(Note: No images or political rant today. Tending to a sick friend. jp)
First floor: oxygen, nitrogen, argon and neon. Second floor: carbon dioxide and water vapor. Third floor: ions and free radicals. Fourth floor: absolutely freaking nothing.
Okay, well… that’s what we can expect to hear as we ascend in our space elevator to what promises to be a very eventful launch tour for our new album, International House, now available from HammerMade music (our own bogus imprint). Why such an unconventional method of travel? Don’t ask me… it’s Mitch Macaphee’s call, and he’s not talking to the press. You’re not the press? Well, then I can speak for Mitch. He’s…. a…. mad… man. Got that? MADMAN! We’ve been doing these interstellar tours for nigh onto ten years, and every time we go it’s in some kind of space vessel. This time, it’s a freaking elevator…. just because the guy reads about it in Popular Mechanics. (Did I say “Popular” Mechanics? I meant Unpopular Mechanics … that’s the mad scientist version. Miss a month, miss a lot.)
Okay, so we’re all supposed to pile into this space elevator thing and hit the up button. Personally, I’m skeptical. Sure, it’s cushy and all that – crushed velvet upholstery, brass fixtures, a veritable gilded carriage of the stars. But it’s not exactly… well… roomy. It’s an elevator, for chrissake! This trip could take weeks, perhaps months if we break the light-speed barrier (lord knows doing so could mean the passage of aeons whilest aging only an instant in the time of man… think of it…. ) Am I expected to share a relatively combined cabin with my execrable band mates, as well as Marvin (my personal robot assistant), both Lincolns, the man-sized tuber, an increasingly irritable Mitch Macaphee, and Big Zamboola, who’s been getting bigger by the day? (I blame pizza…. though that’s a bit like blaming the victim.) This is insufferable.
To compound matters, Mitch’s diabolical new “temporal depression” device could make the trip seem a whole lot longer. After all, it was through the use of this brave new technology that the last week was stretched into several months of actual time as perceived by us. Who would have thunk that some gizmo that looks for all intents and purposes like an espresso machine could actually stretch time/space like silly putty? Mitch is very fond of his invention, and he has every intention of carrying it along with him on the space elevator. No doubt every time he’s a little behind in his chores, he’ll flick the switch and turn an hour into a day… or two… or three. Mother of pearl! This tour will never end! Who was the idiot that asked Mitch to come up with a time expansion machine?
Oh, yeah. Guess it was me. Well… I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. See you on Aldebaran!
Strangest thing. For a moment there, it seemed like time was slowing down, maybe even stopping. And my watch… it’s running … backwards.
started shakin’, the walls started hummin’, and the door started shoutin’ mah name! No, not really… that’s just a little blues number I’ve been working on (they love that stuff on Aldebaran). Actually, there was a humming sound… kind of a low pitched rumble, actually, and the storm windows were rattling a bit. God only knows what kinds of contraptions Mitch keeps in that laboratory of his. Crates keep arriving in the courtyard, mostly by air-drop. (We’ve got enough discarded parachutes to start a silk recycling center.) Do we find that disconcerting? Sure, sure… but that’s just one of the things you need to take into account if you want to have a real madman problem-solver around the mill. Everything’s got its price, you know.
of reality. Mitch explained it to me. He’s created a machine capable of squeezing five, ten, sometimes twenty minutes out of every standard minute. When he cranks it up, the clock slows down, then starts running backwards. Cars in the street kick into reverse. Cakes fall instead of rise. (Actually, that happens to me without the machine.) And my hair starts growing back into my head. Freaky! Still, despite the strangeness, it has afforded us a little more time to take pains over our tour preparations. Don’t want to skimp on the pre-launch checklist (even if we are going up in a glorified interstellar freight elevator).
back in 2000 as the “election show” – the recount fiasco. Only this time the meltdown is happening before the voting begins. Holy jeebus – here we are in the midst of an economic train wreck that any fool could have seen coming from about a hundred miles away, and just as our bonehead president is about to close on a bailout deal, Admiral John McCain melodramatically “suspends his campaign” two days before the first presidential debate and declares that he is going to apply his renowned financial acumen to the negotiations. Next thing anyone knows, the congressional Republicans are bailing on their president’s plan, raising additional provisions (like their perennial favorite, another capital gains tax cut) and digging in their heals less than a day after their leadership indicated a deal was at hand. Mission accomplished, admiral!
