You really have to stop watching that show, Marvin. It’s not good for your electronic brain. And too much television can be bad for your visual detection sensors.
Hoo boy. It’s hard to be a father, sometimes. Not that that’s technically my role with respect to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). His birth father is actually our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, but given the fact that Mitch is something other than fatherly (the term “grisly” comes to mind), I do sometimes act as a surrogate. Though admittedly, the role does not come naturally to me. Especially when your adopted son is literally made of brass. Anyway …
Marvin has taken to watching concerts on television. His favorite is Austin City Limits, though he does spend some time rolling through re-runs of Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert. A couple of hours of this, then comes the inevitable question: Why aren’t WE ever on Austin City Limits? How come WE never get booked for Saturday Night Live? That’s just his logic circuits kicking in; you know … Pearl Jam = band, Big Green = band, therefore Pearl Jam = Big Green. It’s not like math, Marvin! Not at all! (Mitch didn’t provide a lot of capacity for nuance, sadly.)
Still, he has a point. It would be a kicker to go on one of these shows, particularly Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, since it would mean being transported back to the 1970s. I think our music would do much better in that decade, even if a lot of the songs pull from cultural references that would not have occurred yet. (On top of that, I could, maybe, save Salvador Allende and Oscar Romero from assassination!) Unlikely? Perhaps, but a man can dream. And dreams can be nightmares. And I had plenty of nightmares in the seventies, so … it’s not so impossible, is it? Huh?
Okay, so … that’s stupid. We’ll likely have to settle for something less than what Marvin wants. Maybe web concerts, or if we can pull it together, live gigs somewhere. We’ll have to meditate on this … if I can find a decent prayer rug around this joint.
Next up in the internal audition queue was, well … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). This didn’t go very well either. Picture that scene in Room Service when the Marx Brothers are trying to pass customs with Maurice Chevalier’s passport, attempting to imitate him convincingly. Marvin was like Harpo with the phonograph strapped to his back. He’s got a bunch of scratchy recordings stored in his internal hard drive (or tape drive – he is getting a little long in the tooth), and when he sings he selects individually sung words from that entire library. It’s great if you want a mashup, but …. I don’t.
So here I am, strumming the old D-1, grinding my fingers to a raw nub. I don’t use a flat pick. Nor any other kind of pick, actually. I just strum the strings with my thumb, forefinger and middle finger, mostly, and dud them out with the heel of my palm. It’s a cheap bastardization of that Joni Mitchell / Neil Young technique – pretty much the only method of playing six-string that I ever bothered to learn. Limited, yes, but when I play something in three, it’s pretty much useless, so I end up strumming like my fingers were a pick. (And by the time I’m finished, they pretty much WILL be a pick.)
Anyway, some of you may recall our Journey to the Center of the Earth a few years back. For highlights, just look back a few years in this very blog. (If you find it buried in the madness, let me know. I can’t freaking find it for the life of me.) Well, we have had indications that the Morlocks are planning some kind of attack. How do we know? For one thing, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has an electronic earthquake monitor built into his water works, and it has been turning out some disturbing data … data that suggest a veritable army of Morlocks digging their way to the surface. Either that or someone is fracking in the neighborhood. We’re opting for the far more likely Morlock scenario.
Mitch has been in poor humor since they found his coveted dark planet beyond the orbit of Neptune. He had been clinging to the vain hope that it would remain the undiscovered country for another generation, at least … plenty of time to convert it into a black hole or neutron star. In any case, now he’s drowning his sorrows in experimental work, and it’s got all of us on edge. Hard to work on music when the laws of physics are collapsing all around you. Last Monday morning, for instance, he temporarily suspended the third dimension within the immediate boundaries of our hammer mill. It was like being a ColorForms character for the day – very distressing!
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 THAT disaster was averted. No doubt there will be other threats to mankind caused by carelessness and listlessness, but they won’t happen on my watch. Maybe on Mitch’s watch. (He’s got one hell of a watch.) But then I had to go and make a pancake breakfast for everyone. We were out of baking powder, but I went ahead and made them anyway, just to show all those snobby cooks that I won’t be ruled by protocol. I have my pride, you know. My pride and a bunch of inedible flapjacks.
Hoo-boy, there’s an echo in here. And I’m getting dirty looks from the neighbors, so I should wrap this up. Will we be doing any live performances this year? Don’t know. It’s always a possibility. Matt talks about it from time to time, and I certainly think about it. There’s the logistical issue, of course, and then there’s …. well … making it sound like something more than pure suckitude. But those are relatively minor problems in the grand scheme of things.
I’m here in what passes for my cabin in this rented spacecraft, editing the audio play we recorded a few days ago. We’ve also recorded a few songs, as is our tradition, to accompany the hack-job melodrama we’ll be posting in the coming weeks, so those will take some finishing. Work, work, work. I thought this trip was going to be something of a getaway, a chance of rest and relaxation, a hiatus in our otherwise hectic existence of hammer-mill squatting. Fat chance.
Not to put too fine a point on it, we are going to have to Mad Science the shit out of this thing. Mitch Macaphee is working overtime (as much as 3 hours a day) trying to adapt Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s solar power unit to the ship’s main drive. It is by no means a walk in the park for old Mitch. Good thing we brought some decent gin with us. (Though we left the rummy back at the mill.)