Tag Archives: YouTube

Usual Rubbish

Squat of the future.

Are you still tinkering with that thing? Holy shit, I thought you were a scientist. What kind of scientist spends a week screwing the legs into a mail-order ottoman? Whoa, Mitch …. put the hammer down. HEY!

Greetings, Big Green die-hards. This is what I sound like a moment after someone tries to brain me with a flying hammer. Our friend and mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is not all that pleased with me right now. I shouldn’t have asked how his latest experiment is progressing. Don’t know what he’s working on, but I can tell you that it came out of an Ikea box. Maybe it’s an ottoman, or perhaps a chesterfield. Kind of hard to tell from ten paces.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Mitch is a mad scientist in the traditional sense, right? His stock in trade is formulating theorems to crack the earth in half or poison the atmosphere (not that we aren’t already doing that without his help), BIG stuff … not build-it-yourself furnishings or other petty household trifles. Well, all I can say is, never underestimate the inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He is truly ahead of the curve on domestic mad science, and that’s largely because of some YouTube clips he’s been watching on the Internet of Things (IOT).

Talking fridgeRight, so … Mitch spent a few weeks YouTubing, and the next thing we knew he was tinkering with our aging refrigerator. The following day, Matt opened the fridge door and the little light went on. Hey … he’s finally making himself useful, we all thought. But then the thing started talking to me. One afternoon I reached in for a cold drink and I heard a mechanical voice say, “Are you going to have another one of those?” Then it locked the door on me. That was bad enough, but just this past week we started getting random shipments from the neighborhood grocer – eggs, milk, cottage cheese, lettuce. I thought it was Anti Lincoln planning one of his famous cotillions, but no … Mitch had hooked the fridge up to the internet, and the bloody thing has been shopping online and spending a freaking fortune.

So, hell … if Mitch takes a little heat on his home improvement projects, he has it coming. Not sure why an ottoman needs a gun mount, though …

Usual Rubbish

Old continent, new name.

A little higher. Little more. That’s it. Right, now … slowly lower the winch. That’s got it. Okay, a little too fast. Too fast. I said TOO FAST! Oh, Jesus. Right … order another banner. No wonder I never get anything done.

Oh, hello. Forgive me if I always seem surprised when you come along. I’m inclined to forget about the blogging version of the “fourth wall” and the fact that others can see what the hell I’m doing (or not doing). Today you’ve caught me and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) in the midst of constructing Big Green’s new YouTube Channel, hot off the presses. You see, for the longest time we’ve been pointing our listeners/readers/browsers, whatever, to my personal YouTube channel, which has over the last few years become choked with political content, obscure linguistics and philosophy of mind lectures, comedic bullshit, and so on. It finally dawned on my dim little brain that the band needed its own space for video content, and hey presto – a summer project was born.

Why not, indeed?

The timing of our YouTube launch is not entirely an accident. As I mentioned in previous posts, I have been trawling through old tapes, discs, etc., listening to and watching recordings of performances from our terrestrial live performance days back in the 1990s. Over the past few weeks, I cut up a video demo we recorded back in March of 1993 with the guitarist we worked with at that time, the amazing Jeremy Shaw. The video is standard def, 4:3, and a little strange. We taped these performances in a practice room somewhere in Utica – as I recall it was a loft-like space within a couple of blocks of the Police Department headquarters. (Could explain why we look so polite.)

There are some cheesy visual effects inserted at the time of the recording – basically presets in the camera our videographer was using. (The videographer was a dude named Angel whom we met through a mutual friend.) They add a certain trippyness to the whole business, but no matter. Hilariously, the rehearsal space was a typical rock band man-cave environment circa 1993, with cheesecake posters on the walls and overstuffed ashtrays. (Just behind my illustrious brother you’ll notice the incongruous sight of some babe posing for the camera.)

Usual Rubbish

Toast terrific.

Damn it. Misplaced my breakfast again. Third time this morning. I definitely need more sleep. If anybody trips over some cold toast and a half-empty mug of tea, drop me a line.

We keep odd hours here in the cohort of collectivists known as Big Green. Matt, the naturalist in the group, is up at all hours chasing after critters, feeding them, changing their diapers, keeping them safe from the elements. That’s a slight exaggeration, but only slight – the guy is attempting to single-handedly make up for all of the injustices meted out by god and man. Kind of time-consuming. Me? I am the unnaturalist in the group. When I am outside, I think to myself … “This is too strange for us, Hanar. We are creatures of outer space. We long for the comforting closeness of walls.”

Okay, if I’m paraphrasing classic Star Trek, I must be a little groggy. (Too much grog, perhaps.) I’m up late at night in the lab, sometimes. Did I say lab? I meant studio. Cranking up the keyboard, jamming along with drum loops, listening to old recordings and occasionally committing something to disc. Then I’ll climb the stairs to my bedroom and get halfway through a decent night’s sleep before Mitch Macaphee detonates some weakly controlled “experiment” in his lab (yes, lab), shaking the walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill to their very foundations. We’re not so different, Mitch and me. Profoundly sleep-deprived. Trying to make loud noises using sophisticated instruments. Nearly bringing the house down on our heads.

Lincoln, did you steal my toast?One of my obsessions of late has been rebuilding our YouTube site. That’s my hobby, if you will, until Matt returns from Peregrine Falcon watch. (To catch up with him, see his Falcon Watch blog.) We don’t have a lot of video to post as of late, but we do have archival material that may be of interest to those who have limped along after Big Green for lo these many years. I will drop a note to all and sundry when I launch the new YouTube channel. There will be a few takes from an old video demo in there, most likely, along with our usual compliment of strange videos.

Okay, down goes the toast. Turn the keys up to eleven. And Mitch is back in the lab, so … boom goes the dynamite.