NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(June '04)

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06/06/04

Cast off!

Adrift in a void without end. Cast like stones into the inky abyss, the blank plain of nothingness spanning the inconceivable distances between stars. A pinpoint, an atom, a mere speck in the monumental vastness of an infinite universe. In all of this, one can only wonder...where the hell did Jeremiah pack the freaking road maps?

Who ever said space travel is easy? What's that you say? Nobody? Hmmm. Well, "nobody" was obviously wrong. Space travel is like walking blindfolded across the top of the monkey bars when the playground is on fire. If they can come up with an easy way of getting from planet to planet, I'm all for it. Oh, sure...we've got this comfortable imitation Jupiter 2 splitlevel space RV with posi-ion drive, keyless remote and heated bucket seats. I mean, it's not like what the poor man-sized tuber had to endure under the tender mercies of our former commissar from the Pentagon, Admiral Hermann von Gonutz (ret.), who sent tubey up to Mars in what was little more than a glorified Estes rocket. But it's no walk in the park for us, either. Though part of its danger is in what it does to your mind. Five days at greater than light velocity can make you a chronic complainer. First, there are all those bad planet name jokes. Then there's that "general alarm" that goes BONG... BONG... BONG... every time something's about to go awry -- that works on your nerves. (Trevor James Constable has some interesting theories on the phenomenon...but I don't want to talk about them now!!)

Forgive me. I've taken my Theragram pill and I'm feeling much... much... better... now.... How was Big Green's first performance of Tour 2004? Let Mevdac 49q-37x10 to the 23rd and it's easily the biggest... well... crater we've ever played at. We set up at the north ridge, ran a power line from the idling space vee-hickle, set up our massive stadium video monitor, and sipped mango juice while the regular crowd shuffled in. Granted, it takes more than a couple of carloads to fill a room that size, so we waited about... oh... twelve hours as bipedal and quadrapedal life forms took their places in the dry, dusty, natural amphitheatre. Our actual performance was delayed another hour by the discovery that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had inadvertently strung all of our instruments in reverse, including sFshzenKlyrn's sousaphone, so essential for numbers like "The President's Brain (is Missing)". Marvin contritely reworked them all, while listeners continued to file into the great bowl. (I think they're still filing in to this day. Perhaps they always have been...and always shall be.) 

While it's hard to take the full measure of a crowd in an airless void, I'd say we were fairly well-received on Io. Interaction is difficult with an audience that's about 3 nautical miles away at the closest point, but we were able to get them into a couple of numbers with the help of our colossal viewing screen. sFshzenKlyrn even got a "wave" going at one point -- pretty impressive, particularly since our Zenite guitarist doesn't have "arms," properly speaking; just pseudopods, like an amoeba. (It is this very property that makes him such a useful addition to our stage and studio complement. When we do a symphonic number, sFshzenKlyrn can morph into a 40-pc. orchestra... conductor included.)

Streaking through space towards our destination (clear across the galaxy, thanks to Jeremiah Beauregard Tuber), it occurred to more than one of us that we'd never seen a rep, an owner, etc., the whole time we were on Io. No money changed hands (perhaps Jeremiah will get an Io-U ... heh...) I certainly hope our strangely southern-accented promoter got the money thing worked out okay -- I mean, we've got "The Steels" to compensate, and then there's Mitch Macaphee's stipend and that interest-free loan for Trevor James. At least Jeremiah's got a banker lined up to handle the receipts -- some guy he met in Amman named Chalabi... (BONG.... BONG.... BONG... BONG....) 

The Greatest Degeneration. Washington is trying to line up its transitional (puppet) government in Iraq; the one they'll use to ratify their radical economic restructuring edicts in some fairly irreversible fashion, so that when and if an actual elected government comes to power, it will be too late to change anything. Sadly for Dubya, even the puppets aren't cooperating sufficiently of late, having the audacity to pick Ghazi Al-Yawar as president instead of the US-favored octogenarian, Adnan Pachachi. (Al-Yawar was fairly critical of the US siege of Fallujah.) Still, the "fact" of announcing an interim government and the attendant pomp and circumstance is enough to drive the still growing prison torture scandal from the front pages and put the myopic media focus on "progress" towards self-government in Iraq -- what even NPR off-handedly refers to as the "transfer of sovereignty" -- thanks to Dubya's commitment to Jeffersonian principles of democracy. 

