All posts by Joe

Usual Rubbish

What’s new.

Leave a comment

Well, it’s finally coming down. The snow that is. And the lamp post. Yes, you heard me right – the lamp post came down … and Jim Bob is responsible.

Okay, truth is… I don’t know for certain that Jim Bob is responsible. It may well have been Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who knocked the lamp post down during the first snow storm of the year. Here it is, the week after Christmas, and people are still driving like it’s July. Spoiled by global warming, I suppose. In any case, I only have myself to blame. It was I who suggested that Marvin serve as our chauffeur until a suitable replacement might be found. What? You didn’t know we had people driving us around? Well, that’s because we haven’t up until now. We’ve just recently adopted the Bowie-esque doctrine of acting successful to become successful. It’s like priming the pump, man.

Why this sudden obsession? Well, as you know, we of Big Green weren’t exactly born with the word “success” tattooed on our butts. (Mine has something else entirely tattooed onto it. I’m giving you twelve guesses what that might be.)  We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for lo these past three decades, playing in dives, recording in the basement on superannuated technology, scratching for every inch, inching for every scratch…. you get the picture. (Actually, you get the sound file. We don’t do pictures.) What have we got to show for it? A second-hand robot chauffeur, that’s what. And one that can’t avoid major obstacles.

I know, I know – I shouldn’t complain, what with this being the season of kindness and gratitude. (Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, sees it more as the season of mindlessness and attitude, but that’s how he rolls.) We’re still recording, still flailing away at the canon, committing item after item from the seemingly bottomless vat of unrecorded material to virtual tape. You can hear the results of these sessions on our podcast, This Is Big Green, where we post first drafts of songs we will eventually release as our next album(s).

So sure, we live in a drafty mill, no fuel for the fire, no food in the fridge, no miracle grow for the mansized tuber (not that he needs it).  But we’ve got something more valuable than any of that: a gift coupon to Tony’s pizza, good for another three days. To the limo… and damn the lamp posts!

Political Rants

Look back.

Leave a comment

Lots of news about official enemies this past week. Plenty of footage from the funeral of Kim Jong Il, showing legions of North Koreans – many in uniform – displaying their exaggerated grief. (Hey… those folks know what they need to do to get ahead.) And of course the Iranian threat to shut down the Strait of Hormuz if the latest round of draconian sanctions recently passed by the Senate – 100 to 0, mind you – become law. The latter is, naturally, the primary obsession of our news media and our government; the former a mere source of fascination and amusement. Both provide ample opportunities to perpetuate the official line on each of these societies, about which the less we know the better.

But let’s look a little closer. Why is North Korea such a strange, strange place? Lots of reasons. The hermit kingdom is a major thread running through Korean history. More importantly, though, is the experience of the last century – namely, that of the thirty year Japanese occupation, followed by occupation and subsequent destruction by the U.S. during the Korean War. Few Americans know the impact that war had on North Korea; we mostly focus on the fact that the North invaded the South – Korea invading Korea  – but not on the devastating attack we mounted against them. Christine Ahn of the Korea Policy Institute spoke to this fact on Democracy Now! last week:

When I went to North Korea, others-I had a very interesting insight, where I would travel around the country, and with our guides, you know, they would always point to this building. This was a restaurant. It was, you know, a very ancient-looking Korean building. But it was-I was wondering, why are-why do they always keep pointing that building out? And the thing that was really surprising is that was the only building that remained since the Korean War. Otherwise, the rest of Pyongyang was essentially leveled. And that was because of the devastating air raids. More bombs were dropped in the Korean War than in World War II. Napalm was introduced. I mean, the U.S. bombed dams, which was considered a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

It’s a similar story with Iran. Around the time we stopped drenching North Korea with napalm, we were fomenting a coup in Iran that brought in the Shah, who tortured his way through the next 25 years until the Iranian revolution. After that, we supported Saddam Hussein’s 8-year attack against Iran, which cost them about 800,000 lives. If Iran wants a nuclear capability, it’s likely as our own intelligence service estimates suggest – an attempt at building a deterrent. We invaded countries on both sides of Iran, neither of which had nuclear weapons. We did not attack North Korea, which does have nukes. What lesson should the Iranians draw from that?

There’s a tone of near outrage over the notion that the Iranians would threaten retaliation over sanctions. Fact is, they’ve seen what sanctions can do, both at home and in neighboring Iraq. Much as they are a repressive regime with a poor record on human rights, it is easy to understand why they would respond in this way. What I don’t understand is why we seem unable to anticipate that.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Tall tales.

