Tag Archives: Anti-Lincoln

Usual Rubbish

Blame us.

Leave a comment

Hmmm. I thought Mitch was looking a little depressed. Are you sure that’s the reason? Wow. Who knew?

Oh, hi. Christ on a bike, sometimes living in this abandoned hammer mill is like working in a clinic for the chronically depressed. What a bunch of moody Melvins! Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been giving us all the silent treatment for about a week. My brother keeps saying he needs a charge-up, but that’s just making apologies for the fucker. (Stop defending him!) Every time there’s a new episode of “Mercy Street”, old Anti-Lincoln goes all pear-shaped, starts drinking and cursing at us like we’re General Grant or General Sherman (with our inimitable bow-ties snapping). Insufferable.

And then there’s Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser. Though to be fair, his depression is usually rooted in mad science. Anyway, his smile turned upside-down earlier this week, and we had to start rooting around for the cause. (You don’t want to allow Mitch’s moods to fester … that’s when he starts getting really creative in the lab.) At first I thought it may have been about that North Korean A-bomb test, but that wasn’t it. Then I saw the story about the astrophysicist who claimed that there was evidence of a massive ninth planet way beyond the orbit of Neptune, and I knew I had found the cause. Busted!

Frankly, Mitch, it looks kind of ominous.Yeah, we’ve known about that planet for years. Mitch discovered it on one of our interstellar tours, and he was so thrilled at his own cleverness that he resolved to keep it secret from humanity until he could find some practical use for it. It is, in scientific terms, a big motherfucker, with enough mass to line up all the other planets in our puny solar system like billiard balls. (I think that played into Mitch’s plan for the dark world beyond Neptune. He dreamed of racking them all up like nineball and running the table, as if he was the Minnesota Fats of interplanetary collision.)

Okay, so now we need a cover story. Here goes: just call the new planet “Blameus”. Legend has it that this dark world is responsible for all of our sorrows. That should focus people’s attention a bit … at least until Mitch can work out his next shot. (Okay, so I’m an enabler. Just a little harmless fun.)

Usual Rubbish

Parts and parcels.

Leave a comment

What is this … another carton? This one’s from Madagascar, no less. What the hell. Does it rattle when it shakes? Does it roll? If when it shakes it both rattles and rolls, it might be Jerry Lee Lewis.

For the life of me, I don’t know who’s ordering all of these packages. They just show up at the door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (Big Green’s longtime squat-house) and subsequently disappear. At first I thought it might be Mitch Macaphee, but he has long since abandoned the notion of ordering goods from various merchants. He just invents whatever he needs, which is a handy skill to have. (Perhaps the handiest!) Then I thought maybe anti-Lincoln was behind all of this mail order, since some of the boxes came from Urban Outfitters. (He’s taken to a more cosmopolitan wardrobe of late. Very smart.)

I know, I know – I tend to get a little suspicious, living in a condemned post-industrial hulk like I do. A few months here and you start to see conspiracies around every corner. What are those mice talking about? Do the crows in the courtyard wish me well or ill? Perhaps it is THEY who are ordering stuff from Crate and Barrel. Maybe they need crates and barrels for something, I don’t know. Idle minds, right?

A bit too far, Marvin. Just saying.Someone’s handing me a note. It reads, “You idiot. It’s probably Marvin (your personal robot assistant). Mitch Macaphee just made him wi-fi compatible.” Oh, right. So Marvin doesn’t even need a smart phone to buy a bunch of useless junk on credit. All he needs is the credit. Fortunately, he doesn’t have … doesn’t have … hey … where’s my wallet? MARVIN!!

Okay, Marvin has been using this magnetic lock gizmo ever since he saw one on Lost In Space reruns. My guess is that he’s down in his basement room, frozen like a statue in his magnetic lock, placing orders over wi-fi without even lifting a finger. And the boxes that come are probably piling up around him like a fortress – a fortress of consumer joy! Doesn’t that remind you of Christmas?

Anyway, if I’m in the pokey the next time I post, it will be that mindless robot’s fault. See if he’ll let you use my credit card to bail me out.

Usual Rubbish

Get yours here.

Leave a comment

Hey … let’s stop in at the Petrified Creatures Museum. It sounds, well … very dessicated. And interesting. Perhaps. I don’t know … what do YOU want to do, Marvin (my personal robot assistant)?

Yes, we’re taking a day trip. The weather is nice, so it seemed like a good idea to leave the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill behind for a few hours. Trouble is, it’s a little hard to find entertainment that suits everyone’s eclectic tastes. Marvin is a little reluctant to give the Petrified Creatures Museum a look, perhaps because they may mistake him for one of their exhibits and NEVER LET HIM LEAVE. He was scared, even (yes) petrified. Poor creature.

