All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Transit time.

Mmmbbgh. fffmmmprphhh dblffffmmmbfff. mmfmnfb! Okay, okay… so I’ll stop dictating. Awfully hard to make yourself understood with a sweaty bandana tied over your gob. Must… reach…. ENTER… key…. nnghh….

There! New paragraph. Hello again, Big Green aficionados, and welcome to another installment of Hammer Mill Days, that mentally fractured, unspeakably pointless journal of our travels from nowhere to nowhere fast. As many of you may recall, we were in the process of hitchhiking our way across the placid countryside of upstate New York, towards our adopted homestead a.k.a. the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, when the lot of us were cruelly abducted, bound, gagged, and stuffed into the back of a panel van. That’s the bad news. The good news is that I think we’re traveling in the right direction… and we’re making pretty good time. Now… that ENTER key again… nnnghh… (click!)

Yes! As you can well imagine, this has been a bit of a morale-buster, what with our mixing project awaiting us and a production schedule that loses more ground by the hour. (And our corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, is not known for its patience.) But what the hell can you do, right? So with the assistance of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I’ll take advantage of this unplanned sojourn to answer a few cyber-grams from our avid readers. Ready, Marvin? Ready?? Oh, right…. they put a bucket over his head. Well… here’s the first note, anyway…

dear big green,

your lame-ass blog never seems to go anywhere but down. i can see why you changed the freaking name. why don’t you fuckers shut the fuck up and play some fucking music before i fucking step all over your shit.

– m. f. friendly, Boise, Idaho

Thanks for that message, m.f. We couldn’t agree more! Fact is, we would far sooner be making music than doing what we’re doing now. Only trouble is, we appear to be caught in some kind of pernicious space-time vortex that turns all joy into soul-crushing angst. Drop by and visit some time – there’s always room for more!

Next message….

Our Warmest Greetings!!! Incomparable proposition for you Dear Clients!!! Only these 5 days for your byers incredible rebates!!! On all pharma you need!!! Fill in your life with colors of merriment!!!

Sincerely Yours,

On-line association of druggists

Hey, “On-line”… Seriously, now – this is the fourteenth time you’ve written us this week. Give somebody else a chance to ask something, will you? I mean, it’s not fair to all the other Big Green fans… like Felix Richter and Ola Dooley. They’ve been writing too.

Okay, we seem to be pulling over to a truck stop of some kind, so maybe one more message – this one from Guy Incab, no known address….

Dear Big Green….

Keep it down back there or I’ll break your fucking heads.

Best wishes,

guy in cab

Uh, right. Thanks, guy. Well, I guess that’s probably enough typing for now…. don’t want to make the driver nervous. Oh, and if you get anywhere within shouting distance of my mom’s house, tell her Matt and I said mmmpfhfwrrrgwabflllrmmmm!!!!

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

Down to whom?

The ample-assed “brain” of Dubya, Karl Rove, announced his departure from the White House this week, and the air waves were thick with pundit-wisdom on this supposed genius of the modern political arena. How easily public figures earn such designations. I always think of Henry Kissinger, hailed in his time as a brilliant geostrategist and practitioner of cold war realpolitik, whose ham-fisted policy of stalemate in the middle east contributed very substantially to the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war (not to mention the continuing disaster in Israel/Palestine) and whose Nobel Prize-winning Paris Peace Accord was sabotaged by the man himself before the ink was dry. Rove’s reputation is similarly inflated, and we often hear about his meticulous district-by-district, precinct-by-precinct analysis, his get out the vote strategies, etc., but honestly – what did the guy really accomplish? He basically lost the 2000 election against Gore, who was about as flat-footed a candidate as could have been imagined at the time, then very nearly lost four years later (with all the advantages of 9/11 at his back) to John Kerry, more than Gore’s equal in the flat-footed category. Where’s the magic?

Seems much of Rove’s vaunted talent is about luck, much about a very entrenched G.O.P. electoral machine (crucial for Ohio in 2004), and three parts right-wing media echo chamber – the talk show yammerers, tabloids, and reactionary bloggers that push the pusillanimous and profit-obsessed mainstream media to the right on just about every issue. Without those natural advantages, Rove/Bush would have gotten nowhere. For Christ’s sake, the Democrats handed their ass to him on a plate and he practically handed it back… twice, pulling off razor-thin victories that made JFK’s 1960 win look like an electoral landslide. How do their two elections compare with LBJ in ’64, Nixon in ’72, Reagan in ’84, or even Dubya’s father in ’88? Pretty poorly, that’s how. And as a political strategist/advisor, what has he managed to accomplish between elections? His boss enjoys abysmal approval ratings, his administration in a shambles. If it weren’t for the total ineptitude and disingenuousness of the Democratic leadership, I doubt there would have been an administration left for Rove to quit by this time. Seems to me a bona fide political genius might have managed to keep his man from scraping his ass all the way to the finish line.

