Hammer Mill Days

  Have we reached a thousand plays yet? Hmmmm. How about a hundred? No? Right. Hit refresh again. There must be something wrong with that goddamn thing. Stupid YouTube! Hello, friends. Hope you had a wonderful holiday week. Bet you’re wondering what we’ve been up to. No? Well, I’ll just tell you anyway. Nothing you didn’t already know – that’s the short answer. The long answer is I split a gut getting that nano-Christmas concert done and posted, and it looks like YOU haven’t even seen it yet! Okay, so a lot of people (a.k.a. Anti-Lincoln) have asked me why we call this a nano-concert. Simple, my dear friend: it’s just my sorry ass on the view screen. That’s it – no bass player, no backup singers, no drums, only me and my distressed-looking Martin, which (I hasten to add) is not an instrument I ordinarily play on gigs. Until now. A measured response to sloth I know what you’re thinking. Who in their right mind would spend their entire holiday season br...

I’ve said this many times and in many ways ( as far back as 2010 ), but I’ll say it again. Our pundit / journalist class is obsessed with air travel. Their reporting on the state of the industry is way out of proportion with most Americans’ experience of it. Many airline workers are out because of COVID, causing delays and cancellations, and the press’s hair is on fire. Traveler’s tip: if your hair is on fire, don’t attempt to board a domestic flight. (International travel is fine.) It’s not my intention to rant about this incessantly. I’m merely raising it as indicative of the gap between wealthy people’s experience of America and that of non-wealth people. There are many dangers facing poor and working class people in the U.S.; missing an early flight to Miami is not high on their priority lists, by and large. COVID: The long and the short of it Here’s another thing I’ve talked about repeatedly: I don’t understand why the Biden administration isn’t pushing h...

No, I didn’t add a sousaphone. I don’t play the freaking sousaphone. I told you, I’m the only one playing. Try listening to what I say, instead of just watching for my mouth to stop moving so you can start talking again. Geez. Hello out there. Hope all is well with you during this festive time of year. Sometimes festivities can be downright depressing. Oh, sure – there are gaudy Christmas miracles everywhere you look these days. Inflatable snowmen, bloated Santas, flashing lights of every size and color. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) felt compelled to festoon the exterior of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Most sentient beings would say he fell short, but at least he tried. Christmas cracker concert Okay, so, as you know, I talked myself into doing a nano concert earlier this year, and thus far the reviews have been … well …. invisible. Audience missing, presumed entertained. Well, that was so encouraging that I decided to do a special Christ...

I’ve said more than once that Trump was inches away from being a transformational president. The main impediment was his obsessive narcissism and his predilection for believing crazy-ass conspiracy theories. He truly was as gullible as his most crackpot fans, and they rightfully saw themselves reflected and amplified in his titanic stupidity. That said, Trump was the least hide-bound of our recent presidents. He knew nothing about government or politics and so was liable to do anything. When COVID hit, he might have just rolled with a robust global response, spent as much as was necessary, and come out the other end looking like a hero. But the narcissist took over. He didn’t want COVID, and thought it wasn’t fair that he had to deal with it. Then came the flood, and it basically washed his sorry ass out of Washington. Next guy, next fail The talk about Biden back in January 2021 was that he might be the next FDR. Not even close. Roosevelt had a more expansive v...

  Yeah, I don’t have time for greeting cards. Take them away, Marvin. Give them to the kids down the street. Or some monkeys in the zoo. I don’t care, man – just GET THEM OUT OF HERE! Sorry for my all-caps utterance, friends. You know how stressful the holidays can be, particularly when your robot doesn’t follow instructions. Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I’m constantly reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Far from it! We get along like nothing else I can name. (Take my word for the fact that that’s a good thing.) Like you, we are engaged in a last-minute frenzy in preparation for Christmas, New Years, and other assorted observances. And this year it has been made a bit more complicated by my plan to put on yet another nano concert, like the one I did earlier this year . Turns out concert are more fun when you (a) play an instrument you can play, and (b) involve other people in your music-making. Who knew? ...

