Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Yardstick.

Leave a comment

Yeah, it’s up there. How can I tell? I just look out the window, dude. I look out and I see exactly nothing. That’s how you know it’s Snowmageddon. Simple, right? Trouble is … I’m on the third floor.

Yeah, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our squat house) was buried in snow this past Tuesday night, and Mitch is responsible. I know it seems like I blame everything on our mad science advisor, but that’s only because he’s behind everything that happens, at least in some measure. Like that full moon we had last week. Did you see it? It was kind of ghostly, like the clouds had wrapped around it, but you could still see the full disc. Mitch’s part in that? Not certain, but my guess is that he was working the cloud machine that night. (He should really be advising a 1970s arena rock band, but I digress.)

The sad thing is that his cloud invention could be a boon to mankind and animal kind alike … if he would only use it for good instead of evil. That’s a bit unfair, actually – Mitch is amoral, not immoral. Madness has no reason, but it can have a goal … and this week, I suspect the goal may have been snow and more snow. And as I believe I mentioned earlier, he has a cloud machine. Not good.

Hey ... I think it might have snowed.There is one other piece of incriminating evidence. The big nor’easter was named Stella, and that was the name of Mitch’s old girlfriend from back in the day. He doesn’t talk about her much, but Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has dished a bit of back story on Mitch’s wild years. Now I know that doesn’t sound like Marvin, but you would be surprised what’s stored in those creaky, tape-medium databases he holds inside that brass hide of his. (Before you ask, no, there are no audio recordings – just metadata of phone calls, that sort of thing.) Folks: never date a mad scientist. Seriously.

So, let me be the first to apologize about the storm. I’ll probably also be the last to apologize, since Mitch never apologizes for any of the catastrophes he causes. Crazy as fuck means not having to say you’re sorry.

Usual Rubbish

Inside February.

Leave a comment

I know I dropped it around here somewhere. Marvin, have you seen it? What’s that? Oh, right … I dropped it on the internets. How could I forget?

Yes, well … we FINALLY got around to dropping a new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring Ned Trek 31: It’s a Profitable Life. Yes, it’s a Christmas special, so think of it as that fruitcake you never opened in December, shoved to the back of the fridge, and you happen upon it one cold February morning – a happy accident! Except that, well … it’s a fruitcake. So, like it or not, here’s what you’ll find alongside the pecans and candied fruit:

Ned Trek 31: It’s a Profitable Life – Our parody of “It’s a Wonderful Life” as played by your favorite Ned Trek characters: Captain Willard Mittilius Romney in the James Stewart role; Peter Lorre as the angel- (or, rather, devil- )in-training (Gladston Goodstein); Paul Ryan sitting in for the main character’s younger brother; Bernie Sanders as the bank examiner who ends up running the bank as a worker-owned enterprise, and so on. It even features Thomas Malthus, the 18th-19th Century political economist, as the boss fallen angel. An hour of cheap laughs and satirical tirades fit for no man.

Ned Trek 31 also includes 5 new Big Green songs:

  • You Can’t Do Anything – Straight rock number sung by Sulu that asks the question, “Are you having fun?” then talks about fascists on the couch at Christmas. What more can you ask?
  • You Asked Me How – A 6/8, fifties-sounding song sung by Ned himself. Hear me, Android!It's a profitable life
  • Fountainhead – Another rock number, sung in the “voice” of Ayn Rand acolyte Paul Ryan, about his favorite subject …. him, and his bankrupt philosophy.
  • Christmas Without You – Doc Coburn song. If you listen carefully, you can hear a bad imitation of his colleague, Dr. John, in the background vocals.
  • Christmas Pearls – A jaunty little Christmas Carol sung by Mr. Perle, in which he makes the case for his return as a top White House advisor on foreign policy, defense, and getting us into endless (but highly profitable) wars. In other words, a different version of the same song he always sings on Ned Trek.

