NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(September '05)
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9/4/05
Transmission start...
Fifteen... fourteen.... Disconnect life support umbilical.... eleven... ten... nine.... Gantry walkway has been rolled back.... six... five... four.... main propulsion unit has ignition.... two... one... Chocks away! We have lift off! ....three.... four.... five....
Okay,
can I stop counting now? Good, good. (I can't count forwards so good, frankly.)
Yes, browsers and blog-ophiles, THE
BIG ZAMBOOLA: Big Green Interstellar
Tour Fall 2005 is finally
under way.... Big Green's
merry jaunt across more than a dozen worlds scattered between here and the Small
Magellanic Cloud. If I sound a little reserved in my enthusiasm it's only
because I'm experiencing maximum g-forces just now as we career upward through
Earth's atmosphere at an increasing rate of speed, bound for the vast open road
that is outer space already. I'm pinned to my couch like a bug on the windshield
of a speeding car. Can't move as much as a finger, and neither can my
compatriots -- we're all flat as a flapjack. (Mmmm....delicious flapjacks.....)
Which gives me the opportunity to think about, you know, stuff... like
how much does the moon weigh... and who the hell is driving this thing? Please
don't tell me it's sFshzenKlyrn,
because he always gets us lost....always! Can you just look behind me here? Is
there a strange gaseous creature at the astrogator controls? No, wait.... don't
tell me.
I'll
tell you, it's been one hell of a week leading up to this launch. For one thing,
somebody tripped over the electric cord on Matt's dairy fridge and everything
went bad... even the cheese, which I always assumed was just born bad.
(Not so, friends.) Then, as if that wasn't bad enough, "big army
brass" came trooping in here looking for the sniveling weasel who launched
their last Titan rocket booster from its resting pad at Vandenberg air base. Of
course, anti-Lincoln was unavailable at that particular moment, so they 
proceeded to impound our space vehicle, setting up a yellow police-tape
perimeter that no man could cross. When I raised an objection, they had the
local magistrate slap a gag order on me. (Mr. magistrate is still sore about the
bank job we did some time back, so he was more than happy to oblige.) It seemed
our big interstellar tour was over even before it began; no vee-hickle, no dairy
products, no anti-Lincoln, and muzzled by army brass.
The
thing that saved our launch schedule was the timely arrival of Marvin (my
personal robot assistant), who was able to point out anti-Lincoln's hiding place
up on the roof of the Cheney Hammer Mill. (Why did Marvin squeal on the
presidential doppelganger? Because the "big army brass" asked him
where anti-Lincoln was and Marvin is not programmed to lie this week.) I've got
to admit, that anti-Lincoln is one smooth talker when he needs to be. It took
him exactly ten minutes to convince those generals and majors that they had the
wrong guy and that, anyway, nobody coulda' seen him do it. While he kept
them busy with his rambling discourse, Marvin and 
the man-sized tuber removed the
police tape from around our impounded spacecraft and resumed their launch
preparations. Ultimately, the "big army brass" was prompted to take
their inquiries elsewhere when sFshzenKlyrn
awoke from his midday nap and revealed his somewhat disquieting extraterrestrial
presence to the unsuspecting group. (Now we refer to him as "the
intimidator." Easier to pronounce than his actual name, in fact.)
So, anyway.... the rest you know. A nearly flawless launch, I'd say. Still pinned by three or four gravities -- I can see the graceful arc of the Earthly horizon through the forward viewing port. Our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee says we should be on time for our first engagement on dear old Neptune.... provided sFshzenKlyrn isn't at the helm. Or anti-Lincoln. Or the man-sized tuber. (I just can't look!)
(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.)
After
The Flood. Every so often, an event occurs that gives us a glimpse, however
fleeting, of just how things really work here in the US of A -- like turning on
the kitchen light at 2:00 in the morning and seeing the cockroaches
scatter. Hurricane Katrina is surely one of those events -- an opportunity to
observe the full measure of economic apartheid as it plays out in storm-battered
New Orleans. For Christ's sake, I've lived in the northeast practically all my
life. I've only been to the Big Easy once and that was nearly thirty years ago
(I spent a week sleeping in a bus parked on Bourbon street, but that's another
story...). Yet even I knew that a direct hit from a major hurricane would mean
disaster for that city. Most of the 
country
knew it -- there have been news articles, television documentaries, you name it.