Sometimes it’s hard to ignore the extent to which our past haunts us. I suspect that most senior news editors grew up during the cold war. That may be why our media culture seems to be stuck in a very retrograde vision of the world. That east v. west pattern was struck deep, and it will take more than a little rain to wear it off. The current crisis unfolding in eastern Europe is a chilling example of this. If Americans rely on the mainstream media to shape their perception of what’s happening overseas, they will not hear a single skeptical voice regarding our current policy. And if this administration doesn’t get a lot of push-back on this issue, we may find ourselves on the brink of a terminal nuclear war before we even know what’s happening. If you thought you were safe because Trump exited the White House last January, think again. The cost of NATO expansion I’ve blogged about this before , but it’s worth repeating. Nations have enduring interests, and r...

  Cold as hell in here. Haven’t you got that fire going yet? Put some of that kindling around the bottom and let’s see if that catches. Okay, okay – nice. Hey … why does that kindling have an F-hole. MARVIN!! Hello, friends. Well, winter is upon us again. This is the time of year when Big Green most deeply regrets squatting in an abandoned hammer mill. (Sounds like a good album name: Big Green most deeply regrets …. or not.) Squatters don’t get energy hookups. They just flat out ignore us, man. It’s like we’re not even here …. which is good if they’re the cops, but not so much if they’re delivering pizzas. (If cops start carrying pizzas, we’re all in trouble.) The ghost of El Kabong Okay, so we rely on Marvin (my personal robot) for many things. This week, it’s tending the fire. So I told him to go get some kindling wood so he could get the damn fireplace started. He came back with an odd but acceptable assortment of maple, rosewood, and birch fragments. ...

I heard a few moments of oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health while they were underway. I didn’t, however, get the chance to dig into it until about a week later, when Michael Moore ran the full audio feed on his podcast, Rumble . You can also read the transcript posted on the Supreme Court’s web site , if you prefer. Either way you access it, it’s pretty ugly, but that’s not surprising. The fact is, we’ve been seeing this slow-motion train wreck coming for decades, and many, many of us chose to do nothing to stop it. But before I get into that familiar diatribe, I want to comment briefly on some of what was said during these oral arguments – specifically, a few reactionary hot takes as analyzed by someone who is not a Con Law expert. Being neutral on a speeding train If you listen to the entire proceedings, you will hear Justice Kavanaugh dive into a discussion of precedent. Kavanaugh cited cases like Brown v. Board of Education as fodder for his argu...

  Just give me a minute, man. I’m changing the strings on my superannuated cheap-ass guitar. And yes, I’m using new strings. Don’t ask me where I got them. Lets’ just say that someone’s Christmas stocking is going to be a little light this year. Oh, hi, blog visitors. It’s you’re old pal Joe. Yeah, I’ve made the momentous decision to restring my guitar because I don’t want to even attempt to deliver a Christmas concert on those rusty old cables I’ve been twanging on. And when I say twanging, I mean just what I say. Just give a listen to my recent nano concert on YouTube and you’ll get the picture. And the picture has sound, by the way. Holiday Tide … I mean, Cheer Of course, I’ve always been terrible at marketing things. (That’s precisely why I went into advertising, but I digress.) Given that it’s the holiday season, you’d think I’d be hawking our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas , like a maniac. But the fact is, those songs are just the tip of the C...

News of the new Omicron COVID variant is settling in, and people are understandably wary and disgusted. Every time it seems like this thing is ending, this thing is not ending, and there are few things more frustrating than that. Life prior to the pandemic seems like this strange, distant, exotic state of being that can never be entirely restored. Of course, we really don’t know very much about Omicron. The networks are doing their best to pre-emptively scare the living shit out of everyone. I try to tune out all but the most authoritative voices; nevertheless, it eventually catches up with all of us in one way or another. The great, untried solution Now, we know how to get out of this. In case you haven’t heard, this is what needs to happen: rich people need to defeat their hunger for more riches. And if that doesn’t happen, we need to do the work for them. In other words, we need to separate Big Pharma from their excess profits and aggressively distribute the...

