1/26/04


Unexpected feedback isn't always the kind you want. Think of traffic cops, for example, or the red-inked comments on your tenderly engendered English paper. Computers and cars always seem to think of the nastiest ways to complicate your life. Even nature gets in her two bits with bird poop and sunburn.

But feedback does have the constant positive trait of forcing you to step outside your own private Idaho, even if only for a moment, and gaze from the mirror with leftward reading eyes for a change. That's not a gift to be spurned or taken lightly. Any chance you have of harboring a variant worldview is survival provender, another opportunity to pick the approaching headlights out of the possum fog of everyday sameold sameold dronetime reality. More, it's a cheap yoga lesson in disguise, a window on what the other half sees.

I opened my PO box the other morning with the habitual mantra "Money in the mail" on my superstitious lips, to find that my prayer had been answered in the manifestation of an MO from a CD client. But there was a second envelope as well, oversized with a Eugene postmark and a return address to a fellow Chautauquan musician. Late yule card, I thought, and stuffed it in a jacket pocket on the way back to the van. I had an appointment to go get my speedometer checked and the letter looked like a good way to help pass the dreary waiting room time.

After I dropped the van off I hiked over to one of my favorite buildings in Seattle, the Starbucks headquarters with the mermaid goddess of commerce from their logo peeking out above the clock tower to all quarters of the compass, watching over her domain. Settling at a table in their ground floor coffee shop over a Seattle Weekly, strong black tea and a cinnamon bun, I cracked open the mystery missive. A card with a gorgeous shot of a house in full snow overcoat enclosed a folded letter, and as I unfolded it a $20 bill fell out. How now? Money in the mail from people I hardly even know? Sun must be in Aquarius.

The price of fame, it appeared -- the letter and the double sawski were a comment on a tg essay from a week or so back, in which I'd lamented in passing my lack of ownership of a really good guitar. My correspondent wished me well, but was compelled to reply to my self-imposed penury. As a pro musician (union member, no less), he felt the justifiable desire for the best working tools he could acquire. "I'm not going to let money stand in the way of my calling," he wrote. "It is my gosh darned life we're talking about here." An assertion after my own heart. And he urged me to get a fine instrument, saying that the pleasure and empowerment it would provide would far outweigh any initial expense, but equally arguing that "you of all people should be playing on the best instrument you can find."

To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. People wish me well on a regular basis, but few of those wishes are endorsed by Mister Andrew Jackson, and certainly not without considerable outlay of solicitation on my part. Here was advice that put its money where its should was. Admittedly, the donation was only a start, and if I was going to connect with a wire-strung hunk of sculpted wood of any lineage at all it was going to take a multiplication of a couple orders of magnitude. But I hear it's the thought that counts, and this one counted bidecimal.

I considered it. I considered it again. What I was facing was more than just an acquisitions and budgeting issue. It cut deep into my self-image, down where I equated nice things with impending damage and self-gratification with mortal chagrin. While I certainly try to be careful, I'm just not as adroit as I'd like with tender delicate tools of sonic projection. Or as our favorite (and heavily utilized) luthier put it, "Boy, you guys are hard on your instruments." It's telling that the only object of value that I've hung onto over the course of my adult life, my bass trombone, is solid brass.

But I also realized something else: while I'm justified in calling myself a good guitar player (after 40 years, I'd better be good, or else quit), I've always been a musical Sybil, multiple personalities sprouting from every new instrument I pick up, from didjeridoo to sitar, theremin to moog. Some I've picked up and gently put down again (or not so gently -- a misadventure with a borrowed standup bass comes to mind), others I've held in veneration but only bring out for special occasions, and more than a few have a regular slot in my practice rotation. For me to purchase a kilobuck guitar (archtop? flattop? solid? 6-string? 12-string?) would obligate me (at least in my own mind) to forsake all others and follow the One True Path. And even then, which path would that be -- jazz? blues? songwriting? freakin folk?

My wandering, distracted musical ways may well be the major influence on my instrument buying tastes -- I run to inexpensive, durable, loud, diverse and distinctively-voiced axes that allow some aspect of my personality and experience to express itself and won't rip out my guts with remorse if they get stepped on or run over at a craft fair or stolen or fall off a roof rack at 60 mph or freeze solid or any of the other thousand dire fates my hapless companions in music seem to attract like dust bunnies to a wallboard heater. And like Martha Stewart sez, that's a good thing.

But that don't mean I won't put the twenty aside as the seed of the Thaddeus Spae Legacy Guitar Fund Drive. I know a magical spell when I see one. And yes, all donations are cheerfully accepted.


