Yeah, we been workin’ on a song list, goin’ down, down, down, workin’ on a song list - whoop! - writin’ the set down.

Nah, Big Green’s not doing oldies - no sweat, man. Been there, done that. Besides, if you try to pull that off in the Crab Nebula, they’ll cook you for dinner. Literally. (Ask sFshzenKlyrn, he’ll tell you. That is one brutal venue, even for an etheric, transcendental creature with no fixed hairstyle.) Just making a point there, my friends. We’ve been slaving over this song list for the last week, in case you’re interested in what we’ve been up to (and haven’t been checking the mansizedtuber’s twitter feed). You may think that’s about the easiest job in the world, but I warn you…. I WARN YOU…. it’s not anything like easy. In fact, it’s a lot harder than … well, than that easy stuff. And there’s a whole bunch of reasons why…. not least of which is the stark reality that we have to hole up in the Cheney Hammer Mill together with no distractions, no outside influences, no take-out or dial-a-pizza… just the band and our various minions. Insufferable is the word. In. Sufferable.

All right, so that’s not a very good reason. Here’s another one: we’ve got about a million songs. No, I mean it. Christmas songs alone, there are about four albums worth… not including any of the songs on 2000 Years To Christmas. So that means we have to yank out all of our demos, all of our notes, all of our old song lists, and pore through the lot, writing down the ones we want to do, crossing out the ones we don’t. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has his personal favorites, and his understanding of music is limited to a few lines from the 1956 World Book Encyclopedia, which his inventor Mitch Macaphee inserted into his memory banks as test data.  (Hey… he’s going to be traveling with us to the great beyond, so why not allow him a few requests, right? I said, am I right? Hel-looooo?)

All right, well… you can see how this process might lead to chaos. In fact, it already has. No one seems able to agree on what songs we should work on. What are the chances that we would each end up with a different set of 25 songs? I swear, this place is more dysfunctional than the New York State Senate. In fact, in the midst of our desperation, we’ve asked Mitch Macaphee for his assistance. (Sometimes a mad scientist can see his way out of a conundrum much more easily than, say, an unemployed musician or an oversized root vegetable.)  It took Mitch about three hours to come up with a solution of sorts. He walked in from his lab with a small, oblong metal box which he called the “Tune-o-matic.” He pressed a red button on the right side of the machine, and a slip of paper emerged from a small slot on the opposite side. The paper has some writing on it that appeared to be in Vietnamese. Mitch took one look at that and stormed out of the room with the tune-o-matic under one arm. There has since been some banging and swearing from behind the closed door of his lab… I suspect we’ll be seeing more of this wondrous device presently.

For the nonce, however, we have decided to take matters back into our own hands. Matt has been writing the names of all of our songs on one wall of the rec room. John dug up a box of darts. (If you’ve got a better method, let me know. )

Right now, as I write these lines, MSNBC is probably in its fourth hour of coverage on the death of Michael Jackson, with many more to come. So much for “The Place for Politics”. I will admit to be a frequent viewer of Olbermann and Maddow - often enjoy watching them, in fact - but that network operates on a definition of politics that is nearly indistinguishable from that of personality and celebrity. So much of the discussion is about individuals, about style, about posture more than policy. Incidents like Jackson’s death put it in harsh relief. They’ll be on this for days, turning it like a roast on a rotisserie… and they won’t be alone in that. It’s just the type of narrative our pop culture loves best: the mega-star, staggeringly popular yet strangely isolated, follows a long downward trajectory into a very public disintegration, then dies under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Elvis all over again. That and the myth of the young crash-and-burn star (e.g. Curt Cobain) are particular favorites. I’m sorry Jackson’s dead, but honestly… is he the only one today?

We have two pointless wars going on, mind you. People are still dying by the score in Iraq, though each incident is treated like an aberration. I think the mainstream media is too focused on the bogus success story of the surge to dwell on the fact that the temporary truce appears to be falling apart. And while the spotlight is directed elsewhere, our antiwar congress has approved a massive supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan (with funds tucked in to support the IMF) and sent it to our antiwar president to sign.  This is the power of branding, my friends. As long as you sell these political actors as something different, they can do the same thing as the last group and barely raise a note of protest. Let the wise ones and the compassionate ones drive the killing/wrecking machine for a while. Surely they will wreak havoc more wisely than their predecessors.

