Usual Rubbish

Up, up, and no way!

First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is. Got all that? Okay, now let’s do the river. First there is a river, then there is no river… etc. Right. Let’s try Shirley! First there is a Shirley, then there is no Shirley….

Hello again. Just working through my daily mediation exercises. Are you with me? Breathe in… deeply… deeply…. Now let it out, you wind bag! Great — I feel much better now. Trust me, I need something to take the edge off. My fellow denizens of the Cheney Hammer Mill are beginning to make me crazy with a “k”. (Or “krazy”.) We’re trying to finish an album here, damnit, and what does Mitch Macaphee do but send my principal engineer — Marvin (my personal robot assistant) — into the exosphere on some kind of harebrained experiment… using Big Zamboola as the hot air balloon. Now, I know that sounds totally fucked up on sooooo many different levels, so let me deal with them one at a time so that you may better understand.

First — why are we using Marvin as an engineer? That’s simple. He’s got one hell of a set of ears. That was one thing Mitch really did right in building our mechanical friend, let me tell you. That robot can hear a pin drop on the other side of the world, or a child sighing for her mother in Madagascar, or bricks being fashioned by contract laborers in a distant galaxy (oh yes, they do exist — don’t tell me they don’t). When properly calibrated, he can spot the precise frequency that is giving Matt a headache at any point in a given song, whether it’s being generated by an acoustic guitar, a sousaphone, or one of those twangy banjo-like things they play in China. Oh, such a sensitive instrument is that Marvin. In fact, I believe that’s why Mitch sent him aloft in the Zamboola-balloon (or “Zamballoon”, as we’ve taken to calling it). Some kind of research into meteorological acoustics. (I think he’s preparing for a conference. What the fuck, just ask him.)

Well, all right, so the experiment is going to last a few days, that’s what Macaphee tells me. And we’re left to twiddle our own dials, as always — no help from nobody. No Marvin, of course. No producer. We can’t even get the man-sized tuber to sit in, mainly because he’s still wrapped up in that numismatic scam that anti-Lincoln has gotten him started on. Oh, fuck… excuse me. Tubey, put that change jar down! Rare coins, my ass! All coins are rare when you’re broke! Just put it down! Jeezus, he’s gullible. And then there’s Trevor James Constable, who’s been obsessing over his orgone generating device — apparently the works have become severely gummed up… to the point where it doesn’t even attract invisible flying predators anymore. I ask you… what the hell use is an orgone generating device if it doesn’t even attract invisible flying predators? (Trevor James is only now trying to find an explanation. I’ll keep you posted.)

So there you have it — Big Green left to its own devices, our entourage having abandoned us for greener pastures and more promising avenues of cultural and intellectual inquiry. And coin collecting, let us not forget. My change jar is empty, damn it. Tubey!!!

Political Rants

Enemies without.

Back in 1980 — what seems like ten thousand years ago now — I spent a year at the State University of New York College at New Paltz, about an hour north of New York City. It was a tumultuous year, the last of the Carter presidency, with the election of Ronald Reagan, the assassination of John Lennon, and — on a more personal note — the death of my brother Mark, a very excellent jazz pianist (among numerous other things), whose car was knocked off the road by some drunk up in Maine (a blood-alcohol brother of Dubya, no doubt… but I digress). It was also a full year of the Iranian hostage crisis, during which our nation was taken by a kind of hyper-nationalism hitherto unknown to me. Some may remember (amid the soaring gas prices) the jingoistic songs on the radio, the first bloom of yellow ribbons, and the like. I can remember walking through one of the classroom buildings at New Paltz and seeing some bulletin board graffiti that read, “Who needs the Ayatollah’s oil? We’ve got 15,000 Iranian students to burn.”

Those were indeed ugly times, as are these. But the madness of 1980 set the template for much of what followed, and we are still living with its repercussions. Iran remains official enemy number one — the “Great Satan”, in the parlance of the mullahs — their crimes against the U.S. a rap sheet that usually includes support for terrorism (mostly in reference to Hezbollah), nuclear ambitions, and posing an existential threat to Israel. Pretty thin gruel, as it happens. Yes, they give money and supplies to Hezbollah, but Hezbollah wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for Israel’s hysterical use of firepower over their 19-year occupation of Lebanon and thereafter. Yes, Iran does seek to enrich uranium, but these activities are still within the legal parameters of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and they have not demonstrated the ability to produce anything approaching weapons-grade uranium… though with a consistently belligerent nuclear-armed state (Israel) threatening them from just over the horizon, I wouldn’t be surprised if they should move in that direction. As for the existential threat to Israel, see the previous sentence. The only credible existential threat is the one directed at Iran by the regional nuclear power and by the global superpower (us). Amadenijad’s fulminations about Israel carry little weight a) because he is not the supreme leader of Iran, and b) because Iran does not have the capability to even begin to destroy Israel.

