Usual Rubbish

Putting a gloss on that broken shoe

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yep, they just keep rolling in. That’s what Mitch tells me, anyhow. We’re rich, baby, rich. Unless, of course, our mad science advisor is lying to us. For what reason? Madness has no reason, captain. But it can have a goal.

Well, THAT got weird quick. No matter. Just living the dream here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s adopted home. Now that we’ve started performing again, at least in the digital space, we’re finding some small reason to celebrate. Not that we don’t have cheerful moments from time to time. We’re Big Green, after all, not Big Blue. That’s a whole different thing.

Chasing the residuals

Anyway, so we launched this nano solo concert featuring yours truly, Joe of Big Green. And, of course, we assumed that the residuals would start rolling in like oranges on a down ramp. Au contraire, mon frer! Not a farthing found its way to us, not a sausage. We shook the YouTube machine upside-down a few times, but it was no use.

Now, ordinarily this would upset any band. But Big Green is not any band, my friend. Don’t forget – we are a collectivist institution. It’s share and share alike around here. We have built a post-capitalist artist collective in the abandoned mill we call home, and we have no desire for the typical consumer comforts. When we make a sandwich, it’s big enough for five. In other words, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) doesn’t get any. But I digress.

An attempt at radical redistribution

Dennis Moore proved decades ago that redistribution of wealth is trickier than he thought. Among the members of Big Green and our extended network of cast offs, we have tried various methods of radical redistribution over the years. It comes more naturally to some than to others. Anti-Lincoln, for instance, has an innately redistributive ethos: what’s yours is mine, what’s mine is mine. At least you know where he stands!

I don’t want to suggest that we completely eschew standard currency. That’s simply not true. We accept all types of money, from dollars to lire to Aldebaran Quatloos. In fact, we see playing music for money as a form of radical wealth redistribution – exchanging something abstract and intangible for something concrete. Now I don’t know about you, but I’m not particularly crazy about accepting payment in concrete. Sometimes you have to take what you can get.

Sandwiches aren't for robots.

Barrelling toward the future

Last week, the garbage collectors tried a kind of informal redistribution of capital. The took our recycling container and dropped it on our neighbor’s lawn. What’s more, they took the recycling container that belongs to our neighbor on the other side and dropped it on our step. I’m pretty sure this is a signal from the solid waste workers that the revolution is nigh.

Hey, when the revolution comes, we’ll all be rich. That’s right – our new leaders will insist on calling everyone Rich. (I believe it’s an homage to a fallen comrade.)

(P.S. – Don’t forget to check out our nano-concert. New posts coming this week – stay tuned.)

Political Rants

The awesome power of really big numbers

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The press constantly talks about how much the reconciliation plan currently under consideration in congress might cost. Of course, they know what the limit is, since the reconciliation process requires Congress to set one – it’s $3.5 trillion in spending. This is without consideration of the pay-fors, namely tax increases, savings on prescriptions drugs through national purchasing, etc.

More importantly, they characterize this high-end number as impossibly large. In fact, Meghan McCain on Meet The Press even inflated the number by $1.5 trillion, and Chuck Todd (a.k.a. Fuck Wad) didn’t seem to notice. So there’s no upper limit on exaggeration. But WTF – is $3.5 trillion really that much when you’re talking about a ten-year plan?

Lavish military spending

Look at the Defense Authorization Act the House just passed 316-113. It is $768 billion for one year. If you did the same thing with military spending as we routinely do with domestic spending, we would be talking about an 8 trillion-dollar Pentagon budget over the next ten years. That’s probably a conservative estimate, given the fact that the DOD budget increases by something like 7 to 10 percent every year.

So the obvious question for all those budget-conscious legislators questioning the price tag of the reconciliation package is this: why don’t you complain about the much more massive spending on the Pentagon? The answer is obvious. It’s the same thing Eisenhower warned us of back in 1961, as he was preparing to leave office. The military-industrial complex is alive and well.

Various flavors of Keynesianism.

