NOTES FROM SRI LANKA.

(May '01)

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

5/6/2001

Mayday! Mayday!

No, wait...that was Tuesday. It's easy to forget when you've spent time in the states. Not exactly a workers' paradise, you understand. They don't even make the kids do that weird thing with the maypole -- you know, where everyone grabs a streamer and they dance around the pole until the streamers are all wound up. Remember? Neither do I. 

Well, it's been a week since we booked ourselves into this seedy roadside inn, hoping that the mongoose family will vacate our lean-to before the rains come. What a way to come home! This is like being on the road again. (Matt even yanked out his battered 1975 Les Paul Custom and started smashing up the hotel room with it, just like the old days.) A lot has changed around here since our departure some months back, especially the old harbor. Things are really getting built up around here! They've even replaced the seasonal footbridge with something a little more permanent. 

Despite the changes (and the mongooses), it is good to be back on our home turf once again, bringing to a close that frantic chapter that began with Dubya's inaugural balls back in January. What a relief! Now we can get back to what Big Green is really all about...collecting pinecones. Oh, yeah...and making music. Some of that, too. Down from the Olympian heights of Washington politics and back to our humble roots, to reclaim our heritage as the global  standard-bearers for clubhouse rock...or is it tree house rock? Man, we have been gone too long!

A few short days on the island have shown us that reclaiming our heritage will not be an easy task. Neither will reclaiming our lean-to. Each morning we do a drive-by, and it's obvious the mongooses are really digging in for a long stay. What's worse, they've invited a good number of their friends to come and set up makeshift housing in what used to be Matt's butter-grass preserve. The goddamn place looks like the West Bank, now. It's getting to the point where you can't even find the lean-to, let alone spy on it. Jesus Christ on a bike -- if we'd wanted to lived in southern California, we'd have moved there, right? 

It wouldn't be so bad if we weren't living in such a roach motel. I mean, sleeping on the floor is bad enough, but I've got to put a saucepan on my head just to keep my forehead dry all night. John doesn't even have a room anymore (tossed out by roaches), so he sleeps standing up in sFshzenKlyrn's closet. I think Matt is so thoroughly disgusted with the place that he spends his nights at the corner tavern, drinking asparagus schnapps and playing backgammon with the local architect's guild. (Whatever gets you through the night.) 

Can't we afford better? We...the same Big Green whose CD 2000 Years To Christmas is such a smash hit on the planet Kaztropharius 137b? It's the sad truth. Dubya left us penniless. When he broke up the commission he plowed our back pay into his tax cut proposal...so the meager thousands owed us will be lunch money for Bill Gates (or maybe Bill will send it along to his pal Grover Norquist, who will use it to lobby for more tax cuts). Anyway, we're living a little close to the line, and some of us turned to fast food. Well...one of us has. That's sFshzenKlyrn, of course. He doesn't even take the wrapper off the Big Mac before he tosses it back. In fact, he sometimes eats the whole restaurant (see photo for a recent Zenite snack). 

Hey, artists are supposed to starve, right? Only this ascetic routine is a little hard to swallow. Here's hoping we can get our lean-to back before the mongooses stumble upon our stash of Tastybite vacuum-packed dinners.

The Other Shoe. Well, that didn't take long. One week Dubya's cold war re-treads are chalking "Red" in front of "China" on all their maps; the next week they're embroiled in a major international crisis over some pointless spy plane; a few weeks later some low-level DOD clerk causes a break in longstanding liaison policy with the Chinese military, obviously taking his bosses' rhetoric to heart. And the capper -- Dubya's big speech on missile defense, which will save us from whom?...The dreaded (red) Chinese!!!! 

