Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Tourmageddon.

Leave a comment

Idle hands do the devil’s work, right? What about idle minds? Are they commandeered by some other malevolent agency? Inquiring minds want to know.

We appear to have arrived at the doldrums of summer a bit early here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York. Just finishing up a stretch of 90-degree plus days, some of them feeling over 100 degrees with the humidity. When it gets like that, we go subterranean – down into the cavernous basement of the mill, where it’s about 30 degrees cooler and wherein we have built an alternative habitat of sorts. Makeshift furniture made of bits and bobs. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a charging station set up down there. It’s a big, dank, windowless home away from home, perfect for summer staycation.

Okay, I’m exaggerating. It’s anything but perfect. It’s drab as hell and it reeks down here. Even worse, there’s nothing to freaking do except scratch on the walls and think about shit. That’s where the idle minds come in. I don’t remember if it was my idea or someone else’s, but at some point we got to talking about how we haven’t done a tour in years, why that was the case, and where we would go if we decided to go on the road again. Before we knew it, we were scratching out the rough outline of a 40-city tour, using a sharp piece of slate on the cellar wall. I say rough because Anti-Lincoln can’t tell the difference between Jupiter and Saturn – he keeps mixing them up, putting the rings around the wrong one. You may think that’s a detail, but once you’re out in interplanetary space, these details matter.

Io, Lincoln? I don't know ... Okay, so …. here’s the hole we dug ourselves into, at least on paper (or, rather, concrete). Two weeks of engagements in the greater Jovian system – you know, the Great Red Spot, then on to Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto (we limit ourselves to the Galilean moons because, well, they’re more well-rounded). As stop-over at Saturn and Titan (always a lively show). Then from there, straight out of the solar system, assuming we can rent a vessel that will handle interstellar travel. Our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee says he knows a guy. We’ll see about that.

I must confess – I’m not sold on this idea, but if it keeps my colleagues content for a couple of weeks, there will be peace in the basement. And when the heat wave breaks, then maybe I can talk them out of another tourmageddon.

Usual Rubbish

Inside June.

Leave a comment

The Show So Far: First there were two guys talking, then we saw some cartoons, then a fully dressed naval officer jumped into the North Sea, then there were more cartoons, then some guy told us about what happened so far, then …. Oh, wait … that was another show. Sorry.

As some of you may have noticed, we dropped the June 2018 installment of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN, which breaks a kind of long hiatus. Still, it’s 2-½ hours of stuff, including eight new songs, so hey … that took some time. We may reside in a hammer mill, but we’re not running a factory here, man. Unless you count the robots Mitch Macaphee plugs together in the basement. (He’s considering establishing an assembly line. Not sure where that’s going, exactly.)

Anywho, if you haven’t listened to it yet, here’s what to expect:

Ned Trek 37 – Return to The Carl. This ludicrous musical episode of our Star Trek parody Ned Trek is based on the classic Trek episode entitled Return to Tomorrow, which had the Enterprise crew come across a dead civilization whose only survivors concealed themselves in glowing orbs and who talked Kirk, Spock, and some random scientist into letting them use their bodies to build android bodies the space aliens could use permanently. The head alien’s name was “Sargon”. In our version, it’s Sagan. The heavy from the planet’s “other side” is played by Edward Teller – he occupies Ned’s body, then calls everybody “puny”. Silliness ensues. Featured songs include:

Light Thing. A doc song, referring to the glowing orb receptacle that held Sagan’s consciousness (as opposed to the bubble gum machine that held Teller’s). Put your childish things away.

Sagan’s Song. Just what it sounds like – a Broadway-like number sung by Carl Sagan in which he lays out his ambitious plan for making the crew of the Free Enterprise smarter than total lunkheads. (Or, failing that, teaching them better table manners.)

Risk Is Your Business. Romney song based on Kirk’s heroic monologue from the Star Trek episode we based this on, only cross-pollinated with what unconsciously approaches a Marxist critique of capitalism. Oh, and sung in a French accent. Don’t ask me why.

Congratulations. Sung by the Nixon android, this touches on the usual Nixonian tropes of resentment, bitterness, self-aggrandizement, etc. Sixties-style “na-na-na” singalong thrown in for good measure.

