Arbitroliday: colon, coffee, and underwear

The short month of holidays is over. I ran across two the other day: one was something I imagined in my head while thinking about the other, and it turned out to be real. Whew, that was cool. I read on notcot.org post that February sixth was Semicolon Day in Sweden; curiously the seventh was entirely dissimilar. Perhaps that is yet another slight to text, grammar, and punctuation.

In that vein I stumbled across several commiserates. Why not celebrate a new day with some new blogs? It turns out that there are people in the world beyond the Eats, Shoots and Leavesvariety who are interested in punctuation. Maybe, though, they are still all found in England. The Grammarblog is a high-tension haven for… grammar. This of course has little to do with holidays, at least directly, though the site did a fair job slighting a pizza joint with signage marginal at best. The food issue brings me back to holidays.

Trailing out of February, I acknowledged Lent earlier than is tradition. A full two weeks early this year, I continue to celebrate the Lenten season without “foods” including coffee and Coke—I exclude all derivations and permutations if at all feasible. Lent does very little for me as part of a Christian ceremony, but I do enjoy the potential for introspection in giving up, or sacrificing, something, particularly when the terms are monitored by another’s calendar. It is also exciting to celebrate something without the abundance of meals and associated glut intrinsic to other holidays: a Thanksgiving jog.

In visiting another blog the other day, I thought about the prescriptions of familiar holidays. I have no idea how to celebrate Semicolon day, other than to use them more frequently, and perhaps with vigor. I know how to celebrate Valentine’s Day on the other hand; that knowledge coupled with the evident discontinuity in application to my actual life makes it less appealing. There is an excellent offering on the blog I HATE THE EARTH to make January 21, "Kierkegaard's Day," in honor of single people everywhere. Can you imagine—JUST IMAGINE!—the challenge for the people at Hallmark in bringing a palatable selection of cards to fruition for that day? God knows what sorts of stimuli would be in hot demand in Kansas City during the crunch time.

In thinking of my own arbitrary holiday, I reflected back to a comment a really cool, old woman made to me once during the purchase of a belt buckle. We were talking about the hidden marking and signatures of Indian silversmiths. I had commented on a reverse inlay pattern that was only visible on the back of a particular piece. She offered that it was something special just for the wearer, like sexy underwear. It struck me recently that an exciting arbitroliday might be, "Daring Underwear Day." It may or may not preclude foods in excess.

After a pro bono consultation with Google, I learned that a largely similar arbitroliday exists: National Underwear Day on August fifth, founded by freshpair.com. This is the US version; another iteration exists in Brazil, founded by Finissimo and celebrated February 17th. Though less refined than my original vision, the current manifestation is a bit more obvious in its implementation. Not surprisingly, there are plenty of photographs… everywhere… to help neophytes and revelers absorb the nuances. Maybe the thing to do in rising to the challenges of vagaries in a proliferation of minor holidays is to do just as the Christians and the Pagans have done for thousands of years before: combine elements of what you know and charge ahead. Therefore, this year, I will celebrate Middle Name Pride Day, by wearing a special pair of underwear while avoiding coffee and Coke, despite the day falling on a Friday during of the first full week of March, which according to Lenten tradition…

Confessions of a Recovering Evangelical

I met Erika Archer at a strip mall kung fu dojo in 2002. The strip mall location didn't indicate anything about the quality of the kung fu, but it did allow for easy access to a cheap Chinese restaurant. I tried the Chinese one evening with a group of back-to-back kung fu / Chinese regulars. We each ordered our own dish and didn't share. I chose some sort of lo mein, because you're supposed to, and after receiving my food realized that it would be uncool to order anything other than Mongolian beef next time.

Armed with that information, I began to get to know Erika. She was older than me, but I couldn't figure out her exact age. She seemed too young to be married, but she was excellent at kung fu. She lived with her husband up in the mountains and came into town every day to spend time writing at coffee shops.

The kung fu crowd of 2002 was an eclectic explosion of stories. Chaka, my training partner, was a solid 200+lb. rock of a guy from Ghana. We tested the scene at the same time. We met Ben, a passionate, excitable, sometimes student who turned 21 and wore a gi well. He often sparred with Matt, a sweet but vicious black belt that wished he was a woman. Winston and his dad, Steve, were the rocks of the room. There were two Michelle's, both cooler than me, and a Veronica - actually, I should say, the Veronica. An Army sergeant, Veronica put up with no nonsense from anyone, and always had time for a good time. These characters became my life during those years, but this story is about Erika.

