Tag Archives: Cheney Hammer Mill

Usual Rubbish

Red Planet.

2000 Years to Christmas

Come in, Rangoon … I mean, Marvin. Jesus, this is hard! C-Q, C-Q … Marvin, do you read me? Come in, come up, come over …. come on, man! Hey … is this thing on?

Oh, hi, out there in the land of Big Green listeners, readers, etc. It’s your old friend Joe, locked away here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our longtime squat-house concealed in the forested hills (or hilly forests) of central New York state. An easy place to seclude yourself in … to. No one would ever think of looking for you here. That’s largely because, well … no one ever thinks of looking for anyone or anything here. In fact, most people don’t even know this place exists. (Except for you, of course … because you keep coming back.) What better redoubt in a time of COVID, right? Complete isolation …. the secret to good health. Who knew?

So, what are we about this week? Well … people have to occupy themselves somehow. That applies to everyone – washed out musicians, animated vegetables (mansized tuber), antimatter ex-presidents (anti-Lincoln), and of course, mad scientists (Mitch Macaphee). And it is in the settled order of things that some people’s pass times have a greater effect on those around them than those of their fellow time-passers. So when Mitch knocks about the mill looking for something to do, he’s partly looking for someone to do it to. In this case, it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who, I feel it’s important to point out, was created by Mitch in the first place. And if he can create him, he can … well … you know. Do I have to draw you a picture? I do? Damn it!

squx.

All right, so Mitch got a little obsessed this week, watching the goddamned television. They did multiple stories on this Mars Rover “Perseverance” mission, how it was going to land, how risky it was to enter the Martian atmosphere, how forbidding the terrain on the red planet promises to be, etc. Each mention of this NASA mission seemed to make Mitch madder and madder. It was like watching one of those old pressure cookers heat up, the dial on the top flipping over to red, steam pouring out of every join. Anyway, long story short, he decided to stuff Marvin into a makeshift rocket and send him to Mars ahead of the NASA rover. Marvin’s mission: take a selfie with the rover and post it somewhere that NASA scientists could see it, just so that he could rub it in their face that he had gotten there ahead of them. Yep … Mitch seriously wants to own those fuckers, and he’ll do it if it’s the last thing Marvin ever does.

That’s why I’m cranking away at our distressed old ham radio, hoping to raise Marvin’s personal communication channel. (Not that it’s worth much, as Marvin is famously non-verbal.) If I raise him, I’ll let you know.

Usual Rubbish

So it is written.

2000 Years to Christmas

Well, maybe we should use one of those ram horns … you know, just to let people know we’re coming. Or we could wave a herder’s staff about like some kind of crazy goon. THAT would be impressive. So many good ideas.

Yeah, you’ve found your way back to Big Green land. Here in the mostly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, home only to our sorry selves and the nasty neighbors upstairs, we’ve been hashing out the particulars of our eventual return to the public stage. Oh, yes … make no mistake about it. We will be back, and we will be bad. Really bad. Possibly unlistenable, partly due to advance age. Older people playing rock and roll is a bit like the Three Stooges in their dotage – somehow slapstick comedy being played out by geezers is something other than funny. It’s kind of pathetic, frankly …. but I will allow that music is a bit more forgiving, as long as we don’t try to jump up and down and climb up into the rafters of a civic center like we’re apes. (We may be apes … but not the climbing kind.)

We’ve been told that our gigs back in the day were the stuff of legend. I can believe it, because legends – like our performances – are entirely unsubstantial. You would search in vain to find video of even a single one of our gigs. (Lord knows I can’t find a single one. Rare as hen’s teeth! In fact, even rarer – I found at least a dozen hen’s teeth while looking for our videos. So it is written.) Still, you’d think even in the absence of digital video cameras in every cell phone there would be a handful of VHS tapes lying about. All we have, for crying out loud, is us on that crazy demo that some dude named Angel shot, and getting THAT away from him involved a whole lot of crying out loud.

I know, man, I know. Just pretend he's not there.

Now, there are some advantages to having an in-house mad scientist, at least when he’s not out on some mad science junket with the rest of his clan. Mitch Macaphee has postulated that we can use some of his hyper-sensitive instruments to reach back into the space-time continuum and pull audio signals out back from decades long dead. It takes a little fine-tuning, of course, but he thinks it’s possible. Apparently it’s a little easier to get images back than it is to retrieve sound, though Mitch says the images tend to get muddled with random items from the present day, like social media memes and the like. He showed us a couple of examples, one of which I’ve included in this post for your edification. Mitch thinks we can even enlist Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to follow the signals back to yesteryear … or at least, yestermonth … and drag some of our lost performances back with him. Just full of ideas, that Mitch. Wish to hell he could make a decent pot of coffee. (It always tastes like he brewed it in his boot.)

Usual Rubbish

Cold Files.

2000 Years to Christmas

How long do we have to stay down here, man? It’s five below zero. Next time we’re bringing a can of sterno or something. Maybe one of those highway flares. Ah yes – blessed warmth.

Hey, out there in internet-land. Yes, here we are at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, doing what we usually do – nothing much, interrupted occasionally by nothing whatsoever. We lead a sedentary life out here among the ruins of a former mill-driven regional economy, brought low by the greed of post-industrial corporate financiers. So I suppose it is they we have to thank for our adopted abode, right? I mean, if they hadn’t massively dis-invested in this community and moved all their operations to the Philippines ages ago, there wouldn’t be any abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for us to squat in. So it’s an ill wind indeed that doesn’t blow someone some good, somewhere. Somehow.

What’s the nothing that we’re doing today? Ah, nothing much. Just digging through our piles of junk in boxes, looking for old recordings and unfinished projects begging to be reborn. I’ve recruited Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to serve as a kind of metal detector/divining rod, using his advanced sensor technology to scan for magnetic tapes or abandoned discs. When he comes close to either one of those types of objects, lights start flashing and his antennae start twirling around counterclockwise. Then a little mechanical bird pops out of a little door in his forehead and crows the hour. That’s when we all break for lunch. (Even if it happens at 10:00 at night. Lunch is whenever the birdy sings, that’s it.)

Joe: Hey, man .. You picking up any signals? Marvin: squx.

You may ask if we’ve found anything interesting, to which I would reply, “Funny you should ask!” Actually, our time rooting through the basement was pretty much wasted. Hell, I could have looked on our old hard drives for music projects of every description, unfinished, abandoned, neglected, and so on. We started recording Rick Perry songs (later collected in our ridiculous third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick) in probably 2011, then went right into the Ned Trek songs, which number in the scores – probably 120 songs over the course of six years. In between all that, we started to resurrect some older material from the 1980s and 90s – songs we had done demos of but never full-on recordings. I’m not sure how many of those there are. We’ve played a few rough mixes on THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, but some have never seen the light of day. Or the dark of night.

So now, when we’re bored, we rack up one of those old numbers, hit play and twiddle the dials until it sounds like something that’s not junk. If we do that long enough, we’ll send some of it your way. That’s just how we roll.