Tag Archives: Facebook

Usual Rubbish

Trying not to be anti-social on social media

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Get Music Here

You know, there are better things you could be doing with your time. Like, I don’t know …. mowing the lawn. Oh, right – we don’t have a lawn. How about rearranging the bricks in the courtyard? That’s one task that won’t do itself. Or beating the rugs. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment, but they’ve really crossed a line with me over the past few weeks.

Oh, hello, reader(s). You just caught me in the middle of berating Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for not being industrious enough. Yes, I know – he’s an automaton, he only responds to programming, I’m not being fair, etc., etc. The thing is, I don’t know how to program a robot, and his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, is not speaking to anyone this week. All I have left is a dressing down, robot or no.

Multi-platform clusterfuck

Marvin has a few responsibilities as my personal robot assistant. One is taking charge of Big Green’s social media presence. I should say here that Marvin is in no way an expert in this area. (You could pretty much say that about any area.) When it came to deciding who would take that job on, however, we quickly determined that none of us know anything about it. Ultimately, it came down to him being a robot. That’s a lot closer to being the internet than we humans are.

Not every band is successful online. In fact, many are not. But few are as unsuccessful online as Big Green. I hate to be boastful here, but if they gave out a trophy for being obscure, we would have walked away with it a dozen times over. We’ve been on online platforms for almost twenty years, starting with MP3.com, which isn’t even a thing anymore, then The Orchard, CDBaby, and a few others I can’t even remember. Our sales? Less than stellar. Let’s just say, we’ve got some remainders lying about.

Find us on Face-where?

Then there’s the major social media sites/apps, like Facebook, etc. Big Green has been on Facebook for, I don’t know, ten years? More? Not sure. We started a Twitter feed ages ago, but we only got onto Instagram earlier this year. Mostly, these platforms are designed so that your listeners can interact with you easily, share posts, etc. We get some of that, but not much, and don’t sell anything via any of those sites. (I blame Marvin.)

Well, get to it, man!

Actually, with the low number of visits we get, our Facebook page is probably the safest place on the internet. You can probably store your passwords, bank account and routing numbers, and social security number on there and they would all be safe as houses. Ditto with Twitter. I give Big Green a few mercy likes on Twitter posts, but not too often, because mostly their content is crap. (What am I saying??) Instagram gets a little more activity, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re a dead letter on social media. Own it, baby – own it!

New horizons

Anyone else would just give it up. But not us. We don’t know the meaning of the word quit. We think it has something to do with work, but none of us is sure. And since we have a general aversion to work, our consideration goes no farther than that.

Anyway, we just signed up for BandCamp and set up a new page at big-green.bandcamp.com. Why did we do it? Well, like Everest, it’s there … and we’re not. Except that now we are. Hey, if you’re on BandCamp, give us a mercy follow. That’s right – encourage us!

Usual Rubbish

One Long-ass road back from the Joyous lake

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Get Music Here

Think we ought to go? Nah, maybe not. Though I don’t know. Maybe we CAN go. But we probably shouldn’t. And anyway, who the hell is going to pay? Not me, man. Unless they take bottle caps. With the bottles still attached.

Hello, blog friends. It may seem like you’ve caught us in another serious controversy, but that’s not the case. We’re just sitting here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and shooting the breeze about this thing we should have done, this thing we shouldn’t, and so on. Kind of amazing that we all get along with each other so well after spending so many years with these dumb, lousy-ass fuckers. There’s a lot of love here.

Who caught the Katy?

What are we sparring about? Well, I’m gonna tell you. I was browsing the internets, clicking through the facebooks, and I saw an ad for Taj Mahal’s upcoming tour. No, I’m not talking about the ornate monument in Agra. I’m talking about the blues singer, Taj Mahal, who I started listening to as a wee lad of twenty-one, thanks to my dear friend Ellen Everett.

In our earliest incarnations of the band that came to be called Big Green, we played a few Taj covers and I always liked the dude. (We even included one of this songs on our 1986 demo, posted here.) When I saw that he’s planning to play Woodstock (Levon Helm studios), it reminded me of the time, back in the 80s, when a group of us humped our way down to Woodstock to hear him perform at a famous now-defunct club called the Joyous Lake.