Fiscal stimulus has a long track record in capitalism. Championed by British economist John Maynard Keynes back in the 1930s, the standard story goes that it fell out of favor during the Reagan era. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Reagan spent enormous amounts of money on the U.S. military. It comported with his bellicose rhetoric and policies regarding Cold War international conflicts, but there was more to it than that. Reagan’s unprecedentedly high peacetime military budgets sluiced money into high tech industries. That money made its way into virtually every congressional district in the country.

In short, it was a massive public spending program funded by debt. That model has held steady since those heady days of the 1980s, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Biden is no exception. During the 2020 primary campaign, I pointed out the lack of information on his web site about foreign policy. I think that was largely because there would be very little difference.

In any case, the next time someone tells you the reconciliation package is too big, remind them of our OTHER massive spending bills – the ones that blow money on tanks, planes, bombs, etc.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Inside September: The Concert That Wasn’t

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2000 Years to Christmas

What are we calling it? A mini concert? No, that’s too diminutive. A midi concert? Nah … that sounds like I’m running everything with a sequencer. How about a nano-concert? After all, Anti-Lincoln loves peanut butter and nano sandwiches. That’s as good a reason as any.

Well, as usual, your friends in Big Green are putting the cart before the horse. in fact, we’ve gone so far as to actually put the horse in the cart and start pulling the cart around with our teeth. We’re giving him a fun fun horsey ride, only now we’re all going to need orthodontic care and neck braces. But I digress.

What I’m really trying to say (and failing miserably) is that our September THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast includes a solo performance of some six Big Green songs, and instead of coming up with a snappy name for that performance, we just dropped it into the grand pachinko machine known as the internet and left it for you, our listeners, to decide what the hell is going on.

So, well after the fact, we are offering this modest guide to the September Podcast and the six songs I played on acoustic guitar and piano:

Round Up

This is a song I wrote in the mid nineties after hearing a story about a rowdy, racist ATF get-together known as the Good Ol’ Boys Roundup. It’s a bit about that actual party, but really more about the racist culture of law enforcement writ large.

Hey, Caveman

My illustrious brother Matt wrote this song in the 1990s. The title is a callback to an incident in the eighties, I believe, when a friend of our hollered “Hey Caveman” out a second story window to a passerby on the street (a man in robes with a large staff, no less).

Hey, Abe .... what's your favorite nano sandwich?

Do It Every Time

A solo version of a song from our second album, International House. Features some fancy guitar work (NOT) by yours truly.

Meet Me in the Middle

A song I wrote just prior to the COVID pandemic, phase one, when a lot of people were hoping for a bridge of kindness between the two imaginary peaks of Kilimanjaro. This one I actually play on piano, which is an instrument I’ve actually played before. No prior release on this one, though I did do a semi-proper recording of it.

Johnny’s Gun

Another song from International House, this time with gravy. This is a song I wrote after a mass shooting in Brookline, Massachusetts back in 1994. A guy named John Salvi shot up an abortion clinic. The song isn’t really about Salvi – more just about our culture of violence, how we celebrate it in some contexts (i.e. war) and revile it in others (mass shootings at home).

Rich Man

This is an old song, from probably around 1986 or so – maybe the first Big Green song I ever wrote. Another not-previously-released number, along with Meet Me In The Middle, Roundup, and Caveman.

That’s the story, Morey. I have videos of these performances and will post them on our YouTube channel by and by, so that you can see how ridiculous I look when I’m trying to play a guitar and sing at the same time.

Political Rants

Begging for an invitation to the Hague

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Well, the U.S. military finally conceded that the drone strike in Kabul was a “tragic” mistake that killed ten civilians. The dead include a contractor with a non-profit and seven children, who piled into the targeted car when their daddy/uncle pulled into the driveway. In other words, we killed them for being happy and enjoying themselves.

How is it that people like these victims look to our military like some kind of threat? The drone warriors and their superiors apparently thought the drinking water they were loading into their car was some kind of explosive. Just like Amadou Diallo’s wallet became a gun in the eyes of the NYPD Street Crimes Unit, the shooters saw this family’s actions as deserving of annihilation.

