NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.
(June '00)
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6/4/2000
(Interplanetary Tour Diary, fourth installment...)
Hey-di-hey.
Well, we've been adrift in space for a full month now, and it's been pretty exciting, really. Not so much from a musical perspective, you understand. It's had more to do with the basic laws of physics. Like what makes spaceships go. And not go.
Our unscheduled sojourn on the planet Neptune has taught us a few things. One is that you never drop a hammer on a planet with negative gravity unless you step away fairly rapidly. I learned that lesson first. (That's me -- always way out ahead.) Another thing we learned is that Methane gas is a poor replacement for oxygen. But these were minor diversions.
We had John and sFshzenKlyrn working in tandem to repair the damaged propulsion unit on our space barge, with a little kibitzing from New York Times correspondent Tom Friedman, who's been our global trade advisor on this leg of the tour. "Where's my neutron wrench?" John would shout from his pressure dinghy, and as sFshzenKlyrn proceeded to hunt the sucker down, Tom would tap his foot impatiently and declaim, "C'mon, folks...this isn't rocket science!" He was getting a little testy, the way Foreign Affairs correspondents tend to get when they've been holding their breath for days on end.
Of
course, John and sFshzenKlyrn
only caused Tom's mood to degenerate even further when they got sidetracked on
helping George Dubya identify Saturn in three guesses or less. They did this by
using some of our remaining neutronium fuel to ignite Saturn's upper atmosphere
at the poles on cue. So when Matt would say, "Okay, Governor...which one is
Saturn?," sFshzenKlyrn
would use Zenite telepathy to light the planet up as a subtle hint to George.
Anything to help. Frankly, we're all getting tired of his constant drilling. I
don't think he'd get Neptune right if it weren't for the subtle fact that he'd
been stranded on it for a week and a half.
Luckily, our erstwhile repair team was able to get the Big Green barge moving again, and we actually made a few of our scheduled appearances in blefistomprodujch, the cultural capital of Neptune and the garden spot of this enormous ball of gas. Appropriately, the first few nights were a gas. After being sidelined for so long, we felt energized and ready to rock that hideous little globe right out of the solar system. And though the dominant life forms on Neptune are ethereal wisps of acrid-smelling vapor with no sense of hearing or sight, we felt it went over quite well. The Christmas songs seemed to please them -- "Head Cheese Log" in particular seemed to increased the Neptunians' specific gravity to the point where you almost couldn't see through them. Tom Friedman tells me that's good. Over at the bar, he plied them with the joys of globalization until the methane odor almost drove us all from the room (another sign of enthusiastic acceptance on the part of the Neptunians -- their version of applause).
There
were other moments of excitement, as well. A couple of sFshzenKlyrn
former bandmates from Zenon joined us on
stage and sang a impromptu two-part harmony on a Zenite pop song while sFshzenKlyrn
smoked his telecaster in accompaniment. It was pretty amazing. The rest of us
just sort of laid back and just let them take the spotlight for the rest of the
set. Of course, the average length of a Zenite pop song is a bit longer than the
standard back on Earth, partly because the days on Zenon are 462,009 Earth years
long. So their radio songs last hundreds of years. As stunning as the
performance was, we did have to hustle them along a bit. (Worse yet, it was one
of those "one more time" sorts of crowds.)
Anyway, we're ready to break camp here on Neptune and start the final leg of our tour -- off to the icy planet Pluto, and what promises to be one of the coldest receptions we will have garnered throughout this entire enterprise. Even Dr. Hump is showing signs of concern, anxious little bubbles gurgling out of his medulla with alarming frequency. But hey -- if a disembodied brain in spirit is worried, shouldn't we be, as well? Hell no. We're troopers, right? That's the spirit.
Clinton's Legacy. I see through my second-hand spyscope that Bill Clinton is finding some points of agreement with Russian President Vladmir Putin on the concept of "Missile Defense" (i.e. military industry procurement defense). It seems both post-Cold War military behemoths are now trembling in the shadow of North Korea and other terrifying threats to the future of mankind. Osama bin Laden appears to be a foe they can agree to despise; for Putin, as a source of support for Chechen "terrorists"; for Clinton, as a source of support for generic non-western unsavory-looking "terrorists." After having toyed with the idea of using one another as the rationale for bloated military spending, Clinton and Putin may be shifting their focus to those third-world folks we love to hate. Always handy.