Eventually I found out that she was six years older than me. I knew things were interesting when I learned that she was 29 and celebrating her ten year wedding anniversary. Back in evangelical Colorado Springs, there was no dancing at weddings. To me, Erika is a peephole into a world that I barely understand. Raised in churches and banned from using Ouiji boards or roller skating with bare knees, she eventually found her own way, with full understanding of her past. Because she's a writer, I know her teenage years in fantasical detail. Her mid-30's memoir, In a Handbasket: Confessions of a Recovering Evangelical, is a great tour through church youth groups, goldfish eating courtships, and secret missions to 'save' the non-believers.

I have only lived in primarily liberal, non-secular cities. When the news bombs me with information about the Christian right voting one way or another, I always wonder how someone could fundamentally believe that evolution or homosexuality are wrong. Basic scientific fact tells us that the Earth was not formed 6000 years ago. How is it that someone can spend so much energy believing otherwise? In any event, Erika was my window into the bubble. Of course, it took her leaving that world for me to experience it, but it is as close as I have ever been. Erika is far from evangelical now. In fact, she writes for the ever-entertaining The Nervous Breakdown about topics that make me wonder if she's worried that her two kids will eventually stumble across them one day. She does disguise herself under the name Erika Rae.

I see Erika as a translator. She was (and still is) able to pull herself away from her own life enough to evaluate it, decide on its direction, and then reflect on it in the future. This skill, lost on many, allows the richness of her life to be seemingly easily transcribed. It makes me wonder what she would write about me. I can write about her because she has been able to transfer her stories and make them accessible. Is the opposite true?

Maybe I need some Mongolian beef.

Get out and get activist

John Martyn is dead at age 60. I heard the news from my friend mjp6 living in NYC. On a recent trip to Rasputin, in part to support the music store industry as well as feed my own habit, I picked up a used David Gray EPwith which was a mystery CD including a cover of Martyn’s, “Go Down Easy”. Cool.

At the moment, there is a flurry of activity on YouTube with people combing through decades of sometimes bizarre and sometimes stellar (always sweaty) performances. There is a lot of reminiscent posting pared with a justified expression that Martyn was underrated and, in any event, under acknowledged: “I’m sad to know I’m hearing him now for the first time.” That is paraphrased.



In listening to “Sweet Little Mystery,” the memory of seeing Martin Sexton in concert for the first time replayed in my head. It was a show at Off Broadway in St. Louis. Sexton was supported by a great percussionist with an excellent sort of beaded shaker thing that exactly recreated the sound of a drum machine effect… weird inversion. I had been turned on to Sexton by a friend of a friend, both of whom were there with me. Great show and a great place: we ordered a pizza from the place next door and had it delivered to us at the venue. The guy walked in midway through the show and brought it to where we were sitting. Ha! My thought was that in music as with so many things, it takes the active word of mouth and in this case, the lending of an ear (and a CD) to learn something new. That venue itself was another instance word-of-mouth: the theatre manager I worked for at the time told me over and over again to see something... anything... there.



The newest issue of Outside features an interesting interview with Lance Armstrong. In the piece, he talks of his motivations and goals for coming out of retirement to participate in the next Tour de France. Given reflection on his current physical condition as well as his hiatus, his primary goal is to spread the word (i.e., effect new political and economic paradigms regarding cancer eradication). Maybe this has always been his intent, but I am happy to be hearing this now for the first time. It is also exciting (and palpably reported) that he intends to win. That sneakish intent is something I love about both John Martyn and Martin Sexton: while they are in it to play, they are serious players.



Thanks to Thalerguy and shiveringgoat for their YouTube videos.

Skip this and go listen to something by Ana Egge.

The sequence goes like this: watch YouTube video of Ana Egge performing > recall an absurd comment made by John Mayer about how great it is that, “girls get out up there and bang out a few chords” (paraphrased) > try to find the source article in Acoustic Guitar by way of Google > fail > end up on the Wikipedia entry for John Mayer and find… of all things… a subcategory describing Mayer’s apparent consideration of abandoning music entirely to pursue a career in… design. Where to begin? Clearly, at the end.

