Gloria

Merry immediate post-Christmas, y'all.

There was a set of large letters, about as tall as me, that they used to put out in front of the World Trade Center this time of year... they were big and silver and they spelled out "peace on earth", and that always meant a lot to me. So I like to share that every Christmas time. If Christmas is a thing you do, I hope it treated you well. If it's not, I hope you had a pleasant day regardless.

In other news, over the course of the next week I'm going to be moving five minutes up the road to an apartment with some friends. I'll have a house-re-heating party or something. It'll be rad.

And for those of you concerned that I haven't made a music geek post in several 24-hour periods, fear not:

I got some beautiful pickups for Christmas, a pair of Seymour Duncan SH-55 Seth Lover humbuckers. These things are exact replicas of the famous PAF pickups that were the first humbucking pickup (a design meant to get rid of the 60-cycle hum inherent in single-coil guitars like my beloved fender stratocaster, that ultimately had a very distinct and recognizable tone of its own. If you've heard a BB King record, you've heard a PAF.) These SH-55s have very melodic Alnico 2 magnets, wooden spacers between the coils, cloth wiring, the whole shebang.
Yesterday, I put them in my beloved but problematic Ibanez AS-50 (a slightly smaller bodied replica of a Gibson 335). The AS-50 had been running some Gibson '57 Classic pickups, which are very good pickups but at 9.04k and 9.23k impedence, with Alnico 5 magnets, they'd be right at home in a good, strong, bluesy Les Paul, not a delicate archtop. I ran her through the practice amp last night, and she sounds good. Today I'm grabbing my main rig from our practice space in Brooklyn, then maybe I'll post some sound clips.

Sorry for the unmitigated geeking out.

Ephemera

This is fantastic. There's finally a job out there for all those cats who took philosophy classes with me.

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In other news, I'm sitting here waiting for call-backs on an article due by end-of-day today. Then I get to go play some music in front of some people.
I always feel like the bearer of bad news when I call up a press room. Especially a small one, at, like, the NYC Department of Buildings. Who I've had occasion to call on several different occasions.
I feel like I'm saying, "Hello. I'm going to make you work now. And I feel bad about it." It's like, i was sitting on my ass, someone gave me an assignment, now I'm going to be a jerk and hand that off to you whilst I sit back, hypercaffeinate, and wait for you to call me back.

mmm. speaking of which, I think my coffee is ready.


Also, why does my generation (and by that I mean me) not know how to use a fax machine? They're surprisingly useful and elegant devices. Discredited and obsolete.

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Took the bike out yesterday for the first time after an accident rendered my wrist a little... disjointed. Got out a little ways, realized pedaling was hard because the rear wheel was out of true. Realized rear wheel was out of true because of broken spokes. Took off spokes, realized rear hub is really gritty. And I just repacked it, so... time for a new hub.

Luckily I located one, and me and my cousin (we'll call her Sam) are going to rebuild the whole damn wheel. It should be a lot of frustration and fun and I'm really looking forward to it.


bah. to the coffee.

Hello, Goodbye Blue Monday!

This works with the anonymity thing, because y'all don't know what instrument I play. My band is playing a show on Friday at Goodbye Blue Monday, 1087 Broadway in Brooklyn. Doors are at 9. You should come. We are good. That is all. Also, I designed this poster.

Goodbye, Blue Monday!

Yesterday (Monday) was a fantastic day. As one might imagine with such a locale as 14-A, growing up here instills a deep-seated desire to leave. That, combined with a genetic predisposition to stubbornness, matched with a North Jersey vocabulary, explains (albeit only in tangents and outlines) why my extended family has, over the years, done a lot of extending, and not a whole lot of keeping in touch. One of my uncles on this side of the family (a truly wonderful guy) is my editor at the paper. Yesterday, I joined him and his family (my family) for dinner.

My cousin had just come home from her first semester away at college. When I last really spent time with her, we were both in very different places... I was undergoing some or another existential crisis, working through a thesis or looking for a job, and she was applying to college and all the stress and bull that that always entails. We were never really in the same place such that we could relate as equals.

So then, over the dinner table last night, she begins discussing Greek, Latin and Linguistics. Being obsessed with one and oblivious of the other two, naturally, I ask about the Greek and Latin.
Suddenly I'm conversing with this person who I saw come home from the hospital, and she's telling me fascinating things about the structure of possessives in Classical Greek.
After dinner we walked around lower Manhattan as all the shops closed up, getting to know each other again.
We discussed New York, we cursed like sailors, we talked politics, and much about the stupidity of blogs. She was saying things that I would say, and vice versa. We were relating to each other effortlessly, and the whole time I just kept thinking, "huh. This must be family."

