No shortcut.

February 19, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

There’s been a lot of push back from the left this week on the Biden Town Hall, and with good reason. While he presents as an affable old grandpa, his conception of policy is locked into the 1990s in a lot of ways. When he thinks he’s leaning to the left, he means the “left” of three decades ago – the liberal cohort that thinks in terms of community policing, mild reforms, drug rehabilitation programs, etc. Whereas even the mainstream Democratic party has moved on from many of these centrist notions of change, the leftward movement appears to have escaped the notice of President Biden. For the time being, he is riding on a wave of relief that Donald Trump is no longer (a) President, (b) in our faces every single day, or (c) on Twitter. I’m sure millions of people are happy that the current president is not ordering an angry racist mob into the Capitol building. But that, while necessary, is of course far from sufficient.

His position on student debt illustrates this insufficiency to a tee. Biden keeps confusing, probably deliberately, the temporary suspension of interest payments (which he has ordered) with elimination of interest on student debt (which he has not ordered). He vaguely promises $10K in debt relief, but both he and his spokesperson keep suggesting that this is something Congress should take up. To be clear, he has the authority to do this himself. And if he can do $10K, he can do more. But Biden seems to think that there’s a fairness issue involved here. He tends to couch it in terms of not wanting rich people to get the benefit, which brings us back to Biden’s (and most centrist Democrats’) preference for “targeted” programs. In other words, we need a new, overly complicated, dedicated administrative infrastructure to achieve the recapture of funds that our already-existing tax system could accomplish with very little adjustment.

Of course, this problem is more about us than it is about Biden. We’ve got Biden as president – and lackluster officeholders all the way down the line – because we didn’t organize enough people and ultimately bring them around to supporting progressive, even radical, change. In a very real sense, we get the politicians we deserve, and we shouldn’t expect better if we’re not doing the hard, long-term work of building change from below. Organizing is about more than electing people, obviously, but one of the by-products of successful organizing is a better grade of politician. I think we’ve seen that in some of the more progressive Congressional candidates, like Rashida Talib, Cory Bush, AOC, and others. I’m pleasantly surprised when candidates of their stripe are successful, largely because I know that in my own area of the country very little organizing is taking place – that’s why we now have the return of our erstwhile Republican Congressmember, Claudia Tenney, who beat out Anthony Brindisi by a mere 109 votes. Brindisi was part of the “problem-solver” conference and there were few Democratic members farther to the right, but in the end it wasn’t enough.

You see, a little more organizing would have given us those 110 votes to return a centrist to Congress. And a lot more organizing might have resulted in sending an actual progressive to Congress, to say nothing of actual mutual aid benefits for the people in our district. So, what are we waiting for?

luv u,

*Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.*

Usual Rubbish

Frankensong.

February 12, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

I thought you said it was organic. What do you mean “all natural” – that’s a vacuous term. Everything’s natural, goddamn it. Yellow cake uranium is natural, but that doesn’t mean you should serve it at a birthday party.

Cheese and crackers, I don’t know what’s the matter with my squat-mates. They think anything that’s not on fire is good for you, even if it was recently on fire. That’s what happens when you spend the better part of twenty years loitering in an abandoned hammer mill, staying three steps ahead of the property owning capitalists, two steps ahead of the bourgeois lawyers that represent them, and one step ahead of the police that guard their wealth with clubs and guns. It’s kind of like Stockholm syndrome, except that we’ve been taken hostage by our general lack of resources, and my associates are now trying to squeeze every molecule out of the toothpaste tube. (I don’t mean metaphorically – they literally want that last molecule!)

Anyway, they’ve taken to eating GMO rice and GMO corn and whatever else because that’s what’s lying about. Not the best reason to eat something. There are a lot of old hammer heads strewn throughout this mill in various states of corrosive decay – they wouldn’t eat those, would they? (Or WOULD they?) Actually, Anti-Lincoln might sample the hammer heads for some extra iron, but I digress. If I can’t discourage my flop-mates from eating franken-food, then so be it. The trouble is, when you share you place with a mad scientist, the wheels can come off of the lunch cart very easily. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be making muffins out of yellowcake and feeding them to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t have the tools for digesting actual food but seldom refuses a handout from his creator, Mitch Macaphee.

