Tag Archives: Marvin

Usual Rubbish

Trying not to be anti-social on social media

Get Music Here

You know, there are better things you could be doing with your time. Like, I don’t know …. mowing the lawn. Oh, right – we don’t have a lawn. How about rearranging the bricks in the courtyard? That’s one task that won’t do itself. Or beating the rugs. Mind you, I’m not a big fan of corporal punishment, but they’ve really crossed a line with me over the past few weeks.

Oh, hello, reader(s). You just caught me in the middle of berating Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for not being industrious enough. Yes, I know – he’s an automaton, he only responds to programming, I’m not being fair, etc., etc. The thing is, I don’t know how to program a robot, and his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, is not speaking to anyone this week. All I have left is a dressing down, robot or no.

Multi-platform clusterfuck

Marvin has a few responsibilities as my personal robot assistant. One is taking charge of Big Green’s social media presence. I should say here that Marvin is in no way an expert in this area. (You could pretty much say that about any area.) When it came to deciding who would take that job on, however, we quickly determined that none of us know anything about it. Ultimately, it came down to him being a robot. That’s a lot closer to being the internet than we humans are.

Not every band is successful online. In fact, many are not. But few are as unsuccessful online as Big Green. I hate to be boastful here, but if they gave out a trophy for being obscure, we would have walked away with it a dozen times over. We’ve been on online platforms for almost twenty years, starting with MP3.com, which isn’t even a thing anymore, then The Orchard, CDBaby, and a few others I can’t even remember. Our sales? Less than stellar. Let’s just say, we’ve got some remainders lying about.

Find us on Face-where?

Then there’s the major social media sites/apps, like Facebook, etc. Big Green has been on Facebook for, I don’t know, ten years? More? Not sure. We started a Twitter feed ages ago, but we only got onto Instagram earlier this year. Mostly, these platforms are designed so that your listeners can interact with you easily, share posts, etc. We get some of that, but not much, and don’t sell anything via any of those sites. (I blame Marvin.)

Well, get to it, man!

Actually, with the low number of visits we get, our Facebook page is probably the safest place on the internet. You can probably store your passwords, bank account and routing numbers, and social security number on there and they would all be safe as houses. Ditto with Twitter. I give Big Green a few mercy likes on Twitter posts, but not too often, because mostly their content is crap. (What am I saying??) Instagram gets a little more activity, but in the grand scheme of things, we’re a dead letter on social media. Own it, baby – own it!

New horizons

Anyone else would just give it up. But not us. We don’t know the meaning of the word quit. We think it has something to do with work, but none of us is sure. And since we have a general aversion to work, our consideration goes no farther than that.

Anyway, we just signed up for BandCamp and set up a new page at big-green.bandcamp.com. Why did we do it? Well, like Everest, it’s there … and we’re not. Except that now we are. Hey, if you’re on BandCamp, give us a mercy follow. That’s right – encourage us!

Usual Rubbish

Planning a tour on the ground floor

Get Music Here

Okay, I really think you have the order of operations wrong. One thing has to come before the other thing, and you’ve got the wrong thing first. Dude, it’s not that hard – why are you blinking those lights so frantically? This isn’t differential calculus … whatever the hell THAT is.

Oh, hey, out there in normal people land. Just having a little conversation here, nothing to get excited about. Just a handful of friends getting together for a quick jawbone. That’s a big motherfucker, man. I’ve seen smaller jawbones on a donkey. Whoa, is that the time? Okay, well … gotta go, guys! Great chewing the fat with you.

Right … now that I’m out of earshot, JEEEsus, what a bunch of asshats. That’s what I get for raising the issue of touring again. Let me ‘splain.

Cart before the horse

You know the old saying: don’t put the cart before the horse. For one thing, the horse might decide to drive away in the cart. And if you’re applying a different meaning to the expression “put X before Y”, you should always prioritize animals over inanimate objects. That’s a no brainer. (Or perhaps a YES brainer. But I digress.)

I guess the point is, I seem to me among a stark minority of members of Big Green’s broader entourage who believe that we should RECORD and RELEASE an album before we go on tour promoting it, not after. Not sure why I feel that way, but I do, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) can’t get his little brass head around that idea. I mean, I can understand why antimatter Lincoln would be in favor of the before plan – he’s from that backwards universe where everyone eats corn on the cob vertically rather than horizontally.

