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?
Usual Rubbish

Poditis.

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How do you spell XML again? Does it rhyme with “smell”? No coincidence, I suspect. Jesus christ on a bike. Technology is for fools. And forever a fool I shall be.

Oh, hi. Just got done cobbling together this month’s episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our notorious podcast, and placing it online with the technological equivalent of stone knives and bearskins. My approach to programming is akin to placing several monkeys at computers loaded with self-peeling banana screensavers. Trial and error… but mostly trial. Anyway, it got done, and that’s just as well, because this month’s episode is chock full of something. Yes, friends, it’s full of ingredients. It contains contents. Should I draw you a picture?

Right. You’ll see from the program notes that there are not one but TWO new songs from Cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas. These are two more in a series of “first draft” recordings that will comprise (in a more finished form) Big Green’s upcoming album, tentatively named Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Our cousin has inspired an album’s worth of material, to be sure, including one jaunty little number called “Awesome Hair”:

It once adorned Reagan, now on your head it sits
and not on that wanna-be latter day Mitt’s.
When you’re nonsensically talking, it especially fits
If anyone tries to muss it up, you mess with their shit.

Pure audio dynamite, that’s what that is.

Thankfully, things were a little quieter around the hammer mill this week. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) finally gave up any idea of going to robot camp for the summer. “Just because all of the neighbors’ robots are doing something,” I heard myself telling him, “that doesn’t mean you have to do it, too. If they all rolled into the car-crusher, would you follow them?” At that point, Marvin emitted a metallic cluck and rolled his eyes. I just can’t say anything right, it seems. (He’s at that difficult age when robots start pushing the boundaries a little bit. )

One other thing about the podcast, before I forget. You might want to listen to it with something running in the background, like maybe an espresso machine. That would give a better sense of what’s going on in our heads when we record it. Just a suggestion.

 

Political Rants

Stuff and … more stuff.

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Once again, a bit pressed for times. Projects, projects, projects – you know the tune. Here’s what’s chewing on my nerves this week:

In search of a problem. The G.O.P. is obsessed with the notion of voter fraud, a phenomenon so rare that it makes injuries from lightning strikes seem frequent by comparison. Can we just stop pretending, for five minutes, that this is a sincere concern about the integrity of our elections? It’s pretty obvious what they’re up to – they are fighting a rear-guard action against demographic trends, long acknowledged, that do not favor a virtually all-white party such as themselves. The only way to do that is through the usual methods they have employed over the years: voter suppression. Voter I.D. laws, in particular, are meant to place significant hurdles of time, expense, and logistics between individuals and the ballot. Let’s call it what it is – a direct attack on voting rights. Time to push back … hard.

Crime and punishment. As was clear when he was in the White House, leaking the name of a CIA agent and pressing Federal Attorneys to prosecute non-existent voter fraud (see above), Karl Rove is a very nasty piece of work. Now he’s a major force in our electoral process, thanks in part to the Citizens United decision of the Supreme Court. Rove’s 501(c)4 “social welfare organization” Crossroads GPS has been sluicing corporate money into campaigns by the millions of dollars. In 2010 his group was instrumental in swamping Syracuse area congressman Dan Maffei with negative ads in the last two weeks of the campaign, electing tea party challenger Ann Marie Buerkle by a handful of votes – one of many such interventions. He’s doing the same this year. With regard to Rove, I agree with George W. Bush: criminals should know there are consequences to their actions. Should have put him in jail when they had the chance.

Stop TPP. The Obama administration’s trade representative is in the midst of very quiet negotiations on the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement – basically a global NAFTA on steroids. The reason it’s being discussed behind closed doors is that the moment the provisions of these investor rights agreements become public, public outrage brings them down. (See the Multilateral Agreement on Investment and other similar pacts.) I suggest you take a look at this and do what you can to make others aware of it before they slip it in under the radar. This agreement would be a disaster for labor, for environmental regulations, for trade policy, you name it.  Go to http://stoptpp.org/ to find out how.