Leave a comment

Gather ’round the fire, folks. Everybody got their hot chocolate? Not too, hot, right? Make yourselves comfortable. Got some serious yuletide bloviating to do.

As I mentioned last week, all of our little elves have been laboring under harsh working conditions in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, hammering together the disjointed fragments of Big Green’s Christmas Podcast. A thankless job, to be sure, but somebody has to do it (at a substandard wage). Next year maybe we outsource to Sri Lanka in honor of Mitt Romney’s eventual nomination. Or not. Anyway…. Christmas…

It occurs to me, listening to our holiday audio extravaganza, that our explanations of the songs included in the podcast are, shall we say, somewhat wanting. So what the hell… I’m going to give you the low-down on all of them, just so that you can be a more informed listener. That’s how we roll over here at Big Green – full disclosure at all times. Why, you may ask? Well… I’d rather not say.

Okay, so here’s the story below the music. I’ve included the time markers so that you can work your way through our 2 and a half hours of blather:

Merry Christmas, Jane (Part 2). [at 1:40] One of the numbers from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. Some reviewer on GarageBand thought it sounded like Neil Young, but that’s probably mostly the instrumentation. What’s it about? Damned if I know. It was a year-later rejoinder to Matt’s “Merry Christmas, Jane”, which also appears on 2000 Years To Christmas. (Little known fact: There is, indeed, a “Merry Christmas Jane, Part 3” that has never been properly recorded. Maybe next Christmas, children.)

Dark Christmas.  [at 1:10:30] This is an outtake from the 2000 Years To Christmas album – one of the handful of completed songs that didn’t make it onto the disc. What’s it about? I’m still trying to work that out, but it’s sung in the voice of someone who is trying to pull someone out of their holiday slump.

Christmas Sport. [at 1:24:35] Matt’s musical reflection on the warm holiday tradition of shooting everything that moves. Another new recording.

Christmas Puzzle. [at 1:33:00] Matt wrote this about a classmate of his in grade school who was a bit disappointed with his secret santa gift. (He actually explains this better on the podcast.) The original recording was made more than a decade ago and recently enhanced with new vocals, percussion, and a remix.

Jit-Jaguar. [at 1:51:47] We recently recorded this number about the political fortunes of a local officeholder who, disappointed at the results of a recent election, calls upon a Japanese sci-fi movie automatonic superhero to assist with his vengeance on the people who rejected him.

Evening Crab Nebula. [at 2:14:29] A new recording made with the help of “Cousin” Rick Perry; a tale of hope and caution. Hope for political advantage; caution about taking biblical stories too literally. Contains the only known instance of a rhyme with the word “Nebula” in a pop song lyric.

There we go, kids. Lame explanations, I admit, but… lame is better than nothing. Have a happy.

Political Rants

Getting warmer.

Leave a comment

I’m hip-deep in audio editing right now, so again… forgive me for shooting from the hip.

I didn’t want to let too many weeks go by without commenting on the Durban Conference on climate change. I have to say, the Obama administration has gotten really good at acting as though they’re doing something progressive when, in fact, they are doing next to nothing at all. What Durban demonstrated was that, more than any other nation, the United States is an obstruction to any action to alleviate the effects of climate change. Others are following our example, emboldened by our refusal to take this crisis seriously. Canada – currently headed by George W. Bush/David Cameron hybrid Stephen Harper – is pulling out of Kyoto while pulling strings to avoid (unsuccessfully, it appears) having its tar-sands oil appropriately labeled as dirty by the EU. Russia is balking at emissions reductions as well. The fact that we lead the denialist camp gives them lots of cover.

There was a time, about four years ago, when it seemed possible that we might address this problem in a semi-serious fashion. That time is long past, its sentiments plowed under by the financial crisis and the “drill, baby, drill” mentality of mainstream and tea party Republicans. Because of the Democratic party’s failure to find its spine on this issue, the Republicans have managed to position it in a similar way as they have with the gun control issue. It seems like the very mention of global warming or climate change brings a chill to Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Only Republicans ever seem to use the terms, and only then as a means of attacking their cowardly opponents. They have been given the upper hand, once again, by default, just as Democrats have deserted the barricades on the gun issue, on the death penalty, on “missile defense”, etc.