While cable news cameras followed the ambulance block-by-block from Jacko’s mansion to the hospital, one wonders how many Iraqis met their end as a result of the violence we ignited; how many Afghans were shaken down by a kleptocratic state run by warlords and fueled by international aid dollars; how many nameless detainees were beaten, starved, electrocuted, waterboarded, or worse in some third-world dungeon on the orders of a faceless bureaucrat. And those are only the fires we started; there are also those we merely profit from, like the continuing blood-letting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and elsewhere. (And yes, before you email, we did have something to do with putting the Congo in the state it’s in today, funding and directing a terrorist army in the sixties that secured the deranged Mobutu’s grip on power.) In short, there’s no such thing as a slow news day… and no day when it becomes any less important to talk about injustice the world over.

They’re playing “Thriller” again. Ah, well. That’s all I’ve got.

luv u,

jp 

Stage props? Never really thought much of them, frankly. What the hell are we, summer stock? We’re a bleedin’ band, man! Oh, all right, all right. But just the enormous styrofoam sphinx. No pyramid. I SAID, NO PYRAMID!

Oh, sorry, my friend. Hope that wasn’t too loud. I was just trying to get my point across to Anti-Lincoln… the idea that Big Green is not a flash band with a truckload of stage props, seven costume changes, makeup, extras, pyrotechnics, fog machines, etc. Never part of that movement, frankly. No, no…. our roots go back to a simpler time, when the earth was new and the sky was darkened by flocks of cawing pterodactyls. Not that roots have a lot to do with it. Actually, our musical influences are the more pared-down groups of the 60’s and early 70’s, and plain-clothes alternative types from much later.  Anti-Lincoln doesn’t think that’s visually interesting enough. He would sooner we change our names to, I don’t know, “Great Speckled Bird” or “Pilot and the Now Tones”, then don sequined capes and climb like apes on multicolored scaffolding while jumbotrons play a DVD of some Bergman movie.  I, for one, think that would be a bit much. And you?

Yeah, it’s hard to keep everyone happy around here, particularly now that we’re in the planning stages of our next interplanetary tour, tentatively titled: “Destination Space: Big Green’s Galactic Tour 2009″. What’s the itinerary? Glad you asked. Nothing is written in stone, as you might well imagine. All we’ve got around the mill is pencils and pens, no chisels. What we’ve got written on paper, however,  is perhaps worthy of mention. Can’t really share all the details, but what I can tell you is that, if you happen to be in the neighborhood of the planet Neptune sometime in mid-July, you may get the opportunity to see us bomb-out at yet another airless alien pub.  We’re determined to book better venues this time out, but if things go the way they usually go (and, well… they usually do), we’ll probably play those other places as well.  Part of the deal, friends.    

Now, to be fair to Anti-Lincoln, he’s not the only one who wants to add some kind of visual element to our performances. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) even went so far as to do a sketch of a Big Green stage set - one that has an enormous planet hanging down in the middle (either that or a cantaloupe, I’m not sure which).  I think he envisions some expanded performing role for himself and for the man-sized tuber. They used to be satisfied with grabbing a tuba or a banjo or a second-hand guitar and framming away on one side of the stage… now it has to be something more dramatic. I think for the tuber it’s all about that heady experience he had during his trip back to the 1860s. Or maybe it’s just aphids.  (He’s been looking a bit badgered lately.)

Well, stage set or now, we’ll need to work up some kind of show. Hey, Matt - got any more songs about Lincoln? How about Kublai Khan? Yes? Exxxxcellent.

Looks like even in Iran, sometimes elections don’t turn out the way you expect. Been there, done that, right? At least our pundits can’t say it never happens here. Fraud tends to happen around the fringes in our system, when the margins are relatively tight. Iran has much more serious, systemic problems. Even so, the people there obviously know what to do when things go badly wrong - get out in the street. These are the people we want to bomb so badly. I hope Americans are taking a close look at those folks out in the street, putting their necks on the line. This is the enemy, folks - the “axis of evil”. Whatever Bush used to say about having no quarrel with the Iranian people, it is they who would suffer in the event of any confrontation between our countries, just as they have suffered in the past, when we overthrew Mossadeq in 1953, through the decades of rule by our ally the Shah, and under massive assault from our other ally Saddam Hussein during the 1980s.  Just take a real close look.

