Off with us.

November 28, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

Glad that’s over. Anything I hate, it’s packing over a holiday weekend. But we’re under way at last, back into the welcoming arms of deep, deep space. GJ 1132b, here we come!

I suppose I should spare you the details of the last week – the rush job of putting this expeditionary gig together, the foibles regarding our interplanetary transportation, etc. (Just try booking a four-engine ion drive spacecraft on the weekend before Thanksgiving. Freaking impossible!) As you may recall from last week’s post (particularly if you have nothing better to do with your life than to read this useless blog), Big Green has decided to pay a call on our newest neighbor in space – the recently discovered dwarf planet GJ 1132b – and see if we can discover some gainful employment there; namely, a one night stand for a terrestrial band.

Okay, so we dubbed this BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT), which is literally true, as GJ 1132b is out there, man, really out there. We had to name the gig in order to get some support from our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (whose indie imprint is named Hegephonic), still run by Indonesian military thugs. They’ve got deep pockets, though, and they and our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee go way back, so he was able to connive … I mean, convince them into ponying up some of their ill gotten gains to fund this reckless foray into parts unknown. Mitch is just that good.

So that's it, is it? The transport was a major problem, though. All of our previous rides were unavailable. Mitch had inadvertently vaporized our last spacecraft during the course of an experiment (one he was conducting on behalf of those same Generals from Jakarta he was conniving this past week). GJ 1132b is 39 light years away, so we needed something with a little heft. It couldn’t be one of those sub-compact crafts you take to Mars and back, right? There was a good deal of head scratching over that issue, until finally Mitch remembered an old colleague who had built an interstellar spacecraft for his own amusement at some point, then just parked it in his garage next to his Land Rover. Hobbyists!

Anywho, Mitch sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) over to pick it up. Big mistake – Marvin got lost on the way home, so we lost a couple of solar days, delaying our launch until Thanksgiving. Let them eat space! See you on GJ 1132b!

Political Rants

Stirring the pot.

November 28, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump recalls seeing footage of “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Twin Towers fell on September 11, 2001. Fellow candidate Ben Carson briefly claimed to have seen the same inspiring vision in his mind’s eye, too, then backed off. (He seems to be recalling the clip of five Palestinians jumping up and down that was most likely a hatchet job.) Trump’s claim is the ideal bookend to his recent suggestion of maintaining a federal database of Muslims in America, a component in his new post-Paris attack national security platform. It’s a simple, time tested formula: call out a domestic population that you can term a fifth column and associate with a foreign enemy, then repeat your rhetoric and watch your polling numbers rise. Oldest trick in the book.

Look in the mirror, America. The thing is, Trump is a mirror to the Republican base, as Sam Seder and others have pointed out. This is a mostly white minority of virulently anti-immigration, nativist, evangelical Christian Americans who are attracted to Trump for the time being because he arrogantly articulates their hatred of the “other” and gives voice to their sense of outrage over being relegated, however temporarily, to opposition party status. I have heard commentators blame this constituency on Obama – the nauseating former Bush adviser Nicole Wallace, for instance – but it’s useful to remember that even in the depths of his second-term unpopularity, Wallace’s former boss retained a solid core of conservative support, including the same crackpots that showed up at McCain/Palin campaign rallies in 2008. That was the nascent “tea party”, the constituency that has kept Trump in the high twenties for months now.

Stirring up racist or bigoted sentiments is always a dangerous game, but it’s one that remains popular with politicians who have no real value to offer the constituencies they seek to serve. We white people tend to think of non-white, non-European, non-Christian people as different. We see this in the response (or lack of same) to the Beirut bombing, compared to the near media obsession over Paris. Even the President does this. When he talks about Paris, he refers to the fact that we see ourselves in the sidewalk cafes; that Parisians are like us. There is a deep reservoir of anti-foreign, anti-other sentiment in our society. It is hard to avoid this mentality when you become an imperial power. You can mask it, conceal it, but it tends to bob to the surface.

We’ve all seen this movie before. I like to think that there are enough decent people in this country to overcome this type of ugliness, but if there is some kind of attack in the United States over the next year, all bets are off.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Up to the sky in ships.

November 21, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

Next week? That’s kind of short notice, isn’t it? Usually we have a few weeks to arrange for interstellar transport, provisions, sound company, etc. But five days? Sheesh!