I'm sure the administration will get the usual free pass on this one. The mainstream press is starting to remind me of Jimmy Swaggart and his sex scandals -- they've only just offered some lame apologies for their unforgivably poor coverage of Bush's forced march to war ("Father, ah have sinned!") and already they're giving the same treatment to the manipulation of Iraq's political and economic sovereignty ("Ah have sinned again!"). When the Soviets did this sort of thing, the western press correctly termed it as setting up a puppet government. Well, Dubya's commitment to democracy is about as credible as the Soviets' -- in fact, the administration has demonstrated their contempt for it from Haiti to Turkey to Venezuela and back home again. Far from Jeffersonian, their democratic principles are more Kristoffersonian (see illustration), centered around some pliable notion of "freedom" that's consistent with not having a pot to piss in. 

Probably the most under-reported story of this sordid little war is the attempted selling off of Iraq's publicly held assets under the dubious authority of the occupation -- a patently illegal effort at instant "structural adjustment" of the country's economy through massive privatization. Like pretty much every other aspect of Operation Iraqi Freedom, this project has run into problems... but not the kind it deserves. Canadian journalist Naomi Klein has written extensively about this topic -- she has suggested that the administration may be waiting for the interim government to be fully in place so that it may give this piracy its quasi-legal imprimatur before any legitimately elected authority may have the opportunity to veto it. That kind of freedom truly is "nothing left to lose" -- ask Argentina, the economic Bobby McGee of South America. Meanwhile, Bush continues to shuffle from military audience to military audience, giving the same rote patriotic pep speeches to rows of newly decorated canon fodder -- so many bottles on a shelf... so many future dead soldiers. 

While Junior is strutting about commemorating the monumental sacrifices of D-Day, does it occur to anyone how cheaply he's selling the lives of those under his command?  

luv u,

jp

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06/13/04

Bim...bam...boom...

Grrrrreeetings from outer space -- the biggest room in the building, so to speak. Bigger than all outdoors, you might say. Then, too...you might say just about anything. And while I might not agree with what you say, I'd be among the first to defend your right to say it. Harrumph. 

As I write these lines, typing them into the keypad on Marvin (my personal robot assistant)'s arm, we've just come off one of the better engagements of this crazy Big Green Summer Interstellar Tour 2004 -- two sets in a dive on a remote plateau on Kaztropharius 137b, where we were rather well-received by the patrons, who've always been partial to our songs...particularly the more primitive ones. Once the natives knew where to find us, it was capacity crowd all the way. By special request, we even played Matt's immortal "Christmas Out West," a song he wrote at the end of Reagan's presidency -- Christmas 1988...

Looka there, look under the tree

for Ronnie's place in history

 

Christmas out west, we'll always wish him the very best

Capital gains tax cut was good news on this ranch

Children give thanks, sing happy birthday to our Lord

Our glorious destiny's assured.

We had some time to kill in the Kaztropharian solar system before the gig, so we went our separate ways, anxious to get away from each other after several long days in a smallish spacecraft during the interstellar passage from Io. Mitch Macaphee, who has graciously served as our pilot, wanted to do a little shopping, so we press-ganged Marvin into taking the reins, ably supported at the helm by the man-sized tuber. I say "ably" because tubey exudes a quiet kind of confidence (in as much as he's only ever said a few words, this is as it should be)... not because he has what you might call "navigational skill". It's pretty much rote instruction -- Marvin calls out which toggle to throw, lanyard to pull, klaxon to sound, etc., and tubey follows through. Hey -- any system that gets you across the breadth of the galaxy and past the dreaded neutron death star near Aldebron has got to be a good one....hmmm? 