I imagine Daniel Pipes is kind of disappointed right now, since Ahmadinejad’s seems to be on the brink of evaporation. Probably still rooting for him. He and his fellow neocons just love Ahmadinejad with his over-the-top rhetoric (frequently misquoted to make him sound more threatening), and Pipes himself has professed a preference for “an enemy who is forthright, blatant, obvious” over a more conciliatory figure. Once again, the facts are being fixed around the policy. There’s a strong preference for military action against Iran amongst a faction of foreign policy hardliners, some of whom reside in the Obama administration. (My guess is Dennis Ross is the man to watch this time around.) Though he does not set foreign policy or control the military, Ahmadinejad helps them make their case. I don’t have to tell you, wars are easier to stop before they start, rather than after (See: Iraq), so this is when you should make your opinion known about opposing military action by us and/or Israel.

Does this Iran election controversy have a familiar ring to it? If so, perhaps it’s because something very similar happened in Mexico in 2006, when Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador ran against Filipe Calderon and most likely won the election, but was chiseled out of the presidency by Calderon (with the full support of the Bush administration, of course). To look at news coverage of Mexico today and its relationship with the United States, you would never know that there was any question surrounding Calderon’s election. Massive street protests yielded no change, no re-run of the election, no nothing. Could be that Iran’s current uprising will end the same way, despite the hopes of many. That would be sad for the many in Iran who wanted things to change, but with respect to U.S. policy, it is we who must change, whoever the president may be. We’ve invaded and occupied countries on both sides of Iran, we regularly threaten them with massive destruction, and yet we speak of them as the outlaw state. Hypocrisy, anyone?

Let’s show some solidarity with those brave folks in Iran. And let’s start by telling our government to rule out military action against them.

luv u,

jp

Lights are off again. I thought I just bribed that guy last week. Didn’t I? What…. it was the wrong guy? His pushcart was decorated with a cardboard sign that had “electric company” written on it in crayon. Seemed legitimate to me.

It seems I’m too trusting. We all are here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green’s crap shack of distinction. Oh, we’ve had a lot of crap shacks through the years, from a tumbled-down house on Irving Avenue in Castleton-On-Hudson to the slightly less beat up place next door to it…. (and one or two others, if memory serves). Then of course there was the lean-to in Sri Lanka. (What happened to that? It leaned fro.) Anyway, next to all those joints, this abandoned hammer mill is the next best thing to being someplace decent. And yet, here we are… lights off, phone disconnected, water intermittent, gravity reversed (Mitch Macaphee’s been at it again)… It all comes down to one thing: frankincense. No, wait. It’s another word…. Money. Yeah, that’s it. Bleedin’ money.  

Now, Mitch… there’s a guy with frankincense… or, rather, Franken-sense (i.e. the sense of Dr. Frankenstein). He’s always inventing some kind of half human, have robot hybrid. That’s why he’s the only one with any cash around here. For chrissake, the government has dropped more than one grant on him for developing “hybrids”. The fools think Mitch is building cars; instead, he’s formulating a cyborg army in his spare time. I should have him pay the electric bill - he’s the bastard that’s using it all. One might suppose that Marvin (my personal robot assistant), built some years back by Mitch, was some kind of prototype, but not a bit of it. Marvin is pure robot; no organic components whatsoever. He’s clean, man. Ergo, he has no role in the coming reign of the cyborgs. (Not to worry, friends. This is just one of Mitch’s pipe dreams. All mad scientists must have them.)

Yeah, I’m putting Mitch on the hook for pizza tonight. The rest of us are completely tapped out. Typical. That’s what we get for, well…. lack of ambition, let’s call it. Though, to be fair, not all of us are lazy mo-fos. Take the man-sized tuber, for instance. Now, he’s willing to do anything the situation calls for, including standing out in the street and selling #3 pencils. Particularly when we specifically ask him to do this kind of thing… which, of course, we did, just as soon as he wheeled himself out of the time warp and back into the 21st century. And yes, I did say #3 pencils (we sold out of the #2’s last week). Truth be told, his take has been somewhat disappointing thus far. Perhaps he needs bigger pencils. Marvin! See if we’ve got any of the big number threes! 

