Where do we sign again? Here? Right…. Now, we’re done. We’re not done? Freaking hell! You’ve already got our signatures sixty-seven times. Just copy the fuckers.
Everything by the book, that’s how these legal types are. Anyway… greetings and welcome to Big Green-land. We’re finalizing the terms of our forthcoming CD release (actually, it’s our second-coming release… we’ve got two more to go before we get to our fourth) entitled International House, and it’s important to get all the details straight. Except when it comes to really shmeensy details of the sort lawyers love to dive into. (They’re like hippos who joined a flee circus and are trying to dive into the little swimming pool.) Appendix this and codicil that; refer to paragraph 97, section vii; subsection 7a; insofar as the party of the second part shall render unto the party of the first part said sums as designated in paragraph 43
…. Damn! I’ll tell you, it’s all we musicians can do to keep up with the obsessions of the corporate paymasters who rule our asses. (Power to the people! Strike! Strike! Strike!)
Whoops… slipped into a Marxian trance for a moment. (Workers control the means of production…. ahem!) Okay, now I don’t think I’m a particularly unreasonable person. Certainly Marvin (my personal robot assistant) doesn’t think so, either. And I know that brother Matt is far less unreasonable than I am. John? He’s a saint among men. And yet we all seem to recognize that our label, Loathsome Prick Records, is being more than a little true to their name when it comes to getting credit on the album. They’re insisting on prominent acknowledgment, even though this is essentially a self-paid manufacturing job. (We’re mortgaging the most valuable thing we have…. Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating machine. Don’t tell Trevor James!) Now how asinine is that? And I’m not talking about a subtle plug – they want an entire panel of the CD cover…and an audio plug at the opening of the album! Here’s the copy they’ve proposed:
Big Green’s “International House” is brought to you by Loathsome Prick Records, the awesomest label in the world. Without us, these losers would suck in obscurity. Take it away! Fucking thing sucks!
I don’t know about you, but that strikes me as mildly insulting. And they want it read by some guy they know who sounds like Bill O’Reilly freaking out on Inside Edition. (It may even be O’Reilly, I don’t know…. they’ve got some connections.) Now, this wouldn’t be a problem… if we had a competent lawyer. Now when I 
say “competent”, I mean someone who understands the law in the 21st Century. With our limited budget, we’ve been relying on legal counsel from the law firm Lincoln, Anti-Lincoln, Zamboola, and Tuber. (I’ll spare you their T.V. jingle.) As you may have surmised, the only two “lawyers” here are honest Abe and his doppelganger (who, actually, never passed the bar… in fact, he’s never passed a bar in my experience without stopping for at least a couple of drinks). And their expertise is mostly in the context of 19th Century railway law. As for the other partners, well…. the less said the better.
So that’s where we stand… legal blackmail from our rapacious corporate label. Just one more way THE MAN keeps us down. Workers of the world UNITE! (Damn – there I go again. Pipe down, comrade!)
tribunal since the end of World War II has been in session. Who’s the first accused war criminal to take the stand, the Herman Goering of the global war on terror? Well, it’s some dude who drove Bin Laden’s car. Or so they say. Actually, the evidence about that is a little thin, and some of that is testimony extracted under torture (or “enhanced interrogation techniques” as the dark comedians of the Bush administration term it). Another problem: a lot of the folks at Gitmo (Hamdan included) were handed over by surrogates in exchange for a bounty, so you tend to get a high error rate on your collars (e.g. a lot of people who owed a neighbor money or just got on the wrong side of somebody). Happily, the tribunal doesn’t rely on the same standard of evidence as one might expect in, say, a mainland American court of law. I suspect many of these cases, like that of Hamdan the “driver”, would simply fall apart in domestic courtrooms. Not on Fantasy Island, however.
looting, destruction of public property, and collapse of public services while acting as an occupying power;
What do you suggest we do, Gertrude? What’s done is done, right? What? No, no… that’s not an option. Besides… he’s too old to be any good in a stew. Bound to be stringy as hell.
Mitch Macaphee some few years ago. (Marvin is bent just slightly out of shape, as perhaps you can tell from his photos.) I have to say, I don’t like it when people yell at me over the phone. I kind of worry they’ll hurt their throats and have to talk like Miles Davis for the rest of their natural lives. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that….)
I do… but what are the chances both would have the same front page?) Now the label is all pissed off. They’re nervous about terrestrial record sales, of course. I keep telling them that any publicity is good publicity, but these fuckers are old school. They can smell a scandal fifty miles away, especially when it involves five-foot-tall root animate vegetables on motorized carts. That freaking tuber has put us in Coventry once again. (Where is Coventry? Right where we are, that’s where.)