Spread the word, friends. That is all.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Settle. Just settle.

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Listen, Marvin. I know you want to go to summer camp like all of the other robot assistants. That’s understandable at your age. But you have to understand, we just can’t afford it right now. It’s not that we don’t want you to go … it’s money, Marvin. We’ll try to save enough to send you to robot assistant camp next year, okay?

Sheesh. Another dejected look. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has now officially joined the ranks of the disgruntled. That makes about nine of us, if you count both Lincolns. We are in the dog days and, apparently, the doldrums of summer here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, and I can tell you personally, nobody’s happy around these parts. I blame our persistent lack of gainful employment. Most band entourages, as you know, can occupy themselves with the somewhat questionable benefits of touring. Big Green, though, has not done a tour yet this year, and I fear that fact is beginning to wear on us all.

Aw, now look…. mansized tuber is getting fussy again! Matt! Lincoln! Mitch! Somebody else take a turn, for chrissake! I’ve repotted him twice today already and it’s only noon.

Jeebus, just listen to me. Listen to all of us. It’s the sound of domestic life, that’s what it is. We have been in one place far too long, my brothers. I feel the road calling me, once again. Ah, the aroma of poorly prepared meals, the clatter of ancient window-mounted air conditioners, the inviting patina of a well-used shower stall. Okay, so there isn’t a lot about touring that I miss. It’s the lack of touring that worries me. For one thing, it makes us prone to lethargy (well….. more prone, let’s say). For another, it drains our modest resources to what can only be described as a negative value. You see …. oh, jesus. Wait just a minute, my friends…

Not that pot, Mitch! I used that one earlier today. Give tubey a fresh one from the garden shed. Use your head, man!

Right. Where was I? Doesn’t matter. We have to get another interstellar tour together. Just as soon as we finish our upcoming album / rock opera / whatever the fuck it is, titled Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Check out our July podcast, soon to be posted, for details.

Political Rants

Pay now, pay later.

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What does the tea-party acronym stand for again? Taxed Enough Already, as some of you recall. That’s the credo for our age, whether or not there’s any truth to the sentiment. If people are paying higher taxes, they’re doing so on the local level; as county and municipal governments try to grapple with austerity policies from above, they resort to whatever means of revenue generation that may be available to them. Federal austerity starves state coffers; that in turn negatively impacts localities. Combine that with the fact that we are in the midst of a depression of sorts – i.e. a period when people need greater assistance from the government, not less – and that causes upward pressure on local taxes.

When that happens, people inevitably look for someone to blame. Lately that someone has been unionized public employees. Sad to say, my fellow Americans are all too quick to think the worst of them. That’s not surprising. A lot of editorial ink, political rhetoric, and advertising resources have been placed against vilifying the very notion of working for government. It’s a waste of money, they’re a bunch of lazy layabouts who can’t make it in the private sector, etc., etc.  For a long time that blanket criticism seemed confined to, say, the people down at the DMV, but in recent years it’s been expanded to teachers and even public safety employees.

Here’s what the critics – at least, the non-cynical critics – don’t appear to understand: When you lay off public workers, you create more problems than you solve. For one thing, you make whatever institution they worked for less effective; that means less value to the taxpayers. For another, those individuals are now out in the public sector workforce, competing for the same jobs that everyone else is trying to get. Thirdly, their lost income results in less consumer spending (yes, public workers buy groceries, clothes, and gasoline just like the rest of us), which means lower consumption tax revenues, which means – yep – budget gaps of the type we’re grappling with now.

What’s needed, as Jim Galbraith, Paul Krugman, and others have pointed out, is federal stimulus – aid to state and local governments so that they can stop shedding jobs and adding to the ranks of the unemployed, infrastructure spending that will build out the economy and create jobs at the same time, and other public investments.

