All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Talking stick.

Hey, wait … isn’t it my turn? No? What the hell – you just had it. I’m not going to listen to another of your drunken yarns, you ne’er do well. Jesus, what a stupid tradition. Let’s start over.

Oh, hi. Well, since we’re living so close to the ground these days, an almost traditional life style you might say, we’ve decided to take on some of the old practices, just to keep in step with our new way of living. Not sure what ancient peoples dwelt in potting sheds … perhaps there was a Potsylvania after all. (Jay Ward may have been onto something!) Nevertheless, we thought it might make the time go by a bit faster to appropriate some old traditions that we’d seen on TV at some point.

One was the talking stick. You know how it works, right? Whoever has the stick can speak to the group, tell a tale, reveal a secret, cop to a fault or instance of wrongdoing, etc. Then they pass it along. Or sometimes they don’t, and you have to grab it from their ass. God damn, I feel like knocking Anti-Lincoln on the head with the thing, he keeps it for so long. Last time he held it upside down while reading the Gettysburg Address backwards. (I didn’t even know he had an address in Gettysburg. Yes … I know.)

All right, Lincoln. You've had that thing long enough.

Anyway, I have the stick, so it’s time for me to spin a tale.  Ahem! Oh ye, oh ye … I will tell of a time before Big Green … a time when we were playing dive clubs under other forgettable names. When we played with our friend and former guitarist, Tony “Ace” Butera, there was a certain configuration of our band that we decided to call “The Space Hippies”; a moniker we gave to these characters in a Lost in Space episode, one of whom was played by Daniel Trevanti. Tony was calling area clubs, trying to book us, and one guy he talked to – a local bar owner – took exception to that name. “I can’t book a band that calls itself the Space Hippies,” he told Tony. “If I did, I’d be laughed out of Utica.”

After that, I wanted us to be called “Laughed Out Of Utica”. I got voted down on that one, though. Probably just as well. Some things sound like better ideas than they actually are. And that’s one of them. Now who gets the talking stick? Or are we on to another bogus appropriated tradition?

Political Rants

Required reading.

I don’t read a lot of books these days, given my lack of personal time, but right now I’m reading a book I think every American should read. It’s called Kill Anything That Moves, by Nick Turse, it’s a few years old (maybe five or six), and it lays out the systematic slaughter of the U.S. war in Vietnam in sickening detail. Meticulously researched and documented, this book is a really useful guide to archival sources on what was certainly one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century and one that the United States has never come to terms with.

The "things" we killed for moving.

Here is a brief excerpt that describes what was done in the American effort to pacify the Binh Dinh region of South Vietnam in 1966:

During the six weeks of [Operation] Masher/White Wing, from late January to early March 1966, the 1st Cavalry Division fired 133,191 artillery rounds in to Binh Din’s heavily populated An Lao Valley and Bong Son Plain. The navy added 3,213 rounds from its ships. The air force launched 600 tactical air sorties, dropping more than 427 tons of general-purpose bombs, 265 tons of fragmentation ordinance, 165 tons of napalm, and 80 tons of white phosphorus, which damaged and destroyed more than 600 huts and other structures. Of course, troops on the ground also laid waste to many other homes at the same time. 

Bear in mind that this took place in one small area of South Vietnam over the course of six weeks. Turse concentrates a great deal on the retail violence of the war, chronicling attacks on villages by Army and Marine units. Probably the most disturbing part of this narrative, aside from the wanton bloodshed, is the familiarity of the tactics. Our troops in Vietnam would profile Vietnamese in much the same way that drone pilots profile their targets – what decides your fate is where you happen to be standing, whom you’re hanging around with, what you look like, etc. It also recalls stateside police tactics.

Our media and our political leaders spend a fair amount of time criticizing other governments for not owning up to their crimes against humanity. For decades I have heard commentators decrying the strange resistance the Japanese have toward being honest about their imperial past, for instance. But what we have done with regard to our own imperial history is at least as impressive. This war that killed millions is barely known to us, except in broad strokes. This important book takes a major step towards remedying that little issue.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Fighting gravity.

Shore it up, boys. Let’s keep the roof on this thing. Sure, it used to be the floor, but when something’s keeping the rain off your head, it’s a roof. Unless it’s a hood … or an umbrella. Never mind.

Hey, well, here we are again, man. Trying to keep a broken home together. I don’t mean that daddy left and ain’t coming back (even though that’s roughly true); I mean we’re fixing a hole where the rain came in … and it’s the size of the freaking roof. We’re borrowing wood from the floor to shore up the roof. We’re borrowing planks from the south wall to block up the gaping hole in the north wall. This is like the fabled Ship of Theseus. This isn’t a home … it’s a philosophical paradox! Is it the same potting shed as when we moved here? Only your logic professor can say for certain.

Sure, sometimes the demands of home ownership (or home occupancy) keep us from our real work, the work we were put here to do. And that’s a good thing. I don’t feel like filling potholes today. And when the hell is this town going to invest in a pothole killer, for crying out loud? What do I refrain from paying my taxes for, eh? I mean, what is my lack of money buying? (Perhaps Lincoln can tell me.) Well, as you can see, this is distracting, and it is keeping us from the important job of producing more Big Green songs and sending them out into the cybersphere, where they can begin lives of their own and toil in silent obscurity.

See what I mean, Lincoln? We need this.

That’s not to say that we haven’t been writing songs. No, that’s still happening with some regularity. It’s the part about fixing the songs in some moderately sophisticated way to an electronic medium that will allow them to be conveyed to other people’s ears at a time of their choosing. That thing we haven’t been doing a lot of. Hell, we’re just getting to the point of mixing the group of songs we started at the beginning of the year. Now if that isn’t slow, I don’t know what slow is. Though I do know it’s not as fast as fast. That’s just logic, my friends. Ship of Theseus stuff. Look it up.

Anyway, back to the hammer and nails. (We took those out of the floorboards, too.)