Hammer Mill Days

Hey, you know what? I saw a car pass in front of the mill today, just a few minutes ago. Amazing, right? Wait a minute ... there goes another one! Yeah, I guess you can tell that this town is dying. No doubt about it ... since the old Cheney Hammer Mill shut down, there's no reasonable way of making a living around here. Some stragglers work at the corner CVS, a handful more at the non-name convenience market across the street. It's just plain dead. Damn good thing we don't perform any more, or we'd be starving to death for lack of paying gigs. Sure ... we're starving, but it's for an entirely different reason: inertia! You know what they say, though. (That's all I've got on that, because, after all, you know what they say, so I don't have to tell you.) There are a lot of things you can do while standing still - one of them is mixing. That's what we're doing ... or that's what I'm doing, anyway - rhythm tracks, mixes, blah blah b...

It seems like just yesterday we were staring at a line of 20 or more lunatics vying for the Republican nomination. And now, a few short months later, it's all over bar the shouting. And there will be shouting, make no mistake. Donald Trump is now the presumptive nominee of the Republican party, as per Reince Priebus, and his two last competitors, "lyin'" Ted Cruz and "non-descript" John Kasich have dropped out of the race. Poor Kasich ... he never did well enough even to get a decent Trump nickname. That's got to hurt. Kidding aside, we have a major problem - namely that one of the two people that can possibly become president of the United States is now Donald Trump. With regard to governing policy, foreign or domestic, this man is a monumental ignoramus and a congenital liar. Worse, he engages in these incendiary rants that stoke the flames of hatred and bigotry, recalling a violent past that he often invokes when urging his flock towards toughness. ...

Bloody hell ... my mirror cracked. No, I didn't smash it with a hammer ... I just looked into it, trying to freaking shave. Jesus, I'm old. Hey .. can I use your mirror? Yeah, we're cracking mirrors around here, no doubt about it. Looking back on about 30 years of making music under the same moniker, and it's a little stupefying, frankly. True fact: Big Green was founded in 1986 and it's still kind of rolling, give or take a few members. But regardless of the lineup, we still have the same DNA. The clueless core has remained intact ... it hasn't gone sub-critical yet. That's 'cause we're blood, man. Blood brothers, inseparable. (Particularly so, since Matt does most of the work.) As we continue working on the next raft of songs, I've been taking a few minutes here and there to listen to our previous releases, for context if nothing else. Actually, part of it is taking note of stuff that I hate so that I can resolve not to make the same bonehe...

It's shaping up to be an election to remember. For one thing, the television coverage is so obsessive you couldn't ignore it if you tried. But more importantly, I think, the selection is going to be ... well ... less than optimal, let's say. All right - downright scary. Had to get that out there. The last group of northeastern states favored the front-runners pretty heavily, and it seems almost inevitable that we will be choosing between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. That situation will set in motion some strange dynamics that will likely cut across the standard notions of what each party stands for. I can picture, for instance, Clinton attacking Trump from the right on some aspects of foreign policy. Hard to predict what the effect of that might be. The most disconcerting part of this likely scenario is the prospect of living through one, maybe two terms of rule by either an egotistical man-child-billionaire or a corporatist Democrat. Of course, I far prefer the latt...

I told you yesterday about the roof. Now the internet is down. No, not the WHOLE internet ... OUR internet, dumbass! And that electricity you tapped from the house next door? Well ... that's run dry as well. Damned squathouses! Okay, so these are not the easiest days around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, and we of the Big Green collective are having to think our way through some truly daunting problems. This is pretty basic stuff, right? Keeping the rain out when it rains. (Right now, our roof only keeps the rain out when it's sunny.) Surfing the internet in your socks. Plugging the electric can opener in and having it do what it's made to do, not sit there like a paperweight. Stuff that any band should expect to be able to do, even when they're squatting in an abandoned hammer factory. But noooooo ... not us. No, Marvin! For chrissake. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) heard what I just told you and took it into his little tin head that he should try to open...

The New York primary is history, and I am not alone, I'm sure, in feeling somewhat disappointed, if not surprised. Sure, we all knew that the Empire State would be an uphill battle for Bernie Sanders, but when you get all these texts and phone calls from volunteers, and you are visited at home not once but TWICE by canvassers, one group of whom told me (accurately) where my polling place was, you start to imagine a better outcome. Those kids did pretty good upstate, actually - Sanders won my home county along with almost every other county north of Westchester. I hope they draw some encouragement from that. What is kind of discouraging, however, is the mess that New York State elections often turn out to be. We actually have fairly restrictive voter laws. No early voting, no same day registration, excuse-only absentee balloting, and a lot of weird business, like all of those voters shut out in Brooklyn this time around. I'm not claiming any conspiracy. It's just a kind of...

Hey, Matt .. what was that joke about the wooden balls again? Oh, right. Nah ... it doesn't work very well without the visual. Scratch that. Oh, hello. We are, of course, working on the next installment of our podcast. It's like the freaking Forbin Project, for chrissake. Takes us months to write the sucker, record it, edit it, compose and record songs, cut it all together, upload it, then collapse in a heap. (That last part actually happens kind of quickly.) Sometimes you want to just shout, "Enough!", throw up your hands and walk away. Mic drop! But no, my friends, no ... the show must go on. That said, well ... it HAS been kind of a long time. So we dropped another installment of our Ned Trek podcast - that's the show that is just Ned Trek and no random jabbering between me and my brother. This month's installment is extracted from one of last year's THIS IS BIG GREEN episodes, Ned Trek 23: Mitt's Brain . Based on the Spock's Brain episode ...