Holy hell. Is that thing on again? Well then, what’s that little red light for? And the countdown box…. Twenty-five, twenty-four, twenty-three….
Oh well. While we’re trying to figure out what’s going on there… What’s been happening here at the mill? Usual stuff. Keeping the roof on, as they say, and the fridge stocked with lunchables. (Or, at least, snackables.) You have to be versatile to please the mix of tastes we have around this joint. Take Lincoln (please). Now, he’s a fan of chicken fricassee. Of course, being a vegetarian, I won’t have anything to do with the stuff, but that doesn’t stop him. He keeps putting it on the shoplifting… I mean, the shopping list. And I keep coming back with tofu. (He’s no happier now than he was in 1863.)
But it takes more than food to make a life. We’ve been working on the next album, as you know. Quite a process. Some of you have been on the inside of our album construction activities, some not. For those of you who haven’t witnessed this first-hand, here’s a little peek inside our methodology. We start with a big boatload of songs. This time, it’s a mishmash of about 60 or 70 numbers that we’ve done demos for at one point or another. Now you may wonder how, with so many possibilities, we could possibly arrive at a decision on the final project list. There are a number of things Big Green considers… and they include:
- Specific Gravity – This is a no-brainer. If the specific gravity of a song is
too heavy, we try making an alloy by blending it with some more light-hearted material. Failing that, we scrap the sucker. Perhaps the constituent parts will come in handy (they sometimes go into making a first-rate pedal bike). - Stock Value – Something that relates back to what I was talking about before, with the chicken fricassee. Before we consider recording a song, we put the lyrics in a pot of water and simmer it for six hours. If it produces a broth that can be used in pilaf or gravy, it’s a keeper.
- Particularness – I don’t know if I can explain this. I’m looking for some word in particular… mmm, can’t think of it. Oh well… it will come to me.
These and 37 other parameters give us all the data we need to make an informed choice. That’s why we say… the quality goes in before… oh wait. That’s someone else. What do we say? (It’ll come to me….)
Oh, hi out there in TV land. Just attempting to plumb the depths of what has become a rather large rend in the garment of our adoptive home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill here in upstate New York. We’re just getting a preliminary read here, but I’d say this sucker goes down pretty far. Maybe to the center of the Earth (or, to use the term New York-based geoscientists commonly employ, the “oit”). In fact, I have some pretty good evidence that this crack goes straight through the nougat to the chewy center of our lively little planet. What evidence, you ask? The first-hand kind… as in robot hand… as in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who volunteered to, well, dive down there and take a look.
technician – Marvin’s creator, Mitch Macaphee – and asked him to program into Marvin the willingness to volunteer for such a dangerous task, which Mitch did in a trice. No problem for an experience mad scientist. There were a few glitches, of course – in essence, Marvin’s mouth was saying “I volunteer” but his legs were pedaling in the other direction. (Those magnetic-drive casters produce some torque, let me tell you.) That aside, we managed to get a rope around him, strap a flashlight to his forehead, put a cell phone in his claw, and lower him down into the abyss. Fortunately, Marvin’s eyes double as web cams, so we were able to see the underground landscape unfold before him – fascinating journey, as that Australian interior designer might say in a totally different context. Care for a Foster’s? (Product placement – hey, got to keep the lights on somehow, right?)
seventy-five, or even one hundred miles below us. But as far as I’m concerned, anything down there belongs to US. That’s right… a pie-slice shaped vector of earth stretching from the perimeter of the hammer mill down to the core of this planet – a colossal spike of mineral wealth – belongs to us, at least as far as our new legal advisor Anti-Lincoln can tell. Yes, I know what you’re going to say… why, WHY would we consult someone as untrustworthy and disreputable as anti-Lincoln, the literal antithesis of our most revered president? A man with no scruples, no ethics… what kind of a lawyer could he possibly be? OUR kind.
Yeah, that’s me… and yes, I’m doing a cover by The Contours, circa 1962. Got to keep the lights on somehow. If it takes encouraging a bunch of over-swilled woodchucks to do the “Mashed Potato”, so be it. And in case some of you feel as though I’m being less than charitable or disrespecting my fellow upstate New Yorkers, think (or feel) again – I am playing for actual woodchucks, and they’ve been drinking hard cider all night. Tell you something right now – if you think human beings have a corner on inebriation, you’ve never played the Chuck House (seven blocks south of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill). I sincerely encourage you not to. You know how human drunks have a tendency to throw bottles? Well, here at the Chuck House, hard cider is served in little wooden kegs. That’s probably all I need to tell you about that. (INCOMING!)
got to scrape a few semolians together somehow, right? And these days, between Big Green interstellar (or even terrestrial) tours, I’ll take what I can get. Can you blame me? I’m tired of eating out of discarded pizza boxes and running my finger around the inside of empty soup cans. No more fighting the mongooses for bits of breadfruit (those bits that they don’t want) or pulling the bark off of baobab trees to see if there are any tender grubs to be had. (Not that I would EAT them, you understand. No, no… I train them to hunt for vegetables. Painstaking work.)
hard, hard times. We’re all finding ways to make a little extra on the side. Matt, for instance, is giving bird and wildlife tours. How can he stand all those grandmothers and boy scouts, you ask? Well…. he doesn’t run into any. The fact is, he’s bringing wild birds and animals around on tours, showing them the local points of interest. They can’t pay very much, it’s true – a desiccated pine cone is all he made yesterday – but it’s a job, and someone has to do it. The two Lincolns are doing a mutt and jeff routine down in the village square in hopes of garnering a few tips. So far, no luck… though some passers-by have offered unsolicited advice to the two… valuable tips like “Get a life!” and “Where did you losers come from?” and, of course, “Come back here! You’re supposed to pay for those kaiser rolls!” (I get that last one a lot.)