Where no one can see

As many know, U.S. drone strikes in Afghanistan have been going on for many years, principally out of view of the mostly Kabul-based international press. Anand Gopal’s amazing article in the New Yorker – The Other Afghan Women – reports that the ominous buzzing of drones was an almost constant feature of rural life in Afghanistan. The toll from the retail death-dealing by these unmanned weapon systems is one of the untold stories of our twenty-year war in that unfortunate country.

Frankly, I have zero confidence that the military’s drone war didn’t mainly kill civilians, even if unintentionally. The reason why we know what happened in Kabul a few weeks ago is that there were witnesses and members of the media within eyeshot. Most of our strikes occur in extremely remote sections of Afghanistan, where no such accountability is possible.

Brutality is a feature, not a bug

I don’t want to give the impression that the drone campaign is the only problem with our war in Afghanistan, or elsewhere, for that matter. We have routinely killed significant numbers of civilians in rural Afghanistan, typically a handful or one at a time. Our allies in that country have been remarkably brutal, in addition to their obvious corruption.

Gopal writes about the experience of families in the Sagnin Valley in Helmand Province. One woman he focuses on lost 16 members of her family over to the war over the course of the American occupation. Some were killed by warlord militia groups that the U.S. allied itself with, some by U.S. forces, some by Afghan government forces. Sometimes an individual walked too close to a military installation. Others died in night raids.

This is why the official death toll in Afghanistan is very likely way, way too low. I don’t think those official numbers included any of the members of this woman’s family, and her family’s experience was pretty typical, with the average loss of life running around 10-12 per family.

What is accountability?

The general who acknowledged the civilian deaths told his audience that he is fully responsible for this “tragic” mistake. But what does accountability mean in these cases? Will anyone spend time behind bars? Will anyone appear before a war crimes tribunal at the Hague? Will anyone be demoted or discharged for their actions?

It seems unlikely. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t push for it. We should attach a political cost to these policies – that’s the only reasonable way to roll them back … or, at least, begin to.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Podcast

THIS IS BIG GREEN: September 2021

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Big Green emerges from its long slumber to deliver a pasted-together program of songs from their back catalog recorded live by Joe – a virtual basement mini-concert, if you will, served up on toast. Hey presto.

This is Gig Green

This is Big Green – September 2021. Features: 1) Put the phone down: Where the hell we’ve been; 2) Joe rehashes the sordid history of Big Green, again; 3) Song: Round Up, by Big Green – live solo version; 4) Song: Hey Caveman, by Big Green – live solo version; 5) A humble non-COVID cough; 6) Song: Do It Every Time, by Big Green – live solo version; 7) Song: Meet Me In The Middle, by Big Green – live solo version; 8) Song: Johnny’s Gun, by Big Green – live solo version; 9) What’s behind Johnny’s Gun, aside from Johnny; 10) Song: Rich Man, by Big Green – live solo version; 11) Coming repulsions … I mean, attractions; 12) Time for us to go.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Usual Rubbish

Getting all the flashing lights straight

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2000 Years to Christmas

There, that’s got it. Perfect execution. Couldn’t do another one like that if I tried. Okay, Marvin, you can hit the stop button. Wait, what? YOU DIDN’T HIT RECORD?

Hi, everybody. While this seems like the very next moment in my blog post, it’s actually several hours after wrote that intro. It takes me that long to disassemble Marvin (my personal robot assistant) piece by piece and then put him back together. And as I am not particularly mechanically inclined, I usually get something wrong on the assembly side. (Last week I somehow incorporated our toaster into his torso unit.)

Okay, so those of you who are musicians (and I know there are a few of you out there) can appreciate what we’re going through these days. Performance venues are flagging, people are afraid of going out, money is scarce – situation normal, right? Our response to this crisis is exactly what you would expect from Big Green – we pull the shades down and get back into bed. Then, first thing the next morning, we sleep until noon. Then, THEN, we go down and look for snacks. That’s how we roll.

We’ll do it live!