Design: who knows how credible the claim is that design was even a consideration? The overall point though is that the disposition is supported by examples of signature model guitars issued by Martin and Fender. Wow. It is delightful that Mayer had the opportunity to select the wood varieties and offer up some styling cues so winningly, but the fact is that he does not design guitars: at best he specified some features when prompted by legendary makers. Oh wait! Wiki says that Mayer also has designed t-shirts and shoes. I bet that he has even designed a method for sandwich construction whereby the mayonnaise is applied to one piece of bread while mustard is craftily placed on… the other piece of bread. It is like flavor in stereo. Design? How to even begin to describe what design thinking means to a room full of designers when the word design is even casually used in the context of some dolt who stencils a shirt? Clearly at the beginning. [The entirety of the shoe issue has been abandoned for even the slightest attempt at brevity.]

There is always a hip-pocket example to counter the quick dismissal of talent: Mayer’s trivialization of women getting started in the singer-songwriter racket implicitly suggests that women cannot play the guitar like he does… which, I guess, is well. [Though, secretly I am thrilled that there are no heroines-apparent taking up his slack.] The number of brilliant women guitarists is overwhelming, to the point that consideration in light of the comment is moot. Let the mystery be, yes? Not just yet. The fact that there is even discussion of Mayer as a designer to be taken seriously brings me right back to the point of this whole thing: Ana Egge. Her talents are immense vocally, lyrically, and dexterously. The cap though is the fact that she IS a designer. The guitar that she plays is an Egge/Musser original: she made it. Her efforts did not begin and end with style choices. She built it. Further, she plays the hell out of it on a daily basis.

In the world of retail sales of vintage instruments, belt buckle “rash” is an interesting phenomenon: it is the collective distress due to wear from belt buckles, keys, buttons, snaps, and the like that accumulates from the physical contact between instrument and player. Only in particular cases (e.g. celebrity instruments or VERY old instruments) does this kind of wear exist without impact on value. Admittedly, there is a certain bravado in beating up a guitar in more than one way. Patina is cool: designers and musicians agree.



The “honest” wear that I see on Mayer’s instruments I suppose is a trophy of his skill, craft, and lifestyle: hard-charging designer on the road belting out the Grammy winning Wonderbread. Sucks to your asthma,I say! I am compelled to cry foul and pull from my hip pocket video proof of something I have seen in person, as well: the skewed buckle. Aha! Now THAT is a legitimate metric of a designer. That’s right John: she BUILT her guitar; she is designerly enough to understand what that means. Now I know that there are lots of guys getting up on stage with pristine Martins buckling their belts on the hip, but it seems like the world deserves at least one good example of a woman doing the same. That is all: long, boring, and needlessly bitter based on a vaguely remembered quote from an article that cannot be located—interspersed with too many colons.

stairs and sentences

Yes, today was the inauguration of Barack Obama. Sentences! Did you hear all the sentences?

In addition to everything said by everyone, especially Beyonce, I found two parts of Barack's speech to be particularly great details. First, he pronounced the town of Concord correctly. For those not in the know, it's not Con-chord. It's Con-kurd. I believe everything he said that much more because I found him credible on the details that I recognized. Very slick.

Second, the set designer of the speech did a nice job aligning Barack with the blue and red carpeted stairs when viewed on television straight on. It's a classy background that is perfectly suited for television viewers, and a functional and simple piece of infrastructure for those in attendance.

Love Letters of the Future

This is a report on my books: they are sitting in a large pile that I anticipate getting larger within the next few days as some Tintin comics travel from somewhere, here. The stack includes, among others: a travel book on Scotland; The Tempest; Kingsley Amis’, Lucky Jim (no idea why that is taking so long); Slaugtherhouse Five (Homer Simpson has a brilliant interpretation of this, yes?); Thompson’s, Blankets; The Adventures of Tintin: The Black Island; and Chabon’s, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Really I cannot get enough: I need more. Letters to the editor, blogs, instruction sheets, liner notes, and, not lastly, magazines.

The episodic nature of magazine is one of the most compelling and satisfying things about them. Formatted, yes, but each issue has an identity: a new gamble at a satisfying meal. Right? I straddled the recent annual odometer change with two publications that cemented a beautiful year gone and offered particularly inspired direction toward the future.

