Tag Archives: mansized tuber

Usual Rubbish

Density rising.

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You may say I’ve got a lot to learn. Seems like this is the perfect spot to learn. No, I’m NOT playing Vegas … not yet, anyway. (Though I did spend a summer in Reno once. Long story, which I’ll spare you.)

Raining like hell here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Wish we had invested in that new roof a few years back, when we were overflowing with Neptunian shekels from our last interstellar tour. Those were the days …. NOT. Yeah, the water is coming in like … well … water from the sky. The mansized tuber is loving it. Not Marvin (my personal robot assistant), though. His brass finish is getting tarnished in the humid summer weather we get up here in upstate New York, and this is certainly not doing it any good. (Kind of vain, actually, that robot. I think he sees himself as a Tyrone Power lookalike. He needs to download some newer movies.)

Over the last few weeks the humidity has been rising. Our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin, insists that it is atmospheric density, not the humidity, that is rising. He has been hammering away at some kind of device that he claims will control the weather, or something to that effect. I could share with you what he told me, but it might cause you some distress. Suffice to say that throughout his diatribe, he managed to end each sentence with the term (and I quote) “BWA-HA-HA-HA!”  I have asked Y'know, I kinda see it.anti-Lincoln, our resident language history scholar, to find me a gloss on that. So far no luck.

We’re still working on our next album, working title “WORKING TITLE”. (We were thinking of renaming the band “Various Artists”, just so that we would show up in the Columbia House 8-track tape catalogs.) It’s slow going, to say the least. We’re re-thinking parts that we put down over the past two years, building on old tracks that were hastily recorded and shipped out via our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. Some are rougher than others. And we’re starting with the roughest ones … I hope. (These are pretty freaking rough!)

So, we’ll keep scratching. Keep your eyes open …. especially if you’re driving.

 

Usual Rubbish

String theory.

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That thing is way out of tune … I mean WAY out of tune, dude. Use my phone. No, not my SMART phone … that Bell Princess phone over in the corner, next to the mansized tuber. The dial tone is a low F#. Just transpose, for chrissake. DIVAS!

Yes, you’re listening in on another Big Green rehearsal. It’s like you’re a fly on the wall. In the Cheney Hammer Mill, that makes you inconspicuous …. not because you’re so small, but because there are so many flies on the wall, you meld in with the multitude. Anyhow, we’re running through a few numbers, putting down tracks, laying in a groove, etc. etc. Sometimes it’s hard to keep all of these various stringed instruments in tune with one another, especially when the city cuts off your electricity, your internet connection, your phone service, your water, and your air. (That last cut-off only happens on Type-M planets.)

No, we haven’t had our electricity cut off this week (yet), but life is still bloody complicated. Four-string bass guitars are hard enough to tune; try a six-string acoustic! Don’t even talk about pianos and organs. (No, really … don’t even talk about them. An off-color word can make them slip out of tune.) Fortunately for me, my keyboards are of the electronic variety, so tuning is as simple as turning a little knob or clicking an item in a graphic user interface. Or pushing on a bender and securing it with tape. (Non-standard method.)

Still flat as a pancake.Matt and I are putting the finishing touches on the next batch of Ned Trek songs. When I say “finishing touches”, I mean “adding essential musical elements without which the songs would be virtually unlistenable.” Details, details. In any case, we have six (or is it seven?) numbers under construction, some of which border on the blasphemous, others tinkering with long-held practices of civilized peoples, still others merely dabbling in the art of giving grave offense. A controversial collection? Depends on your point of view.

Important side note: No animals or humans were harmed in the making of this music. Though Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has suffered slightly from mechanical wrist overuse syndrome (or MWOS), as he is our defacto percussionist.

Usual Rubbish

Dang me.

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Here we are. Another late Spring arrives in the middle of freaking nowhere. Birds are singing, grass is growing, the underemployed ice cream vendor is driving a superannuated truck up your street, playing “Pop goes the weasel” (or 4 bars of it). Life is good.

I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in an abandoned Hammer Mill in upstate New York over the course of the coldest winter anybody can remember. I mean, damn! We were frozen solid, stuck in the ice for five whole months. The bill collectors had to come after us with ice picks. Visitors from Neptune had to go home half way through their stay – THAT’S how cold it was. (How cold was it? Well … )

So hey … when a little warm weather comes this way, it’s a big deal. Everyone is starting to get into their temperate habits. The mansized tuber has been arranging flower pots. Before you ask, no … he does not have a green thumb. They are both “suburban titanium”. He just plays with clay pots – stacks ’em, shuffles ’em, smashes ’em sometimes. Then there’s Marvin (my personal assistant) and his croquet set. You wouldn’t think he had the agility, but then he exclusively plays against people from the 1910s.