I know, I know - we’ll only get so far abusing the help. Time to start planning an escape from this crap shack. Can you say, interstellar tour 2009?

I’ve been more than a bit irked with America’s permanent ruling class just lately.  You know the one - that core of political actors who operate in and out of government, keeping things from getting out of hand. I’ve talked about the foreign policy establishment in the Obama administration not being all that different from the late Bush II administration (or that of Bush’s father, for that matter). On the domestic policy front, we see more of the same. All of the major economic decisions are being shaped by Wall Street types, focusing on the health of companies rather than the well-being of workers. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the auto company bailouts. Obama’s automotive task force is made up largely of financial types, and their solutions reflect that experience. What the hell - we could have gotten THAT from McCain. 

Okay, here’s what doesn’t make any sense to me about this deal. We are literally pouring money into GM - not to the extent we’ve poured money into Citibank and AIG, mind you, but a substantial sum… enough to make us a major shareholder by anyone’s reckoning. We should be getting some manufacturing jobs out of this. We should be getting upgraded plants and new, more environmentally sustainable vehicles. Instead, we’re funding GM and Chrysler’s efforts to move production off-shore, further eroding our manufacturing base. This is fucking idiotic. Instead of taking a hands-off approach, Obama and his administration should be pushing these companies in the right direction, providing them with contracts for, as many have suggested, components used in wind turbines, mass transit systems, and other critical technologies for the coming decades. That would be consistent with the president’s campaign rhetoric; that’s what he should be doing.  

And if the car companies need additional financing as they retool to produce stuff that people actually need? Where would they get the money? Well, hell… aren’t we part owners in some major financial institutions? The fact is, some of them wouldn’t even exist anymore if it wasn’t for our massive infusions of cash. Maybe we should, I don’t know, direct them to provide some capital to expand industrial production in the United States, focused on useful stuff (rather than superfluous weapons systems). Yes, I know… that sounds an awful lot like central planning and socialism, but what the fuck - if we leave this up to the corporate boards and the financial mavens, what’s left of our industrial capacity will have vanished in a few short years, along with our infrastructure for research and development. Nothing will be made here, nothing will be invented here… and the majority of us will be living in Hoovervilles. (Too many of us are right now, frankly.)

So… there’s two ways this can go: the Hoover way, or the right way. It’s the president’s and the congress’s choice, but we have to help them make it. Time to speak up and speak out, folks.

luv u,

jp

Check the World Book. Not in there? Okay. Now check Britannica. No reference? Right, right. I guess we’ll have to resort to Compton’s. Pull out the 1963 edition, that ought to do it.

Oh, hi. Good god, y’all…. this is a grueling task. To what do I refer, you may ask? No, I’m not making gruel, at least not this evening. (Tomorrow’s menu, however, may include that dubious delicacy… who knows?) Lord, no… many of us here are engaged in finding evidence of the man-sized tuber in various historical accounts, including encyclopedias, history textbooks, comics, etc. After all, it is HE who saved the Republic from a fate worse than death. It is HE who rescued the honor of our most revered president and restored him to the exalted position he once held in the pantheon of the American story. And it is HE who introduced the chocolate cream pie to the post-civil war dinner table… and this BEFORE the invention of the refrigerator. Yes, this is one man-sized tuber that’s larger than life. 

And yet, does his name appear anywhere in the annals of U.S. history? I have yet to see a single jot about him, damn it. That’s gratitude for you.  Here this root vegetable, desicated within an inch of his life, erroneously teleported more than a continent away from his destination then zapped back to Washington, loaded for bear, laboriously wheeled his way up Capitol Hill with what would seem an impossible objective: wrest control of the nation away from that nefarious usurper, anti-matter Lincoln, who had inserted himself into the machinery of state like a log in the works. Some kind of conspiracy, you say? An evil effort to subvert the judgment of history and render meaningless the near-incalculable contribution of one man-sized tuber?