There’s a lot of scavenging going on in this mill. It’s a sign of desperation setting in after months of lockdown, economic hardship, and bad weather. We’ve even taken to plugging together fragments of songs in an effort to make new music out of something that was abandoned months, years, even eons ago. (Well … perhaps not eons. Ages, maybe.) Ah, ’tis an impoverished soul indeed that cannot pull even a slap-dash song out of his or her ass, but such are the times we live in. I’ve got idea tapes lying all over the place. Some of them are incoherent, the product of leaving a cassette machine next to my bed so that if a song comes to me in my sleep I can sing it into the condenser mic and drop back off to dreamland without missing a beat. That almost invariably results in a tape full of drowsy mumbling followed by a respectable snore. Still …. even that can be useful in a mashup, dance mix, whatever. Hey … a frankensong is better than no song at all … or maybe not. IT’S ALIVE!

Political Rants

Bad side of Buchanan.

February 12, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

The historic second impeachment of Donald Trump got under way this week. I have to say that it was more engaging than the first impeachment in some respects. The House impeachment managers seem a bit sharper to me, though they are working what seems like an open and shut case. At some level this is all performative, as it seems unlikely that a sufficient number of Senators whose constituencies are made up of rabid Trump supporters will vote to convict the man. Still, anything that reminds people of the shit show that led up to this last election and the rabid, racist attack that followed it can’t be bad. Trump himself said something like “never forget this day” to his supporters. I embrace that entirely: we should never let Republicans forget January 6, 2021 for as long as they live. That should be one of our political obsessions moving forward.

If the jury (i.e. the United States Senate) in this proceeding were inclined towards acting in good faith rather than in their own narrow political self-interest, it might be relevant to emphasize the fact that, despite the similarities, an impeachment is not the same as a criminal trial. The standard of guilt is quite different, as are the stakes. I realize that barring someone from high office isn’t a small thing, but it’s certainly not what most people would consider a severe punishment. It’s not like a conviction in the Senate would send Trump’s ass to prison; no, it would simply keep him from holding office again. It’s not taking away your rights, because no one has a right to the presidency – it’s an office that must be earned. In that way, impeachment is kind of like a reverse job interview. I think people have a tendency to forget that, sometimes kind of conveniently.

I don’t know if you’ve ever perused one, but on the web there are a number of rankings of presidents from best to worst that get updated every year or so, as per historians’ assessment of the various chief executives and their impact, good and bad. I believe all of these polls put James Buchanan at the very bottom, though he is sometimes challenged in this honorific by Andrew Johnson, who most often appears second to last in the rankings. (Of course, these two putrid presidents flank Abraham Lincoln on either side, Lincoln being ranked number one almost universally.) Now that Trump is an ex-president, he will be included in these surveys. If I were a gambling man (which I’m not), I would put my money on him landing on the bad side of Buchanan. Trump likes to call himself “The 45th President of the United States” as a way of avoiding being referred to as a former president and, therefore, admitting failure, defeat, etc. Actually, the nomenclature might fit the next time these historians render their judgment. My guess is that he will, indeed, be named the forty-fifth president in the line up from best to worst.

We shall see what judgment the Senate hands down on Trump, but I think history’s judgment has already landed and it’s not pretty.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

So it is written.

February 5, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Well, maybe we should use one of those ram horns … you know, just to let people know we’re coming. Or we could wave a herder’s staff about like some kind of crazy goon. THAT would be impressive. So many good ideas.

