Hammer Mill Days

This tape recorder has that Leroy Brown kind of problem. You know ... it looks like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone. Guess it must have been messin' with the wife of a jealous dehumidifier. All right, well, it's no secret that Big Green has a technology problem or two, even with an in-house mad science advisor like Mitch Macaphee. Our machines are aging, our circuits are frayed, our relays are frosted, and the electric bill's unpaid. (That was an accidental rhyme, by the way.) Most of our recording devices have at least one tooth missing. I've got an Evil Twin direct box that needs surgery. Our VS2480 deck has finally been retired for a system that's maybe six years newer (i.e. only nine years old). Hey ... if you're a real band, that shouldn't matter, right? Got a second-hand guitar and a panama hat? Start busking. Got a broken-down upright piano that's barely upright? Grab a tin cup and start pounding those dusty keys. That's the...

Just heard that Texas's asinine SB4 anti immigrant bill has been blocked by a federal judge a day before implementation. Now perhaps more undocumented people in Houston will make their way to safety in the midst of this catastrophic storm. It's conceivable that more than a few people's lives will have been saved by this decision, though it remains to be seen what will happen on appeal. Texas's useless governor is determined to push this point with the full support of the Trump Justice Department, furiously waving the bloody shirt of immigrant crime, murder, rape, etc., to make their bigoted followers happy. Of course, as police chiefs all over Texas and, really, across the nation know, the effect of this broad policy will be the precise opposite of what Trump, Sessions, and Abbott claim. It doesn't take a criminologist to understand how this works. The police don't have omniscience; they rely on people who see something to say something, as the slogan goes. Wi...

Anybody seen my tuning fork? No, damn it, THAT'S not it. That's my tuning spoon. I said fork , you moron. This .... place ! Oh, yeah ... hi out there. I'm just attempting to replace a string on a second hand guitar that's been lying around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill since before we started squatting inside this big old drafty barn of a place. In as much as Big Green is a collectivist institution by nature, we make use of what resources avail themselves, utilizing only what we need to accomplish a mutually agreed-upon task, then replacing the surplus in such a way as to benefit all. Yes, we're all equal here. Except, of course, anti-Lincoln. Fuck that guy! Why am I restringing an old, abandoned guitar? Well, if it makes you feel any better, I'm doing it with used strings. We're scraping the bottom of the stewpot here, folks - I won't make any bones about it. (Typically, what you find at the bottom of the pot is not so much bones as sinew and fat...

His tremendous majesty Trump the First made several speeches this week, generating the usual range of comments, lamentations, amens, and apologies. I will set aside my observations on how he handled all of this presidential business for the moment and focus instead on the most consequential remarks; namely the speech he delivered on the Afghanistan war, now in its sixteenth year. My short take is that there isn't a lot new here. We knew that Trump had loosened the rules of engagement a bit, resulting in a greater number of civilian casualties than was typical under Obama. In Monday's address, Trump said that troop levels would be determined based on conditions, not deadlines - again, nothing new. Both Obama and Bush followed this standard in Afghanistan and Iraq at one point or another; that's why we were still in both countries when Trump started his presidency. He had some kind of stern words for Pakistan; same as his predecessors. (Obama as much as promised cross-borde...

Where's the summer podcast? I don't freaking know. Must have left it in my other pants. What am I, Kreskin? Maybe. I hear HE has more than one pair of pants. You see, here's the problem with living in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. (And I should add here, it's not the ONLY problem.) It's goddamn hard to stay on a schedule. You can set up your little wall calendar or get one of those day planners at the stationery store. (Personally, I prefer stores that move around, like food trucks. Mmmmmm .... food trucks ....) Or you can vault bravely forward into the 21st Century and set your schedule on some phone app. Well, we've got none of that here. Nothing like it. Anti-Lincoln puts a mark on the wall every morning, but frankly, after a decade of that, it just looks like patterned wallpaper. I guess what I'm saying is that we haven't posted a new THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast in four months because, well, we lost count of the days. And days turned into weeks...

The thing about Trump is that he never knows when to shut the hell up. The events of the past ten days put this into stark relief. His post-Charlottesville comments are driven as much by his insistence on being right as by anything else. That said, the man knows how to court his core constituencies - namely, by abandoning any semblance of the traditional presidential role of being the nation's consoler-in-chief and weighing in on the side of white sheets and brown shirts. Classy. I guess that roughly comports with Bannon's avowed strategy of calling out Democrats on race issues, though he claims now to want to crush the "clowns" in the white nationalist movement. (I suspect he's attempting to blow smoke here.) There is little doubt in my mind that Trump is a deep-dish racist fuck. His personal history alone is enough to convince any reasonable person, from his early days as a landlord to his vocal advancement of birtherism to his targeting of immigrants, Muslims...

Ask not what Big Green has been doing for you this week. Ask what you can do for Big Green. And yes, I am cribbing from John F. Kennedy - that's how we roll around here. It's all JFK, all the time. Interestingly, president Kennedy did have a role in Big Green's history, albeit a minor one. Back in the day when we were fighting the cat for the scraps that she had just wrestled away from some mice, we would record in our childhood bedrooms, our mother's living room, some spare room - wherever we could fit a cassette machine and some battered instruments. (Those instruments!) Matt and I would bang around the way we still do now, hammer together a song, then release it on cassette. And when I say "release", I mean something like tossing it out into the middle of the road and hoping someone chances upon it. (You know - essentially like posting it on the Internet ... without the Internet part.) Well, many of those cassette collections were made up of Christmas s...