Hammer Mill Days

Thursday night is still good for me. What about the rest of the week? I'm busy, that's what. Man's got to sleep sometime, you know. Blame it on the diurnal rotation of the earth and the fact that my ancestors evolved on this miserable pimple of a planet! (Oh, crikey ... now I'm borrowing throwaway phrases from minor characters in Lost in Space .) What do you say to someone who sleeps six and a half days a week? WAKE UP! That might work. I've got a little problem in that direction, I admit. It's prompted me to ask Mitch Macaphee to install some kind of alarm clock function in Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He gave me a look that would melt iron, but w.t.f. - why shouldn't I expect a sophisticated robot to have a level of functionality one might expect from a ten dollar wristwatch? (Mitch told me to go out and buy a ten dollar wristwatch, actually. He has a point.) What's this got to do with Big Green, the larger world of indie music, and the fa...

Did you hear it last week, over the noise emanating from the London Olympics? That collective groan from points east? That was the world reacting to the man who might be president next January. There are, I'm sure, millions in Europe and the Middle East thinking, Really, America? So soon after Bush, you're going to elect yet another ham-fisted idiot? Really? In many respects, our president is president of the world, if only because he (and thus far, it's always been "he") wields enormous power - military, economic, and diplomatic - over virtually everyone else. (They should probably get a vote in the matter, but then here in America we're not even guaranteed that right, depending upon which state we live in.) Though his spinmeisters have been working overtime to put a positive gloss on it, Mitt's softball trip to friendly nations was an unmitigated (or un-Mitt-igated, perhaps) disaster, from the crypto-racist tone of the adviser referencing our shared ...

That's no good. They will certainly have lifted the phonograph needle by that point. The phonograph needle ... you know... the thing that scratches along the record and makes the music come out. Don't you know anything about technology? Oh, hello. Didn't see you there, peering in from the void of cyberspace. Just working my way through some technical issues relating to our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . Getting into the minutiae with our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who will actually be making the records this time out. Yes, we do have a corporate label - Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., a.k.a. Hegephonic Records - but they are kind of a "hands off" outfit (unless you owe them money; then it's another story ... one involving off duty military personnel, typically .... I'll stop there). What all that means is simply this: under our "contract", we make the product from start to finish. We write the songs, ...

Attention, politicians of every stripe. I don't want to hear your expressions of regret over the Aurora massacre. You have no intention of doing anything to stop this bloodletting, so spare me your pious speeches and your pretentious, made-for-television tears. There is no excuse for what happened in Aurora, Colorado last weekend. You can blame that madman for losing his head and killing people, but there is a collective responsibility for the magnitude of the crime. This atrocity goes way beyond what a single armed person should be able to perpetrate through the use of legally obtained weaponry. Perhaps some do not see a difference between 70 people shot and five. There is a difference. Five is bad, unacceptable, and something to be outraged about. Seventy shot - twelve fatally - is beyond outrage, and was only possible through the use of military grade weaponry. If Holmes had been armed only with the type of gun my dad used to carry (loaded) to coin shows on Sundays, perhaps on...

Because in the midst of dark, shocking disregard and cruelty, we were privileged to see such inspiring generosity and caring. It is impossible to imagine those first disorienting moments. Impossible to comprehend how the night had turned upside down and inside out. The smoke clawing. The audible terror of gunfire and screams of pain. The ripping flash of gunfire. The barely seen figure hell-bent on destruction. Yet, in this sensory assault, this mayhem, this perversity, decisions were instantly made based on the utmost kindness. While the gunman was cloaked in all manner of protective gear, people chose to use their bodies to protect others. These people had no Kevlar vests to shield them, but they would fling themselves, their futures, their possibilities, their tomorrows over others to offer them a chance. "Here," they said, "let me use all that I am to protect all that you are. You deserve a chance." Friends stayed at each other's side, offering life-gi...

How do you spell XML again? Does it rhyme with "smell"? No coincidence, I suspect. Jesus christ on a bike. Technology is for fools. And forever a fool I shall be. Oh, hi. Just got done cobbling together this month's episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN , our notorious podcast, and placing it online with the technological equivalent of stone knives and bearskins. My approach to programming is akin to placing several monkeys at computers loaded with self-peeling banana screensavers. Trial and error... but mostly trial. Anyway, it got done, and that's just as well, because this month's episode is chock full of something. Yes, friends, it's full of ingredients. It contains contents. Should I draw you a picture? Right. You'll see from the program notes that there are not one but TWO new songs from Cousin Rick Perry, governor of Texas. These are two more in a series of "first draft" recordings that will comprise (in a more finished form) Big Green's up...

Once again, a bit pressed for times. Projects, projects, projects - you know the tune. Here's what's chewing on my nerves this week: In search of a problem. The G.O.P. is obsessed with the notion of voter fraud, a phenomenon so rare that it makes injuries from lightning strikes seem frequent by comparison. Can we just stop pretending, for five minutes, that this is a sincere concern about the integrity of our elections? It's pretty obvious what they're up to - they are fighting a rear-guard action against demographic trends, long acknowledged, that do not favor a virtually all-white party such as themselves. The only way to do that is through the usual methods they have employed over the years: voter suppression. Voter I.D. laws, in particular, are meant to place significant hurdles of time, expense, and logistics between individuals and the ballot. Let's call it what it is - a direct attack on voting rights. Time to push back ... hard. Crime and punishment. A...