I was the first to suggest that we start recording live performances right here in the Cheney Hammer Mill. My bandmates met that suggestion with a resounding silence. Anti Lincoln thought it was a good idea, but he was drunk on the news that his positive-polarity counterpart had been named #1 President of all time once again by the C-SPAN Historian poll. (How that would be a positive reflection on him is another question.)

Well, when it came time to record some live takes, uh … I was the only one who showed up. Now, maybe I forgot to distribute the memo. And maybe I forgot to write the memo. And maybe it never occurred to me to send a memo around in the first place. But for whatever reason, it became clear to me that I would be the only one doing this shit. Just me and my tape opp Marvin.

Choosy mothers

Of course, the question always comes down to which songs I should try to do. It’s actually and easier question than you might think. Since I am equally unpracticed on all of our songs, it really doesn’t matter what the playlist turns out to be. So I pulled some from International House, one or two from Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and a handful of numbers we haven’t included on any of our albums.

Next step, I put the songs in a blender and ran it on Frappe for 45 seconds. That gave them a smooth consistency they never had before, frankly …. maybe a bit too smooth. So I poured that bilge down the drain and limped back into the studio, guitar in hand, looking for trouble. Then trouble found me.

Uh, Marvin ... shouldn't you be minding the board?

Know-how? No how!

Now, as some of you know, I attempt to play many instruments. When I say many, I really just mean three – piano, bass, guitar. I am probably most technically inept at the guitar, so naturally, I chose to record most of my live numbers on six string, without accompaniment.

Why? It’s the challenge, my friend. We cannot make things too easy on ourselves. How far would mankind have gotten if we had taken that attitude. Do you think for one moment that we would be anywhere near the brink of total destruction if we had chosen to be content with the way things are? Not a chance.

Anyway, my lame attempts at covering our own damn songs should be dropping sometime soon. Stay tuned.

Political Rants

An extra shaky finger on the button … again.

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I’m not an avid reader of blockbuster books about the current political moment, whatever that moment might be. On the contrary, I tend to spend my time listening to what others have to say about it. That’s my approach to the new book by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa entitled Peril.

As with practically every book about the Trump administration, Peril sounds like a rough mix of the hilarious and the terrifying. In the first category, there’s a supposed transcript of a call between Mike Pence and his fellow Hoosier, former VP Dan Quayle. Quayle reportedly talks Pence down from any thought of giving Trump what he wants, namely the nullification of the 2020 election result. That’s right – Dan Quayle as the savior of democracy. Who would have guessed it?

Hands across the water

Now, I’m not suggesting that the Quayle call isn’t scary – it is, as we came very close to a coup. More disturbing, though, is the passage about Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Mark Milley taking steps to separate a psychotic president from the means of starting a war. If true, this adds another layer to Trump’s plan to stay in power indefinitely, and a particularly toxic one at that.

This is what the pundits call “pulling a Schlesinger,” in reference to Nixon’s late-stage meltdown and Defense Secretary James Schlesinger’s orders to the Pentagon not to follow Nixon’s commands. (Scarborough used the example of Kissinger during the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict, telling allies not to freak out … though to suggest Kissinger was a steady hand on the tiller is kind of a reach). It’s kind of worse than that, though. Milley’s contention was that Trump was toying with starting a war against China in order to distract the public into allowing him to cling to power. That’s just nuts, and not at all out of character, as previously noted.

Best laid plans

I think it’s fair to say that Trump became fond of the office of the presidency and all the power and protection it afforded. He most certainly did not want to let it go. I wasn’t the only one who thought throughout 2020 that Trump wouldn’t leave if he lost. And now it looks like he had a plan for doing so.

Fortunately, the plan broke down at every level. But someone around Trump is paying close attention to this issue. The ex-president is pushing for replacing pretty much all of the officials who stood in his way last year. He might not end up the direct beneficiary of these moves, but someone in his party will.

