Tag Archives: Marvin

Spring Chills.

March 5, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Throw another log on the fire. What’s that? No more logs? What the hell. Then break up one of those lobster traps. We haven’t caught a single lobster in twenty years of squatting in this mill – can’t understand it. Stupid trap!

Oh, hi. Yeah, you caught us looking for alternative sources of fuel again. It’s pretty much a full time job for the likes of us here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It takes a lot of fuel to heat a big old barn of a place like this, even with the entire west wing collapsed and the north wing taken over by lunatic neighbors. In this current cold snap, we’ve resorted to burning whatever wood we can get both hands on. Brother anti-Lincoln has even started pulling up the floorboards in his personal apartment. Inasmuch as it’s on the third floor, this is making navigating around his living space more and more of a challenge. (He’s devised a system of ropes, but I believe he’s thinking of throwing those into the fire as well.)

Now, plenty of people have asked us, “Hey, Big Green …. since your name is Big Green, why don’t you install some solar panels on the roof of the Cheney Hammer Mill?” To that I respond, good question, plenty of people. We resort to something like passive solar energy – opening the blinds on sunny days and rubbing our hands together furiously. And sure, we could ask our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to fashion some kind of perpetual energy machine, but our Mitch is a temperamental artist – if he invents a perpetual energy machine, it’s because he saw a hole in the world shaped like such a machine, then carved something out to plug that hole. Selfish human concerns, like avoiding hypothermia, are of no interest to him. He’s looking at the BIG picture … and that picture is big enough to block his view of yours truly.

We tried to get in touch with our cousin, Rick Perry, former Energy Secretary and Governor of Texas, as well as subject of our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, but he hasn’t taken any of our calls. So much for pulling strings. (Hey …. maybe we can pull strings to generate electricity … ) There is another option besides resorting to the assistance of celebrity relatives – getting one of those energy generating recumbent bike thingies. Just hook that thing up and go. We could get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to pedal the thing, and that would produce enough juice to power a block of space heaters as long as your arm and thick as your ass. For the record, Marvin’s not crazy about the idea, and suggested I might consider doing it myself as a way of shedding some of the COVID pounds I’ve put on over the past year. Still, it’s one way of getting through March without ending up having to be picked up with a pair of ice tongs.

This will be easy. Just set up the bike, plug it into the wall, and pedal backwards. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.

Usual Rubbish

A little background.

February 26, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Nah, that doesn’t look all that great. Maybe move it a bit more to the left. How about a fill light or two. Is that any better? No? Right … start again.

Man, oh Manischewitz! This age of virtual meetings and electronic communications is annoying in the extreme. You freaking can’t do anything in person anymore. For the first few months we managed to keep a low profile by simply sending Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out to do our various tasks, like shopping, garbage removal, pretzel bending, molecule counting, and other odd jobs. Then last August, Marvin started reading Thomas Piketty, discovered the value of his labor and chose to withhold it from us, now that he considers us soulless capitalist exploiters. In response to Woke Marvin’s job action, we’ve had to go on Zoom, go on Google Meet, go on Skype, go on Facetime, go on, go on, go freaking on. Ever try doing your grocery shopping on Zoom? Don’t.

Hey, a lot of bands do whole concerts via these web-based video conferencing apps. That’s largely because, well, there’s no place else to freaking play – everything’s shut down and chances are good that a lot of the rickety establishments that supported plain-clothes bands will have fallen over backwards by the time people feel safe enough to venture out on a Saturday night again. Fortunately, we haven’t had to resort to such tactics. Mind you, I’m not ruling it out, but for the time being, we content ourselves with spending the pennies we make via streaming services on little bits of cheese, crumbs of bread, and a log for the fire. You may ask how we’ve managed to live so extravagantly off of what an indie band can make from web streams. The answer may surprise you. (It certainly would surprise me, because I haven’t the foggiest idea how we do it.)