Ned Trek, the podcast — Ned Trek, The Podcast

Let me ‘splain. A newly discovered planet 39 light years from here (and when I say newly discovered, I don’t mean it was discovered by Anthony Newley, because he’s dead and not an astrophysicist) named GJ 1132b has been described as Earth-like. And since we are natives of the planet Earth, we take that as an open invitation to go visit this strange new world, seek out its new life and new civilizations, and boldly try to book a gig there … where no one has gigged before. Tall order? Perhaps. But frankly, we’ve been a little short on tall orders just lately here in Big Green land.

This, of course, means scrambling. (For Mitch Macaphee, it means poaching – he HATES scrambled eggs before a rocket launch, HATES them.) We’re having to pull a major interstellar journey out of our collective asses, and that can be a problem. That said, it is kind of exciting to think that at this point next week we will be venturing forth on the surface of a world no human has ever seen before. (Though why we need to go fourth, I don’t know. If we’re going to see something no one has seen before, we should rightfully go FIRST.) Did I just say that? Yeah … I was afraid so.

Eureka. There is one slight wrinkle, of course. Planet GJ 1132b reportedly has a 450-degree surface temperature. Obviously, we can leave the winter gear behind. I’ve asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to pack some extra box fans into the space craft, once we HAVE a space craft. The real problem is going to be keeping our axes in tune. If you’ve ever left your guitar sitting in the sun for a few hours you’ll know what I’m talking about. MARVIN … PACK THE EXTRA GUITAR TUNERS!

Mitch Macaphee assures me that he can rent a suitable spaceship in time for this journey to an unknown world. So, we shall see. If by Sunday afternoon I don’t see him backing that sucker into the courtyard, I’ll start to worry. Til then, take a deep breath.

Political Rants

Land of the (not so) brave.

November 21, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

It’s happening again. A terrorist attack occurs somewhere in the developed societies and right-wingers are falling over themselves to prove that terrorism works. They start railing against Islam writ large, slamming the door shut on refugees from the Arab world, calling for bloody vengeance, and so on. The level of hysteria is almost shocking, given the fact that the attacks they’re obsessing about happened in France, not America. (They don’t seem perturbed by the Beirut bombing, as it was targeted on Hezbollah, which they hate worse than ISIS.) MSNBC’s Morning Joe has become a bullhorn for invading Syria. I can only imagine what Fox News is like these days. Facebook has blown up with people defending (I kid you not) the crusades. This thing plainly goes up to eleven.

Some asshole's good old days. It’s hard for me to see how these calls for military action and pulling up the drawbridge aren’t simply appeals to cowardice. Seriously – the vast majority of the loudest hawks and anti-immigrant fanatics are also fierce defenders of an over-broad interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. Given that many, many more Americans are killed by heavily armed family members, neighbors, or strangers than by terrorism, this is an almost astonishing level of hypocrisy. Even more disturbing is the ludicrous background assumption, expressed most consistently on Morning Joe and by career hawks like John McCain, that if we had simply invaded Syria in 2012, all would be sweetness and light in that sorry nation today. Is there any factual basis for that assumption? The question never arises.

We really need to stop reacting to retail, non-state terrorism in precisely the way the perpetrators hope we will: by sending in the money, the guns, and/or the Marines. Our outsized support for the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s spawned both the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Our sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s and our invasion in 2003 launched Al Qaeda in Iraq, which morphed into ISIS in more recent years. Our “rat line” to the Syrian rebels fed ISIS and facilitated the non-man’s-land that is now the territory of the nascent Islamic State – a consequence our DIA was well aware of, according to declassified documents. Hundreds or even thousands of U.S. troops on the ground will fuel their growth and spawn other, more virulent movements, following on the line of radicalism proselytized by the Saudi Kingdom, our closest ally in the Arab world. ISIS wants us to invade Syria because they know how that works. Do we?

I don’t think we do. From what I’ve seen over the last week, I’m growing more convinced that the American people will tolerate a wider war. (The fact that most presidential candidates are talking about that is proof enough.) So … more war. That will be our legacy to the world.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Distant demi-world.

November 14, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

What the hell, Mitch. That’s just a little speck. No way that’s big enough for us to play on. No way in frozen hell.