What else is there to do, driving along route 20? Well … there are a lot of campgrounds. There’s an ice cream place called “Banana Dan’s”. There are some really cool mountains, if you like mountains. That should be sufficient to satisfy anyone’s taste. But here I am, in a car full of freaks – Marvin, Anti-Lincoln, Mitch Macaphee, the mansized tuber … Matt refused to go, choosing instead to mind his wildlife charges. Anti-Lincoln is pretty much against everything. Mr. freaking negative. Mansized tuber just wants to go to gardening centers. That’s where he goes to meet other plants. It’s like a nightclub, without the booze. Mitch? He’s only interested in conferences and laboratories. He just stares out the window at the passing scenery, dreaming up formulas for making the whole thing go blooey.

Look, Marvin! (meh)Well … so much for our pleasant day out. What’s next on the agenda? Not much. Just back to the hammer mill. We’ve got some music to work on. Where’s that going? I don’t know … another album, maybe. Not sure how we’ll release it, but we will make it available in some way, shape, or form. Maybe we’ll have Marvin hand deliver it to everyone in Upstate New York. Maybe we’ll sell it in the anteroom of the Petrified Creatures Museum. Maybe BOTH of those things.

One other thing we’re working on – a kind of Big Green subscription service. We’re contemplating the price being somewhere between $0 and gratis. Sign up, and we’ll send you disc copies of our first two albums (while supplies last), a digital copy of our third album, and advance digital releases as they are completed. Still ironing out the details, crunching the numbers, etc. (Very crunchy, those numbers.)

Usual Rubbish

Roasted.

Leave a comment

Mother of pearl. Is that the time? I thought the sun was getting kind of bright in here. Pull the blinds. No blinds? Arrgh. Hang another sheet over the window.

Noodles?Rolled out of bed a little tardy today. Who can blame me? After a gut-full of grub, a man’s thoughts turn to hibernation. Big Green doesn’t ordinarily celebrate major holidays, but we did relent this year and enjoy a modest Thanksgiving feast, prepared by the steady hand of our confidant Anti-Lincoln, who has elected to stay at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill while he considers his next steps. (I think he’s contemplating some brand of global domination, but no details yet. Can’t rush a genius!)

Some of you may recall that Lincoln’s favorite dish was Chicken Fricasee. Well, that obviously meant something to Anti-matter Lincoln, if only in the sense that he wanted to run in the exact opposite direction with his holiday meal plan. What’s the opposite of Chicken Fricasee, you may ask? In anti-Lincoln’s twisted mind, it’s dry noodles with tamari sauce sprinkled lightly over them. I think he dropped a couple of mint leaves in there, but that may have been an accident – we keep the tamari right behind the mint leaves. Coincidence? I don’t think so!

So bloody hell, you never saw a band tear into a plate of noodles like we did last night. And when I say “plate”, I mean one modest plate. Two forks on every noodle. Pretty feisty little dinner, but at least we were together. Stupid togetherness! I think only Marvin (my personal robot assistant) got his fill at our holiday table. And that’s only because he takes his nourishment via two leads from a dry cell under his chair. Note to self: I’ve got to get him another cell for Christmas this year.

No “Black Friday” shopping for us, friends. After that singular repast, we will just stick close to the mill for a couple of days and do a little work on our annual Christmas podcast. I’d tell you what we’re planning, but that would be telling. (It would also require us having planned something, which we most certainly have not.)

Usual Rubbish

Loserville.

Leave a comment

It’s the last train to Loserville and I’ll meet you at the station. Wasn’t that a Monkees song? No? Okay … that earworm crawled away decades ago.

Big GreenWell, here we are, kicking around the mill, just me and my shadow … and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Brother and bandmate Matt Perry has taken up residence in some other abandoned structure. We get together for recordings, podcast sessions, etc., then he goes home to his shack and I to mine. The mansized tuber has planted himself firmly in the courtyard; I bring a bucket of swill out to him every couple of days. Livin’ the life, as they say.

As you can imagine, the utility costs here are fantastic. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is, as I have said many times, a drafty old barn of a place, and most of the heat goes straight out the window (the same window, incidentally, that the rain and snow comes in through). Whoever is paying the fuel bills must be ripping his/her hair out by now. And then there’s the occasional rap on the door by, I don’t know, the bailiff, perhaps? U.S. Marshalls? If I looked more like Cliven Bundy’s militia crew, I wouldn’t worry about it much. But I yam what I yam, as the sailor said.

well-maybeIn all honesty, I’m considering moving back to a lean-to type housing arrangement, like what we had back at the beginning of this current chapter in the history of the Big Green musical collective. That’s probably more appropriate accommodation for the collective as it currently stands, which is to say … big enough for me, Marvin, and anti-Lincoln. A little tight for my taste, perhaps. And then there’s the question of plugging Marvin in for the night. (We need at least one outlet for his AC power supply and a second for my electric piano.  Oh, right … and one for my amp. Shit … my Mr. Coffee! Make that four.)