Here's what we got for you, folks!Teller. A literally incendiary musical rant sung in the voice of Edward Teller while in Ned’s body. Think of it as a love sonnet to the H-bomb. Super.

The Other Side. Perle sings this perky little number about all the advantages of trading with the other side, whatever side that may be.

Fat Captain. A wrenching Sulu song about how Shatner soaked up the limelight at his expense back in the day. Based on a true story or two.

Blow The Man Down. Show-ender by Sagan, mopping up after the mess made during the preceding 90 minutes of ridiculousness. A song of grateful resignation. And yes, you get to hear Carl Sagan singing “dum dum-de-doo.” You’re welcome.

Put The Phone Down. Our typical impromptu back-and-forth gab session starts with a rough rendition of “All Saints Come”, a song off of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas. It goes downhill from there. Just give it a listen, you’ll see.

Usual Rubbish

Going up.

Leave a comment

What the hell’s that sound? The street sweepers again? Probably a lawn mower. Lawn mowing! What the hell is this neighborhood coming to?

Well, here I am, down in the basement of the Cheney Hammer Mill, tapping away at my keyboard as I often do this time of week. Strange how you can hear everything that’s going on outside from down here. Of course, there are probably mouse holes in this place you can drive a front-loader through. Though I have to admit – I myself have never seen a mouse drive a front-loader. It would be one way to defend themselves from those awful snap traps. Diabolical contraptions!

Anyway, summer has kind of arrived here in upstate New York, now that we’re on the climate change calendar, so naturally my mind turns to more leisurely pursuits. I know what you’re thinking – what on Earth could be more leisurely than being a member of a band that never plays anywhere? Well, you might be surprised by my response to that question. I find all kinds of pointless uses for my time. My illustrious brother Matt, not so much – always doing things, that one. Me? My natural state is at rest. And while I spend most of the year going up the stairs, in the summer I go down them.

This thing's friggin' WRECKED!My summer pass-times usually include deep archive stuff – you know, threading old reel-to-reel tapes onto antiquated and dysfunctional playback machines, just to get a momentary listen in to what they contain. We have a few of those, and many, many audio cassettes with both stereo and four-track content. We also have Hi-8 DAT tapes from our Tascam DA-88 days (the system we used to record our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas) and, of course, standard DAT cassettes. I’m guessing that if you add it all up, it would amount to less content than we’ve produced in just the last five years, but it may be close. Matt did a lot of recordings in the 80s and 90s – probably hundreds of original songs.

Oh, then of course there’s our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. My guess is that we will be posting the next episode in just a few days,  but I’m terrible at predicting things, so I won’t say anything. Beyond what I just said. Arrgghh … I’m no good at this. Should probably be mowing the lawn.

Usual Rubbish

Dictating machine.

Leave a comment

Hmmmm…. damn thing won’t upload. Stupid internets! Marvin – are you on the phone again? You’re supposed to wait until I’m done using the web. Stupid phone!

Man, I’ll tell you – it’s not easy living in an abandoned hammer mill. None of the familiar modern conveniences of American life. No wi-fi, no broadband, no blender, no dry ice … I could go on. But we’re used to that sort of thing. As you know, Big Green has always flown pretty low to the ground. That’s why so many of our contemporaries have become famous while we remain in the alt-pop toilet. When we go low, they go high. It’s like a freaking see-saw. (Did you see what I saw?)

Anyhow, people like us, we learn to do without. When Matt and I were piecing together the first iteration of this band, back in the late seventies / early eighties, we had the cheapest equipment any band ever thought of using. Our PA speakers sounded like kazoos. Our guitar and keyboard amps were underpowered and flaccid. Even worse, we never had anything decent to record on. One stereo reel-to-reel deck followed us around for a while, but it was of little use beyond serving as a tape echo. A friend of our early eighties drummer, Phil Ross, gave us his old dictaphone mono take deck, which we used to record demos of songs we might take into the studio if we could get the scratch together (which we did, eventually).

Yeah, that's the shit.It took a couple of years, but at some point we moved up to a Panasonic audio cassette deck, the kind that you would use in a home stereo system. We used that and a couple of mics to record ourselves playing in the living room, etc. (Excerpts of those sessions made it on to Matt’s very early compilation, “The Todd Family Chronicles”.) Matt got a second deck and started bouncing tracks, overdubbing, then around 1985 he bought his first cassette portastudio. That kind of took us to a different place musically, though where that place is, I’m not entirely certain. As we could, we got better gear, but our songwriting and recording process has remained about the same as it was with that first portastudio.

