All posts by Joe

Joe Perry is co-founder of the band Big Green and brother to Matt Perry, other co-founder of Big Green. Shall I go on?

Ripped from the heads.

This is just another survey of current issues in the news – don’t mind me. Tired, can’t focus.

Best friend
Some best friend you got there, doggy.

The Koreas. Yes, there are two of them. And yes, there was a war. But that’s about all Americans know about the Korean peninsula except that “North Korea started the war!” and “Kim Jong Sombody is crazy!” Meanwhile, we are flying stealth bombers and stealth fighters and nuclear armed B52s over South Korea in ostentatious demonstrations of force, using some of the very same aircraft that once turned the North into an apocalyptic hellscape. Earth to Obama: There is no military solution to this problem. You’ve got a State Department full of diplomats – send a few over to fashion a treaty with the North, and this will stop being a problem.

K-9 abuse. A few weeks ago, when the latest gun nut incident took place in nearby Herkimer, the State Police used a dog to sniff out the suspect in an abandoned building. The dog was shot dead, as you may have heard. Since then there have been several news stories about K-9 patrols, how the police care about them, etc. Bullshit. These animals should never, ever be put in harm’s way in this manner. There was no reason to sacrifice that dog for the sake of capturing this suicidal dead-ender who had nowhere to go but jail or the grave. I think the police lose sight of the fact that, for all their utility, working dogs are dependent upon humans for their welfare. They are, in essence, like toddlers in that they are trusting, inquisitive, and unable to make their own decisions. They rely on us to keep them from needlessly sacrificing themselves.

Rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t allow a young child to do something, don’t ask a dog to do it either.

Debt Patrol. Egyptians may have thought things were going from bad to worse over the last couple of years. Now the IMF has pulled into town, and the likelihood is that their misery has just begun. Mubarak had already substantially “liberalized” the country’s economy. Now their foreign reserves are extremely low, thanks in part to years of political upheaval and disruptions in tourism and other industries. Next stop, the Bolivia / Argentina treatment. One would hope that, once they’ve endured some of that, they will follow South America’s lead and break free of the global neoliberal institutions of economic control that have led so many to the land of misery.

luv u,

jp

Enter the pod.

The thing is, you have to take a crowbar to the lid, like this. Unggh. Unggggh. Arrrgh! Okay, that’s harder than it looks.

Visual Approximation of Podcast
Visual Approximation of Podcast

Oh, hi, stalwart friends of Big Green. It is I, Joe of Big Green. Just caught me in the process of trying to get the lid off of the latest episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our very popular (in the plant kingdom) monthly podcast, just posted over the last couple of days and ready for download. We want to give people an idea of what they can expect when they download this sucker – all 1 hour and 45 minutes of it, or thereabouts. Wouldn’t want you having to cope with a pig in a poke, especially a porker of those dimensions. You have a right to know what’s in that great big bag of stupid… and know you shall.

Here’s what’s included in March Fiendraiser 2013 (our bogus fundraising episode), to wit:

Ned Trek VIII: The Corn of Ozark Five – Captain Willard Mittillius Romney and First Officer Mr. Ned (the talking dressage horse) are invited down to a little get-together with Louie Gomert, governor of Ozark Five … only to find their commander thrown into a titanic battle, mano-a-mano, with a hideous creature from beyond space already. Introduced by former Secretary of State and War Criminal at Large, Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Put The Phone Down – Our monthly gab session covering a range of topics, from birthday wishes to the entire universe, this month in dead famous people, strange reappearances, and so on. We also shake the tin cup for financial support. Or at least moral support. (We have even less morals than we do financials.)

Previously Unreleased Big Green tracks – We toss up three recordings like skeet and invite you to blow them to bits with your pump rifle of music criticism (talk about tortured metaphors!). Two demos from our 2008 International House album project; one that didn’t make it onto the final album, a song called Round Up; the second a demo version of Matt’s song Come Back Home. There is also a new, first-draft recording of a song we used to play in our terrestrial live performance days – a song called The Milkman Lives.

So listen in good health, friends. As always, let us know what you think … even before you think it.

 

Ten years after.

It’s been a decade since the start of a war that never should have happened, and we are still waiting for some accountability. More than 4,400 Americans killed – more than the number killed on Sept. 11 2001 by 19 individuals from countries other than Iraq. (Mostly from Saudi, but you get the point.) Estimates are in the hundreds of thousands for Iraqi deaths related to the conflict – Les Roberts’ Iraq Study Group had it well north of 600,000 back in 2006, and that was adjusting for concentrated areas of losses like Fallujah. That puts us in Milosovic territory for sure, and more like Suharto-land. The Serbian leader was brought to justice; not so much Indonesia’s dictator. The difference between those two cases have less to do with the magnitude of the crimes, more to do with the magnitude of their geopolitical allies.

