All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Capital!


That thing you just said five minutes ago. Say it again. No, not that – the OTHER thing you said. The thing that wasn’t some dumb-ass comment. Whoa… calm down, Hemingway!

Sensitive artists, these rock musicians. Well, let me qualify that. I’m actually referring to the individuals, human and non-human, who hang around with rock musicians. I’m talking about your man-sized tuber, your Marvin (my personal robot assistant), your Mitch Macaphee, your Lincoln and anti-Lincoln, etc. We of Big Green proper (brother Matt, brother-in-law John, and I) have asked these hangers-on for suggestions on where we should take the next interstellar tour. Of course, this is a bit like placing 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters and hoping for Hamlet to pop out of one of the carriages. Still, you do get lucky from time to time, and just today – I swear – one of them made a suggestion that made sense. Actual sense, in a wholly non-ironic way.

What am I babbling about? I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it. (Ahem…) Mitch Macaphee spouted something that sounded like a reasonable suggestion – let’s begin the next tour on Betelgeuse, he said. (Not the exact words, but close enough. In fact, he may have been coughing up a stuffed grape leaf.) The logic behind this is obvious. Betelgeuse is enormous – many times the size of our own sun. Why not start big, right? Am I right? Okay… so maybe the logic isn’t so obvious. In any case, we’ve played in the Betelgeuse system before, and as I remember, those shapeless globs of protoplasm we found there listened better than most of our terrestrial audiences. (At least they appeared to; they were all bubbly by the end of the show.)

I’m sure you think we should find better things to do with our time than idly ponder the finer points of our tour itinerary when, in fact, it is totally out of our hands… and into the calloused paws of our promoter, Admiral Gonutz (ret.). Well, if you want to know the sad truth…. we don’t. This is the stuff that music biz is made of, friends. A little bit of playing and a whole lot of waiting around to play, as Keith Richards put it many long years ago. I personally prefer John Lennon’s response when someone asked him how he liked France, and he said something like, it was a car and a plane and a car and a room and a car and a plane. With us, it’s more like a skateboard and a rocket and an airless void and a volcano and an ocean and a steamboat and an ambulance and a mental ward.

Okay, anybody else got suggestions? Big Zamboola, perhaps? Marvin? C’mon, let’s have it, chaps!

Political Rants

Junk.

Back to short takes. (Did somebody say shortcake?)

Credibility gulf. If BP is to be taken at its word, oil is no longer spewing into the Gulf of Mexico by the millions of gallons. The only thing spewing right now, it seems, is the torrent of P.R. from the company responsible, as well as a copious amount of whining from the industry. The echoes of this have even my local Congressional district. Now, I’ve had my complaints about our Congressman, Mike Arcuri, and some of the positions he’s taken. But just a look at his G.O.P. opponent is enough to disabuse me of any notion of sitting on my hands this November.

Arcuri’s rival, Richard Hanna, was criticizing Arcuri for supporting Obama’s flaccid 6-month ban on deepwater drilling, saying the oil exploration companies will pull out and go somewhere else. This basically parrots the line from the Petroleum Institute, whose spokescreep I heard on NPR this morning. Think about it for half a second. When we open leasing on all that real estate again, no matter when that happens, will we have any trouble finding someone to drill, drill, drill? Of course not. What the hell, do they only have one rig? Is Hanna and the PI suggesting they can only drill in one place at a time? Pathetically ludicrous.   

Fox samples. I was sitting in a waiting room today and, like many offices, they had FoxNews on the tube. (I think that’s part of the reason why they get such high ratings.) Neil Cavuto’s show lurched from an asinine take on today’s Wall Street protests – lazy people rioting for handouts! – to a segment on Obama’s failure to save us from the Mexican narcoterrorist invasion which featured some former leatherneck who suggested applying a Fallujah-like treatment to, I don’t know, all of Mexico (“This is do-able!”). People really watch this shit? No wonder it’s all going to hell.  

Manning jailed. Seeing the military incarcerate Bradley Manning – the guy who allegedly posted evidence of Afghan War atrocities to wikileaks – is reminiscent of the scene in Catch-22 when Aarfy murders a prostitute and the M.P.s storm in and arrest Yossarian for being AWOL.  Truth imitates fiction.  

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Down count.


Can’t see. Must wipe the sweat from my tormented brow. That’s it… that’s got it. Finished… my work here is through! And now for the final… OH, MAN-GODDAMN!

Hey, out there. How long has it been since you were last here? A week, already? I’ve spent practically that whole time trying to fix my A-90 keyboard controller. I suppose if you were to be charitable about it, you could describe me as technically challenged. And with help of the sort you get from Mitch Macaphee (Big Green‘s mad science advisor) and Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I feel like the proverbial one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Hell, if this is a horse race, I’m the nag hopping along on one hoof.  (Hmmmm… what other colorfully rustic aphorisms can I employ here?) It’s hard enough trying to prepare for a tour under these conditions. But when you’re also dealing with the uncaring vacuum of space, it’s, well, kind of life-threatening.

Speaking of life threatening, the man-sized tuber has volunteered to cook dinner this evening. It’s not so much a new thing as the revival of an old thing, as a matter of fact. Tubey once imagined a career as a Julia Child-type television chef, cooking down-home favorites like mushroom pie and baloney sandwich casserole – you know, the kinds of dishes you grew up vomiting… I mean, relishing. (By which I mean you smothered them with relish to kill the highly repugnant flavors.) I suppose it goes without saying that Tubey never realized his dream-career, but isn’t that the case for most of us, eh? How many of you out there wanted to be space men or jet pilots or mountain climbers or steamship captains? (Only three? C’mon – it’s got to be more than just three of you!)

And while we’re on the subject of steamship captains (I feel a transition coming on), it’s only fair to warn you that Admiral Gonutz is now on the job, in the house, etc., as our interstellar tour coordinator. Has he ever coordinated an interstellar tour before? Well… that answer has to be no. But he has a lot of relevant experience. He has driven a boat. (Boats are kind of like spacecraft.) He has spent time on tropical islands (often mistaken by viewers of sixties television programs as alien planets). I think this experience will serve us well in the great beyond. The admiral has already plastered his walls with charts of terra incognita – though I think most of them are old maps of Patagonia, and I don’t mean the boutique. 

Well, got to go. I can smell dinner already. And I’ve broken yet another A-90 key, so it’s probably time to take my chances with the stew.