All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Ear candy.

2000 Years to Christmas

Turn it down, the radio! No, that’s too low. Now turn it up again. Ah, that’s perfect. What’s that you say? It’s not a radio? But it has dials and lights and noise comes out of it. This is strange.

Oh, hi. I was just contemplating a new advance in audio science called the Eight Track Cartridge Player – a bold invention that enables you to copy a two-sided, long-playing record onto a medium that’s broken into four equal parts … so inevitably, one or more of the songs on the LP will be randomly broken in half somewhere in the middle. Or there will be big unexplained periods of silence at various points on the album. Or both. That IS a step up. Now if we could just get a record album onto some kind of medium that would allow us to play the whole thing from beginning to end without any of that nonsense, skip to another track instantaneously, fast forward, etc. Wait …. WHAT??

You know, the thing about living in an abandoned hammer mill is that you’re so isolated from the outside world, you almost literally become unmoored in time. Even your mad science advisor loses track of what decade it is, and starts inventing things that have already been invented in previous times, thinking they are his or her own ideas. Not that anything like that would ever happen around here. Okay …. in fact, that HAS happened around here, truth be told. This week it was the eight track cartridge deck. Last week it was the bicycle. My guess is that, by sometime next week, he will have installed one of his new tape decks in his ramshackle bike and start riding it around the valley, cranking up the tunes, and swearing at the gaps at key points in whatever album he’s listening to. Fun times!

Wow, Mitch. Another breakthrough.

Now, if we could get Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device working once again, we could actually turn a profit on Mitch Macahpee’s retread inventions. How, you may ask? Well …. think of how we managed to bring antimatter Lincoln into our midst – through a time portal generated by Trevor James’s invention. So, Mitch could take his re-invented eight-track machine, set the Orgone Generating Device (or OGD) to 1957, and drop in at SONY to show those fuckers how it’s done. Of course, they would buy up the patent almost immediately, then he could move forward in time to a point when sales are sufficient to shower him with remuneration, which he could then haul back to the future to share with us. Or maybe he would just use the profits to buy himself a tony house in the 1960s and forget our sorry asses. Hmmmm …. maybe not such a good idea.

SCRATCH THAT, MITCH! TRY INVENTING THE BLENDER NEXT – I’D KILL FOR A SMOOTHIE RIGHT ABOUT NOW.

Political Rants

For the squad.

I want to preface this post with a simple confession: I’m old. And yes, I am a baby boomer, albeit a late-stage one, so feel free to issue the usual “Okay, boomer” eye-rolls, I totally get it – my generation has had plenty of opportunity to get things right, and we totally blew it. So let me simply say that, as with most of my content, I am speaking for myself, not my fuck-up generation, a goodly portion of which showed promise early on but whose best potential was not ultimately realized. (In truth, only about a third of boomers were on what might be termed as the political left during their youthful prime, so what potential there may have been was not broadly shared.)

That said, as someone who has been watching Congress since his teens, I can vouch for the fact that we have seen progress over the past forty years in increasing representation of the left in the House of Representatives. Yes, we have a long way to go before we can hope to move legislation in a more unapologetically radical direction, but for the first time in my longish life, we have a solid caucus of progressive Democrats who actually support a leftist agenda in both legislation and oversight. What’s more, there are opportunities to expand this caucus in the coming years if progressives and leftists in this country organize and engage in coalition-building between movements, regions, and organizations.

Let me be clear. I do not expect Congressmembers to agree with me on every issue. I am pretty far to the left politically, and if I withhold support from candidates until I find one that aligns with me on every issue, I will end up supporting no one. Forty years ago, the closest I could come to a House member that held views similar to mine was Ron Dellums. Shirley Chisholm was good, as well as a handful of others, but there were typically very serious trade-offs, and the overwhelming majority of Congresspeople back then were older white men. In the 90s and 2000s, Barbara Lee (who started as an aide to Dellums and succeeded him in his seat, I believe) was the only serious progressive in the House, and my expectations were pretty low regarding the Democratic caucus at that time. For instance, I was glad when Nancy Pelosi took over leadership of Congressional Democrats after the drubbing they took in the 2002 election, only because she was slightly more progressive than her predecessor in leadership, Dick Gephardt. (Again …. very limited expectations.)

Compare that with today. Now we have the recently-expanded “squad” – AOC, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Rashida Talib, Jamaal Bowman, and Cory Bush, all of whom are way, way to the left of where Congressional progressives were in the 1990s and 2000s. We’ve got solid progressives like Ro Khanna (whose foreign policy views are as nuanced as I’ve ever heard from a sitting Congressmember), Pramila Jayapal, Mondaire Jones, Katy Porter (best interrogator in the House), Dan Kildee, and elders like Barbara Lee, Raul Grijalva, Mark Pocan, etc. There are others as well, like Jamie Raskin, who have strong progressive tendencies on key issues and could lend support on legislation.

Now, admittedly, there is a broad range of views represented by the folks I named above. But overall, the caucus is further to the left than it has ever been throughout my lifetime. And while there’s much left to do, much further to go, this is like a base camp on the side of this mountain we’re climbing. It’s something we can build on from this point forward, if we work together.

luv u,

jp

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Usual Rubbish

Steady Cam.

2000 Years to Christmas

Try to stand still, man. You’re shaking the picture. It looks like there’s an earthquake going on, like Big Green meets the last days of Pompeii. That was a volcano? Okay, so …. Big Green meets the big one. Or Big Green bites the big one. Now that’s more believable.

Oh, hi, Big Green fans. Sure, we know you’re not “fans”, exactly … just casual acquaintances who drop by every once in a while to see what’s on fire at the mill this time around. We’ll take it! Sorry to disappoint – there’s nothing on fire at the moment. I’m, of course, not counting the perpetual St. Elmo’s fire that our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has had burning in his lab since the day he got here. (And no, I don’t mean he has a VHS tape of the movie running in perpetuity – he actually has a plasma corona discharge simulator in his lab … running in perpetuity. I think he likes the glow.) No, we’re having a normal week for once. Though our normal is, well, not particularly normal. More nermal than normal. Nothing blew up, that’s basically it.

As you know, we’ve been trying – like many other bands – to adjust to the virtual marketplace in this era of Coronavirus shutdowns and social distancing. And like many bands from a previous era, we’re having more than our share of difficulties. Doing performances on Zoom, for instance, is less than optimal, even for musicians who have some facility with digital technologies. For people like us, it’s just hopeless, and we have had to resort to other, less frequently used technologies, like long cardboard tubes, or old-style megaphones, or just hiring someone to carry our tunes around in a bucket. (Fact is, nobody in this town could carry a tune in a bucket to save his or her life.) For people used to just standing on a stage and letting the music happen, for better or for worse, this pandemic is …. well …. lethal!

Can you try to get both me AND the piano into the shot ... Scorcese?

This week, though, we stumbled upon another option. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a body cam built into him. I think his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, was imagining he could sell Marvin to the police for use as a ludicrous robo-cop of some sort, but that didn’t pan out. Anyhow, Marvin can be our camera operator, and because he’s set up for wi-fi, we can route him into our hacked modem, push the signal up to the main fiber hub, and send our music out to thousands of potential listeners. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the capacity to record anything, so we have to do all of our songs live. And damn it, the fucker just can’t stand still. Every time we count something in, he starts rolling around. I think he’s trying to pull off a crane shot or something. We keep telling him to stop watching music videos so much, but these are COVID times, and frankly, he’s got little else to do.

Okay, so when you see a performance from us, if it looks a little shaky, that’s NOT because we live in a fault zone. It’s artistry at work, my friends. Cinematic artistry.