So yeah, when we need to talk to a promoter or the people who own our squat house, we do the teleconferencing thing. The biggest challenge, from my perspective, is finding a backdrop that faithfully amplifies the kind of image you want to project to the world. For instance, authors often have their books prominently displayed behind them. Representative Lauren Boebert makes sure to have a jumble of assault weapons randomly dumped on a shelf behind her as she speaks. I myself had to think long and hard about what objects would best represent my values to anyone interacting with me over Zoom. I thought maybe a stack of sandwiches, but we don’t have anything like that lying about long enough to make it into the picture. I don’t know – maybe I should go with the Boebert approach, except a little more intimidating than just some poorly maintained long guns. Something that will make my interlocutors thinks TWICE about contradicting me.

Or maybe I should just show them dilapidated interior of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. If that doesn’t scare the hell out of them, nothing will.

Usual Rubbish

Red Planet.

February 19, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Come in, Rangoon … I mean, Marvin. Jesus, this is hard! C-Q, C-Q … Marvin, do you read me? Come in, come up, come over …. come on, man! Hey … is this thing on?

Oh, hi, out there in the land of Big Green listeners, readers, etc. It’s your old friend Joe, locked away here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our longtime squat-house concealed in the forested hills (or hilly forests) of central New York state. An easy place to seclude yourself in … to. No one would ever think of looking for you here. That’s largely because, well … no one ever thinks of looking for anyone or anything here. In fact, most people don’t even know this place exists. (Except for you, of course … because you keep coming back.) What better redoubt in a time of COVID, right? Complete isolation …. the secret to good health. Who knew?

So, what are we about this week? Well … people have to occupy themselves somehow. That applies to everyone – washed out musicians, animated vegetables (mansized tuber), antimatter ex-presidents (anti-Lincoln), and of course, mad scientists (Mitch Macaphee). And it is in the settled order of things that some people’s pass times have a greater effect on those around them than those of their fellow time-passers. So when Mitch knocks about the mill looking for something to do, he’s partly looking for someone to do it to. In this case, it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who, I feel it’s important to point out, was created by Mitch in the first place. And if he can create him, he can … well … you know. Do I have to draw you a picture? I do? Damn it!

All right, so Mitch got a little obsessed this week, watching the goddamned television. They did multiple stories on this Mars Rover “Perseverance” mission, how it was going to land, how risky it was to enter the Martian atmosphere, how forbidding the terrain on the red planet promises to be, etc. Each mention of this NASA mission seemed to make Mitch madder and madder. It was like watching one of those old pressure cookers heat up, the dial on the top flipping over to red, steam pouring out of every join. Anyway, long story short, he decided to stuff Marvin into a makeshift rocket and send him to Mars ahead of the NASA rover. Marvin’s mission: take a selfie with the rover and post it somewhere that NASA scientists could see it, just so that he could rub it in their face that he had gotten there ahead of them. Yep … Mitch seriously wants to own those fuckers, and he’ll do it if it’s the last thing Marvin ever does.

That’s why I’m cranking away at our distressed old ham radio, hoping to raise Marvin’s personal communication channel. (Not that it’s worth much, as Marvin is famously non-verbal.) If I raise him, I’ll let you know.

Usual Rubbish

Frankensong.

February 12, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

I thought you said it was organic. What do you mean “all natural” – that’s a vacuous term. Everything’s natural, goddamn it. Yellow cake uranium is natural, but that doesn’t mean you should serve it at a birthday party.

Cheese and crackers, I don’t know what’s the matter with my squat-mates. They think anything that’s not on fire is good for you, even if it was recently on fire. That’s what happens when you spend the better part of twenty years loitering in an abandoned hammer mill, staying three steps ahead of the property owning capitalists, two steps ahead of the bourgeois lawyers that represent them, and one step ahead of the police that guard their wealth with clubs and guns. It’s kind of like Stockholm syndrome, except that we’ve been taken hostage by our general lack of resources, and my associates are now trying to squeeze every molecule out of the toothpaste tube. (I don’t mean metaphorically – they literally want that last molecule!)

