Tag Archives: Gaza

News, Songs

T-minus 22 for our new single; time to learn some guitar chords.

First, tune your folk guitar to the standard tones. Okay, so how does that go again? Every Good Boy Does Fine, right? But what about the sixth string? Wait a minute – you mean there’s a DIFFERENT system for guitar strings? Man god damn. This is more complicated than I thought.

So, you may well ask, why am I furiously brushing up on my substandard guitar skills? Simple, my friend – we will be releasing our new single on June 1st, and I may be called upon to perform the number at some point. And pianos are heavy, or at least mine are, so it makes more sense to work up a solo version on my nice portable Martin D-1. Which I can barely play. Hence the drills. Get the picture?

Up “Against It”

I am authorized by Big Green’s counsel to announce that our new single, Against It, will be released on June 1. This will by our first commercial release in a year, since we dropped our fourth album, In Retrograde, on May 1 of 2025, and I guess you could say we’re excited. Yes, you could certainly say that, though saying it doesn’t make it true. We’re not the excitable type, frankly – we just kind of do our thing and chill, like they did in the old days.

That said, Against It is not exactly a chill track, so to speak. Unlike nearly all 24 of the songs on In Retrograde, this single is topical. And no, I don’t mean it’s the kind of song that comes in a tube and that you should only use externally. Against It can be termed a political song. We’ll have more to say about the lyric later. I can tell you that the cover art is a photo by a Palestinian photographer named Hosny Salah, who works in Gaza (see below).

So, hey … something to look forward to, anyway. Am I right? I said, AM I RIGHT?! Whoops. Apologies – I keep forgetting this is a blog post, not a face to face conversation. Wrong of me to expect instant affirmation.

Other things happening … and not

Aside from our pending single release and my ongoing struggles with a low-rent six-string, we’ve got a few things on the back burner. These include:

The Ned Trek Collection – As I previously mentioned, we’re planning on pulling together one (or possibly three) albums worth of our Ned Trek songs from the same-named podcast we ran in the twenty teens. These would mostly be remixes of the songs we included on the musical episodes, plus some material we never released (including eight tracks from the mythical “lost episode” that we recorded in 2018 but never finished).

There are – again, as referenced in previous posts – about 100 Ned Trek tracks. We’re going to work them over and see how many will meet our AMAZINGLY HIGH STANDARDS for commercial release. (Please keep the laughter down – I’m trying to think while I type.) In any case, whether or not we drop one, two, or three volumes via CDBaby or whatever, we will make the other tracks available for listening via other means (yet to be determined). Maybe a King Crimson-like archive! Or (far more likely) something infinitely cheaper!

New Songs – Lest we be denounced as mere retread-focused has-beens (or, in our case, more like never have-beens), we do have a raft of new songs just begging to be recorded (well …. Matt has new songs. I have song ideas that need work, so situation normal). Once we dispense with the Ned Trek remixes, we will move on to that little project. (Promises, promises …)

Write the colonel

If you have questions about anything to do with this lame-ass band, don’t hesitate to reach out at [email protected]. We always respond to inquiries … and I mean ALWAYS. (You can also consult our Freakishly Unanswerable Questions for more general info.)

Political Rants

When brute strength gets construed as virtue.

We’re witnessing another paroxysm of killing in the occupied territories of what was once mandate Palestine, the Israelis using their first-world military capabilities against a captive populations with at best pathetic means of self-defense. Much has been written, broadcast, etc., about the proximate cause of this latest bloodbath. I am somewhat persuaded by the argument that it may be a function of Netanyahu’s inability to form a coalition government for the umpteenth time. The best way to get the religious bigot and neo-fascist blocks on your team is to start blowing Palestinians to bits.

Whatever the specific heinous sequence of events, this is just Israel “mowing the lawn” once again, dropping bombs on one of the most densely populated regions on earth, rampaging through Al Aqsa mosque, beating the living hell out of young Palestinians and killing as many as they can manage. (See my posts on the 2014 edition of this story.) You have no doubt heard endless condemnations of rockets being fired into Israel from the open-air prison that is Gaza, but make no mistake: these are toys compared to what’s being dropped on Gazans every day and every night. The power differential between the two sides is absolute.

