Must be the generator, Mitch. Did you use that nefarious contraption again? Probably pulled too much current, and now look at us. Clueless and in the dark. What’s new, eh?

Yes, my friends. More power issues here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. That long extension cord I had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) run from the pizza place across the street? Well, someone discovered it, unplugged it, etc. Last time I order a pizza from those cheapskates! And when we found an alternative power source (i.e. the antique store on the other side of the alley… their back door latch is a little unreliable), what happens but Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, decides to crank up the old Orgone Generating Device in the basement where Trevor James Constable left it years ago, and… and… well, I hate when that shit happens.

This always happens when we’re between tours. People get bored, start looking for distractions. For the two Lincolns (posi and anti), it’s Yahtzee - game after game of freaking Yahtzee. No wonder they lost the war! (Home schooling… what can I tell you?) For the mansized tuber, it’s that stupid ant farm he got for Christmas. (He just loves to watch the little guys dig tunnels.) For Matt, it’s running around after wild animals with bags of seed and video cameras. Johnny White? He’s all about flying aeroplanes. Mitch Macaphee’s tastes, however, are a bit more exotic. Time travel, the thirst for limitless power, formulating theorums to destroy galaxies …. idle hands, you know. So he fires up the old Orgone Generating Device, blows a fuse next door, and now I can’t even post a podcast, for chrissake.

Then there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and his latest obsession. He picked up my Harper’s magazine the other day, thumbed through it, and read a statistic about how many robots there are in the world today. Not counting household appliances, it’s apparently in excess of one million - that’s right, more than a million automatons in the world today! Well, this hit Marvin like a truck. “I am not alone” I heard him repeat to himself in standard, monotonous robotian fashion. That’s what he’s been up to. Wheeling around the mill, Harper’s issue in hand, muttering to himself. What’s next? Will he find a nice, wind-up pen pal? Will he volunteer for the Romney campaign?

Well, that’s all I’ve got. My between-the-tours pastime, somewhat less enjoyable, is trying to keep the lights on in this freaking dump. Any suggestions on where I should run this extension cord next?

Hey, check it out - new January episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN. You’ve been warned.

The South Carolina food fight - a longstanding electoral tradition - is in full fury, the GOP candidates fighting like dogs, only this time with even bigger dogs - the Super PACs - duking it out in the same ring. This is typically when the worst tendencies come to the fore in the Republican party, and this year should be even uglier than the last two presidential cycles.

In any case, let’s look at some of what’s being said, shall we?

Gingrich in the last debate: “To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”

Hah! You’ve got to love this guy, don’t you? He finds it “appalling” that the media would stoop so low as to open a debate with questions of infidelity. Yes, this is the same Newt Gingrich that was Speaker during much of the Clinton administration - the same Newt who made that president’s extramarital dalliances a national issue, to the point of the first impeachment trial in the Senate since Reconstruction. Newt Gingrich, who led the nation to a constitutional crisis over a presidential blow job, is now appalled that his pseudo-romantic foibles are considered a matter of national concern. Welcome to the world you helped invent, big guy.

Romney in the last debate: “I’m someone who believes in free enterprise. I think Adam Smith was right. And I’m going to stand and defend capitalism across this country, throughout this campaign.”

Who can doubt that Romney stands for free enterprise? It’s the system that made him a multi-millionaire, with so much cash he needs to ship a fair amount of it to the Cayman Islands for safe (i.e. tax-free) keeping. The thing is, like so many modern-day “capitalists”, he has a very narrow understanding of Adam Smith - the man who had little sympathy for the “joint stock companies” of his day and who decried the “vile maxim of the rulers of mankind - all for me and nothing for anybody else.”  Smith was a product of the Enlightenment, which of course puts him in a separate category altogether from these robber barons and bigots, who make me think of another more recent philosopher, John Dewey, who described politics as “the shadow cast upon society by big business.” True that.

Rick Perry: “I quit”

Domage. I, for one, will miss Cousin Rick, if only for all those songs he did for us.

luv u,

jp

BANG! BANG! BANG! goes the hammer. POP! POP! POP! goes the rivet gun. RING! RING! RING! goes the phone. It’s our neighbors, the antique dealer. He’s telling me to shut the hell up. “Turn it down, the radio!” he shouts over the phone, and I smile quietly to myself.