Friends don't let Friends

I went out with John today after work and had a pitcher of beer on the East Side. We talked at length about many things, including dictionaries, Objectifying the Signifier (a really apt pretentious term for what the anatomy project seeks to do), sang along to Joe Cocker, and then, staggering across downtown looking for a place to pee, I drunkly bought The Elements of Typographic Style.

There is no hope for me.

Traction Control

There's a problem with projects: they have to begin. Spontaneous creation has far less nuance, but it wants to start, and you just have to let it. A project that you've been planning for a while, well... a thousand different iterations have been floating around, in their potential form, for however long you've been planning the project's little twists and turns. And as you develop the arcs and leaps, and they give you great pleasure to think about, you almost want to hold off putting pen to paper, for fear of ruining the project's perfect immaterial existence.

Not that this will make much sense to anyone not familiar with the project, but I bought a notebook and a good pen today for the purpose of composing the raw text to my almost four-year-old Anatomy of Poetry project. And I never write well at night (not true), but I just can't bring nib to notebook....
so frustrating, as this is but the first step in a long progress of steps to actually complete the damn thing.

Off to where Garfield shipped Odie

A dear friend, one of my closest companions in the universe, the one who loves the brick story, is leaving within a month or so for a job on the other side of the world. The only thing larger than how crushed I am at his leaving is how happy I am for him--he'll be a well-paid reporter for an upstart English-speaking newspaper that seems to have a fair amount going for it. This is travel and writing, two passions that the both of us share and that he's always been bold enough to act on. I wish him quite well, and just need to hope that international media mail isn't too expensive...

Radio Cures

You may have noticed the addition of a link in the sidebar. That's my friend John. John and I know each other from back at the Academy, and were active in writing and producing radio dramas at one of my favorite radio stations of all times. He and I have been kicking around the idea of writing some scripts again. I think that would be just grand.

Also, as promised, I've attached some sound clips from the amp I was fixing, pictured above. Please disregard my playing in the clips, I wasn't really trying. The amp is an old Voice of Music amp, probably an old mono for a turntable or somesuch. It has an interesting tone-contour section that will be a real hell to repair should it ever need it. Anyway, I had to replace some capacitors, and I spent a while this afternoon selecting tubes for it from my collection. Still needs a bit of a tuneup and maybe some circuit modifications to make it a little higher gain. It runs on two EL84 power tubes, probably at no more than 12 watts. Preamp is a 6AU6 and a 12AX7. Might rewire it to take a 12AX7 up front and get me another gain stage. I swapped the 5Y3 rectifier for a 5AU4 to calm it down a bit. The amp is dirty, in a bluesy way. Sounds like the power transformer is on its last legs, confirmed by the rusty-ness of the transformer's casing. But it's a beater blues amp, and for $30 thats all I wanted it for.

+ Clip 1

+ Clip 2

(my main rig, for anyone interested, is a re-tubed Fender Hot Rod Deluxe. It's not perfect, but it's seven different amps in one, and with a properly tubed preamp, its the best amp on the market for the money, IMHO)

The Writers Retreat

So a few of us have decided to make it a regular event to retreat to an old farm house in New York for the express purpose of drinking bourbon, lighting fires, firing (bb for now) guns and writing. The farmhouse has no internet, no phones, and minimal cell reception. It is beautiful.
The following is my most complete work from the retreat this weekend.
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He was four beers into a two-beer night when he made us promise; just sober enough to convince us, just drunk enough to believe himself. So when, years later, we found it scrawled in the margins of his will, we were probably more surprised than we should have been. The arthritic tilt of the tiny letters, the bright ink against the yellowed paper, meant that he had recalled. Or decided. The addition, made in the last few months, as he sat surrounded by his books, listening to Bach, read only,

Remember: you promised.

And so we had. There were only three of us left at the time—fifteen years prior, Brenda has wrapped her Beemer around a tree, and a decade later Francis had been discovered at his computer desk, tranquilizers in hand, deleting old photos. So, we owed it to the guy, as the last ones left.

You’d be amazed how easy it is to get two-hundred and fifty quarts of used motor oil in Jersey City, free, no questions asked. The boat, surprisingly, was the tricky part, requiring some less-than-legal copies of Coast Guard papers Ralph “found”. Two mornings later, in violation of every health code in Hudson (and Bergen and Essex) county, we had him in the front seat, the tiny Volvo straining to pull the boat to its final launch. Dodging the police and red lights like clockwork, we sat in the car with a silence we had never shared. And as the condos parted to the warehouses that still survived, we took in the Passaic with peace that spoke the volumes we had wished to write.