Lost weekend … or weekdays

I can’t remember what year it was – maybe 1984? My illustrious brother Matt, our guitarist then, the late Tim Walsh, Phil Ross, our drummer, and I piled into somebody’s car, drove to Woodstock, had a cheap cafe dinner, and trooped over to the Joyous Lake to buy tickets. As we were standing there, waiting for the tix, I turned around and saw the man himself, Taj Mahal, having an early dinner, gabbing with Rick Danko from The Band.

Left me a mule to ride!

I remember him putting on a really good performance that night, mostly solo, playing an electric guitar, I think a drobo, and an upright piano. He kicked the shit out of Johnny Rivers’s Rockin’ Pneumonia and the Boogie Woogie Flu on that piano, as I recall. As an added bonus, the horn player Howard Johnson came up and accompanied Taj on a couple of songs, playing one on a tuba and the other on a piccolo. Taj also did a nice, quiet version of his arrangement for Johnny Too Bad.

Then what? I’ll tell you …

I don’t remember what happened next. We went home, we slept, we played, we slept …. rinse and repeat. Fast forward to this week, I see the ad for Taj’s gig in Woodstock, and I think, man, I should go. Only trouble is, it’s sold out at $100 a ticket for general seating. Good going, Taj! You can still pull them in.

Guess I’ll just have to suffice with another rendition of She Caught The Katy, or Fishin’ Blues, or Corrina. Where’s my non-existent dobro?

luv u,

jp

Usual Rubbish

The worst of all possible universes

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2000 Years to Christmas

Just give me a minute, man. I’m changing the strings on my superannuated cheap-ass guitar. And yes, I’m using new strings. Don’t ask me where I got them. Lets’ just say that someone’s Christmas stocking is going to be a little light this year.

Oh, hi, blog visitors. It’s you’re old pal Joe. Yeah, I’ve made the momentous decision to restring my guitar because I don’t want to even attempt to deliver a Christmas concert on those rusty old cables I’ve been twanging on. And when I say twanging, I mean just what I say. Just give a listen to my recent nano concert on YouTube and you’ll get the picture. And the picture has sound, by the way.

Holiday Tide … I mean, Cheer

Of course, I’ve always been terrible at marketing things. (That’s precisely why I went into advertising, but I digress.) Given that it’s the holiday season, you’d think I’d be hawking our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, like a maniac. But the fact is, those songs are just the tip of the Christmas iceberg here in Big Green land. There’s plenty more where those came from. You’ll see!

Some of those songs are from Matt’s early period, when he recorded Christmas songs on his 4-track cassette deck and distributed them as low-rent, labor-intensive gifts. And then there are some songs from the Ned Trek period, which covers the second half of the 2010s and, technically, is still underway. Many songs in this latter group feature funny voices and bizarre ass lyrics. Oh, and many in the former group, as well.

All about the wormhole

I wish I could say that everyone is looking forward to the holiday season. Fact is, I squat with a bunch of sad sacks. Take Mitch Macaphee (please!). Our Mad Science advisor has spent the past three weeks laughing up his sleeve at Mark Zuckerberg. The reason for that is simple – Mitch has been conjuring wormholes into alternate universes since long before Zuck was a tike. The notion of someone creating a fake universe seems hilariously redundant to him.

Okay, so here’s my question: what if Mitch finds out you can make money at that Zuck scam? Will he borrow Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine and rip open the fabric of space/time? Will he then charge punters fifty bucks a head to step through and shake hands with purple protozoa-men from the fourth dimension? And last, but perhaps most importantly, will he share the proceeds with us? THAT’s what keeps ME up at night.

So, is this your answer to the Metaverse?

The reason for the seizin’

In any case, our Christmas season is starting out like all the rest of them have: fighting off the bailiffs. As you know, we’ve been squatting in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of two decades (or, perhaps, the worst part). The local authorities, bless their hearts, have been trying to evict us for most of that time. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without an eviction notice!

Thus far, we have let our nasty upstairs neighbors answer the door when the cops come calling. Frankly, I think they’ve forgotten we still live down here. And truth be told, I am in no mood to remind them.

Usual Rubbish

Our influencer needs some pruning.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Jesus Christmas, is THAT what he’s been doing? Oh, yeah … sorry. I forgot that his pronouns are it, its, and … uh …. it. I mean, ITS pronouns, not his. Sorry, sorry. But …. is that what it’s been doing? Whoa.