Yeah, you’ve found your way back to Big Green land. Here in the mostly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, home only to our sorry selves and the nasty neighbors upstairs, we’ve been hashing out the particulars of our eventual return to the public stage. Oh, yes … make no mistake about it. We will be back, and we will be bad. Really bad. Possibly unlistenable, partly due to advance age. Older people playing rock and roll is a bit like the Three Stooges in their dotage – somehow slapstick comedy being played out by geezers is something other than funny. It’s kind of pathetic, frankly …. but I will allow that music is a bit more forgiving, as long as we don’t try to jump up and down and climb up into the rafters of a civic center like we’re apes. (We may be apes … but not the climbing kind.)

We’ve been told that our gigs back in the day were the stuff of legend. I can believe it, because legends – like our performances – are entirely unsubstantial. You would search in vain to find video of even a single one of our gigs. (Lord knows I can’t find a single one. Rare as hen’s teeth! In fact, even rarer – I found at least a dozen hen’s teeth while looking for our videos. So it is written.) Still, you’d think even in the absence of digital video cameras in every cell phone there would be a handful of VHS tapes lying about. All we have, for crying out loud, is us on that crazy demo that some dude named Angel shot, and getting THAT away from him involved a whole lot of crying out loud.

I know, man, I know. Just pretend he's not there.

Now, there are some advantages to having an in-house mad scientist, at least when he’s not out on some mad science junket with the rest of his clan. Mitch Macaphee has postulated that we can use some of his hyper-sensitive instruments to reach back into the space-time continuum and pull audio signals out back from decades long dead. It takes a little fine-tuning, of course, but he thinks it’s possible. Apparently it’s a little easier to get images back than it is to retrieve sound, though Mitch says the images tend to get muddled with random items from the present day, like social media memes and the like. He showed us a couple of examples, one of which I’ve included in this post for your edification. Mitch thinks we can even enlist Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to follow the signals back to yesteryear … or at least, yestermonth … and drag some of our lost performances back with him. Just full of ideas, that Mitch. Wish to hell he could make a decent pot of coffee. (It always tastes like he brewed it in his boot.)

Political Rants

Lying in state.

February 5, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

The body of Officer Sicknick lay in state in the Capitol Rotunda this week – the same Capitol he died defending about a month ago when bloodthirsty right-wing thugs invaded the building by the thousands, hoping to forcibly stop the Senate’s counting of the electoral votes which, somewhat remarkably, reflected the will of the majority of American voters in denying Trump a second term. For all of the failings of law enforcement that day, Sicknick and many of his fellow officers fought fiercely to keep the insurrectionist mob at bay long enough so that members of Congress and the Vice President could be moved to more secure locations. As I have said before, this was nothing less than an attempt at a self-coup, and though there are many in the political class who would prefer that we forget about it and move on, that is the absolute last thing we should do. We forget this at our own peril – they have provided the template for future attempts, and we must be prepared.

I’ve talked about this quite a bit on my podcast, Strange Sound, but I think it bears repeating, hopefully by people with larger audiences than mine. There’s a lot to criticize about our federal government. It has inequities built into its very constitutional foundations, such as slave economy measures like the electoral college, the Senate, and so on. Even the 13th Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery, explicitly allows that toxic institution to persist for incarcerated people. Bernie Sanders is right, in fact, when he says that we need a kind of revolution in governance, but I think he would agree that he’s not talking about an actual political revolution involving a forcible overthrow of the U.S. constitutional order. Actual revolutions are a bloody business, and you never know where they’re going to end up. They also require more effort, energy, and suffering than just hardscrabble organizing in all fifty states. So from a left perspective, in my humble opinion, overthrow of the national government is a bad idea and an unnecessary one for the promotion of positive change.

That’s the left. The right, on the other hand, are bomb throwers. The people who attacked the capitol last month were bent on autocracy. They had been fed the big lie for years, with a ramp up over the course of the 2020 campaign – the election is rigged, vote by mail is rife with fraud, the whole thing is fixed, etc. This was Trump’s plan A in 2016. It never got implemented because something unexpected happened – he won. This past year he resurrected Plan A, and it nearly led to the gutting of the federal legislature, the murder of our representatives, and the installation of someone who plainly lost the last election, hands down. Do these deluded right-wingers want a revolution? I don’t know, but they almost got one, and that is some pretty scary shit. For all the “defense” bluster our government puts out on a regular basis, all the posturing on terrorism, all the billions it spends on war materiel, it seemed somehow powerless to stop a bunch of white Americans from trashing the center of government. Plainly all that anti-terrorism prep, like that clause in the 13th Amendment, was not meant for whitey.