Mistakes were madeThat’s why I have long been a skeptic of the International Criminal Court. I have said this before, shouted it on the podcast, and I will say it again here: until they haul someone from a powerful country to The Hague, the effort will be a meaningless exercise. Iraq is an excellent test case. Given the number of deaths, given the destruction of a society, given the craven nature of the attack and the fact that it was an aggressive war – the most serious category of crime – our leaders should have been indicted at the very least. Nothing. Freaking. Useless.

Not only are the architects of the disastrous Iraq war not being held accountable, they are in fact skating from television program to television program, attempting to rewrite Iraq into a screaming success. They are, in effect, flaunting the law, daring it to come after them because they know it won’t, taunting the cowardly administration that shields them. Even worse, they are working to get us into the next conflict, in Iran, Syria, wherever. Not only aren’t they sorry about the catastrophe they brought upon Iraq and ourselves, they are only too eager to repeat the crime.

To paraphrase the president, are we really powerless in the face of such carnage? I think perhaps, but only by design. American political life demonstrates again and again how powerful the will of the people can be. Look at gay rights. Look at immigration. Our government has worked to insulate us from the experience of war by canceling the draft, borrowing the funds to keep the fighting going, etc. Perhaps we are simply not connected enough to act dramatically.

Perhaps. But nothing ever changes unless we do.

luv u,

jp

This Is Big Green: March Fiendraiser 2013

Big Green shakes the tree of perpetual folly with three previously unreleased tracks, a new episode of Ned Trek, and shameless kvetching. Give generously.

Features:

1) Ned Trek VIII: The Corn of Ozark Five;
2) Put the phone down: Matt and Joe shake the tin cup for freedom;
3) Happy birthday, universe;
4) Departures and arrivals: Chavez, Achebe, Pearle, and others;
5) Song: Quality Lincoln (lame live version), by Big Green;
6) Song: Come Back Home (demo version), by Big Green;
7) More bogus fundraising;
8) Song: Round Up (demo version), by Big Green;
9) Conversations at the seed store;
10) Song: The Milkman Lives, by Big Green;
11) Over and …over

Enterprise, come in.

What next, man?What is this again? Beeswax. Do you have to keep it in my bedroom? We’ve got an entire abandoned 19th century mill here – there’s plenty of space in the forge room. Marvin??

Oh, hello. Didn’t see you there on the other side of that iPhone screen. Thanks for dropping by Big Green’s near totally useless blog, now more than ten years in the making! (Slogan: Blogging pointlessly since 1999.) You caught me in the middle of a small dispute with the help. No, we are not effete artists with domestics swarming all over the place, attending to our every whim. Certainly not! Our domestic workforce consists of a handful of surly operators, including:

  • Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – Created by a mad scientist and one-time scrap metal dealer, Marvin helps around the mill with lifting fairly heavy things, moving those things from one place to another, and …. and lifting other fairly heavy things.
  • Mansized tuber – Talk about growing your own! Matt harvested this oversized sentient sweet potato back in the old days, when we were in the witness protection program and pretended to be living in Sri Lanka. Anyhow, the mansized tuber isn’t really much of a help at all, but he does give me something to blog about once in a while, and that amounts to a particular kind of heavy lifting.
  • Lincoln – Storied 16th president of the United States, saved the Union, ended organized chattel slavery, and became the greatest president Hollywood has ever seen. Rescued from the awful past via Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine, which created a time portal through which Lincoln and his evil doppelganger passed and …. well …. search the blog for details; it’s complicated. Anyhow, he helps around the house with light cleaning, some cooking, occasional legal counsel. Probably the best natured of the bunch.
  • Anti-Lincoln – Surly opposite doppelganger of the above. (See above for creation myth or just follow the tag anti-Lincoln.) He burns things when it gets cold outside. Sometimes he’ll throw something edible into the fire.

That’s the list of what might be termed domestics. Everyone else around here is an associate, or hanger-on, or I don’t know what. It’s a squat house, for crying out loud. And now Marvin has gotten it into his head to sell lip balm or something. He managed to trade some bricks from one of the outbuildings in exchange for a couple of barrels of beeswax. Entrepreneurs! They’ll be the death of all of us!

Sorry. He gets a little over enthusiastic sometimes, that’s all.

Guns and poses.