Talk about a sales job! These TRW/Lockheed boys don't let the grass grow under their feet, do they? But then, they've got a real beauty of a product in Missile Defense, particularly the "theater-based" variety. Here's a "defensive" system that creates its own threat -- perfect for any procurement-addicted industry. We spend billions (and billions) to set up a sophisticated, wholly non-functional anti-missile battery in Taiwan and vicinity to counter about twenty leaky, 60s-70s vintage Chinese nuclear warheads. Soon thereafter, China will start blowing their money on more modern missiles and warheads...and hey presto! An ex-post-facto rationale for Theater Missile Defense!  

What a thrilling prospect for Donny Rumsfeld, who has been such a persistent advocate of "early deployment" -- early as in, before the system shows any signs of working. Working, that is, in the sense of being able to shoot down hostile missiles. Where the system's true intent (making $$$) is concerned, it already works just fine, and has done for about 20 years. So, forget the fact that even fraudulent tests of the system have failed. Forget the fact that the "rogue states" it's designed to counter are more likely to send an h-bomb via UPS than via ICBM. Forget that deployment means an end to arms control and a renewal of the very bomb-building frenzy that makes our lives so precarious. When you look at Missile Defense as a means of generating lucrative contracts, then the rest of it all makes sense. 

Write your congressperson, your Senators, and your president today and tell them to knock it off, will you? I'll join you...but right now I've got some mongooses to shift. 

luv u,

jp

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

5/13/2001

Who am I now, then?

Greetings from this dilapidated roadside rest here in rural Sri Lanka, just a few miles away from our mongoose-occupied 14-room lean-to. It's been another challenging week at the Discomfort Suites motel, with our various creditors descending upon us and no relief in sight -- not even from our fair-weather label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., whose representatives refuse to return our calls and whose peacocks engage in noisy fornication on the front lawn of this insufferable flophouse they've booked us into. 

Well, it didn't take long to discover that the erstwhile bean-counters at Hegemonic have been neglecting to pay our motel bill, which would explain the recent shut-off of our water, air conditioning, electricity, telephone, room service, gravity, etc. (I'd thought it might have been something one of us -- sFshzenKlyrn -- had said, but...). Naturally, none of us has the cash to pay our back rent, having squandered all our savings on our brief stint in Washington. And as if doing without air, food, and gravity isn't bad enough, the management has hired some cheap '50s TV gangsters to intimidate us. And boy do they look mean! (It's old "Fingers" Milhous and the Unthinkables, and it looks like they're packin' heat.)

So here we are, floating about five feet off the ground, using old CD display cards for fans, hoping our disconnected telephone will start ringing with a call of reprieve before the landlord sends his toughs around to evict us. But even the world's foremost dis-corporate rock band cannot survive on hope alone. I think it was Matt who first suggested we stop bobbing about in mid-air and start taking control of our own lives. That was the kind of inspiration we all needed. And after the rest of us had gotten 'round to suggesting it two or three times, we actually did start doing something about our predicament...three steps ahead of the Discomfort Inn hit squad. 

Though we've seldom discussed the circumstances surrounding our emigration to Sri Lanka, it's fair to say that we never planned on working here to support ourselves. But now that we've been cut off from the royalties generated by our CD sales on other planets (and with loanshark thugs on our trail), there seems no other option open to us. So we've been trying a few different day job ventures to try to raise the funds necessary to save our collective Big Green ass. So far, the only one that's panned out even slightly is our roadside vegetable stand, which we stock by gathering produce that falls off the trucks supplying the proper farm stand a mile or so up the road. sFshzenKlyrn has even consented to transmute himself into the shape of an infant just to add some rural pathos. We've filled a few coin jars that way, at least.

Still, it's going to take a whole lot of rutabaga sales to cover the costs we've incurred since our return home. And while we're hawking tubers to the locals, the mongooses are busily building annexes to our property, creating a massive infrastructure that will soon render our beloved lean-to unrecognizable. I'm telling you, if the boys at Hegemonic don't intervene soon, we'll soon be forced to abandon our rights to that property and become permanent fixtures on the roadside of rural Sri Lanka, scratching out a mean subsistence from the leavings of more prosperous produce vendors. Such a cruel fate!  

