Usual Rubbish

Hello, yes.

Knee deep in other matters, my friend. That’s about all I can tell you. Thanks. Hope the ankle trouble gets better. (click!)

Oh, hi. Just in the midst of blowing someone off… I mean, ending a phone call somewhat abruptly. Just been one of those weeks. Can’t find time to do anything, including this blog. Shoo-wee. Busy, busy, busy. What other meaningless chatter can I share?

Big Green news: Matt and I are still mixing cousin Rick’s new album. Mixed another song last night. These will be finished versions of some of the numbers we featured on the podcast over the last year. (Hey, collect them all!) We’ve done about half a dozen as of this week. So it goes.

Recorded another episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN’s now near-monthly feature, Mr. Ned, a politically charged and wholly insensitive dramatization of the adventures of Willard “Mitt” Romney’s dressage horse, on the model of 60s sit-com “Mr. Ed” – everything from bad scripts to low production values. Talk about a cop job! Anyway, you’ll hear it and hear it soon. Spoiler alert: Willard and Ned walk through a time portal and take a trip through interstellar space. With hilarious consequences. (Well…. hilarious if you are easily amused by childish humor. I, myself, don’t go in for that sort of thing. I find it crude and unrefined. You, however….)

What came in the mail bag this month? Not a lot. Bills, bills, bills, political advertisements, eviction notices, misdirected packages, you name it. No fan mail. No one writes the colonel. We just sit here, fashioning those little fishes out of gold, then melting them down and making them again, over and over. (Oh, christ. I’ve lapsed into Gabriel Garcia Marquez-land.)

Okay, that’s all from the mill. I’m dead on my feet, frankly. Can barely press the keys. (Piano or computer). Sleeeeep, Joe Perry, sleeeeeep…..

Political Rants

Bite back the bad news.

I’m not going to say much about politics this week. Just bracketed with work, school, more work, etc. A few quick comments and I’m out – sorry for the lameness.

Watched the Biden / Ryan matchup. My thought about presidential and vice presidential debates is that you tend to feel the person you agree with was the winner. Only makes sense, right? This was a much easier contest to watch than the last one, I must say, but it retained one of the central themes of the presidential debate: Romney/Ryan does not want to talk specifics about anything, and are now in full flight from their own positions.

The purported “numbers guy” seems very reluctant to use any when it comes to talking about their tax plan. They are planning to cut marginal tax rates to 20% across the board, while increasing military spending something like a trillion dollars or more above current spending levels. Ryan was claiming that this can be balanced by closing loopholes on upper income earners. Horseshit. Where’s the proof? They don’t have any numbers. They can’t name deductions that they would suggest in any negotiations with Congress. They’re talking about an enormous gap that their plan would greatly expand, they claim they can close it, but they offer no details. They’ve got a secret plan to cut taxes and balance the budget while raising military spending: it’s called “Just trust us.”

The laser focus on the Benghazi terror attack is instructive about how efficient the right-wing echo chamber is. Fox News blows this story to its many millions of viewers, along with Rush and the gang; the more mainstream outlets pick it up out of nervousness. What the hell – they are blowing this thing up as if it were a bigger failure than 9/11. They certainly talk about it more than Afghanistan, where Americans are killed every week, for chrissake.

That’s all for now. More later.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Distinct possibilities.

The trouble with doing liner notes is that, damn it, there aren’t any liners nowadays. Nothing to put the notes on. Are you getting all this? Great.

Just dictating my thoughts to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). What else are PRA’s for anyway if not taking dictation? I had a dictating machine once, but it went off one day and started an authoritarian government in the Philippines … so now I’ve got Marvin. Sounds like a foot disease. (Don’t tell Marvin I said that. Gratefully, he’s not programmed to read blogs.)

What am I dictating to said personal robot assistant? Just incidental liner notes on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Yes, I know, this is billed to be an album by Cousin Rick Perry, for Cousin Rick Perry, featuring Cousin Rick Perry. That is all true. But it is also the next Big Green album, and damn it, it needs liner notes like carter needs liver pills. (Ask your grandfather, kid.) This is a complicated task, so it is taking up much of Marvin’s time these days. Between draining the water out of the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill and putting buckets under all the leaks in the roof, Marvin is simply run off his wheels. Woe is he who serves Big Green. Woe, indeed.

Whoa. Indeed! Is that yet another band backing up Cousin Rick? What the hell, that makes an even dozen now. It seems like every track has a different backing band, each one weirder than the last. All of these freaking credits. Once we get done paying the mechanical rights on this sucker, there isn’t going to be enough profit left to buy a discarded sandwich at the local pub. (My go-to place for discarded sandwiches.) Damned job-killing regulations! Who the hell says we have to pay every band that plays with Cousin Rick, let alone list their names on the freaking album?

BMI, ASCAP…. anyone else? All right, damn it. Let’s see. Frank and the Texas Hots. No way am I including them. What else have we got?

 

Weird ass music since 1986