Usual Rubbish

Tick, tock.

I don’t know. That looks like a relative of mine. Are you sure this isn’t my family album? Striking resemblance.

Not sure about the shirtless lookOh, hi. We’re just thumbing through a book on the ascent of man. If I were to pick one that looks most like me, it would clearly be Australopithecus, from maybe 3.5 million years ago. Old school, if there ever was one, and yet a mere wink of the eye in evolutionary terms. So I’m a throwback, for chrissake. Curvature of the spine. Small brain case. Predisposition for randomness. (Good thing old Australo had thumbs, or I couldn’t thumb through this thing.)

I guess we’re thinking about evolution around the Cheney Hammer Mill because, well … hell, somebody has to. It’s about time Big Green got down to the hard work of advancing the species. God knows we have precious little else to do. No gigs on the horizon. A podcast waiting to be recorded and edited. Songs standing unfinished. Come to think of it, we DO have a lot to do, just not a lot of will to act. I guess that just boils down to being lazy mothers. And maybe that’s just okay. Sure, we live in an abandoned hammer mill. Sure, our audience is scattered throughout the galaxy with the exception of the planet Earth. But we still have our pride … even if it’s only pride in lethargy.

I suppose if we were going to work on human evolution, some might suggest we consider starting with the development of a little organ called ambition. That seems to have been left our of our band’s DNA, and rightfully so. Lookit – Big Green is about making music of dubious quality, not the business of hawking said music to all and sundry. Some people are born with the sales chromosome, some just the beer chromosome; some both. It’s not for us to decide, my friends. I have concluded my opening statements!

Wow, that got a little heated. It’s almost like I grew that ambition gene just in the last five minutes. Could do with a new pair of genes.

Political Rants

Fear itself (again).

These grim days remind me a bit of the far worse days of late 2001, when our nation was reeling from the 9/11 terror attacks and the world seemed to be falling in on itself. (It happened that my family life was imploding at the same time, but that’s another story.) I guess what reminds me most of that time is the visceral fear evident not only in mass media culture but in everyday life. People are scared, very scared about some relatively minor threats, while at the same time seemingly unconcerned about the real dangers facing us.

Year 2 of the Romney foreign policyThis is a cultivated disconnect, certainly no accident. Every day, the news media hammer away at the threat of Ebola, of ISIS, of Russia, and to a lesser extent North Korea and Iran. In the case of the former, we’re reaching a near hysteria about a virus that has affected only a handful of Americans, and only three cases in the U.S. The public has been worked up into such a lather that politicians are falling over themselves to try to benefit from it, take advantage of it, channel it in some way that is useful to them. One only wishes we could evoke this sort of reaction on actual threats, like our disastrous automotive transportation system that kills over 30,000 of us a year.

I only raise that particular example because it’s the 24th anniversary of my brother’s death behind the wheel of a crappy, very common unsafe-at-any-speed vehicle. There are far greater threats, though – those of climate change and of nuclear war, for instance. The former we cannot bring ourselves to seriously address; the latter we have discounted and essentially forgotten, unless our attention is turned to an official enemy, like Iran or North Korea. If our news media were reporting on these issues the way they report on a hemorrhagic African virus that’s not half as contagious as the flu, we might ultimately feel motivated to do something about them. So far, no potato.

We are probably the most fearful people ever to run an empire. It’s something we need to overcome, so that we can arrive at the kind of clarity we need to see what actually confronts us.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Genericville.

Do we have 1.5 children? Only if you double-count the man-sized tuber. Let’s ask anti-Lincoln to do the counting – ever since the war, he sees everything twice.

Stupid comet!Oh, hello. Just working up our census form. Don’t mind me. Didn’t know there was going to be a 2014 census, but I guess that’s understandable, since we don’t get a lot of news flowing into the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our squathouse. Just yesterday some dude in a Fedora knocked on the front gate and handed me a questionnaire. He said I had to finish it by Saturday or his friend might set the mill on fire. (I think the friend’s name was Giancarlo.) How old is Mitch Macaphee? No … I mean before the youth serum?

Questions, questions. Way too much on Big Green’s plate lately, I can tell you. We’ve got the THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast, of course – always time-consuming. Our next episode of Ned Trek, for instance, will feature as many as 6 or 7 new songs, never before heard (and probably never again), all apropos of the ridiculous story line. This is part of the biggest crop of new material to come out of Big Green in, I don’t know, twenty years or so. Over the past year or so, we’ve written and began recording something like 30 new songs; that’s since we finished Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick last year.

Then there’s the pressure to get out and play in front of an audience, for chrissake. We considered doing a gig or two on Mars this month, but given the fact that the red planet is going to be buzzed by comet Siding Spring this weekend, we thought better of it. We have had run-ins with comets before; can’t say that we ever got the better of those confrontations. Chilly little hunks of ice, those comets. No pity. Who can blame them? They’re billions of years old, and only get a little sun once every million years or so, then it’s back to the Ort cloud. But I digress.

Hmmm…. Should I account for multiple personalities on this census form? Yes, I’m back on anti-Lincoln again (and his alter ego, anti-Edgar Allan Poe).

Weird ass music since 1986