Poking around the shops in the humanoid quarters of Kaztropharius 137b, Matt ran across a strange looking piece of headwear. When he put the thing on, he began spouting some kind of physicist jargon about differential field theory as it relates to gravity phenomena. John grabbed the hat and stuck it on his own noggin. His face went blank, and he said "Of course... I see now... Simple... so.... simple...." Clearly, this was no ordinary hat. I forked over the 50 quatloos ($2.37 US) to the proprietor and tried the thing on for size. Suddenly, I knew the lyrics to every Billy Joel song. (Typical. Matt gets physics. John gets revelation. I get oldies.) Who says flea markets are nothing but junk? This thing could be useful, says I. And what a tremendous addition to our stage get-up, something to spice up our thirty wardrobe changes (that's a lifetime total, mind you, not counting socks and underwear).

It's a funny thing -- the "portable brain" seems to have a dramatically different effect on people who... well... have a big floppy brain already, like Mitch Macaphee. When he puts the hat on, he cops an artistic temperament and starts commenting uncharitably on paintings that only he can see. Trevor James Constable just wordlessly tosses a tennis ball up against the bulkhead on the lower deck, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. I guess there's a limit to the amount of genius that may be held in one skull -- that's just as well. Too many big ideas and we'll miss our next gig... a festival on sFshzenKlyrn's home planet of Zenon. I plan on wearing the "portable brain" in concert to see if it helps me remember my parts any better. (Hey... anything beats rehearsal.) 

Ronnie, I hardly know ye. All this week, they've been eulogizing this guy they call "Ronald Reagan" ... a man of simple honesty and integrity... a man of great kindness who reassured us and made us feel good about ourselves... a strong leader who ended the Cold War single-handedly (and who was born in a log cabin he built with his own two hands). I've been listening to this and asking myself, was this guy president during my lifetime? He looks a hell of a lot like that other Ronald Reagan, the one who ran the show from 1981-1989 and very nearly incinerated all of us through remarkable arrogance, sheer incompetence, or (most likely) some combination of the two. 

True, the press loved him and they (along with ossified hacks like Chuck Krauthammer) have made this an extra special week for all of us. Having lost my own father to Alzheimer's, I'm glad Reagan is out of it for his own sake...but calling him "honest?" How could anyone tell? HE WAS AN ACTOR, albeit a lousy one. He may have had some degree of honesty in the sense of believing what he said was true (i.e. not knowing the difference between truth and lies), but with respect to the kind of honesty that is provable (i.e. speaking the truth; not lying) his record is abysmal. "Kind?" "Reassuring?" As someone who well remembers those years -- particularly the ghastly period between 1981-86 -- I can tell you that it was a terrifying time to be alive for anyone with an aversion to the prospect of a devastating global war. Reagan brought us to the very brink, refusing any kind of arms control negotiations until years into the Glasnost period when his handlers started thinking about a "Reagan legacy" and negotiated a deal they could have had in 1982 if they'd thought it would serve them politically. "Won the Cold War?" How? By taking credit for it? This is like saying DeGaulle won World War II.  

Obviously, this noxious hagiographic claptrap about Reagan has been spun without significant challenge over the past 12 years by his political allies who use it in an attempt to build support for continuing Reagan's more reactionary policies. And while they've managed to make Reagan popular in retrospect (he wasn't overly popular during his presidency), they haven't built much support for the policies themselves, if polls are any indicator. Reagan's Cold War (like that of his predecessors) was fought in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East...pretty much everywhere but the industrialized world. When the Cold War "ended", it continued in the "developing" world under different and shifting rationales. The confrontation with the Soviet Union was immensely useful to the Reaganites both for domestic political reasons and as a justification for massive, deadly, and highly unpopular interventions abroad. They didn't want it to end, and were somewhat at loose ends for a few years when the USSR collapsed unexpectedly. Fact is, it's taken them this long to re-invent the Cold War under the rubric of the "War on Terror," a recycled Manichean conflict between good and evil that they'll be milking for as long as we let them get away with it. 

As far as Dubya is concerned, any casket that doesn't contain a dead soldier is one he can be seen praying over. Still, he can only aspire to being as dangerous a nincompoop as his now-departed political hero. From what I've seen, he's far too incompetent to pull it off... and aside from U.S. casualties (4000 killed on his watch and counting), he's still got a lot of caskets to fill to catch up with uncle Ronnie. 

luv u,

jp

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06/20/04

Ahem...ahem...