Well, neither. I just made it up, friends. Not a bit of it is true. Tubey never stopped nothin’ from happening. Fact is, even when we got him back to Washington, he couldn’t find his way to the White House or the Capitol. No, he spent most of his time looking for the Lincoln memorial which, of course, WAS NOT BUILT YET IN 1864! For chrissake, tubey! Anyway, the real story is that we got Mitch Macaphee to apply his massive brain to the problem. He actually very cleverly reached back in time to the instant anti-Lincoln arrived in the past and snatched him back to futureland before he could do all that damage. Near as we can tell, all is back as it was before. Except for one small detail. This will make you laugh. Remember president George H. W. Bush? Well, because of some insignificant act on the part of anti-Lincoln back in 1864, Bush’s son George W. became the 43rd president. Weirdest thing.

Sorry about that, man. Blame anti-Lincoln - it’s his bad.

I saw parts of the President’s speech at the University of Cairo this past week and I have to say that the symbolism of the event was striking. This man whose personal history embodies a kind of cultural crossroads and an international experience previously unknown in the White House - to see him make reference to historic wrongs so seldom acknowledged by Americans really puts the lie to that old “only Nixon could go to China” conventional wisdom. Sure, the rhetoric was, well, just rhetoric, and even as such carefully balanced and qualified, but just the same… what an odd impression it must have made on an Arab world so accustomed to the condescending ignorance and arrogance of Obama’s predecessor. I’ve got to think they think we’re goddamned weird, veering our little electoral pinewood racer from one side of the track to the other (and, doubtless, back again before long). Not hard to see why we’re hard to trust.

And yet, through all that swerving, cascading symbolism, the bombs keep falling, the drones keep striking, and the cash keeps flowing to no good ends. It is good to have a president appeal to reason and understanding instead of fear and intimidation, but to do this and not depart from the tactics of oppression will ultimately prove an empty gesture. We cannot proceed from the assumption that animosity towards the west in general and the United States in particular is based largely upon xenophobia and irrational hatred. Obama did touch on the U.S. backed overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953, but that is only a fragment of our nation’s long and sordid involvement in that region. There are concrete reasons for that distrust that stretch back more than just the last eight years.

It’s silly to preach to Hamas about making concessions, for instance, when we’ve been spending billions of dollars a year for decades on the gradual Israeli takeover of that 22% of mandate Palestine that represents the only hope for a viable Palestinian state. And calling Iran out for threatening its neighbors is simply laughable - they are literally surrounded by the burned out ruins of our imperial overreach. It is this, more than a lack of openness, that breeds contempt towards us. That is much of what is being said by people in the Arab countries - good words, now let’s see some action. This doesn’t sit well with the likes of David Brooks, who describes the Arabs as ready to “sit back” and watch America force concessions out of Israel. But it is the people in Muslim countries in the middle east who have been bearing the brunt of these struggles for the past sixty years. They don’t expect anything to come easy. They just want us to stop actively working against them.

Can’t blame them, really. Obama’s speech was a good start. Now we as a global power have to follow through. 

luv u,

jp

Mill boy to tuber, mill boy to tuber! Do you read, tuber? What’s your position? Can’t read. Can you turn up your gain? Roger. How ’bout this…. try turning down your lose. Ah… much better.

Ah, you have returned. Good on you. Yes, as you may have surmised, the man-sized tuber… ahem, I mean the intrepid man-sized tuber has made his way into the remote past, fully 145 years ago or more, back to the time of Lincoln. His mission? Very simple… to apprehend the nefarious anti-matter Lincoln (one of our various hangers-on) who has somehow supplanted the actual president and begun to drive what’s left of a Civil War-plagued nation into the sewer. Shouldn’t be too difficult a task for a non-verbal overgrown root vegetable on a cart. At least, that’s what our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee had assured me. He said that security was not as tight in those days as it is now, so it shouldn’t be hard for the tuber to catch up with anti-Lincoln to deliver his ultimatum. Piece of cake, right?