Perhaps if the GOP could take a break from passing radical anti-abortion legislation for about five minutes, perhaps they’d consider doing something about this depression. Just saying.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Weighty stuff.

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Matt… can you talk to him this time? He’s freaking ignoring me. Give it a try, damnit. I need to get some sleep. We’ve got the governor coming in the morning and…. well, you know.

Oh, hi. As per my usual affectation, I will act surprised at my discovery of your presence. What-WHAT? Okay, now that that’s out of the way. Just trying to get Matt to speak to Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad science advisor, about keeping the noise down a little bit, just for one night. One night, Mitch! That’s all I’m asking! Man does not live by tofu alone! He needs socks, too, and occasionally a couple of ounces of baby oil … so, my point is that it’s more complicated than you think! Oh, what’s the use?

What’s he doing that makes so much noise (i.e. more noise than a rock band)? Well, I made the mistake of leaving last Wednesday’s paper lying about. Mitch picked it up and zeroed in on an article about the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland … you know, the high-tech gizmo that smashes atoms to PULP. (Gulp.) Yeah, well … apparently that’s one of Mitch’s hobbies, too, and he got this bug in his head about finding something he calls the Higgs boson particle, which is the theoretically predicted thingy that gives all matter its mass. (Apparently, we Americans are just chock full of the stuff.) And now he’s obsessed with finding the bastard before those scientists in Switzerland do.

Now, when I use the term “obsessed” with reference to Mitch, I am not using hyperbole. He’s plugged together his own hadron collider (which he calls the “reasonably large hadron collider” or RLHC) using discarded PVC tubing the plumber left behind, as well as other odds and ends. He’s press-ganged Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into the effort as well, making him eyeball the gauges and man the meters, day and night. And the freaking noise! I can’t even hear myself type. I mean, how the hell are we supposed to finish our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick? How are we supposed to record our July episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN? If those smock-wearing eggheads in Switzerland could just … just…

What? They found it? Oh, Mitch…. The paper’s here. Read all about it.

Political Rants

Rights and wrongs.

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G.O.P. congressional fiscal policy wunderkind (somehow) Paul Ryan was talking about rights on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos the other day, and he said this:

We [Republicans] disagree with the notion that our rights come from government; that the government can now grant us and define our rights. Those are ours. Those come from nature and god according to the Declaration of Independence.

I’ve heard similar stuff emanating from the heads of various conservatives over the years, of course. It just amazes me, though, that this creature they present as such an intellectual heavyweight in the area of legislative statecraft can seemingly lack the knowledge a pre-teenager might glean (between naps) from civics class. Rights are given to us by god and nature just as food and water are; which is to say, not really at all. Rights exist; we may (or may not) be aware of their existence. But they are not “given” to us in any respect.

Government is, at its best, an imperfect guarantor of rights; that is one of its primary functions. If people are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights, what of the African Americans owned by the very man who penned the Declaration of Independence? Were they not also handed the gift of freedom by the almighty at birth? I think not. They were chattel, for chrissake; uncounted millions were born into forced labor and indeed died therein. It took a civil war, fought for other purposes, to abolish institutionalized slavery, but the fight for freedom was far from won when the guns fell silent.

The civil rights struggles of the 20th Century carved out some basic rights of citizenship that were then encoded in federal law and implemented and enforced by federal authority. No miracles there. No, the government doesn’t hand you freedoms; neither does god, nor business. We scratch for every inch, and if we’re persistent (and fortunate), the government can assist us in holding on to our gains. Or it can throw us under the bus, with the wrong people at the helm. The only role any god might play is if s/he gives us enough brains and enough strength to fight.

All I can say is, if Ryan is the best thinker they have … they’ve got some thinking to do.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Preppin’ for Tex.

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Got your cowboy hat yet? Oh. Okay, why the hell not? Just go downtown, walk into the cowboy supply store, and pull a ten-gallon hat off the rack. What’s so hard about that?

