That one was mine. Oh yes, absolutely it was. It had that black spot on the left side. No, no… the left-hand side, as one looks at it. Bloody mongoose!
Oh, hi. You caught me haggling over the incalculable bounty of a bunch of bananas. Somehow, twenty years ago, I never pictured myself spending any serious time trying to convince a rogue mongoose that a twice-discarded piece of fruit belonged to me, not him. (I had no vision, no foresight.) And yet here I am, on the cobblestone street outside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, engaged in this literally fruitless enterprise. No, my friends, I am not hungry. We of Big Green are not wanting for sustenance. We have our art to feed us, our music to fill our bellies, our powerpoint slides to use as sandwich slices, our amplifier heads to employ as toaster ovens, our… our… man, I’m hungry!
All right, to be honest… it is lunchtime at the Mill. (The whistle just blew – crazy thing still works even though there hasn’t been a shift on duty here in probably 50 years.) It’s a 
Pavlovian response for me. Still, I don’t want the banana for snacks. We are working on concepts for the next Big Green album, and one of the many, many useless ideas involves bananas. (Only one? you may ask.) Not sure – I think Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have come up with that one. Hire an old phonograph somewhere, he says. Get a banana, he says. Put the banana on the phonograph turntable, he says. So what do I do? I go and listen to him, that’s what. Who’s the fool here, eh? The fool robot or the fool who listens to him? Oh, well. We grab ideas wherever we can find them.
Not that the bananas wouldn’t come in handy anyway. All that stuff about 
spiritual/artistic food? In truth, it’s not very satisfying. And bananas are better than what I can usually wrestle away from the local mongooses. (Mongeese?) Typically that’s a breadfruit rind or coconut shells. I mean, if I’m going to have a spartan dinner, I would prefer it not be something that has to be eaten with vise-grips. Hard times indeed. We’ve been trying to put our meager minds together on how to yank ourselves out of this pit of poverty and obscurity. (Leave us face it – we have a following like the fictional band played by Flight of the Conchords.) I don’t know. Hootenannies? Open rehearsals? Slide shows? Bake sales?
That’s the thing – so many ideas, so little time.
enough. But whatever his motivations or limitations may be, we simply cannot allow ourselves to be confined by them. What America needs is a healthy dose of movement politics – the kind that brought us the five day work week, earned black people the vote, and brought the Vietnam war to an end. It’s the only way fundamental change happens, and we had best start facing that fact.
Whether or not Obama is serious about making positive change, he should understand one thing: the Republican party, particularly those in Congress, will not support him no matter what he does. He could adopt all of their positions (instead of just many of them) and they will still work to destroy him politically. That is their clear objective, whatever noises they make for the cameras and microphones. From a political standpoint, I don’t blame Obama for addressing the G.O.P. retreat this week and taking their questions. I think he should call them out, and we did see a little bit of that today. But if he seriously thinks that they are going to work with him on anything substantive, he is smoking crack. He would be well-advised to start appealing to his base, a.k.a. the people who got him elected, and use his considerable rhetorical gifts to articulate a more progressive vision of governance.
Yeah, that’s me… and yes, I’m doing a cover by The Contours, circa 1962. Got to keep the lights on somehow. If it takes encouraging a bunch of over-swilled woodchucks to do the “Mashed Potato”, so be it. And in case some of you feel as though I’m being less than charitable or disrespecting my fellow upstate New Yorkers, think (or feel) again – I am playing for actual woodchucks, and they’ve been drinking hard cider all night. Tell you something right now – if you think human beings have a corner on inebriation, you’ve never played the Chuck House (seven blocks south of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill). I sincerely encourage you not to. You know how human drunks have a tendency to throw bottles? Well, here at the Chuck House, hard cider is served in little wooden kegs. That’s probably all I need to tell you about that. (INCOMING!)
got to scrape a few semolians together somehow, right? And these days, between Big Green interstellar (or even terrestrial) tours, I’ll take what I can get. Can you blame me? I’m tired of eating out of discarded pizza boxes and running my finger around the inside of empty soup cans. No more fighting the mongooses for bits of breadfruit (those bits that they don’t want) or pulling the bark off of baobab trees to see if there are any tender grubs to be had. (Not that I would EAT them, you understand. No, no… I train them to hunt for vegetables. Painstaking work.)
hard, hard times. We’re all finding ways to make a little extra on the side. Matt, for instance, is giving bird and wildlife tours. How can he stand all those grandmothers and boy scouts, you ask? Well…. he doesn’t run into any. The fact is, he’s bringing wild birds and animals around on tours, showing them the local points of interest. They can’t pay very much, it’s true – a desiccated pine cone is all he made yesterday – but it’s a job, and someone has to do it. The two Lincolns are doing a mutt and jeff routine down in the village square in hopes of garnering a few tips. So far, no luck… though some passers-by have offered unsolicited advice to the two… valuable tips like “Get a life!” and “Where did you losers come from?” and, of course, “Come back here! You’re supposed to pay for those kaiser rolls!” (I get that last one a lot.)