Tag Archives: mitch

Usual Rubbish

The thing is.


Just settling in here. Man, but it’s good to be back home! If by home, you mean … something a little more congenial than this dank, drippy, drafty old mill.

It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green, being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket… and some oxygen.) It’s a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire… but not TOO close. It’s a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you.

So, yeah, it’s snowing, soon as we get here, and the freaking place is cold as a polar bear’s ass. Basically we’re confining ourselves to indoor activities. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is on the treadmill. Hour after hour he pedals away. What’s the point? Perhaps in his robot mind he is actually going somewhere interesting. (Actually, Matt thinks he’s road testing some new kind of lithium battery.) The Lincolns are catching up on their reading. Carl Sandberg is the selection this week. (Last week, too, as it happens.) And Mitch Macaphee? Off to the lab, creating something that may enable him to (dare I say it?) rule…. the world…! (Or perhaps making a club sandwich. Turns out it’s a very similar process.)

How am I wasting my time? Well… usually it’s my job to waste OTHER people’s time. But this week, bored, I opted to do a little video New Year’s greeting for all you folks out there. Just a brief tour of the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, a little look inside our “creative process” – what it looks like when we’re making the sausage we call “music” – and so on. I have posted same for your edification on our YouTube site and other internet haunts bearing our likenesses. Marvin was of some help, though…. his attention was divided, as per usual.

Man, it’s cold. Maybe I can get Mitch to try some kind of fusion reaction to generate a little heat in here. Not too hot, you understand…. (he measures everything in Kelvin scale).

 

New Year’s Video:

Usual Rubbish

Home for the helladays.


We’ll be home for Christmas? Only in your dreams.

Yes, I know… we should do the decent, right? Be with our families, etc. Alas, technology makes clueless monkeys of us all. This horrible rust-bucket leftover from some forgotten interplanetary invasion we rented as transport during our interstellar tour has blown yet another gasket or some such thing, per our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. He used a lot of big words, none of which I’d ever heard before (though Matt was familiar with several of them… strange…). The upshot is, we’re chugging along at subnormal speed, making our leisurely way back to Earth from the Kuiper Belt – last stop on the ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour.

So… like my cat Macky, we’re making the best of it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has fashioned a Christmas tree out of whatever was available. The mansized tuber has been coaxed out of his terrarium to serve as the aforementioned  “whatever was available”. John’s playing “Oh, Holy Night” on his four-string banjo. (I keep singing “Oh, Holy Shit!” to annoy him, but still he is not annoyed.) Lincoln and Anti-Lincoln are dec’ing the halls with clumps of Neptunian seaweed, considered a delicacy on Titan and a form of currency in the Kuiper Belt. (If you’re wondering how we were paid for all those performances on those tiny asteroids, wonder no more.) Yes, it’s quite festive out here in deep space.

Me? I’m telling holiday stories to anyone who will listen. Thing is, no one will listen. Actually, as rock bands go, we’ve got a lot of holiday related material. There’s our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas, of course, featuring 13 songs that use Christmas as raw material for songs that are about other things entirely. Few people know that that is the tip of the iceberg. During his salad days (i.e. back when he was rich enough to afford salad), Matt wrote and recorded about 60 or 70 songs themed on Christmas as cassette gifts for friends, relatives, etc. 2000 Years To Christmas is a sampler from that body of songs. Trust me, there are a lot more where that came from.

Fact is, we finished 16 songs for that project, so there are 3 unreleased numbers. One day … maybe next Christmas … you may find them under your tree. (Or under indictment.) In any case… have a happy.

Usual Rubbish

Lost in found.


That looks like my first pair of Chuck Taylors. Always wondered what happened to them. And there’s that bike that got stolen when I was twelve. And some pocket lint that looks very familiar.

Oh, hi, friends of Big Green. Glad this is getting out to you. WiFi is a little unreliable out here in the midst of the Kuiper Belt… all these particles and planetoids cause a boatload of interference, as you might well imagine. Yes, we did manage to navigate our way through the black hole that had parked itself next to that annoying Goldilocks Planet our label talked us into playing. (We now know why the Gliesians call the black hole “Papa Bear”). The advice we’d been given took us right into the old vortex. Turns out it’s just a transdimensional expressway back to the Kuiper Belt. Bit of good luck, that.

So, yeah… we’re here for the final leg of our somewhat anti-climactic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour 2010. Why anti-climactic? No climax… Why else? We’ve gone something like 60 gazillion miles in the last seven weeks and what the hell do we have to show, eh? No cash, no kudos, no nothing. Bloody flop.  Still, we’re indefatigable (except for the man-sized tuber, who hasn’t been out of his terrarium since three stops ago). So we’ve already spent a couple of days on Pluto, the big brass buckle of the Kuiper Belt, jamming out to a frozen house, making the icicles shake, rattle, and crack. (No rolling on Pluto. They have a code, you know.)

There are three things you need to know about this Kuiper Belt place. The first is that it’s bloody cold. I think you might have guessed. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has tanked out his battery half a dozen times since we got here. The second is that this place is like the solar system’s lost and found. Apparently everything that gets lost on Earth (and everywhere else in Sol’s neighborhood) ends up here. For instance, there are literally billions of odd socks floating around and between the asteroids. Explains a lot. That stuff they call “dark matter”? Socks. Just socks. I think it’s just centrifugal force, spinning everything out to the rim. Now you know.

The third thing is that… some of these venues are so small, it’s almost impossible to perform. Right now, I’m straddling two of these Kuiper Belt objects, my keys parked on a third, playing to an audience perched on dozens more within earshot. Keee-razy.