All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Detour guide.

What is this? Another one? And wait… there’s one more! Can’t you see it there, behind the gaseous cloud formation? Oh, right… that’s sFshzenKlyrn. Step aside, will you? I’m trying to make a point here…

Ah, yes… the blogosphere. Nearly forgot. Sorry, friends. I’ve taken to having Marvin (my personal robot assistant) take dictation on this page, so very often he’ll pick up stuff I don’t actually want him to transcribe. Sometimes he starts a little early and some times he just fails to exercise common sense. Okay, like now, Marvin. Stop typing for a moment… I’ve got to use the can. I said stop. Did you type that? Stop, damnit! STOP! Oh, Jesus… never mind. I’ll just continue – it’s simpler, really. Anyway… I suppose I should explain. I was just commenting to my colleagues on the hitherto undiscovered planet around star 55 Cancri in the constellation Cancer. Damn, just wait until we get news of this back to planet Earth! People in the astronomical community will really sit up and take notice this time.

What’s that, Johnny? It’s been discovered? Bloody Yahoo headlines! You at least could have left me a few days to savor my imagined triumphant discovery. No matter.

Well, as some of you may already know, planetary pioneers or not, we did pretty well on planet Mars this past week, performing some tunes off of our upcoming album (plug, plug) as well as older numbers from the Big Green songbook. There were a couple of exciting moments, like when our oxygen began to run out. Luckily, we were able to innovate a solution to this most fundamental of dilemmas, even without the help of our too-clever-by-half science advisers, Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James Constable, both of whom remained on earth this time out. Indeed… as the air in our makeshift spacecraft began to grow quite thin, Matt had a flash of inspiration (comes from watching those fan-fiction Star Trek Web videos). He stuffed the man-sized tuber into his terrarium along with a sack of plant food and clicked on the grow lamps. Well, that sucker started pumping out oxygen as fast as we could catch it. WTF – that man-sized tuber has a practical use after all. (Aside from general likeability.)

Okay, so the gigs went okay, though I will admit… no cash changed hands at any time. I for one am chalking that down to our paymasters at Loathsome Prick Records, our corporate label. No doubt payment was made, just not to us. (After we finished playing, somewhere in an office building in New York a computer went “cha-ching!”) Someone got paid, that’s the important thing. Anyway, we left the red planet and started wandering in the general direction of Earth when one of the Lincolns (can’t remember which one, actually) took a particular interest in a small cluster of stars in the mid distance. So he took the controls. That was last night, while the sanest amongst us slept.

Now we’re in the general vicinity of Cancri 55, though I can’t say exactly how we got here. (I think sFshzenKlyrn knows, but he’s not saying.) Hey… what can I say? We’ll let you know if there’s a Starbucks there.

Big Green lives at www.big-green.net. Excoriate them at your pleasure.
Political Rants

Uniform standard.

Our great ally in the “global war on terror” and Cheney’s favorite military dictator Pervez Musharraf declared emergency rule last week, just ahead of a ruling by his nation’s supreme court on whether or not he could remain both president and army chief at the same time. (Hey… he’s multi-tasking. What’s wrong with that?) Before they could rule against him (as they were expected to do), he dissolved the court and appointed puppet justices in their stead. Case dismissed! Or rather, Court dismissed! Musharraf’s placing his political opponents in fetid jails (or under house arrest for those of a more lofty social rank) and general (no pun intended) heavy-handedness sufficiently embarrassed the Bush administration (to the extent that it is capable of being embarrassed) into pressing for Pakistani elections and a call for Musharraf to “take off his uniform,” in Dubya’s words. Sure, it took a few days for them to react, but then it always takes at least that long for them to figure out that they need to do something. (See: Katrina) My guess is that the impulse came from either Rice or Gates (who was put there after the Baker-Hamilton commission to keep half an eye on things).

Here again, our lunatic foreign policy has made the world a far more dangerous place. Pakistan is a nuclear-armed nation run by the military. Its intelligence service (ISI) contains elements that are very close to the Taliban and, to a lesser extent, Al Qaeda. Because Pakistan shares a long border with Afghanistan (one so rugged as to be nearly impossible to secure) as well as deep cultural ties with Pashtun Afghans, the country has had an abiding interest in the political affairs of its neighbor, not surprisingly. Of course, our CIA managed proxy war in Afghanistan during the Reagan years leveraged that relationship, building with the assistance of the ISI a substantial army of “Arab” Afghans to fight the Soviets, from which sprang Al Qaeda. Our current war in Afghanistan put substantial pressure on Pakistan, the Musharraf regime being compelled by the U.S. to turn against its longtime allies, the Taliban. (In effect, they convinced Mullah Omar’s crowd to fold shortly after the U.S. invasion.)