Put The Phone Down – Our stranger than usual conversation opens with something like a song, ranges into some apologizing, lamenting the loss of John Hurt (whose resonant Shakespearean voice is often badly imitated on our podcast), a look back at my turkey house apartment in the 1980s, and wrap up with an impromptu version of Special Kind of Blood.

So, hey … Happy Holidays. Belated.

Usual Rubbish

Seven up.

Leave a comment

Oh, Jesus …. I think I’m going to sleep over at the neighbor’s house for a few nights, guys. At least until the radioactivity dies down a bit after Mitch’s head explodes like an atom bomb.

Yes, you guessed it – it’s another one of those weeks, folks. Started out just fine. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) was vacuuming the drapes. Anti-Lincoln was out walking his imaginary dog and insulting the mail carrier. Matt and I were cloistered in the studio, digging through mountains of unpublished material. Everything was going just swimmingly …  and then NASA has to go an discover seven new Earth-like planets around a sun named Trappist-1. And no, not just any seven Earth-like planets, but the same freaking seven planets Mitch has been secreting away for the last decade. And he is going to bum, people.

This planetary search has simply got to stop. Not because it isn’t highly productive and stimulating from a scientific point of view – quite the opposite! I speak entirely from the perspective of narrow self-interest. Every time NASA finds new planets, it puts Mitch Macaphee into a funk. Often times they are worlds he has previously discovered – and even visited, in some cases. A true capitalist inventor, he has a decidedly proprietary approach to space exploration. Whatever he finds, he keeps. “Finders/Keepers” kind of cuts against the grain of NASA’s philosophy, so there’s bound to be conflicts. And it’s not such a good thing when both sides of a conflict have rockets at their disposal.

Mitch ... they're ALL yours?Now before you get alarmed, let me qualify this. Mitch is not … repeat, NOT … at the point of launching any rockets. He is principally an electrical engineer, so he’s always cooking up gadgets that bend time/space or generate black holes – that along with a lot of buzzing, whirring, and flashing. (Remember that he invented Marvin, who does a fair bit of buzzing, whirring, and flashing of his own.) In fact, I’m not convinced that Mitch hasn’t found a non-spacecraft method for traveling to other planets. And I am not talking about soul travel here, brother (though that would be an excellent name for a travel agency). There’s the time he hooked up that surplus department store revolving door to Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device. That’s how we got Antimatter Lincoln. That was awesome.

So, hey …. seven new planets, seven new problems. That’s the story here at the mill.

Usual Rubbish

Song farm.

Leave a comment

Where’s Matt this morning? Where he always is – trudging across the landscape like Ewan McTeagle, writing crazy-ass song poems in his head and putting them to music … also in his head. And feeding the beavers. Curious fellow!

As we’re patching together the next episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring our holiday (yes, holiday!) installment of Ned Trek, it’s beginning to dawn on me just how many Ned Trek songs we have recorded over the last three years. If you piled them up, the resulting stack would be taller than the Empire State Building. (That’s assuming, of course, each song is about 1/50th the height of the Empire State Building.) But spacial relationships aside, we’ve got a big backlog of songs that are just screaming “Put me in an album!” Marvin (my personal robot assistant) tried to be helpful by picking up a photo album down at the corner drug store, but of course, that kind of album is a whole ‘nother thing. But semantic considerations aside …

Yep. About that tall, man.Okay, well … 50 songs is a lot for an album, even one of ours. Here’s where both the spacial and the semantic relationships actually come into play. What the hell is an album, right? It used to be an LP with a limited capacity; then a cassette, same deal; CD, same deal. In the digital music age, those limitations have vanished. No more four-disc box sets, right? It’s just a big virtual bag of MP3 or .wav files. So both the semantic and the spacial constraints are history, man. That means the only constraints on what to include in our next album are those pertaining to aesthetics and good judgment. (In our world, that means no freaking constraints at all!)

