I think it’s over there, in that cardboard box. No, no – not that one! The one under that one. Or the one under that. I don’t know, just start opening boxes – I’ll tell you when to stop.
Oh, yes, that’s right … I have a fourth wall. Hello, then. What are we doing? Thanks for asking. We are digging through the Big Green archives again. And when I say “archives”, I’m talking about something that’s really much more rudimentary than that term suggests. Call it a series of boxes, some of which have the Kellogg rooster emblazoned on their side. Then there’s those round Quaker Oats boxes …. I used to make pretend ham radios out of those.
What we’re searching for is, well, some ideas for this year’s Christmas pageant extravaganza. Amazingly, there’s a lot of holiday material that hasn’t been released or even heard for the last ten years. Matt did, what, ten years of Christmas tapes, between 1986 and 1995, with one added on after that for good luck. We’ve got an enormous backlog of 4-track cassette recordings from that period, essentially demos, which we can harvest and repurpose like, I don’t know, sorting through a junk yard for something useful. Don’t ask me for metaphors this early in the morning!
Now, I don’t want to leave you with the false impression that we are constantly recycling music from days of old. Not a bit of it! In fact, the songs on our last THIS IS BIG GREEN – Ned Trek extravaganza are all brand spanking new (and probably in need of that spanking). Not that we haven’t reached into the old grab back in past episodes. Usually around the holidays we start rummaging around for something that will fill a hole in the production. I’m thinking maybe we should just patch in some video of a local 2nd grade school orchestra playing Jingle Bells. Now THAT’S entertainment, people. (Literally every one of those cute little critters playing the same note, all together.)
Okay, so … yes, we’ll be working on a Christmas show. Because that’s how we roll here at Big Green. Next podcast will be another non-musical Ned Trek, then who knows … an actual album? Yikes!
There are people in this country – coastal urban mayors and the like – who have to face facts on this issue, but pretty much everyone else is free to ignore the obvious: that we are now living in a far more dangerous and unstable environment, and it’s only going to get worse. The longer we play this denial game and pretend it doesn’t exist, the more profound the long term costs will be. Unfortunately, this is a difficult issue to get traction on in a country like the United States. You find yourself arguing for a major change in people’s day-to-day lives, tremendous investments, and more, for positive effects that likely won’t become evident for another generation or more. It’s a crisis that breeds fatalism, and that plays right into the hands of the petrochemical-driven profit machine that’s been stoking climate change for decades.
Song: Nimrod – Perle song lamenting his frustrations as commander of the Nimrod 7, the misunderstandings … it’s like everybody speaks a different language! Heavy is the head … and kind of heavy the song.