Israel, on the other hand, has the capability to destroy any state in the Middle East, with hundreds of undeclared nuclear weapons in their arsenal. And while the rest of the world is transfixed on the horror we’ve created in Iraq, Israel has taken this opportunity to kick the living hell out of the slum that is Gaza, firing missiles into densely populated residential neighborhoods and following their usual tactics. The IDF has iced so many children in the occupied territories that the western press hardly bothers to report on the phenomenon any more — it’s becoming remarkably unremarkable. All the while, our government — the only one that can effectively restrain Israel — is asleep at the switch, standing aside while the blood flows in Gaza, much as we did when Lebanon was savagely attacked last summer and when Jenin and Nablus were being pounded by the IDF. We have demonstrated in a multitude of ways how little we care about the lives and livelihoods of people in that area of the world. Repairing that will take more than a cosmetic changing of the guard at the Pentagon and some high sounding rhetoric.

In any case, twenty-six years of pointless enmity is enough. It’s time to start behaving like adults and make peace with the Muslim world like we did with Russia and China. Iran is a good place to start.

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

Next frame empty.

What is that… a bell tower of some kind? Can’t tell. My eyes are too clouded. Must be the Zenite snuff sFshzenKlyrn left for me in my jacket pocket. Next frame. A deer… in a field. Hmmmmm…

Oh, forgive me. Just clicking through a few Viewmaster wheels from long ago. I’m freaking lost on those things without the phonograph record to tell me when to change the slide. In any case, welcome back to the house of joy — a.k.a. the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in what we euphemistically (and with great license) refer to as Sri Lanka, but which is, in fact, an undisclosed location (though not the same one where you’ll find the other Cheney in all of our lives). Anyway, me (myself) and the fellows are just settling in here, getting used to our surroundings once again, breaking the same windows that our financial manager Geet O’Reilly had repaired while we were away. (She keeps doing that. So irritating.) Got to get a little air, you know, after being cooped up in a dusty space craft for nigh on to two months. Just breathe it in, friends!

Hi-de-ho, we’ve been turning our meager attention back to the second Big Green album, now in the mixing stage and nearing completion. While everyone has his/her part to play in this process, probably the most all-around useful member of our entourage has been the indefatigable Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has obligingly offered up his services as tape operator. Sure, sure — we had the man-sized tuber twisting the dials earlier in the process, but that was before, damn it. Tubey has got other interests. Music will never come first for him… not so long as he has coin collecting and pretzel-bending to keep him occupied. (Just the other day he found a “Peace” dollar in the bottom of my shirt cupboard — which, quite coincidentally, is just where I left the fucking thing.) Someone should ‘splain to Tubey that collecting other people’s coins is just plain stealing.

Trouble is, I think the person that got him into this hobby is none other that anti-Lincoln, the nefarious doppelganger of our late Great Emancipator. Anti-Lincoln is obviously running some kind of scam here, and apparently feels that the man-sized tuber is clueless enough to play an unwitting part in it. Don’t know where he would get such an outlandish idea — why, Tubey is the sharpest root vegetable I’ve ever traversed interstellar space with. Though… apparently not sharp enough to avoid handing over his ill-gotten gains to anti-Lincoln like so much lunch money. Can’t trust anybody anymore. Next thing you know, Mitch Macaphee will be enlisting Big Zamboola as some kind of hot-air balloon for his next atmospheric experiment. Hey…. so that isn’t a strangely 3-D depiction of a rising sun in my Viewmaster! And isn’t that Marvin in the gondola?

Okay, so what the fuck — we’re not going to make a lot of progress on our album this way. For chrissake, I wish Mitch would wait until after our remix session before he sends our tape operator into the exosphere. Bloody scientific mentality!

Weird ass music since 1986