Hammer Mill Days

Anybody got a plumb line? You know - a weight on a string? Come on, people - let's get resourceful here. Jeezus. How about a tape measure with an eggplant tied to the end? Oh, hi out there in TV land. Just attempting to plumb the depths of what has become a rather large rend in the garment of our adoptive home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill here in upstate New York. We're just getting a preliminary read here, but I'd say this sucker goes down pretty far. Maybe to the center of the Earth (or, to use the term New York-based geoscientists commonly employ, the "oit"). In fact, I have some pretty good evidence that this crack goes straight through the nougat to the chewy center of our lively little planet. What evidence, you ask? The first-hand kind... as in robot hand... as in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who volunteered to, well, dive down there and take a look. Now, when I say he volunteered, I mean so in the technical sense. In other words, I called in ...

News organizations, film-makers, and journalists in general have a maddening tendency to personalize everything and render the most complex issues into extended personal anecdotes. It's a method for storytelling tried and true, and it's obviously one that generates sales since it is so prevalent in the mainstream media. This sometimes manifests itself in the form of stories that focus on a reporter's experience rather than whatever that reporter is witnessing. (Gary Trudeau has offered an extreme example of this with his journalist character Roland Hedley and his perpetually inane Twitter feed.) There's also the phenomenon of framing complex historical events as being largely the product of one person's efforts. Probably the best example of this would be Reagan purportedly bringing down the Berlin Wall through the awesome power of speech. And there's "Charlie Wilson's War", the namesake of which - former Texas representative Charlie Wilson - just p...

Now there's something you don't see every day. That is, unless you're one of those people who sees it every day. I'm just sayin'. (Oh no... I've become one of those people who says, "I'm just sayin'..."). The thing I'm seeing (as opposed to the thing I'm sayin' ) is this massive crack in the foundation of our beloved Hammer Mill. Never noticed it before, actually. Funny what you run across when you're snooping around the place, looking for discarded foodstuffs (abandoned sandwiches, leftover fruit, etc.). Pretty soon you're picking up on all of the stuff that's been going on without your noticing it. I always thought that Mitch Macaphee's experiments in plate tectonics might have some regrettable consequences. Now I can see that I was right. What has Mitch been working on, specifically? Funny you should ask. It's this thing he picked up on in one of Matt's songs, a little number called "Why Not Call It G...

Just a few short takes on what's happening on planet Earth this week. Got a lot of things going on, as it happens - no excuses. Anyway... here's what's bugging the hell out of me. Haiti. The story is starting to get old, I can see, even though many are still waiting for help, not getting enough food, can't find a doctor, etc. A large part of the problem is our obsession with security. I'm afraid we've been an occupying power for a few too many years; it has had its effect, just as it has on the Israeli Defense Forces. We take a military approach to everything, and we trust no one. The U.N., for the most part, is in the same boat, driving around in secure vehicles even before the earthquake hit. Combine this with the general decay of our emergency management capabilities over the past decade and it's not hard to understand why even with a significant commitment of resources, people in Haiti have been waiting a long time for a helping hand. For chrissake - ov...

That one was mine. Oh yes, absolutely it was. It had that black spot on the left side. No, no... the left-hand side, as one looks at it. Bloody mongoose! Oh, hi. You caught me haggling over the incalculable bounty of a bunch of bananas. Somehow, twenty years ago, I never pictured myself spending any serious time trying to convince a rogue mongoose that a twice-discarded piece of fruit belonged to me, not him. (I had no vision, no foresight.) And yet here I am, on the cobblestone street outside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, engaged in this literally fruitless enterprise. No, my friends, I am not hungry. We of Big Green are not wanting for sustenance. We have our art to feed us, our music to fill our bellies, our powerpoint slides to use as sandwich slices, our amplifier heads to employ as toaster ovens, our... our... man, I'm hungry! All right, to be honest... it is lunchtime at the Mill. (The whistle just blew - crazy thing still works even though there hasn't been a shift...

I have to think that President Obama really wants to be remembered as one of the great presidents, like FDR or Lincoln. (Don't say Reagan, because that would just be silly.) I just don't know if he thinks big enough. But whatever his motivations or limitations may be, we simply cannot allow ourselves to be confined by them. What America needs is a healthy dose of movement politics - the kind that brought us the five day work week, earned black people the vote, and brought the Vietnam war to an end. It's the only way fundamental change happens, and we had best start facing that fact. That is something the late great Howard Zinn understood. (Very sorry to hear of his passing this week.) And it's something that gets repeated frequently in these strange days when the closest thing we have to a national progressive party behaves like a timid opposition even while it enjoys the largest majorities it has seen in Congress since the Watergate era. One can, with some justificatio...

Watch me now - Work, work! (Aw, shake it up, baby!) Work, work! (Yeah, you drive me crazy!) Work, work! (Got a little bit of soul, now!) Yeah, that's me... and yes, I'm doing a cover by The Contours, circa 1962. Got to keep the lights on somehow. If it takes encouraging a bunch of over-swilled woodchucks to do the "Mashed Potato", so be it. And in case some of you feel as though I'm being less than charitable or disrespecting my fellow upstate New Yorkers, think (or feel) again - I am playing for actual woodchucks, and they've been drinking hard cider all night. Tell you something right now - if you think human beings have a corner on inebriation, you've never played the Chuck House (seven blocks south of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill). I sincerely encourage you not to. You know how human drunks have a tendency to throw bottles? Well, here at the Chuck House, hard cider is served in little wooden kegs. That's probably all I need to tell you about th...