December 30, 2008
December 22, 2008
HERE'S SOMETHING WE CAN ALL AGREE ON
I don't believe in Jesus or Santa Claus. You might believe in these things, or something else. It doesn't really matter. These beliefs do absolutely nothing to bring us together or make us better people. Nothing. We are defined by what we do, not what we say, or think.
So, this holiday season, I'm featuring something that I think (hope?) we can all agree on: coming home.
Happy Holiday Season to us all...
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December 17, 2008
December 12, 2008
QUARTERLY REPORT
...my main squeeze spring/summer 2008. acquired early spring off craigslist, very good price, proceeded to replace all internal wiring and pots, tuners (grover imperials--same as used on d'angelico new yorker), and pickups were changed to a jason lollar imperial humbucker (neck) and a tv jones classic filtertron in the bridge. after playing with the wooden bridge I switched back to brass. very good playing action, intonates superbly and I'll put the lollar humbucker up against anyone. it's damn perfect. this guitar is the all-time king of the polished turds: a budget axe that I'd put up against many significantly more expensive brand-name instruments at four-digit price points. great for trad jazz playing, chet-style, rockabilly, blues and old timey rock n roll. however my studio is not heated so for this time of year I needed something I could leave down there which wouldn't be quite so prone to the temp changes....
the first tele I ever built from the bare wood, now rebuilt with a new neck and new hardware and a new neck humbucker. another craigslist find: a seymour duncan antiquity humbucker (with the signature of seymour on the back)...the japanese guy swore it sounded just like the tone of "rah-ree kaw-ton"...well who's to say but it does sound good. fat, clean, nice chirp. bridge pickup one of my favorites ever, the harmonic design super 90. callaham hardware, bridge and control plate. 4-way switching for parallel/series option. replacement neck is a FAT boatneck contour from warmoth with brazilian rosewood slab and gibson-scale ("conversion") for slinkier feel. heavy strings feel almost like slinkys. all parts finished in nitro-cellulose lacquer. lightweight, very resonant. as of this week the final touches and setup are just complete and I'm in a total honeymoon with this guitar. will probably be my main practicing axe for the cold months at least...
since I was on vacation this week, I tried to get to a few things that had been banging around the studio. one of the things I wanted very much to try was to repurpose the replaced neck pickup from the archtop (an ibanez "super 58") and put it in the neck position of my leftovers frankenstein strat. boy it sounds great. and I dig that it's an orphan gold pickup on a mix & match parts axe where nothing really goes together in but everything works. kinda like a gold tooth on an otherwise ordinary face. I've told the story of this guitar previously so I won't go back into the same long spiel, but suffice to say that it ain't quite over. everything works so well that I'm actually thinking of investing in something (breaking my rule of not spending any money directly on this guitar)--a good quality bridge that would finally remove the crappy old floyd rose-licensed bridge/tremolo. maybe even convert to a hardtail. I know this would improve the tone tremendously.
another summer craigslist acquisition. the first guitar I ever messed around with was a student nylon string and I've always liked them. but the main reason I wanted one at this stage was for two reasons--chet atkins style fingerstyle (see: red thumbpick) and for brazilian music, which is slowly transforming from something I love listening to to something I can now play (a little bit). having the nylon strings makes a huge difference. a lovely feel, a very mellow tone (cedar!) and so fun to have the cutaway, especially with the 12th fret neck join. and one big challenge: not a single fret-marker! this is the one that lives in the upstairs living room.
all in all, a nice quiet week off, a few bumps along the way (sick babies, sprained shoulders, rain) but also nice and mellow. and the two solidbodies above were made whole. if nothing else, I am at least adequately equipped to ward off the evil xmas music that lurks sinister around the next corner...
ho ho ho.
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December 06, 2008
THE REAL BILL AYERS
By WILLIAM AYERS
[from today's NY Times]
Chicago
IN the recently concluded presidential race, I was unwillingly thrust upon the stage and asked to play a role in a profoundly dishonest drama. I refused, and here’s why.
