Tag Archives: Anti-Lincoln

Usual Rubbish

Vox test.

Hmmmm. That doesn’t sound quite right. Can you put a little more reverb on it? No, no … not just the plate. I mean generation reverb. Make me sound like I’m at the bottom of a well. Yeah, like that. Nope … nope, still no good. Bugger.

Oh, hi. Just caught us in the grips of an artistic quandary – the kind Big Green gets caught up in all the time: How to make a track not suck too badly. I just did a vocal on one of Matt’s songs an I’m not crazy about it. Sounds a bit too nasal for my tastes. Just try to sing like a full-throated Mitt Romney, and with that I say good luck to you. I’m at the point of auditioning ghost singers, kind of like what the Monkees used or the Partridge Family used to do … you know, the Partridges would move their lips and you would hear the mellifluous voices of some unknown bird-named stock singers; perhaps the Loon Family, down on their luck. Yeah, well … maybe we gotta get some of that shit.

Trouble is, when you live in an abandoned hammer mill and you have no money, putting out an open call for auditions is not an option. Ergo, we try to draw on the talent we already have. Like anti-Lincoln, for instance. I thought, inasmuch as he is the antimatter doppelganger of our great emancipator, that he would be endowed with the exact opposite of his namesake’s reedy voice. I imagined booming, pear-shaped tones emanating from that bearded gob, but no dice, my friends, no dice. Apparently that’s one thing that stays the same in the antimatter universe – we all have the same voices, even if we eat corn on the cob vertically instead of horizontally.

Psst ... Who's singing your parts?Next up in the internal audition queue was, well … Marvin (my personal robot assistant). This didn’t go very well either. Picture that scene in Room Service when the Marx Brothers are trying to pass customs with Maurice Chevalier’s passport, attempting to imitate him convincingly. Marvin was like Harpo with the phonograph strapped to his back. He’s got a bunch of scratchy recordings stored in his internal hard drive (or tape drive – he is getting a little long in the tooth), and when he sings he selects individually sung words from that entire library. It’s great if you want a mashup, but …. I don’t.

So, back to the drawing board. Or the singing board, more appropriately. Me-me-me. Who’s on the hook this time? Me-me-me.

Usual Rubbish

Blame us.

Hmmm. I thought Mitch was looking a little depressed. Are you sure that’s the reason? Wow. Who knew?

Oh, hi. Christ on a bike, sometimes living in this abandoned hammer mill is like working in a clinic for the chronically depressed. What a bunch of moody Melvins! Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been giving us all the silent treatment for about a week. My brother keeps saying he needs a charge-up, but that’s just making apologies for the fucker. (Stop defending him!) Every time there’s a new episode of “Mercy Street”, old Anti-Lincoln goes all pear-shaped, starts drinking and cursing at us like we’re General Grant or General Sherman (with our inimitable bow-ties snapping). Insufferable.

And then there’s Mitch Macaphee, our mad science adviser. Though to be fair, his depression is usually rooted in mad science. Anyway, his smile turned upside-down earlier this week, and we had to start rooting around for the cause. (You don’t want to allow Mitch’s moods to fester … that’s when he starts getting really creative in the lab.) At first I thought it may have been about that North Korean A-bomb test, but that wasn’t it. Then I saw the story about the astrophysicist who claimed that there was evidence of a massive ninth planet way beyond the orbit of Neptune, and I knew I had found the cause. Busted!

Frankly, Mitch, it looks kind of ominous.Yeah, we’ve known about that planet for years. Mitch discovered it on one of our interstellar tours, and he was so thrilled at his own cleverness that he resolved to keep it secret from humanity until he could find some practical use for it. It is, in scientific terms, a big motherfucker, with enough mass to line up all the other planets in our puny solar system like billiard balls. (I think that played into Mitch’s plan for the dark world beyond Neptune. He dreamed of racking them all up like nineball and running the table, as if he was the Minnesota Fats of interplanetary collision.)

Okay, so now we need a cover story. Here goes: just call the new planet “Blameus”. Legend has it that this dark world is responsible for all of our sorrows. That should focus people’s attention a bit … at least until Mitch can work out his next shot. (Okay, so I’m an enabler. Just a little harmless fun.)

Usual Rubbish

Parts and parcels.

What is this … another carton? This one’s from Madagascar, no less. What the hell. Does it rattle when it shakes? Does it roll? If when it shakes it both rattles and rolls, it might be Jerry Lee Lewis.

For the life of me, I don’t know who’s ordering all of these packages. They just show up at the door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (Big Green’s longtime squat-house) and subsequently disappear. At first I thought it might be Mitch Macaphee, but he has long since abandoned the notion of ordering goods from various merchants. He just invents whatever he needs, which is a handy skill to have. (Perhaps the handiest!) Then I thought maybe anti-Lincoln was behind all of this mail order, since some of the boxes came from Urban Outfitters. (He’s taken to a more cosmopolitan wardrobe of late. Very smart.)

I know, I know – I tend to get a little suspicious, living in a condemned post-industrial hulk like I do. A few months here and you start to see conspiracies around every corner. What are those mice talking about? Do the crows in the courtyard wish me well or ill? Perhaps it is THEY who are ordering stuff from Crate and Barrel. Maybe they need crates and barrels for something, I don’t know. Idle minds, right?

A bit too far, Marvin. Just saying.Someone’s handing me a note. It reads, “You idiot. It’s probably Marvin (your personal robot assistant). Mitch Macaphee just made him wi-fi compatible.” Oh, right. So Marvin doesn’t even need a smart phone to buy a bunch of useless junk on credit. All he needs is the credit. Fortunately, he doesn’t have … doesn’t have … hey … where’s my wallet? MARVIN!!

Okay, Marvin has been using this magnetic lock gizmo ever since he saw one on Lost In Space reruns. My guess is that he’s down in his basement room, frozen like a statue in his magnetic lock, placing orders over wi-fi without even lifting a finger. And the boxes that come are probably piling up around him like a fortress – a fortress of consumer joy! Doesn’t that remind you of Christmas?

Anyway, if I’m in the pokey the next time I post, it will be that mindless robot’s fault. See if he’ll let you use my credit card to bail me out.