Hammer Mill Days

Step one: fill the little box with letters. It's a letter box! Step two, check your work on step one. Step three: press "publish" and watch the blue smoke come out. You are now a "blogger", Charlie! All you need now are decipherable opinions. Well, here we are at the mill, still waiting for the next episode of our Podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN to roll off the back of a truck. Late again. Must be short on key ingredient this month. Actually, as I pointed out last week, the main ingredient is work on our parts, which is rare indeed. A jem of great price ... that price being the sweat off of our collective brows. Work, work, work ... that's what a podcast is all about. The internet is a slave-driver! Small wonder we chose to outsource its production to some nameless third world country. Working through a social media broker, we have been assured of a good and reliable product, voiced by people who sound exactly like Matt and I, their Indonesian accents just bare...

No denying that last week was a big week in the world of Supreme Court jurisprudence. While I am no legal scholar, here are my two-cents on a few of the decisions: Obergefell v. Hodges. The Court decided that the protections associated with marriage can no longer be denied to gay couples. About freaking time. It always struck me as ironic that we should forbid marriage to a group of people who seem to want it more than anyone else. Though I'm happy with mine, I am no firm believer in marriage as an institution. I think its only value - and this is my opinion, of course - is that it enables you to enjoy certain benefits granted by the government - tax advantages, visitation rights, property rights, etc. That's the way things work; that's the way our society is arranged. Given all that, couples of all sorts should be allowed to marry. Marriage equality is seen by some evangelical Christians as a threat to their beliefs. Those who confer marriage licenses in some officia...

Y'okay. I know. I'm still working on it, okay? What the hell are you, my mother? I AM WORKING ON IT. Leave me aLONE! Sorry, man. Catching me at kind of a sensitive time, let's say. I was just being grilled on where the June podcast (and its half-album of new material) is. Worst part of that whole thing is that, the person grilling me is not a person at all. It's Marvin (my personal robot assistant) ... sort of. I say "sort of" because the shaming tirade he just subjected me to was programmed into him by someone else. Who, exactly? Well ... apparently one of the few people who listen to our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN . So that narrows the possibilities a bit. Someone who has it in for me, big time. Okay ... obviously I owe someone an explanation, even if I don't know who it is. So here are my top reasons for not having our podcast episode ready at this late date: Solar Obstruction - At this time of year, the sun is between us and our podcast. What do...

The stars and bars are coming down all across the old south. High time, in my humble opinion. This does, however, represent a kind of gallows conversion on the part of many of the region's politicians who capitalized on this symbol of their racist past throughout their noxious careers. Now they're climbing over each other in a scramble to be out front on the flag issue. The political calculus has shifted with respect to the battle flag of the confederacy, and political leaders see the loss of this symbol as an opportunity to gain some easy points. No policy changes - just remove the flag and we're all good, right? It's vintage American political theater, kind of like the ubiquitous flag pin. (Pin on, hero! Pin off, traitor!) We are so obsessed with symbolism that we invariably miss the fundamentals. Reverend Barber was talking about this over the last few days, countering a lot of the happy talk about everyone coming together and pulling down that offending flag. Seri...

What do you mean the broken-down car has broken down? How much more of a heap could it possibly be? Okay, okay ... we'll call the hook. No, not CAPTAIN Hook. Unless he's opened a towing business in his dotage. Seems unlikely. Well, as you can see, the bottom is falling out of Big Green, economically speaking. Nothing new, right? As a class, musicians tend to be monetarily challenged, let's say. Doing music for a living is tantamount to perpetual unemployment, interrupted by occasional contract work. And when you're a plainclothes band, the gig money sucks. Usually you get a percentage of the door. If you're more well known, they might give you the WHOLE door. And if you draw a good crowd, they might even throw in a window as well. Now, when you play mostly original music, like we do, that's an even bigger problem. Nobody knows the songs, for one thing ... when you're not famous, that is. Even worse, the audience starts requesting songs by the Scorps, or ...

What is there to say about the Charleston shooting? Another three-foot creep with a four-foot gun. That's the long of it. I notice most of what's being talked about is this generic "pure" hatred, evil, etc. Most of the television commentators have been avoiding the "R" word. Hey, folks ... it's called racism. Combine a racist history with a birthday gun, and you've got the recipe for Charleston. School friends talk about racist jokes that nobody took seriously. He wore flag patches on his jacket for both Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa, Confederate flag license plates. No particular concern? We shall see. The sad fact is, racism is a default position in white society, south and north. I grew up in white society, and I have been surrounded by racism my entire life, at various levels of severity. I am certain that, had it not been for the guiding efforts of my mother and my older siblings, I might well have ended up as racist as some of my ne...

What the hell. Is that the number of songs? Are you freaking kidding me? Just looking at it is freaking exhausting. All those parts! What the .... ! Oh, hello. I'm pretending to just notice you, there on the other side of this transparent screen that separates us. Hoo-boy, well ... you've caught us in the middle of an analysis of our song inventory. Little hard to keep close track of this stuff. We just write 'em, track 'em, and stack 'em. Never take the time to count them, for chrissake. Before you know it, they're cluttering up the closets, over-stuffing all of the dresser drawers, spilling out into the hallway, and god knows what. Bloody nuisance! So, on Matt's insistence (slave driver!), we've taken to inventorying them, starting with the most recent examples and working backward. What's first? Well, our Ned Trek songs, of course. Stacks of them. Our February episode of Ned Trek included no less than six new songs, including a number by Mr. S...