Winter pursuits.

Pass the all-spice. Now the dried currents. Okay, now shake this up. Shake harder! HARDER! That’s good. Okay … now we need five coconuts, cracked like hen’s eggs. Hurry, hurry!

Jebus Christmas. It’s so hard to get good ingredients this time of year. How the hell am I supposed to make Madagascarian ratatouille without five coconuts cracked like hen’s eggs? What the hell are we supposed to eat between now and St. Swithun’s day? Coal dust? Hammer handles? (Actually, they’re pretty close to corn on the cob if you close your eyes … and your mouth.) It’s a bit of an issue.

Aside from working on the next episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, and the various songs contained therein, we do try to keep busy here inside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill as the snow falls in sheets, covering the rolling farmland of upstate New York like a bedspread. It seems to slow everything down to a crawl this time of year. And yes, that is a lame attempt to blame the lateness of our first-of-2015 podcast episode on the weather or some other factor beyond our control. Let’s be honest: we’re freaking useless. But loveable, I like to think.

Yeah, that's the stuff.Tonight Matt and I will return to tracking the new songs we’ve been working on these long, frigid winter weeks. Mostly working on vocals now, though that effort often descends into strange hooting sounds and choruses of background harmonies that incorporate the words “banana boat” in some fashion. I had the temerity to attempt a guitar part the other day … an ELECTRIC guitar part … but thought better of it. Mostly confining myself to keys lately. House keys … and car keys. Now where did I leave that kazoo … ?

Apologies if I seem scattered this week. So much to do, so little time.  Then there’s the ratatouille and the recently discovered planet NASA’s been talking about. We’re considering sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) up on a scouting missions to see if the new world contains any potential listeners. Could be why he’s been making himself scarce these last few days. COWARD!

Week that wasn’t.

Just a few short takes on a variety of subjects. A lot to focus on, so I’ll try not to focus too much on anything.

Burning people alive, American styleISIS Killing. The so-called “Islamic State” burned a Jordanian captive alive this week. In retaliation, the Jordanian King executed some prisoners. Meanwhile, we dropped some bombs on some nameless people, some of which, quite possibly, were burned alive (though not in front of a camera). Your pick as to who is the biggest asshole here. On points of style, it’s a toss up. On volume, we win hands down.

Ukraine. The reporting on this crisis has been abysmal, though not surprising. Mainstream media, including left-leaning outlets like MSNBC, have been toeing the administration line by and large. When we hear from them about casualties on the Kiev side, it’s in graphic detail. Deaths on the separatist side are somehow authorless, with the persistent question of whether they might be the result of bad aim by the separatists. This is a tremendously dangerous conflict, resulting from nearly three decades of bad policy on the part of the U.S. and Europe. Instead of making promises in Kiev, Kerry should be in Moscow talking to the Russians about how to dial this mess back before it gets any hotter.

Vaccinations. Some substantial smoke-blowing over the question of whether or not parents should have the right to refuse vaccinations for their children. Governor Christie and Senator Paul both weighed in, then weighed out … somewhat … when they heard the reaction. Meanwhile, 100 kids in California have come down with measles, another smaller group in Illinois. These kids are, in part, victims of misinformation about the science behind (a) MMR vaccines and (b) the nature of disorders like autism. Misinformation fuels skepticism, particularly in an age when childhood diseases like measles and mumps have been brought under control and no one remembers the bad old days when 500 kids would die each year from measles.

I don’t have kids, so I can’t give advice. I just know that science and public health are on the side of vaccinating your kids. Seems like the right choice, folks.

Nuff said.

luv u,

jp

What the pod?

Okay, here’s a good name for a band (I know it’s good because someone’s using it): Teenage Brain. Here’s another: The Canabinoids. Well, there’s my day’s work. Man, I’m exhausted!

Yes, I’m sure there are some of you out there – and you know who you are – who think that we of Big Green sit around our abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill all day and do next to nothing. The fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. We work our fingers to the bone every day, trying to think of stupid shit to say the next time someone interviews us, which could be any minute (though in actuality, it hasn’t happened in about two decades). We set a very high standard for stupidity; not talking garden variety here. Our comments are expected to be wildly off the mark, not just a little strange.

And there are other things occupying our time, such as the January podcast … which is now certain to be the February podcast. All I can say is, mea culpa. (That’s all the Latin I know.) Our podcast production process (or PPP) has become much more complicated in recent months, mostly due to our own highly exacting standards. Now every other Ned Trek episode has to come complete with a full complement of new songs written specifically for the occasion, produced to the best of our ability, and inserted into that otherwise pointless show. Time consuming stuff, yes. The kind that makes January into February.