My guess is that the Democrats will miss Rove more than the Republicans. He makes a good target – he is obnoxious and despicable, to be sure – and it fits into the general narrative that everything was swell until the Mayberry Machiavellians came to town. That is the theme of the Hillary campaign… back to the future. Don’t buy it, friends. As much as Bush has been able to destroy the U.S. empire merely by strolling through it, Bill Clinton was culpable for considerable misery, including an eight-year campaign of economic strangulation and bombing against Iraq that cost at least 500,000 lives. There are marginal differences, but nothing to get too giddy about. And while Rove bears substantial responsibility for the carnage that has occurred since, he isn’t the mastermind the Dems make him out to be. In fact, a cursory look at the past fifty years of electoral history shows him to be a third-rate Svengali, less accomplished than Michael Deaver or James Carville.

The most influential figure over the past three election cycles was named Bin Laden. And that fucker cast his votes with hijacked planes.

luv u,

jp

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

Homeward bound (and gagged).

Sittin’ in a railway station, got a ticket for my destina-shun. Oooooooh. Ah yes, that brings me back. Back to all those lame gigs I played as a twenty something. Damn that sucked!

Well, hello, my friends, and welcome to the Big Green saga on the Web, now in its… let’s see… eighth year? Good god, man – that’s nearly old enough to type. I could practically put this blog to work in an electronics factory in Nogales. (What’s Spanish for, “One more electrocution and you’re fired”??) The least it could do is key itself in. Work, work, work, that’s all I ever do. That and sleep. And run from dinosaurs. Dinosaurs! That’s right – the nauseating circumstances of our most recent posting. It seems the saying is true… that one about music soothing the savage beast. (Though it is taking some license to refer to that Dino song as “music”, still… the principle applies.) We found that singing the Dino song was just comforting (or perhaps confusing) enough to keep the Creature of the Barge Canal from swallowing us whole. (Or perhaps the shrimp – or was it crab? – salad hadn’t agreed with him. More likely the hapless lieutenant he washed it down with was what caused any gastric distress…)

Anyway, keeping ourselves from becoming the soup du jour was hardly enough – we had to work our way back home somehow. While Matt continued the serenade, I asked for ideas from the group. Nothing. Well… Matt had one, but he was singing. Then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) piped up – not verbally, you understand, but through the use of a handy chalk board. The means of our return home was right before us, and we hadn’t seen it. That freaking dinosaur – we could hitch the half-eaten cruise ship to its ass and have it drag the sucker forward. Marvin could wheel along the tow-path, playing a greeting-card chip recording of the hypnotic song, leading the dinosaur like the pied piper. Hey… not half bad for a constabulary school drop-out.

Well…. it didn’t work so well. I know you’re as shocked and amazed as I was. It seemed like such a good idea. Turns out Marvin couldn’t get the song quite right – it was too tinny, and that creature of the deep has very selective hearing. And the thing about lashing the ship to its back? Yeah, well… that was just… kind of… dumb. So, what the fuck, with no better ideas at hand, we made our way to shore, humming the Dino melody all the way so as not to seem like attractive morsels in the somewhat stagnant water of the canal. (Though I hear it’s great for kayaking! And waterskiiing!!) Once on the banks, we ran as best we could (with our sea-legs) up an embankment to State Route 5. Then it was thumbs out. Not the first time, friends. Not by a long shot. Sure, I know what you’re going to say…. Hitchhiking is dangerous, Joe. You could get mugged… or abducted. Think of young Marvin and the poor defenseless tuber…. Right, right… I’ve heard it before. I just want to live MY life the way I WANT TO. And NO, I’m NOT going to do my homework! And YOU CAN’T MAKE MEEEEEE…..!!!

Whoops, sorry. Don’t know where that came from. (Issues.) Well we did get a ride. And as much as I hate to admit it, it was kind of dangerous. Tied up, gagged, and thrown into the back of a van kind of dangerous, to be more specific. Okay, you were right. Just pay the ransom, please. I’m keying this blog on my cell phone, and it’s taken me the better part of a week to do it…

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