Tag Archives: Zoom

Usual Rubbish

Steady Cam.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Try to stand still, man. You’re shaking the picture. It looks like there’s an earthquake going on, like Big Green meets the last days of Pompeii. That was a volcano? Okay, so …. Big Green meets the big one. Or Big Green bites the big one. Now that’s more believable.

Oh, hi, Big Green fans. Sure, we know you’re not “fans”, exactly … just casual acquaintances who drop by every once in a while to see what’s on fire at the mill this time around. We’ll take it! Sorry to disappoint – there’s nothing on fire at the moment. I’m, of course, not counting the perpetual St. Elmo’s fire that our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has had burning in his lab since the day he got here. (And no, I don’t mean he has a VHS tape of the movie running in perpetuity – he actually has a plasma corona discharge simulator in his lab … running in perpetuity. I think he likes the glow.) No, we’re having a normal week for once. Though our normal is, well, not particularly normal. More nermal than normal. Nothing blew up, that’s basically it.

As you know, we’ve been trying – like many other bands – to adjust to the virtual marketplace in this era of Coronavirus shutdowns and social distancing. And like many bands from a previous era, we’re having more than our share of difficulties. Doing performances on Zoom, for instance, is less than optimal, even for musicians who have some facility with digital technologies. For people like us, it’s just hopeless, and we have had to resort to other, less frequently used technologies, like long cardboard tubes, or old-style megaphones, or just hiring someone to carry our tunes around in a bucket. (Fact is, nobody in this town could carry a tune in a bucket to save his or her life.) For people used to just standing on a stage and letting the music happen, for better or for worse, this pandemic is …. well …. lethal!

Can you try to get both me AND the piano into the shot ... Scorcese?

This week, though, we stumbled upon another option. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a body cam built into him. I think his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, was imagining he could sell Marvin to the police for use as a ludicrous robo-cop of some sort, but that didn’t pan out. Anyhow, Marvin can be our camera operator, and because he’s set up for wi-fi, we can route him into our hacked modem, push the signal up to the main fiber hub, and send our music out to thousands of potential listeners. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the capacity to record anything, so we have to do all of our songs live. And damn it, the fucker just can’t stand still. Every time we count something in, he starts rolling around. I think he’s trying to pull off a crane shot or something. We keep telling him to stop watching music videos so much, but these are COVID times, and frankly, he’s got little else to do.

Okay, so when you see a performance from us, if it looks a little shaky, that’s NOT because we live in a fault zone. It’s artistry at work, my friends. Cinematic artistry.

Usual Rubbish

A little background.

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2000 Years to Christmas

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.)

Like my background?

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

Virtual signalling.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Is this thing on? What? I think you’re muted, man. Yeah …. the little audio symbol has a cross-out graphic superimposed on it. Huh. Funny how that works.

Oh, hi. Yeah, the century is finally catching up with us … or we’re catching up with it. It’s no secret that we of Big Green tend towards the Luddite side of the ledger. When a visitor asks us to turn the heat up a bit in the Cheney Hammer Mill, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. When a neighbor asks us for a cup of sugar or a pint of milk, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. (That’s just something we do when people ask us stuff. Don’t ask me why … or, well, you know what we’ll do.)

So, while as a band we were relatively early to the internet and early adopters of MP3 files (as well as early arrivals in the blogosphere), a lot of this newfangled technology is way over our heads. I would ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to explain it to me, but he is literally made out of old plumbing fixtures and doesn’t know the first thing about interactive stuff. Sure, he interacts with the rest of us, but not in any sophisticated way – mostly just flashing lights and beeps, meted out in various coded combinations. (Fun fact: seven flashes and eleven beeps translates to “George Washington, our first president”.) So when our business associates asked to meet with us, and then told us we needed to do it through Zoom or some other thingy, we were a little confused. I mean, I know what a computer is. Does that get me anywhere?

Lincoln, you're muted!

I guess you could blame our ignorance on an over reliance on expert advisors, like our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. Not every band has a mad science advisor, you know … or a personal robot assistant. After a while, they do become like a crutch. We’re so used to just calling Mitch over every time we have a little problem, like, I don’t know … booking a gig on Aldebaran Five. That presents a logistical issue that we, as artists, are not particularly comfortable with attempting to solve on our own. So we get Mitch to invent some kind of ion propulsion system that could either blow us to kingdom come or propel us to Aldebaran Five. Or strand us on Aldebaran Four, just short of the mark. That’s a possibility, too. Trouble is …. Mitch never uses Zoom, so he can’t help our sorry asses on this one.