What time is it? That late? Jeebus. Then what the fuck are the moons still doing five hands high in the sky? Crazy planetoid. A few more weeks of zero gravity showers and I'll be ready for Camp Wacky. Better practice my tap-dancing nickel-spitting routine... got to keep the punters happy. 

Here we are, week three of our 2004 Summer Interstellar Tour, putting in our standard issue appearances on sFshzenKlyrn's home planet of Zenon -- a weeklong string of outdoor festivals, jam sessions, and media events that seemed to last twice as long, even though it had nothing whatsoever to do with our recently-adopted booking agent, Jeremiah Beauregard Tuber, cousin of the man-sized tuber and quite probably the worst tour promoter in the vegetable kingdom. No, sir -- sFshzenKlyrn himself books the Zenon stint every time we go on tour. He's from a prominent cluster of gaseous clouds (the Zenite equivalent of a "family") that seems to run half of everything on Zenon (the other half doesn't run at all). We're always bumping into uncles in the governor's palace, cousins at the stock exchange, nephews emptying the trash, etc. It's astounding!

We've been staying on a desolate piece of rock owned by one of sFshzenKlyrn's many uncles, aunts, or cousins. It's a remote planetoid in the Zenite system with an artificial atmosphere and artificially enhanced gravity for the convenience of earthly visitors. (There are also a large number of date palms here -- somebody must have told sFshzenKlyrn's relatives that we humanoid musicians are "date-happy.") It is a bit disorienting to stay here, since the concept of night and day doesn't really apply. It's kind of like living in a child's drawing, with a mild crayon sun prominently fixed in the dark purple sky above you. Mechanical pigeons peck at imaginary seeds in the courtyard. It.... is.... all.... so.... beau.... ti... ful...

A space jitney comes by once a day to shuttle us to whatever event we're playing at. Generally, The Steels, Mitch Macaphee and Trevor James will pile in with us, while Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man-sized tuber stick close to the ship. What happens if Matt, sFshzenKlyrn, or I break a string on stage? A jitney is sent to pick up guitar tech Marvin. Yeah, it's a ponderous and impractical process, but you have to understand that time has no meaning for Zenites. Ask sFshzenKlyrn -- he simultaneously lives every second of his 7 billion year lifespan. (I always have to fight the temptation to ask him what's going to happen next.) That does seem like it would take all the mystery out of life. Perhaps that's why sFshzenKlyrn seems so... well... diffuse at times, like when he goes Hubble-stumping for months on end, trying to get his picture in Sky & Telescope, even though he has known whether or not his efforts will be successful since the dawn of time. No, I don't envy him one bit. 

Once again, we opened several of our performances with "Christmas Out West," our Ronnie Reagan satire country song. It goes over pretty well on Zenon, even through they don't keep very close tabs on human affairs. Their attitude is like that of the guy on Lost In Space with the big plastic frog's head (and I know some of you are saying, "Which guy with the big plastic frog's head?") -- the guy who said, "I know your Earth very well. It is filled with stupid and avaricious people." Hey, it's a fair cop. Maybe that's why they keep us on this remote planetoid, well off the beaten trail. Mitch Macaphee thinks it's because of the danger posed by the strong magnetic fields around Zenon itself, but I have my doubts. I think it's because they're starting to receive our television signals from the 1960's and are only now discovering what a bizarre and warped species we are. (Dragnet put them over the edge.)

Maybe I'll ask Matt to put on the portable brain and try to scope this problem out. That is, if he can remember where he left it!  

The Other Shoe. After a solid week's worth of historical revisionism in honor of "the gipper" (see Alex Cockburn's excellent remembrance for an antidote), the major media was probably just too exhausted to make much out of the 9/11 commission's determination that any Saddam/al-Qaida alliance existed only in the tiny minds that run the Bush administration. This was, after all, a moment roughly equivalent to David Kay's announcement that those Iraqi WMD's... well... that there aren't any Iraqi WMD's. In both cases, the facts seemed obvious but had previously lacked any stamp of official acknowledgement. Now they bear one, and there can be no doubt -- the two public pillars of rationalization that supported the invasion of Iraq have collapsed like the Twin Towers. This war hasn't a leg to stand on. Looks like that global "focus group" that took to the streets in February 2003 may have been on to something after all. 