Phil didn’t blow out the torch until the boat approached the horizon, the two lights thus vanishing as one. The fireboats had caught up by the time he’d passed under the Pulaski Skyway, but the motor oil was a stubborn burn, mimicking Newark, Elizabeth, Paterson, the Oranges…
They’d have it out by the time he reached the Kill van Kull. But by then they’d be smelling him in Bayonne.

Things Discredited and Obsolete

So the band has been doing very well, of late. Playing shows all around the city, making hip other-band friends, and actually finding a way into a scene I wasn't sure existed. In a few weeks we're running down to Washington DC to open for a national act that rhymes with "whirl stalk".

I've been working for the past few months as a low-level reporter / general office person at a small newspaper in Lower Manhattan.

Though this pays me virtually nothing (especially as the plan is to move into the city ASAP, so I'm trying to save...) this array of creative support and occasional trickles of cash has allowed me to indulge once again in one of my favorite hobbies... the repair and upkeep of old guitar amplifiers.

There's a beauty to old technology, but tube amplification in particular intrigues me. As opposed to digital technology, the tubes actually recreate the waveforms passing through them, rather than approximate them with ultra-high-resolution right angles... Think an oscilloscope versus a graphing calculator.

Anyway, at the moment, there's an old hi-fi amplifier in the trunk of my car. I'm going to go get it out and start nursing it back to health....

maybe I'll post pictures and soundclips later.

Which Lover are you Jack of Diamonds?

My band has finally been making some significant headway. We've been playing a number of gigs in the City, and have been receiving very positive feedback. We play shows that are incredible fun, that seem to greatly entertain people, and at the end of a show-night, we just look at each other, with these stupid grins on our faces, like, "we're living the dream!"

And we are, technically speaking. When we were in high school together, my bandmates and I eagerly awaited the day that we would all come home from college, free to pursue our creative drives. It was like that rosy picture of the future that gets you through the day but that you never reasonably expect to come true. So, even though we're a bottom-rung-of-the-ladder band, playing dives and weeknights, every time we crack open a beer during a break in practice, we feel like damn lucky bastards.

This weekend, I traveled to North Carolina, where my girlfriend is enrolled in a graduate program. Every morning, I woke up with someone I love dearly, walked around a beautiful (if small) liberal, artistic town (ok, that now narrows down the list of cities to about... two) went on bike rides, read (Herodotus, as well as the superb graphic novel DMZ), and felt alive in the way one does in the presence of love.

We've done the distance thing before, she and I. And its the longest, most frustrating emotional roller-coaster.
But if I leave the art that I've craved for so long in order to be with her, then can I still be the person I am in the relationship?

OK, Charlotte, what's the point?

Well, if home is people, then home is either multiple, or scattered, necessarily. And perhaps which one is decided by me, internally.

I just got off of the plane, I'm not thinking terribly clearly. But I will have to think more on this.

I have other things to write: about a new project of mine, and about where I've been for so long (*weeks* without an entry!), but that'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Invisible Ink and the Secret Decoder Ring

Notebooks are interesting. We surround them with airs of privacy. We lock them up. We stash them away. Blogs, at least, are more honest: open to the world, commanding "read my thoughts".

I always entertain the fantasy of a youngish grand-daughter, or a great grand-daughter, opening a wooden box in the attic of her parent's house to find all of my notebooks. To get to know me, a forgotten ancestor, as a real person, a poet, with failed dreams, realized hopes, weaknesses and terrible handwriting. It's this hope that keeps the privacy alive: if we write as though we wish no one to read, then what we write is for once honest and flawed, truly worthy and ready to be read.


There's one notebook that stands out in this fantasy. It's red and its small and its simple and the paper is perfect--It's my journal about my experiences as a student in New York a few September elevenths ago. I wont write anything about it here. I cannot finish the journal. I wanted to get it all down. to chronicle the day and the days that followed, and the weeks that followed, and the months sliding into war. I didn't want to lose any of it.

It took four or five years to get to the morning after. As I go, the narrative slowly starts to sputter and stop. Nietzsche once wrote something about the absolute necessity of forgetfulness in human relations. And no matter how I try to save that terrible day, a greater more primitive portion of my brain pushes it under, pushes the book aside and keeps its thick pages blank.

When she opens that book, my great-great-grand-daughter, what kind of truths will she find in that flaw? What kind of history will write with ghostly ink on my empty pages? What words will she have for my inexplicable speechlessness?

