Don’t mind me, or the deafening clatter you hear. That’s just the sound of me working on our next episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, the podcast we hammer together every month or so. Why hammer it, you say? W.t.f. – we live in a hammer mill, for Pete’s sake. (Jesus, I’ve been doing that lame Romney imitation way too long.)
I suppose if you listen regularly to our podcast, it probably seems like not a lot of work goes into creating it – that it’s sort of slapped together randomly, like a salami sandwich made by someone who’s got a five minute lunch break. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yea, we take pains in building each episode, agonizing over every detail, every nuance. We spend weeks drafting the scripts. (Oh yes, even our random-sounding conversations are completely scripted.) Then it’s another week nailing down the timing, the miscues, the poor pronunciation, the stupidity. (We spend an entire day on inanity. Why? Because it’s worth it.)
Now, as you know, Big Green is a decidedly low-tech operation. We don’t have fancy cameras, microphones, or any of that new-fangled electricity. (Okay, well … yeah, that we have.) Our studio is primitive beyond redemption, and we are forced to record the spoken bits of the podcast without the aid of standard teleprompters. The best we can do is key the entire script into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), store it in his electronic brain, and ask him to display it on his anterior video monitor. Sure, we have to squint to read it, but it’s better than rattling a piece of paper in front of live mics.
The trouble with this method is that there are unintended consequences. Like this month, we talked about the Pope retiring. Once the lines from that script got into Marvin’s tiny brain, it started percolating through his various logic circuits, and the next thing we knew he was trying pointy hats on for size. He seems to have convinced himself that he’s in the running to replace Pope Benedict. (I think the idea appeals to his creator, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, who would very much like to be the power behind the pontiff.)
Would you like to see Marvin as the next pope? Let us know. Send us your thoughts and we’ll read them on the next episode.
Sometimes I forget that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) isn’t an undereducated human like myself. He is, in fact, a mechanical man. Much must be explained to him, and what can’t be explained must be programmed in by force, if necessary. That’s the lot of a robot assistant, I’m afraid. Work, work, work.
Oh, hi out there. As I’m sure you already know, the morning after Thanksgiving is always a force to be reckoned with. Especially when you have a mansized tuber who has just discovered juicing. (He’s trying to win some of his bi-weekly pickup basketball games, but I think even with the Miracle Gro he’s reaching.) Morning starts kind of early around here – sometimes before noon, even. (You fellow rock musicians out there better sit down: There is a thing called morning. It’s not just another hallucination. That’s right … I’m talking to you, pothead.)
Hey howdy. Welcome back to the hammer mill. Who won the Lincoln contest? Still up in the air. My bets are on Anti-Lincoln, but that’s just a hunch. He does have an ace in the hole – namely, Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device, the monstrosity of modern engineering that brought him here from the past in the first place. Anti-Lincoln seems to think that by stepping into that thing and turning it up to eleven, he’ll get the full Daniel Day Lewis treatment.
Oh, right…. I’m keying this into the internets, not merely speaking to some disembodied listener. What was I thinking? Right, well…. as busy as things get here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in beautiful upstate New York, we never seem to stop finding other things to do with our time. Last week Marvin (my personal robot assistant) discovered numismatics … with a little encouragement from his creator, Mitch Macaphee, who was really attempting to program a penchant for petty larceny into his brass hide. Not one of Mitch’s proudest moments, convincing Marvin that lifting stray coins out of people’s pockets is how coin collecting works. (That mad science grant from the Cato Institute must not have come through.)
Okay, well that‘s discouraging. Here we are at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home in upstate New York, mixing our … I mean, cousin Rick’s new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, and I’m just discovering now that I am a lousy engineer. Who know (aside from everyone who listens to my work)? Thank the god of your choice that I have Matt Perry to work with, a.k.a. “Mr. Ears” himself. No, that’s not because he wears Spock-like ear extensions. I’m not saying he doesn’t, mind you … I’m just saying that’s not the reason for the moniker. Though after being summarily ejected from our mixing session due to excessive loudness, I’m thinking about calling him “Mr. Mouth” from now on.
All these knobs, all these switches… Hey, that’s a good idea for a song. All of these knobs, all of these switches, keep this up and you’ll need stitches, uh-huh. Okay… not a good idea for a song. I’m getting punchy, and small wonder. Matt and I are hip deep in mixing Rick Perry’s new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick … being a collection of songs that arose from some strange sensory phenomena our dear cousin experienced over the past year. You know how when sometimes you have a little too much to drink or a bit too much …. well, whatever, and the world around you gets all fuzzy and weird, and then the next day you find yourself freighted with all these unexplainable memories of odd behavior, like something your fevered mind cooked up in a dream? Well…. Rick wrote some songs about that.
This writing finds us chin deep in production for our next album. Imagine Matt and me in a roomful of 1-inch Ampex tape, all spooled out and tangled like Don Knotts had it in his space capsule in The Reluctant Astronaut. Yes, we always aspire to such heights. “Why not the best?” we ask ourselves, and the answer, of course, is obvious. (Go right to the source and ask the horse.)