Well, not so right. Believe it or not, the tuber has run into some difficulties. For one thing, even though he jumped through the same wormhole as anti-Lincoln, he somehow didn’t land in the same geographical area as anti-Lincoln. Hell, he wasn’t even on the same continent. Tubey and his little cart rolled out of the time warp in Santiago, Chile. Now I know what you’re going to say. Yes, it is a capital. And yes, it is an American capital. But that’s where the similarity ends, my friends. And in any case, similar isn’t enough. We’re talking about the man-sized tuber on a cart a continent away from where he needed to be, in a century when the fastest mode of travel was probably a not-so-fast train. This was not a good beginning. And while tubey bumped around from one end of the Avenue Francisco Bilbao to the other, we set ourselves to the task of working out what to do. (Which involved scratching our heads for a few minutes, then running off to get Mitch Macaphee, who has some semblance of a functional brain.)

Mitch’s suggestion came quickly. Commandeer Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating device and fire it directly at the image of tubey, who was just visible as a cloudy outline in the center of the spiraling shape within the time warp. (Whoa, that was a mouthful.) Mitch would then manipulate the controls in such a way as to transport the man-sized tuber thousands of miles across the 19th Century landscape to where he needed to be. Well, we tried it…. and when we next received word of the tuber (when I say “word”, I actually mean Morse code - we tied a clicker to one of tubey’s more dexterous roots) he did seem to be in a more congenial place vis-a-vis his mission. Which was a good thing… for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), because he has been sitting in the ready room for the last five hours anticipating some kind of back-up rescue mission… a prospect he has not been savoring, I can tell you. Hang in there, Marvin!

So, what the fuck. One thing leads to another, right? My guess is that by the time you check in on this ridiculous account again, something will have happened… somewhere….

Another week, another war… or at least the threat of same. Any week that starts with a nuclear explosion tends to focus the mind a bit, even if it isn’t a very sharp focus in the case of many of those reacting to the recent actions of North Korea. It’s as though we are born anew every six months or so, our past wiped clean, our journey set to begin again. Here we have the grim dividends of a craven policy towards northeast Asia that has become particularly nasty over the past 10 to 15 years (and especially so in the last eight). As it happens, we inched very close to a disastrous war back in 1994, then concluded a framework agreement with Pyongyang that would have provided them with a uranium reactor and ended their international isolation. Due to the vagaries of the Clinton administration and the maniac Gingrich Congress, neither of those provisions was honored. It was then left to the Bush II administration to do its usual job of pouring gasoline on a smoldering problem, placing North Korea squarely within the “Axis of Evil” and setting UN Ambassador John Bolton and others to further antagonize them.

The result is quite apparent. The North Koreans did what numerous other nations have done through the decades when faced with what might reasonably be considered an existential threat: they built a deterrent. Having witnessed Washington’s willingness to invade and destroy nations that clearly do not possess nuclear weapons, Pyongyang apparently opted for what seemed the less risky course. (One can imagine the same kind of thinking taking place in Iran.) It bears remembering, also, that North Korea knows something about the horrors of war. We bombed the place to smithereens during the Korean War, destroying virtually every standing structure in the North - campaigns that resulted in the death of perhaps 2.5 to 3 million people north of the 38th parallel. Regardless of who is to blame for igniting that conflict, it was certainly they who bore the brunt of the destruction. Their culture is largely built around that experience, and it is not surprising that they should engage in what appears to be some defensive saber-rattling.

Sure… that was then and this is now, right? Well, not everyone forgets the past as quickly and efficiently as we do. North Korea is a repressive place run very much like a prison, but its central obsession is national survival. With the change of leadership in the United States, I’m sure Pyongyang is testing Obama’s rhetoric of reconciliation. Seems to me like they’re skeptical that anything fundamental has changed, and frankly, so am I. Consider for a moment the world order we’re living under. Washington and the great powers live under one set of rules with respect to weapons of mass destruction, while developing nations must abide by another. The fact is, the non-proliferation regime requires the U.S., Russia, and other nuclear powers to move decisively towards disarmament, just as it seeks to prevent smaller players from joining the nuclear club. We conveniently ignore the former while waxing righteous about the latter, and while our hypocrisy may not be featured on the Nightly News, it is pretty obvious to the relatively powerless nations of the world.

So, as you hear many voices - the execrable Newt Gingrich among them - calling for military action against North Korea, just remember: a massive war on the Korean peninsula causing hundreds of thousands of deaths is precisely what we want to avoid. So… starting one is hardly a solution.

luv u,

jp