1/19/04


As a red-blooded, rarin' tarin' all-American slacker, I reserve the right to display the characteristics of the public image of the artist -- sleep all day, fart around with trivia, live in my head, and most important, never never be effectual. Getting anything done on anything more than a conceptual level is strictly off the table. Hey, it's part of the union regs. Want me to get fined?

But this week started out surprisingly efficiently. I made a list of things to do and bygawd went out and did them. Monday and Tuesday were whirlwinds of activity, from researching the power entry change I've put off for six years to getting rid of the old Mazda that's cluttered up the yard for six months to finding a universal remote for the Big Eye, a 28" tv a construction client donated because it was too big for her to get down the stairs, to getting an internal SCSI terminator and finally putting all my hard drives in the same basket to inspecting and bidding a potentially daunting but ultimately doable handyman job. I even saved hundreds of dollars on my car insurance by switching to Geico -- thanks, li'l lizard!

Wednesday my headlong rush of accomplishment slowed down a trace and I started bogging down, although I received a load of fill dirt and cleaned off my desk, discovering the number of the shop that had fixed my speedometer in the process. The speedo had failed again within a couple months and I was getting to taking the van back in.

Then Thursday there was a long interview with a Aging and Disabilities worker that needed me available, so I stayed home and baked bread and did some redesign on the Amber Tide website, trying to bring it up to some semblence of 1998 as opposed to the 1994 look it sported. It didn't seem like that much work, but I took all day doing it.

And then came Friday. I got up bright and early, only to discover the caregiver wasn't coming in. After ministering to S, I took the van in to get the speedo fixed, spent an hour in a Denny's nursing hard coffee and an anemic Seattle Times, returned and picked it up fixed (they claimed) and drove off to find it just as bad as before, with no time to take it back. Then I came home to make a CD for a client who was having trouble getting my disks to run on her player, burned three that sounded fine on my cheap little walkman but were sullenly rejected by her big bad Bose stereo and ended up loaning her the walkman for her presentation. Then I took S to her swimming pool session and on the way back stopped for a little final dharsham from my favorite electrical supplies guru before really starting the installation on the new power entry. He raised so many questions and issues on the matter that I decided to wait and talk to the power company on Monday. Then I went home and tried to download a demo copy of a sound application I was interested in and couldn't get it to install properly. Then S got home and announced that she'd been unable to go swimming either. In the end I sat around and read Tolkien and watched Harvey. My high-productivity week had come to a ridiculously inglorious end.

It's this kind of stuff that makes me take astrology seriously. Sometimes I can sense the type of day that it's going to be, smell or taste or feel something that imparts whether I can whip my weight in wildcats or should go back to bed, or better still under it. I go my rational 21st century way with this mumbo jumbo in the background, a hidden application performing its thread in some corner of my consciousness. It's tempting to perceive the effect as some grand cosmic influence, some mechanation of the Invisible World impinging on my own private daily life. Flattering, too. And since it's cyclic, or at least time oriented (today I suck, tomorrow I rule -- this too shall pass), it's easy enough to pin it on the biggest cyclic thing around, the movements of the astronomical objects and patterns way up in the sky.

I know, I know, there's a statistical explanation, just the tendency of things to clump in various ways at random, with our overactive pattern recognition to supply the lines connecting the dots. In fact, as Stephen Jay Gould pointed out, we're more likely to find meaning in genuinely random patterns like, say, the scattering of stars in the night sky than in somewhat organized ones like the distribution of glow worms on a cave ceiling with each little worm staking out its own roughly equal area. The one will exhibit clumps and speciated regions while the other will be more uniform, a field of more profound incoherence generated by a more basic organizing principle. That most boring of arrangements, the fabled Heat Death of the Universe (verse-verse-verse...) takes its ultimate lack of meaning from the nadir of functionalities: uselessness.

At the same time, my Flushout Friday had its bright spots. I was able to balance my duties as Standby Always-On Caregiver with what I laughingly regard as the rest of my life, I managed to hit all my scheduled marks even if none of them paid off, and I had enough sense to know when to take some quality time, however involuntary it might have been. And at least I had the flexibility to deal with the whole thing. The worst day self-employed is better than the best day working for Da Man.

Maybe I should be content in the way the week ordered itself, with all the important stuff getting done by humpday and the rest sort of spread out over the rest of the week.

It only looks like a plot.


