All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

About your face.

I don’t know. Do you really think it’s that insulting? Not sure why anyone would take it personally, frankly. Unless, of course … they have a particularly hate-able face. A hate-friendly face, if you will. Oh, well.

Yeah, here we are, in the midst of one of our summertime projects. Always something to do here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, even if that something is virtually nothing. You could say this entire blog – all 17 years of it – amount to virtual nothingness, am I right? In any case … we’re just hashing out what the rest of the season is going to look like. We’ve got some archival material yet to go through; the kind of stuff that accumulates over three decades of playing and writing and recording together. A mountain of … something. Give it a listen, then you pick the descriptor.

This week’s “Wayback Wednesday” release was another selection off of our 1993 video demo – just us playing our set list live in front of a madman’s camera. We posted Matt’s song “I Hate Your Face“, the first verses of which goes like this:

God, I hate your convulsive face
Four, sixteen, a million, your annoying face
has got me sick and I’ve got to go

God, I made a big mistake
Eight sixty-four, a million, a huge mistake
when I parked it here
Did I stay too long? You know I stayed here far too long
Back in the day

Teenage angst? No sir. He wasn’t a teenager when he wrote it, for one thing. I won’t speak for Matt, but it always felt to me like a parody-punk song, complete with faux-teenage angst. By the way … this isn’t about YOUR face. Just putting that out there. It’s another face entirely, folks.

What’s left? Well, from the video, there’s a bunch of cover songs, a couple of which we may be able to get away with posting. (Expect pop-up ads.) We also have a lot of audio content – a bunch of live songs, some even listenable. We also have a handful of studio numbers that we can put out.

I know, I know … stop talking, start posting. Right, right.

Political Rants

Yea or nay?

Another week of national convention television, this time, the Democratic party. Different from last week, to be sure. Less venom, less doom and gloom – in some ways, more similar to what Republican conventions used to be. That’s not surprising: the Republicans have officially vacated the hyper-nationalist territory they have occupied pretty much my entire life, heading decidedly off to the reactionary end. So now, Democrats are a mixture of Eisenhower/Nixon/Reagan Republicans, with some elements of center-left muddle in the middle politics and labor-left sensibilities. The most energized base is certainly on the left, but from what I’m seeing this fourth and final night of the DNC, they are shooting for these centrists and disaffected Republicans.

Yeah, I know.This is not a great strategy. They’re risking turning off some of their most ardent activists with the bluster, the hyper-patriotism, the parade of military officers, etc. Chants of USA, USA, USA! It’s pretty horrifying on a certain level to see them resort to overt jingoism. But Trump has given them that opportunity, and politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum.

That’s the bad news. The good news? A lot of Bernie Sanders’s core issues are represented in the major speeches, including the one Hillary herself delivered. Her speech was pretty slow to get started, but she got on track about halfway through, when she started talking policy specifics. A lot of the economic points were good. National security stuff is giving me heartburn. So … someone got Bernie on my Hillary. Someone got Hillary in my Bernie. It’s a mix, for better or worse.

I’m not going to tell people what they should do. Everyone needs to work this out for themselves. But it’s pretty clear to me, from watching these two conventions, that as binary choices go, this one is pretty much a no-brainer. It only takes five minutes to figure that out and actually vote (unless you’re a person of color, in which case the latter part might be more like five hours). One of those two people is going to be president. Among the many, many things we need to involve ourselves in politically, we need to take that handful of moments to make certain we never let somebody like Trump lord it over us.

So in my world, it’s yea. What say ye? Get back to me.

luv u,

jp

 

Usual Rubbish

Hold on.

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Turn the key and …. nuts! Nothing again. Hey, Mitch – you’re a mad scientist. Make yourself useful. Get this freaking car to run, willya?

Oh, hi. Just working through the usual nonsense. Trying to get a car going. Working on a broken amp. Turning all the chairs in the house upside-down. (We do that to discourage visitors from staying too long.) There’s never a lack of useful things to do, and lucky for us we have a lot of help. Mitch Macaphee, for one, can be counted upon to invent some new way of dealing with minor annoyances, like invasive insects or gravity. Ooops, did I say gravity? I wasn’t supposed to mention that one. It’s going to be a surprise. A BIG surprise. HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAA!

Well, THAT took a dark turn. Anyway, aside from Mitch tinkering with … uh … continental drift, we have the able services of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who can, among many other talents, life very heavy things. He picked up a whole desk set the other day … one of those three-pen jobs, all by himself! Tomorrow I’m going to have him replace the Kleenex in all of the dispensers distributed throughout the hammer mill. Yeoman work, to be sure. (I would do it myself, but I am not a Yeoman.)

Uh, Mitch ... Gravity again?I suppose you’re wondering where your podcast is. Well, I was getting to that. THIS IS BIG GREEN has been coming together slowly. We did the voices for the next episode of Ned Trek last week, then we’ll need to do some editing and dubbing, etc. We’re probably looking at another couple of weeks, during which time I will frantically try to dig up some not-too-uninteresting material from our archives. There will likely be a few more Wayback Wednesdays on tap, so stay tuned.

I am sure some of you have already said, “Y’know, if you didn’t waste so much freaking time doing useless shit, you’d have finished the podcast by now.” My response is a simple one: “Freaking” is not a word. It’s a cop-out, my friend. Say what you mean and mean what you say. That’s our motto ’round the mill. Call it a mill motto. Call it anything. I’m getting back to that dumb-ass car.