Marvin, croquetI saw anti-Lincoln crawling out of the local public house. At least he’s got a hobby. Fact of the matter is, I admire anti-Lincoln for having the ambition to get off of his doppelganger ass and venture out into the night. I and my fellow core Big Green members (or member) haven’t been near a nightclub in, well, years, particularly when you’re talking about terrestrial venues. No, it’s not because we are impossible to work with, or that we draw the wrong kind of crowd. That’s all true, of course, but the main reason we don’t show up in the local clubs is … well .. lack of ambition, motivation, you name it.

So, dang me. We all observe the arrival of summer in our own ways, some lamer than others.

Podcast Plug. Hey, want to hear Matt and me talk about Al Jolson? Or perhaps our most ludicrous episode of Ned Trek (our Star Trek parody) yet? Give our latest installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast. Then tell me about it @BigGreenJoe.

Usual Rubbish

Pod-where? Dunno.

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Not a real good bookkeeper, I admit it. Never have been particularly good with numbers. Don’t know much about geometry. (There’s a song in this somewhere.)

Tubey and the stump in the courtyard.So what happened to the March podcast? Well, as you’ve guessed if you follow our various pointless postings in cyberspace, we have moved to a bi-monthly format, given the production demands of Ned Trek, particularly the musical episodes. We’re currently producing five or six songs for what will ultimately be the June episode, and we should be recording the April episode in a week or so. So … production is moving forward, but like Issa’s snail climbing Mount Fuji, it is proceeding “slowly … slowly.”

My illustrious brother had a cold for a couple of weeks, like half of humanity up here in the great frozen north country. He spends a good deal of his day outdoors, feeding and entertaining all manner of wild critters. Not so different from being in the restaurant business, actually, and you know how demanding THAT can be. In any case, that pushed our production schedule back a couple of weeks … enough time for Mitch Macaphee to flesh out our plan to start a Mars colony before the end of the decade. (Well, THAT certainly took a strange turn.)

That leaves us a brief opportunity to mark the return of Spring and all the traditional rites associated with it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has taken it upon himself to erect a maypole in the hammer mill courtyard. Sure, it’s only five feet tall … and yeah, he made it out of the remnants of a sawed-off telephone poll, but it’s a good conversation piece, at least, and now the mansized tuber has some companionship out there as the warmer months arrive. Spring is busting out all over.

Cowboy Scat on YouTube: We posted another couple of songs to the YouTube playlist. For any of you who haven’t heard the whole album, here’s how to give it a listen.

Usual Rubbish

20 questions.

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No, the moon is NOT a planet, nor a star. And you may THINK you just saw an ankylosaurus, but they died out 65 million years ago during the late Cretaceous. Don’t you know anything?

Christ on a bike, what the hell am I, anyway, a grade school teacher? How is it that people (and robots … and sentient oversized vegetables) can reach adulthood without knowing all this stuff? We may live in a very sheltered environment here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (and I use the word “sheltered” very, very loosely here), but some light does peek in through the crack in the wall, and a bit of the real world does seep into our isolation. Once in a while. Happened last year, as a matter of fact.

You know what it’s like when it’s the dead of winter and you spend a stretch of days indoors – nothing but you, your personal robot assistant, and a man-sized tuber. Idle minds run in neutral. Ends up being a long game of 20 questions, for chrissake. But you have to keep the kids entertained, right? Otherwise, they start busting the place up. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might try his hand at plumbing. That’s all anybody needs. (If that happened, I’d have to get the ankylosaurus after him.)

It's probably just a big dog, MarvinIt’s not all fun and games, you understand. Matt and I have been hard at work on another crop of songs that will be featured in the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek parody we include in our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. We’re talking maybe five or six new songs, not sure exactly. It’s a bit like baking for the holidays. Some things come out right, others go into the compost heap. For Big Green, when a song goes flat in the middle of tracking it, we chop it up and put it into the mansized tuber’s flower pot. There’s usually enough nitrates in there to perk him up for a few hours. Waste not want not.

So, yes … Keep your eyes peeled. Not for stray late-Cretaceous throwbacks … for the next episode of our podcast. Should be coming through any … week, month … whatever.

Usual Rubbish

Plan ahead.

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Is that where I left it? Oh, Jesus. Well … I’ll have to pick up another one, then. It’ll be long gone by now. Bloody inconvenient.