It's a good name, anywayThis time out we have, let’s see …. six new songs, maybe? I’ve lost count. It’s become this blur of recording parts onto different projects, a piano here, a horn section there, a beery-sounding horse voice on this one, some fucked-up swabbies on that one. That’s the only way I know how to work – just keep chipping away at the mammoth rock until it looks a hell of a lot more like Lincoln. That’s how Mount Rushmore was made. That and driving native people off the land (we don’t include that in our creative process).

So, I don’t know … look for our new podcast episode in the coming weeks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my couch.

The year in advance.

Okay, I promised domestic policy this week, but I’m going to have to go back on that for a paragraph or two. It’s the product of swallowing so much crap news over the course of the week. Just a few minutes of Latin America coverage by NPR is enough to make me want to pull my own head off. So I just want to dwell on that topic for a few minutes … don’t mind me.

One that got awayObama’s shift on Cuba is instructive in a lot of ways. For one, it is wildly popular, with something like 60% of the country in support. That has been reflected in polls for quite a long time. Second, it does help to lay bare the true nature of the relationship. Just listening to our diplomats lecture Cuba on human rights issues is enough irony to last a decade in and of itself. For chrissake, we can’t even claim to hold to a high standard on human rights even within the confines of Cuba itself!

Raul Castro has said that reestablishing normal relations would require our return of Guantanamo Bay – the only eastern-facing harbor on the island, which would be kind of useful for trade with Europe. The Obama administration has rejected that out of hand. Again … does any news organization in the United States ever examine the issue of our dubious claim on Guantanamo Bay? Nope. Too busy reporting on Russia’s heinous seizure of Crimea.

It goes deeper than that. Why have we targeted Cuba for five decades? Dictatorship? That can’t be it. We cozy up to dictators in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and elsewhere without a problem. Human rights? Please! Here’s a more plausible explanation. We “owned” Cuba, like a master owns a slave. Cuba broke away, setting a “bad” example for the other slaves. We have never accepted its disobedience, and we have punished it grievously ever since. We’ve invaded it, attacked its people, attempted to assassinate its leaders, strangled it economically as only a superpower can, vilified it in every imaginable way.

So … the nation that innovated the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 pursues the same principle on the national stage. That is the context of this new detente with Cuba.

luv u,

jp

Radio Andromeda.

So, there’s a station that’s playing our last album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, in rotation. That’s the good news. The bad news? It’s in the galaxy of Andromeda, a very long ride from here, I’m told. Can’t raise it on my crystal set. (Damn … we need some new gear.)

Well, I am exaggerating a little. Apparently the radio waves from the Andromeda station are reaching planet Earth. Trouble is, no one can translate them into something intelligible. The only people hearing it are rocket scientists, and they’re not exactly our audience. Now, shapeless blobs of protoplasm on the planet Mongrovitowa 427K – THAT’S who listens to us (if you can call pseudopod sensory processing of nano-vibrations “listening”). But that counts as airplay in my book. And if we make some eggheads scratch their … well … eggheads, then that’s all to the good. It’s like when the Beatles added that hypersonic message to the family dog at the end of Sergeant Pepper. Except that, well … dogs aren’t typically scientists.

You see where I’m going with this, right? Because if YOU don’t, then neither of us does.

I suppose it should make us feel a bit guilty that we are wasting all this astrophysicist speculation time just so that we can claim some listenership of one of our drug-on-the-market albums. No doubt we are also fulfilling ancient prophecies left and right among the Eric Von Daniken crowd. The space brothers are coming! Oh, no … wait. It’s just Big Green broadcasting from Neptune. What a bloody huge disappointment for someone.

Airplay! Freaking amazing!Anyhow, we’re not just in business to cause people trouble. Matt and I are recording the next episode of Star Trek this very evening. We have been working on six or seven songs to accompany the episode, which will be included in the next installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast. My guess is that a couple of weeks into February we should be ready to post. Slow time of year – ah, for the days when we would post every month like clockwork! Now that we’re old and in the way, it’s a little more of a challenge.

What’s next? Let’s get Andromeda to start broadcasting the Ned Trek show. That will confuse the hell out of those astrophysicists!

The state of it.

I imagine if you didn’t watch the president’s state of the union address and listened to NPR (aka Empire) news the next day, you might think they were talking about a speech made by a reactionary republican legislator or pundit. That’s all they had on their guest list for the two days following the address. You have to wonder why they feel these people need all this air time. Instead of wallowing in the predictable knee-jerk partisan reactions to the speech, why don’t they drill into some of the issues? Sure, they do a little “fact check” report, kind of like Politifact (and just about as superficial). But report on, say, oil and gas drilling and its implications for climate change and ultimately human survival? Not when one of their big sponsors is “think about it dot org”.

