five days our boycott was in effect, Kraft Foods sold more Velveeta than during any other five-day period in the history of the popular nutritional substitute. In fact, all of their processed foods did better last week, ostensibly because we were telling people not to buy them. Go figure! 

The boys at Kraft were overjoyed. They've even offered to sponsor our next interstellar tour -- an offer we, of course, refused with disdain. (Well...I did, then told my fellow Big Greeners when they returned days later, after which they chased me around the block with telephone poles.) I understand the next thing on offer might be a promotional "boycott" of some new line of toaster waffles, which would feature our likenesses on the box, holding signs that say "Don't buy this product" and "These things suck!" Projected sales are in the hundreds of millions. 

My response to this insult can only take one form: Don't buy our CD! Boycott Big Green! Strike! Strike! Strike! Don't buy ten of them right now using our convenient order page at Amazon.com or at Soundclick.com! (Man, this marketing stuff is easier than it looks...) 

If they were to sell those waffles today, our friend sFshzenKlyrn would not be on the box. The only evidence John and Mitch Macaphee found of him in Bonn was a half-eaten stack of deadly buttermilk-blueberry flapjacks with a cigar butted out in it. Those were a weakness of his from the get go. They would always make him more than a little crazy. Once he ate a stack of b-b jacks then squirted ketchup all over the side of my beloved cargo van as if it were a bloody great frankfurter. I believe he meant to eat it. (I found the squeezed-out bottles beside the vehicle. They bore traces of all his signature isotopes.) I have to think that right now he's blazing a trail of ketchup from one end of the galaxy to the other. Who knows -- maybe he's doing a colossal "smiley face" up there. 

In any case, I brought Matt and John up to speed on the mineral extraction situation -- how Hegemonic Total Resource Removal, Inc., was planning to strip-mine our property for the valuable Velveeta and toast deposits that lie beneath its surface. We visited the building site so that my colleagues might assess the devastation for themselves. John jumped down into the hole and scratched a sample out of the living rock. He spread the fragment on some melba toast he'd been carrying around and took a bite. "Good ore," he commented, chewing. "Not a lot of cracking needed."

"The engineer said they could practically box it right out of the ground and ship it straight to Levittown," I told him. 

Matt just shook his head. "Magnificent desolation," he muttered. Somewhere a dog was barking. 

Never trust a confident engineer, that's what I say. My suspicions were somewhat justified by the sight of some crude testing equipment near the excavation site. They were obviously running the raw Velveeta through a distilling unit of some kind, trying to determine its specific gravity. That's an indication of a certain lack of faith on the part of the Hegemonic foreman that this will be a simple (hence, profitable) operation. The profitability standard Hegemonic uses is based on a 50% handicap margin (they only start counting profits when they're in excess of 50%), so they tend to be a little risk-averse. If the ore isn't at least mostly pure, they might abandon the deposit entirely. 

A light bulb went off in my head. That night, when everyone was asleep, I sent my robot personal assistant Marvin out to the building site with a bag of toasted cashews, instructing him to press the nuts deep into the vein of cheese-food in the areas around where the test samples had been taken. (This is the Big Green equivalent of spiking trees.) I had tremendously high hopes for the success of this operation...until I saw Marvin returning with the bag still in his claw. Upon inspection, the bag now contained brass door hinges. What he had done with the cashews I don't know. 

Lots to work out around here, not least of which being our stalled LIVE CD/MP3 release. If Hegemonic insists on ripping up our new lean-to before it's built and consigning us to another six months in the drafty old Cheney Hammer Mill, we may just have to engineer a bootleg release of Big Green LIVE from Neptune! Supported, of course, by an accompanying boycott.

The Guns Of Peace. How like a big-"R" Republican administration to claim credit for success when their policy lies in ruins around them! It's hard to overstate how many different ways the most recent suicide bombing (15 civilians killed) represents policy failure. For the Israelis, it confirms the uselessness of their bloody West Bank rampage in stopping terrorism (not what the invasion was about anyway, but no matter). For the suicide bomber brigades, it illustrates not only their mindless fanaticism but the cloudiness of their strategic thinking, as such attacks are quite simply a gift to Sharon (and an appropriate one too, since he remains the Levantine King of Terror). For the U.S., it demonstrates our inability to accomplish anything beyond signing the checks, shipping the helicopter gunships, and papering over the brutality of our allies even as we underwrite it to the tune of $3 billion per annum. Where's the success? 