Rumor has it that the assault weapons ban is all but dead. There’s a surprise. It has, after all, been more than a stretch of weeks since the Newtown CT children’s massacre, so all of the will has drained out of our ever-reliable legislators. The rabid voices of reaction have once again gained the foreground and are pulling out all of the stops to keep open their option on tactical nuclear arms … or whatever military weapon system will next be successfully marketed to bullet-headed Americans. We knew we had a problem after Newtown, but I don’t think we realized just how deep that problem is.

Repeat offenderAssault weapons, high-capacity ammunition magazines, and a lack of regulatory oversight over who can purchase a gun and who can’t – these are all crucial components of this national crisis. But they are not the core of the problem. Our problem is far broader than our persistent gun lust – it is the easy resort to violence for which we Americans are best known. This takes many forms, from the epidemic of domestic abuse to retail gang violence in Chicago and other cities. We fetishize anger and violence, honor it, respect it. And we have little trust for our neighbors and the people beyond our immediate circles of acquaintance.

My home region was struck by gun violence over the past week and a half – the kind that gets you into the national headlines for a day or two. Some older guy, out of work, out of money, grabbed a shotgun and started shooting people seemingly at random in a barber shop and a car wash he frequented. He was eventually shot by the police, but not before he killed several, sent others to the hospital, and blew away a police dog. No, he didn’t have an assault rifle … but that right up the street from where he committed his heinous acts is a major manufacturing plant that produces AR-15 style rifles, including Bushmasters like the one the Newtown shooter used.

This guy’s simple solution was to kill at random, and plants like Remington Arms feed the national addiction to violence. Put those two pieces together and you have a recipe for the types of atrocities we see all too often in this country.

Next week: Iraq, ten years later.

luv u,

jp

Mixing business.

What time is it again? Morning already? Christ on a bike. If I don’t start getting some sleep, you’ll have to take over the bailing duties.

The voice of reasonOoops. Sorry. Didn’t realize I was typing this into a blog post (or that anyone was looking at me from the imaginary wall-side of my three-walled room). We were in the process of working out chore assignments here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill on this cold March morning in upstate New York, home of … well, abandoned factories … and crack-head shooters … and nervous deer. Come visit anytime!

The thing is, we are working diligently on the mixing of our next album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – an odd, patchy collection of songs from a forgotten musical about Cousin (Governor) Rick Perry (the score for which, legend has it, was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe back in the seventies. True story). This painstaking work can sometimes last one, maybe two hours at a stretch, over an unrelenting schedule of nearly one evening per week, pushing late into the early evening hours. It’s as much as a person can do to keep body and soul together in this pressure cooker. Stop the madness!

All right, I have pulled myself together. (Phew!) Why are we keeping such a punishing schedule? Well, blame our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (a.k.a. Hegephonic Records). They will stop at nothing. First they send the Indonesian military after us. (That’s usually last for most people.) Then they take the unprecedented step of reprogramming Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of robotic taskmaster. Every time I freaking turn around now, Marvin’s giving me the dagger eyes and running a tape loop of John Cameron Swayze saying, “Did you do it yet? Did you do it yet?” (Strangely, Marvin also offers us Camel cigarettes, as if Hegemonic implanted some Swayze DNA in his hard drive.)

How to do all this without sleep? I should ask our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, who hasn’t slept in years. (Hell, if I’d done half of what he’s done just during our relatively brief acquaintance, I’d never sleep again.)

Short memory

North Korea has unilaterally withdrawn from its 1953 ceasefire agreement with South Korea, cutting the emergency hotline between the two halves of this divided peninsula. The move has been roundly condemned as provocative and an indication of increasing cravenness on the part of third-generation great leader Kim Jong Un, whose government recently tested a nuclear device. As reported on NPR and other major news networks, this behavior is portrayed as almost innate, not rooted in anything other than blind aggression and dogmatic fealty to the North’s longstanding cult of personality and garrison state mentality.

All they know of us.
All they know of us.

Now, it is true that the North Korean state is an ossified, garrison state, very oppressive – a dungeon, even. I can’t defend it. But they didn’t arrive at this state of affairs without prompting. There is one thing they want: a non-aggression treaty with the United States. Because the war of 1950-53 was fought with the U.S. more than with South Korea, and that was a war of genocidal proportions, particularly for the North. The U.S. unleashed everything short of nuclear weapons on the North during that period, until no standing structures remained north of the 38th parallel. This after years of oppressive U.S. occupation of the southern half of Korea, which itself followed more than three decades of Japanese occupation.