When astronomers stumble upon some new deep space option, like that dwarf planet recently detected some three times more distant than Pluto is to the Sun, they think, “eureka!” To us, it’s just another potential gig. We’re that proverbial hammer, always looking for a nail. Appropriate metaphor for a band that lives in an abandoned hammer mill.

I know, I know … all the planetoid-huggers out there are going to accuse Big Green of being money-hungry, selfish twits. Not true. We are crazy motherfucker selfish twits, in point of fact, and when we see another ice world out there, we can hardly wait to pile into some poorly designed space craft and slip the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of our cold hard money god. So, yeah … on second thought, I guess we are money hungry selfish twits as well. It’s the crazy motherfucker part that kept me from seeing it. (I see now … )

Nice place. How can we be sure there are music fans on XZ9-Marvin 14? (Note: Before I get flooded with angry messages from disgruntled astrophysicists who have never had an opportunity to name a planet, consider this a planetoid pseudonym just for the purposes of this conversation.) It’s what Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, calls the fourth principle of astrophysical convenience: Any planet or planetoid large enough to land on has to be home to some kind of sentient life form, preferably one that speaks English. (The third principle is about breathable air.)

Now, why on earth (or in space) would we name a planetoid after Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Well, let’s just say that Marvin has been name-checked as our advance man on this endeavor. That is to say, Mitch has plans to send him up in whatever spaceship is handy and point the nosecone towards that icy little spec in deep space. Then it’s drive forward until you hit pay dirt. Or pay ice. Same thing. Marvin has done this sort of work for us before, and there’s not a thing for him to worry about … except that it’s EXTREMELY DANGEROUS and that none of us is willing to go in his stead.

Hey, what are personal robot assistants for? We’re setting him up with a fax machine so that we can get first hand accounts, retro style. Should be interesting.

Political Rants

Chance, not skill.

November 14, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

This week saw stories about campus uprisings (some successful) relating indirectly to the Black Lives Matter movement and yet another Republican debate about practically nothing. These seemingly distinct phenomena are not entirely unconnected, particularly when you consider the economic focus of the G.O.P. debate and the very racially exclusive history of the expansion of the middle class during the second half of the 20th Century.

Living in my hermetically sealed white man’s world, I am witness to a lot of head scratching about why students at, say, University of Missouri are so upset. Of course, all my white companions know of this is what they hear on the evening news or via online sources, which only brings them the events of the past few days. The long history of abuse, exclusion, marginalization, incarceration, injury, and in some cases killing is not encapsulated in these very brief reports. So naturally, it seems nonsensical.

60s suburbia: green grass, red lines. My life isn’t exactly typical, but my family experience offers some insight into the depth of white privilege. My dad came back from World War II, got his high school equivalency diploma, and went to work. He was white, so it wasn’t that challenging to find a job in those days. He had V.A. and F.H.A. loans, barred to black families, with which to purchase his first, second, third house and so on. By the late sixties / early seventies, we were living in a new house in the richest town in our county, with one son on the way to Oberlin College, all on one salary. Dad’s financial profile more or less tracked the trajectory of the American white working class, declining somewhat through the seventies, eighties, and nineties, but he left enough to fund an IRA and, with Social Security, set my mom up for the rest of her life. Black families, by and large, didn’t have any of that – not the jobs, not the equity, not the access to credit, an not the freedom to live wherever they wanted.

What’s more, because my parents benefited from that brief period of somewhat broadly shared white prosperity in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, they were there to catch me and my siblings when we faltered. I had the luxury of being able to fail once, twice, many times, always having that safety net below me. Again, black people my age didn’t have that, because their parents hadn’t shared in the prosperity. So when people like Ben Carson, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, etc., tell this tale about pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, they’re talking out of their asses.

The truth is, the American economy is a game of chance, not of skill. Not everyone can grow up to be an entrepreneur or a famous neurosurgeon, and they shouldn’t have to in order to have a decent life. And though we live under these lofty-sounding delusions about self-reliance and persistence, people no longer have the luxury of failure. Black people never had it, and now white people are reaching that threshold as well.

We need to fundamentally change the way we do things if we’re ever going to achieve racial or economic justice. This is probably a good time to start.

God awful. So sorry to hear about the bloody attacks in Beirut and Paris. My condolences to the families of the fallen.

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Freak week.

