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Usual Rubbish

Pod bay door.

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The good news is, we’ve scored a ride to the stars. The bad news is… it’s aboard a doomed ship sent from hell. Not the kind of luxury we’re accustomed to, but hey… we’ll manage.

Big Green will be departing for Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, and points east (I believe it’s east) on September 29 for our [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. Not that the date is much of a concern, now that Mitch Macaphee has a tenuous hold on the time-space continuum. If we miss our launch date, what the hell, we just have Mitch send us back a few days. Depending upon what kind of a mood he’s in, that could be easy or hard, very hard. (Actually, Matt thinks that if you run backwards really fast, you will go back in time. Call me a skeptic… though I’ve noticed that when you run forward real fast, time seems to move forward. If this were an elegant universe, the converse would be true. And no, I don’t mean the sneaker.)

I should mention that, as we wait for our departure, we are in the midst of what I would call a series of “mini-sessions” in our Hammer Mill basement studio. These are related to production of our new podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, the second installment of which is now available on iTunes and directly from us peoples. This time out we’re featuring a somewhat rich discussion of the thinking (or lack of same) behind our song “Quality Lincoln”, a rough draft of which we include on the podcast. What we’re doing is laying the basic tracks for a song, playing that on the podcast, and then finishing the song later for separate release. The result may be another album, a series of EPs, or something else entirely.

I should also add that “Quality Lincoln” is not so much one song, but rather three songs, knit together with sturdy fibers of ludicrousness. I suppose there are better ways to spend one’s time as he/she waits for an accursed space vessel to pick him/her up. I just can’t think of any, and I’ll wager neither can you.  Or perhaps I am mistaken.

Well, is that the time? Was that me talking just then? Perhaps. Hey – give the podcast a listen and let us know what you think. Send an email or something. More fodder for the podcast.

Political Rants

Shortcakes.

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I’ll just do short takes today. No, not shortcakes! Short TAKES, damnit!

Ten and Counting. I find it hard to mark the anniversary of 9/11. I’ve always kind of bridled at the idea, pretty much since the first six-month anniversary of that awful day. It’s a thing that’s always with us, seared into our consciousness, a pall cast over our democracy. Do we need a ceremonial reminder? I don’t know. If it brings people solace in some small way, it’s worth it. For myself, though, it feels superfluous. Every day is a reminder.

There are enduring monuments to that day. Probably the most imposing are our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, still going after the death of Osama Bin Laden. What a legacy, eh? All the more bitter, really, since we still have malevolent actors like Dick Cheney running around, peddling their twisted rationales for atrocities they played a central role in committing. Even with all this, I spent a good amount of time watching that film by those French guys who were with the firehouse that first responded to the Trade Tower disaster. Gripping stuff. Those firefighters are giants.

Lend Me Your Keynes.  Obama has proposed something about a third the size of what’s needed, but that, in the current political circumstances, is about twice the size of what I’d expected from him. I’m not crazy about the trade deal component – that seems like bailing out the boat on one end and poking a hole in the hull on the other – but otherwise it’s not bad, nor are some of the “pay-fors” proposed in the form of tax increases on rich people. Of course, Boehner and his chorus of tea party clowns are rending their garments, swearing to oppose any new spending or increased taxes, clinging to the same tired arguments that got us here in the first place – cut taxes, slash spending, eliminate regulation.

Here’s the thing: if we keep cutting, we undercut anything that resembles a recovery. I know the republicans don’t like the idea that federal spending creates jobs, but they also don’t like the idea of anthropogenic global warming or evolution. Their not liking something doesn’t make it any less true. Spending on infrastructure projects, aid to states and localities, and the like saves and creates jobs, period. It did in 2009-10, just not enough to pull us out of the titanic hole George W. Bush and the “slash taxes and regulations” crowd pitched us into last time we let them drive.

Congress: shut up and pass the freaking bill. People need work and you’ve got nothing. Just pass it.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Yours truly.

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Our rocket test failed. Only two weeks to launch date and the thing can’t get off the ground. Some kind of rust blight has destroyed our food supply. And the gravity in the Hammer Mill (at least around Mitch’s lab) is intermittent and untrustworthy. Sounds like a good time to open the old mail bag!

