Hammer Mill Days

There are a thousand and one practical uses for them, Mitch. You can eat them, for one thing. And if you wire them up right, you can use them as primitive dry cell batteries. That’s two. Just nine hundred ninety-nine to go. Damn, it’s hard to talk a man of mad science into something that doesn’t involve explosions. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are currently in the midst of an agrarian revolution. We’re feeling our roots here in rural upstate New York. Why fight it, Big Green? You are people of the land. You are born of the soil, and you refer to yourselves in the second person. Did I ever tell you my daddy was a poor dirt farmer from up in the hills around Milford? Well, if I did, I was either drunk or more drunk. Dad grew some tomatoes and hot peppers in the backyard, that’s about it. (Oh, and there were those grape vines, but I digress.) Okay, so we DON’T have the soil in our blood. What of it? We are simply living up to the promise implicit in our...

My god, what a depressing week. Our first-in-the-nation presidential electoral contest ended in a train wreck, when the brainchild of Democratic Party operatives managed to turn the already chaotic Iowa Caucuses into a failed experiment in participatory democracy via digital technology. While it’s not clear exactly what went wrong with regard to the Shadow app, what is clear is the fact that the party officials and app developers did not adequately test their reporting system before the day of the caucuses. I’ve heard stories of technical problems, user errors, poor training, inadequate support, poorly staffed phone banks (which was, essentially, the traditional means by which results were reported in previous election years), etc. What I HAVEN’T heard is someone saying, “it was my damn fault.” What was worse was that, days later, we still didn’t have the full results. When I looked Wednesday afternoon, only 75% of the results were in. That night it got up to 92%, the n...

It think there’s room. Absolutely. We’ve got plenty of space on the shop floor. Just sweep those old discarded hammer parts out of there and we’re in business. Oh, hi. Welcome to Big Green’s Cheney Hammer Mill headquarters, the innovation center of northeastern central New York! Sure, I know you folks all think we’re a bunch of layabout deadbeat motherfuckers, and, well, you’re mostly right about that, but I’m here to tell you that we’re on the verge of turning over a new leaf. And that leaf will be turned by the claw of a hired robot. What am I talking about? Trends, my dear listeners, trends. Take a look at our non-existent newspaper. You don’t have to look very far at all to find stories about robots increasingly being used in agriculture. That’s right – robots plowing, robots planting, robots fertilizing, robots picking, etc., etc. Now look at us. (No, really …. look at us.) We are an independent band, planted in the middle of an agricultural community – a mus...

I don’t know how many of you have been following the impeachment trial of one Donald John Trump. I’ve watched some of the proceedings, and it has been at various times hilarious, painfully dull, and infuriating. It seems now, though, that it has come down once again to the question of whether or not to allow relevant witnesses to testify before the Senate; particularly former National Security Advisor John Bolton, whose forthcoming book has been strategically excerpted and propagated by anonymous reviewers in the White House. With respect to this, I find myself in rare agreement with Ezra Klein, who this week commented on how crazy it makes him that we’re all focusing on witnesses when we already know what the President did …. he said it himself. Whether or not you think that’s enough really just comes down to party affiliation. Just a word about Bolton. This man is an ideologue and a warmonger. His views are so toxic regarding war and peace that he failed to win conf...

Huh. Ever had the feeling that you’ve lived a particular moment before? Or been someplace you’ve never been to before? No? Okay, well …. I’m having it right now! Okay, now I don’t know how many of you out there have ever had the pleasure of producing an album that’s made up of songs you’ve already recorded. Show of hands? Let’s see …. five …. six …. ten …. and a few more way in the back. So maybe just fifteen of you. That’s fifteen out of five billion, okay? I think the point’s been made. And if I sound testy, well, it’s been a long goddamn day and I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT RIGHT NOW. Um ….. sorry. Anyway, my point is that making an album out of existing songs is like building a staircase from the pieces of your previous staircase. Which is what one of my landlords did once. Then my next landlord fixed a hole in the porch roof by tearing down the entire porch roof and throwing it into the gully behind the house. Don’t even get me started on what he did to the p...

In the main, there are two things that the ongoing impeachment trial of Donald John Trump bring to my mind. One is that this man is perhaps the least suited individual in America for the high office he now holds. The second is that the office of the presidency is far too powerful for a single person to hold, and that if we do not act to constrain that power, we will be in the same situation again before we know it. So in a certain respect, you can say that the Trump administration was an accident waiting to happen, made inevitable by the weak constraints on executive power, particularly in the era of U.S. global dominance following World War II (i.e. the era we remain in now). Brother Matt took a whack at the hyper paternalistic imperial presidency back in 1991 with his song, “World War II”, the refrain to which went like this:   Daddy likes things done in a big way Daddy's back with bargains from D-Day Daddy chose a game for the lads to play Daddy showed his hand wi...

 What’s to celebrate? Well … a lot of things, Mr. anti-President. Like, I don’t know … the lack of snow? Ummmm …. mail delivery? The persistence of our life-giving sun? Okay … I got nothing. Hey, what the hell, we appear to settling into a bit of a post-holiday funk here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Like most bands of our generation, we like to get funky, and there’s not time like the post-holidays for a little funk-a-delic framming. Why not, right? Matt’s got a Fender Stratocaster for the first time in his life (sure, he’s had it for three years, but still … ). I’ve got my Korg SV-1 with funky clav sounds and something that sounds like a 70s Farfisa organ. So when it comes to post-holiday funk, we’re loaded for bear. It’s fair to say that we don’t have a reputation as a jam band. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done it a whole lot. Big Green rehearsals were usually just jam sessions, interrupted periodically by some swearing and hand waving....