Oh… hey, man. Caught me, once again, in the midst of lecturing the help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) refers to it derisively as “reprogramming”, but you know better. All I asked him to do was to purchase his own cowboy gear – that’s all. Is that so unreasonable? Am I expected to pay for everything around here? What the hell – I’m the “job creator”, right? I’m the one using “air quotes” left and right. Haven’t I done my part in this employer-robot assistant relationship? Huh?

Okay, so why am I asking Marvin to dress up like Tex? So that he’ll match the rest of us, of course, when we start shooting videos to support our upcoming album of Cousin Rick Perry songs. What the hell, we can’t release an album of songs nominally by the governor of Texas without donning ten-gallon (or, at least, 5-liter) headgear. That would be tantamount to malpractice. And what is malpractice but a crutch for cats who can’t blow? (Okay… I murdered that quote, but it had it coming.)

Admittedly, there is more to making a new album than getting matching cowboy suits. Much more. Like shoes. And pizza boxes. Bubble-stuff in a plastic jar. What else? Hmmmm. Corn husks. Put them all in a cement mixer and flip the switch, baby. Round and round they go, and after a few hours, pour it out into a six-up mold and start stamping out those CD’s. Nothing to it.

What about the music part of it? Details, details. We’re working on it, that’s all I can say. All of those first-draft podcast songs? We’re polishing them to a sparkling luster. We’re patching them up like ten miles of bad road. We’re turning knobs, flipping switches, and cranking …. cranks. We’re making the little lights flash like glow-bugs. That’s a bit of doing.

So, yes… we will have an album. Big Green will crawl again across the shattered landscape of American music anyhow. In cowboy hats. Yee-haw.

Political Rants

Next round.

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Sure, I’m surprised that the Affordable Care Act survived this past Thursday. I thought the mainstream media was going to talk it to death, frankly. Talk about wind-ups … by the time 10:00 a.m. rolled around, I was too bleeping sick of the issue to even care, and let me tell you – that’s quite a distance for me. It’s just that the horserace coverage of every political issue gets under my skin in the worst way. The merits of a given issue are never deeply examined; it’s always he said this, she said that. No way to work out which is closer to the truth.

They did this with health care, pretty much all day. After the decision was handed down, NPR had some guy from Cato and a policy wonk from the administration. Basically just put them in a room and watch them spar. Of course, Cato guy is much further to the right than the Obama person is to the left, so it’s kind of a straw man argument at best. How is this news? They pulled the same thing with the “Fast and Furious” faux-scandal. Even though Fortune Magazine blogger Katherine Eban blew a hole in the standard story about this a full day before, NPR, NBC, and other mainstream outlets were still framing the argument the same way – the GOP want documents, Holder and Obama say no. He said, they said.

What about the merits of the Affordable Care Act? I was never a big fan. It is, of course, a conservative idea, like cap and trade – market-based policy designed to head off something saner and more effective. Basically profit insurance in its purest form. Nevertheless, it establishes the concept of national health insurance for the first time, so that’s a minor step forward. The mandate requirement includes a penalty that the Supreme Court has called a tax; there’s a shocker. I wrote about this herein a few times, I think, most recently in March. Arguably any cost the government imposes can be described as a tax. I would go so far as to say that the failure to provide affordable universal coverage is a kind of tax, since everyone ends up paying through the nose as a result of its absence.

The G.O.P. is crowing because it thinks it has a tax issue for the coming election. All I can say is that, for all their bluster, they are responsible for the single largest tax hike I have ever had – their refusal to renew the “Making Work Pay” tax credit cost me $800 last year, as it did millions of other Americans. Where’s your tax issue now, boys?

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Thing is.

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What’s that? What’s that you say? Can’t hear ya, young man. You’ll have to speak up a bit. Nah, I’m not deaf. I’m either old or living on top of a fracking operation. Or maybe both.