Here’s one from fairly close by – a little town called Philadelphia.

Dear Big Green:

Your music is full of obscure references to old television shows. Why don’t you work more historical subject matter into your songs? That might attract a higher quality listener (like me).

Respectfully yours,

Horton Pompideau (signed in what appears to be grape juice)

Well, Horton. I’m glad you asked that question. In fact, if I were to make up a phony listener question, it would likely be something very much like that. (Fortunately, my strong ethical sensibilities keep me from stooping that low.) Actually, we do reference historical events, such as in the song Quality Lincoln, which was featured on the first episode of our new podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN.  The thing is – and this is important – that song is as much about television as all the other ones. It’s like history thrown into the blender of television and turned up to “frappe” speed with the lid left off. So big chunks of history are flying out of the thing, and what you’re left with is a musical slurry of factoids, mostly unrelated to one another. That’s the creative process, man. Live with it.

Here’s another one:

Dear Big Green:

Final notice. Remit outstanding balance of $47.85 by close of business 12 September 2011. Non-compliance may result in criminal or civil penalty.

Warmly,

Ivan Pitcairn, Collections Officer
Hegemonic Energy Consortium and Worm Farm.

Oh, hey Ivan – long time no hear from. Didn’t I tell you the check is in the mail? If you have a problem with that, take it up with the postal service.  I only write the checks, not deliver them.

Okay, we’ve got time for one more. This looks like another local query… very local…

Dear Joe:

Get your butt back in the studio. And stop making up those ludicrous letters. We’ve got work to do, you fricking idiot!

Gratefully yours,

Matt Perry

Hey… it’s a little hard to argue with this writer. I have been slacking. Back to my padded (or at least sound retardant) cell, then.

Political Rants

Eight is enough.

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Though I didn’t intend to do so, I did in fact watch part of the Republican debate at the Reagan Library on Wednesday night. At the outset, I have to say that this election season is front-loaded beyond all comprehension. For chrissake – no one has actually voted in any real sense, and yet we’ve already seen a major candidate – T-Paw – drop out, seen others alternately being accorded front-runner status, seen the declaration of a “two-man race” for the G.O.P. nomination, etc. What the hell… it’s bad enough that we are now in perpetual election mode (i.e. all of last year and much of 2009 was taken up with the mid-terms; all of this year with 2012). Can we just let the voters sort this out?

Having said that, on to the debate. The moderator’s attention first trained on THE NEXT NEW THING: RICK PERRY, who is, in fact, a very old thing. Perry (no relation) has gotten a lot of pop-culture credit for job creation. Every time I hear this, I think of an Onion headline from back when a previous Texan was in the White House – the headline went something like “Bush to U.S. Businesses: Create Millions of Shitty Jobs.”  I think it’s kind of a Texas thing, because many of those great Texas jobs that are not either in government or in the extractive industries are of the low-wage, no benefits, no security type. Anyway, here is what the governor had to say:

You want to create jobs in America? You free the American entrepreneur to do what he or she does, which is risk their capital, and I’ll guarantee you, the entrepreneur in America, the small businessman and woman, they’re looking for a president that will say we’re going to lower the tax burden on you and we’re going to lower the regulation impact on you, and free them to do what they do best: create jobs.

This is the kind of trope you hear from all of the G.O.P. these days. It’s those job-killing (low to non-existent) taxes and those job-killing (incredibly lax) regulations that are killing those jobs! Hokum. I have to think these people are just garden-variety liars, because they all look old enough to remember some substantial portion of recent history. If they think for five minutes, they’ll realize that the reason we have high-tech industry and something we call the internet is because public investments were made over the course of decades, mostly through the Pentagon system. I don’t know why these people can’t simply admit that the Federal government, with its enormous buying power, can play a significant role in prompting the development of new technologies and new industries, and has a history of allowing the privatization of innovations that the government paid to procure.

It’s not rocket science. Wait… actually, it is. That was funded by the government, too. More on these clowns later.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Close quarters.

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Here. Squeeze your head into this helmet, see if it fits. What? No, I’ve never seen the movie Scarface. Not all the way through, anyway. Why?