Hey … if we manage to conquer conference call technology, I guess we won’t be able to claim that 2020 was a total loss.

Usual Rubbish

Old Man Fall.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, I know, I know – heat costs money. Unless we start burning shit, right? I mean, we’ve got a lot of fuel in this joint, don’t we? And when that runs out, we’ve got a mad science advisor on hand. He can either invent some way to keep us warm, or we can burn those many notebooks he has, all stuffed with theorems to destroy whole planets. We’d be doing humanity a favor!

Howdy, everyone. Sure, we want to do humanity a favor. But we also want to do ourselves the favor of keeping from freezing to death. If the coming winter turns out to be anywhere near as chaotic as this past summer, people will be porting us out of this dump with a pair of ice tongs. Oh, the humanity! And yes, I am being a bit paranoid over the question of how we are going to heat this place, particularly as the nights are get colder and damper. And spookier. But let’s face it – as squatters here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we have no means of acquiring energy from mega-corporations and using it to keep ourselves toasty. Besides, the idea is loathsome to us. Give in to big corporations? Bah! We’d sooner, well …. burn something other than what they’re selling.

There are a lot of drawbacks to living in an abandoned hammer mill. Lack of heat is one of them, sure, but the real problem with our Big Green lifestyle is that we tend to sleep through the worst weather, no matter how bad it gets. That is not a good thing. It’s not that we’re particularly comfortable here. It’s just that we’ve been musicians so long that our diurnal clock has ceased to function properly. You’re supposed to be up all night, in bed half the day, then it’s supper for breakfast and you’re off. (Supper used to be my very favorite breakfast!) Of course, we used to drink like fish … or like fishes. Maybe just Phish. (I think they drink Saranac, actually.) If we still did that, well …. we’d jam more.

See? There is a resemblance.

Which makes me think, hey …. in this weird ass COVID world we now inhabit, why don’t we join all of the other out-of-work musicians and start jamming on YouTube or Zoom or some other web platform? Well, I can think of one reason – our internet access is dotty, to say the least. I’d like to say we have a legitimate node or ingress to the Web here at the mill, but I don’t want to be accused of lying. Let’s just say that it’s sub-optimal, so if we ever do start cranking out virtual performances, live or pre-recorded, we’ll probably have to tap into somebody’s broadband wifi. I’m looking at you, Ken’s Barber Shoppe!

No doubt about it – Fall is the season that hangs us up the most. Always has been. But here at Big Green, we make the best of things, even if things are …. well … just things. Maybe we can convert Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of space heater. (He was partially constructed from an old hot water tank, as legend has it.)

Usual Rubbish

Summer doldrums.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Hey …. turn the light off. It’s the middle of the freaking night, man. What? The sun? You mean the sun that the Earth orbits? What’s the sun doing out in the middle of the …. oh. Right. I need one of those twenty-four hour clocks.

Yeah, that’s right folks – I overslept again. I blame the season. Now, that comment would make even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) laugh up his brass sleeve, because I basically blame the season for everything. No work? Goddamn northern winters! No groceries? Stupid spring cleaning! I knew those cereal boxes would come in handy one day. No gravity? Dumbass autumn! That’s when Mitch Macaphee starts sharpening his antigravity skills in anticipation of the big mad science annual meeting in Berlin on October 17.

Here in upstate New York, it’s getting so that we only have two seasons anyway: coldish and hot. That means fewer scapegoats for our manifold failings. In any case, I blame my sleepiness on the doldrums of late summer, when that sun is beating down on the leaky roof of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, turning the third story of this heap into something like a brick oven. I always get snoozy in this weather. And the fact is, there isn’t a lot going on musically these days. COVID-19 has shut down all the clubs. Musicians are performing on Zoom and Google Hangouts, hoping for a mercy tip. It’s just a weird damn time to be alive.

Zzzz.

I was saying to Matt the other day (he couldn’t hear me, of course, because he was out passing sweet potatoes to beavers) that these days are a lot like back in the day when we first started out. There were about five places to play around where we lived, and they were all dives. He was too young to get into a bar, but we got in anyway and jammed in front of rows of punters drinking their faces off and hollering for that Dave Mason song … you know, the one that goes blah blah blah and we just disagree! Nine times out of ten we’d get stiffed at the end of the night and have to burn the effing place down …. and then there would be even fewer places to play. I’m telling you, people, violence doesn’t pay! (Unless you’re paid to do it, of course.)

What’s my point? Good question. I think it’s that, well … don’t expect us to do much until it gets colder. Then expect to hear some complaining about how freaking cold it is in here.