Hammer Mill Days

  Man alive, I just got done talking about Mitch Macaphee’s dick-like rocket ship, and what happens? Some billionaire flies into the exosphere in a ship that looks as much like a dick as Mitch’s. What the hell! Okay, enough with the rocket launches. I don’t want to give the impression that we spend all of our time obsessing over the exploits of space oligarchs. That’s more the province of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who likes his cable television very much. We sentient members of Big Green prefer more lofty pursuits, like …. I don’t know … reading things. Or putting one thing on top of the other. And then there’s walking around as you read a thing and tripping over the other two things. That happens a lot at the hammer mill. Reaching back dimly Then there’s reminiscing – every upstate musician’s favorite sport. I was thinking back this week to a time before Big Green. What do I dimly recall of those days? I remember rocks … rocks bubbling. The s...

Did I mention that the Biden Administration’s foreign policy is abysmal? I thought so. It’s always worth repeating, and the last couple of weeks have borne it out entirely. On July 12, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken made a statement to the press regarding recent demonstrations in Cuba. Among some other boilerplate nonsense about our supposed commitment to human rights, Blinken told the press that the protesters “criticized Cuba’s authoritarian regime for failing to meet people’s most basic needs, including food and medicine,” chiding Cuba’s leaders that “peaceful protesters are not criminals”. Okay, a couple of things. First, Cuba has been under sanction by the United States my entire life – sixty years – with the most punishing restrictions having been added during the Trump years. I’m not sure how well most Americans understand what these sanctions mean for a poor country like Cuba. They can’t do business with us, the regional hegemon, and other countries ar...

  Look, I may not be a venture capitalist … or even a garden-variety capitalist, but this much I know: it’s not going to work. I would stake my reputation on it. And maybe even stake something valuable on it as well. Yes, you guessed it – trouble at the mill. How is it that you can see into our very souls? Are you Kreskin? Criswell ? Big Green must know … but not right away. For now, suffice to say that our squatter’s household has been turned upside-down by the raw power of unbridled ambition and simple, bald greed. I ask you – what other band has to put up with this kind of shit? (And don’t say Chefs of the Future .) You know, I told my illustrious brother not to leave the T.V. on during the day. The reason is simple. There’s always a chance that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, will see it and start obsessing over something, anything. Well, it happened this past Sunday, during the multiple hours of coverage they gave to Richard Branson’s space fligh...

The increasingly crusty-looking billionaire owner of Virgin Galactic Richard Branson took a sub-orbital flight aboard a rocket plane last week. News outlets like MSNBC spent nearly an entire day’s worth of air time covering this monumental achievement and the presser/victory rally that followed. So, just to be clear – a self-obsessed billionaire essentially did what Yuri Gagarin did sixty years ago, and somehow it’s news. Of course, there’s more to this than space flight. On one level, it’s a childish pissing match between three billionaires – Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk – all of whom want to CONQUER SPACE. More than that even, it’s a marketing effort, helped along by drooling press coverage by everyone from CNBC to the New York Times . Ticket to nowhere The Times article made note of the fact that the cost of a ticket on one of Branson’s rocket-planes rose from $200K to $250K since they first went on sale, perhaps dampened somewhat by a crash in 2014. “...

  Ring the bell tower. We don’t have one? Well, then pull the fire alarm. What? No fire alarm? Are you telling me we’ve been squatting here for twenty years and there’s no freaking fire alarm? I am depressed. Hello and welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I’m afraid you find us in crisis mode this week. We’ve just received a ransom message from the former King of the Catskills (or so they claim) saying that they’ve kidnapped Anti-matter Lincoln and are demanding a considerable forfeit for his safer return. My lack of god! Will these scoundrels stop at nothing? They abduct an obvious senior citizen – Anti Lincoln is 196 if he’s a day – and cart him off like a sack of grain in hopes of squeezing riches out of his squat-mates. He went off to take his constitutional this morning (he always takes the constitution for a little walk first thing) and when he didn’t return, we knew something was up. Crimped like a sea dog Now, this would be bad enough ...

What keeps a worker going to the job, day after day, even if s/he hates it like fire? The need for money, mostly. During the pandemic, however, that need was outweighed by something more basic – namely, the desire to stay alive. When going to work began to entail risking your life for a broad swath of workers, those who had a choice in the matter chose to remain at home. The government made some effort to facilitate this, at least in some segments of the economy. There were those deemed essential workers who were compelled to risk their lives. This included many undocumented immigrants who picked our food and cared for our elderly while we hid from COVID. Now that Americans are being strongly encouraged to return to their desks, their machines, their stations, etc., many are reluctant to do so. No doubt some folks have decided that this was an opportune time to drop out of the workforce entirely. Others are not convinced it’s safe. But I suspect many are holding ba...

  Well, we don’ have any flour. The mice ate it. And no baking pans of any kind. I’ve got a rusty skillet and enough batter mix for one pancake. Will that do? Oh, I see … Little Lord Fauntleroy. Hey, you can’t please everybody. (And frankly, there’s no point in trying. ) The fact is, we are ill-equipped to celebrate anything here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, as we don’t have the usual set of domestic crockery, pots and pans, etc. that you expect to find in these parts. Then there’s that no-baking clause in our lease. (Yes, lease. The one some panhandler drew up for us on toilet paper.) Here’s the rub, though – we kind of have something to celebrate. It’s our thirty-fifth anniversary as a named band. And if that isn’t worth frying up a flapjack, what the hell is? Deep roots. Broken branches. Of course, we didn’t spring out of the ground back in the summer of 1986. Far from it! We fell from the sky, my friends. Fortunately, there were a lot of tr...