Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

Parts and parcels.

What is this … another carton? This one’s from Madagascar, no less. What the hell. Does it rattle when it shakes? Does it roll? If when it shakes it both rattles and rolls, it might be Jerry Lee Lewis.

For the life of me, I don’t know who’s ordering all of these packages. They just show up at the door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (Big Green’s longtime squat-house) and subsequently disappear. At first I thought it might be Mitch Macaphee, but he has long since abandoned the notion of ordering goods from various merchants. He just invents whatever he needs, which is a handy skill to have. (Perhaps the handiest!) Then I thought maybe anti-Lincoln was behind all of this mail order, since some of the boxes came from Urban Outfitters. (He’s taken to a more cosmopolitan wardrobe of late. Very smart.)

I know, I know – I tend to get a little suspicious, living in a condemned post-industrial hulk like I do. A few months here and you start to see conspiracies around every corner. What are those mice talking about? Do the crows in the courtyard wish me well or ill? Perhaps it is THEY who are ordering stuff from Crate and Barrel. Maybe they need crates and barrels for something, I don’t know. Idle minds, right?

A bit too far, Marvin. Just saying.Someone’s handing me a note. It reads, “You idiot. It’s probably Marvin (your personal robot assistant). Mitch Macaphee just made him wi-fi compatible.” Oh, right. So Marvin doesn’t even need a smart phone to buy a bunch of useless junk on credit. All he needs is the credit. Fortunately, he doesn’t have … doesn’t have … hey … where’s my wallet? MARVIN!!

Okay, Marvin has been using this magnetic lock gizmo ever since he saw one on Lost In Space reruns. My guess is that he’s down in his basement room, frozen like a statue in his magnetic lock, placing orders over wi-fi without even lifting a finger. And the boxes that come are probably piling up around him like a fortress – a fortress of consumer joy! Doesn’t that remind you of Christmas?

Anyway, if I’m in the pokey the next time I post, it will be that mindless robot’s fault. See if he’ll let you use my credit card to bail me out.

Usual Rubbish

Pluto did it.

They say that Pluto is a big surprise. That may be true for most people, even rocket scientists, but not for the interstellar collective known as Big Green. Ha, ha!

I mean, that stuff about surface features suggesting frozen bodies of methane – um, we knew that. What the hell, you don’t even have to GO to Pluto to know that much. All you need is Mitch Macaphee’s trans-dimensional light-enhancement planetometer. He showed me the gizmo just this past weekend. It looks strangely like that old oscillator we picked up at a garage sale. I guess he probably hollowed it out and filled it with some of that mad science technology. Now it flashes on and off like a … uh … like a flashy thing.

Well, Mitch can tell a lot about distant, frozen planets just by looking at those little lights go on and off. When I tell him about NASA’s revelations, he just rolls his eyes, then mouths the word “NASA” while he makes a face. I know, you probably think he’s still sore over the fact that the agency rejected him when he applied as a teenager, but I think he almost has to be more mature than that. How would he get through the day if he obsessed over every little slight? Such an attitude would have turned him into a deeply bitter, paranoid wreck of a man. Which, of course … um … he is. So that thing I just said … strike that.

Cold, eh? I knew that. We’re thinking about stopping over to Pluto for a brief engagement, maybe four or five shows, back to back. Which sounds shorter than it is. See, if we play consecutive days, it will take something like a month, because each Plutonian day is worth more than 6 Earth days. (See … Mitch told me that, too. HE knows all aBOUT Pluto.) We’re going to try out a few of our Ned Trek songs and see if the Plutonians start throwing frozen methane at us. (Not much more to put your hands on out there, frankly.)

Well, be that as it may. We’re posting a new, old episode of Ned Trek. That’s my news.

Usual Rubbish

Just whistle.

I’m sorry – that’s as soft as a piano will go. The very word “piano” means soft, for chrissake. (Sure, piano is short for pianoforte, which means “soft – loud/strong”, implying dynamics, but that’s beside the point!) Just get some freaking earplugs already!

Neighbors. I guess you have to have them, even when you’re living in an abandoned hammer mill. I like to think that we make every effort to be good neighbors. I like to think it because, well, it isn’t true, and thinking things that aren’t true is something of a hobby of mine. Actually, we are crappy neighbors – up until all hours of the night, banging on noisy instruments, tooting on sousaphones, launching rockets, creating energy dampening fields that affect entire continents (note: those last two are down to our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee).

Our neighbor to the north, a guy named Wilson, has been leaving subtle hints that we are making too much noise. Today, for instance, there was a scroll of parchment posted to our front door with a railroad spike. (Apparently Wilson used to work for New York Central or Amtrak or something.) The parchment had two words scrawled on it in a shaky hand: “TOO LOUD”. I brought it to Anti-Lincoln (who has become our de facto legal adviser, being the only individual amongst us to have attended law school in some centrury) so that he might determine the full implications of this writ. He scanned it with a look of consternation, then offered in his characteristically reedy alto voice, “Yep. Somebody writ it.” Not sure where we’d be without him. (Someplace more permanent, perhaps.)

Well? What does it mean?In spite of what our neighbors think (or demand), making music is an intrinsically noisy business. We are working on an album, for chrissake. That means take after take, recording rhythm parts, experimenting with sound – painstaking work that generates a lot of ambient sound, despite Mitch Macaphee’s efforts to soundproof our makeshift studio. His latest attempt involved having Marvin (my personal robot assistant) hold up sheets of foam core, one in each claw. Did it work? Your answer is nailed to our front door.

Well, we’ll plow on in any case. That’s what we do. If we didn’t do that, we’d have to do something else. And then I just don’t know what we would do. (Got all that?)