The subsequent war in Iraq has only increased the pressure. Though Afghanistan was always largely a war by proxy, U.S. forces and intelligence resources were transferred to Iraq, leaving that conflict to fester. As Iraq went septic, Iraqi insurgent tactics were increasingly exported to Afghanistan, where suicide bombings – virtually unknown in that country a few years ago – are now quite common, as are roadside bombings. Seeing a resurgent Taliban, our fearless leaders have pushed applied more air power, which means more indiscriminate killing on both sides of the Pakistani border, while pushing Musharraf to do more with his own forces. The result of the latter has been a kind of scorched earth policy in Waziristan, where collective punishment by the Pakistani army is relatively commonplace. This has raised the anger level against Musharraf’s regime, and has likely produced more extremists than it has eliminated. Now we’re threatening Iran with attack, raising the potential of an all-out regional war. And I’m sure Dubya is scratching his head and wondering why Pakistan is falling apart. Didn’t he shake Musharraf’s hand and see good in his soul, like he did with Putin, Blair, and Howard? What part of “useful to the U.S.” do the Pakistani people fail to understand?

Don’t get me wrong – there’s plenty of blame to go around on this policy, the roots of which stretch back decades. But Bush and his crew are pouring gas on the fire… and we keep tossing them matches.

luv u,

jp

Big Green lives at www.big-green.net. Excoriate them at your pleasure.
Usual Rubbish

Hollow mo’on.

Antlers? Not antlers. That won’t work at all. You need something more simian looking. A chimp’s muzzle, perhaps, or lemur tail. Prehensile, yes… that’ll do the trick.

Oh, it’s you again, mister Spindle-legs. (A quote from Lost In Space, sorry to say.) Welcome back aboard the S. S. something sacred, where yours truly is coughing up copy for the commodore. Who’s the commodore? Well, that’s the guy in charge of Loathsome Prick records – the fellow who sent us off on this fool’s errand to planet Mars, where Big Green is slogging through some promotional performances to support the release of our next album… the one that ain’t done yet. Want a good time? Try careering 143 million miles through interplanetary space in a converted piece of playground equipment piloted by a crew of genetically modified, oversized root vegetables. You don’t know the meaning of the word “excitement” until you’ve done that once or twice. (Frankly, once is enough for me.)

As many of you will have surmised, we did eventually catch up with that speedy planet Mars, in spite of our poorly-planned trajectory. Man-sized tuber “A” (the original one) loaded a few more logs on the atomic propulsion fire and gave us enough additional thrust to reach Mars about 20 hours late (right about when we were scheduled to start playing our first gig, in an open-air stadium at the foot of Mount Olympus, the tallest peak in the known solar system already.) Luckily, time is not as precious on the red planet as it is on the green, so we were able to gather ourselves together, take a few quick belts of kilulu juice (official beverage of Big Green), and take our places on Mars’s most prestigious concert stages. Oh, yes, friends, this is the top of the world out here. No doubt about it – ask any Martian. (Note: This is what our Loathsome Prick publicist told us to say. Actually, it seems a hell of a lot like a graveyard to me, but…)

So anyway… we’ve played a bunch of numbers for a bunch of Martians and other unidentified space critters, pulling out archival tunes like “Special Kind of Blood” and “Don’t Give Up The Ship”, as well as tunes from our upcoming album (with tantalizing titles like “The Bishop” and “Do It Every Time”). Pretty soon, we started wondering about the crowd… could there be that broad a variety of head shapes, body sizes, and antennae styles? Seemed odd. Then John noticed an alien with a pirate hat on, and we realized what was up. Hallowe’en on Mars – guess it’s pretty big in these parts, or so Marvin (my personal assistant) tells me. (Don’t ask me how he knows. Like Tonto, he hangs out in those barrooms and hears things, I imagine.) And of course sFshzenKlyrn, our perennial sit-in guitarist, had a thing or two to say about this imported tradition. (He tells me the bastardized Martian term for the holiday, literally translated, is “Hollow mo’on.” Doesn’t lose much, actually.) So when in Rome…. don a costume and join the festivities. (But no antlers, Marvin. They don’t suit you.)

So, I’d say the first Martian gigs went okay. No major upheavals or breakdowns. A good time was had by all and sundry. Sure, the spaceship won’t start and we’re stuck here until we can find a competent mad science mechanic, but that’s nothing. Nothing at all. (Until our oxygen runs dry…. oh, man….)

Big Green lives at www.big-green.net. Excoriate them at your pleasure.