The cover story of Fretboard Journal (Winter 2008) is Bill Frisell’s interview of Jim Hall. Brief introduction if necessary: Frisell is an exquisite musician and a student of Jim Hall, whose commensurate talents were shifted back in time so as to influence directly and indirectly students of guitar. The cover story itself is a nearly perfect example of the successful transfer of knowledge with the serendipitous effect of broadening the pools in which everyone swims, rather than diminishing a single source of food. Within that piece is a lovely detailing by Jason Verlinde on Gary Larson’s experience as Jim Hall’s student. Larson, creator of the quintessential single-frame comic, The Far Side, is an excellent player, and as Verlinde conveys, also a fine synthesizer of jazz. What are the odds of Larson being a guitarist capable of playing with Hall and Frisell? Evidently about the same as Woody Allen being a professional clarinetist.

Last month’s issue of National Geographic included the eerily beautiful glimpses of Mars conveyed from the Rovers and friends. John Updike authored this piece. John Updike. John Updike. He proffered a tantalizing historical account of the Mars exploration and spun it his own way to make it the fact people take conversationally. William Buckley (R.I.P.) once responded to the suggestion that he was master of words with the following paraphrase: “you know who has a good vocabulary? John Updike.” (I think that this was on the Charlie Rose Show, though I cannot recall exactly.) I would like to imagine a similar moment in history where Bo Jackson and Michael Jordan sat down to talk about who was better at playing baseball. The idea that John Updike can, not only, be an authority on astronomical proceedings, but can also shrug perceptions of expertise to deliver the goods is nothing short of amazing. This is the future and it is being offered by the past.

My thoughts upon finishing these two pieces drifted to the state of design, the state of the world, and the states of America, in particular. In one regard, it was reassuring to read of music being an unowned resource from which anyone can draw, both in difficult and easy times. More contextually, I felt validated by the power of shunning expectations in favor of charging forward in embrace and defiance of challenge. The people I know and those I know who will change their worlds can speak as easily with drawings as with songs, with bridges as with glances. It is a delightful club that can delightfully, by example, include everyone.

Catch Me if You Can

Today I became a particle in the ether. I was an excited electron, put into uber-orbit.

I wrote the above line about a month ago. I was laying on an Aerobed on a hardwood floor in LoHa (Lower Harlem, for those not in the know). I had just eaten a healthy dose of good cheese and salami, played wii, and taken a shower. I reflected on my day. That morning I arrived at San Francisco International Airport, and was dropped off at the entrance to the international terminal. I wasn't flying overseas, but I rolled my suitcase through groups of foreigners dressed up to a level that Americans simply can not achieve while traveling. With no line at the check-in kiosk, I proceeded on to the Virgin America gates.



In front of me on the escalator were three people, all between the ages of 22 and 32. Each wore head to toe comfortable black, with a small red Virgin logo on their sleeve. "oooh my flight attendants are very hip and young," I thought. I descended with them and watched as they smiled and laughed at funny things I couldn't discern before they disappeared down the jetway.

I boarded the aircraft and slid into my clean, leather, aisle seat with full width under-seat storage - none of the half-width aisle seat storage you find on the major carriers these days. The entire plane is lit with colored LEDs that change in color slowly with the time of day. I felt like a musical note. Together with my fellow notes we all composed a song by someone with two almost-first names.



My seat had a mini touch screen TV that let me control its pitch and yaw. I set up playlists and figured out which shows I'd watch before we even left the ground. The TV menus had options to use email and send text messages in addition to watching programming. When I tried to select one of these features the Virgin told me that these features were still in development, and would be rolled out soon. I found this particularly compelling. What a show of confidence from the Virgin! It put itself out there and let me know that, "hey, we've got some neat stuff in the works but we're not all there yet." I appreciated the candid honesty.



Right before takeoff, the captain, one of the three young, fit people I had falsely followed down the escalator as flight attendants came out of the cockpit to do the pre-flight chit-chat. Hello young, fit aviator. He indicated that the emergency information movie would be playing shortly. I watched it: a glorious hand-drawn cartoon animation of the usual strangely diverse clip that is most definitely entitled "My Great Movie" on an iBook near you.

I ended up watching a Top Chef marathon for the entire flight. This means that the Virgin gets Bravo. Bravo! I have cable at home and they don't include Bravo. We landed at JFK a full hour early after about 4.25 hours of travel. I walked off the plane with my rock-star self and right to the baggage claim area where bags were already rolling off the conveyor belt.

Ahhh, so this is why Leo did it!