was the most important foreign policy question of the last 8 years, and he was dead wrong. McCain pushed for it, voted for it, supported it to the hilt, and the result is more than 4,000 dead Americans, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, millions of refugees, a wrecked country, and a new ally for McCain’s despised Iranian regime. If that’s what victory looks like to you, vote McCain/Palin. Trust me, he and his Alaskan sidecar would get us into new and even more exciting military adventures, I’m sure. (She certainly appears to think war with Russia is a real option. Perhaps it’s her rapture-obsessed extremist Christianity at work, hoping to bring about blessed Armageddon.)
think so. How about anti-Lincoln? Drank it? What the hell… how thirsty is that guy, anyway?
tell you just what goes into releasing a new Big Green album. First, there’s that bit about making the music. I’ve talked about this before. Oh, it’s a painstaking process of cultivation and assembly. You start with good topsoil – rich Mississippi delta loam is the best. Turn it over a few times to get some air in there, then start planting random musical notes. If the weather is with you and you have a reliable robot (or root vegetable) to do the tilling and the watering, you will yield probably twice as much raw music as you plant. Then you start picking and sorting, then assembling them into DNA-like strings… and eventually whole songs. 
boil. We cook the songs down to a thick paste-like consistency (takes about five hours). Marvin and the man-sized tuber then apply the paste to the bottom of each disc with a wooden spatula, like frosting Christmas cookies. The coated discs are then placed face down on an anvil made of pure anti-proton material (absolutely pure!), and Big Zamboola sits on them one at a time, fusing the music right into the disc. Works like glass mastering, only cheaper. (We just have to keep feeding them pizzas. They’re like interns, you know.) The album art is then handpainted on by anti-Lincoln. (He’s better at it than his posi-doppelganger.)
casino we call Wall Street, are now no more. This is a meltdown of epic proportions – something on the scale of what had been predicted in “activist” literature over the past few years. Such a large portion of the world economy rests on a foundation of speculative investment, much of which is driven by impossibly complex financial instruments that effectively obscure the very concept of ownership and liability. The problem was a long time in the making, but it gained considerable steam after Congress voted in 2000 to gut the Glass Steagall act, eliminating the fire wall that existed between commercial and investment banking and essentially deregulating large swaths of the financial services industry. This action made possible the vast market growth of mortgage-backed securities and abstruse devices like credit default swaps that proliferated in the free-for-all atmosphere legislated by the likes of Phil Gramm, former Texas Senator, now a senior economics adviser to the McCain Campaign and quite possibly the next Treasury Secretary.
This couldn’t have worked out better if they’d planned it. The entire mission of the Bush Administration appears to have been one of crashing the U.S. government and making severe cutbacks on social programs inevitable. Because programs like Social Security and Medicare are popular, there’s no other politically feasible way to derail them than to empty the treasury of funds, then shrug and turn your pockets inside-out. Fortunately, Bush’s friends in the high-rolling investment community (fellow MBAs, many of them) have seen to it quite nicely. Now we will all underwrite their bad investment decisions, secure their bad loans, and take the hit on the defaults. And if profit is to be made in any of these enterprises, you can be sure that it will not accrue to the benefit of ordinary citizens. This is something like what used to be called “lemon socialism” – essentially privatize the profits and socialize the losses. And you can be sure Bush will be serving it up like lemonade.
the personal touch around here. Customer service, that’s what Big Green is all about. Have a seat. Anything I can get for you? Drink, perhaps? Something a little stronger?
our space elevator (built from spare submarine parts), Mitch has got a lot of time on his hands. And let’s face it, the Large Hadron Collider has been very much in the news just lately. I mean, every time the guy watches the evening news, smoke starts coming out of his ears. So for a couple of days, he holed himself up in his lab, hammering away at something, ultimately to reveal a diabolical-looking device which he claims has the power to inhibit the Collider experiment, even though it is halfway around the world from here. How it is supposed to do this, I don’t know…. but before I could ask him, he pulled the lever.
psycho Bin Laden put a loaded bazooka into the sweaty hands of a dry-drunk frat-boy named George W. Bush. God knows, the ruins of the twin towers hadn’t even stopped smoking before Dubya started blowing holes in everything pretty much at random. The war he started in Afghanistan – the “good war” as many see it – is nearing the end of its seventh year, still sowing death and destruction week after week, with no end in sight. This success story has become a dire failure, even in the eyes of military commanders, and our primary objective appears to have become one of staying there permanently. Not very different from our goal in Iraq, in essence. We allied ourselves with some of the most retrograde elements in Afghanistan, many of whom worked alongside the Taliban before our invasion (and in tandem with our own intelligence services two decades ago). These are the power brokers in that country – blood-soaked creatures like Dostum. Little wonder large areas of the country are beyond the control of the national government.