NBC better break out that video graphic of the earth with bin Laden's terrifying (non-Caucasian) face superimposed upon it -- they'll be needing it soon, no doubt.
Keep your heads down, folks. Love you.
jp
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6/11/2000
(Interplanetary Tour Diary, installment five...)
Ahoy...
This is just too, too far out. As you may recall, the Big Green entourage was planning to be within the environs of the frosty little globe known to terrans as Pluto -- you know which one; the yellow one with the floppy ears who never says anything, unlike all of the other animal characters, like Mickey and....
Ooops. Wrong Pluto. Whatever you do, don't tell Michael Eisner. He'll sue us for the seven cents that remains in the Big Green treasury after our somewhat less-than-profitable interplanetary venture. (Eisner's a little on the hungry side, you see, having made only $636.9 million over the last three years.)
Why has the tour been such a financial bust? There are a number of reasons. Gasoline prices, for one. (Our space barge gets lousy mileage). Also, as our resident Free Trade specialist Tom Friedman has pointed out in exasperation many times, the currency exchange rates are killing us. Our two-week involuntary stay on Neptune happened to coincide with one of the most furious episodes of currency speculation in that planet's history. By the time we left there, our Neptunian drachroniasters were worth less than Necco wafers. (And to add to our misery, when their value was the same as Necco wafers, Matt started eating them!)
But
the single most important factor in making this tour a financial bust was the
lousy driving directions we got from sFshzenKlyrn.
Don't get me wrong, he's a nice...um...guy and a good guitarist, but he
simply doesn't know his way around the solar system. (One wonders how he finds
his way across the trackless parsecs of the interstellar void to his home on
Zenon.) Take last week's debacle, for instance. sFshzenKlyrn
said he had a "fix" on Pluto, the next (and last) stop on our
performance itinerary. Well, we each took a turn with his Zenite viewing scope,
and it sure looked like Pluto, so we swung the barge around and threw the
Neutronium drive into high so we could get there in time to play at least half
of the gigs we'd booked.
I
started suspecting that we might be going in the wrong direction when I saw
something that looked remarkably like Uranus out the portside bay window. I
brought this to sFshzenKlyrn's
attention, and he shrugged it off (at least, I think he did, though it's
a little hard to tell with someone who doesn't have what you might call
shoulders). I could see his exoskeleton was turning that reddish color it gets
when he's pissed off, so I dropped it. On the next day, when John commented on
the tell-tale off-axis ring around the planet that looked suspiciously like
Uranus, sFshzenKlyrn
did venture an explanation: "optical illusion caused by mass
hysteria." Plausible enough.
A
day or so later, Trevor James Constable was complaining about those invisible
critters again -- the same ones that had attached themselves to his orgone
generating device when we were in the Saturnian system a few weeks earlier. Sure
enough, I looked out the starboard mail slot and saw something that looked
remarkably like the great ringed planet. I pulled sFshzenKlyrn
aside and confronted him with this new evidence of his incompetence, and he had
another convincing explanation all ready for me: "You're looking through a
wormhole." He gave me a pair of blue/red 3-D glasses and told me to enjoy
myself.
Then
on Friday of last week, as we were rehearsing the new grand finale of "Nothing
But Time" we were planning to debut at our closing concert on Pluto's
companion Charon, we heard shouts of joy coming from George W's cabin. I pushed
my way through the phalanx of Secret Service goons (who look strangely like Al
Gore) to see Dubya excitedly pointing through the skylight at the source of his
joy -- the planet Mars...red as an apple and twice as round. This was no worm
hole. sFshzenKlyrn
had brought us back to where this ludicrous tour had begun.
Needless to say, we're plotting our own way home. As for sFshzenKlyrn, he's sitting in the bus station at the base of Olympus Mons, looking for someone with enough of a clue to get him back to Zenon. We wish him well.
