Hammer Mill Days

Back to the ongoing saga of Big Green's Interstellar Tour 2013-14: The Cowboy Scat edition... Interstellar Tour Log: January 27, 2014 Exiting orbit of KOI-314c Just in the process of attempting to reach escape velocity from KOI-314c, the strangely Earth-like planet recently detected by Earth scientists. Have to say, it was a bit disappointing. For one thing, we couldn't find any inhabitants. Well, of course there was a vast ocean of liquid methane that might have contained some life forms, but I wasn't going to be the first to volunteer to check it out. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) got a good look around; no clubs in site. Not even a Denny's. What the hell is Earth-like about that? Next trip, we bring Mitch Macaphee. Interstellar Tour Log: January 29, 2014 Entering asteroid belt (Yaaah!) Asteroids! We're taking a swing back through our home solar system, on our way to Sirius, and our trajectory appears to run straight through the dreaded asteroid...

Listened to Obama's fifth State of the Union address Tuesday night and was not surprised to hear many of the same small-bore themes we've heard from this president many times before. I am not someone you could describe as disappointed in the president: he is very much the kind of leader I expected him to be following his 2008 election. Probably the most prescient look at the then-early Obama presidency in 2009 was published in Harper 's under the title Barack Hoover Obama . The author Kevin Baker pointed out that, like Obama, Hoover was a very intelligent, well educated, worldly, and highly capable man - that was the reason he was elected president. And yet, Hoover failed miserably. Baker sums it up in this passage: Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life,...

Interstellar Tour Log: January 20, 2014 Somewhere in deep space There are some things you can accomplish quite well in space (e.g. mid-air cartwheels) and others, well ... not so much. I'm afraid our January podcast is an example of the latter. Those of you anxiously awaiting the new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN , take heart: it's in the works, though Matt's interplanetary breathing apparatus is getting in the way of his doing a credible talking horse imitation. (You'd think it would be a positive boon, but no.) We're hoping this problem will be eliminated when we arrive at the gassy, Earth-like planet known as KOI-314c, which - I'm guessing - has a perfectly breathable Earth-like atmosphere. (Hey, they said it was Earth-like. That's all I need to hear. We're playing there.) Interstellar Tour Log: January 23, 2014 Somewhere else in deep space Well, we've arrived on KOI-314c, and if this is Earth-like, things have gone seriously downhill ...

Not that this is all that unusual, but I heard from various representatives of the Republican party and the "tea party" movement on NPR this morning. I really wonder why these right-wing types are so critical of NPR - the network is almost wholly devoted to providing them with outsized coverage. Every time they sneeze, Steve Inskeep is holding the rag. Sure, I listen to them regularly, because they have some good reporters, some good programs, and because they're better than everything else on my upstate New York radio dial. But that's a bit like voting for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Yeah, Barry's a pretty lousy president; he's just better by an order of magnitude than the object he was running against. Pretty low bar, frankly. What irks me, though, is the legitimization of truly extremist right-wing notions of governance (or lack of same) through what I'm sure NPR and other networks consider "balance coverage". A brief example: yesterday t...

I'm sure I'm not the first to make this observation, but I'll say it anyway. There's something compelling about Capella (the Goat star). What it compels us to do is another thing entirely. Booked into another series of club dates on the fourth stone out from Capella, my Big Green colleagues and I have tried to make the best of it. It hasn't been easy. For one thing, the locals here are not very fond of country music, and since our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , is largely made up of mock-country numbers, that puts a damper on things. We've had to reach deep down into the song bag to keep these rock-like creatures happy. (And by that crack I don't simply mean that they like rock music. I mean, they are themselves animate rocks, with stony arms and legs and eyes like geodes. But yes, unsurprisingly, they prefer rock music.) We asked sFshzenKlyrn , our perennial sit-in guitarist, to remove his cowboy hat for the duration (he tries hi...

After an eight-year coma, Ariel Sharon died this past week. I say good for him. I am glad that he's gone, and I say that without malice. No one deserves what he went through as a result of that stroke, not even a heartless killer. And I regret to say that that is exactly what he was, despite the graveside accolades. Starting with the Qibya massacre in 1953, when troops led by Sharon killed almost 70 Palestinians, as well as destroying 45 homes and a mosque, Sharon made it his business to make the Arab inhabitants of Israel/Palestine miserable, homeless, or dead. He earned his title "The Bulldozer" after the 1967 war when he pacified Gaza by destroying thousands of homes. While Sharon is hailed as a hero of the 1973 war - a war resulting from the stalemate policy encouraged by super-genius Henry Kissinger - he is probably best remembered for his role in the murderous 1982 invasion of Lebanon, in the midst of that country's civil war, culminating in the massacre of Pa...

Which star is this again? I get them mixed up sometimes. We did Betelgeuse. We did Aldebaran. One big red, the other little yellow. Now it's time for a blue star ... Rigel. Perfect place to play the blues. Big Green playing the blues ... on our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick ? Well ... sure, why not. That's some of what we started out by playing many, many moons (and many suns) ago, before we started writing a lot of our own music. We played Taj Mahal numbers, real standards like Statesboro Blues, and similar stuff, along with songs by The Beatles, The Band, Neil Young, etc. In our early days as Big Green, we had an alter ego cover band that performed under a series of ridiculous names, including "The Space Hippies", "I-19", and others. (One club owner, I recall, refused to hire The Space Hippies, claiming that, if he did, he would be "laughed out of Utica." That's when we founded the band, "Laughed o...