1/12/04


Some people dream about sex. Some people dream about power. I dream about buying $2000 guitars. Just the other night, in fact, I dreamt of discussing with some vaguely-sinister co-player (or, if you believe the gestalt people, co-self) the disposal of a couple of grand in savings on a good acoustic. The usual random complications dreams always seem to have were in full evidence -- the hippie bus, the desert oasis landscape, the comments on spendy brands with rotten necks -- but the notion was clear enough. I had two large, I was axe shopping.

I've never owned a really expensive guitar. Not because I couldn't afford one -- several times in my life Mother Chaos has endowed me with hunks of excess capital I could easily have shaved off a decent instrument from. But I never did. Any number of reasons floated to the surface, from self-doubt (I don't deserve this) to self-knowledge (I'll turn this thing into match wood in a week). But the primary motivation was always just miserliness. I was raised poor by a pennypinching bargain-hunter and I never learned how to factor in the luxuries.

It may have cost more than I saved. Back in the 80's there was one brief shining moment when S & I were at the top of our game and bowling 'em over at festivals, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. Most likely it was our ignorance of and distain for the biz that kept us down, but some of that ignorance may have extended to accepted standards of appearance. Some musician friends of ours noted recently that they were contemplating the purchase of a "good" guitar because they'd received feedback that nobody would ever take them seriously unless they had one. Truth? Myth? Snark? The Sphinx, notably silent on most things, remains mute on this subject as well.

There are times when lack of intelligence on how the Other Half lives can be exceedingly injurious to your health. Not knowing how to choke a budget til it squeals for mercy has left a lotta halfbaked middle class types hurtin for certain when the pink slip hit the fan. But every now and then comes the occasion when, as the saying has it, "the stingy man pays the most," and like it or spike it you just gotta open up that ol motheaten pinch-purse and dump, whether to impress the natives or just not end up with the bargain you buy over and over. Case in point: transmission replacement.

I've put a lot of ego investment into my shadetree mechanic escapades, both in terms of actual money saved and ingenuity displayed. I've also put myself through craptacular misadventures of incompetence, ill-preparation and tool-penurage to bypass the unscalable heights of shop costs. Live by the slop, perish by the slop. One of the more horrific experiences involved the trannie on my last minivan. Desperate to avoid the evil mechanics after an earlier experience with a national chain that practically held my vehicle for ransom, I fell into the crackpipe vice of junkyard parts, going through five very used gearboxes before the van itself gave out. I reached the point where I could tear one out in half a day and punch it back in another, with nothing but a minimum tool kit and a few bottle jacks. It was an expertise I neither aspired to nor profited from, other than keeping my clunky old van on the road, but I did claim bragging rights for it.

Right after I got rid of that dog I got into a cheap and reliable Mazda coupe that pretty well relieved me of chronic shadetreeing. It accompanied a major period of change in my life, going from catch-as-catch-can musician to catch-as-catch-can musician and semirespectable, almost-employed recording engineer, CD manufacturer and handyman. By luck, pluck and knucklesweat, I gradually worked myself into a state of tolerable poverty and managed debt. When I added the new van to the stable, it was a gesture of faith, both in the reliability of the vehicle and in my abilities as a Joe Lunchbucket.

While my lunchbucketing held up tolerably well, barring the occasional table-saw-ripped fingertip, the van didn't. But when Blue got tired of hinting around with slipping clutch and sloppy shifting and lowered the boom by losing reverse, I realized that despite my general lackamoolah lifestyle, I was going to have to take him to a shop. It wasn't just that I didn't want to crawl in the rain and mud under a van for hours on end -- and I didn't -- but also that I couldn't afford to do the job more than once. And despite my years of expertise, I hadn't the tools, the facility or the judgement anymore to do a trannie yank and make it stick. Age and hindsight had made me just humble enough to admit that maybe I never did.

On the other hand, I'm not totally ignorant, either. I started phoning around, got a couple grotesque estimates, then hit an establishment bidding a good 30% under the rest, barely inside my budget. Oh yeah, I was suspicious. But sometimes good things happen, too. I drove over to check the place out. It was a neat, tidy, meticulously organized garage on a back alley in a working class neighborhood, and Tan, the owner/operator, was an older man with an intelligent immigrant's accent and the sober yet humorous mien of a zen monk in a martial arts flick. Not all ringers wear blue workshirts with "Mr. Goodwrench" embroidered on the pocket.

We bonded as outsider businessmen and I dropped the vehicle off then and there. I knew at once that my van was in good hands. Even better, I knew that my money was going to someone who deserved it, someone who got his money the real old fashioned way -- by providing a service that benefited his customers.

Certainly it benefited me. Even if I can't talk big about doing it myself, at least I didn't have to.