It is one of the top five disaster scenarios in the nation, and yet unlike
nuclear explosions and earthquakes, something could have been done to prevent
this disaster... but wasn't.
New Orleans didn't have to be destroyed by that storm. In his quest to find more federal money to a.) give away to his rich constituents and b.) spend on his criminal war in Iraq, Dubya's last budget cut crucial funds for strengthening the levees in the city nearly 45% from what was budgeted in 2001. Work on the 17th Street levee (which gave way) was shut down for lack of funds. Wetland mitigation projects (key to long-term protection against storm-surge) have also been shortchanged. The crew in Washington D.C. knew that this would ultimately result in the city being submerged in 20 feet of water. In essence, the poor, the elderly, the infirm in New Orleans were knowingly hung out to dry. I suppose it fits the world-view of the religious bigots who now so strongly influence national policy -- the well-off are spirited off to safety in rapture-like fashion, while the neediest are "left behind" to suffer the apocalypse as some kind of divine come-uppance for their crime of poverty. Suitably Manichean in its division of humanity and Malthusian in its salutary outcome -- let the poor be washed away.
While
a number of rank-and-file journalists have actually criticized the impossibly
slow federal response to this catastrophe, much of the corporate media has
portrayed this as a "Mad Max" descent into chaos and 
lawlessness.
I had the opportunity to watch some of FoxNew's coverage on Friday -- their
reporter on the scene was embedded with a phalanx of law enforcement officials
in the warehouse district where two buildings were burning out of control. The
reporter was speaking with a (white) teenager on a bike who displayed a knife he
was carrying to protect himself, when the reporter said he heard a shot (I could
not hear it). Within a half-hour, the young man's knife had become "a
hatchet" and the "shot" was being blown up into a major
confrontation with police "in broad daylight," one worthy of a
sustained super just above the ubiquitous news crawl. There was a steady
ratcheting up of the hysteria as the reporter speculated on what would happen
after nightfall -- the specter of armed (black) people gone wild. (This was
interspersed with a near hagiographic report on Bush's tour of Mississippi.) Fox
was not alone in this -- other news media did what they could to work this into
the familiar "law and order," personal responsibility themes they
always use when obliquely referring to people of color.
Next up: Rush Limbaugh and other right-wing broadcasters go on a "truth tour" to New Orleans so we can see how great things are really going.
luv u,
jp
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9/11/05
CQ....CQ....
Deep space. Blackness. Cold as frozen asparagus. Breakfast trolley. I'll have two sugars, thanks very much. Desolation. Emptiness. Nothing there-a-tude. Samovar. Must be that fair trade stuff from Nicaragua. Nothing like it...nothing. Void.
Hello,
earth people. Just having a spot of breakfast, the group and I, out here in an
excellent three-star ... or is it a mediocre four-star?.... resort hotel on the
frozen and jagged surface of Pluto. We're on break from our first few nights
performing in the pressure domes of Neptune to throngs of translucent
single-celled creatures the size of sombreros. Hovering sombreros, as the TMBG
song goes, except they look more like giant euglenas ... ones that really know
how to get down and get funky with that flagellum. Of course, we were performing
in this kind of aquarium-like device that maintains an Earth-like atmosphere --
one of the basic requirements we put into our performing contracts, listed right
after "easily available 220v electrical source" and before
"positive gravity in dressing room." Trust me, you have to ask
for this stuff out here. I could fill your ear (and various other orifices)
with stories of past Big Green tours when
our feet barely ever touched the ground, but I'll save that for another
time.
Anyway...
not a bad start for THE
BIG ZAMBOOLA: Big Green Interstellar
Tour Fall 2005.
Particularly when you consider who is traveling with us this time out. Oh,
sure... we've got the usual Big 
Green
suspects: Mitch Macaphee, Trevor James Constable, Marvin (my personal robot
assistant), the man-sized tuber, sFshzenKlyrn,
and even the infamous Dr. Hump in his jar of spirit. But with peripheral
characters like the two Lincolns (positive and anti-matter both), there is much
greater opportunity for mishaps, unplanned hijinx, madcap misadventures, etc.
