Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Yamtastic.

2000 Years to Christmas

There are a thousand and one practical uses for them, Mitch. You can eat them, for one thing. And if you wire them up right, you can use them as primitive dry cell batteries. That’s two. Just nine hundred ninety-nine to go.

Damn, it’s hard to talk a man of mad science into something that doesn’t involve explosions. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are currently in the midst of an agrarian revolution. We’re feeling our roots here in rural upstate New York. Why fight it, Big Green? You are people of the land. You are born of the soil, and you refer to yourselves in the second person. Did I ever tell you my daddy was a poor dirt farmer from up in the hills around Milford? Well, if I did, I was either drunk or more drunk. Dad grew some tomatoes and hot peppers in the backyard, that’s about it. (Oh, and there were those grape vines, but I digress.)

Okay, so we DON’T have the soil in our blood. What of it? We are simply living up to the promise implicit in our name. If we call ourselves Big Green, we should be cultivating green things in a big way. And now, with the advent of robot-driven agriculture, we can, in a sense, plant our cake and eat it too. Though I understand that cake is very hard to grow hydroponically. It takes a lot of sun, and when it ripens, you have to frost the whole crop or your yield goes right through the floor. I’ve seen many a good man flounder on the shoals of cake farming, my friend. Nope …. not for me.

Me bairns! Me poor bairns!

No, we’ve decided to go with sweet potatoes. That’s not entirely by accident (though most of what we do is). Our long time associate, the mansized tuber, is himself an overgrown sweet potato, and he has graciously consented to contribute some shoots to the cause. I’ve instructed Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to plant the shoots in such a manner as might be recommended by people who know how the hell to do this. Marvin duly checked YouTube, then started poking shoots into little pots, all lined up on tables in the dilapidated main assembly room. Before any of us knew it, he was raising a small army of mansized tubers …. only they weren’t yet man-sized, unless we’re talking about very tiny men. They were more mouse-sized. Give them a chance!

I don’t know where this is going, but I know this: our friendly mansized tuber is going to have a lot of company this spring.

Usual Rubbish

Agro-botics.

2000 Years to Christmas

It think there’s room. Absolutely. We’ve got plenty of space on the shop floor. Just sweep those old discarded hammer parts out of there and we’re in business.

Oh, hi. Welcome to Big Green’s Cheney Hammer Mill headquarters, the innovation center of northeastern central New York! Sure, I know you folks all think we’re a bunch of layabout deadbeat motherfuckers, and, well, you’re mostly right about that, but I’m here to tell you that we’re on the verge of turning over a new leaf. And that leaf will be turned by the claw of a hired robot.

What am I talking about? Trends, my dear listeners, trends. Take a look at your non-existent newspaper. You don’t have to look very far at all to find stories about robots increasingly being used in agriculture. That’s right – robots plowing, robots planting, robots fertilizing, robots picking, etc., etc. Now look at us. (No, really …. look at us.) We are an independent band, planted in the middle of an agricultural community – a musical ficus plant, dying of thirst in a creative desert. Year after year, we seek something our community cannot give us: money delivered to our door in easy to negotiate, small denomination bills. After all this time, we’ve decided, why fight it? Let’s join the agricultural sector. Now … how can we do this without breaking a sweat?

Well, now there’s an answer to that age-old question: Robots! Robots are doing all the work these days, cultivating cash crops all across the country. Now you may say, “But Joe, you don’t have any land? Where will you grow the crops?” Well, nameless interlocutor, first, thanks for calling me Joe. Second, we’ve got all the growing space we need, right here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. We can set up a hydroponic garden on the shop floor. Hell, we won’t even need dirt! Just millions of gallons of water and … well, we’ll work that out.

And you may ask, “But Joe, where are you gonna get the robots?” My reply: Thanks for your question! In fact, we have robots. Well … at least one robot. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) will be patient zero in our agricultural revolution. He will be the prototype, the one-bot vanguard for a future army of agro-matons. Right, Marvin? …. Marvin??

Marvin? Anyone seen Marvin today? It’s planting time, damn it!

Usual Rubbish

Tune down.

2000 Years to Christmas

What’s to celebrate? Well … a lot of things, Mr. anti-President. Like, I don’t know … the lack of snow? Ummmm …. mail delivery? The persistence of our life-giving sun? Okay … I got nothing.

Hey, what the hell, we appear to settling into a bit of a post-holiday funk here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Like most bands of our generation, we like to get funky, and there’s not time like the post-holidays for a little funk-a-delic framming. Why not, right? Matt’s got a Fender Stratocaster for the first time in his life (sure, he’s had it for three years, but still … ). I’ve got my Korg SV-1 with funky clav sounds and something that sounds like a 70s Farfisa organ. So when it comes to post-holiday funk, we’re loaded for bear.

It’s fair to say that we don’t have a reputation as a jam band. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done it a whole lot. Big Green rehearsals were usually just jam sessions, interrupted periodically by some swearing and hand waving. Our gigs were kind of ragged back in the day, and I’m not at all sure what we would sound like live right now, on planet Earth, with its normal gravity and its oxygen-rich air. Not the same as playing on the semi-molten surface of Neptune. Nothing like the venues on Henson’s Planet. (What are those like? Well, I guess you’ll just have to ask Henson.)

Okay, our rehearsals were weird, but never THIS weird.

I guess what brought this to mind was listening back to some old live recordings we have kicking around the mill. They’re all on analog audio cassettes, so I have to plug them into Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who helpfully has a cassette deck built into his abdomen, and a couple of mini stereo speakers on either side of his oddly misshapen brass head. (He’s like a walking ’80s boombox … except for the walking part.) Anyway, we would extend cover songs to keep people dancing or milling about or doing whatever they were doing that didn’t involve chucking things at us. That typically entailed some longish guitar solo by whoever was working with us at that time – either the amazing Jeremy Shaw or the astonishing Tony “Ace” Butera, either one of whom could shred hard enough to peel the paint off the walls. (Though, in all honesty, most of the venues we played in those days didn’t have a lot of paint left on the walls.)

So … here’s to the funky jam. Kick out the jams, motherfuckers. Let me hear you say “yeah.” Now let me hear you say “Madagascar”. Now … uh … I got nothing.