Doing too little? Seriously?Then there’s “Morning Joe” (or “Morning Blow”) on purportedly liberal/progressive MSNBC. Their foreign policy braintrust of, well, Joe Scarborough, Richard Haas, and various senior editors from Politico have been engaging in a narrative that goes something like this, in short – “W” Bush did too much, Obama does too little, and both put us in greater danger from the scourge of jihadist terrorism, which has killed nearly one person in the United States so far this year (call it none). Setting aside the obsessive focus on this rare and sensational threat, I agree with the assertion that both presidents’ foreign policies have put us in greater danger, breeding a new generation extremists, several of whom, for instance, attacked the offices of Charlie Ebdo in Paris. But the notion that Obama does too little is ludicrous. Bush and Obama basically have the same foreign policy. Obama is following Bush’s playbook from 2006-08. And yes, it is murderous and destabilizing and designed to radicalize people.

Of course, the pundit circle’s prescriptions for what we should be doing are drawn from the same volume. This week on Morning Blow they were latching onto co-host Mika Brzezinski’s father’s suggestion that we should deploy troops to the Baltic states to provide a “tripwire” against further action by Vladimir Putin. The braintrust was opining that NATO should be beefed up; more troops in Poland, etc. Again – Obama has been following the same policy as Bush, in essence. Aggressive eastward expansion of the U.S.-European trading zone and of NATO, right into Ukraine, which is as integral a part of Russian security planning as Canada and Mexico are for the U.S. Want to keep Putin from overreacting? Stop boxing the Russians in. Just saying.

The only new piece of foreign policy from Obama has been the Cuba opening, but like Boehner’s invite to Netanyahu as a way of scuttling the Iran talks, there are many ways for Congress to undermine the new policy.

Next week: Domestic policy. Stay tuned.

luv u,

jp

20 questions.

No, the moon is NOT a planet, nor a star. And you may THINK you just saw an ankylosaurus, but they died out 65 million years ago during the late Cretaceous. Don’t you know anything?

Christ on a bike, what the hell am I, anyway, a grade school teacher? How is it that people (and robots … and sentient oversized vegetables) can reach adulthood without knowing all this stuff? We may live in a very sheltered environment here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (and I use the word “sheltered” very, very loosely here), but some light does peek in through the crack in the wall, and a bit of the real world does seep into our isolation. Once in a while. Happened last year, as a matter of fact.

You know what it’s like when it’s the dead of winter and you spend a stretch of days indoors – nothing but you, your personal robot assistant, and a man-sized tuber. Idle minds run in neutral. Ends up being a long game of 20 questions, for chrissake. But you have to keep the kids entertained, right? Otherwise, they start busting the place up. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might try his hand at plumbing. That’s all anybody needs. (If that happened, I’d have to get the ankylosaurus after him.)

It's probably just a big dog, MarvinIt’s not all fun and games, you understand. Matt and I have been hard at work on another crop of songs that will be featured in the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek parody we include in our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. We’re talking maybe five or six new songs, not sure exactly. It’s a bit like baking for the holidays. Some things come out right, others go into the compost heap. For Big Green, when a song goes flat in the middle of tracking it, we chop it up and put it into the mansized tuber’s flower pot. There’s usually enough nitrates in there to perk him up for a few hours. Waste not want not.

So, yes … Keep your eyes peeled. Not for stray late-Cretaceous throwbacks … for the next episode of our podcast. Should be coming through any … week, month … whatever.

Extremism.

It’s just like old times. Terrorism “experts” fanned out across all networks. Threats of new terror attacks every morning. Television commentators hypothesizing about what might be wrong with Islam that it makes its adherents resort to violence. Oh yeah, so reminiscent of the good old days of late 2001. Except that we are already embroiled in endless wars overseas, so it’s hard to see how we could react the same way as we did back then. Invade them again!

AFree speech rogues' gallerymazingly, much of what people talked about on television this week was the fact that the Obama Administration did not send anyone to the enormous march in Paris. All I can say about this is, man, this administration really screws up on the simple stuff. I mean, after going through the time trouble to pass a national health care plan (substandard as it was), they couldn’t manage to build an e-commerce web site, right? You have to wonder …. why couldn’t they just send someone to walk arm and arm with all those great champions of liberty? Hell, Obama could have been dubbed King of the Hypocrites, there with Cameron and Merkel and Netanyahu and reps from Saudi Arabia, Gabon, UAE, Egypt, Russia, and other blatant free speech and human rights abusers. They might have chanted La Marseillaise and praised our shared values as Chelsea Manning rots in the brig and another drone flies in Pakistan or Yemen.