R.I.P., officer Sicknick, and condolences to your family. We’ll have to work harder to ensure that his loss was not in vain.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Cold Files.

January 29, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

How long do we have to stay down here, man? It’s five below zero. Next time we’re bringing a can of sterno or something. Maybe one of those highway flares. Ah yes – blessed warmth.

Hey, out there in internet-land. Yes, here we are at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, doing what we usually do – nothing much, interrupted occasionally by nothing whatsoever. We lead a sedentary life out here among the ruins of a former mill-driven regional economy, brought low by the greed of post-industrial corporate financiers. So I suppose it is they we have to thank for our adopted abode, right? I mean, if they hadn’t massively dis-invested in this community and moved all their operations to the Philippines ages ago, there wouldn’t be any abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for us to squat in. So it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good, somewhere. Somehow.

What’s the nothing that we’re doing today? Ah, nothing much. Just digging through our piles of junk in boxes, looking for old recordings and unfinished projects begging to be reborn. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to serve as a kind of metal detector/divining rod, using his advanced sensor technology to scan for magnetic tapes or abandoned discs. When he comes close to either one of those types of objects, lights start flashing and his antennae start twirling around counterclockwise. Then a little mechanical bird pops out of a little door in his forehead and crows the hour. That’s when we all break for lunch. (Even if it happens at 10:00 at night. Lunch is whenever the birdy sings, that’s it.)

Joe: Hey, man .. You picking up any signals?

Marvin: squx.

You may ask if we’ve found anything interesting, to which I would reply, “Funny you should ask!” Actually, our time rooting through the basement was pretty much wasted. Hell, I could have looked on our old hard drives for music projects of every description, unfinished, abandoned, neglected, and so on. We started recording Rick Perry songs (later collected in our ridiculous third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick) in probably 2011, then went right into the Ned Trek songs, which number in the scores – probably 120 songs over the course of six years. In between all that, we started to resurrect some older material from the 1980s and 90s – songs we had done demos of but never full-on recordings. I’m not sure how many of those there are. We’ve played a few rough mixes on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, but some have never seen the light of day. Or the dark of night.

So now, when we’re bored, we rack up one of those old numbers, hit play and twiddle the dials until it sounds like something that’s not junk. If we do that long enough, we’ll send some of it your way. That’s just how we roll.

Political Rants

Week One.

January 29, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

A lot might be said of any administration’s first week in office, Because we’re coming off of a presidency like no other, and not in a good way, there’s going to be a tendency among members of the press to be more deferential than might otherwise seem appropriate. On a human level, that’s understandable – White House correspondents are happy to see the daily briefing return, and to see it managed with a lot less tone. After four years of being subjected to withering attacks from Trump and his crew, reporters are breathing a sigh of relief and, I’m sure, hoping that this signals a return to the normal routines of previous presidencies, when there existed a more generally congenial symbiotic relationship between the press and the press office. (There was symbiosis between Trump’s administration and the press, but it was of a more corrosive variety.) They want their cheap-glamor White House Correspondents Dinner back, roast and all.

I’m not sure they’re going to get their wish this time, not entirely. The media universe is much more fragmented now then it was even five years ago, and the broad flaccid consensus that the mainstream media so worships may prove elusive. This is a divided country, with what looks like a larger number of people on the side of our standard mediated democratic governance, and a large minority seemingly (and in many cases openly) advocating for autocracy. It’s really more than advocacy, though – large numbers of them have been moved to violence, murder, and active disruption of the constitutional order, such as we saw on January 6. Now the vast majority of the insurrectionists have melted back into their home communities, unmolested, perhaps celebrating their success at delaying the electoral vote certification beyond the statutory deadline. Millions of people believe ridiculous lies about fraudulent votes in the last election – it’s hard to move on from that fact.