Then you have the various "values-based" rationales that are, of course, absurd on their face. Bringing "democracy" (like some commodity) to the middle east is meaningless if you insist on controlling both the process and the outcome of the selection of leadership -- it is, in any case, certainly not something to start a major war over, unless you are some kind of pathological nihilist that feels compelled to destroy societies and then build anew. For many thousands, this kind of "altruism" has meant death, not freedom -- the freedom of the grave. (It's a little difficult to sustain this altruistic rationale while Dubya creeps from military audience to military audience, delivering pugnacious photo-op speeches that resemble the overconfident taunts of the schoolyard bully's kid brother, his protector at his side.) Also, the argument that we're "better than Saddam" falls apart when you recall that our 12-year sanction regime and accompanying weekly bombing raids cost at least half a million Iraqi lives...to say nothing of the crucial support we gave Saddam through the worst of his atrocities, both before and after the 1991 Gulf War.

This leaves us with, well, the actual reasons for attacking this crippled society, the ones spoken of by policy planners in fairly frank terms since fall of 2002. One is to establish the new doctrine of "preventive" war announced by the administration's National Security Strategy document -- basically confirming by example that we can invade anywhere we want, anytime we want, for whatever reasons we choose, a "right" we had previously arrogated to ourselves in a quieter, more diplomatic  way. The other is to establish permanent, secure military bases in the heart of the middle east oil producing region (I believe we've built about 14 bases in Iraq so far) to provide an effective lever of control over the world's largest energy reserves. Naturally, we cannot be allowed to focus on this rationale, so Dubya and company continue to cling to their public arguments for war long after they've been discredited in every imaginable way. Friday's "revelation" from Vladmir Putin about Russia having warned Bush in fall 2001 of Iraq's plans to carry out terrorist attacks provide valuable distraction. (This is about as credible as Blair's "45 minute" WMD claim. There's a reason why terrorism is frequently carried out by stateless groups -- no return address.)

Stay tuned -- there's plenty more obfuscation ahead as Iraq embarks upon its new phase of "independence." 

luv u,

jp

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06/27/04

'Ello, mate!

My ears are ringing. Don't you hate it when you're in a crowded restaurant or watching a good movie and somebody's ears start ringing? Put the fuckers on vibrate, for chrissake! Have a little consideration! Now, what was I saying? Oh yeah....ringing. All this loud music is affecting my hearing, as well as my braaaaiiiiiinnnn. So it goes. 

Back in our home solar system again (you know the one -- third star on the right, right next to the can), we played a pillbox of a club last night that recalled nothing so much as some of the LOUD gigs we played in the late eighties back on Earth -- bars like Looney Tunes in Kirkland, NY, or QE2 in Albany. Just thrashing away at high volume, peeling the paint of the walls (not that there was much paint there to begin with). That's how they like it on Uranus these days. I think it has something to do with their physiology -- those thick bony heads of theirs must be hard to hear through. Whatever the reason, I feel like somebody put a bucket over my head and banged on it with a shovel. (Funny thing is, I did wake up this afternoon with a bucket over my head... and there was a shovel parked outside my door. Coincidence?)

For those of you who pay attention to what happens in this column from week to week (and you know just who you are), we actually did find the "portable brain" (or "portable clue," as Matt has started to call it) that we picked up at an interstellar garage sale a couple of weeks ago. Good thing, too, because our designated driver, professor Mitch Macaphee, went on a Zenite snuff binge this week with our perennial sit-in guitarist sFshzenKlyrn and was unable to pilot our spacecraft to our engagements on Uranus. (sFshzenKlyrn has a pretty good network of snuffologists on Zenon, if you know what I mean.) This necessitated planting the "portable clue" on John's head and making him drive us across the trackless wastes of outer space. Trouble is, you really need two people to pilot this heap, and Trevor James Constable was unable to provide his usual yeoman's service as navigator due to a minor incapacity (I believe on Zenon they call it "zuMuhklyniSton's revenge"), so I (a.k.a. "skill-less George") filled in at the navigation console. We just tossed the "clue" from man to man, as needed. It worked after a fashion. 