Why hasn't there been a disaster? Personally I think it's the novelty of space
travel -- the Lincolns simply can't get their 19th Century minds around the
concept of flying from planet to planet. For the first couple of days,
"positive" Lincoln spent most of his time in a corner of the lower
deck, reciting his speeches from the Lincoln-Douglas debates by memory.
Anti-Lincoln has been planted in front of the view port, staring into the
trackless void and muttering oaths to himself. (Trevor James has kindly offered
to provide counseling for them... or at least a sizeable "zap" from
his orgone generating device. Not sure I want to upset that apple cart just
yet.)
After
ripping through a couple of sets of Big
Green favorites for the
enjoyment of those floating Neptunians, we shot over to the hotel on Pluto.
(Don't know why, exactly, but you just can't get a decent room on
Neptune...unless you're a giant euglena.) Mitch and Dr. Hump installed
themselves in the cocktail lounge for the 
overnight
duration, while Matt, Trevor James, and I did a little sight-seeing along the
colossal crevice that runs along the back of the hotel and (incidentally) down
to the center of this frozen world. I'm not sure what sFshzenKlyrn
and John got into, but whatever it is they won first prize. The Lincolns, on the
other hand, spent most of their free time trying to figure out how to work the
automatic doors on the space ship. And Marvin? He was over at the casino,
getting harassed for imitating a slot machine. (It's not his fault, actually --
we used to get him to do that back home when we ran short of laundromat
change.)
Yeah, yeah... I know. We should be concentrating on more legitimate ways of raising money, right? Well ... what the hell do you want, anyway? We're working here, damn it! Another night on Pluto and it's off to sFshzenKlyrn's home planet of Zenon. After that, Kaztropharius 137b, the asteroid known as KRONOS, and who knows what next... maybe.... BIG ZAMBOOLA!
(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.)
Rising
Water. Nearly 1900 U.S. service people have been killed in a criminal
invasion of Iraq, and our entire political class stood by and did nothing. The
levees gave way in New Orleans (much as predicted) leaving thousands dead,
stranded, homeless, and our entire political class stood by and did nothing. Now
energy prices are going through the roof (a 70% hike in natural gas,
30-something in heating oil) and, once again, our useless politicians are
sitting on their ample asses, letting the waters wash us away. Any chance, with
all this unexpected expenditure in emergency aid and reconstruction (i.e.
closing the barn door after the horse got away) 
that
they'll repeal the massive pork-stuffed highway bill they just passed? How about
taking back some of those billion-dollar subsidies and tax-incentives for oil
and gas producers tucked into this summer's energy bill, now that the industry's
profits are through the fucking roof? Roll back of rich-boy tax cuts? Less money
for useless weapons systems? Hel-looo? Anyone awake down there in
Washington D.C.?
You see, now the administration has a real mission in life -- save the president's political bacon. So they've thrown open the national treasury and are ladling out the cash like it's a bottomless stewpot. No adjustment in the tax structure, just borrow borrow borrow like there's no fucking tomorrow.... because the way they're going, there probably isn't. This nicely dovetails with the administration's other mission in life, which is bankrupting the federal government and crashing the economy, thereby forcing draconian cutbacks in the remaining social safety net programs, including privatization of Social Security and Medicare, as well as gutting Medicaid. That's why in the face of all this needless hardship, the chimp is still smirking. When New Orleans was being submerged in a lake of polluted water, Dubya sauntered out to the southwest to tout his multi-billion dollar gift to the pharmaceutical industry (a.k.a. the Medicare prescription drug benefit) in the firm knowledge that no matter how bad things became, his core agenda (see above) would only be strengthened. He's truly the master of disaster, the Irwin Allen of modern American politics.
Now
his cronies in the energy industry are going to rob us blind, and I don't hear
anyone -- Republican or Democrat -- saying all that much about it. After all,
this is the significantly deregulated marketplace they've all been shoving down
our throats the last 20 years or so, telling us how competition would keep
prices low...the magic of the market. And so suppliers of these vital
commodities -- stuff we in the northeast can't live without -- are welcome to,
say, double the price of what they sell whenever it seem appropriate.