Unable to challenge the content of Barack Obama’s campaign, his opponents invented a narrative about a young politician who emerged from nowhere, a man of charm, intelligence and skill, but with an exotic background and a strange name. The refrain was a question: “What do we really know about this man?”
Secondary characters in the narrative included an African-American preacher with a fiery style, a Palestinian scholar and an “unrepentant domestic terrorist.” Linking the candidate with these supposedly shadowy characters, and ferreting out every imagined secret tie and dark affiliation, became big news.
I was cast in the “unrepentant terrorist” role; I felt at times like the enemy projected onto a large screen in the “Two Minutes Hate” scene from George Orwell’s “1984,” when the faithful gathered in a frenzy of fear and loathing.
With the mainstream news media and the blogosphere caught in the pre-election excitement, I saw no viable path to a rational discussion. Rather than step clumsily into the sound-bite culture, I turned away whenever the microphones were thrust into my face. I sat it out.
Now that the election is over, I want to say as plainly as I can that the character invented to serve this drama wasn’t me, not even close. Here are the facts:
I never killed or injured anyone. I did join the civil rights movement in the mid-1960s, and later resisted the draft and was arrested in nonviolent demonstrations. I became a full-time antiwar organizer for Students for a Democratic Society. In 1970, I co-founded the Weather Underground, an organization that was created after an accidental explosion that claimed the lives of three of our comrades in Greenwich Village. The Weather Underground went on to take responsibility for placing several small bombs in empty offices — the ones at the Pentagon and the United States Capitol were the most notorious — as an illegal and unpopular war consumed the nation.
The Weather Underground crossed lines of legality, of propriety and perhaps even of common sense. Our effectiveness can be — and still is being — debated. We did carry out symbolic acts of extreme vandalism directed at monuments to war and racism, and the attacks on property, never on people, were meant to respect human life and convey outrage and determination to end the Vietnam war.
Peaceful protests had failed to stop the war. So we issued a screaming response. But it was not terrorism; we were not engaged in a campaign to kill and injure people indiscriminately, spreading fear and suffering for political ends.
I cannot imagine engaging in actions of that kind today. And for the past 40 years, I’ve been teaching and writing about the unique value and potential of every human life, and the need to realize that potential through education.
I have regrets, of course — including mistakes of excess and failures of imagination, posturing and posing, inflated and heated rhetoric, blind sectarianism and a lot else. No one can reach my age with their eyes even partly open and not have hundreds of regrets. The responsibility for the risks we posed to others in some of our most extreme actions in those underground years never leaves my thoughts for long.
The antiwar movement in all its commitment, all its sacrifice and determination, could not stop the violence unleashed against Vietnam. And therein lies cause for real regret.
We — the broad “we” — wrote letters, marched, talked to young men at induction centers, surrounded the Pentagon and lay down in front of troop trains. Yet we were inadequate to end the killing of three million Vietnamese and almost 60,000 Americans during a 10-year war.
The dishonesty of the narrative about Mr. Obama during the campaign went a step further with its assumption that if you can place two people in the same room at the same time, or if you can show that they held a conversation, shared a cup of coffee, took the bus downtown together or had any of a thousand other associations, then you have demonstrated that they share ideas, policies, outlook, influences and, especially, responsibility for each other’s behavior. There is a long and sad history of guilt by association in our political culture, and at crucial times we’ve been unable to rise above it.
President-elect Obama and I sat on a board together; we lived in the same diverse and yet close-knit community; we sometimes passed in the bookstore. We didn’t pal around, and I had nothing to do with his positions. I knew him as well as thousands of others did, and like millions of others, I wish I knew him better.
Demonization, guilt by association, and the politics of fear did not triumph, not this time. Let’s hope they never will again. And let’s hope we might now assert that in our wildly diverse society, talking and listening to the widest range of people is not a sin, but a virtue.
William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is the author of “Fugitive Days” and a co-author of the forthcoming “Race Course.”
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December 04, 2008
PROP 8 - THE MUSICAL
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