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"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid" said Han Solo, before going to Afghanistan. (via Twitter) |
Photo © 2010.
Went home to Canada for much too short a trip. It was sunny and hot in the mountains (above, Kootenay National Park, near Banff) until we got to Vancouver for its first rainy weekend of the summer. But even rainy Vancouver is brilliant. Below, that’s Richard (right) and me (left) looking to beat up Emily Carr art students and granola chewing babies at Granville Island Market.
Photo © 2010.
My thanks to OffsetGuitars.com for being a wonderful source of collective information and guidance, as well as to Jim Shine, for his “Intricacies of the Fender Jazzmaster” webpage, a great reference. Special thanks to everyone who helped me directly.
This year I began to repair and restore a 1960 Jazzmaster, starting from an old chestnut of a body and using 1960 components. While the guitar is not yet fully restored with 100% original parts, it’s now relatively complete as a Jazzmaster after some months of work.
Photo © 2010.
When I first received the vintage body, it was missing its coat of paint. Its original Sunburst paint had been covered over with Dakota Red many years ago, and then Olympic White, and then it was partially stripped down to the bare wood, but then finally abandoned at the white primer stage and left very rough. Also, several of the tail piece screws were lost in their holes (with broken off heads and with no easy way to remove them.) Additionally, it required a replacement neck. So, I set an agenda to have the body repaired and refinished in Inca Silver, an original Fender custom color from 1960, and saw about getting a new replica neck with a matching headstock.
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“When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been anticlimax.”
— Flannery O’Connor
I think for every person there’s probably a perfect chocolate bar. I’m lucky to have found mine in my lifetime. My aspirations are fulfilled and my chocolate bar walk downhill begins.
Photo © 2009.
One has to be very particular about how to use adjectives and be careful they’re not abused for writing creative or seemingly poetic descriptions. Push adjectives into the wrong situation and they can stop meaning anything of real consequence. They’ll just confound people if you don’t pair them up with their familiar nouns.
“Dastardly Chopstick.” Cool, but weird for the sake of being weird.
This is an important note to remember for many of the more uncommon adjectives, such as crepuscular. Certain adjectives like that one only fit deservingly with a very select group of nouns. You can’t just throw the word crepuscular around for this or that.
For example, there are just four things to which you should properly ascribe the word runny: make-up, oil paint, snot, and cheese. If you say “runny fingerfoods,” you’re really only narrowing down the edible possibilities by half or less, providing your readers aren’t under five years old.
You see, adjectives shouldn’t be treated like sprinkles for textual ice cream. If you glob them on like a thick crust of multi-colored crunchies, the more impressionable readers eat it up and get sick.
“A beautiful aircraft is the expression of the genius of a great engineer who is also a great artist. It is impossible for that man to carry out the whole of the design himself; he works through a design office staffed by a hundred draughtsmen or more. A hundred minds, each with their own less competent ideas, are striving to modify the chief engineer’s original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief engineer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and his way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsmen, so that each one of them is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas. If the chief designer has not got this personality and strength of will, his original conception will be distorted in the design office and appear as just another not-so-good airplane. He will then not be ranked as a good chief designer.
All really first-class chief designers, for this reason, are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and an intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of their plans, and energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. If they were not so, they could not produce good aeroplanes.”
— From “No Highway,” 1948, by Nevil Shute.
My Bloody Valentine at Roseland, Sept. 23, 2008. Photo © 2008.
I don’t know if they “sold out” but the venue did. They ended the concert with the infamous Disney ride that is their wall of noise finale. About 17 minutes of cacophony that is not unlike what you’d hear during an atomic blast. The room vibrated so much that hairs on my arms stood at full attention and my legs felt like mini-fans were circulating the air in my pants. Ear plugs definitely required.
I got another chance to see A Place To Bury Strangers.
"Missing You" Single by APTBS. Photo © 2008.
The beauty of APTBS is in the layers of sounds. Oliver Ackermann makes it look effortless to blend so many guitar sounds together at once that it sounds like there are an extra two invisible guitarists on stage with him. I know this sort of effect playing isn’t easy, but you can tell that this is his passion. And then the projections behind the band, 16mm film strips that were madly edited like Quentin Tarantino meets Andy Warhol, were just the right icing on the cake—a pop art collage of vintage girls, cars, guns, and sparks.
The band sounds so much better live than on their early recordings that I really was wide eyed and disbelieving. It was full throttle guitar. I was also hoping the gig would give me the a taste of the feelings I had when I was infatuated with My Bloody Valentine, Lush, and The Jesus & Mary Chain, and it did. For a fleeting few moments, I was 17 again, with my headphones on. It wasn’t just nostalgia, although it was a sort of relief to know that the old shoegaze sound persists and is still evolving. The feeling was more like watching a magic trick and getting completely taken in.