The Paris attack was against a controversial publication, so it can be termed as an assault on free speech. I can’t vehemently criticize Charlie Ebdo because I engage in much the same brand of borderline offensive, often childish humor myself. But there is no question that this publication is not the only motivating factor in these waves of attacks. We get this clearly from the attackers themselves. They were initially motivated, as many of their compatriots were, by America’s war in Iraq. This is blowback, pure and simple. Welcome to the future, my friends. We were warned that we were breeding a new generation of jihadists back in the early 2000s, and now they have come to age.

This is why you don’t go around blowing people up practically at random. It’s like setting your neighbor’s house on fire.

luv u,

jp

Old home week.

You can’t just look through the telescope. You have to squint really hard to see them. That’s because, well, they’re either really, really small or really, really far away.

What are we doing now? Good question. Aside from working on yet another episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our somewhat-monthly podcast, we are trying to catch up with some of the incidental characters in the shaggy dog story of our lives. Isolated from the world as we may be here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, buried in a mountain of snow, we still have a fitful internet connection and at least one hand free. We can track down pretty much anyone on the other end of that “series of tubes” known as the Web. (Precious little else we can accomplish, at least until Spring.)

For instance, what is Mitch Macaphee doing? Well … a quick investigation using various search engines turned up next to nothing. So I guess what I said in the last paragraph is not entirely true, at least when it comes to the nut jobs that hang around with this band. In any case, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) suggested clicking on Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device and just shouting Mitch’s name into the swirling space-time vortex it creates. We did that and, interestingly, heard back almost immediately. He’s in Colorado. I don’t think I probably have to tell you why. (Things usually look a little cloudy through the time portal, but I don’t think that’s the reason we could barely see the guy.)

The Pillars of CreationThen there’s sFshzenKlyrn, our occasional sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon. It seems sFshzenKlyrn has gotten back together with his old band, “The Pillars of Creation”. I didn’t actually find that out from him directly. They apparently did another photo shoot with NASA, using the Hubble Space Telescope. (I hear they’re doing a promo spread in Sky and Telescope). If you look closely, you can see how sFshzenKlyrn has changed over the past couple of years. A little older, a little wiser, a little cloudier, perhaps.

So, sure … keeping our hands busy, our minds engaged. Recording new numbers. And calling old friends out of the blue. Sounds like winter to me.

Back at it.

The year is just getting started, and already there are too many things to write about. Let’s start with the obvious.

New Congress. The all-new, all-GOP controlled Congress is now in session, with old Kentucky Mitch holding the gavel in the first Republican-led Senate since 2006. You might think you could resist, even for a single moment, the impressionThe Keystone cop that the GOP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, the energy companies, and Wall Street … but that wasn’t possible even on  the first day of the session. Our representatives are ready to push forward the Keystone XL pipeline, repeating all the bogus claims that this project will create jobs, jobs, jobs, make America more energy secure, and is only opposed by “environmental extremists”. Sure, blow up the atmosphere on your first day. Good going, Kentucky Mitch.

Charlie Hebdo. The sickening murder of 12 people in Paris by extremists has focused our media-driven culture on the issue of speech freedom. The principle is a good one. I have to say, though, that we live in strange times when the symbols of free speech are somewhat vulgar and childish cartoons about the prophet Mohammed and some dumb-ass Seth Rogen movie. You’d like to think that if people are going to sacrifice their lives and those of their colleagues for freedom of expression, it would be over something that really needed saying. In any case, for all of the anxiety over a threat to free speech, I hope people save some concern for ethnic Algerians in France, who will now be the target of even greater abuse than the substantial measure typically meted out to them.

P.S. – Just so no one understands me, I think Charlie Hebdo and anyone else has every right to publish whatever the hell they want without fear of harassment, imprisonment, or terror attack. People also have the free-speech right to say a particular piece is dumb, inflammatory, gratuitous, childish, etc. (I’ve said as much about our own podcast. Useless rubbish!)

Palestinians and the ICC. I’m not a big believer in the International Criminal Court. The minute they haul a powerful nation in and put them on the dock, I’ll start believing. As of right now, it’s victor’s justice. That said, it’s always a positive thing when there’s a move in the direction of real justice, however modest. Establishing the principle that, say, Netanyahu might be held accountable for killing more than a thousand Palestinians last summer, is worth doing. That would be a far cry from accountability, but a place to start at the very least.

Do that and Cheney might need to start sweating a little. Not much, but … a little.

luv u,

jp

Official site of the band Big Green