Anyway, they’ve taken to eating GMO rice and GMO corn and whatever else because that’s what’s lying about. Not the best reason to eat something. There are a lot of old hammer heads strewn throughout this mill in various states of corrosive decay – they wouldn’t eat those, would they? (Or WOULD they?) Actually, Anti-Lincoln might sample the hammer heads for some extra iron, but I digress. If I can’t discourage my flop-mates from eating franken-food, then so be it. The trouble is, when you share you place with a mad scientist, the wheels can come off of the lunch cart very easily. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be making muffins out of yellowcake and feeding them to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who doesn’t have the tools for digesting actual food but seldom refuses a handout from his creator, Mitch Macaphee.

There’s a lot of scavenging going on in this mill. It’s a sign of desperation setting in after months of lockdown, economic hardship, and bad weather. We’ve even taken to plugging together fragments of songs in an effort to make new music out of something that was abandoned months, years, even eons ago. (Well … perhaps not eons. Ages, maybe.) Ah, ’tis an impoverished soul indeed that cannot pull even a slap-dash song out of his or her ass, but such are the times we live in. I’ve got idea tapes lying all over the place. Some of them are incoherent, the product of leaving a cassette machine next to my bed so that if a song comes to me in my sleep I can sing it into the condenser mic and drop back off to dreamland without missing a beat. That almost invariably results in a tape full of drowsy mumbling followed by a respectable snore. Still …. even that can be useful in a mashup, dance mix, whatever. Hey … a frankensong is better than no song at all … or maybe not. IT’S ALIVE!

Usual Rubbish

So it is written.

February 5, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Well, maybe we should use one of those ram horns … you know, just to let people know we’re coming. Or we could wave a herder’s staff about like some kind of crazy goon. THAT would be impressive. So many good ideas.

Yeah, you’ve found your way back to Big Green land. Here in the mostly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, home only to our sorry selves and the nasty neighbors upstairs, we’ve been hashing out the particulars of our eventual return to the public stage. Oh, yes … make no mistake about it. We will be back, and we will be bad. Really bad. Possibly unlistenable, partly due to advance age. Older people playing rock and roll is a bit like the Three Stooges in their dotage – somehow slapstick comedy being played out by geezers is something other than funny. It’s kind of pathetic, frankly …. but I will allow that music is a bit more forgiving, as long as we don’t try to jump up and down and climb up into the rafters of a civic center like we’re apes. (We may be apes … but not the climbing kind.)

We’ve been told that our gigs back in the day were the stuff of legend. I can believe it, because legends – like our performances – are entirely unsubstantial. You would search in vain to find video of even a single one of our gigs. (Lord knows I can’t find a single one. Rare as hen’s teeth! In fact, even rarer – I found at least a dozen hen’s teeth while looking for our videos. So it is written.) Still, you’d think even in the absence of digital video cameras in every cell phone there would be a handful of VHS tapes lying about. All we have, for crying out loud, is us on that crazy demo that some dude named Angel shot, and getting THAT away from him involved a whole lot of crying out loud.

I know, man, I know. Just pretend he's not there.

Now, there are some advantages to having an in-house mad scientist, at least when he’s not out on some mad science junket with the rest of his clan. Mitch Macaphee has postulated that we can use some of his hyper-sensitive instruments to reach back into the space-time continuum and pull audio signals out back from decades long dead. It takes a little fine-tuning, of course, but he thinks it’s possible. Apparently it’s a little easier to get images back than it is to retrieve sound, though Mitch says the images tend to get muddled with random items from the present day, like social media memes and the like. He showed us a couple of examples, one of which I’ve included in this post for your edification. Mitch thinks we can even enlist Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to follow the signals back to yesteryear … or at least, yestermonth … and drag some of our lost performances back with him. Just full of ideas, that Mitch. Wish to hell he could make a decent pot of coffee. (It always tastes like he brewed it in his boot.)

Usual Rubbish

Cold Files.

January 29, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

How long do we have to stay down here, man? It’s five below zero. Next time we’re bringing a can of sterno or something. Maybe one of those highway flares. Ah yes – blessed warmth.