booster; the candidate’s chief foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann as well. Scheunemann is a bona-fide neo-con, member of the Iraq Liberation Council and, as noted previously, a paid lobbyist for the government of Georgia up until earlier this year… though he is still apparently representing their president in his new role of shadow national security advisor. I have to say, Georgian President Saak’ashvili certainly got his money’s worth this week, with the advent of a major party candidate for the vice presidency of the United States going on record as saying we may go to war with Russia over Georgia. Why this Alaskan creature is not considered a dangerous lunatic is a matter for Americans to sort out (and quickly), but she’s probably a big hit in Tbilisi right now.
What’s this one for? Cabin pressure? Kool. And this one? Get out! What the fuck, this thing is like something out of… I don’t know… fantastic voyage or something.
must say… it’s sweet. Very sweet by our standards, certainly. Usually we’re pock-pock-pocking around the galaxy in some rent-a-wreck or a distressed piece of interstellar transportation history borrowed from a cheap sci-fi television show. This sucker is different. All that plush furniture, a working refrigerator, gauges and levers galore…. I half expected Captain Nemo himself to come striding in disapprovingly. (John could play the Kirk Douglas part… I’ll take Peter Lorre.) In fact, at one point, I turned to Mitch and asked him if perhaps he thought we were playing our first promotional gig in Atlantis.
ourselves to order take out from his favorite restaurant, the Bavarian Castle (big fan of…. uhhhhlll… sauerbraten….). That did lift his mood a bit, though I think I may have hit a particularly sore spot. Turns out that the space elevator he devised was built from remnants of an undersea vessel of some kind. Where did the parts come from, specifically? He wouldn’t say. And with his twitchy hands on that death ray, I wouldn’t ask him. (They were someone else’s, now they’re ours. End of story.)
Convention in St. Paul. (I think I hear him yelling “Fight with me!” – watch out!) I have to say, just having had a good look at his audience, that is one of the whitest gatherings of people I have ever seen, and I grew up in the suburbs. After listening to bits and pieces of what has been said over the past few days, I’m getting a pretty good feel for what will be the overriding themes of the G.O.P. general election campaign. A bit different from 2004, it seems. That year, “service” was largely vicarious – i.e. honoring our people in uniform in the abstract (from 5,000 miles away) while denigrating the service record of the opposing party’s nominee quite shamelessly (recall the band-aids with purple hearts printed on them being sported by the smirking manatees on the convention floor, almost none of whom had ever heard a shot fired in anger).
prisoner in Hanoi, McCain feels that Nixon’s bombing drove North Vietnam to the bargaining table. And yet it is demonstrably true that the Paris Peace Accord signed in early 1973 was in essence the same as the agreement that could have been had in October 1972, prior to the massive U.S. terror bombing of Hanoi/Haiphong around Christmas of that year. Moreover, the accord reflected terms at least as favorable to Hanoi if not more so than those that had been put forward for many years prior to that – certainly more favorable than what the “Vietcong” (NLF) had offered in the early 1960s. All of the death, destruction, massive bombing, appalling chemical defoliation (that still kills today, incidentally)… all of that was for nothing. So… we should have bombed more? We dropped many times more bombs on Indochina than in all theatres of World War II combined, with most ordinance falling on South Vietnam, our supposed ally. Sorry, but the suggestion is simply bizarre and obscene. 
Well, tubey’s got a few holes in him. Little holes. A dab of plastic wood ought to do the trick. Where’s my spatula?
along the lines of customer service. Let’s face it – it’s been nine years since our last full length commercial release. We’re a little more than rusty when it comes to glad-handing the potential buyers of our wares, if you know what I mean. (Fact is, we’re actually quite a bit nastier than last time around… the bitterness of broken promises and unfulfilled aspirations… gnaws at you like a wolverine…. rrrrrrrrr…). Yeah, so anyway… we could use someone on the other end of the phone… or the IM chat box. Someone like tubey – he’s got an open, honest face that anyone could trust. And even though he can’t talk so good, he can at least type with his root filaments. (Pretty good trick for someone who’s been out of the ground for more than a few years.)