Hammer Mill Days

Got your cowboy hat yet? Oh. Okay, why the hell not? Just go downtown, walk into the cowboy supply store, and pull a ten-gallon hat off the rack. What's so hard about that? Oh... hey, man. Caught me, once again, in the midst of lecturing the help. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) refers to it derisively as "reprogramming", but you know better. All I asked him to do was to purchase his own cowboy gear - that's all. Is that so unreasonable? Am I expected to pay for everything around here? What the hell - I'm the "job creator", right? I'm the one using "air quotes" left and right. Haven't I done my part in this employer-robot assistant relationship? Huh? Okay, so why am I asking Marvin to dress up like Tex? So that he'll match the rest of us, of course, when we start shooting videos to support our upcoming album of Cousin Rick Perry songs. What the hell, we can't release an album of songs nominally by the governor of Texas ...

Sure, I'm surprised that the Affordable Care Act survived this past Thursday. I thought the mainstream media was going to talk it to death, frankly. Talk about wind-ups ... by the time 10:00 a.m. rolled around, I was too bleeping sick of the issue to even care, and let me tell you - that's quite a distance for me. It's just that the horserace coverage of every political issue gets under my skin in the worst way. The merits of a given issue are never deeply examined; it's always he said this, she said that. No way to work out which is closer to the truth. They did this with health care, pretty much all day. After the decision was handed down, NPR had some guy from Cato and a policy wonk from the administration. Basically just put them in a room and watch them spar. Of course, Cato guy is much further to the right than the Obama person is to the left, so it's kind of a straw man argument at best. How is this news? They pulled the same thing with the "Fast and F...

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,"...