  Over the river and through the woods to Macaphee’s house we go. Isn’t that the lyric? Got it wrong again? Damn. Okay, here goes. Over the river and through the woods to Trevor James Constable’s house we go. Oh, hi. Didn’t think anyone would be reading the blog on Thanksgiving weekend, but here we are. My guess is that you’re trying to get away from your annoying relatives, especially uncle Sully, quaffing his gin, telling you all about it. That’s the kind of holiday we know and love – food and family conversation, both thoroughly indigestible. What’s cooking, bad looking? Let’s talk about the fare. People have this mental picture of what the traditional Thanksgiving feast should be like. Naturally, it is a concoction of many different stories and fables. The harvest feast shared by English settlers and Wampanoag people in 1621 was likely a diplomatic gathering of sorts . Who the hell knows what they ate? Corn, maybe. Freaking pine cones. Yeah, well …...

After a week of nearly non-stop domestic news, good and bad, I’m going to talk about foreign policy. Think of this as the latest in an ongoing series of posts about how bad Biden’s foreign policy is. Frankly, the only good thing I can say about it at this point is that it is better than Trump’s version, albeit not by much. Longtime readers of this blog and listeners to my podcast Strange Sound (now on hiatus) know that I have been critical of Biden’s imperial world view from the beginning. Since his candidate days, he has de-emphasized foreign affairs. His campaign web site, for instance, included almost no detailed information about his plans in this regard. That was not because he had no plans – it was because he didn’t want to talk about them. Target Asia (again) If you watch the mainstream media, you can’t miss the extent to which they are obsessing over China. They don’t do that unless our nation’s political leaders give them the space to bloviate. This is t...

I don’t think that’s the right box, man. I keep the glass bulbs in the box marked “winter gloves” and the tinsel in the box marked “soup can collection”. That box is marked “Christmas decorations”, and that’s where I keep my soup can collection. And my winter gloves. Oh, hey. I hear you knocking, but you can’t come in. No, I’m not being anti social. I just don’t want to spoil the surprise. We’re working on our Christmas pageant, and we’re hoping that no one will guess this year’s theme before we finish our parade floats. I’ve had Marvin (my personal robot assistant) run out for some more plaster of Paris. What’s that, Anti-Lincoln? Are you sure? Damn. Marvin went to Paris. What’s in a theme? I can tell you what the theme won’t be this year. Anti Lincoln wanted to do a reconstruction-themed Christmas. I told him that we simply couldn’t do it justice. Also, our crazy neighbors upstairs would come at us with torches for advancing what they’ve been calling Crit...

The chattering classes are having a hair-on-fire moment about labor. We’ve seen this coming for a while now. I commented on it back in July when retired ad man and political commentator Don Deutsch fired off a petulant little tweet about working people, then yakked about it with Joe Scarborough. Well, they’re back, and it’s because the service is just not what it should be. Hell, do you realize Joe and Mika had to wait two hours for a flight because there weren’t enough baggage handlers? It’s like workers don’t want to work anymore. Unprecedented … or IS it? An ill wind, indeed When the Black Plague ripped through Europe in the 14th Century, it created a massive labor shortage . This was due to the fact that the disease may have killed as much as 1/3 of the population. The peasants who survived were reluctant to return to their rich masters’ fields. This compelled the gentry to sweeten the pot a bit – compensate the workers more, give them money, cut their rent, e...