The truth is, we haven’t completed a new album because we’ve been taken up with writing and recording new songs for the podcast. When we finish a bunch, we start on the next one. And when I say “finish”, I mean our typical fast-mixdown …. not finished in any kind of releasable way. That takes time and care, much care. Marvin has to lay down a coat of shellac. Then we get Anti-Lincoln started on the hand-carved details. And that’s just for the box it comes in!

Many’s the time I’ve thought, there must be an easier way. But even thinking about that seems way too hard.

 

 

Usual Rubbish

What you hear.

Leave a comment

Man, it’s windy again today. That’s what I’m hearing, right? Oh, okay … Anti-Lincoln is just practicing his bass clarinet. Right. Sounds like wind. Lots of wind.

Hey, look …. I know living with other people can be annoying. But we try to be tolerant around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and let one another live up to his or her true self. And when they achieve that hard-won moment of self-realization, we all point fingers at them and laugh derisively. Particularly when they take up some wind instrument they have no hope of mastering. (Happens more often around here than you might suppose.) That’s what we call “positive reinforcement.”

I don’t want to give the impression that we of Big Green have something against innovation and initiative. Lord, no. The fact is, we rely on other people’s innovation and initiative to make up for our woeful lack of those qualities. We’ve made plenty of recordings that have random horn-like instruments honking in the background or someone plunking on a banjo in a lackluster way. Naturally, we don’t hire session musicians for this. (Very few of them are willing to work in ThereThere's a multitude in this place!exchange for discarded hammer handles from the last century.) So naturally we are left to forage for talent a little closer to home. And when I say “talent”, I’m using the word in a very generic, denatured sense. Bodies with working digits is what I mean.

Take Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. (Please.) Little known factoid: Many of the horn parts on that album were played by Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and Anti-Lincoln. We used trained monkeys for some tambourine parts. And when I say “trained”, I’m using the word in a very generic …. oh, never mind. Actually, I played the freaking tambourine. I just made it sound like I’m a trained monkey. Though frankly, most people playing the tambourine sound like trained monkeys. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The point being …. we may look like a band of three people, but there’s a virtual multitude involved in everything we do. (Now by “virtual”, I mean literally “in essence or effect, but not in fact”.)

Got all that? Good. Maybe you can explain it to me (and the virtual multitude).

Usual Rubbish

Tubs and bones.

Leave a comment

Well, nice try anyway. I always thought it would be best to start on the valve trombone and work your way up. Maybe I was right for once, though the odds are against it. Anywho ….

Oh, hi. Just talking to my illustrious brother, who was gifted a trombone for Christmas this past month. We’re always stretching our musical horizons here at the mighty abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, always looking ahead to the next Big Green project, whether it be a new album, a podcast, or just some random squeaking in the night. Sadly, whatever that project may turn out to be, it’s unlikely to have trombone parts on it. Matt’s not big on the mouthpiece, frankly. Making music is just plain hard!

This is far from the first time we’ve attempted to add instrumentation. And no, I’m not referring to when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) hired a Lowry organ for a fortnight so that he could learn the wedding march in time for Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding on Netflix. (Sentimental pile of lifeless tin.) I mean all those other times, like when Anti-Lincoln took up the glockenspiel or when the mansized tuber tried to carve a piccolo our of one of his root-like appendages. (This, too, I have seen with mine own eyes.) I even banged on some drums once upon a time.

Um, I think you need mallets with that thing.The simple fact is, when we are producing a piece of music, our only resource is ourselves. We can’t go out and hire people to score and perform orchestral parts – that’s prohibitively expensive …. in that it would cost more than the fifteen bucks I have hidden in the mattress. No, sir …. Big Green forages for what it needs, plucking banjos and bagpipes from the junk pile of music history. That’s part of our thing, actually – found sound made with found instruments. What the hell … if we didn’t do that, we would have to get another thing.