I’m afraid, with respect to global warming, this is more about us as a people than our politicians. The fact that we cannot avoid some of the impacts of this crisis has somehow led people to believe that it’s just as well to do nothing. (I am referring here to people who actually believe global warming is real, not those who buy the crackpot hoax argument that fossil fuel shills like Sen. James Inhofe peddles.) We have this unfortunate tendency focus on the present to the exclusion of the future. It just cuts against the grain to act as though we should treat the world as something that should last beyond our own lifetimes – something that can support life for countless generations to come. This will have to change and change quickly. We had a start back in 2007. We need to get back to that moment again.

Last chance, humanity. Get smart. Merry Christmas.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Yule be sorry.

Leave a comment

We don’t have a garage. This is an abandoned hammer mill, built when people didn’t have cars. There is no garage here, get me? Now DON’T CALL HERE AGAIN! (Click! buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…. )

Got to love these small town managers. It’s bad enough that they pass an ordinance against squatting in abandoned properties (something Lincoln is convinced is aimed directly at us, lawyer that he is); now they’ve got one against all night parking. Thing is, we – that is to say, the core members of the musical collective known as Big Green – don’t even have cars. We’re not parking overnight on the street because we’ve got nothing to park. No, no –  they’re complaining about the big, blimp-like space vehicle we rented for our recent interstellar tour, which is still hovering over the mill like some kind of sales promotion. (The owner has yet to pick it up.) The town would hang tickets on the thing if they could find a ladder long enough. (They’re talking to the fire department right now. This could get ugly.)

So many distractions. How the hell is a man supposed to produce a podcast? Matt and I have yet to finish our Christmas episode, and time is running short, as you all know. We may have to …. cancel … Christmas. There’s nothing I can do; it’s this weather…. Oops, sorry. I started channeling Rankin-Bass’s “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Retail Bonanza”. I mean Reindeer. It’s not about the weather at all. It’s about time, it’s about space, about two men in the….. D’oh! Damn you, 1960’s television! Get out of my head!

Okay, to be fair, it’s not like we haven’t made any progress on our Christmas episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. We have done the basic tracks for at least two previously unreleased Big Green Christmas songs. We are going to resurrect an outtake from our 1999 album 2000 Years To Christmas – another previously unreleased Big Green song – specifically for the occasion. There will be other musical oddities, including yet another performance by Cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas, presidential candidate, and… and…. something else. I can’t remember the third thing. Oops.

So listen, mo-fo’s, we’ve got some work to do. A present to wrap, if you will. I’m taking the phone off the hook.

Political Rants

Issues and non-answers.

Leave a comment

A little more off the top of my head. One of these weeks I’m going to take some pains over this posting, but… not this time.

Don’t worry, Kyoto. Canada’s pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol (can you say “tar sands”?) and Durban was a bust. What’s it going to take, people? We had massive tornadic storms this past year. We don’t have the luxury of another decade of inaction and ignorance.  

See you in health. One of the issues that comes up in our perennial presidential campaign is that of health insurance, mostly in the context of so-called “Obama Care”. What doesn’t get discussed so much is, well, the only possible positive solution to the current situation, which is bankrupting individuals, bleeding businesses dry, and threatening to drown the government in red ink. The only constituency the current health insurance system benefits is private health insurers. Seems like we, as a nation, sacrifice a great deal to preserve their profitability. That has got to end. We need a national health insurance system – basically universal Medicare with some enhancements – that covers everybody.

When GOP strategist Ed Gillespie was on the Daily Show the other day, he seemed to suggest that he didn’t have a problem with the notion of insurance exchanges or the idea that veterans, for instance, should have government coverage because they deserve the best. And yet his – and I think most Republicans’ – solution to the ongoing health crisis is to throw everyone into the private market. I can tell you from experience – that is not a good place to be unless you’re very young, very healthy, and can afford very steep premiums. And the employer based system isn’t working either, partly because it’s based on the pool of employees covered by the plan. If there are a lot of illnesses in a given year, that sends the premiums through the roof. The only way to control costs is to a) get everyone in the freaking country into the same pool, and b) cut the profit out of it entirely so that, as with Medicare, practically all of the money goes to patient care. 

Private, employer-based health insurance is an anachronism that should go the way of the typewriter. It was designed for an age of close to full employment, when companies needed to incentivize people to come to work for them. If the GOP wants to reduce “uncertainty” for their friends in business, they might consider making it possible for them to get out of the health insurance business altogether. The only reasonable way to do that is through a national health plan administered by the federal government.