  Step back a little bit further – you’re out of frame. Okay, now take a step to the right. That’s it. That’s … no, that’s too far. Go back to the left. LEFT! You know, the side your left hand is on. Oh, Jesus! Oh, hi. Well, once again I’m called upon to do something that I have zero aptitude for. Namely, that’s taking pictures of our band. We do not have an official photographer, which is a shame … because we had a professional photographer before we even had a drummer. (In fact, he sat in on one of our photo sessions as our drummer.) Then we had a drummer, but no guitar player. But I digress. Bad self portaits That said, I’m not averse to learning new skills. Neither am I skilled at learning a new verse. The thing is, I am singularly bad at photography. Ask anybody I’ve taken a picture of. I’m always giving them portrait orientation when they want landscape, and vice versa. (Turns out a lot of people prefer portrait – it’s more slimming.) There’s ano...

There was an old saying among politicos in Albany, according to noted New York State Government scholar and CEO of WAMC public radio Alan Chartock . It went something like this: “Don’t break the other guy’s rice bowl.” (I always felt there was some element of latent racism in this saying – why a rice bowl? – but let’s set that aside for a moment.) This is, in essence, the principle of you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. A legislator will not attack the pet project or campaign funding source of another, and therefore can rely on the same deference from their counterparts. While Chartock’s example is specific to New York politics, it applied at a national level as well, to some extent, and I think the Democratic leadership still plays by these types of rules. Trouble is, their opponents have changed, and they have not changed their tactics in response. No Justice, No Peace Honestly, I sometimes have to slap myself across the face to be certain I’m not having ...

  Hey … this one doesn’t have so much twang in it. No, not Tang! Twang! You know – the sound that doesn’t occur when you pluck this dead-ass string you gave me. That’s the stuff. Yeah, hiya, folks. It’s your old pal Joe from Big Green. No, don’t get up – just relax and have another glass of lemonade. We believe in hospitality here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our longtime squat house. You’re more than welcome to stop by, take a seat, and watch us attempt to record pop music using stone knives and bear skins. Friends of the band will know that I’ve been framming on the guitar just lately, as seen in my recent nano-concert on YouTube . I’m not a virtuoso, to put it mildly. In fact, I beat that mother like Betty Crocker, even when I’m practicing. That’s why I found myself in need of replacement strings. The principle of scarcity Now, with MOST bands, when someone breaks a string, someone else runs up with a fully stringed and pre-tuned spare guitar...

We live in an age of miracles, my friend. Well … minor miracles, anyway. Just this week a neighbor’s cat who disappeared ten days ago turned up. That almost never happens. Then, of course, there are the elections. As always, it was a night of many disappointments and few surprises. Elections always give me heartburn, frankly. The thing is, there are only a few institutions in modern society that are even nominally responsive to the public will. The most important of these is government. And while government has become increasingly unresponsive to the concerns of the people over the past few decades, that fact is partly a reflection of our lack of interest or participation. Through a mirror darkly The last thing I want to do is sound like the morning-after prognosticators on MSNBC . But I will say that complaining about Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema is something like displacement. Yes, they are tremendous assholes doing valuable service to capital. Yes, in the m...

  I could have sworn I left it right here. Sometimes I think I’m losing my nut. And sometimes I think I’m losing my soup. So I’ve got it covered, soup to nuts. What was I saying again? Hoo, man. Those squatters upstairs must be smoking the devil’s weed once again. I’ve got second-hand smoke brain. Of course, after having spent a third of my life with first-hand smoke brain, this almost rises to the level of clarity. No, there are many possible reasons why I’m thick as a brick today. Here’s one … Sleep is our friend Let’s face it. When you don’t sleep enough, you start getting stupid. Ask anyone who’s been up for five days. Rest assured, they will tell you that they cannot rest assured. And if you ask anyone who’s been up for a hundred days, they won’t answer because they’re busy being dead. In short, sleep is obligatory. Now, many of you know I’m a part time geezer. In fact, pretty much everyone in Big Green is exactly that. My illustrious brother M...