The image of Clueless George stumbling around amongst the ruins of the Pentagon provides perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this seeming rudderlessness. Sixteen months in office and we've seen more rubble and craters than in the previous sixteen years. What a bunch of hacks!  

Never at a loss for spin, General Powell credits his administration with bringing "moderate" Arab states along (though it sure looks like the other way 'round), releasing Arafat from his imprisonment (at the rather high cost of precluding any serious inquiry into Israeli atrocities at Jenin), ending the siege at the Church of the Nativity (after fumbling it about a dozen times), and extracting a suitably humble denunciation of terror from Arafat (who is presumably still waiting for a similar denunciation from Powell regarding his own people's victimization). There's a list of accomplishment any general should be proud of. 

Even as Israeli tanks line up at the border of Gaza, ready to prosecute more first-world warfare on crowded third-world refugee camp residents, Powell defends this peculiar "peace process" with an oblique sports analogy:

"What I have in mind is: Bring ideas together. Bring differences of view together. Bring representatives of the parties together -- not for the sake of throwing the deep pass, Hail Mary into the end zone, but for the purpose of finding out what the field looks like and how do we start moving down to score. There will be many more steps along the way."

In as much as the general seems so proud of his "score" up to this point, one wonders where these "many more steps" will lead us. 

luv u,

jp

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5/19/02

Welcome (hee-hee-hee..),

As I sit here tapping away at my decrepit keyboard, I can hear the sound of blasting in the distance. Could be those Hegemonic Total Resource Removal, Inc., boys again, or perhaps we're under attack by an army of blind bazooka-toting cyborgs. Anything is possible here in the land of Big Green, this I have learned. 

Which is exactly why I wasn't too surprised this week to hear news of sFshzenKlyrn from a friend of Mitch Macaphee's over at NASA. Mind you, we've been mounting an all-out "man"-hunt for our Zenite friend since he lit out of here last month, tracing his steps through barnyards, tour buses, and all-night diners from here to Coventry city and coming up empty. All we'd been able to turn up was that half-eaten stack of buttermilk-blueberry flap jacks that John and Mitch uncovered in Bonn. Then this week we got word of a sighting from Mitch's NASA crony -- sFshzenKlyrn has been spotted by the Hubble space telescope no less than seven times in the past three weeks. He's got astronomers all over the world scratching their heads and coming up with names for this new phenomenon, only to cross them out when he disappears from view again.

When I heard that, I knew what old sFshzenKlyrn was up to. It's a little game he and his fellow Zenites used to call "Hubblestumping" -- just position yourself ostentatiously against a field of stars or nebulae and wait for your photo to pop up on the NASA website. Over the long treks between engagements during our various interplanetary tours, sFshzenKlyrn would recount with laughter the many times he and his siblings were catalogued, classified, published in journals, and added to the projectors at planetariums through the years. (One of his uncles even passed as a Messier object.)

A favorite story of his involved a certain observatory in Great Britain whose professorial operator had latched onto our Zenite friend with great enthusiasm, thinking he had uncovered some remarkable interstellar phenomenon hitherto undiscovered. As the astronomer followed sFshzenKlyrn's path across the night sky, sFshzenKlyrn climbed down through the telescope tube and popped out of the eyepiece, sending the professor off in something of a hurry. Pleased with himself, sFshzenKlyrn then helped himself to the man's cold English breakfast.  

If sFshzenKlyrn was truly on one of his "Hubblestumping" benders, he might be gone until at least early June. We were hoping to get him back here next week for some publicity photos to support the extraterrestrial release of our LIVE from Neptune EP (even though the Zenite guitarist does not perform on any of the tracks). Everyone's doing what they can to entice him. Trevor James Constable has the full array of his Orgone generating device trained on sFshzenKlyrn, the polarity set full over to "attract". John's been writing Erik von Daniken-like messages in the local ruins; runic pleas that should be visible from space, if the extraterrestrials squint really hard. 

Matt had a novel idea. He commandeered a local observatory's 50-inch telescope and turned it upside-down, so that the eyepiece was pointing out to space in the general direction of sFshzenKlyrn. Then he placed a plate of luscious frankfurters in front of the lens on the other end. His theory is that this should send a magnified image of one of sFshzenKlyrn's favorite snack foods up where he can see it. So....then he'd come down...and get... the hot...dogs...(okay, it's a lousy idea.) Sure hope it works.