Work harder, not smokier.Oh, hi. Yep, I left my hand-carved walking stick at the bakery again. Second time this month. Last time, some old guy walked off with it … and yes, he was older than ME. Not exactly an heirloom, you understand. It’s actually just a branch that fell off the poplar tree in back of the Cheney Hammer Mill, by the canal. I cut some bits off of it, peeled back some of the bark, and voila! Cheap crutch.

Not that I need a walking stick. Fact is, I’ve been trying to stay close to the Mill as we plan our next interstellar tour. Nothing particularly ambitious, you understand – just a couple of the major star clusters, maybe a jaunt out to Aldebaran. (Matt’s not real crazy about that last one. The gravity’s a little strong for his taste.) I’ve asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to crunch some numbers on possible itineraries that might result in, I don’t know, a few extra shekels in our pockets. There’s some smoke coming out of his head, so he must be working on it. Good man.

Where’s the next episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN? Still in development, my friend. These things take time, particularly when you’ve got as full a plate like yours truly. Suffice to say that I am straining myself to the limit simply taking these few moments to write this post. Our production manager, the mansized tuber, is literally hitting me over the head for that script. Yes, tubey – I’m working on it! (Pssst … Don’t tell him I’m not.) It should be another extravaganza, perhaps unprecedented in its sheer stupidity. But don’t take my word for it …. Take …. someone else’s. Not sure where I was going with that.

Well, better get back to work. I’m typing, Tubey! Can’t you hear me typing??!

Usual Rubbish

Inside the May podcast.

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Well, I’m back from watering the man-sized tuber. Never thought his personal life decisions would so dramatically affect my schedule, but apparently so. He has to be watered two or Could have picked a better spot.three times a day, and it looks like I’m nominated to be his personal gardener. By default. (Well, I can’t leave it to anti-Lincoln. He’d set the poor bastard root vegetable on fire!)

Anywho, this seems like a good time to talk about our May THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast and what you’re likely find lurking inside that largish mp3 file. Here’s the rundown:

Ned Trek XVIII: Captain Fricassee – This is a riff on the “classic” Star Trek episode “The Enemy Within”, in which the captain – in this case, Willard Mittilius Romney – is divided by a transporter malfunction into a good half and a bad half. Our version features a Romney doppelganger that embodies the southern reactionary buried within every conservative candidate for higher office. Gluttony saves the day. Don’t ask … just listen.

Song: Brotherly Love – a half-assed, live rendition of a tent revival gospel song originally sung by Robert Goulet on an episode of The Big Valley. Again… don’t ask. Sometimes we just do stupid shit, and sometimes the audio recorder is running … and sometimes those two things happen at the same time. That’s how a podcast is born.

Song: Going to Andromeda,  by Big Green – This is a song produced on a 4-track cassette portastudio back in 1991, I believe. Matt wrote it, and as it happens it’s one of my favorites of his songs (and that’s saying something). Lo-fi but worth a listen.

Song: Good Old Boys Roundup (Demo Version), by Big Green – This one we’ve played on the podcast before. It’s one of mine, and we’ve never finished a full-blown version of it. So it’s just me howling and strumming a guitar. And banging a piano. (And by banging, I mean playing … don’t put words in my mouth.)

The rest is talk … talk about dumb stuff. Bad movies, etc. You get the picture. Give it a listen sometime and tell me what you think. No, really – tell us and we’ll post your comments right here. Promise.

Uncategorized

Dwarfed ambitions.

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Interstellar Tour Log: April 10, 2014
On the surface of Dwarf Planet 2012 VP.

That’s it. I am officially declaring our Interstellar Tour over and done with. I’m sick of these stupid slug lines reminding people where the hell we are all the time. Also, we’ve simply run out of places to play here on Dwarf Planet 2012 VP. That’s likely because, aside from a few street-corner fried plantain vendors, there is virtually no commerce here. This planetoid is devoid of performance venues. We actually set up and jammed in a nearby crater just on the off chance that random extraterrestrials would happen upon us. Nothing. Not a sausage.  This is just like back home.

Ah, home. The sainted abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It’s leaky roof, its moldy basement, its crumbling walls, its heaps of abandoned hammer parts and random knobs of discarded pig iron that I keep tripping over even after having squatted there for more than a decade. I miss that dump, and I’m not alone in that sentiment. Hell, even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) looked a little misty yesterday as he scrolled through photos of the mill on his laptop. Lincoln seems like a man without a rostrum. The mansized tuber, well … he’s a plant. Don’t expect a lot of overt sentiment out of him.

