Category Archives: Usual Rubbish

Usual Rubbish

‘Tis the season to be somewhere else entirely

2000 Years to Christmas

No, I didn’t add a sousaphone. I don’t play the freaking sousaphone. I told you, I’m the only one playing. Try listening to what I say, instead of just watching for my mouth to stop moving so you can start talking again. Geez.

Hello out there. Hope all is well with you during this festive time of year. Sometimes festivities can be downright depressing. Oh, sure – there are gaudy Christmas miracles everywhere you look these days. Inflatable snowmen, bloated Santas, flashing lights of every size and color. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) felt compelled to festoon the exterior of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Most sentient beings would say he fell short, but at least he tried.

Christmas cracker concert

Okay, so, as you know, I talked myself into doing a nano concert earlier this year, and thus far the reviews have been … well …. invisible. Audience missing, presumed entertained. Well, that was so encouraging that I decided to do a special Christmas nano concert this year – a Nano Christmas, if you will, in which I would render selections from our sizeable holiday songbook. I can hear the bots applauding already.

So, once again, I’m performing solo for a cheap tablet camera, strumming an instrument I’ve never been able to master, hollering like a crazed chimp. Doesn’t that sound like Christmas? It is our gift to you, dear reader/listener. Not a thing of great value. Not a sausage, though there are such things. An offering like those proffered in days of old. No, I’m not talking about the magi. (Not THAT old!) I mean the days of Matt making Christmas tapes and handing them out to all and sundry. This is the digital interwebs version of that.

Big Green Nano Christmas Concert

Going half way

We don’t observe a lot of traditions. No fish on Christmas eve. No boxing day. No dead carcass of an evergreen tree decaying in the living room. We are non traditional, and that’s why you love us. Of course, we did a whole album of Christmas songs – not the familiar numbers, as you know, but home-made jobs, recorded in the basement, pressed, packaged, shipped, unloaded, and … well … brought back down the basement.

And yes, I know there are twelve days of Christmas. Feels more like twelve hundred, but I digress. Thing is, we’re running on fumes here at the hammer mill. So yes, we will be posting stuff over the holidays. But we can’t afford twelve days of that shit, so we’ll do six. Or seven. No more than seven. But probably six, really.

Hey, half a loaf can still make a sandwich or two, right? We may be starting with the lords a-leaping, but that doesn’t matter, man. It’s the thought that counts.

Watch for those holiday posts on our Facebook page and our Twitter feed. And have a very happy holiday week, people.

Usual Rubbish

How to put on the worst concert ever

2000 Years to Christmas

Yeah, I don’t have time for greeting cards. Take them away, Marvin. Give them to the kids down the street. Or some monkeys in the zoo. I don’t care, man – just GET THEM OUT OF HERE!

Sorry for my all-caps utterance, friends. You know how stressful the holidays can be, particularly when your robot doesn’t follow instructions. Now, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that I’m constantly reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Far from it! We get along like nothing else I can name. (Take my word for the fact that that’s a good thing.)

Like you, we are engaged in a last-minute frenzy in preparation for Christmas, New Years, and other assorted observances. And this year it has been made a bit more complicated by my plan to put on yet another nano concert, like the one I did earlier this year. Turns out concert are more fun when you (a) play an instrument you can play, and (b) involve other people in your music-making. Who knew?

Hello out there!

As luck would have it, we live in a time of burgeoning COVID. It’s like being on a plague ship, minus the pleasure of a south sea cruise. The upshot for us musicians, of course, is that we can’t stand each other’s company … I mean, we can’t BE in each other’s company. If we share the same space, the smell …. I mean, the VIRUS might kill us. (As is my custom, when reading that line, I pronounce the word “kill” as KEEEL.)

Some may accuse me of harboring resentments for other musicians. That is not the case. I don’t harbor them, I nurture them. But in the end, we must all get along, at least better than we did at the beginning. So we need the means to play together in a way that won’t leave us all dead. (Again, following my personal custom, I pronounce the word “dead” as DAY-ID.)