That blasting was getting louder, so I decided to send Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to investigate. After several hours had passed with no sign of Marvin, I ventured forth from the Cheney Hammer Mill to have a look for myself. It was with some relief that I discovered the explosions were coming from Gung-Ho's compound. Apparently he is subcontracting for Lockheed-Martin on some component of "Missile Defense," though I can't get close enough to find out what it is (something that explodes). I returned "home" to find my room filled to the ceiling with breadfruit. Marvin had devised a makeshift ore-cart system up the side of the building to load the breadfruit though my broken skylight. (Clever boy.) Back to the programmer's shed. 

Being John Malkoviched. Perhaps this is where all that "civility" talk of the last decade has been leading us -- a society that can brook no dissent from the official line. War-loving liberals ("laptop bombardiers," as Alex Cockburn has called them) seem particularly thin-skinned, as if convinced that the mere existence of a different opinion will negate their own. Disagree with them, and they start frothing like a Fox News commentator. Curious thing. 

The recent Israeli rampages (still ongoing, incidentally) and, of course, 9-11 have put this phenomenon in stark relief, adding a kind of righteous fervor to the otherwise garden-variety intolerance shared by liberals and reactionaries alike. Any criticism of U.S. or Israeli military force is enough to draw ludicrous death threats, such as actor John Malkovich's comments at a Cambridge Union talk that he would like to shoot journalist Robert Fisk. (See Fisk's column of 14 May) So when you dislike the message, you shoot the messenger? There's a plan for pluralism!

This, of course, merely reflects the us vs. them mindset of Dubya's administration, whose paranoia about criticism reaches Nixonian proportions. Just as the Bush boys are obsessed with controlling every bit of information that may reflect badly on them, Malkovich's desire to shoot Fisk speaks to a very Stalinist concept of truth management current among media figures today, one that seeks to quash dissent no matter how small its audience. One wonders: does Malkovich think Fisk is all that influential with regard to Middle East policy? Does anyone other than myself read the London Independent over here? (Show of hands, please.) What does Fisk's courageous and valuable reporting amount to against the corporate media monolith that cheerleads military adventurism, delimits acceptable public discourse to anything between conservative and reactionary, and blows the president harder than Monica Lewinsky ever dared?

Speaking of hypersensitivity, the intelligence failure surrounding Sept. 11th provides a case in point. As the facts filter through bit by bit, the White House and Congressional Republicans get more and more indignant. Any examination of the circumstances relating to this, the largest and most horrific criminal act in recent U.S. history, is tantamount to treason. Why? Because Dubya and friends stand to lose some ground politically. So like the thief who yells "thief!" during a robbery, Bush, Inc., accuse those timidly calling for an investigation of "playing politics." Clearly they know what a good thing they've got going here, and they're guarding it like rabid wolverines. 

So...expect somewhat more heated denials in the days and months ahead. Should be interesting.

luv u,

jp

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5/26/02

Huzzah!

The traditional opening of the "summer" season has arrived back home in Upstate New York, and I can smell the barbecues stoking up from half a world away. Or is that the smell of burning tires wafting over from Gung-Ho's vehicle boneyard? Hard to say. 

There has been quite a lot going on over at Gung-Ho's lately -- enough to warrant some measure of neighborly concern on our part. Aside from the tire fire that's been burning in his back yard on and off for the past quarter century, that feisty demolition specialist next door has been furiously developing some kind of weapons system or combat vehicle that may eventually worm its way into one of the many smoldering conflicts that contribute to the climate of goodwill now wrapping itself around the globe like a lovesick cobra. 

No, I haven't been spying on Gung-Ho -- that's far too dangerous for the likes of me. But this past week the postman mistakenly delivered to us a manila envelope addressed to Gung-Ho, and it somehow fell open to reveal the blueprints of some diabolical contraption that could only be an instrument of war -- a submersible of some type, with just enough room for the big guy and a few of his lawn robots. 