Yeah, hey howdy. Welcome back to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, where the winters are cold and the derricks run day and night, pulverizing the shale that supports the very ground we walk on to squeeze every last iota of value out of the battered slag that is America. Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, our once and future corporate overlords, are working this little piece of borrowed real estate like it’s Irian Jaya and they’re Freeport McMoran. But…. I digress. Always like to start on a bright note. Now on to more serious matters.

Well, it took some doing with all of this earth moving and earth shaking (movers and shakers are we), but we managed to post the June episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Another titanic installment of … well … nothing in particular. Though we have included not one but two first-draft recordings of Rick Perry songs. Could be worth a listen …. just advance over about half an hour of insane blather and you’ll hear the first one; a funky little number called “Aw, Shoot.” It offers, in its own ludicrous way, a thumbnail sketch of cousin Rick Perry’s trajectory from simple country dummkopf to dummkopf on a national stage already. Sounds vaguely like an early 80s soundtrack cut. Think Bam-Bam on Mars. Some of you know what I’m saying.

The other Rick Perry song is, well, an ode to his staying power. He’ll be there, that’s all he’s saying. Wherever there’s a law beatin’ up a gun, he’ll come on like a burning sun. And so it goes.  Big Green will be putting out a collection of cousin Rick songs later this year, with polished up and enhanced selections from these podcasts, plus additional material. (I’m not going to say what kind of material. It may be music, may be fracking fluid. Not sure there’s a difference.)

This month’s podcast also features a Big Green number from back in 2004, called The President’s Brain is Missing. It’s about our old friend George W. Bush, who seemed to fancy himself something of a martial type back in those days. Seemed like he should have a “Green Beret” type theme associated with his heroic exploits, so we just made him one.

Well, there’s the work whistle. Won’t be able to hear myself think for the next 12 hours, so I’ll sign off now.  WHIRRRRRRRRR……

Political Rants

Kvetch in haste.

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There’s a lot going on these past few weeks, so I just want to touch on a few things and go. Touch and go, that’s right.

Fast and fatuous. Congressman Darrell Issa’s House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted this week to recommend Attorney General Eric Holder be held in contempt of Congress. That, of course, has been reported by all and sundry. What have only really been visible on Fox News are the positively loony allegations that are behind this push for the contempt citation. Perhaps you’ve heard this – it’s a conspiracy theory that the Obama administration allowed the “Fast and Furious” arm sales to go wrong in the hopes that the resulting increased gun violence in Mexico would prompt a popular movement for gun control back home.

Crazy stuff. Except that it’s being repeated by G.O.P. lawmakers like Rep. John Mica, Trent Franks, Joe Walsh, and Issa himself. Sen. Charles Grassley (a.k.a. Grandma) has alluded to this as well. So…. why is it the mainstream media haven’t pointed out the fact that this goof-ball paranoid yarn is driving this whole effort? I’m no great fan of Holder, but this is ludicrous. Question for the mainstream media: when they start eating dogfood on T.V., will you report on it?

Lovin’ it. Hiring is still down. Millions are still out of work. This is a depression, and Congress is sitting on their hands, hoping it stays bad long enough to elect one of their own president. They are not alone. American business, large and small, could make a difference here, but they are making do with fewer workers. Frankly, they like it like this. What’s not to like? They make their existing work force work harder for the same money or less (greater “productivity”). The presence of a large surplus labor force keeps the employees quiet and cautious, afraid to ask for a raise, better working conditions, etc.  And pappy tax cut gets elected president. Am I wrong? Has anyone out there ever worked for a business? I have, and I can tell you…. if they can get away with fewer people, in my experience, they do just that.

One wishes large businesses, at least, would act for the good of the nation and start hiring people again instead of sitting on their historically enormous cash reserves. But that’s not their mission. Their mission is to maximize shareholder value, workers be damned. So prosperity for them doesn’t mean jobs for us. It means more of the same.

luv u,

jp