All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Millsville.

Sometimes if you’re up early enough in the morning, you can see the first rays of the sun breaking over the ruins of the abandoned mill next door. I think they made broom handles there or something. Now it’s just some disheveled wreck that the sun rises over. Hey …. been there.

Yes, friends, it’s been many, many suns and even more moons since I started this blog about Big Green. We now have posts that stretch back nearly as far as those rays of sunlight. A rich body of balderdash, and it’s getting balder all the time. Sometimes you forget where this all began – in some crappy dive on the west end of the city, the walls smelling of beer, dog crap on the stage, and a bartender who hates your ass. A lot of music careers start that way. Ours, on the other hand, was never anything else. (Yes, we are like most bands – spectacularly unsuccessful and damn proud of it.)

So we took to the hammer mill and started hammering out recordings. That was in the nineties. Since then, we’ve put out three albums and a bunch of songs on the podcast. Christ on a bike – I think we’re up to more than 50 songs since releasing Cowboy Scat in 2013. (Time for another album, right?) We’re still recording on an old Roland platform, trying to transition to Uh, I don't think so, Marivn.something more appropriate to the century we’re living in. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has suggested we start recording on cylinders or wire. Damn it, it’s been done, Marvin! Come up with something new, like, I don’t know … recording on bricks.

Some five years ago we started the podcast, and it is still sputtering along, though getting slower … slow like the two thousand year-old man. Fact is, we’re thinking about launching another podcast that would be devoted exclusively to bloviating – something we could get out a bit more regularly. And if it ends up half as popular as THIS IS BIG GREEN, we could nearly double our listenership.  Fan… tastic.

So, on we go. We’re in production for another podcast episode, doing the songs right now. (Damn, they’re strange.)

Political Rants

Trojan horse.

The polls are tightening, and it’s no surprise. The Clinton campaign has spent the summer on the sidelines, courting centrist republicans and waiting for Trump to collapse under the sheer weight of his contradictions and xenophobic rhetoric. That strategy has been a dismal failure. Young people and the left are drifting away to third-party dead-end candidates or to simply sitting on their hands, mostly because the Clintons have done virtually nothing to attract them and plenty to piss them off, like naming fracking advocate Ken Salazar as transition chief and courting the approval of the likes of John Negroponte. When you see Trump ahead in Ohio, that’s down to the fact that fewer left-leaning members of the Obama coalition are self-identifying as likely voters. That’s a recipe for disaster.

Here they come.What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there’s also clearly identifying and characterizing the opposition, not in terms of the singular problem of Trump but rather the broader Republican party as it is currently comported. Trump is a bombastic idiot and a hypersensitive man-baby with tiny hands, but his xenophobic rants reflect the core of the party that nominated him. Clinton should make that clear.

And if she can stop praising neocons from the Bush administration, Hillary might want to point out that because Trump is a total idiot on foreign policy, that area of his presidency is likely to be populated by recycled Bush people. And because he hasn’t spent five minutes thinking about domestic policy either, she might want to mention that his economic team, justice department, interior department, you name it, will very likely be run by right wing ideologues of the kind represented by his vice president or his (meaner) campaign manager from Breitbart. Trump, she can say, will basically be a Trojan horse for the crew who (a) started the Iraq war, (b) let New Orleans drown, and (c) crashed the economy into the worst recession since the 1930s.

Oh, and that crew has a name: it’s called the Republican party.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

New thing.

What’s this summer been about? I’ve got nothing. What’s happening in your world, mansized tuber? Finally taking root, are we? At least someone accomplished something this summer.

Look at me, talking to a plant. What is this world coming to? Though I suppose a lot of people talk to their plants. Though that kind of makes it sound like the mansized tuber is my property, and he is most certainly not. He is totally his own plant, a sovereign creature of the universe, a law unto himself … a … an oversized sweet potato riding around on a dolly. At least up until recently. The tuber planted himself in the courtyard, so you could say it’s “goodbye, dolly!” for him.

So, it has been an uneventful summer, to say the least. I’m not sorry to see it go. Probably the high point was when Mitch practically self-immolated over the news that his planet orbiting Proxima Centauri had been discovered. That broke us out of our stupor for a few days, at least. Just recently he was getting a little hot under the collar about the news that scientists were planning to send out a spacecraft to do some soil collecting on an asteroid Mitch took some interest in. Given his expression, I refrained from asking for details. I know that look. It’s usually followed by a sickeningly bright flash and some deep rumbling. (We just replaced the windows in that side of the hammer mill, for chrissake.)

Makin' it rain, Marvin?Marvin (my personal robot assistant) tends to get a little busier in the Autumn months. I think he may have volunteered for one of the political campaigns, actually. He seems to be taking an awful lot of phone calls just lately, and one of our friendlier neighbors (i.e. the guy without the pitchfork) told me Marvin was handing out flyers in the town square. (Fun fact about this little burg: the town square is round. So why don’t the cars have square wheels? Riddle me THAT, Batman.)

What are we planning for the Fall? Glad you asked. In fact, this conversation would be just perfect if I had an answer for you. You know Big Green well enough to know that we never plan anything. We’re rebels, we’re loners, we’re iconoclasts. And in addition to that, we’re … broke. So, maybe that means work. A new thing ’round these parts.