Why am I amused by this? Hey… when you call a dump like this “home”, you must find amusement wherever it may be lurking. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are always looking for new distractions. Is that because Big Green is not what you would call a “performing” band? Perhaps, perhaps. Fewer reasons to venture out of the mill, particularly now that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes our grocery runs for us. “You trust him with money?” I imagine you’re thinking right now. My imaginary answer would be, “No; we program him to work as a day laborer before he goes to the store. That’s how we roll.”

Well, goddamn-a, why do we need a robot’s money… when a Google search on “Big Green International House” turns up more than five million sites? No man can say. Perhaps it is that vow of poverty. Not that any of us took such a vow, but perhaps someone else took one for us. In any case, we have to keep busy somehow, right? And aside from Googling our own names (and album titles) there must be something productive we can do.

So hell, I’m building a new Big Green web site. It will be big… and green. Perhaps shiny, perhaps not. I’m not super crazy about shiny, to tell the honest truth - it makes things look too much like what’s looking at them. Anyway, that’s what all the hammering is about - that’s the sound of Web development up here in the sticks. That’s what it sounds like when someone is building a Web site you can really sink your teeth into. A site that is chewy, not cakey… just the way you like it.

As you might expect, we’re doing this - as we do our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN - on a shoestring. A little infusion of venture capital wouldn’t go amiss right now, truth be told. Get Bain on the phone. No answer? Hmmmm…. must have closed up shop. Start picking numbers randomly out of the phone book. (I’m addressing Marvin, you people - don’t try this at home.) Someone out there must be looking to drop some cash on an ill-considered venture.

Uh-oh. The phone. It’s my neighbor again. Or it’s Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm. Either way, I’m fucked.

Just a few comments on some current issues, now that the presidential primary season is well underway. And since the entire GOP field - with the occasional exception of Jon Huntsman - denies the existence of climate change, let me start by mentioning that here in upstate New York, where the typical January measures snowfall in feet, not inches, and where January temperatures are often subzero for days on end, it is raining and in the 30s. There is no snow on the ground and there hasn’t been, really, any significant snow yet this season. I’ve lived here most of my life and I can say that this is unprecedented in my experience. And yet when I mention the words “climate change” to people in connection with the fact that we appear to be locked in permanent November, they look at me like I have six heads. “Do you really think that’s what it is?” a friend asked me. He home-schools his son, by the way.

This, my friends, is the power of the fossil-fuel industry. Through their marketing and their political surrogates, they have taken a nation on the brink of consensus regarding climate change back in 2007 and turned it 180 degrees into deep denial. The great recession has helped in this regard, of course - jobs versus environment has always been an effective diversion. It has particular resonance now that the Democrats are effectively missing in action on this issue, running scared on the threat of nastiness from the other side. Welcome to the Alice in Wonderland election year.

Would that climate change were the only matter about which the major party candidates appear to know nothing. Here, for instance, is an excerpt from Willard “Mitt” Romney’s New Hampshire primary victory speech a few nights ago:

President Obama wants to put free enterprise on trial. In the last few days, we have seen some desperate Republicans join forces with him. This is such a mistake for our Party and for our nation. This country already has a leader who divides us with the bitter politics of envy. We must offer an alternative vision. I stand ready to lead us down a different path, where we are lifted up by our desire to succeed, not dragged down by a resentment of success. In these difficult times, we cannot abandon the core values that define us as unique - We are One Nation, Under God.

Okay, sure… there’s a lot that’s wrong with this. I think the most flabbergasting part, though, is the “bitter politics of envy” gambit. Who is advising this geezer? Someone who’s been living in a cave for the last year? For one thing, free enterprise doesn’t need Barack Obama or anyone else to put it on trial - it’s been doing a pretty thorough job on itself these past few years. I’m always astounded by these so-called free market evangelists who insist that government intervention is detrimental to economic growth in a world where command economies like China are eating our lunch and “European-style entitlement societies”, as Romney puts it, offer a far better standard of living than us even in the midst of a major debt crisis.  Can they point to a single example of an unbridled capitalist economy in which the vast majority of people enjoy a rising standard of living? Thought not.

Lookout below. Looks like we may have another idiot president in the hopper.

Hmmm. I like that one you had the other night. How did it go? Strum through that number once again, will you? There’s a good chap.