1/5/04


The New Year is coming in like a bull in a china shop, like a lion in winter. The New Year is busting out all over. The New Year is the Man. The New Year is the Biatch. Don't fuck with the New Year. Don't ever think about it. The New Year is baaaaaaad.

Yeah, whatever. The New Year is only just here and already it's getting an attitude. It's a leap year. It's an election year. But it's just another artificial time delimiter as far as anybody except h. sap is concerned. Unfortunately, that would include me.

So. Welcome to the Year of Good Lord, 2004? Where's my flying car? Where's my household robot? Stupid futurologists didn't get anything right. Well, maybe one or two things. There are an awful lot more of us. We're still fighting amongst ourselves. Man-made type thingies are flying around in space here and there. A kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh.

And some of the things they got wrong aren't all that much of a loss (Thought Police, WW III, et cetera). We're actually in pretty good shape by some assessments. And for all the titanic unpleasantries flushing around the world, there are tons of hopeful signs. They might not look like it at first sight, but they're there.

Communication, that harbinger of education and mutual understanding, is on the rise in a way that's unprecedented, not just in the history of the species but in the history of life. Email, ichat, cellular phones, even p2p filesharing are happening at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, which as we all know is not just a good idea, it's the law. Arts and science are at a level that's never been touched before. World wide depressions no longer burn down cities and inspire mass insanity. In its own stupid, clumsy fashion a genuine world jurisprudence is starting to emerge.

And on the home front, regular exercise, yoga and tooth-whitening dentifrice actually work. That alone is enough to leave me positively giddy. Small victories are just as important as big ones.

It's all enough to inspire in me a resurgence of my stupid hippy hope, pitiful remnant of my youth, that maybe, just maybe, love really is all you need. Gawd knows we need it, anyways.

I don't do New Year's resolutions -- they're kinda like strapping on the cement overshoes and going for the new free diving record. I think in terms of New Year's possibilities, the things I could do now that a brand spankin' fresh slab of chronic measurement's been delivered hot and juicy right to my own door.

There are always the phantasies, and we'll get them right on out of the way. I could get rich and famous playing music. Yeah, it could happen. Next!

The most unformed possibility I'm looking at is one that's been chasing me for a while: a supplement to or replacement for handyman work. I'm all for earning extra income with whichever appendage is most convenient, but I've had one or two too many accidents with Great Whirling Blades of Death to be quite happy recomposing construction materials for gain. Apart from just strapping on a semblance of normality and getting a minimum wage job (highest minimum wage in the naaaation, dude!), I need to find something more in my specialty. No, my other specialty, music -- there isn't any career track for assclown, I looked it up. I suppose that means either gigging or perhaps more specific forms of studio work, like production or mastering, stuff that takes advantage of my experience with the mechanical process of sound recording. I actually did a remaster job for a friend last year that ended up on an NPR compilation, so I've seen some evidence of having more skill in that area at least.

The other obvious move is into freelance or whatnot writing. I would probably phrase that possibility more like "investigate the nuts and bolts" of writing for pay. I would have to look for information or a model or a mentor there -- writing seems to be about as deregulated and wild-west an occupation as you could get short of cat-herding.

Either that or I reinvent myself as a standup comic (or why not as an airline pilot as long as I'm blueskying here...)

More within the province of likelihood is a recurrent possibility, carried over from last year, of getting more exercise. The wind that shakes that barley isn't really time, but space -- I haven't got a spare room available for the Super Hulker Bulker Exercise All-in-One Asskicker Machine. Solution might well be an ugh shudder gym membership. S goes to the Y, Y not me? All I know is, Clint Eastwood's right -- it seems unfair, but the older you get, the more of a jock you need to be.

And as always I have an eternal New Year's Possibility of learning something new, something I've never really tackled before -- a language, an instrument, a discipline. The last I heard, there are two or three things you can do to stave off crapulous old age in all its creased manifestations. Exercise. Stay active. Have something to look forward to. Be around people and animals (okay, unless you're violently allergic -- otherwise stick with the animals). And keep an inquiring spirit. You may get snaggy anyways, but at least you'll have more fun doing it.

On the other hand, if I were to get all political and shit, my only actual resolution would be to work as hard as I can afford to in whatever way I can for Regime Change 2004. It's morning In America! Time to take out the trash! But even that has a caveat attached: given full attention, politics will drive you bugnuts. If I can help, I will, but I ain't going down with the Ship of State, or Fools either for that matter.

Okay, Anno Nova, I'm ready for my closeup.