Tag Archives: Anti-Lincoln

Usual Rubbish

Frankensong.

2000 Years to Christmas

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.

Got any old songs you don't want?

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

High Yuletide.

2000 Years to Christmas

Uh, Anti-Lincoln …. Abe … I was going to have a word with you. Actually, several of us were planning on, well, maybe starting a conversation about, well … it’s kind of awkward. How can I put this delicately? Ah, yes. – got it. You’re a stoned-out, drunken loser-ass mofo. Can we talk?

Yes, that’s right, friends. It’s time for another intervention, this one directed at the Great Un-Emancipator, Antimatter Lincoln, who’s been with us since the day he stumbled out of whatever alternate universe he comes from via Trevor James Constable’s patented orgone generating machine. Seems like so long ago now, doesn’t it? Well, some things never change … and one of those things is Anti-Lincoln’s propensity toward inebriating and intoxicating substances, including (but not limited to) hard liquor, malt beverages, chicken fricassee (with cognac sauce), morphine, hooch, devil’s weed, and marijuana. Oh, yes … it’s time for another little talk with the tall guy.

We thought this would be easier, frankly. I think it was Matt who had the idea of making Marvin (my personal robot assistant) a kind of trustee to Anti-Lincoln, as well as a minder. If he saw the unpresident start to imbibe in a serious way, he was to insert himself between the man and the drink, or joint, or bowl, or whatever he was into. Okay, well … that didn’t work so well. Anti-Lincoln is a bad tempered fellow, as you may recall. His reaction to being corralled by a robot was to attempt to convert said automaton into an elaborate bong for his hashish bender on alternate Saturdays. (Actually, Marvin makes a fairly decent bong, mainly because he has a lot of empty space inside that metallic exterior. True fact.)

Uh, Lincoln? We gotta talk, man.

Last week was the last straw. Anti-Lincoln took delivery of something like a bale of marijuana. He claimed it was CBD and that he had a prescription for insomnia. I called bullshit because the mother sleeps most of the freaking day as it is. If he has insomnia, I’m Pavarati. (And just for the record, I am, in fact, not Pavarati). Now, I know he’s just stocking up for the holidays. In Anti-Lincoln’s world, when the Yuletide rolls in, it does so with a vengeance. And so before he goes on his holiday bender and starts insulting the neighbors, and the local constables, and the bartender, and the … well, pretty much everyone that comes within his field of vision, we of Big Green need to convene a small group intervention. Old Anti-Lincoln will be scared straight …. or not. (If history is any guide, we will be the only straight ones in the hammer mill by the time we’re done.)

Usual Rubbish

Twelfth Month.

2000 Years to Christmas

Did you hear that just then? That faint sound of bells ringing in the distance? That can only mean one thing …. the elementary school up the road is having a fire drill again. Third one this week.

Oh … and of course, it’s December again, the month of joy and celebration. Which means, in this year of our lord 2020 (which happens to be the year of YOUR lord 2020 as well), we are fast approaching the first anniversary of the twentieth anniversary of the release of our first LP, 2000 Years To Christmas, a space odyssey … I mean, an album by Big Green. Now when I say “LP”, I mean “CD”, actually, because we never pressed vinyl on any of our records. That’s for the heavy wallet brigade, my friends, though we have considered converting Marvin (my personal robot assistant) into some kind of record-cutting machine. (For the record, he’s not keen on the idea.)

Yeah, so here we are, a year later, still flogging the thing. And why not, right? Our first album is 21 years old. It can buy a drink in New York, maybe two. (If it can find an open bar, of course.) But even more significant is the fact that the album is themed to the season. It is, after all, a Christmas album in a way – not a collection of traditional carols and popular songs, but an alt-rock album written on the theme of Christmas. That’s why December is such a special month around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-home. Of course, there’s also the arrival of heavy snow, which typically comes through sections of the roof that are no longer quite as roofy as they used to be. That makes December extra special, too.

Aw, come on, Marvin!

Now, I don’t want you to think that we’re just huddled here in our drafty mill, sifting over the artifacts of a career that’s long since gone sour. Nothing could be further from the truth. We’re not huddled at all – not in this era of social distancing. Nay, we’re standing a respectable distance apart from one another as we sift. In the hammer mill, that amounts to 17 and a half feet. (We’ve got extra floor space, so it only makes sense to err on the side of distance.) We’re working on some remixes this winter, trying to refurbish some songs that we recorded in a hurry over the past few years. And I think Anti-Lincoln is working on a new shepherd’s pie recipe, though I’m not sure where he got it from. Never heard of a pie made of digestive biscuits and peanut butter. (By pure coincidence, that’s what was lying around the kitchen this week.)

Anywho, have a great December. This year is almost over, people. Damn.