Ensconced once again within the crumbling walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, I can report that we of Big Green are back to doing what we do best: inventing snacks out of items collected from the goodwill box. If it weren’t for all this music stuff we might be good at it by now. Oh, the burden of servings such a demanding muse! Nothing is good enough, nothing! We work our fingers to the bone - nay, to the marrow - hammering out songs in the clammy basement of this condemned factory, then tossing them skyward… only to see them knocked back in anger. “Send me hooks!” demands the disembodied voice. “We are not amused!”

It appears that somewhere in the metaphysical accounting department some faceless paper-pusher assigned us a pop music muse. Let’s get one thing clear - we do not make pop music. We make crackle music - there’s a difference. It’s a whole ‘nother Rice Krispie. We don’t write choruses like, Keep the ball rollin, keep the ball rollin…! or We could have had it all-uh-hall…! Nah, nah, nah - our choruses go like this:

I’m not Kublai Khan, no no no!
I’m not Kublai Khan, no no no!

… or …

Lincoln! It shouldn’t happen to our quality Lincoln!

No wonder that muse hates our guts (or at least our hooks). Though I think all of us agree - this is the kind of criticism we have received in the past from our various labels. Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm (now Hegephonic); Loathsome Prick; all of them had their concerns with the material. They also had some concerns about our various retainers - Mitch Macaphee, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and our official spokesvegetable the mansized tuber (now tweeting at http://www.twitter.com/mansizedtuber ). Before putting any resources behind a terrestrial tour of any kind, they would insist that we cut them loose, shave off our long yokel beards, and start playing banjo versions of the Monkees’ greatest hits. For my money, I prefer to confine our performances to deep space… for the nonce, at least.

Well, is that the time? Got to get back to work on that album. Oh, yes… there will be another…. all in due time.

All that run up, and such an unsatisfying result. What a pity the election process never takes a break here in the U.S. of A. We’ve been in a near-constant cycle of electing people since 2008, with whole cable networks devoting resources to consideration of the various candidates ad infinitum. Still, here we are with two primary G.O.P. challengers who appear to disagree on very little … and who mutually argue that we should go straight back to the same policies that landed us in the hole and the end of the Bush administration. It’s a wealth-protection strategy, to be sure - wealth as concentrated in the hands of the extremely well-to-do. There really isn’t anything else on offer by either Romney or Santorum, except an early commitment to war against Iran. (That should be good for the economy.)

We have reached a point where the Republican party is inhabiting an entirely separate reality from the rest of us. In their world, there is no global warming, no inequality, no corporate dominance, no limits to American military might. They mark the beginning of the recession in the Obama administration, not the Bush administration. They see the national debt as the cause of unemployment. On their planet, the only problem with our electoral system is fraudulent voting - i.e. people (perhaps “illegal” immigrants) breaking federal law to usurp a franchise very few Americans are inclined to exercise legitimately. All domestically produced fossil fuel, in their tiny minds, is somehow reserved for use by Americans alone, not simply dumped into the global market and snapped up by whoever pays for it (i.e. how it actually works).  

This being the case, their standard bearer could be pretty much anybody. No specialized knowledge required - sorry, Jon Huntsman - just a willingness to carry water for the richest people in America and a corporate culture that is not only making more profits than it has since the great recession hit but is also paying less in taxes than it was in 2008. Mitt fits the bill; so does Rick “man-on-dog” Santorum. Both potentially good stewards of our national top-down economy. In fact, any one of them, all the way down to cousin Rick Perry, would be acceptable to the moneyed overlords, though I think it’s clear that the preference of the institutional elite is Mitt Romney.

Still, with such flaccid support, they must wonder if the right-wing rabble might be getting out of hand.  Mitt’s pathetic victory demonstrates that winning this year is what losing was four years ago.

luv u,

jp

Well, it’s finally coming down. The snow that is. And the lamp post. Yes, you heard me right - the lamp post came down … and Jim Bob is responsible.

Okay, truth is… I don’t know for certain that Jim Bob is responsible. It may well have been Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who knocked the lamp post down during the first snow storm of the year. Here it is, the week after Christmas, and people are still driving like it’s July. Spoiled by global warming, I suppose. In any case, I only have myself to blame. It was I who suggested that Marvin serve as our chauffeur until a suitable replacement might be found. What? You didn’t know we had people driving us around? Well, that’s because we haven’t up until now. We’ve just recently adopted the Bowie-esque doctrine of acting successful to become successful. It’s like priming the pump, man.