Mother of pearl. I’m surrounded by moaners. Nobody wants to wear a freaking space helmet, not even Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s afraid of getting “helmet hair” of all things. (His so-called “hair” is made of leftover brass fittings from what appeared to be a Victorian era lawn mower.) I keep telling these people – if we’re going to pile into that substandard missile Mitch Macaphee found for us and fly to distant solar systems, we will need at least minimal protective gear, to include a) a helmet, b) a bag of oxygen, c) some portable food, preferably sandwiches, d) THERE IS NO “D”, e) boots, non hobnail variety, and f) a bunch of other stuff that you might need for space travel on the cheap. (Look it up on the Web.)

Would that that were the worst of our problems. Fact is, Mitch’s missile is a real piece of crap, not worthy of sending a payload of trailmix into space, let alone flesh-and-blood musicians such as ourselves. I have put out some inquiries about alternative transportation. Nothing yet, I’m afraid. Beginning to think we should abandon the idea of private transportation and just sign aboard one of those interstellar budget tours. You know – you take a jitney to the moon, wait there for about six days until the big Trailways spacebus shows up. You squeeze in next to a spotty couple from Boca Raton while a morbidly obese business man in a rumpled tan business suit coughs his lungs out in the seat behind you.

Yeah. Been there, done that, haven’t you? Well… haven’t we all? Anyway, I’m a little tired, frankly. Matt and I have been working at a furious pace ever since we started that pod cast. A session a week – nearly an hour and a half of music making! Yes, I know that sounds impossibly ambitious, but… we’re motivated. We’ve started about half a dozen recordings. Our plan is to do a rough initial draft of each song, play that on the podcast, then finish tracking the song and release it later as a finished number. We’re starting with Quality Lincoln, which will be featured on the next episode, due out…. in a matter of days…. right?

Right. Yeah, I’m tired. Sandman’s beating me to death. What did I ever do to him, eh?

Political Rants

Game over.

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Some storm, that Irene. Trouble is, it may – as so many recent catastrophic weather events have – turn out merely to be a taste of things to come. I can tell you, I’ve lived in the northeast for fifty years – that’s 350 dog years, young ‘uns! – and I have never seen anything like the flooding that has affected so much of northern and eastern New York. For chrissake, a street two blocks away from me was evacuated due to flooding… and we got just a very small piece of the storm. I shudder to think what might have happened to us if that storm had hit a bit further to the west.

Here’s the thing, though – this has been a disastrous year for weather pretty much everywhere. We’ve had tornados here in upstate New York. Multiple tornados. (My cousin saw three funnel clouds while out on the golf course that day.) Sure, we’ve gotten them before, but they were more like three in a decade, and not anything on a grand, midwestern scale. Just this morning, on NPR, the first three or four minutes of their news summary was taken up by extreme weather and other disasters – the aftermath of Irene in Vermont and New York, a tropical storm bearing down on New Orleans, record-breaking drought in Texas as well as wildfires there and in Louisiana. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard harried residents of some devastated town say something like “this is the worst ____ I’ve ever experienced” or “we haven’t had a ______ this bad in 60/80/100 years.”

Former NASA scientist James Hansen (denounced by conservative hacks as an “alarmist”) and others have spoken out for years on the forces behind this extreme weather. But you hardly have to be a rocket scientist to work this out. Our climate is more unstable than it’s ever been in our lifetimes – I think we can all acknowledge that. And as of a few years ago, we seemed to have something like a broad consensus that the burning of fossil fuels was a major contributor to global warming. I think at that time major corporations saw some profit potential in what was agreed to be an unshakeable truth. Since then, the financial crisis and the Great Recession have convinced them and their political allies that cash-strapped Americans can more easily be sold comforting lies than inconvenient truths. Now it’s all about getting the economy moving again, drilling out more oil and gas, and turning everything into cash.

There are perceived upsides to things like building a massive pipeline to carry tar sands oil from Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico. But there are enormous costs, as well. As Bill McKibben has said, the tar sands deposits represent an enormous carbon bomb waiting to go off. If it gets tapped more efficiently via that pipeline, it’s essentially “game over” in Hansen’s words, with costs previewed this past week in places like Montpelier VT and elsewhere.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Cheap ride.

