Usual Rubbish

Tubs and bones.

Well, nice try anyway. I always thought it would be best to start on the valve trombone and work your way up. Maybe I was right for once, though the odds are against it. Anywho ….

Oh, hi. Just talking to my illustrious brother, who was gifted a trombone for Christmas this past month. We’re always stretching our musical horizons here at the mighty abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, always looking ahead to the next Big Green project, whether it be a new album, a podcast, or just some random squeaking in the night. Sadly, whatever that project may turn out to be, it’s unlikely to have trombone parts on it. Matt’s not big on the mouthpiece, frankly. Making music is just plain hard!

This is far from the first time we’ve attempted to add instrumentation. And no, I’m not referring to when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) hired a Lowry organ for a fortnight so that he could learn the wedding march in time for Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding on Netflix. (Sentimental pile of lifeless tin.) I mean all those other times, like when Anti-Lincoln took up the glockenspiel or when the mansized tuber tried to carve a piccolo our of one of his root-like appendages. (This, too, I have seen with mine own eyes.) I even banged on some drums once upon a time.

Um, I think you need mallets with that thing.The simple fact is, when we are producing a piece of music, our only resource is ourselves. We can’t go out and hire people to score and perform orchestral parts – that’s prohibitively expensive …. in that it would cost more than the fifteen bucks I have hidden in the mattress. No, sir …. Big Green forages for what it needs, plucking banjos and bagpipes from the junk pile of music history. That’s part of our thing, actually – found sound made with found instruments. What the hell … if we didn’t do that, we would have to get another thing.

What kind of instruments will we need for our next album? Good question. Sousaphone comes to mind, but only because I like the sound of the word “sousaphone” … even more than I like the sound of the horn itself. We may have use for mandolins and accordions, but it’s a little early to say. Ask me after dinner. That’s when I do some of my best thinking.

Political Rants

Week one.

Well, we got through the first week alive. That’s the good news. I had the creeping fear that Herr Mr. Hair might mistake the biscuit for his smartphone one early morning and, in an attempt to throw Twitter shade on Alec Baldwin, mistakenly launch World War III. That didn’t happen, but it has been a busy start to what promises to be a very problematic presidency. There has been the usual flurry of shiny media objects, which in Trump world amounts mostly to diversion tactics, drawing the press’s attention away from the crucial legislative and executive actions that form the core of the Republicans’ reactionary agenda.

Get the big picture.The most effective way of distracting the media is by attacking them head-on, which we saw last weekend when Sean Spicer marched into the White House press room and delivered a stern lecture to the fourth estate, mostly based on outright lies and falsehoods. It was a remarkable performance, worthy of a pre-teenager, and pure Trumpist arrogance/ignorance. All presidential administrations lie; the Trump cadre, however, is distinctive in that they tell painfully obvious lies – lies that require no research to disprove. Many of their transparent lies are rooted in Trump’s overheated ego: the whining about the relative size of his inaugural crowd, the fable about millions of fraudulent votes in California, and so on. The press should just slap the “lie” label on this trash and soldier on.

It’s what lies behind the lies that should be our focus. The voter fraud accusation is the opening salvo in Trump’s effort to nationalize the ongoing GOP war on minority voters. This will start with an investigation along the lines of his inquiry into Obama’s birth certificate. (“You won’t believe what my people are finding.”) And while the mainstream press has reported that Trump’s fellow Republicans have backed away from this, Paul Ryan’s response was instructive. He essentially said that voter fraud was a “concern” in Wisconsin that the state addressed through voter I.D. legislation and other measures. Those responses helped deliver that Wisconsin to Trump, of course. So, with respect to legislative “solutions” to so-called voter fraud (i.e. voting on the part of people who don’t typically vote for them), Trump and Ryan are on the same page.

Bottom line: Keep your eye on Congress and on the executive orders and memorandums flying out of the White House, and respond accordingly. That’s where the real fight is now.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Start ’em.

Is that the time? Are you sure? Seems like the sun just went down. Are you certain that THAT is the sun coming up again? Possible that it’s just a distant thermo-nuclear explosion. Think of the times we live in. No? Okay …. morning. Uhhhhhlll.

Hey, don’t look at me like that. Everybody …. and I do mean EVERYbody … gets caught in the Winter doldrums, bobbing around between the cross currents of time, never catching a break until the first signs of impending spring. Not that this is all that much of a Winter. I mean, it’s been 30s and 40s for about a week now, here in the dead of January in upstate New York. But despite the freakish weather, we try to hold on to tradition here. We of Big Green don’t give a damn about how nice it is outside. It’s winter, damn it, and we’re determined to get nothing done.

While it shouldn’t, this includes work on music and other sound stuff. That’s been kind of stalled, frankly, but again … doldrums. That said, we should be back in the studio on Friday if we can stay awake that long. I’m starting to No one is above the law!think we have some bear-like ancestry back a few generations – I have a strong inclination towards hibernation. In fact, I’m getting sleepy as I type this. Bouncing bowling ball … riding up the side of a dragon’s tail. Yep, sleepy.

I know … we should all be beating the bushes for work, right? Of course, that presupposes the notion that we give a flying fuck. As that web video makes clear, honey badger just don’t give a fuck. Besides, why should we beat the bushes? Haven’t they suffered enough? And what about the law of averages? If we all strive to excel, NO ONE will be average anymore. Isn’t that a violation of the law? Sounds like it to me!

These are matters that consume the mind and confound the soul. Or confound the mind and … confuse the soul? Soul Confusion – there’s a good name for a band. See? I’m already working hard, friends. Goodbye winter doldrums. And so on.

Weird ass music since 1986