When North Koreans talk about destruction, they know the meaning of the word. It is not an abstraction for them. After all, they share Poland’s great misfortune of being geographically located between two great powers, frequently at odds. Worse yet, they became ground zero of a growing cold war that was never hotter than it was during that three year period in the Korean peninsula. If they have nuclear weapons, it’s because they don’t want to be attacked. And if they take exception to the annual mock-invasion of the north conducted by Washington and Seoul, it is because they have a deep memory of the devastation of sixty years ago.

In America, we haven’t forgotten the Korean War so much as simply never known it in the first place, except for the dwindling number of veterans who fought there. It’s high time we stopped acting like an aggrieved empire and found a way to settle this conflict … before it explodes again.

luv u,

jp

This just in.

Getting some feedback on our recent episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, the monthly podcast we wrap together with gaffer tape and bailing wire (whatever the hell THAT is), stuffing it full of discarded hammer components left lying around from a previous era here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. It’s a smart podcast … about as smart as a box full of hammer heads. Yep, yep … we’ve got at least one brain between us. And then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He has an ELECTRONIC brain.

Okay, where was I? Ah, yes. Feedback. What has it been like? Kind of a whistling, whining sound that drops in and out. I think I left the speakers on while we were recording. Annoying, but tolerable. I suppose you were thinking by feedback I meant audience reactions to the podcast. Oh, no … that’s not what I had in mind at all. I couldn’t possibly post those comments here. The FCC would jump all over my shit. (And likely they’ll complain about that last sentence, as well.)

What can be said, right? Some may have taken offense at the latest episode of Ned Trek, featuring Willard Mitt Romney and his talking dressage horse Mr. Ned. Others may have objected to the blank verse I quoted from the poet Google YouTube (the automated video transcription bard), to wit:

uh,
about that system work so if you can see the slow-speed and very moment
antiquated castle green too
this is reviewing
uh… or it’s it’s mean-spirited
means german personal assistant
stats apparently to
little it’s little bit please
know the other night
the other side of the form of walnut

Not half bad … not that I’m an expert at this sort of thing. Maybe we’ve just reached an age when verse is not all that dissimilar from randomly generated word combinations. Auto poetry … what a concept!

So anyway … we may start writing some songs this way. Start with raw lyrics, read them into a video camera, post the video to YouTube and generate the transcript. Then re-record it as a song. It would sound! (Ask your father where that comes from.) The pop music equivalent of re-fried beans or twice baked potatoes.

Keep those cards and letters coming!

Crock tears.

Rumor has it they used to wait until the person they despise was cold in the ground before excoriating them. Now, not so much. So Hugo Chavez, elected president of Venezuela three times (four if you count the recall) is called a “strong man” and “steadfast ally of dictators” who “showered the poor with social programs”. Rest in peace, anyone?

Chavez
Rest in peace.

I’m not surprised to hear this kind of claptrap on NPR news (known around my house as “Empire News”), particularly since their point man on Latin America – Juan Forero – is an abysmal reporter, incessantly critical of Chavez while giving a remarkably easy ride to Colombia (the last report I heard from him on Colombia, within the last six months or so, made no mention of human rights violations, intimidation, ongoing repression). He characterizes Chavez’s complaints against American imperialism as if U.S. economic and political domination of Latin America were some drug-induced hallucination by frenzied Bolivarian revolutionaries.

Forero’s principle complaints against Chavez, aside from his efforts to buy his people’s love with “showers” of social benefits, were that:

  • Chavez supported FARC, the guerrilla group operating in Colombia, according to the Colombian government (now there‘s a reliable source) and “interviews with former Colombian guerrillas” – or interrogations, perhaps?
  • Chavez had nasty friends, like Iran and Syria (and Bahrain? And Saudi? Oh, right … those are our friends.)
  • He called people names. (That never, ever happens here.)

NPR is not alone in this. It’s pretty much everywhere, even on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow show (Maddow described Chavez as “clownish” I believe). NBC seems hyper-focuses on Venezuela’s oil, what’s going to happen to it, why that makes the country so important, etc. I think embedded in that rhetoric is the root of all this animus towards Chavez. Yes, he had some dictatorial tendencies, but he was certainly not a dictator. They despise him because he wouldn’t play the IMF game; because he was independent of Washington, unlike previous Venezuelan regimes. As with Cuba and Haiti, they hate him because he took Venezuela away from them. It’s got nothing to do with “democracy” and everything to do with empire and money.

If no one else will say it, I will. Rest in peace. Best of luck, Venezuelans … there’s trouble ahead.

luv u,

jp