November 7, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

That’s kind of an odd sound. Did you hear it, Anti-Lincoln? What’s that? No hearing aid? I didn’t know you were hard of hearing. Huh. Explains a lot, really. I think we all just sort of assumed that you were obstinate and disagreeable. And manic depressive. And a total asshole. Oh – well, you heard THAT now, didn’t you?

It’s hard to ‘splain what it’s like living with a bunch of freaks like the entourage surrounding Big Green. I know that if you’re a rock music fan, you have probably read all the stories about the folks who hung around with the Beatles or Justin Bieber’s posse or whatever. Yeah, our group is nothing like that. Though I suppose we have the rough equivalent of “Magic Alex” in our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee. Just call him Magic Mitch. (Not to his face, of course.) Once caveat: his version of the “nothing box” would probably be explosive.

Maybe it’s just that you get more sensitive with age. You know, the goings-on in the middle of the night, the moving stuff around and slamming doors, the playing instruments at all hours – I should really stop doing all that shit. No, seriously … I’ve become kind of attached to the idea of sleeping through most of the night (especially this time of year, when the nights last half the day.) In fact, I get SO attached to the idea of sleeping that I need an frightfully loud Two useless inventions alarm clock, which now takes the form of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) setting off one of his servo-alarms while standing next to my cot.

You know you’re living in freak land when the most normal individual in your group is a man-sized tuber. (I would say my brother Matt is the most normal, but that would just be a dirty lie.) Of course, that has never stopped us from making music. In fact, you could say that it has contributed to our productivity. The freakier we get, the stranger the albums get. That seems like a natural progression to me.

Okay, well … back to whatever I was doing before. Odd jobs, like bending pretzels, perhaps.

Political Rants

Dark skies ahead.

November 7, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

My plan was to continue my comments on the CNBC Republican debate last week, and I will do some of that, but given the events of the past week it seems appropriate to broaden that discussion a bit. There are some troubling signs about the upcoming election and, more generally, the trajectory we’re on as a nation and – yes – an empire.

When you suck at the game, blame the refs. Starting with the debate, probably the most telling moments of that sorry spectacle were the attacks against the event moderators – the calls of unfairness most effectively delivered by Ted Cruz, who (as Sam Seder has pointed out) really owns that sense of grievance that has become such a central part of the Republican/Tea Party narrative. There goes the “liberal” media, ripping into us after having given the Democrats the kid gloves treatment. Several of them – Christie, Trump, Carson, Huckabee – took turns revealing their inner Gingrich, whining at such a pitch that their grievance grew legs and very nearly derailed the entire GOP debate schedule in the days that followed. Pauvre petit!

Then, of course, there was some good old fashioned red baiting on the part of Cruz, Christie, and others. Christie in particular seems to be vying for the Nixon award, now that Scott Walker (a.k.a. Nixon without the charisma) is out of the picture, demagoging on Black Lives Matter by offering rhetorical support for the men in blue while calling out the socialist. Apparently, Fox Business was unmoved, as Christie has now been regulated to the also-ran table in their upcoming proprietary GOP debate.

These people probably virtually equal to one another in nuttiness, with variations in presentation. They are building popular support on the right for some really dangerously insane issues, like building a huge border wall and drilling anywhere and everywhere. Their foreign policy ideas are W. Bush II, Return with a Vengeance. And Obama is setting up the toy soldiers for them all across the game board, with special forces fighting directly in Syria, probably in Yemen and Somalia, and god knows where else. At a time when we face these enormous challenges, not least of which being that of converting to a zero emission economy, we simply cannot afford to have any of these people as president.

But here we are. Carson and Trump in the lead, Ruby-hole just behind. Really, people?

luv u,

Usual Rubbish

Parts and parcels.

October 30, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

What is this … another carton? This one’s from Madagascar, no less. What the hell. Does it rattle when it shakes? Does it roll? If when it shakes it both rattles and rolls, it might be Jerry Lee Lewis.

For the life of me, I don’t know who’s ordering all of these packages. They just show up at the door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (Big Green’s longtime squat-house) and subsequently disappear. At first I thought it might be Mitch Macaphee, but he has long since abandoned the notion of ordering goods from various merchants. He just invents whatever he needs, which is a handy skill to have. (Perhaps the handiest!) Then I thought maybe anti-Lincoln was behind all of this mail order, since some of the boxes came from Urban Outfitters. (He’s taken to a more cosmopolitan wardrobe of late. Very smart.)