Hell, why not triple it? The sucker have to buy it, right? Reminds me of
that story, "The Octopus" -- whatever price the traffic will bear.
Well, hey... if disaster strikes and we can't heat our homes up north, we know
what to expect at least. FEMA director Michael Brown -- mister "Arabian Horse trader"
-- will see to it we're well taken care of. (In all honesty, couldn't Dubya have
made that idiot, say, ambassador to Tonga or something if he owed him a
political favor or two? Did he really have to give him something
important to run?)
I don't know about you, but my favorite moment of the week was when Cheney was down on the gulf coast, praising federal relief efforts, and someone shouted "Go fuck yourself, mister Cheney." Hey, think about it. Who the hell else would fuck the bastard?
luv u,
jp
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9/18/05
Big gorilla at the county zoo.....
Just humming to myself. Weightlessness tends to make you goofy. Real goofy. No, no -- you don't understand. I mean out of your fucking mind kinda goofy. I see three of everything right now. (Except you. Just two of you.)
Whoops.
Did I say weightlessness? I mean airlessness. Always get those two mixed up.
Sorry.
Somebody bad stole my oxygen regulator. (Maybe it's the same "somebody bad" who stole Chubby Checkers' wedding bell.) Your friends in Big Green have been forced to don their tattered space suits and helmets because our cabin pressure control system has bit the big one. It's like those emergency procedures they go over with you on airline flights -- you know. Wait for the mask to fall from the ceiling, or whatever. Well, in this case, it's a whole space suit. Just drops down on a string like a marionette and you climb right inside. And with any luck, it will have a full tank of oxygen and a working.... working.....oxygen......re....lease..... recliner.... figment.... (Whoa! Got to replace that regulator! ) Anyway, it's everybody into the pressure suits until Mitch Macaphee can restore our artificial atmosphere.
I
say everybody, but the fact is, SOME of us don't need oxygen to survive. 
I am
referring, of course, to the extraterrestrial in our midst -- our strangely
misshapen sit-in guitarist from the distant planet Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn.
(No, he's not strangely misshapen because he doesn't use oxygen...the
bizarre physique just comes naturally to him. As natural as the finish on his
Telecaster.) While we're all clunking around in our cumbersome space gear,
cracking our helmets together and tripping over our umbilical cords, sFshzenKlyrn
is happily raiding the food lockers, building mountainous club sandwiches and
platters of canapés for his own ravenous consumption. (Food he can use....
oxygen, no.) One would almost think that it was he who sabotaged our
artificial atmosphere, but I know for a fact that the blame must fall in an
entirely more terrestrial direction. No, not Marvin (my personal robot
assistant), a.k.a. the renegade robot from Mars. No, not Trevor James Constable.
I'm talking about that ne'er-do-well antimatter Lincoln fellow, who took a solid
week to get his sea legs, then started turning knobs, pulling levers, opening
faucets, etc., until....well, you know the rest. Airlessness.
Then
there's the other little problem. Well, perhaps, not a little problem, exactly
-- depends on how close you are when you look at it, I guess. Seems we picked up
some boarders on the planet Neptune. Those giant dancing euglenas I talked to
you about? Well, seems they've climbed on board the old Big
Green bandwagon and are now, as we speak, clinging to the view port,
keeping an eye on our every move. I suppose you might describe them 
as
interstellar "Dead Heads" -- giant one-celled creatures who insist on seeing every
show in the tour, then trade music files over the Internet. They rode with us to
our gig on Kaztropharius 137b and
are intent on clinging their way to Zenon. Only problem with that analogy
is, well, they don't have heads, exactly. Just nuclei, chloroplasts, and
flagella. Also an apparently insatiable appetite for life on the road. (Damn
good thing they don't need air.)
What about the Kaztropharius 137b gig? Nothing out of the ordinary. Frantic thrash through our song list, followed by ravenous consumption of interstellar comestibles. They pack a decent spread, those Kaztropharians. Never thought we'd get sFshzenKlyrn away from the buffet table. Now if we can get to Zenon alive....he can tuck in to some home cooking for a change.