Now we record like everybody else does – on a freaking computer. Fact is, a depiction of pretty much any profession now looks like somebody sitting at a freaking computer.

Usual Rubbish

Thumbs sideways.

Leave a comment

Hello, this is central control. Central control to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Do you copy, Marvin? Of course not. Who on Earth would copy Marvin?

Well, I seem to have the mill to myself today. The place is as quiet as a grave, albeit a very drafty one. Dank, too … or maybe the word is acrid. Musty … that’s what I’m looking for. Anyway, everyone seems to have taken the week off. I hear it’s spring break week for the kiddies at all the local schools, so maybe my various associates all have secret lives involving school age children and tickets to Disney World. Can’t say for certain – Anti Lincoln has been looking a little extra suburban just lately.

For my own part, I have filled my time with something very unproductive – watching TV. I binge watched all ten episodes of the new Lost In Space reboot, and I think I’m ready for some kind of high tech media purge. Since I have no self-control and even less in the way of formal responsibilities, I will take this opportunity to render a brief review for your edification. Ahem … it doesn’t entirely blow, but there are aspects of it that do. Fun to watch, but it has some issues that are not unlike the original, super-campy TV show. Let me ‘splain. First I’ll put my T.V. critic hat on. You know, the one that makes you mean and nasty.

Was it THAT bad, really?First off, the basic premise of the Lost In Space reboot is, if anything, weaker than the original. They land on the planet Colorado, it appears. Mind you, they have reconfigured some of the plot devices used in the original, so the alien world has an eccentric elliptical orbit that brings it waaaaay too close to a black hole (in the original, it was the planet’s sun) causing everything to burn to a crisp. They aren’t clear on what the annual cycle is, but I assume it’s short since they seem to be heading for the hot spot of the orbit. So … they’re saying that everything on the planet dies and is reborn, but we’re seeing massive, mature stands of forest, complex animal life, including apex predators … what the hell? A random scientist on the show tells us the trees have only one ring. They’re eighty feet tall! Ridiculous.

Then there’s that robot. For chrissake, they could have just rented Marvin from me for a few weeks. We could have used the revenue, frankly. And instead of re-orchestrating the original third-season heavy-on-the-french-horns theme song, we would have been glad to provide them with suitable space music. Not a problem, producers … all you got to do is call.

Bottom line: it’s kind of meh, but watchable. Well, is that the time? Thanks for taking that detour with me. Tune in next week – I’ll be reviewing Father Ted.

Usual Rubbish

Theme park.

Leave a comment

That’s it, Lincoln. I’m tired of your get-rich-quick schemes. They always end up with trouble. Like that “Civil War” idea you had once. How did THAT turn out?

Damn, I’ll tell you … sometimes I feel like a walking suggestion box. Every time I turn a corner in this cavernous abandoned hammer mill, someone starts pitching ideas to me about what we can do to generate income, filthy lucre, serious bank. Capitalists! All they ever think about is their money. What about MY money? When the hell is someone going to build an economic theory around THAT? If I hear one more hare-brained scheme about starting a theme park based on the history of hammer manufacturing in North America, I’m going to move to another kind of abandoned mill entirely.

That said, this place really would lend itself to being a kind of theme park. They could do a kind of Gaslight Village or something equally fourth-rate – the vintage is about right, construction wise. Or it could be a life-scale model of an early 20th Century factory town, with plastic manikins and some kind of conveyor belt ride that drops you into a vat of molten nickel. (And it would only cost a nickel!) They could have a whole separate section in the courtyard called “Strike Land” where you can walk in circles holding signs that say, “Day’s Work For A Day’s Pay” and “Enough is Enough”. Then half-trained actors dressed as Pinkertons file in and beat the crap out of you. Hey … it’s educational!

