All posts by Joseph

Usual Rubbish

Assault with Batteries.

2000 Years to Christmas

Look, I don’t have any space in my room for this goddamn thing. And no, it can’t go in the freaking studio – it’s cramped enough in there as it is. Christ, why do you think we’ve been playing all those Cramps covers? Tight as a tick.

Yeah, that’s right – we’re having a bit of a disagreement again here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, our adopted home. (When they say beloved bands have gone to a farm upstate, this is where they go, my friends.) Nothing new around here. Tempers wear thin after a Winter like this one, am I right. I said, AM I RIGHT? Damn it, this COVID shutdown is even making hermits like us feel claustrophobic. Even the mansized tuber, not exactly a social butterfly, has gotten so cagey he’s decided to resurrect his long-neglected Facebook account. And hell, if he’s just dying to do something useful, I told him he should just do all of our posts while I sit back in an abandoned easy chair and enjoy some expired cider from a bell jar glass. Life of Riley.

What are we arguing about? Here’s the beef: the international space station recently jettisoned a space pallet full of spent batteries, sending it down towards an almost certain burn-up reentry. Sounds like a bit of mundane space news, right? Well, not to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Like the rest of us, he likes to make use of discarded bits and bobs. Come to think of it, that’s principally what Marvin is made of. And so when he heard this story, it was like he discovered the pot of gold at the end of the Van Allen belt. Marvin may be a lifeless piece of tin (don’t tell him I said so), but he’s smart enough to know that even spent batteries have a little juice in them. So he appealed to his creator, Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, and talked him into pointing his tractor beam (actually, Trevor James Constable’s abandoned orgone generating device) at the discarded space pallet so that he could drag it to earth.

Here she comes, Mitch. Steady, now ...

Okay, so Mitch cranked up the tractor beam, and the whole Mill started to shake like a leaf. Before long, we could see this bloody thing hovering over the building, emitting an unearthly glow, like an aura. Mitch somewhat expertly guided the thing into our central courtyard and landed it with a dull thud. It was hot as a toaster oven on a late-Summer Saturday morning in 1974, just after the kids had breakfast and before dad shook off his hangover enough to start hollering again. (Okay … that simile went a little sideways.) But by the end of the afternoon, Marvin was able to retrieve some of the spent nickel-hydrogen batteries and install them into his personal recharging station (which, I swear, looks like a jukebox). Now he wants me to find somewhere in the mill to stow the space pallet, but I keep telling the stupid automaton that it’s too damn big.

We need a pallet garage. One of the bigger ones. Where’s my Sharper Image catalog?

Political Rants

New pilot.

As I write this, the details are still filtering in from Georgia about the shooting at the massage parlors in and near Atlanta. Yet another sickening crime carried out by some dude who bought a gun the same day he decided to use it on a bunch of innocent people. That’ll be $600, young man. Enjoy the pistol! Want bullets with that? Goddamn, what a crazy country we live in. Still, the part of this incident that made me scratch my head was when the police told us that the suspect had said the crime was not racially motivated. (Of course, this was followed up by the officer’s comment that the alleged shooter was having a bad day.) My first reaction to that was …. since when do you care what the suspect says? The answer, of course, is obvious – the suspect is white. Can you picture them coming out and saying something similar about a black person in custody? Neither can I.

I’m listening to a podcast called Resistance, and though I’m not crazy about the corporate advertising (for instance, I now know way more about the latest Mitsubishi compact SUV than I ever needed to know), they do really good work. The episode I’m listening to, entitled “My Somebody”, focuses on a young man from Baltimore who is incarcerated for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I can tell you, the police didn’t give a damn what this fellow had to say about his guilt or innocence. They shot him in the face and stood guard around his hospital bed. But then … he’s black. As for the white guy who shot up three massage parlors in Georgia this week, well, he was having a bad day, according to some random (white) police captain known for sharing anti-Asian posts on Facebook. I mean, seriously …. they don’t even bother trying to hide it anymore, do they?

This is what underlies the movement for de-funding and even abolishing the police. If you are a white person, and you grew up in, say, a town like my old home town, which was almost entirely white at that time, the police are there to protect you. In other words, they are there to protect you from the nasty, non-white people down the street in Utica or Albany or Rochester or wherever. If, on the other hand, you are a person of color and you live in a community of color, the police are not there to protect you. They are there to contain you, to detain you, to keep you in your place. They are there to watch you like a hawk. That is why so many black families don’t dial up the cops when stuff goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if there are black police officers, or a black police chief, or a black mayor … or hell, a black president. Like the Pentagon, law enforcement is like a big killing machine. You can put a different pilot in there, and they may drive the killing machine more slowly, even nudge it into reverse, but it’s still going to do what it’s designed to do. The abuse is a feature, not a bug.

There’s a lot to be said about criminal justice reform, and we’ve barely even begun to have that conversation. But if we’re ever going to even attempt to fix these problems, we must first acknowledge the nature of the system we have. That is a prerequisite for moving forward.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Usual Rubbish

Banjogeddon.

2000 Years to Christmas

So, wait a minute. You say the Chicago tuning is like the top strings on a guitar? Is that so? What about the standard plectrum tuning? Oh … and I think I turned the peg too many times … unless it’s supposed to sound like that. My bad.

Oh, hi. Just caught me in the middle of a session. No, it’s not the kind of session we usually have here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted squat-house in upstate New York) – something a bit more prosaic. As always, Big Green is making do with whatever is around us at any given time. When we made 2000 Years To Christmas, for instance, we were short on effects, so we had to use the mill’s steam HVAC system to get some decent reverb. Then, when faced with a shortage of horn players during the sessions for International House, we had to retrofit the mill’s HVAC system so it could be used as a brass section. And when our mastering deck broke down in the middle of mixing Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, in a moment of desperation we routed the tracks through the HVAC system, which may explain why that album sounds the way it does. (There has to be a reason.)

Right, so we’re sorting through the songs we’ve written and recorded since 2013, mostly Ned Trek related numbers, with an eye to enhancing the tracks before attempting to release them to the public. And in more than one case, it seems like we’re a little light on the stringed instruments. Only trouble is, our guitars are all out at the guitar laundry …. I mean, the tech. The only thing we have left is a four-string banjo left here by the “Old Ones.” (How many centuries ago? Even Ruk doesn’t remember.) The strings are made of some nameless substance that I’m afraid may have once been a living thing. The tuners are worn away to nubs. There isn’t a good thing to be said about the remains of this instrument. In other words, it’s a perfect addition to our next album … whatever that may be called. (Something with banjo in the title?)

Hey, that's great, Abe.

I have to tell you, it’s been close to a decade since I last played a banjo. (And what’s worse than that, even then, I never knew how to play the effing thing.) That’s why I’m working with our resident expert, Antimatter Lincoln, on how to at least tune the instrument. He prefers the Chicago tuning, being a former resident of antimatter Illinois (or Sionilli, as they call it). After that, he started giving me some pointers. Things like, “Don’t cross the street with your eyes closed,” and “Keep your feet under your knees at all times,” and who could forget, “Avoid the Ford Theatre on April 15, 1865.” No pointers on how to play the banjo, but he did rip into a couple of songs while I was in the room, and let me tell you … he makes me look like a good banjo player. (Notice I said “look” and not “sound”.)

This may end up with some kind of dueling banjos standoff between me and Anti-Lincoln. Who will prevail? Music, my friends … that’s who.