See what happens when you try to simplify? That’s when things start to get really complicated. Now pardon me … I have a podcast to finish, for chrissake.

Usual Rubbish

Exodus.

Leave a comment

Lincoln has returned to the 1860s via the Orgone Generating Device intertemporal portal, and best of luck to him. Hope he doesn’t run into any dental problems while he’s back there. Whiskey and pliers, that’s what he’ll have to look forward to in that grisly century.

Big GreenWell, that kind of solves his problem. What about the rest of us in the Big Green collective? A kind of dwindling party, it seems. Lincoln is back in Washington (though his evil doppelganger Anti-Lincoln remains). Washington is presumably back in Lincoln (Nebraska). Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is still on an extended tour of resort hotels, attending mad science conferences and watching the sun set on five continents with a glass of bourbon in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Now that our interstellar tour is over, our occasional guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has returned to his home planet of Zenon in the Small Megellanic Cloud.

Let’s see … what else is in the news? Oh, yeah … the mansized tuber has decided at long last to take root in the courtyard. He’s pushing twenty now, and feels it’s high time for him to settle down and start a garden. Hard to argue with a root vegetable. We’ll see how long THAT lasts. Christ on a bike, about the only ones around here I can count on are my brother Matt and Marvin (my personal robot assistant), This looks like a good spotthough I caught the latter thumbing through the want ads the other day. It seems there are more opportunities out there for personal robot assistants than there were just a few years ago. I may have to start PAYING him, for chrissake.

The bottom line is that, with all of these departures and major life decisions going on, it’s getting pretty quiet around this big old barn of a place. We’ve talked about finding someplace smaller to squat, maybe opt for another three-room lean-to of the kind we occupied back in our Sri Lanka days. So long as it’s big enough to produce a podcast in, we’re good.

Usual Rubbish

What the frack?

Leave a comment

Interstellar Tour Log: February 12, 2014
The still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Greetings from camp slag! As you can see from the subject line of this dispatch, Big Green and entourage are still stranded here on alpha asteroid Ceres, here in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a veritable no man’s land of broken planets and random shards of rock, careering through an airless void in an endless race to hell. (Sounds like my morning commute, actually.)

Readers of this asinine blog will know that Big Green, in the third leg of its Interstellar Tour 2014 to support galactic sales of our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, had performances booked in the system of Sirius, the dog star. Trouble was, our GPS navigation system – Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – got the names mixed up in his tiny 1978 Texas Instruments calculator of a brain, and ended up sending us to this lifeless slag in space. It’s a bit like camping out, except without the fun (if you think camping’s fun). The weird thing is, not only is there no where to play on this rock, but there’s no one freaking here, period! I was expecting a hard rock cafe or something, at the very least.

Interstellar Tour Log: February 14, 2014
The still, still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid

Hmmm. It seems I spoke too soon a couple of days ago. There is somebody else here. Anti Lincoln was taking his morning constitutional the other day (he has this thing about the Constitution … he takes it everywhere!) and he ran across a little mining operation on the other side of the asteroid. Looks like Halliburton / Brown and Root has somehow secured mining rights up here, as well. (They say it’s part of Obama’s See? Solid as a rock.“all of the above” approach to energy production and development … so I guess that means everything above the Earth’s surface is up for grabs.) They’re apparently fracking the place. I know, because Anti-Lincoln got a job working the bilge pumps. (They also let him handle burning off the gas leaks. He has a lot of practice with that.)

That puts us in an awkward position. Broken spacecraft, under repair, and intensive fracking operations going on. But it’s okay: the project supervisor, a Mr. Nerim, tells us that this asteroid is made of layer upon layer of solid rock soooo thick you could lay a burning sun on its surface, and the sun would just burn itself out and leave the asteroid untouched. So I guess we’ve got some time.

Plug: Hey, if you haven’t heard the February podcast yet, give it a listen. Cheap laughs, and plenty of ’em. Check it out.

Usual Rubbish

Another Earth?

Leave a comment

Interstellar Tour Log: January 20, 2014
Somewhere in deep space

There are some things you can accomplish quite well in space (e.g. mid-air cartwheels) and others, well … not so much. I’m afraid our January podcast is an example of the latter.