That's the ticket!So, yeah, after months in space, we are ready to take the long trip home, back from the Ort Cloud, back from hastily named space rocks that are hard to classify. Before we go, though, we want to leave a stake in the ground here on Dwarf Planet 2012 VP. My thought is, well, let’s name the sucker after ourselves. Let’s claim it for Big Green, well and truly. We could be subtle about it and just shift the name to 2012 BG. Or we could go all-out and call it Big Greenland (though I was reserving that for a future theme park). We’ve got friends at NASA … I’m guessing this is do-able. (And yes, we have to ask for permission, since we need telemetric data from the space agency to find our way back to the mill.)

Homeward bound, chaps!

Usual Rubbish

Release minus … what?

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Still watching that space? Well, give it up. That was a joke, damn it. Don’t take me literally … that way lies madness.

Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of RickWell, here we are, inching closer to the release date of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, Big Green’s third and perhaps silliest album ever. Fully 21 tracks of pure, unadulterated goofiness, each one performed by what is nominally a completely different combo. We’ve got the master all set. We’ve designed the packaging for our limited run of CD-Rs and the graphics for our digital distributors. Now all we have to do is, well, complete the arcane process of acquiring ISRC codes for all of the tracks, manufacturing the discs, doing a run of wax cylinders for those listeners still enamored of that format, and so on.

What is the release date? Good question. Ask our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., a.k.a. Hegephonic. They make all the big foot decisions. (By that I mean, they actually have a sasquatch  serving as their Chief Operations Officer. Explains a lot.) Like many artists (and it’s in deference to the mansized tuber that I include us within that rubric), we get impatient with red tape. So when you see the disc – if you see the disc – you will see our own imprint on the package; a logo for Hammermade Records, and well, it doesn’t exist, but it sounds right, so what the fuck.

The mother of all imprintsSome have told us that we should have called the label Hammermaid, like Milkmaid condensed milk. We don’t listen to some people, particularly if they are Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who has a particular liking for condensed milk products because they remind him of motor oil. In any case, we don’t take a lot of pains over trifles like imprints and logos, because in all honesty, that’s not what we’re about. We are the original discorporate rock band. We say no to corporate hegemony. We’re off the grid, man. (Aside from all that stuff involving money, paying for things, etc.)

So again, be forewarned. Release of Cowboy Scat is imminent. After which, we will likely go into hiding (or perhaps the witness protection program) assuming Cousin Rick Perry catches wind of this. (Don’t tell ‘im!)

Usual Rubbish

Enterprise, come in.

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What next, man?What is this again? Beeswax. Do you have to keep it in my bedroom? We’ve got an entire abandoned 19th century mill here – there’s plenty of space in the forge room. Marvin??

Oh, hello. Didn’t see you there on the other side of that iPhone screen. Thanks for dropping by Big Green’s near totally useless blog, now more than ten years in the making! (Slogan: Blogging pointlessly since 1999.) You caught me in the middle of a small dispute with the help. No, we are not effete artists with domestics swarming all over the place, attending to our every whim. Certainly not! Our domestic workforce consists of a handful of surly operators, including:

  • Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – Created by a mad scientist and one-time scrap metal dealer, Marvin helps around the mill with lifting fairly heavy things, moving those things from one place to another, and …. and lifting other fairly heavy things.
  • Mansized tuber – Talk about growing your own! Matt harvested this oversized sentient sweet potato back in the old days, when we were in the witness protection program and pretended to be living in Sri Lanka. Anyhow, the mansized tuber isn’t really much of a help at all, but he does give me something to blog about once in a while, and that amounts to a particular kind of heavy lifting.
  • Lincoln – Storied 16th president of the United States, saved the Union, ended organized chattel slavery, and became the greatest president Hollywood has ever seen. Rescued from the awful past via Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine, which created a time portal through which Lincoln and his evil doppelganger passed and …. well …. search the blog for details; it’s complicated. Anyhow, he helps around the house with light cleaning, some cooking, occasional legal counsel. Probably the best natured of the bunch.
  • Anti-Lincoln – Surly opposite doppelganger of the above. (See above for creation myth or just follow the tag anti-Lincoln.) He burns things when it gets cold outside. Sometimes he’ll throw something edible into the fire.

That’s the list of what might be termed domestics. Everyone else around here is an associate, or hanger-on, or I don’t know what. It’s a squat house, for crying out loud. And now Marvin has gotten it into his head to sell lip balm or something. He managed to trade some bricks from one of the outbuildings in exchange for a couple of barrels of beeswax. Entrepreneurs! They’ll be the death of all of us!

Sorry. He gets a little over enthusiastic sometimes, that’s all.