Why this sudden obsession? Well, as you know, we of Big Green weren’t exactly born with the word “success” tattooed on our butts. (Mine has something else entirely tattooed onto it. I’m giving you twelve guesses what that might be.)  We’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for lo these past three decades, playing in dives, recording in the basement on superannuated technology, scratching for every inch, inching for every scratch…. you get the picture. (Actually, you get the sound file. We don’t do pictures.) What have we got to show for it? A second-hand robot chauffeur, that’s what. And one that can’t avoid major obstacles.

I know, I know - I shouldn’t complain, what with this being the season of kindness and gratitude. (Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, sees it more as the season of mindlessness and attitude, but that’s how he rolls.) We’re still recording, still flailing away at the canon, committing item after item from the seemingly bottomless vat of unrecorded material to virtual tape. You can hear the results of these sessions on our podcast, This Is Big Green, where we post first drafts of songs we will eventually release as our next album(s).

So sure, we live in a drafty mill, no fuel for the fire, no food in the fridge, no miracle grow for the mansized tuber (not that he needs it).  But we’ve got something more valuable than any of that: a gift coupon to Tony’s pizza, good for another three days. To the limo… and damn the lamp posts!

Lots of news about official enemies this past week. Plenty of footage from the funeral of Kim Jong Il, showing legions of North Koreans - many in uniform - displaying their exaggerated grief. (Hey… those folks know what they need to do to get ahead.) And of course the Iranian threat to shut down the Strait of Hormuz if the latest round of draconian sanctions recently passed by the Senate - 100 to 0, mind you - become law. The latter is, naturally, the primary obsession of our news media and our government; the former a mere source of fascination and amusement. Both provide ample opportunities to perpetuate the official line on each of these societies, about which the less we know the better.

But let’s look a little closer. Why is North Korea such a strange, strange place? Lots of reasons. The hermit kingdom is a major thread running through Korean history. More importantly, though, is the experience of the last century - namely, that of the thirty year Japanese occupation, followed by occupation and subsequent destruction by the U.S. during the Korean War. Few Americans know the impact that war had on North Korea; we mostly focus on the fact that the North invaded the South - Korea invading Korea  - but not on the devastating attack we mounted against them. Christine Ahn of the Korea Policy Institute spoke to this fact on Democracy Now! last week:

When I went to North Korea, others-I had a very interesting insight, where I would travel around the country, and with our guides, you know, they would always point to this building. This was a restaurant. It was, you know, a very ancient-looking Korean building. But it was-I was wondering, why are-why do they always keep pointing that building out? And the thing that was really surprising is that was the only building that remained since the Korean War. Otherwise, the rest of Pyongyang was essentially leveled. And that was because of the devastating air raids. More bombs were dropped in the Korean War than in World War II. Napalm was introduced. I mean, the U.S. bombed dams, which was considered a war crime under the Geneva Convention.

It’s a similar story with Iran. Around the time we stopped drenching North Korea with napalm, we were fomenting a coup in Iran that brought in the Shah, who tortured his way through the next 25 years until the Iranian revolution. After that, we supported Saddam Hussein’s 8-year attack against Iran, which cost them about 800,000 lives. If Iran wants a nuclear capability, it’s likely as our own intelligence service estimates suggest - an attempt at building a deterrent. We invaded countries on both sides of Iran, neither of which had nuclear weapons. We did not attack North Korea, which does have nukes. What lesson should the Iranians draw from that?

There’s a tone of near outrage over the notion that the Iranians would threaten retaliation over sanctions. Fact is, they’ve seen what sanctions can do, both at home and in neighboring Iraq. Much as they are a repressive regime with a poor record on human rights, it is easy to understand why they would respond in this way. What I don’t understand is why we seem unable to anticipate that.

luv u,

jp

Gather ’round the fire, folks. Everybody got their hot chocolate? Not too, hot, right? Make yourselves comfortable. Got some serious yuletide bloviating to do.

As I mentioned last week, all of our little elves have been laboring under harsh working conditions in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, hammering together the disjointed fragments of Big Green’s Christmas Podcast. A thankless job, to be sure, but somebody has to do it (at a substandard wage). Next year maybe we outsource to Sri Lanka in honor of Mitt Romney’s eventual nomination. Or not. Anyway…. Christmas…

It occurs to me, listening to our holiday audio extravaganza, that our explanations of the songs included in the podcast are, shall we say, somewhat wanting. So what the hell… I’m going to give you the low-down on all of them, just so that you can be a more informed listener. That’s how we roll over here at Big Green - full disclosure at all times. Why, you may ask? Well… I’d rather not say.