As we approach an impeachment trial in the Senate, Trump’s second, Republican senators are taking issue with the process, attempting to stop the trial by arguing that because Trump left office, the issue is moot. When the facts aren’t on their side, Republicans always go for process. They’re doing everything they can to obstruct the majority. I have to say, it is not surprising but still shocking that, after that Trump-fueled hate mob busted into the capitol looking for Pence’s head and those of the Congressional leadership, these senators can still casually tut tut over the effort to hold the former president accountable. They were almost impaled on the end of a pitchfork just three weeks ago, and yet they still go to bat for the outside strategy … and for every rube to remain duped. Un-effing-believable.

I started critical coverage of the Biden administration on this past week’s episode of Strange Sound, with a focus on foreign policy. I encourage you to do the same, even if just for your own edification.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Space friends.

January 22, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Yeah, not many people gave Nixon the credit he deserved as a singer of songs. Not President Nixon, of course – he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. I mean the Nixon android from Ned Trek. Now THERE’S a chanteuse if ever I heard one.

Oh, hey … what’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up. Space, that’s what …. waaaay up. We were just thinking about potential markets for our music. One could be the local Firemen’s Field Days – those rustic events always cry out for entertainers. We might pick up maybe four, even five new listeners. Then there’s the people across the street, up on the third floor. They seem weird enough to like us. We could ask. I suppose if I put Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out on the street with sandwich boards and a bell, we might be able to drive up some interest. Then there’s the overseas market and what we call the over-skies market – outer space. Lots of untapped potential there.

Sure, there are logistical issues, right? I mean … we could send Marvin to Mars with the sandwich boards and bell, and see if anybody on that dusty little world bites. That may be a bit too retail for the extraterrestrial market. We need to do broad-spectrum outreach – the kind of marketing that blankets entire solar systems with positive messaging. Even if we get one one-hundredth of one percent of the punters on, say, Aldebaran three, that’s enough paying customers to keep us in pub cheese for the rest of the year. And it’s only January! This could be like those automated robocalls, always fishing for a live one. We may have to piss off whole civilizations with our annoying spam calls in order to reap a few hundred listeners, but hey …. interplanetary harmony is greatly overrated. When’s the last time Earth had a serious dispute with its nearest celestial neighbors? Not recently, that’s when.

The next question is, do we have the kind of music that the public wants on, say, Aldebaran three? Well, there’s no way to be sure. We can make an educated guess, though. Or we could ask our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee whether he has any ideas. (That could be dangerous, however.) We do have some idea of space alien music tastes just from recent media reports. The Guardian, for instance, did a story on a signal from Proxima Centauri that was detected by radio telescopes. The signal contained a single pure tone at around 982 MHz. That sounds like one of those Cage compositions, right? So maybe we need to go in more for the longhair stuff to get the Centauri crowd rocking. Matt and I are talking about doing some one-note songs …. and I DON’T mean One-Note Samba (which actually has more than one note in it).

That’s where Mitch Macaphee comes in – we need a big-ass antenna to broadcast our one-note tunes into deep space. Get to work on it, Mitch! We’ll work on the songs, you build the radio telescope. From each according to his/her talents.

Political Rants

That happened.

January 22, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

This is the first blog post I’ve posted since the end of the Trump presidency on Wednesday at noon. Congratulations, America – we got the stiffs off the property. That’s the good news. As in previous years when presidents I despised were defeated and sent packing, my inauguration day focus was on the departure of the jackass, which I watched this week with great pleasure. In the end, Trump slunk away out the back door of the White House, into his government provided chopper, over to Joint Base Andrews where he gave a farewell address that, one would hope, every school child will learn by heart … just so that there’s a chance we will never have to do this again. (Fat chance, right? This is America, after all.) “Have a good life,” said the now ex-president in one of his last utterances as Chief Executive of the nation. Like that’s a choice, right? He’s had one, but that was preordained by the gods of money.