Spending a week on Uranus gave Marvin (my personal robot assistant) ample opportunity to acquire yet another hobby through which he can project some of his more anthropomorphic qualities. It's this kind of pointless game they have here on the big "U" involving these rather large hoops. The object is to chuck them high into the methane-stained sky. Quite high. Several miles, in fact, so that these beach ball-sized planetoids in orbit around Uranus fly right through the middle of the rings. When that happens, a little analog score counter moves up a tick, and then it's time for your opponent to take a shot. Marvin's been playing an extended "singles" match with the man-sized tuber (tubey's not real good, having only the most rudimentary arms that mostly hang limply at his sides). I guess the idea is that you look at Marvin and think HE'S SO HUMAN... LOOK... HE'S PLAYING A POINTLESS GAME... but I'm not going to bite.

Interestingly enough, the Uranian tourism board (populated mostly by beings from the local hospitality industry) are anxious for our help in attracting more humans to their great green marble of a world. They've already got a slogan: "Uranus -- the planet that starts with YOU." They envision us doing a music video-type ad extolling the virtues of Uranian night life. Haven't the heart to tell them that we're virtually unknown on our home planet, except for some moderate interest in a fairly ridiculous song about the President's Brain going AWOL. Still, if there's a stipend involved, I might be convinced. Maybe we could get a bidding war going between them and Saturn. (Glad I've got this stupid hat on.)

Transfer Looms. That big June 30th date is fast approaching...the momentous day when absolute power in Iraq will be transferred from Paul Bremer and a gaggle of generals to John Negroponte and a gaggle of generals. Meaningless as this "handover" is, the fact that the administration has hyped it to the rafters has created its own symbolic significance, and the situation in-country is getting more and more drastic as the day looms nearer. Now we're seeing "insurgent" attacks of a more coordinated nature, with larger numbers of fighters involved and a sickening number of casualties. Wealthy Iraqis are leaving the country as the cost of private security in Baghdad has reportedly reached $12,000 a day. Former Ba'athist hit man Iyad Allawi has muttered about martial law, though how that would differ from the current system of military occupation and collective punishment I'm not certain. 

There's a kind of hysterical, post modern quality to the way our political-military establishment is reacting to the disaster they've created in Iraq. The compromise agreement that grew out of the almost universally condemned US attack on Fallujah has been all but abandoned, as American warplanes have bombed apartment blocks Israeli-style, claiming those within (many of whom are women and children) are hardcore terrorist cadre of current US obsession, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. I mean, just when it seems the CPA may have rented a clue from somebody, they turn around and do the same, murderous, club-footed death dance yet again, sowing more and more hatred with each laser-guided missile. This seemingly incoherent downward spiral of violence, driven by one immensely powerful military force, closely resembles Ariel Sharon's war on his subject population.

Hey...but it works for Sharon, "man of peace". Just ask Chuck Krauthammer, who followed his profoundly ahistorical tribute to Reagan with last week's hideous gloat over Israel's continuing destruction of Palestinian society. Krauthammer's claim that the second intifada has ended is a clumsy attempt to justify the iron fist occupation policy he has endorsed so consistently in his column. This is to be expected. Never once have I seen him refer to Israel's occupation as what it truly is -- a criminal attempt to gradually dispossess Palestinians of the remaining 22% of their homeland that lies outside the state of Israel, with a relentlessly expanding infrastructure of illegal settlements, Israeli-only highways, massive barriers, and military checkpoints that confine them within tightly constricted enclaves and deprive them of anything that remotely resembles a life. What we see today is the realization of a process started by Israel decades ago -- a kind of slow-motion ethnic cleansing designed to make it impossible for Palestinians to live in the occupied territories, in hopes they'll all just pack up and leave.

Krauthammer's gloat may be premature. Palestinian resistance is nothing if not resilient. Until the Israelis deal in good faith with the legitimate national aspirations of the Palestinians, they should expect the intifada to continue. 

luv u,

jp

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