What are you going to be for this year’s Christmas pageant? A reindeer? A slice of gooseberry pie? As small pile of pine cones? So many possibilities.
I don’t imagine that anyone reading this blog is unaware of the fact that the holidays hold a special resonance for Big Green. God knows, when they start blowing those freaking carols through every available loudspeaker, my head starts resonating like a church bell at Noon. That’s what I call old time religion. And sure, we did do a whole album of Christmas songs, entitled (not surprisingly) 2000 Years To Christmas (2KY2C) – our first formal album.
When I say “formal”, I don’t mean that we appear in tuxedos with massive red cummerbunds and top hats. I mean that we released a number of collections on cassette tape prior to 2KY2C that were anything BUT formal. More than a few of those were Christmas themed albums, from which we drew the 13 songs that appeared on 2KY2C. Okay, so … as we have in previous years, we’re planning on putting together a holiday episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, and in an effort to lard it out with some extra music we are ladling out compositions from those earlier “informal” releases. Last year it was “Merry Christmas from Henry K;” the year before we did “Father Christmas,” “Christmas Spirit” and a couple of others. Plenty more where that came from.
I’ve often said (and you’ve often heard me) that the difference between Big Green and a successful group is that all-consuming lust for fortune, fame, and higher achievements. Yeah … we ain’t got that. We’ve got the songs – scores and scores of them. We’ve got our modest musical abilities. We’ve got a sense of how to put an album together. We even half know how to record ourselves, with some struggle. But that other stuff – that “I’m the greatest” shit … that particular human chromosome was left out of our genetic inheritance.
So what the hell. Bereft of an Earthly audience, we please ourselves. If that involves putting antlers on for a few hours, so be it.
The trouble with approaching these issues with an imperial mindset is that we are blind to our own failures while expressing righteous indignation over the failings of others. Russia’s military action in Syria is a good example. They are perhaps the fifth or sixth power to drop bombs in that unfortunate country. Their strategy, while militaristic and morally bankrupt, is not difficult to understand – they view Islamic radicalism as an extreme threat, and they make the not unrealistic assumption that the fall of Syria’s government would result in a failed state something like Libya or Somalia or Iraq (all of which are beneficiaries of our aforementioned bellicosity). So, like the U.S.’s support of Saudi’s murderous campaign in Yemen, they are applying force in support of Assad’s crumbling regime.
Must be a reason that sound comes out of the speakers when you play our recordings. All I know is that we make noises, put them into machines, and voila. Maybe Mitch Macaphee goes in there after we’re done and fiddles around with the sound molecules, perhaps in hopes of precipitating some kind of sonic explosion. Perhaps not. (I know that there’s usually an subsequent economic explosion, or implosion, to put the matter more precisely.)
Okay, that was a sobering sign, to be sure. Even more infuriating than the sideshow atmospherics was the framing of the questions, delivered for the most part by Anderson Cooper. While the Democratic field is decidedly to the left, at least from a rhetorical perspective, of where they were even eight years ago, the corporate media questioners proceeded through the lens of Reagan’s America. The signal example of this for me was Cooper’s comment to Bernie Sanders about his support for the Sandinista government in Nicargua in the 1980s, as if that was a particularly controversial position in retrospect. (This can be equated with opposition to the Contra terror war against that government being pursued by the Reagan administration at the time – a war so broadly opposed by the American people that Congress had explicitly banned funding for the Contra forces.)
Song: It Should’ve Been Me – The closer on our 2013 album 
It is a bit maddening to see Defense Secretary Ash Carter denounce the Russians for being the gang that can’t shoot straight (which they apparently are) when only days ago our forces in Afghanistan blew up a Medecins Sans Frontieres hospital – an accident, of course (we seem to have a lot of them). While we’re railing against Putin, we might pause to remember that we have been in Afghanistan for fourteen years, and that the place is still ungovernable. We’ve been in Iraq for 12 years at some level or another, and large swaths of it are under the control of a group we profess to hate – ISIS or ISIL, nurtured in the government-free zone we carved out in the cradle of civilization, supported by Saudi and Turkey. (I guess the friends of our friends are somehow our enemies. And the enemies of our enemies … also our enemies. Have we no friends?)
I guess there’s a renewed interest in the red planet since NASA recently determined that there’s evidence of flowing water on the surface – mostly ice melt in the mountains. Hell, we could have told them that. I can’t remember which interstellar tour it was, but one time we played a ski chalet on Mount Olympus. The dry ice was up to our ankles, but there was some water ice as well – mostly in our cocktails, though. Pretty cushy arrangement, but again … not our audience. And dry, very dry.
One can only guess what was running through the minds of so many members of the General Assembly when they listened to this balderdash, particularly those who have been on the receiving end of American military and economic power. Sure, it’s heavy handed and gratuitous for Russia to start bombing parts of western Syria. I imagine there are countries who have sufficient moral standing to take issue with that. The United States is not one of them. We haven’t a leg to stand on in that regard, and the fact that we complain the loudest about Russia’s action is a bit too much like the kleptomaniac yelling “Thief!”
We’ve started to use Cubase a bit over the last two years, just out of necessity, but we’re kind of locked into the thingmaker, despite the fact that it’s got a beastly 486 processor and a primitive proprietary “closed” operating system – and I do mean closed! There’s literally one way to get data out of that thing other than via analog audio outputs, and that’s through the coaxial digital outputs. There is no system that currently supports Roland’s (again) proprietary R-Bus data ports. The only other bus is SCSI, which of course is toast. The CD burner doesn’t work. The optical audio outs don’t appear to work either. Thingmaker.