What does it take to get a drink in this place?

Two conflicting images stand out in my recollection of today: the assertion, on a friend's couch, that there is no such thing as enough travel, and the sweat collecting on the back of my neck as I sat in traffic on Route 17 North.

An old friend once told me that the thing about the world is that for all their differences, people all over the world are the same: same issues, same vices, same needs and wants and faiths. Four years steeped in the post-modern academy, and I have to say I've never felt it to be more true.

This weekend, I returned to my academy, sought out old girlfriends, old professors and others, and made what peace there was to be made. In a few weekends, I travel southward to a current girlfriend. I've come to realize that home is not places, home is people. And I feel that the process of growing older is the process of adding to the things that count as home.

That this should keep me inside my small volvo, darting about such that I am kept for great lengths of time from that place which is "home", the physical location that has such a connection that I cannot help but write about it... well, I'm not yet old enough to tell whether or not that's apt.

The Brick Story

I have a friend who was born here, moved to the suburbs for a while, and has recently returned. Whenever someone from another part of the world wants an explanation of this one, he turns to me and says "Charlotte, tell the brick story."

You know how the more affluent suburbs like to adorn the crosswalks of their main avenues with inlaid brick, to add a quaint-yet-cultured flair to their streets? Well I'm from a place that's neither quaint nor cultured. In the interest of my quickly evaporating anonymity, I'll refer to this place as 14-A. The town officials of 14-A clearly wanted the same dignified charm added to their city. So they singled out a few crosswalks and promptly removed the top layer of asphalt. So far so good, right? Rather than lay bricks, the city then decided to lay a fresh layer of asphalt, trace a brick pattern into it, and then paint it brick-colored!

As if this isn't enough, the daily deluge of automobiles wears the paint off at a rapid rate, such that any money that 14-A may have saved via this ridiculous cop-out is quickly spend on the continual process of repainting.

That's the brick story.

Scene and be Seen

So the thing about the New York music scene is... well come on, it's New York. See, the bitch about being a native of the most talented and imposing art scene on the continent (don't complain to me, west coast. Even the Beats hung out in Patterson)
is that breaking into it in a meaningful way is damn *hard*. The scene here is so big and well-developed that you need to be popular somewhere else before you can run with the hip crowd here. Usually that somewhere else is wherever it is your from (for instance, The Hold Steady hails from the midwest). That works fine, unless you're from here. And yeah, technically I hail from hudson county, and yeah Hoboken had a scene for a while, gave rise to some noted greatness, but the damn place is so yuppified and stroller-friendly now that the chances of the next big thing in rock getting a start in Hoboken are pretty bad.

There are bands that make it though. That work hard for years until a scene that digs them comes into being and then *bam!* they're locked in to an environ of adoring fans, positive press, general rock-star-dom. Yes I'm talking about TV on the Radio, and yes, I'm talking about Williamsburg. And this brings me to something I was thinking about the other day, talking to a fellow musician about the potential of a scene of the same magnitude forming in Bushwick.

Architecture.

SOHO, Greenwich Village, Hoboken, Williamsburg--all these locations that go through an artistic renaissance before their inevitable fall into yuppification--have some unique architectural features. Lofts, abandoned warehouses, old industrial architecture that can be put to public purpose, that can become venues and galleries and studios. Look at downtown Jersey City, which was mostly brownstones and vacant lots, five or six years ago: it skipped the "scene" step entirely. The more and more I think about it, the more it seems that pre-existing architecture is the dominant factor in determining the path of gentrification, at least in this part of the world, already well flooded with individuals wanting to make art.

The Rumor About the True Things

So I'm going to try something. I blog often, on other blogs, under other names. But those are intended for friends, people I know and who know me. This is for others. People who know me will immediately know who this is. But this isn't written for them.

So allow this to be our introduction. In this site I'll generally not use real names, but I will discuss true things. insofar as they exist. I dont know.

I am a student of philosophy and theories of government, returned to my native urban New Jersey to find a place rapidly gentrifying, changing, growing--whatever you want to call it. I am a guitar player in a band trying to "make it" (whatever the hell that means) in the same landscape. I am trying to make art after four years of academy, trying to feel for an ever elusive home... also trying to keep my car running. Trying to live and work and create in a way that each is copacetic to the other two.

A note about the title: "the rumor about the true things" is a phrase employed by the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin in a letter to a friend regarding the genius of Franz Kafka. It is a product of the modern decay of wisdom--one if its few remainders. "A sort of theological whispered intelligence dealing with matters discredited and obsolete."

I like that.