Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Dream off.

2000 Years to Christmas

Turn it to the “golden oldies” station. Yeah, that’s the one. Okay … maybe a little Bob Seeger will wash it away. Hmmm. Turn it up a little. Little more. Oh, god – that’s enough! TURN IT OFF, THE RADIO!

Cheese and crackers, what a night! Now I know you’re used to that being a positive expression when it is issued from the lips of a rock musician, but that’s not the kind of night I’m talking about here, folks. This is one I slept through, for the most part. I was dreaming like a madman, and I heard music in one of my dreams that stayed with me after I woke up. It’s like someone planted an earworm in me while I was sleeping, and I can’t freaking shake it. (Well, I did shake it, literally, but that didn’t help.)

And yes, I know many great songwriters and classical composers harvested some of their best themes from dream music. Again, I am going to back over another popular preconception about musicians. Yeah, I hear music in my dreams, and sometimes it sticks with me when I wake up. But with me, it’s almost always lousy as hell. Whoever does the incidental music score for my dreams is a freaking hack. For crying out loud – everything in my life is the low-rent version of something decent. Some people have sophisticated androids. I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who’s little more than a hopped up samovar crossed with a hot water heater. Some people have tony mansions. I live in an abandoned hammer mill with a bunch of lunatics. Poor little motherfucking me.

There, see? There is a resemblance!

Okay, I feel better now. Got to get these things out of your system, you know. Now if I could only get this dumb-ass dream music out of my head. It’s a plunky little number in 10/4 time that goes absolutely nowhere, so it loops easily, and it goes round and round. And round. I’ve tried going to the supermarket and wheeling around an empty cart while listening to piped in music, but that was unsuccessful. Next, I think I’ll cue up all of the Nixon Android songs from Ned Trek, our other podcast. I think there’s about a dozen of them. Listening to an audio animatronic Nixon sing about his misfortunes in 12 different ways should be an ideal method for burning this plague out of my brain. NOTHING can survive Nixon.

Which reminds me … what the hell happened to our fourth album? We were going to build it out of selections from our Ned Trek catalogue, but thus far, no potato. Maybe that little earworm is trying to tell me to get my lazy ass moving. Jesus. Why not send a telegram, for chrissake?

Usual Rubbish

Broken windows.

2000 Years to Christmas

That putty’s too dry. You can’t do anything with it now. What’d you do, leave it out in the sun? Well, that’s your problem right there. Sun, hot. Sun HOT.

Oh, hi. Just another summer’s day here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, Big Green’s longtime adopted home (squat house). Truth be known, we don’t always squat here – sometimes we stand bolt upright. I know that breaks with protocol for squat houses, but hell … we’ve got a lot of head room in this mill. Those old nineteenth century hammer-meisters must have been pretty tall; either that or they all worked on horseback. (I seem to remember one promoter we had once who wanted us to play our music on horseback. He also wanted me to change my name to Tex Piadro. Don’t remember why we let him go, but …. we let him go.)

Well, as anyone who has ever lived in an old apartment building knows, when it comes to structural flaws or things that leak, you’re basically on your own. If you’re a legit renter, you can call your landlord, and s/he will send a) a friend who owes some money, b) a brother in law who purports to be a handyman, or c) his or her own ass with a monkey wrench and a prayer. Our situation is different, of course – being squatters, we have no one to complain to when the place is falling apart around us. But the upside of that is, no useless hacks hammering away at some home maintenance problem they haven’t got a clue about addressing. As squatters, we become the useless hacks. That’s called self-reliance, kids. Look it up.

They obviously need some work. (The windows, that is.)

There’s a lot wrong with this hammer mill. Not for nothing did they abandon it. You would have thought they’d convert it into some kind of multi-vendor consignment mall or indoor craft fair, like they typically do with old mills up here, but frankly the place is just in too rough a shape. (I think it’s more of a rough hexagon than anything else.) We’re trying to do something about the leaky windows, as that’s the most annoying problem right now. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has been called into service as a wind-break and rain shield. Basically, we told him to hold up a stretched out garbage bag in front of the window and … well, just keep holding it.

Then Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, started getting busy with the window putty. Don’t know where he found the stuff, but I for one have never seen putty that glows in the dark before. When I asked Mitch about that, he just gave a dry little cackle and kept working. Fair enough.

Usual Rubbish

Revival.

2000 Years to Christmas

Looks pretty moribund to me. Did you kick the tires? Here – take the ignition key and give it a few cranks. Nothing? Right. This will be harder than I thought.

Hey, hello. Welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in central New York state, an out-of-the-way corner of an out-of-the-way place if ever there was one. (And there was one.) Still in the midst of an archive summer – not that much of a novelty around this place. Seems like every summer I find myself diving through boxes and bins of old tapes, moth-eaten notebooks, forgotten scraps of paper, and old biscuit tins filled with souvenirs of a bygone age. You know what they say about idle hands. Don’t you? Hell, I don’t know what they say. I was hoping you’d tell me. Something like, idle hands build false … idols. Who knows?

Actually, it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who reminded me that we haven’t posted an episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our podcast, in over seven months. Something of an oversight, I’d say. Like most musicians in these pandemic times, I chalk it up to COVID-19, but that’s not really the reason. You know the story, right? Just too much other shit to do. Anyway, Marvin has talked me into reviving the podcast, and not a moment too soon. The RSS feed was getting too rusty to send anything over. If we’d waited another month, it would have seized up entirely. We have blown the whole impulse stack trying to start it up again. Sure, we could have mixed the matter and antimatter cold, but it’s never been done. How’s that for a reason?

You search the biscuit tins. I'll revive the podcast.

As some of you know, I have, in fact, started yet another podcast – it’s called Strange Sound, and it’s a long-running political rant … something like the audio version of my, well … political rants. Anyway, that soaked up some of my time and energy. Of course, there’s ongoing maintenance of the hammer mill. Not that I actually do any of it, but it is something that’s happening, and it does take time. (Just not mine.) Then there are local relationships to keep up. You can’t overstate the importance of this – If we don’t work our butts off to mollify our neighbors, they’re likely to come after us with pruning hooks. Have you ever been pruned by an angry neighbor? One time is enough, believe me. Finally, the hammer mill’s roof is in terrible shape, and I have to spend practically every rainy day changing the buckets under the leaks. It feels like bailing out the titanic sometimes, only with less cheesy music.

Well, we’ll see if anything comes charging down that RSS feed. (Keep your ears open.)