Hello? Do you read me?

Sophisticated technology unleashed

Right, so how do you play together without being together? Technology! There’s this thing called the internets, and I’m guessing it just might catch on. You just set up your instrument at one end, play like the devil, and the music goes round and round, woah woah woah, and it comes out there. My advisors (Mitch Macaphee) tell me that there’s room enough in the internet tube for music to go both ways, so you can jam with someone on the other end of the tube. Holy cats!

Now, I know Mitch has suggested some crazy things in the past. Shit like that gonzo underground tour he dreamed up a few years back. But this time, THIS time, he may be on to something. Or just on something. In any case, yesterday he handed me the business end of something that looked like one of those Dr. Seuss instruments, like the Zimbaphone or whatever the hell. If you hold the thing up to your ear, you can vaguely hear something that sounds like Matt playing his guit-fiddle. Damndest thing.

Let’s get ready for something … anything

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for something. And if I have anything to do with it, it will involve me playing musical instruments into the Dr. Seuss invention known as the internets. When and if that happens, you will be the first to know. Or maybe the second or third to know, but certainly in the top ten.

Usual Rubbish

The worst of all possible universes

2000 Years to Christmas

Just give me a minute, man. I’m changing the strings on my superannuated cheap-ass guitar. And yes, I’m using new strings. Don’t ask me where I got them. Lets’ just say that someone’s Christmas stocking is going to be a little light this year.

Oh, hi, blog visitors. It’s you’re old pal Joe. Yeah, I’ve made the momentous decision to restring my guitar because I don’t want to even attempt to deliver a Christmas concert on those rusty old cables I’ve been twanging on. And when I say twanging, I mean just what I say. Just give a listen to my recent nano concert on YouTube and you’ll get the picture. And the picture has sound, by the way.

Holiday Tide … I mean, Cheer

Of course, I’ve always been terrible at marketing things. (That’s precisely why I went into advertising, but I digress.) Given that it’s the holiday season, you’d think I’d be hawking our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, like a maniac. But the fact is, those songs are just the tip of the Christmas iceberg here in Big Green land. There’s plenty more where those came from. You’ll see!

Some of those songs are from Matt’s early period, when he recorded Christmas songs on his 4-track cassette deck and distributed them as low-rent, labor-intensive gifts. And then there are some songs from the Ned Trek period, which covers the second half of the 2010s and, technically, is still underway. Many songs in this latter group feature funny voices and bizarre ass lyrics. Oh, and many in the former group, as well.

All about the wormhole

I wish I could say that everyone is looking forward to the holiday season. Fact is, I squat with a bunch of sad sacks. Take Mitch Macaphee (please!). Our Mad Science advisor has spent the past three weeks laughing up his sleeve at Mark Zuckerberg. The reason for that is simple – Mitch has been conjuring wormholes into alternate universes since long before Zuck was a tike. The notion of someone creating a fake universe seems hilariously redundant to him.

Okay, so here’s my question: what if Mitch finds out you can make money at that Zuck scam? Will he borrow Trevor James Constable’s Orgone Generating Machine and rip open the fabric of space/time? Will he then charge punters fifty bucks a head to step through and shake hands with purple protozoa-men from the fourth dimension? And last, but perhaps most importantly, will he share the proceeds with us? THAT’s what keeps ME up at night.

So, is this your answer to the Metaverse?

The reason for the seizin’

In any case, our Christmas season is starting out like all the rest of them have: fighting off the bailiffs. As you know, we’ve been squatting in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of two decades (or, perhaps, the worst part). The local authorities, bless their hearts, have been trying to evict us for most of that time. It just wouldn’t be Christmas without an eviction notice!

Thus far, we have let our nasty upstairs neighbors answer the door when the cops come calling. Frankly, I think they’ve forgotten we still live down here. And truth be told, I am in no mood to remind them.