Big GreenThose of you anxiously awaiting the new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, take heart: it’s in the works, though Matt’s interplanetary breathing apparatus is getting in the way of his doing a credible talking horse imitation. (You’d think it would be a positive boon, but no.) We’re hoping this problem will be eliminated when we arrive at the gassy, Earth-like planet known as KOI-314c, which – I’m guessing – has a perfectly breathable Earth-like atmosphere. (Hey, they said it was Earth-like. That’s all I need to hear. We’re playing there.)

Interstellar Tour Log: January 23, 2014
Somewhere else in deep space

Well, we’ve arrived on  KOI-314c, and if this is Earth-like, things have gone seriously downhill back on Earth since we left.  We sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out there to gather environmental data (and hunt down some performance venues), and after twirling a few antennae and waving his arms about, he gave us the following run-down on a little strip of paper that might have emerged from a 1920’s vintage stock ticker:

  • Surface temperature: 104 degrees centigrade
  • Length of year: 23 days
  • Atmospheric composition: hydrogen and helium

Looks harmless enoughI wouldn’t say this news was received with a total lack of enthusiasm. Anti-Lincoln was just dying to get out there and take a dip in one of the nearby liquid methane pools. And for sFshzenKlyrn, the guitarist from Zenon, this sounds like a tropical paradise. There are some issues, however, should we be asked to do an outdoor concert. First, my Kork SV-1 would probably melt at 104C. Second, the helium in the atmosphere would make us all sing like those munchkin dudes from the lollipop gym.  (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) And if we are contracted to play again next year, that’s just 23 days from now.

Guess we’ll consider this conundrum from inside our rented spacecraft for the time being. Maybe even get a chance to finish the podcast. We’ll see, eh?

Usual Rubbish

Yonder bound.

Leave a comment

Marvin (my personal robot assistant), didn’t I tell you to pick those Legos up about three hours ago? Can’t you do anything without being told twelve times?! Are you even awake?! MARVIN!!

I'm your Lincoln ConciergeChrist on a bike. Sloth has reached a new level of intensity here at the hammer mill, and it’s no surprise. We have been cooped up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of three years (the worse part, too … I remember those awful days…), not a hand’s turn of work. Sure, we produced and released an album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and have dutifully (and pitilessly) posted our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN every month, on the month (or quite nearly). But gainful employ? Naught, my friend. Goose egg.

Arguably, it goes against human nature (and personal robot assistant nature, presumably) to be idle for so long. I’ve seen signs of restlessness, to be sure. Not from anti-Lincoln, of course, who spends most of his day in the forge room, swilling cheap rum that he got from god-knows-where. But his positive doppelganger, Lincoln, tries to keep busy in imaginative though annoying ways. (I keep telling him, I can’t afford a big fat car – it’s just not in the game plan. But just try telling Lincoln not to sell you something.)

Big GreenMarvin is always coming up with pass-times, as well as hair-brained schemes for making money. But I think he’s hit a wall, and it’s understandable. Even his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser, has wandered off to richer pastures, taking advantage of some time-share property he invented in Madagascar. (Something about hanging gardens … though I’m not sure about what stage of insanity he was in when he told me about it.) So Marvin sits and rusts a little every day, his battery running down. He needs a change of scene, and so do the rest of us.

That’s why I have started making inquiries about doing an interplanetary tour to support extraterrestrial sales of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. (Spoiler alert: Terrestrial sales have been abysmal.) Stay tuned for details. Big Green out.

Usual Rubbish

Roll with it.

Leave a comment

Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close … too close.

Another day at the Hammer Mill
Another day at the Hammer Mill

Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won’t go!) We’re just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you’ll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths … even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It’s brutal out there!

Okay, so we’re thin skinned. That doesn’t stop us putting shit out there, friends. That’s because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example – perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week as he decided to attend the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, TX, along with all of the living ex-presidents and his evil doppelganger, anti-Lincoln. And the current president, btw). Talk about motivation! And who can forget Mitch Macaphee, mad scientist extraordinaire, inventor of Marvin, promoter of the interstellar space-time warp, and collector of dark matter, that mysterious substance that comprises most of what we know and hold dear.

No, my friends, we cannot be dissuaded by mere cat calls from beyond the internets. We have an album to finish and a podcast to produce. We are behind schedule on both, and that’s okay, because we are determined to finish. HAARUMPH! Right, then. Sorry. I was listening to a Dale Carnegie tape someone left in the forge room a few decades ago. Sometimes that stuff gets into you head, like the earworm from hell. Anywho, we are basically finished mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick – that much is true. We’ve got another episode of Ned Trek in the can. Our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast will be posted by the end of the month. Projects, projects, projects.

I don’t know … maybe it’s time for a tour. Any takers?