Well, maybe NOT like gaslight village.Of course, why should we limit ourselves to the most obvious options? Hell, you could do anything in this barn. Just hang a sign over the front door that reads “Lost in Space Land” and you’ve got a theme park fit for the Robinson Family. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) could take tickets at the door, and Anti-Lincoln could pose as Professor John Robinson, so long as people aren’t expecting the stubble-bearded military dude in the current reboot. So what if John looks like Lincoln? He was modeled on Kennedy … isn’t that close enough?

There I go. Will you just look at me? I’m doing the very thing I admonished my colleagues not to do. I guess now THEY’LL have to find another kind of mill.

Usual Rubbish

Old stock.

Leave a comment

Damn, I always forget how big this place is. Who the hell knew all this junk was in here? I didn’t. Maybe Mitch knew, but he’s in Sao Paolo, noodling around with deadly lasers and the like.

Hi, everyone. Yeah, we’re stumbling upon all kinds of trash/treasure, now that the local realtors have us on our toes. They held an open house here last Sunday, for chrissake. What’s next? Shooting an episode of House Hunters in the courtyard? I mean … is anyone going to want to open a store in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill?

Anyway, back to our find. There’s this little room on the east side of the building. We pulled the lock off with a crowbar and found all these old hammer handles. It looked like Lester Maddox’s closet. (Ask your mother.) That got me thinking: If we could sell the handles, we could pay rent on this place. Then I realized how stupid that idea is. Now, well … I’m fresh out of ideas on how to stay in this squat house without opening a boutique of some kind. Maybe we can get Mitch Macaphee to make decorative candles in his lab. (Preferably the kind that don’t explode.)

Looks like this side of the mill needs a lttle TLCWe could sell old stock out of said boutique. We’ve got hammer handles. There’s also a bunch of old music lying around in various forms. We could sell CDs, but since we only have three full-length releases and a couple of EPs, that would make us a bit like the Scotch Boutique on 70s era Saturday Night Live. (Ask YouTube … or your mother.) I keep digging up old recordings from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago. If people still recorded on cassettes, we could just tape over the tabs and sell those. (Ask your … oh, never mind.)

Okay, so we’re lousy capitalists. What’s new? When I come up with something you’re likely to pay money for, I’ll let you know.

Speaking of old stock, we just dropped another installment of our occasional Ned Trek podcast. It’s another Ned episode knifed out of THIS IS BIG GREEN from a couple of years back – Ned Trek 25: Not The Children One, Please!

Usual Rubbish

Monetizing sloth.

Leave a comment

Leave me alone, Charles. Can’t you see I’m trying to sleep? It’s obvious, for chrissake … I just called you Charles, and I don’t even know anyone by that name. So I must be effing sleeping, right? Charles?

Oh, hi. Fell asleep in my cozy broom closet. We are still in our highly restricted corners of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill as local venture capitalists eye the joint from stem to stern to see if it has any potential to make them serious bank. (I think there are more opportunities in the stem than in the stern, but I’ll let them find that out for themselves.) It’s like they have glass heads; I can see them picturing some knitting basket of a store, maybe a Hickory Farms … if such a thing still exists. (I remember stealing samples there as a kid. Strange, because I wasn’t even hungry … still, it was a good find.)

So, yeah … they’ll probably sweep us out of here like yesterday’s floor scum in a few months. Unless, that is, we come up with some cash … or Mitch Macaphee comes up with some kind of diabolical invention that will hold them at bay. Maybe a time-warp generator. Maybe a force field. (Even a little, teensy-weensy force field would help.) Maybe a great invisible ruler we can use to whack the invisible hand of the marketplace. Just throwing out a few ideas here. Are you listening, Mitch? Mitch??

A potential buyer visits.Oh, damn … that’s right. Mitch is off to Sao Paolo to attend the bi-annual convention of the International Society for the Purveyors of Mad Science (or ISPMS). I believe they’re giving him some sort of badge this year. (Not sure what it’s for, but it suspiciously glows in the dark.) In any case, we can’t rely on Mitch to keep the capitalist wolf pack at bay here at our besieged hammer mill squat house. We could have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) go out there and try to reason with the developers, but that would just make them laugh and point. We could coax Anti-Lincoln (perhaps with the promise of bourbon) to give one of his famous presidential addresses from the mill’s parapet, but again … pointing and laughing would ensue. (He’s not good.)

