All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Waffle-o-rama

Hey, Trevor James! Help me get this thing out of my ear, will you? Goddamn, they make these ear buds tiny these days. What the fuck, are insects buying i-Pods now? Wouldn’t surprise me. Trevor James? Hel-looooo?

Greetings, web crawlers of all descriptions. I’m afraid you’ve caught me once again in the midst of a work-related crisis — trying to adapt to new, cheap equipment here in the bowels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill where we maintain our makeshift production studio. This time it’s headphones (I keep breaking the bloody things — damnable nuisance!); before that it was mic stands. We had those old, chrome piping jobs and the twisty friction-grip thingy wore out on them (and I apologize for using technical jargon on you). Ever try to sing into a moving microphone? Not recommended. In any case, we found it necessary to visit our local music recycling yard to see if we could find some adequate replacements. Never been to one? Beats the hell out of internet shopping, I can tell you.

Now that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is in the midst of some ill-defined atmospheric experiment thought up by his creator, local mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, I’m forced to carry out many of these mundane tasks myself. First it’s doing my own mixing. Oh, it may not sound like much to you, but trust me — the incessant running back and forth between the “live” room and the control room can get pretty maddening. Then there are all of the Marvin-esque chores I’ve had to commandeer, like sweeping the beds and making the floors (not sure I’ve got that quite right yet), manning the night watch, bribing the local tax collector (for the privilege of paying our taxes — another story entirely), pretzel-bending, and the like. And now this… this is the final indignity. Marvin has always been our runner, our go-fer, our step-and-fetch-it, our get-it-the-fuck-over-here-or-die, etc. And frankly, I’m not the right person to take over that job. I’ve never been any good at telling myself what to do. (Where to go, yeah, but not what to do.)

So until the Big Zamboola-balloon comes down, we’ll all be picking up Marvin’s slack. Lots to do, too. Album to finish. Dinner to start. Tube radios to warm up (a little charity work we do for the old folks up the block). Every man’s hand will be needed in the days ahead, so Matt and I have canceled all leaves and put padlocks on the exits. Fortunately, we will be able to press gang a reluctant Mitch Macaphee into some of the heavy work. He has successfully completed his experiment in turning waffles to platinum. That’s right, friends — solid platinum, the metal that used to send Dr. Smith into great greed-soaked reveries. Mitch is truly the master of alchemy. Funny thing is, the device he created that does this miraculous transformation looks like, well, a toaster. You just put the waffles down, wait about a minute, and up pops the precious metal. Fact is, I mistook it for a real toaster a couple of days ago and nearly put my teeth out on a solid bar of platinum. (Platinum’s actually pretty good with a helping of blueberry syrup and a couple of strips of fried cadmium on the side. Mmmmmmm-boy!)

Well, anyway — all this talk of precious metals is making me a bit peckish. Mitch, old boy! You can take over Marvin’s cooking duties for the time being. What’s that you say? No, I can’t, Mitch. That would be a physical impossibility… and tantamount to incest, I might add. Eat shit, you say? Do-able, at least… though not the grade of victuals I had in mind, actually. Stop hitting me!

Political Rants

The way out.

Say what you will about Jimmy Carter — I thought he was a pretty awful president in many ways, quite frankly — he has certainly brought attention to one of the greatest injustices of our time, for which effort he will undoubtedly be attacked ad derided as an anti-Semite. I must say, I have a great deal more respect for him this week than I did last. The guy has, more than any other ex-president in living memory, distinguished himself through his philanthropic work, earning the Nobel Peace Prize and the admiration of many. Rather than being content to settle back on his laurels and enjoy retirement, he has instead chosen to wade hip deep into one of the most acrimonious political issues going — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Carter is using his considerable prestige to gain a broad public hearing for what has long been the international consensus solution for that conflict, namely the end of Israeli rule over that less than one-quarter of mandate Palestine they’ve occupied since June 1967. He has also shone a light on the Palestinian experience in a way that is seldom (if ever) seen on U.S. television.