Oh, hiya. Glad to see some visitors from the sane side of reality. Here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat palace, it’s crazytown USA. Chock full of nuts, you might say. In here, we just page through the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or the DSM-5, as they call it) and take turns embodying each entry to its fullest. It’s almost like the authors have been hiding in the walls, watching us through two-way mirrors. (Is that paranoia … ?)

Sure, that’s problematic. But we’ve got other things to occupy our thoughts. Like, for instance, what the hell is that mansized tuber up to now? For years it’s been like … well, like a potted plant, taking up space in the courtyard, hoping for rain. Now, suddenly, tubey (friends call him tubey) has reemerged from seclusion, firing up its social media accounts and firing off posts like a mighty oak dropping acorns. It is a site to behold.

Branching out

Lord knows that tubey has been in one or two scrapes, as any reader of this blog will surely know. But nothing like what it’s likely to run into on social media. For instance, tubey just restarted his Facebook page after a long absence, and already some loser has asked it to admin their page. Imagine the gall! (Some podcast named Strange Sound …. what the hell is that?)

I think he's right, tubey. You have to turn it on first.

Now, typically when you haven’t done a thing in a while, you get less practiced at that thing. That’s just common sense, right? Tubey, however, doesn’t subscribe to the notion of competence, let alone common sense. That’s why he’s strongly considering opening a TikTok account. Or maybe Instagram.

Master of none

There’s such a thing as spreading yourself too thin. And when you are a root vegetable, such a thing can be fatal. Fortunately for tubey, it has us to advise it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is also happy to pitch in with his suggestions, though they’re a little hard to parse. Marvin has never mastered English … or any other language, come to think of it. Which leaves us to interpreting random squeaks. Don’t try this at home!

Let’s face it – none of us is an expert on social media. Maybe tubey will be the first in Big Green land to make it work. Or maybe he’s just nuts like the rest of us.

Political Rants

New pilot.

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As I write this, the details are still filtering in from Georgia about the shooting at the massage parlors in and near Atlanta. Yet another sickening crime carried out by some dude who bought a gun the same day he decided to use it on a bunch of innocent people. That’ll be $600, young man. Enjoy the pistol! Want bullets with that? Goddamn, what a crazy country we live in. Still, the part of this incident that made me scratch my head was when the police told us that the suspect had said the crime was not racially motivated. (Of course, this was followed up by the officer’s comment that the alleged shooter was having a bad day.) My first reaction to that was …. since when do you care what the suspect says? The answer, of course, is obvious – the suspect is white. Can you picture them coming out and saying something similar about a black person in custody? Neither can I.

I’m listening to a podcast called Resistance, and though I’m not crazy about the corporate advertising (for instance, I now know way more about the latest Mitsubishi compact SUV than I ever needed to know), they do really good work. The episode I’m listening to, entitled “My Somebody”, focuses on a young man from Baltimore who is incarcerated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can tell you, the police didn’t give a damn what this fellow had to say about his guilt or innocence. They shot him in the face and stood guard around his hospital bed. But then … he’s black. As for the white guy who shot up three massage parlors in Georgia this week, well, he was having a bad day, according to some random (white) police captain known for sharing anti-Asian posts on Facebook. I mean, seriously …. they don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore, do they?

This is what underlies the movement for de-funding and even abolishing the police. If you are a white person, and you grew up in, say, a town like my old home town, which was almost entirely white at that time, the police are there to protect you. In other words, they are there to protect you from the nasty, non-white people down the street in Utica or Albany or Rochester or wherever. If, on the other hand, you are a person of color and you live in a community of color, the police are not there to protect you. They are there to contain you, to detain you, to keep you in your place. They are there to watch you like a hawk. That is why so many black families don’t dial up the cops when stuff goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if there are black police officers, or a black police chief, or a black mayor … or hell, a black president. Like the Pentagon, law enforcement is like a big killing machine. You can put a different pilot in there, and they may drive the killing machine more slowly, even nudge it into reverse, but it’s still going to do what it’s designed to do. The abuse is a feature, not a bug.

There’s a lot to be said about criminal justice reform, and we’ve barely even begun to have that conversation. But if we’re ever going to even attempt to fix these problems, we must first acknowledge the nature of the system we have. That is a prerequisite for moving forward.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.