War’s end. The Iraq war is coming to a close, at least with respect to American troops (though many contractors remain). Of course, there are those amongst us who consider withdrawal a mistake, such as Cheney, McCain, and nearly all of the GOP presidential candidates. I know – who cares what Cheney thinks, right? Has a man ever been more consistently wrong (or despised) than he? Still, I don’t think we should be too dismissive of their views. If Cheney, McCain, Lindsey Graham, Michelle Bachman, and other foreign policy super-geniuses want us to stay in Iraq, we should ship them over there. Good place for them. And they can stay as long as they want.

Of course, we could never really allow that to happen. I mean, haven’t the Iraqi people have suffered enough?

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Homearriving.

Leave a comment

Yeah, there’s some in here, too. Yep, all over the floor. Jesus Christ on a bike. Where are all the freaking buckets? Why don’t squatters have landlords … with buckets?

Oh, hi… Yes, Big Green has made its triumphant return to Earth from its somewhat less-than-triumphant [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, pulling our rental spacecraft into a low, low … very low parking orbit (approximately 100 feet above the Earth’s surface) over the Cheney Hammer Mill, our abandoned mill of a home in upstate New York. And, as will happen when one leaves one’s home for a stretch of weeks, some maintenance issues have emerged to greet us, providing us with distraction even before we’ve had the chance to remove our tour galoshes. They say all roofs leak, but I doubt they all leak this badly. My converted hammer assembly room suite looks like a freaking swimming pool. I think I see fish.

Right, well… that’s the kind of problem you expect. What I didn’t expect was to have to deal with obstinate bandmates after our return as well as throughout the tour. I’m thinking specifically of … wait for it! … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). You may have thought I was going to say the mansized tuber, but really… he’s no trouble, hanging out in his specially climate-controlled terrarium, working his smartphone with both roots, tweeting pictures of himself in a methane sauna on Neptune. (Very therapeutic for cruciferous beings.) No, no… Marvin gets the prize this week. He has refused to leave the circa 2001: A Space Odyssey rent-a-vessel we took on this latest tear through the solar system. He has developed what Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) calls “Hal 9000 Syndrome”. It’s a bit like Stockholm syndrome, except, well, a lot less congenial.

Okay, so Marvin is refusing to open the pod bay doors. This is not a tragedy. We’ve got too much on the agenda to care, frankly, so he can float up there, 100 feet above our heads, and play Captain Bligh to his brass heart’s content. Matt and I have a Christmas podcast to produce, and time is running thin… I mean, short. (Premise is running thin.) Lord knows we want to have an action packed episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN posted before the fat elf flies – an episode full of new recordings, old yuletide favorites, an outtake from our “classic” (i.e. elderly) album 2000 Years To Christmas, and just the sort of incoherent ramblings you expect from us.

No, no…. you don’t have to thank us. Just send buckets. Lots of buckets.

Political Rants

Roger, out.

Leave a comment

Again, just some thoughts. I’m overloaded, as usual. Details at eleven.

Cain’s out. No more Herman Cain. That’s disappointing in a way, though I can’t say as I’m all that disappointed whenever a manifestly incompetent right-wing shill is deemed unfit for service as president. He would have been the conduit through which Randy Scheunemann, Phil Graham, and other luminaries would have run the country into yet another deep ditch. Of course, that would be true of practically anyone on the Republican deck right now, save Gingrich, who would likely insist on doing everything (badly) himself. I will, however, miss the Pokeman quotes, the seeming lack of conviction that a president actually needs to show any interest in politics or administrative policy, foreign or domestic. He’s like the cut-out who can’t hide the fact that he’s a cut-out: there’s obviously no other reason for him to even want to be president than to carry out the wishes of corporate America more consistently than even their bought and paid-for politicians of both parties.

Ging-riches. Speaking of corporate shills, our former speaker seems to keep rocketing higher in the polls. Unstoppable. They’ve even started phoning my brother in New York, never a Republican he, asking him to volunteer. (A hilarious recording of this conversation will be included in Big Green’s Christmas podcast, coming up soon.) Obviously they’ve got some cash on hand. Perhaps old Newt is pumping some of his ample riches into the effort, earned cashing in on his government connections and experience. All those riches haven’t softened the old bugger one iota. That thing about nine-year-olds becoming school janitors, cleaning out the can – that is vintage Gingrich. I have to appreciate the way, even in describing such a Swiftian enterprise, he manages to get a dig in about “unionized Janitors.” It reminded me of the classy way his former lieutenant, Tom Delay, described his failure to serve in the military during Vietnam (a war I’m certain he supported) as a case of having been kept out of the army because an illegal immigrant took his place. In any case, I’m expecting unbounded riches from Newt over the coming months.