Hey, out there in internet-land. Yes, here we are at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, doing what we usually do – nothing much, interrupted occasionally by nothing whatsoever. We lead a sedentary life out here among the ruins of a former mill-driven regional economy, brought low by the greed of post-industrial corporate financiers. So I suppose it is they we have to thank for our adopted abode, right? I mean, if they hadn’t massively dis-invested in this community and moved all their operations to the Philippines ages ago, there wouldn’t be any abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for us to squat in. So it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good, somewhere. Somehow.

What’s the nothing that we’re doing today? Ah, nothing much. Just digging through our piles of junk in boxes, looking for old recordings and unfinished projects begging to be reborn. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to serve as a kind of metal detector/divining rod, using his advanced sensor technology to scan for magnetic tapes or abandoned discs. When he comes close to either one of those types of objects, lights start flashing and his antennae start twirling around counterclockwise. Then a little mechanical bird pops out of a little door in his forehead and crows the hour. That’s when we all break for lunch. (Even if it happens at 10:00 at night. Lunch is whenever the birdy sings, that’s it.)

Joe: Hey, man .. You picking up any signals?

Marvin: squx.

You may ask if we’ve found anything interesting, to which I would reply, “Funny you should ask!” Actually, our time rooting through the basement was pretty much wasted. Hell, I could have looked on our old hard drives for music projects of every description, unfinished, abandoned, neglected, and so on. We started recording Rick Perry songs (later collected in our ridiculous third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick) in probably 2011, then went right into the Ned Trek songs, which number in the scores – probably 120 songs over the course of six years. In between all that, we started to resurrect some older material from the 1980s and 90s – songs we had done demos of but never full-on recordings. I’m not sure how many of those there are. We’ve played a few rough mixes on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, but some have never seen the light of day. Or the dark of night.

So now, when we’re bored, we rack up one of those old numbers, hit play and twiddle the dials until it sounds like something that’s not junk. If we do that long enough, we’ll send some of it your way. That’s just how we roll.

Usual Rubbish

Space friends.

January 22, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Yeah, not many people gave Nixon the credit he deserved as a singer of songs. Not President Nixon, of course – he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. I mean the Nixon android from Ned Trek. Now THERE’S a chanteuse if ever I heard one.

Oh, hey … what’s up? I’ll tell you what’s up. Space, that’s what …. waaaay up. We were just thinking about potential markets for our music. One could be the local Firemen’s Field Days – those rustic events always cry out for entertainers. We might pick up maybe four, even five new listeners. Then there’s the people across the street, up on the third floor. They seem weird enough to like us. We could ask. I suppose if I put Marvin (my personal robot assistant) out on the street with sandwich boards and a bell, we might be able to drive up some interest. Then there’s the overseas market and what we call the over-skies market – outer space. Lots of untapped potential there.

Sure, there are logistical issues, right? I mean … we could send Marvin to Mars with the sandwich boards and bell, and see if anybody on that dusty little world bites. That may be a bit too retail for the extraterrestrial market. We need to do broad-spectrum outreach – the kind of marketing that blankets entire solar systems with positive messaging. Even if we get one one-hundredth of one percent of the punters on, say, Aldebaran three, that’s enough paying customers to keep us in pub cheese for the rest of the year. And it’s only January! This could be like those automated robocalls, always fishing for a live one. We may have to piss off whole civilizations with our annoying spam calls in order to reap a few hundred listeners, but hey …. interplanetary harmony is greatly overrated. When’s the last time Earth had a serious dispute with its nearest celestial neighbors? Not recently, that’s when.

The next question is, do we have the kind of music that the public wants on, say, Aldebaran three? Well, there’s no way to be sure. We can make an educated guess, though. Or we could ask our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee whether he has any ideas. (That could be dangerous, however.) We do have some idea of space alien music tastes just from recent media reports. The Guardian, for instance, did a story on a signal from Proxima Centauri that was detected by radio telescopes. The signal contained a single pure tone at around 982 MHz. That sounds like one of those Cage compositions, right? So maybe we need to go in more for the longhair stuff to get the Centauri crowd rocking. Matt and I are talking about doing some one-note songs …. and I DON’T mean One-Note Samba (which actually has more than one note in it).