The Drill Bit. When Halliburton gave Dick Cheney his multi-million dollar severance package, I'm sure they had some expectations in mind as to what the new leader of the world economy would deliver in terms of policy, prospects, and preferential treatment to the oil industry in general. So far, there's been very little to be disappointed about. Petroleum remains close to the heart of U.S. domestic and foreign policy, as it has for more than sixty years. The presence of Cheney and his assistant Bush Jr. in the White House is merely the icing on this extremely well-constructed cake.

And the drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge? Well...Halliburton is an oil exploration company, so it sounds like another lucrative opportunity for the boys, like putting out the Kuwait oil field fires from Cheney's Gulf War was a decade ago. Like the Bush tax plan, I'm certain whatever the circumstances are at any particular moment, they will be used as justification for a policy already decided on -- that of ripping up what's left of Alaska to extract as much profitable mineral reserves as possible. We can all pretend -- as always -- that it's being done for our benefit...so we can continue driving our big, empty, all-wheel-drive SUV's around paved roadways and pay less than $2 a gallon for the privilege. Rally 'round the Bush boys -- they're protecting our mindless, earth-cracking  way of life!  

As for conservation (the only policy that has ever worked to keep gas prices affordable), that has been duly designated by Cheney as merely a "sign of personal virtue" and not the basis for a "sound, comprehensive energy policy." No surprises there. Oh, sure...you'll hear some mild backtracking, just to provide a conservation fig leaf for an even more pronounced petroleum bias. But the core message is clear --  just the kind of message you expect from paid oil industry spokespeople. Keep using as much as you can, folks! Buy bigger SUV's! Why settle for four cylinders when you can have eight? Global warming is for nervous nellies and sissy-maries!  

As the old song goes, "breathe deep while you sleep...breathe deep."

luv u,

jp  

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

5/20/2001

Hello, world! 

Don't you just want to jump to your feet and sing! No? Well....neither do I, truth be known. 

I thought I might take a momentary respite from our ongoing travails here in Sri Lanka to share with you some listener email we've received in recent months. Let's just open the mailbag and have a look-see, shall we?

Here's a little missive from a fellow named Collin on AOL who heard our song Pagan Christmas and submitted this comment through our questionable contact form here at BigGreenHits.com:

I have to say that Pagan Christmas is a very ignorant song... if you were playing on stereotypes in your lyrics, you could have made that clear. Really.... what the hell is this?

We-hell, Collin...it's a fair cop! Next time we'll just telegraph our intentions a little more clearly at the start of the record -- maybe add a subliminal mumble track that explains the whole metaphor in no uncertain terms. Sorry for the misunderstanding! 

Okay, who's next? Howzsabout this comment from someone named "Ches" in Calgary, Alberta, who reviewed our song Strange Christmas at www.garageband.com. Ches wrote: 

Curses! Christmas time is NOT here and neaither is the goodness in this song ha ha ha ha ha no but seriolsy bad lurics!

Hey, nothing's more inescapable than logic. What were we thinking? Hats off to you, Ches...and thanks for the spelling lesson! 

*    *    *

Let's just close that mailbag up again (gingerly) for this week, so that I may regale you with news of our current predicament and how it has mutated since last I spoke with you. Our discarded vegetable stand has barely moved the needle for us economically, I'm sorry to say, yielding only a few spare sovereigns and one questionable suitcase of soggy lire which a tattered British naval officer claims to have recovered from the hull of the Lusitania. This wasn't going to dig us out one inch from the massive debts we've incurred!

Then John came up with a cunning idea. Balloon rides! We could stitch together a bunch of old rutabaga hulls, hang a makeshift gondola beneath it, and fill it with hot air, he suggested. Matt said he knew a public relations guy that might provide the hot air, and  sFshzenKlyrn said he could print up some tickets. Before we knew it, dozens of locals had gathered to witness the maiden voyage of our new pay-per-lift pleasure balloon venture. sFshzenKlyrn was to pilot the craft and I was chosen to be the test passenger. 