Of course, the Chuck Krauthammers of the world will remind us of every bad decision Carter has ever made, every war crime committed by a Palestinian, every concession they claim Israel has tried to make through the decades, to its own detriment. They will invoke the existential threat posed by extremists like Amadinejad and Nasrallah and claim that Israel’s 1967 borders were indefensible. Bullshit. Unlike in 1967, Israel does not now face a hostile Egypt, a hostile Jordan, a hostile Iraq. It is clear that the occupied territories and the plight of Palestinians both there and scattered throughout the region remain the only real obstacles to normal relations, with the possible exception of Israel’s formidable nuclear arsenal, still undeclared and yet undeniably real. Fact is, with the continued occupation of that small part of Palestine that was left to the Palestinians after 1948, Israel’s more expansive borders are indefensible precisely because those territories are filled with legions of people whose lives are being crushed by the mad pursuit of a greater Israel. It’s a pretty tight neighborhood, and the only way to have good neighbors is to be one.

Then there’s Amadinejad. What a gift to Israeli and American hawks that man is! His ludicrous fulminations provide them with the ammunition they need to maintain perpetual military confrontation. And the best part about him is that he doesn’t even run Iran. He is as powerless as Khatami was before him, subject to the will of Iran’s supreme clerical leader, the Ayatollah Khamenie. So he presents a pretty low-grade threat to any state that possesses enough conventional and non-conventional weapons to reduce the region to rubble. Add to that the fact that Israel’s politicians (to say nothing of their U.S. counterparts) regularly threaten Iran with attack, and it should come as no surprise that Iran might contemplate building their own nuclear deterrent (though it appears this remains in the contemplative stage at present). With his observations about the Palestinians, Carter is trying to defuse the bomb that is the modern Middle East… and as a result, he will no doubt be lumped together with the bomb-throwers.

All I can say to him is what my mom always told me: No good deed goes unpunished. If you feel resistance, you’re probably doing the right thing.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Point taken.

That’s it. That’s it. Keep your eyes on the horizon. Don’t look down, for pity sake. Never look down… or up, for that matter. Good man. Or should I say, good robot? Good robot.

Oh, hello. Didn’t know you were standing there behind the lintel. You caught me in the middle of talking Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out of his mechanical version of sea-sickness. He’s been up in that bloody Zamboola-powered observation balloon for the better part of two weeks now, and the constant rocking is more than even a rock band hanger-on can easily stand. Sure, I know what you’re thinking — He’s a mechanical man, isn’t he? Surely Mitch Macaphee installed some gimbals in that bloody thing! Well, Marvin was one of Mitch’s most ambitious experiments up to that point in time. He hadn’t yet gotten all the bugs out of his theories on automaton equilibrium. Long story short…. Marvin’s turning green up there, and now we’ve got to do something.

Good christ in himmel. Remember when being in this band meant playing music in some fashion? (Though some might take issue with the fashion part.) Interruptions and more bloody interruptions! I can tell you, Matt and I had a good long talk with Mitch Macaphee about commandeering our help (i.e. Marvin) in the middle of a session (i.e. waste of time), and Mitch gave us a relatively firm scientific reply (i.e. fuck off), so that was that. Next thing we know, he is working with Trevor James Constable on some kind of alchemy experiment, seemingly having lost interest in the atmospheric probe on which he had sent not only Marvin but Big Zamboola (who may be needed to assist in the remix process, like adding a little gravity here and there to the “lighter” songs). Back only a few weeks and this lousy abandoned mill is… well…. virtually abandoned again. And that’s just plain unnatural. (And you can quote me on that.)

Still, even with the loss of Marvin and the man-sized tuber (still in numismatic heaven), we’ve plodded on with our mastering sessions, doggedly putting the bits of these songs together like Mitch trying to knit toaster waffles into blocks of solid platinum. (I told him it’s never going to work. He isn’t even using the ones with Hanson on the box.) How’s it going? Well…. sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. But we’re getting there. Sure, I know — you’ve heard me say that so many times before, what the hell does it mean, right? Well, let me just say this to you. Ask not what your Big Green can do for you… ask what you can do for your Big Green. Moral support — that’s what we need. Think good thoughts. Put our names in your little book of wishes. (Not your little book of fishes, thank you very much.) And hope someone… someone comes along to twiddle these bloody dials in the right direction.

If that’s going to be Marvin, I’d better get back on the line. My apologies. Marvin? Is that you hanging over the side of the gondola? Eyes on the horizon, boy!