Already, the cries of fraud are rising from the smouldering ruins of California’s recall effort. That is 100% the playbook for the GOP now – yell fraud, like the thief who cries “Thief!” We’ll have to see how far they can get with this strategy.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Usual Rubbish

Passing the hat on the internets

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2000 Years to Christmas

Okay, let me play a few more notes. Yes, I will choose them carefully. Here we go. All right, that’s got it. Did the donation meter move up at all? No? Mother of pearl.

Hey, out there. Another week in the life of Big Green, possibly the most obscure rock band in the history of the genre. I’m always looking for superlatives when I write about this group, and frankly that’s the only one I’ve got. Maybe, just maybe the Chefs of the Future (friends of ours) approach our level of obscurity, but I doubt it. (After all, if I’ve heard of them, how obscure could they be?)

I don’t need to remind you about how hard it is to keep the lights on around here. Important historical context: the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squat house, was originally a gaslit factory, later wired for electric lights. Those lights feed on electricity from our local utility, which we … ahem …. borrow from the corner telephone poll (for crying out loud, don’t tell anybody!). Of course, they keep cutting our line, so yeah, it’s hard to keep the damn lights on. And, uh …. what was I talking about?

Return to cyber busking

Oh, yeah. Generating income. Well, as I began to describe in last week’s column, we have been turning dustbins upside-down in this place looking for material to build a show out of. Not that we’re likely to venture into local clubs or auditoriums any time soon, but the virtual space is another question. Lord knows plenty of musicians are out there framming away – why the hell not us, right?

Hence we have opened the door on cyber busking once again. I know, I know, we had a lot of problems last time, not least of which Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his shaky camera hand. Then there were the copyright strikes – damned intellectual property! YOU CALL YOURSELF AN INTELLECTUAL? HOW … DARE … YOU?

Another Big Green original

Well, fortunately, we have a lot of original material. I mean, a boatload of the stuff. Sure, it’s a boat from some unknown country where music is completely weird and unfamiliar to American ears, but that’s okay. We can fill whole nights with our own tunes, honest. I’m sitting on a stack of original songs right now. The sharps are kind of pointy, frankly. (When it comes to converting music to furniture, I prefer the flat keys.)

Okay, so you may ask (and well you may), why haven’t you done so? Why haven’t we pulled out our western guitars (or space guitars, for that matter) and started twanging on Facebook, like all of our singer-songwriter pals? Good question. I think the main reason is that it takes us nine years to do the simplest thing. We have whole albums worth of material recorded, for instance, and we can’t seem to knit those recordings into actual albums. I’ve got a stack of magazines chin high in the kitchen, and …. well …. they’ve needed to be thrown out for about five years. (Four more to go.)

Well, damn it, this time we’re determined. And we’ll flag you when we’re ready to go live. Make some tea and sit tight – we’ll be right with you.

Political Rants

We’re not doing this for our health

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News flash: our health care system is broken. That is to say, it is broken from the standpoint of the people who need medical treatment. From the industry investor standpoint, it’s working just fine. People are making a killing, quite literally, from COVID and other illnesses, lending credence to that line from our song Well, Well, Well: “from every misfortune a fortune is made.”

I say this on a week when women’s health is under attack to an even greater extent than usual. The Texas anti-abortion law, which the U.S. Supreme Court has allowed to go into effect, has effectively made abortion illegal in the lone star state, regardless of what their moronic governor claims. This inevitably will be followed with similar restrictions in other “red” states. But even under the best of circumstances, women have trouble accessing and affording care precisely because of the kind of system we still have.

Promises, promises

When he was running for president, Donald Trump promised that he would replace the ACA (“Obamacare”) with something much better, a plan that would cover everyone, etc. Of course, that was a transparent lie that he had no intention of even pretending to make good on. Then last year, when he was running for president, Joe Biden promised adding a public option to the ACA. No sign of that yet, either.

I don’t know what Biden’s plans are for the reconciliation package with respect to health care. What I do know is what he said during the campaign. Back then, he claimed that workers loved their employer-based healthcare and suggested that they had “negotiated” for it. I pointed out back then on my podcast Strange Sound that this was balderdash. Less than 15% of American workers (generously) have union contracts. No one other than a subset of unionists ever “negotiates” the particulars of their health coverage with their employer. The plain fact is that employers provide substandard coverage to their employees, by and large, and that it leaves tremendous gaps.