I think it was about when we reached an altitude of 800 feet that sFshzenKlyrn admitted a near total lack of knowledge with respect to balloon aviation techniques. I gasped, remembering last year's interplanetary tour and how, after leaving the navigation in our Zenite friend's...er...hands, we had met with near disaster. This was not good. 

Recalling as best I could all the sixties television shows I'd ever seen that had dealt however tangentially with the subject of ballooning, I started yanking on ropes and shouting orders to a disinterested sFshzenKlyrn, who was spending the flight rummaging through the lunch box I had packed for our paying customers. Whether it was due to my sheer ineptitude as a pilot or the prevailing winds, we began to drift inexorably towards the coastline. From our lofty vantage point I could see a typhoon (or "big blow") brewing over the Indian Ocean. The gondola creaked beneath us, as sFshzenKlyrn extracted the last mango chutney and sardine sandwich from its hiding place. Somewhere a dog was barking....

Well, I hate to seem a killjoy, but I obviously survived this minor mishap...or I wouldn't be writing this dreck. Surf over next week to learn how. 

Rambo Nation. Hey, we may be a long way from home, but we hear a lot about what's going on back in the states, even when we're hanging in mid-air and being blown out to sea. It's been somewhat entertaining to follow the stories about our old hometown mayor, Ed "Giant Watering Can" Hanna, and his various pet projects floated by public money -- projects seemingly unencumbered by the thought process. Like the $1 million recreation center for basketball and volleyball games that ended up costing over $4 million and is too small for either sport. Or the Historic Marina project that's also way over budget and features almost no parking or docking facilities. Or the bank building downtown whose more than $800,000 in publicly funded renovations were probably negotiated on the back of a napkin, later discarded.

Of course, the Bob Kerrey story has gotten out here, as well. I would imagine the most surprising aspect about that story to most people in the "third world" would be how unremarkable it is -- another sordid tale of state-sponsored murder, in the context of one of the bloodiest military attacks of the Twentieth Century. Screaming about Kerrey is a bit like shouting "my house burned down" after the Chicago fire. Just dig up a copy of In The Name Of America (1968) edited by the group Clergy & Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, and you'll see what I mean. Therein you'll find dozens and dozens of similar tales, all publicly available at the time they occurred. 

Hey -- the real killers are the policymakers. Everyone else is just a hired gun (some more enthusiastic than others, as is always the case).

luv u,

jp

Click here to return to Table of Contents.

5/27/2001

Salutations...

Our very best to you from the subcontinent, a mere few thousand miles from Pearl Harbor. There...I said it. Now someone in Hollywood should be cutting me a check, goddamnit. Just compensation for my role in the full-bore multimedia marketing assault on humanity now underway in support of the blockbuster movie/book/accessories/etc. known as Pearl Harbor. This sucker has been hyped pretty heavily since last year when the web trailer came out. And it's about time I got my cut. So here goes....Pearl Harbor! Pearl Harbor! Pearl Harbor! 

Now I see our mistake. Big Green's first album should have been entitled "Pearl Harbor." And it should have been released this week. That would have helped terrestrial sales a bit. Of course, our label Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. has a whole different approach to hype, as some of you may remember. Last year, while the Hollywood PR mavens were laying plans for this week of infamy, Hegemonic was dispatching a shriveled little elf to croak the name of our CD on a deserted corner in Erie, Pa. That's the kind of marketing support we get, friends. That's why we're still so loveably obscure here on planet earth. Oh, sure...I have to watch what I say, or else Hegemonic will send their Indonesian goon squads after us again, right? Well, I say fuck 'em. Let 'em do their worst. Let 'em send the whole bloody army over. I couldn't care less!!

What was that?! Was that someone at the DOOR?! Oh...just the mailman.