I know, I know – I tend to get a little suspicious, living in a condemned post-industrial hulk like I do. A few months here and you start to see conspiracies around every corner. What are those mice talking about? Do the crows in the courtyard wish me well or ill? Perhaps it is THEY who are ordering stuff from Crate and Barrel. Maybe they need crates and barrels for something, I don’t know. Idle minds, right?

A bit too far, Marvin. Just saying. Someone’s handing me a note. It reads, “You idiot. It’s probably Marvin (your personal robot assistant). Mitch Macaphee just made him wi-fi compatible.” Oh, right. So Marvin doesn’t even need a smart phone to buy a bunch of useless junk on credit. All he needs is the credit. Fortunately, he doesn’t have … doesn’t have … hey … where’s my wallet? MARVIN!!

Okay, Marvin has been using this magnetic lock gizmo ever since he saw one on Lost In Space reruns. My guess is that he’s down in his basement room, frozen like a statue in his magnetic lock, placing orders over wi-fi without even lifting a finger. And the boxes that come are probably piling up around him like a fortress – a fortress of consumer joy! Doesn’t that remind you of Christmas?

Anyway, if I’m in the pokey the next time I post, it will be that mindless robot’s fault. See if he’ll let you use my credit card to bail me out.

Political Rants

More old wine.

October 30, 2015 Joe Leave a comment

We were treated to the spectacle of another Republican debate last night. I’ll dispense with my usual comments about the format, style, and proprietary nature of the event – suffice to say that as a wholly-owned property of CNBC, it met the usual low standard of reality television production values. That said, on to what might be referred to euphemistically as “the substance”.

First off, it’s worth noting that there are way, way, WAY too many candidates on that stage to allow any kind of reasonable debate. Setting politics and policy aside for a moment, I have to wonder what the hell is wrong with the Republican party that they can allow this to continue? The policy distinctions between these ten are minor, at best. Hasn’t it occurred to any of these people that, for the good of their party, it might be best to just sit this one out? In other words, sacrifice your own petty political ambitions so that there might be ample opportunity for substantive debate? Apparently not, as not only are there ten main debate candidates, but a kids table with 4 more. Talk about vanity.

Peterson Institute shill. Issues wise, we heard a lot of recycled crap about simplifying the tax code. The flat tax is presented as something new; it’s basically Jack Kemp 3.0. The unifying principle is, of course, massive deficits coupled with massive tax savings for the super rich. Sound familiar? Sure it does. Nine, nine, nine, anyone? Yesterday’s nines are today’s “tithing”.

The ironic thing is that there was some talk of stagnating wages for working people, particularly from Fiorina and Huckabee, but the prescription for that ailment is always just more of what’s screwing the common folks now. The contextual narrative these candidates are operating with identifies Obama as a socialist who has gotten his way for seven years. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We have been living under a kind of modified austerity, more of less following the principle set by Grover Norquist that Democrats in power should be forced to “rule like Republicans”. That has stagnated growth and increased inequality. They want to make it far worse.

Some of the most despicable posturing came from Governor Christie, a media favorite (particularly on MSNBC’s Morning Joe), who wasted no time in throwing the media under the bus. Far worse, he continued his practice of carrying water for Pete Peterson:

Let me be honest with the people who are watching at home. The government has lied to you and they have stolen from you. They told you that your Social Security money is in a trust fund. All that’s in that trust fund is a pile of IOUs for money they spent on something else a long time ago.

This is the kind of gas that’s been emitting from New Jersey’s blimp-like governor for some time now, and it’s bogus as hell. Where does he get the notion that money that has been borrowed has somehow been “stolen”? So, is he saying China isn’t getting their money back from us? In fact, they are. We can pay ourselves back the same way we pay back all of our other creditors. It’s called keeping promises. New concept for that fucker.

Christie’s just trying to advance the narrative that Social Security is bankrupt and that we need to privatize it and hand it over to his friends in the financial services industry. I think the fact that those pirates are still slathering over the prospect of getting their greasy hands on it is proof positive that Social Security has plenty of life left in it.

There are other points to cover, but let me stop here and maybe resume next post.

luv u,

Official site of the band Big Green