Okay, so here’s the story below the music. I’ve included the time markers so that you can work your way through our 2 and a half hours of blather:

Merry Christmas, Jane (Part 2). [at 1:40] One of the numbers from our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. Some reviewer on GarageBand thought it sounded like Neil Young, but that’s probably mostly the instrumentation. What’s it about? Damned if I know. It was a year-later rejoinder to Matt’s “Merry Christmas, Jane”, which also appears on 2000 Years To Christmas. (Little known fact: There is, indeed, a “Merry Christmas Jane, Part 3″ that has never been properly recorded. Maybe next Christmas, children.)

Dark Christmas.  [at 1:10:30] This is an outtake from the 2000 Years To Christmas album - one of the handful of completed songs that didn’t make it onto the disc. What’s it about? I’m still trying to work that out, but it’s sung in the voice of someone who is trying to pull someone out of their holiday slump.

Christmas Sport. [at 1:24:35] Matt’s musical reflection on the warm holiday tradition of shooting everything that moves. Another new recording.

Christmas Puzzle. [at 1:33:00] Matt wrote this about a classmate of his in grade school who was a bit disappointed with his secret santa gift. (He actually explains this better on the podcast.) The original recording was made more than a decade ago and recently enhanced with new vocals, percussion, and a remix.

Jit-Jaguar. [at 1:51:47] We recently recorded this number about the political fortunes of a local officeholder who, disappointed at the results of a recent election, calls upon a Japanese sci-fi movie automatonic superhero to assist with his vengeance on the people who rejected him.

Evening Crab Nebula. [at 2:14:29] A new recording made with the help of “Cousin” Rick Perry; a tale of hope and caution. Hope for political advantage; caution about taking biblical stories too literally. Contains the only known instance of a rhyme with the word “Nebula” in a pop song lyric.

There we go, kids. Lame explanations, I admit, but… lame is better than nothing. Have a happy.

I’m hip-deep in audio editing right now, so again… forgive me for shooting from the hip.

I didn’t want to let too many weeks go by without commenting on the Durban Conference on climate change. I have to say, the Obama administration has gotten really good at acting as though they’re doing something progressive when, in fact, they are doing next to nothing at all. What Durban demonstrated was that, more than any other nation, the United States is an obstruction to any action to alleviate the effects of climate change. Others are following our example, emboldened by our refusal to take this crisis seriously. Canada - currently headed by George W. Bush/David Cameron hybrid Stephen Harper - is pulling out of Kyoto while pulling strings to avoid (unsuccessfully, it appears) having its tar-sands oil appropriately labeled as dirty by the EU. Russia is balking at emissions reductions as well. The fact that we lead the denialist camp gives them lots of cover.

There was a time, about four years ago, when it seemed possible that we might address this problem in a semi-serious fashion. That time is long past, its sentiments plowed under by the financial crisis and the “drill, baby, drill” mentality of mainstream and tea party Republicans. Because of the Democratic party’s failure to find its spine on this issue, the Republicans have managed to position it in a similar way as they have with the gun control issue. It seems like the very mention of global warming or climate change brings a chill to Democrats on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Only Republicans ever seem to use the terms, and only then as a means of attacking their cowardly opponents. They have been given the upper hand, once again, by default, just as Democrats have deserted the barricades on the gun issue, on the death penalty, on “missile defense”, etc.

I’m afraid, with respect to global warming, this is more about us as a people than our politicians. The fact that we cannot avoid some of the impacts of this crisis has somehow led people to believe that it’s just as well to do nothing. (I am referring here to people who actually believe global warming is real, not those who buy the crackpot hoax argument that fossil fuel shills like Sen. James Inhofe peddles.) We have this unfortunate tendency focus on the present to the exclusion of the future. It just cuts against the grain to act as though we should treat the world as something that should last beyond our own lifetimes - something that can support life for countless generations to come. This will have to change and change quickly. We had a start back in 2007. We need to get back to that moment again.

Last chance, humanity. Get smart. Merry Christmas.

luv u,

jp