So...last week, as you recall, I was hanging precariously from a hot air balloon ineptly piloted by sFshzenKlyrn during the maiden voyage of our new money-making venture, Windbag Tours, Unlimited. I'm sure you've been on pins and needles since my last dispatch, which described the menacing typhoon brewing over the Indian Ocean. What happened, you ask? Well, I'll tell you. Right after these short messages....

Just kidding. As the balloon was being pulled out to sea, I set my sights on a small, deserted island a few miles off the Sri Lankan coast. With all the strength I could muster, I tugged on the guide ropes so as to bring the balloon around to a southwesterly heading, which would carry us over this barren patch of rock and sand. I had just started releasing some air from the balloon to bring us lower, when sFshzenKlyrn obligingly poured some boiling water into my lap (he has a small tea kettle attachment powered by his own personal ionized magma core). While I was naming off the saints, I inadvertently tugged on the release flap a little too hard and sent us spiraling earthward.

Our landing was hard -- at least it was for me. As always, sFshzenKlyrn seemed unscathed, though he had spilled the rest of his tea water on the way down. While he lumbered off in search of something edible, I dragged myself out of the surf, pulling our patented Hegemonic Industries survival kit along with me. Inside the waterproof casing was the usual assortment of necessities -- beef jerky, egg shells, condoms, a Dutch/Timorese phrase book (mostly translations of commands and epithets), and the most valued item of all...the patented Hegemonic one-shot crank transmitter, guaranteed to give you no more than one chance at calling for help before it falls apart.

I cranked that sucker up, tuning it to the dedicated Big Green distress frequency, and made my one distress call clear, concise, and unambiguous: "HAAAAAAALLLP!" I felt certain that my message had been transmitted before the shoddily manufactured unit burst its plastic seams. I didn't have to wait too long for confirmation that my plea had been heard on the big island -- the silhouette of a large military vessels soon became visible against the gathering clouds on the eastern horizon. Frankly, I was surprised by the apparent large scale of the rescue mission. Then after watching the ship approach for another twenty minutes, I realized it was, in fact, an 1/48 scale destroyer, approximately twenty feet long, manned by polystyrene action figures. So realistic were these figures that upon their landing they immediately became embroiled in an inter-service argument over who should carry my personal effects back to the mini-destroyer, which had, in fact, foundered on the rocks behind them. The little plastic Marine won the argument, but only after peppering his "buddies" with rubber bullets. 

The rescue went well, otherwise. Until sFshzenKlyrn melted their little toy boat. I could use some swimming lessons, let me tell you. 

Pappy Tax-Cut. In case those of you living in Madagascar haven't heard, Dubya got his big fat tax-cut, which will dole out an average of $1 million to each of America's 400 richest multi-millionaires (Dubya's principal constituency), about $58 million a year to the wealthiest 1%, and nothing to the poorest families. This will be funded over the next 11 years at the expense of any federal efforts to provide adequate health care, education, and now limited assistance to the needy and the working poor -- not that any such efforts were forthcoming from the current caveman Congress. Even the so-called "compromise" amount of $1.35 trillion is a fiction, based on phased introduction of the bill's key provisions, which will ultimately cost the treasury in excess of $4 trillion. 

Of course, all you'll read about in the papers is the check you'll be getting from the IRS in the coming months -- $300 (or so) for individuals, and so on. Never mind how much you pay for health insurance, if you can afford it at all. 

It's that same old magic formula Grampa Reagan's handlers worked to perfection. Big tax cut for the rich, with a bone thrown to the middle class to get most voters on board. Then spend a pile on the Pentagon to float high-tech industry. That way there's nothing left for those pesky social programs we're told we despise so much. Where are the Democrats? Missing in action, as usual. No filibuster on this one, even though it scuttles any chance for the development of a progressive agenda in the coming years. 

But that's okay, folks....cuz the check's in the mail!!!

luv u,

jp

Click here to return to Table of Contents.