The network coverage of the transition of power was about what you would expect. The focus tends to be on the pomp and circumstance, the traditions, the contrasts between the incoming and outgoing administrations, the bipartisan spirit of continuance, etc. Inasmuch as the riotous attack on the Capitol building took place only two weeks before the inaugural ceremony, it was impossible for them to avoid the inherently divisive nature of what was taking place. No matter how much they show Mitch McConnell grinning ear to ear (behind his mask, of course) or Roy Blunt joking about Amy Klobuchar, the fact remains that the Republican party was all-in for Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, that more than 145 members of the House caucus voted not to accept the electoral count, and that more than eighty percent of registered Republicans believe the president handled himself well during the transition period. It takes more than a little bunting to conceal that magnitude of support for, frankly, what amounted to an attempted coup.

Still, let’s dwell for a moment on the fact that Trump and his minions are gone. Let’s take a moment to celebrate the fact that this would-be autocrat no longer has his finger on the nuclear trigger, or the other vast powers of the presidency. Let us rejoice in the fact that his attempted coup was a failure, even though it provides a road map for future coup plotters. Let us be thankful that there has thus far been no replay of the pitched attack that took place on January 6, though many of the responsible parties remain at large and their enablers in Congress remain in office. Let us be hopeful that the new administration will deal seriously with the COVID crisis and other priorities, even though we know we will have to push them to do the right thing.

Indeed, the best way for us to celebrate this transition – and the end of that awful thing that happened these past four years – is to stay on our toes and remain active. That’s the only path forward.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Holism.

January 15, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first? Spinach, then cake, or vice-versa? Right, then … let’s start with the bad news. Astronomers have discovered a super massive black hole 1.6 billion times more massive than our sun. It subsists on a diet equivalent of 25 suns a year, so it’s the deep space equivalent of the proverbial hungry hungry hippo. And it’s HEADED THIS WAY. Or not. That’s the bad news.

The good news? Well … it’s 13 billion light years away. So we’ve got some time. That said, I’ve already talked to our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, about this terrifying celestial object. That may have been a mistake, because he appears to be obsessing over the thing. He has already proposed some kind of top secret space mission to learn more about J0313-1806 (the code name for the black hole inside a quasar). Mitch is proposing to send a volunteer – namely Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – in a specially designed space craft straight into the dark heart of the object, then bring him back so that he can report on what he saw there. How would he do that, given the irresistible power of the black hole? Well, there’s this rope, you see? And he’s planning on tying it to the marble statue of Grover Cleveland that stands in the nearby town square. (I think he was just spitballing at that point.)

Well, when Marvin heard about this, his lights started blinking frantically. At first I thought it might be Morse code, but it was probably the fight or flight circuitry Mitch built into him using spare parts scavenged from his central HVAC system back in Vienna. I kind of think Marvin doesn’t want to do this mission. Frankly, I can’t blame him. The stories I’ve read about flying into the center of black holes are not very encouraging. I mean, best case – he could be sent into some kind of time-space worm hole that would lead him to a previous era on Earth when dinosaurs ruled …. or perhaps when men with six-shooters ruled, depending on where he hops off. It might also, I don’t know, send him into the future, or drop him into a weird cave-like nether world inhabited by one-eyed freaks and Michael J. Pollard. Or (somewhat more likely) it might crush his atoms into a singularity long before he gets within light years of it. Either way, not a day in the park.

Not sure you want to go there, old chap.

Fortunately for Marvin, Mitch hasn’t even started work on the spacecraft yet. Frankly, I don’t think he has much to worry about. Mitch gets these bugs sometimes, and they usually pass. Like when scientists were receiving radio signals from the Jovian moon Ganymede. Next thing I knew he had a radio telescope in the backyard, vacuuming up every microwave that dared float in his direction. A couple of days later, it was on to the next thing. Still, I’ve locked the rope in a trunk in the basement, just in case. (Sometimes you have to do the right thing, even if it’s not the simplest thing. This is not one of those times.)

Official site of the band Big Green