Hammer Mill Days

What's that? What's that you say? Can't hear ya, young man. You'll have to speak up a bit. Nah, I'm not deaf. I'm either old or living on top of a fracking operation. Or maybe both. Yeah, hey howdy. Welcome back to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, where the winters are cold and the derricks run day and night, pulverizing the shale that supports the very ground we walk on to squeeze every last iota of value out of the battered slag that is America. Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, our once and future corporate overlords, are working this little piece of borrowed real estate like it's Irian Jaya and they're Freeport McMoran. But.... I digress. Always like to start on a bright note. Now on to more serious matters. Well, it took some doing with all of this earth moving and earth shaking (movers and shakers are we), but we managed to post the June episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN . Another titanic installment of ... w...

There's a lot going on these past few weeks, so I just want to touch on a few things and go. Touch and go, that's right. Fast and fatuous. Congressman Darrell Issa's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted this week to recommend Attorney General Eric Holder be held in contempt of Congress. That, of course, has been reported by all and sundry. What have only really been visible on Fox News are the positively loony allegations that are behind this push for the contempt citation. Perhaps you've heard this - it's a conspiracy theory that the Obama administration allowed the "Fast and Furious" arm sales to go wrong in the hopes that the resulting increased gun violence in Mexico would prompt a popular movement for gun control back home. Crazy stuff. Except that it's being repeated by G.O.P. lawmakers like Rep. John Mica, Trent Franks, Joe Walsh, and Issa himself. Sen. Charles Grassley (a.k.a. Grandma) has alluded to this as well. So.... w...

Oww. Did you feel that? I did. Feels like another podcast coming on. I always imagine this is somewhat akin to launching a new naval ship, except that THIS IS BIG GREEN is full of holes the minute it gets lowered into the water. Oh well... Things have been kind of noisy around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, actually. Pretty hard to finish a podcast with all that clanging, drilling, truck traffic, occasional machine gun, etc. What, with Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm now using our adopted home as a platform for hydrofracking, I suppose I should expect as much. Some might think hydrofracking and music production aren't necessarily compatible, but that's .... well, that's just plain ignorant and insensitive. To some people's ears, the sound of extractive enterprise is melodious and enchanting. And the smell ... just like flowers. Not that Big Green has always required complete silence while working on an album. Far from it, my friends. Just listen to our first two...

Here is the bad news about living in New York State right now: we are standing between what's perceived to be valuable mineral deposits and some of the richest corporations in the world. That's never a good place to be. Ask Iraq. Their abundant oil deposits have brought them nothing but misery, from the moment the West determined that they existed. We (ourselves and, early on, the British) saddled them with repressive regimes, bombed them when they weren't sufficiently compliant, and generally pressed our advantage as the richest and most militarily powerful nations on Earth. Once the home of some of the Arab world's most learned people - they used to say that, in the Middle East, books are written in Cairo, published in Beirut, and read in Baghdad - the place is now a basket case, wracked by sectarian strife, its infrastructure still in a shambles, waiting for the next chapter in a seemingly endless chain of misfortune. Make no mistake - this is not an authorless c...

Hmmm. That drill bit looks a little large. As in, larger than the entire building. Perhaps if we moved the hammer mill a little to the left. No? Hokay. Oh, well.... hi there. Just negotiating a small issue with a representative from Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., the entertainment branch of the titanic multinational that has agreed to, once again, sponsor Big Green - take us under their cold steel wing, as it were - in exchange for mineral rights to the land upon which our adopted squat-house home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, now sits. What is it about these Hegemonic guys that even their A and R people wear full body armor? They seem a little, I don't know, nervous. This guy I'm talking to has a very twitchy trigger finger. Wish to hell he'd put that Kalashnikov down. Hegemonic, as some of you may recall, was our corporate label back in the early 2000's. We had a little falling out.... though I guess you could almost call it a "falling in,"...

So Scott Walker held on to his job in Wisconsin. Not a huge surprise. The polling has been in his favor for weeks. Plus the recall effort has kind of had the stench of failure about it as we approached the actual vote; people hedging and putting on the brave face. Sorry to see so many working people disappointed in that way. I've never been a big fan of the recall concept, personally, but I understand how they came to that point. If nothing else, the effort did give them motivation to do what actually needs to be done in Wisconsin and elsewhere - organize. It's not just about voting. It's more about standing up for your rights and fighting back against the torrent of corporate money swamping our politics. John Dewey had it about right when he said that politics is the shadow cast on society by big business. I suppose in his day it wasn't very different - the wealthy have always pressed their advantage. Perhaps the period from World War II through the 1970s will be see...

Sweepin' up after that big storm. Man, the weather these days. Good goddamn thing that global warming story turned out to be a hoax. If it'd been true, we'd be worried about all this extreme weather. But no, no.... everything's fine. Experts agree. No, today's not contrary Wednesday. It's contrary every freaking day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. I'm spouting that stuff about global warming in hopes of ingratiating ourselves to a potential corporate sponsor. Who, you may ask? Well, it's someone Big Green worked with before - Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., king of the extractive industries. Tearing Earth a new Asshole since 1953 ™. From the tar sands of Alberta to the gold mines of Irian Jaya to the fracking fields of Pennsylvania, the name Hegemonic has been synonymous with ... well, with making big piles of money out of big piles of slag. Who better to shake down for some cash, right? Oh, yes... I know what you...