Homeward unbound. As we close in on that hideous little globe we call Earth (and Dubya calls "bluey"), the previous week's newscasts are coming up on the TV screen (out toward Neptune, all you get is first-season runs of "The Flying Nun" and "Then Came Bronson"). The special Congressional Commission on Terrorism has made some interesting recommendations, like keeping a closer eye on foreign students, and setting off alarms when they switch their major from, say, "English" to "Nuclear Physics" (I'm not making this up). They've also recommended getting the military to investigate "terrorist" incidents within the US, involving the military ever more deeply in law enforcement (a troubling but consistent theme of recent years, promoted by both the Clinton Administration and Congress).
Speaking of which, there was also news of a recent Human Rights Watch report that says the US drug war overwhelmingly targets blacks, incarcerating black men in state prisons at 13 times the rate of white men. (In some states, the ratio was as high as 57 to one). And this is just the domestic toll; in countries like Colombia (now under attack by the US military and DEA), this drug war is burying people at an alarming rate.
For more on the domestic front, read the HRW report. For more on Colombia, visit the Colombia Support Network website and other sources on our Links page.
See you in Sri Lanka. "We're goin' hooooooome!!!!"
luv u,
jp
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6/18/2000
Hail!
Back on Terra Firma. And from where I sit, it don't seem all that firma. (Insert laugh track here.)
Just a brief Tour Post-Mortem. We navigated our leaky space barge back to Sri Lanka with some small difficulty, to say the least. Part of the problem was our shortage of funds -- with all those lucrative dates we had to shitcan on Pluto, Big Green was practically bankrupt by the time we touched down outside our 12-room lean-to in Columbo. But even with all that, it was good to be home.
Under
the circumstances, I can't say that there was a lot of acrimony between group
members during this tour, though tempers were wearing a bit thin towards the
end, particularly with sFshzenKlyrn and
some of his annoying habits. Setting the atmosphere on fire was one of them (a
childish pastime on Zenon, I'm told). Another was his insistence on getting
everyone together for a group photo at the close of the tour. Naturally, George
dubya had to get in on the action, as he was the only one who really gained
anything from the experience (a working knowledge of weightlessness). You can
see sFshzenKlyrn hamming
it up a bit in the foreground. He's a little hard to take, sometimes. (If the
Bush campaign tries to capitalize on this photo, they'll have to answer for some
of sFshzenKlyrn's
outrageous behavior, not to mention his 290-quatloo-a-day jones for Zenite
snuff.)
Then, of course, there was the problem of unpacking after six weeks on the road. John left one of his favorite shoes on Titan (the left one). And Matt...Christ, he would've forgotten his hat if it weren't stitched onto his head. As for myself, I remembered everything except my A90EX stage piano, my Proteus, my sub-mixer, my oxygen tanks, my pineal gland, and all my hair ties. And my CD collection. And my keys. So, we've got a little re-stocking to do, now that we're back.
Want to lend a hand? Write me at jperry@biggreenhits.com ...or just email me a 1974 Alpha Romeo Veloce GT. That'll get me started.
What
about all the luminaries (or "hangers-on", as they're known in the
trade) who accompanied us? You already know what became of sFshzenKlyrn.
Dubya's back on the champagne...I mean, campaign
trail. Trevor James Constable has returned to his search for the alien
intelligences behind the UFO's, Big Foot, Big Mouth, and others. Tom Friedman
has gone home to his olive tree and his Lexus. And Dr. Hump has returned to
Italy to continue his experiments (after long and heated discussions with Trevor
James Constable about biorhythms, it's back to the drawing board for him).
And we, the core members of Big Green, may now return to our grueling recording schedule under the terms of our contract with Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm. Pass the gruel.
Speaking
of Diallo. It appears that Bruce Springsteen's song for Amadou Diallo
("American Skin") is getting bad reviews at City Hall. (Hell, 41
Times left them speechless!) Rudy "Laughing Jack" Giuliani was
quoted as saying, "There are still people trying to create the impression
that the police officers are guilty." Hmm...his outrage is
understandable. The fact that Rudy's boys shot nineteen bullets into
Diallo sort of created the impression that Diallo was guilty of
something, too. At least Springsteen confined himself to song, rather than a
frenzied hail of bullets.