The six thousand dollar man

As some of you know, I spent about a week in the hospital at the height of the COVID first wave back in April 2020. (It was an ailment unrelated to COVID, as it happened.) After I got out, I got bills that amounted to about $6,000. Now let me be clear – if I did not have health insurance, provided by my employer, the cost would have been much higher. But with this great insurance that Joe Biden suggested I love so much, I was six grand out of pocket over an unexpected illness. I opted for a payment plan with the hospital (which, I should point out, receives a lot of public subsidy).

That is not the way it works in civilized countries. In civilized countries, they do their best to make you well, and that’s it. No bill, or none of any consequence. In Britain and France, I believe, they even give you money when you leave the hospital, under certain circumstances. Why are we not a civilized country? I don’t know. Ask Joe Biden. And every other president, for that matter.

I am fortunate that i had the resources to bear that cost with only minor sacrifices. Most people – including many with employer based coverage – are not that lucky. We need a system that works for those people, not the people who seek to profit from our misfortunes.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Usual Rubbish

Another week on duty at the recycling center

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2000 Years to Christmas

No, man … I think it starts like this. Or maybe it’s a little slower than that. But it’s in E for sure. What? It’s in A? Are you sure? Damn ….

You know, I’ve never been very good at total recall. I don’t think my time at the Cheney Hammer Mill has improved my memory, either. So, what the hell am I talking about? Well … I’m gonna tell you. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and I have been pulling out the old numbers. No, I don’t mean numerals in Old English script. No, I don’t mean stale joints. I mean songs, damn it!

Sorry. That came out a little stronger than I meant it to be. Suffice to say that we’ve decided to take a few hours to dust off some items from our back catalog. It’s a catalogue of mostly Matt’s songs, as he is the more prolific writer, by far, but regardless of authorship, there’s a lot of shit in there. (And by “in there” I mean in a recondite side room of the hammer mill where they used to keep the machine tools.)

Invisible chestnuts

Now, of course, we have a process. Marvin finds a song in the machine room. He dusts it off, as I suggested earlier, and hands it to me. Because we don’t write songs out in standard notation (or any other kind, for that matter), it’s a little hard to get a grip on a thirty-year-old song, particularly when it only exists in the vaguest metaphysical sense.

I’ve often (or perhaps never) said that Marvin’s sole super power is his ability to carry around insubstantial things. Once I saw him pushing an invisible hand cart stacked ten high with invisible cases of Nehi cola. That makes him the ideal automaton for the job of retrieving song ideas from the dustbin of history. Lord knows, there’s likely to be a chestnut or two in there. Perhaps more.

Twang!

Entering fram-a-geddon

Okay, so once Marvin trundles in with a brass armload of decades-old songs, I get right to work. I pick up my superannuated Martin guitar and start twanging until the neighbors begin throwing things. That typically takes as long as five or six minutes. Then I close the window and start over, slapping the strings with my thumb and fingers like I just don’t effing care.

Why, you may ask, don’t I use a pick? Very simple, my friends. I don’t freaking know how, that’s why. Also, you can drop a pick, but try … just try to drop your thumb. Not so easy, is it? And before you ask, yes, my right thumb gets sore and calloused and all the rest of it. And yes, my chaotic framming sounds kind of extra twangy. But a dude has to do what a dude has to do. And dis dude does dat ding. (Yes, I said that. I’m ashamed of it, but I did, in fact, say that.)

Time for the round up

Like I said earlier, there are a few of my songs in that basket. One of them is called “Good Old Boys Round Up”, which was slated for our second album, International House, but never got off the ground. I think we started to record it, but it went all pear shaped. Not that there’s anything wrong with the shape of pears, but … anyway.

I’ve been jangling that sucker a bit and will likely do some “live” virtual recordings of that and other selections, then post them somewhere, somehow, maybe with some video, who the hell knows? Well … you’ll be the first to know.

Official site of the band Big Green