What kind of instruments will we need for our next album? Good question. Sousaphone comes to mind, but only because I like the sound of the word “sousaphone” … even more than I like the sound of the horn itself. We may have use for mandolins and accordions, but it’s a little early to say. Ask me after dinner. That’s when I do some of my best thinking.

Usual Rubbish

Rough draft.

Leave a comment

I’m sure I put that window putty around here someplace. And no, I’m not using masking tape again. You think tape is the answer to everything! Look at your clothes – they’re all taped together, for chrissake!

Whoa, damn it. Sorry for all the shouting. Not the best way to start out a new year. Tempers wear thin when you get extremes of temperature – I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It’s been decades since the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill has had anything like climate control technology, and back then it just amounted to an enormous, octopus-like boiler in the basement. In the summer, they opened a few windows. (With all of the broken windows in this old barn, we don’t need to do that anymore.) But now, when the mercury dips below zero, well …. we have to innovate.

Now, you would think that we would benefit from having a mad scientist on retainer (no, really … his dentist had him fitted for one last week), even if his advanced knowledge is somewhat tainted by the sound of wild cackling in the night. I took it upon myself this past week to ask Mitch Macaphee if he had some solution to the cold; you know, move the earth a few million miles closer to the sun, or laser open a magma vent … stuff like that. He pretty much ignored me. I was picturing some kind of atomic solution – the equivalent of a neutrino space heater, but no luck.

Well, that's ONE way to stay warm.Even so, Mitch seemed not too bothered by the sub-zero cold. I got curious, so I sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into his mad-science lair to take some web cam video. Turns out, Mitch has been holding out on us. Apparently, he’s been using the Orgone Generating Device left behind nearly a decade ago by our old friend Trevor James Constable. He switches on the OGD and creates a curved time-space anomaly that amounts to a portal to Miami. Well, that’s the rough equivalent of having the windows open on a summer day, right? So it’s nice and toasty in his study; meanwhile, we’re burning the furniture out here in the not-so-great room. Christ on a bike. If you’ve got a cure for leaky mill windows, send them our way.

Usual Rubbish

Ice days.

Leave a comment

Man oh man. Put another log in the furnace, Anti-Lincoln. Drafty old barn of a place. Are you sure we weren’t somehow transported overnight to one of those Kuiper Belt planetoids? I’m freezing my ass off in here.

Oh, hi. Yes, we’re in the midst of another cold snap here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Our local gas an electric company discontinued service here years ago, as you might suspect. The hammer forge has been pretty quiet since the 1940s. You might think, well … burn the furniture, right? Well, we did that YEARS ago. I’m sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and no, I’m not burning that. (We’re always looking for kindling. After almost twenty winters of this, the mansized tuber is looking pretty nervous.)

Okay, so we have to break the ice in the bathroom sink every morning – is that anything to complain about? We have a roof over our heads … or most of a roof, anyway. More importantly, we have a floor beneath our feet. I say that because, if you’ll recall, we went on a “Journey to the Center of the Earth” tour some years back, and I for one never want to make THAT journey again. You haven’t had a tough audience until you’ve played for Morlocks. And those talking rock creatures! What’s that, Marvin? You don’t say. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has just told me that there were no talking rock creatures. This one club owner just had a novelty landline telephone, that’s all.

Oh, right. I remember these guys.I suppose we, like so many other upstaters, should find some way of monetizing this freezing cold weather. I don’t know, like … exporting ice or something. We could turn this place into the abandoned Cheney Ice Mill, start shipping ice all over the country. We could pack it in dry ice, or sawdust, or … something. Iron filings, perhaps. (There’s a lot of those in the hammer mill basement.) It’s just a damn shame that you can’t bottle this weather and sell it in the summer. Hey ….. Nah, forget it.

Well, we’ve got one thing to keep us warm: Our Christmas episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, still in production. Likely to be a little late this year, friends – my apologies. I will post something around the holiday as a placeholder then drop the new episode when it’s good and ready. (Well … ready, anyway. If I hold out for “good” , we may be talking about NEXT Christmas.)