That’s where Mitch Macaphee comes in – we need a big-ass antenna to broadcast our one-note tunes into deep space. Get to work on it, Mitch! We’ll work on the songs, you build the radio telescope. From each according to his/her talents.

Usual Rubbish

Holism.

January 15, 2021 Joe Leave a comment

Well, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first? Spinach, then cake, or vice-versa? Right, then … let’s start with the bad news. Astronomers have discovered a super massive black hole 1.6 billion times more massive than our sun. It subsists on a diet equivalent of 25 suns a year, so it’s the deep space equivalent of the proverbial hungry hungry hippo. And it’s HEADED THIS WAY. Or not. That’s the bad news.

The good news? Well … it’s 13 billion light years away. So we’ve got some time. That said, I’ve already talked to our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, about this terrifying celestial object. That may have been a mistake, because he appears to be obsessing over the thing. He has already proposed some kind of top secret space mission to learn more about J0313-1806 (the code name for the black hole inside a quasar). Mitch is proposing to send a volunteer – namely Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – in a specially designed space craft straight into the dark heart of the object, then bring him back so that he can report on what he saw there. How would he do that, given the irresistible power of the black hole? Well, there’s this rope, you see? And he’s planning on tying it to the marble statue of Grover Cleveland that stands in the nearby town square. (I think he was just spitballing at that point.)

Well, when Marvin heard about this, his lights started blinking frantically. At first I thought it might be Morse code, but it was probably the fight or flight circuitry Mitch built into him using spare parts scavenged from his central HVAC system back in Vienna. I kind of think Marvin doesn’t want to do this mission. Frankly, I can’t blame him. The stories I’ve read about flying into the center of black holes are not very encouraging. I mean, best case – he could be sent into some kind of time-space worm hole that would lead him to a previous era on Earth when dinosaurs ruled …. or perhaps when men with six-shooters ruled, depending on where he hops off. It might also, I don’t know, send him into the future, or drop him into a weird cave-like nether world inhabited by one-eyed freaks and Michael J. Pollard. Or (somewhat more likely) it might crush his atoms into a singularity long before he gets within light years of it. Either way, not a day in the park.

Not sure you want to go there, old chap.

Fortunately for Marvin, Mitch hasn’t even started work on the spacecraft yet. Frankly, I don’t think he has much to worry about. Mitch gets these bugs sometimes, and they usually pass. Like when scientists were receiving radio signals from the Jovian moon Ganymede. Next thing I knew he had a radio telescope in the backyard, vacuuming up every microwave that dared float in his direction. A couple of days later, it was on to the next thing. Still, I’ve locked the rope in a trunk in the basement, just in case. (Sometimes you have to do the right thing, even if it’s not the simplest thing. This is not one of those times.)

Usual Rubbish

Nano Christmas.

December 25, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Okay, let’s do your presents. Start with the big one. No, not that one – the bigger one. How can you not see that? It’s almost 3 centimeters across!

Oh, hi. Just caught us in the middle of our annual Christmas ritual – gathering around the abandoned drill press in the Cheney Hammer Mill and taking turns opening our gifts from Satan …. I mean, Santa! (Unfortunate typo, though one that may find a receptive audience among the fans of Pagan Christmas). It’s Marvin (my personal robot assistant)’s turn, actually, but of course the order of the present-opening makes no difference. It’s the thought that counts, right? And well … a certain amount of thought went into this year’s pile of sugar plums. (Just to be clear – there are no actual sugar plums in the offing. That’s just a metaphor.) Not in the sense that they were well thought-out, but due to the fact that … well … we had very little cash to work with.

