All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Old home week arrives at the hammer mill.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Man alive, I just got done talking about Mitch Macaphee’s dick-like rocket ship, and what happens? Some billionaire flies into the exosphere in a ship that looks as much like a dick as Mitch’s. What the hell!

Okay, enough with the rocket launches. I don’t want to give the impression that we spend all of our time obsessing over the exploits of space oligarchs. That’s more the province of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who likes his cable television very much. We sentient members of Big Green prefer more lofty pursuits, like …. I don’t know … reading things. Or putting one thing on top of the other. And then there’s walking around as you read a thing and tripping over the other two things. That happens a lot at the hammer mill.

Reaching back dimly

Then there’s reminiscing – every upstate musician’s favorite sport. I was thinking back this week to a time before Big Green. What do I dimly recall of those days? I remember rocks … rocks bubbling. The sky was darkened by flocks of pterodactyls. And I was groping around the ancient city of Albany, looking for a steady gig so that I could keep the light bulb burning (the one dangling from the hairy cord just below the ceiling).

There were a bunch of clubs around Albany back in the 80s, and when I got there in January of 1981, they were all hurting. New York had just raised the drinking age to 21 that very month, which meant most of the college students who crowded into bars on the weekend were now prohibited from doing so. In other words, the perfect time to start gigging in the Capital District.

It's old home week!

Friend of a friend of a friend

The only band I played with in Albany back in 1980-81 was the pre-Big Green group I started with my brother Matt, my SUNY New Paltz drummer friend Phil, and our guitarist friend Tim Walsh, who died some years back. After failing miserably, I went back to Albany in 1984 to play with a commercial club band. Let’s call that group PROMISE MARGARINE, or PROMISE for short.

A couple of years later, the drummer from PROMISE got his bandleader to hire me for another commercial gig in a band I’ll call CANDYASS. The keyboard player in that band was Big Green co-founder Ned Danison (I was playing bass). We started working on songs, and before anyone knew what the fuck was happening, Big Green emerged from the pastel colored ether of the eighties club scene around Albany, NY.

Love-in spoonful

As it happens, I heard from Ned this past week, and he shared a relatively recent song of his that sounds more than a bit like Big Green. It’s called Houston, We Have A Love-In. Give it a listen and shake your fist at us for being so damn awesome.

You can also hear our four-song Big Green demo, featuring Ned, on this very web site here.

Political Rants

Pirates (or landlords) of the Caribbean .

Did I mention that the Biden Administration’s foreign policy is abysmal? I thought so. It’s always worth repeating, and the last couple of weeks have borne it out entirely.

On July 12, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a statement to the press regarding recent demonstrations in Cuba. Among some other boilerplate nonsense about our supposed commitment to human rights, Blinken told the press that the protesters “criticized Cuba’s authoritarian regime for failing to meet people’s most basic needs, including food and medicine,” chiding Cuba’s leaders that “peaceful protesters are not criminals”.

Okay, a couple of things. First, Cuba has been under sanction by the United States my entire life – sixty years – with the most punishing restrictions having been added during the Trump years. I’m not sure how well most Americans understand what these sanctions mean for a poor country like Cuba. They can’t do business with us, the regional hegemon, and other countries are threatened with retaliation if they trade with Cuba.

What this means, of course, is that food, medicine, and other goods are scarce. Now, I’m not claiming that the Cuban government is a model of efficiency, but I would say that any government that can maintain a standard of living exceeding that of its regional neighbors while under siege is doing something right.

Comparing like with like

I hate to keep bringing up Morning Joe, but when the protests began in Havana, the very next morning Joe Scarborough was sniping at the Cubans’ socialist “workers paradise”. “How’s that going?” snarked the former Florida congress member. Meanwhile in Colombia, massive protests against this capitalist banker’s paradise propped up by billions in U.S. aid were in their seventieth (and now eighty-fifth) day. That story didn’t make it onto the Morning Joe couch.

I know hypocrisy is kind of an impotent charge in this day and age, but honestly, the record of capitalist failure in Latin America is broad and deep. There is no lack of examples, no paucity of dumpster fires. I believe the Morning Joe crew commented on the “chaos” in Haiti the same day they cat-called Cuba, but of course when capitalist experiments fail abysmally, it’s always the fault of the populace.

Where’s the change?

What angers me most about this policy is that it doesn’t even reach the low standard of the Obama administration. Biden is literally leaving Trump’s extremist Cuba sanctions in place. He was in the government that decided at the eleventh hour to lessen tensions with Havana, and yet now he’s content with observing the new/old status quo.

Let’s face it – we have no standing to criticize Cuba on human rights, none at all. We support plenty of governments that abuse human rights on a far more horrific scale, including Colombia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt … the list goes on and freaking on. Did I expect better from them? No, of course not. But that’s no reason not to be pissed off.

luv u,

jp

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Usual Rubbish

Mitch cashes in on a long shot.

2000 Years to Christmas

Look, I may not be a venture capitalist … or even a garden-variety capitalist, but this much I know: it’s not going to work. I would stake my reputation on it. And maybe even stake something valuable on it as well.

Yes, you guessed it – trouble at the mill. How is it that you can see into our very souls? Are you Kreskin? Criswell? Big Green must know … but not right away. For now, suffice to say that our squatter’s household has been turned upside-down by the raw power of unbridled ambition and simple, bald greed. I ask you – what other band has to put up with this kind of shit? (And don’t say Chefs of the Future.)

You know, I told my illustrious brother not to leave the T.V. on during the day. The reason is simple. There’s always a chance that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, will see it and start obsessing over something, anything. Well, it happened this past Sunday, during the multiple hours of coverage they gave to Richard Branson’s space flight.

Missile envy

Now, maybe Mitch is getting a little old. And maybe he’s just getting a little more crazy. Whatever the explanation might be, he is determined to beat Branson at his own game. It is HE, Mitch insists, who first traversed interstellar space (from an Earth launch point, mind you). “Why is Branson getting all the credit?” Mitch says, his fists waving in the air.

I think what really got Mitch, though, was the knowledge that Branson is planning on charging his passengers $250K a seat. Ever see those cartoons where a character’s pupils turn into dollar signs? That’s actually what happened to Mitch. Next thing we knew, he was forging hard alloys in the shop and sticking them together.

Looks real, uh ... anatomically correct, Mitch.

Let’s do launch!

Okay, so I think Mitch is failing to consider some important factors in his competition with various space-happy billionaires. One is that he is not, in fact, a billionaire, though as a mad scientist, he can invent all the money he wants. The other is that he doesn’t get scads of free media every time he uses the can or launches a rocket shaped like his penis. I don’t think he can invent his way out of that deficit … OR CAN HE?

There is one more thing. Branson and Bezos and the other one have access to a handy launch pad for their space flights. We don’t have anything of the sort at our disposal. Unless, of course, Mitch is thinking of using the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill as a kind of mission control center, maybe launch his flights from the courtyard.

Holy shit, Mitch. We’ve got enough trouble with the codes department as it is.