Drone nation. The Iranians have captured one of our drones, evidently involved in yet another undeclared war by remote control. Aside from morals and ethics and basic human decency, this is the policy downside of all this drone use: it’s just too damn easy. Obama is using them more and more, in more countries – it’s the ultimate mission creep, and it’s going to blow up in our faces, frankly.

Yeah, I know – the G.O.P. will do it too if they take control. That shouldn’t stop us from calling Obama and telling him to knock it off.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Back to ground.

Leave a comment

Okay, then. Is that a wrap? What? It’s already the holiday season? What happened to freaking October? Okay, then… so it’s a Christmas wrap. Satisfied?

Oh, hi. Yeah, I know. After ten weeks on the road, tempers wear a little thin. What, you got a PROBLEM with that? (Sorry. I’ll start again.) Post Thanksgiving slump. This shipboard life is not for me; nor, apparently, is it for anyone else on board. Speaking of bored … this business of bobbing around the solar system is bloody tiresome. I don’t know how sFshzenKlyrn stands it, year after year, millennium after millennium. It’s just as well that he’s a transcendental etheric life form that ignores all boundaries between space, time, and whatever. (Especially the whatever. The man simply cannot take anything seriously.)

And then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s bouncing around this tin can like… like a robot in a tin can. Of course, he always gets antsy this time of year, when the big robotics convention is taking place back on Earth. He is constantly checking the Web for updates, seeing if any big strides have been made. Always has to be in the vanguard, our Marvin. Get used to it, man – one day, time leaves all of us behind. It’s freaking inevitable. In fact, it’s the great hairy screaming inevitable that is our universe. Who cares if some table-top tractor can solve equations faster than you do? You still can…. well…. lift very heavy things…

And then there’s the marigolds, the marigolds. What? Sorry… there  are no marigolds. Oxygen is running a little thin in this rattletrap we call a spacecraft. We’re somewhere between Jupiter and five miles away from Jupiter, running low on fuel, supplies, and what-not. Ever run out of what-not on an interstellar voyage? You do NOT want to know how awful that can be.

So anyway… it’s back to Earth for us, or the Earth that will be left when we return – an Earth wracked by climate change, war, illness, poverty, and rapacious corporate greed. Home sweet freaking home, just in time to do our annual Christmas Special podcast. Stay tuned!

Political Rants

Weeks away.

Leave a comment

Just a few hurried comments on the events of the day. (The events of the day are keeping me from the events of the day. Shall I say that a second time?)

Cain Mutiny. Presidential candidate Herman Cain has some more difficulties maintaining his myth of marital bliss, and this may be a game stopper for him. Naturally the death knell may come about over something that doesn’t matter a damn. Aside from his family, who the hell cares who he sleeps with, so long as it’s consensual and doesn’t involve minors, animals, etc.? Somehow this seems to bother people (and the mass media) more than the fact that the man has given zero thought to anything having to do with public affairs. He must be the first presidential candidate I’ve ever seen fail to give an opinion when someone asks him about something like the Libya intervention. He had to ask the interviewer what side Obama (i.e. the United States) was on. What the … ? Has the man been living in a pizza box? He is running for the G.O.P. nomination and apparently has no concept of what the pro-life and pro-choice positions actually mean.

Why the hell does this man want to be president? He smells to me like a cut-out for the Koch brothers, but what he says is that God encouraged him to run. Personally, I think God may have just been trying to order a pizza.

Deficit of Imagination. They’re sparring over the payroll tax cut – otherwise known as The Only Tax Cut That Needs To Be Paid For. With the Occupy movement receiving eviction notices from coast to coast, Congress is managing to turn the conversation back to debt with a good bit of help from the major news organizations. I heard Joe Scarborough sparring with Sherrod Brown about Medicare costs and showing “courage” by acknowledging that those costs were tantamount to a cancer on the body politic. His solution? Cut, cut, cut. Which is basically shift the burden onto the elderly, the ill, etc.

I didn’t hear Brown say this (he may have), but the courageous position to my mind would be to advocate expanding Medicare to cover everybody. The reason we have deficit Medicare spending projected for the next few decades is simple – we are subsidizing the profitability of private health insurers, who get to cover the least costly consumers while the government covers the most costly ones (i.e. the ones private insurers don’t want). The courageous thing to do would be to say, we can’t afford this model any longer.

I’m waiting to hear that from someone. Anyone?

luv u,

jp