Rights to exist.

There is no question but that Israel is legitimately a country. It has a highly problematic origin story and was founded on massive violence and displacement, like every other country, including and especially the United States. So within the pre-1967 borders, it has rights and responsibilities. Beyond those borders, in East Jerusalem, in the West Bank, in Gaza, in the Golan, it has only responsibilities, no rights. Our international order is less than ideal, but to the extent that there is a law of nations, that principle is at the center of it.

Palestinians have national rights, even though they don’t currently have a nation state. But because of their forced separation from their homeland, they are not seen by our foreign policy establishment as having the right to self-defense, to a decent living, to be free from the hand of oppressors, and so on. It is therefore up to us to ensure that their right to exist as a people is duly recognized.

Cracks in the apartheid wall.

Because of the degree to which the Israeli military relies on direct aid from us, popular opinion on Israel-Palestine in the United States is crucial. Up until recent years, the only voices you would hear on the mainstream media were those of Israeli PR flacks. But as the Intercept has reported, this is changing the same way public perception of police violence in the U.S. is changing – largely due to the fact that smart phone cameras make millions of people amateur photo journalists and documentary filmmakers.

Now raw footage of Israeli troops abusing Palestinians, marauding through their places of worship, their schools, etc., is available to compete with the carefully crafted video being generated by the IDF. Beyond that, a broader range of voices can now be heard on corporate media, such that actual substantive criticism of Israeli policy makes its way onto the airwaves to a greater extent than it did just a few years ago. That’s a remarkable shift that reflects shifting sentiments around the nation.

This is not the first atrocity committed against Palestinians and it won’t be the last. As Americans, we need to do what we can to move our government closer to a reasonable position on this conflict. Right now, their heads are in the 1980s – we need to snap them out of it.

luv u,

jp

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Political Rants

The Bolton effect

Well, it has taken, what … two weeks? Two weeks for Bolton to blow up not only the Iran deal but the nascent detente with North Korea as well. Quite an accomplishment, but then he is the same John Bolton that helped lie us into Iraq and provoke an earlier standoff with Iran and North Korea, back in his Bush 43 days. And while I hate to give the man too much credit for being relevant, Kim Jong Un did call him out by name in that communique, citing Bolton’s comments about disarming North Korea along the same lines as what the U.S. did with Libya. Now, I have to think Bolton knew what effect his words would have. I doubt that he would have believed the North Koreans would think that a positive comparison. (Clearly, they did not).

Dead wrong ... for different reasonsBolton appears to have leveraged the fact that our credibility is shot in order to foment this crisis. The world doesn’t need reminding that in Libya, we talked Qaddafi out of his nuclear arsenal, then supported an uprising against him that ended with this murder. They don’t need reminding that both Iraq and Afghanistan, non nuclear states, were both invaded by us and are still under the partial control of our military. So, they know that we are liable to attack if you don’t have nuclear weapons … or if the U.S. manages to talk you into relinquishing your arsenal. What lessons would you draw from this kind of behavior?

Not that Bolton alone has brought us to this point. Trump’s big mouth, apparently, played some role. Kim Jong Un, it appears, watches American television (or has people do that for him) and was able to hear Trump bragging about his initiative regarding Korea, boasting that no other president had done what he had done, soaking in the calls for a Nobel prize. But this Trumpian noise is not rooted in any ideology aside from Trump’s own cult of personality. Bolton, on the other hand, has an ideological foundation, not as a neocon, but more as an old-style imperial interventionist who disdains international institutions as irrelevant and values overwhelming American power over all else. He represents a deeply rooted mindset in our foreign and military policy establishment, and people like Bolton can use Trump to further their ends. They may have to pick their fights a little carefully, but that shouldn’t be a problem for an old hand like Mr. Mustache.

Hey, people – we knew it was going to be bad. And it’s likely to get worse before it gets better. Just push for peace … that’s all we can do.

60 Dead in Gaza. What a disgusting spectacle this week has been – Trump’s spawn celebrating the new American embassy in Jerusalem while IDF snipers pick off protesters at the Gaza border with deadly precision. More on this later. Again … worse before it gets better.

luv u,

jp