Tag Archives: VHS

Usual Rubbish

Steady Cam.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Try to stand still, man. You’re shaking the picture. It looks like there’s an earthquake going on, like Big Green meets the last days of Pompeii. That was a volcano? Okay, so …. Big Green meets the big one. Or Big Green bites the big one. Now that’s more believable.

Oh, hi, Big Green fans. Sure, we know you’re not “fans”, exactly … just casual acquaintances who drop by every once in a while to see what’s on fire at the mill this time around. We’ll take it! Sorry to disappoint – there’s nothing on fire at the moment. I’m, of course, not counting the perpetual St. Elmo’s fire that our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee has had burning in his lab since the day he got here. (And no, I don’t mean he has a VHS tape of the movie running in perpetuity – he actually has a plasma corona discharge simulator in his lab … running in perpetuity. I think he likes the glow.) No, we’re having a normal week for once. Though our normal is, well, not particularly normal. More nermal than normal. Nothing blew up, that’s basically it.

As you know, we’ve been trying – like many other bands – to adjust to the virtual marketplace in this era of Coronavirus shutdowns and social distancing. And like many bands from a previous era, we’re having more than our share of difficulties. Doing performances on Zoom, for instance, is less than optimal, even for musicians who have some facility with digital technologies. For people like us, it’s just hopeless, and we have had to resort to other, less frequently used technologies, like long cardboard tubes, or old-style megaphones, or just hiring someone to carry our tunes around in a bucket. (Fact is, nobody in this town could carry a tune in a bucket to save his or her life.) For people used to just standing on a stage and letting the music happen, for better or for worse, this pandemic is …. well …. lethal!

Can you try to get both me AND the piano into the shot ... Scorcese?

This week, though, we stumbled upon another option. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has a body cam built into him. I think his inventor, Mitch Macaphee, was imagining he could sell Marvin to the police for use as a ludicrous robo-cop of some sort, but that didn’t pan out. Anyhow, Marvin can be our camera operator, and because he’s set up for wi-fi, we can route him into our hacked modem, push the signal up to the main fiber hub, and send our music out to thousands of potential listeners. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have the capacity to record anything, so we have to do all of our songs live. And damn it, the fucker just can’t stand still. Every time we count something in, he starts rolling around. I think he’s trying to pull off a crane shot or something. We keep telling him to stop watching music videos so much, but these are COVID times, and frankly, he’s got little else to do.

Okay, so when you see a performance from us, if it looks a little shaky, that’s NOT because we live in a fault zone. It’s artistry at work, my friends. Cinematic artistry.

Usual Rubbish

So it is written.

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2000 Years to Christmas

Well, maybe we should use one of those ram horns … you know, just to let people know we’re coming. Or we could wave a herder’s staff about like some kind of crazy goon. THAT would be impressive. So many good ideas.

Yeah, you’ve found your way back to Big Green land. Here in the mostly abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, home only to our sorry selves and the nasty neighbors upstairs, we’ve been hashing out the particulars of our eventual return to the public stage. Oh, yes … make no mistake about it. We will be back, and we will be bad. Really bad. Possibly unlistenable, partly due to advance age. Older people playing rock and roll is a bit like the Three Stooges in their dotage – somehow slapstick comedy being played out by geezers is something other than funny. It’s kind of pathetic, frankly …. but I will allow that music is a bit more forgiving, as long as we don’t try to jump up and down and climb up into the rafters of a civic center like we’re apes. (We may be apes … but not the climbing kind.)

We’ve been told that our gigs back in the day were the stuff of legend. I can believe it, because legends – like our performances – are entirely unsubstantial. You would search in vain to find video of even a single one of our gigs. (Lord knows I can’t find a single one. Rare as hen’s teeth! In fact, even rarer – I found at least a dozen hen’s teeth while looking for our videos. So it is written.) Still, you’d think even in the absence of digital video cameras in every cell phone there would be a handful of VHS tapes lying about. All we have, for crying out loud, is us on that crazy demo that some dude named Angel shot, and getting THAT away from him involved a whole lot of crying out loud.

I know, man, I know. Just pretend he's not there.

Now, there are some advantages to having an in-house mad scientist, at least when he’s not out on some mad science junket with the rest of his clan. Mitch Macaphee has postulated that we can use some of his hyper-sensitive instruments to reach back into the space-time continuum and pull audio signals out back from decades long dead. It takes a little fine-tuning, of course, but he thinks it’s possible. Apparently it’s a little easier to get images back than it is to retrieve sound, though Mitch says the images tend to get muddled with random items from the present day, like social media memes and the like. He showed us a couple of examples, one of which I’ve included in this post for your edification. Mitch thinks we can even enlist Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to follow the signals back to yesteryear … or at least, yestermonth … and drag some of our lost performances back with him. Just full of ideas, that Mitch. Wish to hell he could make a decent pot of coffee. (It always tastes like he brewed it in his boot.)

Usual Rubbish

Don’t let it be.

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Why not? Because I said so, damn it. Will you just listen to me once? No, Marvin, no. We’re far to … uh … well-done for that. Too crispy. If “The Colonel” saw us, he’d try to put us in a bucket with some nice pre-fab buttermilk biscuits. Mmmmm boy.

Oh, hello. Funny that you always seem to show up when we’re having a little disagreement over here. Nothing serious, you understand – just a difference of opinion. Between me and a robot. Not just any robot, of course – I mean Marvin (my personal robot assistant). I should keep him off Facebook, frankly. That’s where he saw that article that’s been driving him frantic ever since. It was probably planted on Facebook by the IRA – the Internet Robotics Agency – as a black ops effort against gullible automatons.

What’s the story about? Glad you asked. It was a piece about how filmmaker Peter Jackson is going to make a documentary out of hours of archived film footage of the Beatles originally gathered for the movie Let It Be. That got Marvin thinking … maybe WE could do something like that. First, find a director (preferably a famous, gullible one), then send him all of our home movies from the past thirty or thirty-five years. Make it forty. After that, they could shoot interviews of all of us while we talk about the content on the footage and make pithy comments while the Director checks his phone. Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?

Make a movie out of THAT?Of course it bloody doesn’t! What, point hi-def video cameras at our superannuated faces? Nothing doing. And as far as the archival footage goes, what we have is so rough and so primitive I doubt anyone would be able to interpret the hazy dark shapes on the screen in a way that would suggest real human activity. What director is going to take a bunch of VHS tapes and make a documentary? The idea is ludicrous, and yet Marvin is married to it, much like that time he married that stamp vending machine over at the corner drug store. The only thing that worked about that marriage was when it came to putting postage on the wedding invitations. In that respect, it was a match made in heaven.

So, short story, we’re not doing it … no matter what the black ops people say.