I don't know, Abe. That doesn't look right to me.

What’s that you say?

Now, some of you out there may be asking, what album? And yes, I know lately we’ve been doing little more than posting old archival video of us playing random songs. But just because there’s snow on the roof doesn’t mean there isn’t snow in the living room as well. (I’ve got to stop using so many cliches, particularly the ones that don’t make any sense.) The simple fact is, we’ve got some songs … a whole lot of them.

What are we doing with said songs? We’re incubating the fuckers. We’re tossing parts back and forth, writing chord charts, barking into microphones, squinting at pages of poorly recorded verse. We’re pulling things apart and patching them back together with bailing wire and scotch tape. We’re …. killing time, frankly. It’s just fun to play new stuff, even when you’re doing it over the internets.

Why the internets? Matt is sequestered in his naturalist redoubt, watching birds, feeding beavers, and somehow writing scores of new songs. So we use sophisticated web-based technology to do our dirty work. Because that’s how we roll.

Where to begin. So many choices.

Now, if we were to go on tour … AFTER finishing the new album, we could start on that pulsar I talked about last week. Nobody’s played there yet, so we could finally be the first to market with something. (Damn, we suck at capitalism!)

Usual Rubbish

Hello, Captain Neutron – we are receiving you

Get Music Here

Sure, there’s probably a reasonable explanation behind it. Why wouldn’t there be? Lord knows, everything we know is firmly rooted in reality. Except, of course, for our upstairs neighbors. And Mitch Macaphee. Yes, yes … and Anti Lincoln, too, but only when he’s drunk. Which is most of the time.

Just spending a little time as a Big Green family, sitting around the hammer mill, reading the headlines to one another. Now, as you know, we can’t afford a subscription to the real newspaper. That’s way beyond our humble means! Luckily, there are the internets. All you need to do is borrow a little wi-fi, do a search or two, and voila! Instant news. Not terrestrial news, you understand – that would cost money. No, we read news from outer space. It’s fresh, it’s interesting, and there’s always a head-scratcher or two in there.

From a land beyond time

Here’s something, Bob! (Your name is Bob, right? I always assumed that was the case.) A strange radio-emitting neutron star has been discovered in a stellar graveyard. Now, I know what you’re going to say. We shouldn’t be so morbid, reading about stellar graveyards. Why not focus more on what’s happening in stellar nurseries? Hey, you know, we find news wherever we can. If it leads us into stellar graveyards, so be it. Don’t be so judgmental, Bob!

Still, you have to admit that it’s interesting. I mean, what are the chances that another race from a land beyond time would have stumbled on the same invention that Marconi did? Even more intriguing, they appear to be trying to communicate with us, via radio. It seems to me that we should be able to decipher their language relatively easily. Why? If they’re on the surface of a neutron star, whatever they’re saying must be the deep-space equivalent of GET ME THE HELL OUT OF HERE! We just work backwards from there.

I think it's trying to tell us something, Lincoln.

Strange magnetism

At the same time, scientists are detecting a new type of magnetic wave emitting from the earth’s chewy center. Is this a coincidence? I think not! The coincidence of these two stories on the same week is certainly no coincidence. (Wait, what?) I think it’s only right that we speculate on why this is happening at this particular juncture. To my tiny mind, there is only one possibility …. mother earth is responding to the neutron radio waves with magnetic fields. It’s like neutron man is calling collect, and she’s accepting the charges. Like any good mother would.

Skeptical? Well, there’s really only one way to test this theory. We need to break out Trevor James Constable’s patented Orgone Generating Device. The thing’s been in mothballs since we used it to bail Anti-Lincoln out with those crypto-kidnappers last year. But dramatic rescues are only one of the device’s practical uses. It can core a apple, make mounds of julienne fries, raise pole cats, and interpret interstellar communications, particularly those emanating from invisible flying predators.

Point it to the sky, Mack!

Damn, I wish we were more resourceful. If we had half the moxie of those forties guys that used to sing backup in our Ned Trek songs, we would have solved this mystery by now. As it is, it’s taking most of the week just to drag the Orgone Generating Device up from the cellar. And then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has first dibs on it. (He’s making julienne fries.)