Thankfully, it’s a weekend, and I have the option of staying in my broom closet, strumming my unplugged guitar, while the realtor does walk-throughs. “What’s that sound?” the punters will ask, and the realtor will say, “Just the wind in the willows.”

Usual Rubbish

Five gets you ten.

Leave a comment

Remember those ridiculous glasses with the tiny black lenses? Sure you do. And those dumb ass purple sneakers. They were super easy to find because no one besides me wanted to wear them. (Oh, and you could find them in a dark room. I think they were radioactive.)

No, we haven’t converted this into some kind of retro fashion blog. Far from it! We’re just playing a game that’s gotten kind of popular around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It’s called Five and Ten. You guess what the other players were doing five years ago, then ten years ago, then fifteen, and so on. Every time you guess correctly, you get five points. The person with the most points by the time everyone has walked away in anger is the winner – they then have to go to the local strip mall and open a Five and Ten store. (The game’s a little too complicated, in my humble opinion.)

I’m actually no fun to play against in this game, because if you ask me what I was doing five years ago, I would have to say that it’s very much the same thing I’m doing right now. Same sort of thing with ten years ago. Now if you say twenty or thirty, I have intelligible answers to that. Twenty? We were working on our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, and I was starting to think about doing this blog. Okay, so that’s MOSTLY like today. No points on that one.

Huh. Old Ben beat me to it.Thirty years ago, I was working for Donald Trump. (Or “Drumph,” in the original Norwegian – Trump’s family comes from that part of Norway that’s called “Germany”.) Well, I was a contractor for him in a sense, playing in a band that performed at Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. I’m not certain, but I think around this time of year in 1988 I was playing the last of three month-long engagements we had at Trump Plaza, in one of the casino-side lounges, playing pretty horrible covers. My big song on that gig was Benny King’s “Stand By Me”. (The front person for that group was a singer named Joanna Lee.) At the end of that particular run, I got fired for losing my voice. (Not by Drumph, but by our manager, though admittedly I wasn’t very well liked in that establishment. Attitudinal issues, I believe.)

You can read all about my exploits as a low-flying road musician by dropping me a message via the comments form and asking me to tell you all about it. How easy is that? Now excuse me – I have to go open another Five and Dime.

Usual Rubbish

Pull!

Leave a comment

That thing shouldn’t be allowed in a residential neighborhood. Yeah, I’m talking to you, Mitch. I don’t want the mayor to send us nasty letters again. Five letters in one week is enough for any abandoned mill-squatter.

Oh, hi. I’m pretending to have just noticed you, looking at the blog post I wrote days ago. (What a giveaway!) We’re having personnel issues again here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, high in the hill country of Central New York, far from the beaten path. It’s my own fault for taking on a mad science advisor. Sure, he helps us get to Neptune and other distant worlds. Sure, he bends time like Superman bends steel bars (i.e. with his bare hands). But the utility ends where the madness begins, and let me tell you something, friends – Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is as crazy as Jeremy Shaw’s proverbial shithouse rat.

What’s the source of the current eviction order? Well, Mitch heard an internet rumor that a certain Chinese Space Station – the Tiangong 1 – has been sputtering in a decaying orbit for the past few years, neglected by its owners, causing a threat to navigation high above the Earth’s surface. He is now taking it upon himself to defend planet Earth by shooting the sucker out of the sky. Bet you can’t guess how. No, not with a rocket. Nope, not a deadly Edward Teller-style laser. No, not an electron lasso (is that even a thing?). Give up? Me too. I don’t freaking know.

Frankly, this seems a little dicey.All I can tell you, honestly, is that this project has consumed Mitch and our courtyard at the same time. He’s spent the last week building a big howitzer-like monstrosity with a barrel that’s got to be 80 feet long and a control panel with gauges, levers, flashing lights, electrical arcs, and steam whistles. (I think those are just for laughs, frankly.) Mitch refers to the device as his Positron Howitzer, though what that means I cannot tell you. But from what I’ve seen he can zero in on that sputtering space station and plant some kind of projectile in its side in a way that has the potential to ruin its whole day.

Matt wants me to dispatch Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to City Hall with some kind of peace offering – donuts or potato soup, something like that. I don’t know. Those official threats are the only personal letters I receive anymore … I’m a little reluctant to let them go.