Times being what they are, we haven’t been playing any gigs – along with the rest of the musician world – due to COVID club closures and the simple fact that we’re too shiftless to find club work in the first place. (Usually the first place we play is an unspeakable dump. Now, the second place … that‘s worth the booking right there.) For that reason, this year we were forced to resort to nano-gifts – gifts that would be totally awesome at normal size, but which are shrunk down to near-microscopic dimensions, just to keep the costs down. For instance, our gift to Marvin is a 3 centimeter long bicycle that Anti-Lincoln lifted off of somebody’s charm bracelet. Now before you start in on me, let me just say that I don’t condone that sort of behavior – Anti-Lincoln acted on his own initiative, as he often does, and well … times being what they are.

Actually, we did see a couple of practical gifts. For instance, Mitch Macaphee gave me a guitar string, full-size – a G string. It was a little hard to wrap, without the envelope it originally came in, but he managed – longest, skinniest Christmas present I ever saw, frankly. I think he pulled it out of one of Matt’s sets, but I didn’t want to say anything – when Mitch is in a good mood, best not upset the apple cart, so to speak … because the apple cart may contain a few hand grenades. Matt, for his part, received an aluminum thimble, which can be used for sewing, or drinking small drinks, or as a bottleneck on a very tiny guitar, which itself would have been a totally appropriate gift for Nano Christmas. After all of the exchanges, we all sat around the fire (i.e. the part of the mill that happens to be on fire today) and had a cup of what passes for eggnog, but what is probably some soy milk that was left out of the fridge for a few too many days. (Hey … a little nutmeg and who could tell the difference?)

However you celebrate, whatever you celebrate, I speak for all of Big Green when I say happy holidays and be well. (And may your Christmas be more macro than nano.

Usual Rubbish

Rough sledding.

December 18, 2020 Joe Leave a comment

Take a look out the window and let me know what you see. What? What do you mean you don’t see anything? Did you open your eyes first? Okay. It’s just that you’ve made that mistake before, but …. let it pass.

Hey, greetings from the great north country! As you may have noticed, particularly if you live in the northeastern United States, we’ve gotten a little bit of snow this week. In fact, it appears to be up to the second story of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house. That would be fine, of course, except that … well … we have to come and go occasionally, to get provisions, to frequent the local tavern (I’m talking Anti-Lincoln here), to mail parcels, etc. All of that vital, life-giving activity has been brought to a halt in the wake of a fearsome nor’easter that isn’t fit for Christmas, New Years, nor Easter. (That’s why they call it a nor … uh … never mind.) Yes, winter is here with a vengeance. I think it’s pissed at us for the previous couple of mild winters, likely fueled by runaway climate change.

Okay, so, if you were snowed into an abandoned hammer mill in upstate New York, what would YOU do to pass the time? I can think of one thing right off the bat: Christmas carols. Sure, we can gather ’round the old spinet, old uncle George will plunk out the tunes from the sheet music, and Frankie and the girls and I will sing five-part harmony on the classic yuletide favorites, like Pagan Christmas and Merry Christmas, Tarzan and other seasonal hits. We’ll have to get Tiny to sing the lead on Merry Christmas, Jane (Part 2), of course, and then we can all sip some mulled cider as we gather around the TV yulelog broadcast and sing along with Head Cheese Log.

What’s that? You’re not familiar with those carols? Why, those are selections from Big Green’s 1999 debut album, 2000 Years To Christmas, now celebrating the first anniversary of its 20th anniversary. It’s been 20 for a whole year now! This past year we put the entire album on YouTube so that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) could listen to it without cranking up the phonograph like a Model T. No need to roll out the spinet, my friends – just call up YouTube, load the playlist, and hit play. We’ve even posted the lyrics so that you can sing along. So if you’re snowed into your abandoned hammer mill, no way to get out, tired of watching static on your rabbit-ear TV set, this is an easy way to pass the time. Send us a video of you signing along with the album on YouTube, and we’ll send you a free copy of the disc. (I think we’ve got one or two of them kicking around the place.) If you prefer the mp3 version, just get the disc and rip mp3s from it. Simple!

Anyway, happy sledding, my friends. Time to dig a tunnel to the bar … I mean, the bank.

Official site of the band Big Green