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Well, I guess THAT didn’t work. Spectacular failure, old man. What’s next on the agenda? Setting toast on fire? Turning gold into lead? Some other feat of science?

Oh, hello. If you detect some sarcasm in my voice, it’s no accident. I’m merely ripping on Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, whose latest experiment/get weird quick scheme was an abysmal failure. Sometimes I think old Mitch is losing his touch. Sometimes I think we of Big Green should be looking around for another mad science advisor. Not to replace Mitch, you understand, but rather to keep him company in his dotage. Maybe that would give him someone to talk to about how his time travel experiment was about as amazing as someone hiding in a closet for half an hour. No, Mitch – I’m not kidding… it was just that bad. I’ve seen grade school magic tricks that put that to shame, man.

All right, maybe I’m being a bit too hard on the guy. Frankly, I’m a little miffed at him over another matter entirely. (I think the psychologists call that “transfer” … or perhaps “coconut”… one of those two.) As you know, we’ve been searching the local bulletin boards, want ads, and health food store countertop flyers for some kind of conveyance that will reliably carry us from planet to planet on Big Green’s upcoming [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. Naturally we asked Mitch to keep his good eye – the one that doesn’t see evil things – open for anything vaguely appropriate to the task. Would that I had bitten back those words!

I am reminded of the old saw (hack saw?), “be careful what you ask for.” Nothing truer could be said of Mitch’s spacecraft search. He was gone for a couple of days this week and came back with a largish missile in tow. (No, it wasn’t a “tow missile”, dammit.) Mitch pulls up and says, in effect, “Here’s your ride.” And I’m looking at this thing, my mouth agape. Matt’s mouth was agape as well, as was John’s. (Lincoln’s was not agape, but it was open slightly.) I mean, that missile was battered, leaking, beat to hell. I think he bought it off of Col. Gaddafi, or perhaps from rogue elements of his famous “kung fu” brigade.  It looks like a freaking SCUD that someone never bothered to drain the fuel out of. And … worse yet … we’re supposed to fly to Andromeda in that bloody thing?

No way in hell, man. No way am I getting in that lousy hunk of junk. And when I say, no way, I mean only under certain limited circumstances. (Let the record show that I’m beckoning to my counsel.)

Political Rants

Staying power.

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Anxious to report on an “end game” in Libya, the press have amped up coverage on that conflict, though not their capacity for clear-eyed criticism. I heard one story in a news report this week about a squalid refugee camp on Libya’s border with Egypt for guest workers from other African countries, undefended by any kind of perimeter barrier, low on supplies, being neglected by the rebels who control that area. That was one item that indicated some kind of journalistic curiosity and a willingness to go beyond the press release (even if it is hard and messy).

Now, President Obama has pointed to the Libyan intervention as an example of what the NATO alliance was capable of. I am inclined to agree – it took combined force from the world’s most powerful militaries to drive Gaddafi from the seat of power… after 4 months of god knows what. I think the administration would be well-advised to avoid any bold statements of success based on this experience. This is Iraq war II; this is Bush lite. There may well be many negative consequences that will fall out of the rebel’s eventual victory, as well – I guess we will have to see.

Speaking of the nation’s second longest war ever, it seems as though someone – perhaps us – wants us to stay beyond the deadline agreed to by Bush as he was walking out the door. Certainly the U.S. military command has made its opinion known that they would like to see us stationed there for some time to come. Perhaps permanently. I have to think that if the top brass are saying it, they are mostly reflecting what they have heard in the corridors of power. Our leaders of both parties have a habit of hiding behind their generals, making strategic or even political decisions seem like they are the stuff of battlefield tactics. There is an institutional bias towards staying in a country we’ve invaded. Forward basing in the Middle East has always been a priority, and will remain so as long as most of the world’s energy lies beneath its sandy landscapes.

What can we do? More than throw up our hands. We need to make it clear to Obama that it’s time to leave Iraq, and Afghanistan for that matter. Ten years is enough – nay, about ten years too much. Out. Now.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Pre-launch blues.