What the hell is this neighborhood coming to, anyway? First an Indonesian mega-conglomerate starts mining Velveeta in the basement of our new home...and now Gung-Ho is setting up an assembly line for some military contractor that gets traded by the Carlyle Group! It was just a matter of days before a line of prototype tanks started coming over the hill between him and the Cheney Hammer Mill, flattening my grapevines and firing blindly at some of Trevor James's pet invisible flying predators (they're hard to hit even with 80mm shells). At one point, there were so many of the lumbering vehicles that I had to go out and shoo them away. (Well...I didn't go out there personally. I asked Matt to go, who threatened my personal robot assistant Marvin into standing them down. He was something less than successful.) This I don't need. 

As it happened, we had a bit more luck this week in getting sFshzenKlyrn to show up for our promo shots. My little ruse with the observatory worked, though I had to change the target snack a few times before stumbling upon something he simply couldn't resist. (Turned out to be a baloney sandwich. Who knew?) Our Zenite friend used the "climb-down" technique, materializing at the magnifying end of the telescope just long enough to wolf down the sandwich. Then he went back to Hubblestumping...but not before we squeezed off a few shots of him. He's one stubborn fucker...and vain as all get-out. (He kept trying to push his part over to the other side with a spatula. I told him to stop it -- it looked unnatural.)

So at least now we can get back to the task of releasing our LIVE From Neptune EP, once all the legal and technical matters are cleared away. Our nefarious label Hegemonic Records & Worm Farm, Inc., has agreed to cut a deal with us: they'll stop their subsidiary from ripping our lean-to property to shreds if we agree to work the word "Dallas" into the title of our next album of original material. A strange request, you say? We all agree...but it's better just to nod on this one and iron out all the details later. (Maybe they'll feel mollified if we just design the jacket to include a photo from John's collection of famous Dallas breakfasts. That could work, though it would have to be another concept album. Also, we don't have any songs about Dallas, but with Tex in the White House, that's not an insurmountable challenge.) 

The deal may include another 10-week interplanetary tour to promote the release. So we may be coming to a lonely asteroid or shriveled dwarf star near you.  I'll keep you posted.

Feel Safe? I don't know about you, but I find it enormously reassuring to hear Donny Rumsfeld talk about the inevitability of terrorists gaining nuclear capabilities...especially during the same week when other administration officials are trotting around, complaining that terrorist attacks can't be stopped. Hmmm....that's funny. Weren't they the ones who were hollering "traitor" at anyone who suggested such a thing prior to the bombing of Afghanistan? So, there's nothing we can do about terrorism after all, eh? Or is it just that they're too hopelessly incompetent to keep attacks like 9/11 from happening. 

To be fair, the administration was very busy during the days leading up to last September's attacks. Dubya had just returned from an exhausting month-long vacation. He'd been working hard on his new initiative to fight gossip...which never quite saw the light of day after the WTC burned, but hey -- it was a biggy. Just as the stem cell issue had consumed his full intellectual and moral attention, our young warrior king must have found the topic of pernicious gossip most absorbing. It's just possible that he and his top advisors may have dismissed the various pre-9/11 intelligence advisories as, well, so much gossip and simply gone about their normal duties of frantically divesting themselves of Enron shares. We may never know.

The thing that kills you (literally) about Rumsfeld's musings on nuclear terrorism is that you heard about it the same week as Dubya concluded the "historic" nuclear arms reduction treaty with Russia's Putin. Dubya delivered his predictable lecture about nuclear proliferation after having signed an agreement that -- over Russia's objections -- provides for deactivation and storage of 2/3 of both country's nuclear warheads, not their destruction. So soon upwards of 4,000 Russian nukes will be sitting in storage facilities somewhere within that country's badly decaying military infrastructure, where the chances that nuclear materials will find their way into the hands of terrorists are much, much higher. Maybe Rumsfeld is right. Maybe it is inevitable that this will happen...unless we get a handle on those idiots in the White House. 

Back from Oblivion. East Timor became an independent nation this week after 27 years of brutal occupation and oppression by Indonesia...with the full support of U.S., British, and Australian arms and cash. After more than 200,000 deaths, not to mention massive destruction by the Indonesian military and Indonesian-backed militias (particularly in the wake of Timor's 1999 independence referendum), it was aggravating to see representatives from Indonesia, the U.S. (Bill Clinton), and other offending countries toasting East Timor's independence. The Timorese are still vulnerable on all sides -- it's up to us to remind our  leaders that we hold them accountable for what was done there on our dime. 

For more info, listen to Amy Goodman's reports on the proceedings at www.democracynow.org. Then call the State Department and give 'em hell. (Ask for Colin.)

luv u,

jp

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