Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

What the pod?

Okay, here’s a good name for a band (I know it’s good because someone’s using it): Teenage Brain. Here’s another: The Canabinoids. Well, there’s my day’s work. Man, I’m exhausted!

Yes, I’m sure there are some of you out there – and you know who you are – who think that we of Big Green sit around our abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill all day and do next to nothing. The fact is, nothing could be further from the truth. We work our fingers to the bone every day, trying to think of stupid shit to say the next time someone interviews us, which could be any minute (though in actuality, it hasn’t happened in about two decades). We set a very high standard for stupidity; not talking garden variety here. Our comments are expected to be wildly off the mark, not just a little strange.

And there are other things occupying our time, such as the January podcast … which is now certain to be the February podcast. All I can say is, mea culpa. (That’s all the Latin I know.) Our podcast production process (or PPP) has become much more complicated in recent months, mostly due to our own highly exacting standards. Now every other Ned Trek episode has to come complete with a full complement of new songs written specifically for the occasion, produced to the best of our ability, and inserted into that otherwise pointless show. Time consuming stuff, yes. The kind that makes January into February.

It's a good name, anywayThis time out we have, let’s see …. six new songs, maybe? I’ve lost count. It’s become this blur of recording parts onto different projects, a piano here, a horn section there, a beery-sounding horse voice on this one, some fucked-up swabbies on that one. That’s the only way I know how to work – just keep chipping away at the mammoth rock until it looks a hell of a lot more like Lincoln. That’s how Mount Rushmore was made. That and driving native people off the land (we don’t include that in our creative process).

So, I don’t know … look for our new podcast episode in the coming weeks. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my couch.

Usual Rubbish

20 questions.

No, the moon is NOT a planet, nor a star. And you may THINK you just saw an ankylosaurus, but they died out 65 million years ago during the late Cretaceous. Don’t you know anything?

Christ on a bike, what the hell am I, anyway, a grade school teacher? How is it that people (and robots … and sentient oversized vegetables) can reach adulthood without knowing all this stuff? We may live in a very sheltered environment here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (and I use the word “sheltered” very, very loosely here), but some light does peek in through the crack in the wall, and a bit of the real world does seep into our isolation. Once in a while. Happened last year, as a matter of fact.

You know what it’s like when it’s the dead of winter and you spend a stretch of days indoors – nothing but you, your personal robot assistant, and a man-sized tuber. Idle minds run in neutral. Ends up being a long game of 20 questions, for chrissake. But you have to keep the kids entertained, right? Otherwise, they start busting the place up. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) might try his hand at plumbing. That’s all anybody needs. (If that happened, I’d have to get the ankylosaurus after him.)

It's probably just a big dog, MarvinIt’s not all fun and games, you understand. Matt and I have been hard at work on another crop of songs that will be featured in the next episode of Ned Trek, the Star Trek parody we include in our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. We’re talking maybe five or six new songs, not sure exactly. It’s a bit like baking for the holidays. Some things come out right, others go into the compost heap. For Big Green, when a song goes flat in the middle of tracking it, we chop it up and put it into the mansized tuber’s flower pot. There’s usually enough nitrates in there to perk him up for a few hours. Waste not want not.

So, yes … Keep your eyes peeled. Not for stray late-Cretaceous throwbacks … for the next episode of our podcast. Should be coming through any … week, month … whatever.

Usual Rubbish

Old home week.

You can’t just look through the telescope. You have to squint really hard to see them. That’s because, well, they’re either really, really small or really, really far away.

What are we doing now? Good question. Aside from working on yet another episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our somewhat-monthly podcast, we are trying to catch up with some of the incidental characters in the shaggy dog story of our lives. Isolated from the world as we may be here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, buried in a mountain of snow, we still have a fitful internet connection and at least one hand free. We can track down pretty much anyone on the other end of that “series of tubes” known as the Web. (Precious little else we can accomplish, at least until Spring.)

For instance, what is Mitch Macaphee doing? Well … a quick investigation using various search engines turned up next to nothing. So I guess what I said in the last paragraph is not entirely true, at least when it comes to the nut jobs that hang around with this band. In any case, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) suggested clicking on Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating device and just shouting Mitch’s name into the swirling space-time vortex it creates. We did that and, interestingly, heard back almost immediately. He’s in Colorado. I don’t think I probably have to tell you why. (Things usually look a little cloudy through the time portal, but I don’t think that’s the reason we could barely see the guy.)

The Pillars of CreationThen there’s sFshzenKlyrn, our occasional sit-in guitarist from the planet Zenon. It seems sFshzenKlyrn has gotten back together with his old band, “The Pillars of Creation”. I didn’t actually find that out from him directly. They apparently did another photo shoot with NASA, using the Hubble Space Telescope. (I hear they’re doing a promo spread in Sky and Telescope). If you look closely, you can see how sFshzenKlyrn has changed over the past couple of years. A little older, a little wiser, a little cloudier, perhaps.

So, sure … keeping our hands busy, our minds engaged. Recording new numbers. And calling old friends out of the blue. Sounds like winter to me.