(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.)
Who's
sorry now? I have to admit, it is a bit entertaining to see the Bush
herd caught in something that resembles that familiar spiral of apology and
contrition political figures occasionally suffer when they say the Wrong
Thing or just fuck up big time. Naturally, the consequences aren't as
daunting for them. What's going to happen to them, after all? Impeachment? Not
likely. Election loss? Not Bush's problem. Maybe they're apologizing to help out
Congressional Republicans who are getting a little worried about next year. But,
as political analysts are quick to remind us, a year is an eternity in American
politics. Could it be that Dubya is actually worried about what people may think
of him -- people other than 
the corporations, family cronies, religious zealots, and self-centered
white people who make up his electoral base? Is he starting to think about
a "Dubya Legacy," sort of like they did with Ronnie Reagan? Or is he just drumming up enough support to squeak through another packet of draconian
policies? Some combination of all of these, perhaps.
Whatever the reason, I am confident that the photo-op national address from New Orleans is just so much cover for the next domestic chapter of what Naomi Klein has aptly termed "Disaster Capitalism" -- corporations and governments capitalizing on the misery of those victimized by various catastrophic upheavals, both natural and unnatural. Her recent column in The Nation shines a light on some of the profiteering already underway in the Big Easy, with reflections on the grim experience of displaced fisher-folk in Sri Lanka. It's an ill wind indeed that doesn't blow some well-heeled player some good, and many of the usual suspects are positioning themselves to reap substantial benefits off of this truly unprecedented cluster-fuck in the south-land. Developers benefiting from the misfortune of poor, mostly black people? You'd think they planned it.
That
was a bit of irony there. Sure they planned it. They gutted FEMA. They starved
federal programs that benefit the poor. They cut funding for rebuilding the
levees and for restoring the wetlands around New Orleans. The only thing they
didn't plan was the hurricane, and that just takes care of itself if you wait
long enough. There were warnings upon warnings about New Orleans. FEMA got all
kinds of red flags from its own people on the eve of this hurricane. They did
nothing because the people who live in the poorest part of one of the nation's
poorest cities did not count. This is what neglect looks like. And when I hear
people blaming New Orleans's poor for their own misfortune, it sounds like
blaming the people in the Twin Towers for being blown to bits. What's the
fucking difference?
Bush'll find who's responsible for this mess. But first he'll get in a little fishin'. Man's gotta' relax once in a while, you know.
luv u,
jp
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9/25/05
Ramalama, ding dong.
Who
put the bomp in the bomp-ba-bomp-ba-bomp, who put the ram in the ramalama-oh
don't get me started. We've been there before, haven't we? Seems like. No, we're
not getting into some kind of lame 50's rock-n-roll retro show -- not yet,
anyway. It's just that we get so many requests in the nether regions of the
universe for old tunes. Like that guy the other 
night on
Zenon. Who was
that man? (I'd like to shake his ha-and. He made my baby fall for.....)
Doh!
Well,
as you may have gathered from my previous utterance, we did indeed make it to sFshzenKlyrn's
home planet of Zenon without too much trouble. Mitch Macaphee did eventually
work out the reason for our loss of artificial atmosphere. (Good thing, too. I
was getting tired of holding my breath. Extremely inconvenient during meal
times.) It turned out to be a few of our euglena-like friends from the planet
Neptune. A few of them decided to set up camp in the ventilation system,
clinging to the walls of the ductwork like... well....like giant euglenas. When
I say a few, I mean probably thousands (they're kind of thin, and have a
predilection for stuffing themselves into small spaces, like phone booths,
etc.). Those suckers get into EVERYTHING. (They're like Slim Jims ... they go
everywhere, including Zenon. And sometimes they yell "Eat me!") They
even got 
hold of an embarrassing old promo book we did in the 1970's, back when
Reuben Kincaid was our manager and....wait a minute. That was somebody else!