And speaking of Dr. Hump. The Chairman of the Oneida County (New York State) Right-To-Life Party has condemned contraception and abortion as being "two fruits of the same tree" and "twins joined at the hip." Don Thomas (who's run alternately for Congressman & County Executive) wrote a helpful letter to the local Gannett Newspaper making explicit this connection in his murky mind and in the minds of those who parade behind the righteous banner of Right-To-Life. Says he:
"Once you accept the goal of intercourse without a baby, what should it matter which method you use to reach the goal."
So get this straight: if abortion=murder and contraception=abortion, then contraception=murder. How's that for morality? Condoms kill! Get Dr. Hump on the line!
later,
jp
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6/25/2000
'ello, 'ello, 'ello...
Hope all is well back your way, whatever way that may be. Here at BigGreenHits.com, we've had a number of visitors from Japan, New Zealand, and other points east in the last few weeks. Must be the speed of the Earth's rotation at this time of year. The hotter it gets in Sri Lanka, the faster the Earth spins. And the faster it spins, the more people on-line tend to browse towards the west. Prevailing currents, you see.
Here's a little experiment you can try at home. Take an average-sized chicken's egg (could be hard-boiled, raw, whatever) and try to balance it (pointy-end down) on top of your computer monitor. During the summer months in the Northern Hemisphere, if you live east of the Urals, the egg will tend to fall down the western-facing side of your computer; if you're west of the Urals, vice-versa. And if you live on top of the Urals, you may have many troubles...but that egg should stand steady as a rock.
Is
that clear enough? Good. Trevor James Constable taught me that one. He was real
handy to have around during our interplanetary tour. In fact, it was Trevor
James who convinced me to look more deeply into my own personal genealogy. As
many of you know by having browsed through our band history (see Big
Story), our particular branch of the human family breaks off somewhere
prior to the development of what grade school archaeologists call "Homo
BigJerkus" or what's more commonly known as, "White American
Businessman with No Shirt On" (see chart, bottom right).
While we were relaxing in our hotel room on Ceres, Trevor James explained to me that my genealogical connection to "Homo McCoyus" or "DeForestKelly Man" (chart, top left) and "Homo Stereotypicus" or "Nickel Man" (chart, bottom left) was actually closer than our connection to "Homo BigJerkus." It was a major turning point in my therapy. That's when I started seeing those invisible critters Trevor James was always on about.
But
enough about me. What's new with Big Green? Well, preparations for our next
album are moving along, albeit slowly. I'm currently doing scratch tracks for
Matt and John, so that they can throw them away the moment I leave the room.
Matt's got about a dozen new songs; I've got maybe half as many, but they're all
twice as long. We're planning how the album might go together, i.e., what its
specific gravity will be, how many moons it will have, will there be a
breathable atmosphere, etc. We're each filling out a little sheet of priorities
(though I think we're all still a little obsessed with Pluto, because the
attributes we've listed for our new album so far are nearly identical to
those of that remote little globe). Maybe that's our CD cover, eh? The one that
got away. No?
Good Sports. Tell me something. Why would anyone want a major sports team in their city? Think about it. You have to buy them a freaking stadium. You have to give them tax breaks up the ass. If they don't win games, they're a bunch of losers. And if they win a championship, you get packs of bonehead fans rampaging through the streets, turning the town upside down in delirious celebration. I'm not trying to single out LA here. I mean, it only happens every time! Admittedly, I hate sports...but where's the advantage?
Where
was George? Dubya's Air National Guard Commander in Alabama says he can't
remember dubya serving there during the waning days of the Vietnam War. Could it
be George Jr. was off engaging in youthful indiscretions? Seems unlikely the
Colonel (now General) wouldn't have noticed him. I imagine even in the Air
National Guard, the first thing they point out to the commanding officer (after
the latrine) is the Congressman's son. Should've asked dubya when I had the
chance.
Maybe Trevor James has a theory. I'll have to try to contact him. More later.
c.u.,
jp