Has it been a year already? Mother of pearl. Election day is almost upon us, and the pundits are out in force, telling us what to expect, handicapping races, reminding us of historical trends, etc. We are defenseless against their onslaught of conventional wisdom! How can we stop the madness? Well, as you can see, I’ve been watching (or at least listening to) way too much cable television. Every election is unique, as much as the talking heads want us to think otherwise. And while I know many of my friends on the left don’t like to focus on voting, I still feel strongly that we need to take the time to do it if only to stop the reactionaries from running everything into the ground. Anyway, for those who are interested, here are my thoughts on this year’s elections. Ballot measures in New York Like most years, I wasn’t aware of any of the ballot measures in New York State this year until a handful of days ago. My sense is that three of them are no-brainers. Ba...

  Okay, back it up a little further. That’s it. Little more. Little more. That’s great, stop there. I said stop. STOP, DAMN IT! Bloody hell! Yeah, hey, everybody. Just attempting to wave a shipment of widgets into the loading dock here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I have to say, it’s not working out very well. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) volunteered to drive the truck. Need I say more? (We’ll be needing to put a tarp over the loading dock, now that he’s punched a truck-shaped hole in the garage door.) What kind of widgets are we receiving? Not sure. This wasn’t my gig. Actually, Anti-Lincoln had the bright idea of getting an assembly line going here in the old mill. He is from the mid 19th century, and so a hammer mill from the 1890s looks quite modern to his eyes, particularly when he’s had some of his beloved absinthe. Unintended consequences So, I’m pretty sure I’m partly to blame for Anti-Lincoln’s new project. I told him to do s...

Former General Colin Powell died this week of complications from COVID-19. I’m sure you’ve heard this about a million times by now. You’ve probably also heard that he was a hero, a man of great stature, an inspiration, etc. I can tell you that a lot of hagiographic remembrances came floating up from the television on Monday and Tuesday. I don’t think it will surprise any readers of this blog that I was not a fan of the former Secretary of State. Yes, like many on the left, I never forgave him for his Feb 5, 2003 performance at U.N. headquarters in New York – a key moment in the rush to the Iraq invasion. (Some may recall that they draped Picasso’s Guernica during Powell’s presentation , which was just a little too on-the-nose.) But his career had a lot of bloody patches. Spinning from the beginning Powell was a Vietnam veteran. He did, actually, play a small role in concealing the My Lai massacre, suggesting that the story was unrealistic because Americans and Vi...

  Okay, here’s the thing. I’m too big in the frame. It goes against the theme of the series, dude. If there’s one thing Big Green doesn’t like, it’s inconsistency. Those are our principles. And if you don’t like them … we have other principles. Oops! Didn’t know anyone was reading this. You just caught me having a little disagreement with Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is serving as my video producer this month. Nothing serious – just an obscure conceptual question that has vexed us since the beginning of this blog post: how nano is nano? What means this? Allow me to explain. A question of scale We’re doing a little side project called the Nano Concert. Perhaps you’ve heard us nattering about it in previous posts and on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN . You haven’t? DAMN IT! Marvin, did you forget to publish the blog posts again? Why have I been wasting my breath? What’s that? You DID publish them? Uh, okay. Never mind. What was I saying? Ah...

I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating. As a society, we appear to be stuck in a holding pattern, circling our somewhat fractured collective memory of the Cold War. It seems we long for the illusion of a simple, good guys v. bad guys conflict, and we will stop at nothing to conjure one up again. The echoes of the previous Cold War still reverberate, sometimes in odd and almost laughable ways. For instance, this week my Congressional Rep. Claudia Tenney called Pope Francis a communist . She is, of course, an unreconstructed Trumpist just visible under a faded coat of John Birch Society lacquer. But putting aside retrograde small-fry politicians mired in the failed policies of previous decades, we face a much larger problem. Paging Howard Phillips! Back in the days before the Internet, crazy people could only make their voices heard on radio and direct access cable television. One of those crazy people was the late Howard Phillips , co-founder of the Ameri...