Speaking of "eat me", the performances on Zenon were the usual raucous affairs. sFshzenKlyrn's entire extended family of strange, cloud-like objects joined us on stage for an extended version of Matt's anthem to dairy drivers everywhere, "The Milkman Lives". Of course, sFshzenklyrn himself started getting carried away, playing with his "teeth" and shouting epithets at the crowd. They started tossing things back, and before you know it we were in the throes of a madcap free-for-all, with chairs, foodstuffs, nuclear reactors, class rings, potato chips, and quite a bit else being tossed hither and yon. (When you've been in the music business for more than a few weeks, you learn to duck. It's duck or die, friends.) At one point they set the stage on fire, but it was just St. Elmo's fire, so there was little to worry about, so long as we stayed in our pressure suits.
Another
interesting phenomenon I thought I should share with you. The euglena colony has
apparently taken to setting up tent cities of a sort around our performance
venues. I took a stroll through one the other night, accompanied by Trevor James
Constable and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). There were all kinds of
vendors - euglenas selling tie-dyed bandanas, lava lamps, little metal pipes for
smoking some kind of material, glow-in-the-dark posters, and a surprising
assortment of Big Green memorabilia,
including a pair of shoes I hadn't seen since one of our early interstellar
tours. 
There was also a photograph of ourselves with Dubya Bush prior to his
presidency, back when he was trawling for votes wherever in the universe he
could find them. (It wasn't signed, so not to worry.) Marvin's law-enforcement
instincts got the better of him when, in the midst of a teaming euglena-town, he
started directing traffic. (Stout fellow.)
So how do I feel about being a kind of Grateful Dead for large groups of enormous single-celled creatures? Not so bad... so long as they share the proceeds and don't clog up our air purification system before we get to the outer banks of the Milky Way -- our next series of gigs. We're happy to have hangers-on for a change who don't want to 1) kill 2) arrest 3) rob, or 4) hijack us. Except for the chloroplasts, it's almost like having fans.
(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.)
The
Other Shoe. The gulf coast is under sustained assault form what may be the
most devastating hurricane season in U.S. history. The region faces another colossal
storm even while New Orleans is still under water from Katrina; many
are likely to be double evacuees, while the number of dead from round one is
still not known. I've only just heard that the levees are giving way again in
the city, sending water back into the poorest districts. Once again, those at
the bottom of the 
economic ladder will take the biggest hit, including the needy
elsewhere in the country, who must weather the blow of skyrocketing fuel prices
as winter approaches. And yet with all this devastation (and more on the way),
Alan Greenspan's fed voted to increase interest rates for an eleventh time in a
row. It seems the Katrina disaster poses no "persistent threat" to the
nation's economic health.
Hmmmmm. This "nation" of his obviously doesn't include all those folks whose lives have been inalterably changed by this brutal weather, or those millions of others who face the persistent threat of not being able to make their heating bills. But then, this is Greenspan we're talking about (I'm not entirely certain he's heard about the storms yet). I keep forgetting that this sputtering, job-shedding economy works for the people Greenspan (and Bush, for that matter) represent. And the way reconstruction is starting to take shape -- profitable contracts for favored corporations and no obligation to pay prevailing wages to those actually doing the work -- it seems that this is truly the perfect storm. Money to be made, my friends. As Brit Hume (or as Matt calls him, "shit fume") recently observed, looks like it's "time to buy!"
There
is another piece of good fortune to be had out of this disaster -- in point of
fact, good fortune for the few, more disaster for the many. In the streets of
New Orleans, we are witnessing a quantum leap forward in the growing
militarization of society that has been underway for a number of years now.
Blackwater mercenaries are roaming the flooded neighborhoods, training their
automatic weapons at all and sundry. Battle hardened troops from Iraq patrol New
Orleans much as they did Baghdad. Bush said it himself -- the military is the
only government institution with the capability to work through a situation of
this magnitude. That's because they've starved the non-military institutions
that should handle disaster relief. This is an important opportunity for this
kind of instant Bush justice to be meted out in a major American city, with
little legal restriction. Dubya can look tough...just like his old pal Popeye.
Good times ahead, everybody. Best of luck to those fighting the hurricane on the gulf and those fighting the tempest in Washington this weekend.
luv u,
jp