Tag Archives: Marvin

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

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

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.)