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.