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Gonna’ pump some liquid oxygen… and twirl my sextant dial. I said I’m gonna’ pump some liquid oxygen… and twirl my sextant dial. And when I lift you off that launch pad… baby you know you’ll ride in style. Oh, yeah!

Yeah, sounds like we need a little more chunkiness in the rhythm section. What? Oh… we have visitors. Hello, blogsters. It’s your old pal Bozo. Nothing like a little blues to take your mind of your troubles, eh? And a little country western to put it back on ’em. (Keep talkin’ like that, and more than a few Texans’ll want to treat me kinda ugly.)  Yeah, we’re just working our way down to our departure time. What will our interstellar conveyance be? Glad you asked. It’s about time someone asked. No one around the Hammer Mill has bothered inquiring. A strange disinterest has taken hold of Big Green and its entourage, apparently. It entered the room like a miasma, pulled up a chair and made itself at home.

Honestly, I don’t know how we’ll be hopping from planet to planet, star system to star system, on Big Green’s [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011. Mitch Macaphee was going to arrange a short term lease arrangement of some kind. He knows a guy who knows a guy, apparently. I think the delay comes out of the fact that the guy the guy he knows knows is, in fact, him. (Is there an echo in here? Wouldn’t be surprised.) So what the hell, maybe we don’t have reliable private transportation from Betelgeuse to Kaztropharius 137b. We can always take a commercial flight. There’s always priceline or expedia or whatever the fuck.

I think the reason why Mitch dropped the ball on this is that he’s been obsessed with his latest dabbling into time travel techniques. He’s got this new one – check this out. It’s a means by which people in the past can tunnel into the future and wait until we normal, moment by moment time travelers catch up with them. Mitch made a device about the size of an iPod that anchors you in time, so that as everyone else moves forward with the passing moments, you stay in one moment. (So it it’s 4:37p.m. on Tuesday when you hit the button, for you it will remain that time while time ticks on for everybody around you.) Then you hit another switch, and the thing launches you through a wormhole into the not-so-distant future – like an hour from now – where you sit frozen in a single moment and wait for “real time” to catch up with you. Then like a mail bag being snagged by a passing train, you start moving with normal time once it arrives.

Anyhow, you can see why he gets distracted. He’s sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on a test run. We should get to his moment…. any moment now.

Uncategorized

Thinking small.

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President Obama is on vacation this week, sort of. Him and about a thousand other people, bringing him information, taking his orders, blah, blah. I don’t know why he bothers, but… he does. With that job, you may as well assume that you’re going to be working straight for four to eight years. Even so, every American president since Carter has been determined not to seem like he’s barricaded in to the White House, manning his vigil in vain. So Obama, like his predecessors, takes a ceremonial vacation, and his detractors take aim. Of course, they would anyway. He has locked himself into Washington! He’s out of touch with (white) America! they would cry if he were to cancel his outing. May as well go, Barry.

Frankly, if he were to come back from the Vineyard with a Jobs / Recovery Act proposal that involves bold efforts to fund infrastructure projects, incentivize hiring, raise taxes on the rich, and so on, I would be the first to say that the man has earned his rest. But that is an extremely unlikely scenario. Obama, smart as he is, does not want to have to walk back every statement he has made about the debt since last year. That’s my best take on that. My worst is that he really believes that cutting spending, basic social safety net programs, and government investment in the short term will, as his Republican opponents believe, create jobs. If he doesn’t know they’re smoking crack on that one, we could be in for Japan in the 1990s.

Speaking of smoking crack, Texas Governor Rick Perry has launched himself headlong into the race to defeat Obama, entering amid a flurry of wild claims and random threats against the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. Here’s a guy who has publicly referred to Social Security and Medicare as “ponzi schemes.” Seriously? This should not be hard to beat. Honestly, if Obama had just done what he needed to do, none of these freaks would stand a chance of winning. That it’s a race at all speaks to the weakness of his policies, not the strength of theirs…. because clearly, they’ve got nothing except tax cuts, tax cuts, and more tax cuts. And that’s nothing.

Will the president suggest a solution that is on the same grand scale as the problem, or is it small-bore policy all the way from here on out? We shall see.

luv u,

jp