Usual Rubbish

It’s about time.

Leave a comment

I don’t know, I’m thinking it’s time. What do you think? Not sure? Okay. When do you think you’ll have an answer? I don’t know about you, but … I’m thinking it’s time.

Okay, well … I’ll be frank with you. (Just call me “Frank” from now on.) We are grasping at straws here in Big Green land, now that our interstellar tour has been scuttled. And here it is, the holidays. We were thinking that we’d be traversing interstellar space when Christmas week came, but no dice. Trouble is, that was going to be our excuse for not getting anyone presents – sorry folks, we’re headed to a big gig on planet KIC 8462852. No time to shop! Well, THAT’S out the window. Any other good ideas for cheapskates?

Marvin (my personal robot assistant) humbly suggested we hand out signed copies of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, which appropriately follows a theme somewhat tangentially related to the holidays. Of course, we’ve resorted to that tactic before – it’s been a full 17 years since we put the sucker out, so everyone we know (and quite a few people we don’t know) has a copy. By this point, they’re stacking them under broken table legs and using them for drink coasters. I saw one of our friends re-purposing the jewel cases. Talk about a post-apocalyptic music hell-scape – people are mining our album like it’s a natural resource. (And it’s anything but natural.)

Give them discsThe gift of music is always an early resort for us. That’s basically how 2000 Years To Christmas was born – Matt writing songs as holiday gifts, back in the day. Then there’s the gift of podcasting. There, we have some good news and some bad news. The GOOD news is that we are working on another Christmas pageant as we speak – a Ned Trek holiday classic that will have some new songs embedded in it. The BAD news is that … at the rate we’re going, it likely won’t be finished until AFTER Christmas, so … hot holiday leftovers are coming your way.

For the holiday week itself, we may put out a rerun podcast with some additional “members only” elements. (Oh, right – we don’t have membership levels. Scratch that.) Back to the grind, boys!

Usual Rubbish

Cleanout.

Leave a comment

Hey, got any old concert DVDs or VHS’s? No? Okay, well … that makes one of us. In fact, I have stacks of them in the forge room. That is, unless Mitch melted them down into something useful.

Oh, hello. You just caught us in the middle of doing our year-end inventory, housecleaning, etc. I know, I know – that seems like a strange choice, given our recent preparations for an interstellar tour, but this is the sort of thing we do every year at this time, whether we need it or not. We sort of turn the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill upside-down and shake it a few times. Whatever drops out of the east-side windows goes into the junk heap. Then it’s the DPW’s problem.

Some stuff is easy to get rid of. That cardboard carton our electric roll-out radiator came in? Probably don’t need that anymore. Molded styrofoam from a shipping container? Fair game for the dumpster. Video tapes and DVDs, though …. that’s another story. You never know when you’ll want to watch the Concert at Big Sur movie (or what I euphemistically refer to as the anti-Woodstock) again, particularly that part when Steven Stills gets into a suburban grade school-level fight with some grizzled looking guy complaining about the high ticket price, then, after being led away by his bandmates, offers a lame little speech about how “everything’s going to turn out however it’s gonna,” before playing 4 and 20. Or when Joan Baez was having trouble keeping the stoned rhythm section together. That was awesome.

Yeah, baby, yeah. (Squx)Other gems from the junk pile? Well, there’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s favorite: Rainbow Bridge! A “concert” movie that features about 15 or 20 minutes of Jimi Hendrix playing a set interspersed with about an hour-long montage of stoned hippies running up and down hillsides, being totally free. Why Marvin likes this so much I can only guess, though you can tell he’s been watching it when you see him rolling pointlessly around the mill with his claws up in the air. I might get him a headband for Christmas this year … or maybe some feathers and bells, and a book of Indian lore. (Apologies to Zappa.)

So, which is it going to be … fly off to the stars in our Plywood 9000 rocket or watch old concert tapes? Tough choices.