Hammer Mill Days

  Editor’s note: There is no editor for this blog. I’m the night janitor, emptying the trash cans and spreading the refuse thin enough on the floor that no one notices. I’m on my smoke break, but I’m taking this opportunity to say that what follows is the rest of that lame interview with Big Green co-founder Joe Perry. Part one: The bad van Marvin: Rumor has it that Big Green and its various precursors had some of the worst vehicles in the history of indie bands. That’s quite a distinction. Care to expand on that? JP: Glad to, Marvin. Of course, back when we were just starting out, a bunch of dewy-eyed kids with a song in our hearts and a sandwich in our hip pockets, we had a 1973 C-10 pickup with a cap on the bed. It had gaping holes, rust, primer, five different shades of orange paint, etc. In fact, it had so many pieces missing, we called it “Ruck” (i.e. not quite a truck). I’ll spare you the grisly details of driving Ruck to gigs. Suffice to ...

This week was the 76th anniversary of our having dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seems like yesterday, doesn’t it? What an insane thing to do – though to be frank, at that point in the war our bombers were laying waste to Japanese cities with conventional bombs, including a 1000 plane raid on Tokyo. (The commander liked the number.) When we pay homage to those whose lives were lost or permanently altered by this episode, we do so in the knowledge that things went from bad to worse over the years that followed. The system we set up over the arc of the Cold War was aptly described as a “Doomsday Machine”. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg reviews this system in great detail in his recent book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Planning for first strike/use One thing that wasn’t particularly surprising about Ellsberg’s book was the fact that U.S. nuclear policy has always been based on the idea of first strike or first use. The ...

Gather ’round, you kids. I’m going to tell you a tale of woe from long ago. A story so dumb it leaves you numb. A fable so …. oh, never mind. The years are catching up with us a bit, here in Big Green-land. And as you get older, you tend to look back a bit more. Makes sense, right? No point in looking back when you’re three years old. Even less point in looking forward when you’re ninety. But you know what they say – foresight is everything, and hindsight is everything else. The plain fact is, sometimes this stuff just pops into my head. I’ll be hanging around the kitchen of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, having a cup of borrowed tea, when suddenly I’m transported into the past. And no, it’s not the fault of Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine. No, sir – it’s just the restlessness of an idle mind. And they don’t get much more idle than mine. In a distant dive, long, long ago Anywho, I was thinking of a time back in the early nineties when ...

The end of the eviction moratorium this past week and the response by the Squad says a lot about the limitations of the administrative state. Mass evictions should not be a problem. The large COVID relief package passed last year included something like $40 billion in rental assistance, distributed to the states. As of now, only about $3 billion has been allocated to the people who need the help. That’s maybe 8%. What the fuck? Why is it that when we go through the ridiculously baroque process of applying federal funds to a problem like this, the money often doesn’t get spent? David Dayen talked about this a bit on the Majority Report on Monday . Put simply, after decades of neoliberal attack on the administrative state, the means of getting government aid to people are sclerotic and dysfunctional. Loudest voice in the room There’s a reason why we have such an atomized, ineffective system for helping poor and working people. Ordinary people don’t have armies o...

  Note: The following is a partial transcript from an interview with Big Green co-founder Joe Perry. The interviewer was conducted by Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Part one: The first part Marvin: In your early years, Big Green lived in not one, but TWO houses on the same street in Castleton-On-Hudson, NY . WTF were you thinking? JP: Glad you asked me this question, Marvin. (Which is to say, I’m glad I asked your inventor, Mitch Macaphee, to program this question into your tiny brass skull.) The answer is, I haven’t a freaking clue. All I know is that the two houses were next door to one another. One of them had a claw-foot tub. The other had holes in the porch roof. Am I getting warmer? Marvin: We all are getting warmer, due to climate change. Moving on. Big Green has released three studio albums thus far, the most recent being Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (2013). And though all three are of questionable value, Cowboy Scat is by far...

Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon. Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated. The miracle that wasn’t Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was ...

  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...