I’ve changed to a new host and in the process decided to change my URL by dropping the /blog1, which I’ve never cared for. Hopefully, I’ve done this in such a way that inbound links will redirect as should the rss feed. We’ll see. Things might be a bit wonky over here while I get settled in.
This is the videopoem I made for “drylung” by Clayton Michaels. It comes from his chapbook, Watermark, winner of the 2010 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest.
About a month ago, Dave Bonta and Beth Adams, co-managing editors at qarrtsiluni asked if I would be interested in doing a video for one of the poems from Watermark. They sent the manuscript, which proved to be an embarrassment of riches. I read it a few times, went back and forth with a few and settled on “drylung.”
What will the world “look like when all the water leaves?” Last Summer we were on the tail end of a two-and-a-half year drought here in central Texas. The lakes were drying up. The aquifers were emptying. Austin and San Antonio were imposing harsh water use restrictions and through all those 105°F days, there was the underlying sense that this was the future. Those in the know—politicians and policymakers, the few who try to think long term—claim that water will be the issue in Texas in the 21st century.
Parts of Lake Travis that hadn’t seen the sun in decades were exposed, and docks and boats were marooned hundreds of yards inland. Everything shriveled as the ground compacted and cracked so slowly it could almost seem normal at times.
In October, the rains came and the drought ended. We had one of the wettest, coldest winters in a long time. Memory of such things is short and so water, or the lack thereof, was soon forgotten.
What will the world “look like when all the water leaves?” Mars.
Ever since I was a kid in the ’70s in Washington, DC where the Air & Space Museum was my favorite place, Mars has fascinated me. I can scroll endlessly through the images beamed back by NASA’s rovers. Mars is beautiful and stark. It is the subject of a few of my poems, one published earlier this year at qarrtsiluni and another here at Coyote Mercury. I’m even writing a novel (slowly, too slowly) set on Mars, that world from which all the water really has left (actually, it’s possibly still there, trapped below the surface in a layer of permafrost, but I digress).
Texas and Mars collided in “drylung.” In my mind, it sounded like prophecy such as one might hear between channels on a weather radio. This summer had been (it isn’t now) unusually mild. Mid-90s and regular rain. It was easy to forget the previous year. “drylung” forced memory and took me to Mars where ancient water likely flowed.
I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to make this video. Thanks to Beth and Dave for inviting me to do this and for their suggestions on improving the final edit. Thanks to Clayton for his wonderful poem and reading and for allowing me to interpret his work like this.
Watermark will be published August 30th. You’ll be able to read it and listen to Clayton read his poems at watermarkpoems.com, and you can order it from Phoenicia Publishing. I’ve got a few of Phoenicia’s books, and they’re tip-top all the way and speaking as someone who’s had the privilege of reading Watermark, I recommend buying a copy. It’s an incredibly good read, the kind that makes me want to be a better writer.
This is my first attempt at making a cigar box guitar. In last Sunday’s Austin American-Statesman, there was an article (can’t find it on the site so no link) about 2 guys who make and sell cigar box guitars under the name Bobby Taylor Guitars. They’re based here in Austin, and the article made the guitars sound so cool, I thought about going out to find one. The article also mentioned a few websites with plans for building your own, which sounded like more fun than buying one. Thus building a cigar box ax became my project for the week.
The plan I used was for a simple 3-string fretless guitar that relies more on parts from Radio Shack and Lowe’s than anything from a music store. The plan for this simple guitar is available at Cigar Box Guitars, though I used many ideas and relied on a lot of insights in the forums at Cigar Box Nation, especially for wiring.
I’m a rank amateur when it come to carpentry. My dad is talented in woodworking and though he taught me the “measure twice, cut once” rule, I’m still at the “measure twice, cut twice, screw it up, fix it, and improvise to get it right” level. Because of this, I decided I wasn’t going to worry too much about how it looked and hell, it’s a DIY cigar box ax: if it looks kind of jacked up, then that just makes it look more punk. Fine with me. I just wanted it to work and sound cool.
On Monday, I gathered all the supplies. I got the wood, a 3-foot 1×2 of poplar, and various bolts and nails at Lowe’s. I got the pickup (a piezo transducer) and 1/4 inch output jack at Radio Shack. The tuners and the volume pot came from Strait Music. The cigar box came from the Twin Liquors down the street and seemed to be the only empty cigar box in town. I’d have preferred a deeper one, but in the spirit of use-what-you-got, I took what I could get.
Cutting the neck to fit the box was the trickiest part. I went to my parents’ house to get some help from my dad since I don’t even have a workbench. We experimented with a bandsaw, jigsaw, coping saw and various weapons of sanding. In the end, and for future reference, the jigsaw was fine for most of the cutting, followed by various files and a pocket knife to finish and get the cuts just right.
I read about fretting the neck and understand the principle, but a guitar has around 20 frets and that sounded to me like 20 opportunities to screw up the neck beyond repair and so I decided it would be a fretless ax and moved on to staining the neck.
Once the stain was dry, I put it together. My cuts in the cigar box weren’t perfect and so I nailed the neck to the box lid with small finishing nails (rather than gluing it). Then I strung it up and wrestled with physics, one of the more unforgiving teachers. Here is where I had to go off plan. The first issue was that as I tuned the strings to pitch, they dug into the wood of the tailpiece. As they cut the wood, they lost tension and so I couldn’t tune them. I needed some metal to stick into the string holes.
I went back to Lowe’s and wandered up and down the aisles looking for something that might work. In the plumbing department, I found some little pieces of copper tubing with flared ends. They weren’t as thick as the tailpiece and it looked like the balls on the ends of the strings might not go through them. I bought a few, widened the string holes and glued them in.
That solved the strings cutting the wood problem, but the balls on the ends of the strings could slide up the tubes, so I used this solution, which I saw in a picture on Cigar Box Nation:
You can see holes, where I tried staples, but that didn’t work as well as the nail. This works, though, it does mean that changing even one string will require me to de-tune all three in order to release the tension on the nail.
The other string related issue was the fact that the middle string wanted to be too close to the low string. Because I’m using bolts instead of a “real” (ie: cut) nut and bridge, the strings will slip into the most natural groove, but I needed the middle string moved slightly downward. I remembered the string guides on Stratocasters and figured I could just drive a fat screw in there and perhaps it would work. It did, and now I have a nice ugly DIY-looking headstock:
Believe it or not, it works and the thing stays in tune.
Next up was the wiring. I haven’t soldered anything since 7th grade electronics class so this took some practice. The plans I used say to just hook the piezo transducer to the output jack, but I wanted a volume pot in there so I had to search around, but I found a simple wiring diagram at Cigar Box Nation. I wired it up, but could never get the ground wires soldered onto the back of the volume pot. After reading that real electric guitars use the bridge as the ground, I decided to just run the ground wire out of the back of the box (that black wire in the detail photos above) and wrap it around the bolt I’m using for a bridge. To my surprise, it worked.
Now it was time to tune up. I tried acoustic strings hoping to get more volume since the box is so thin, but they kept breaking. Electric guitar strings, however, work quite well. They’re thinner and require less tension. The source of the breaking turned out to be scale length (the distance between nut and bridge, aka, the 2 bolts). A longer scale equals more tension. I measured the scale length and found it was almost 2 inches longer than the scale length on my other guitars, but shorter than bass scale length. Had I known about this, I would have cut 2 inches off the neck, so that info will get filed away for the next one.
The thing turns out to be playable. The action is kind of high, so next time, I’ll use a slightly thinner bolt for the nut. Not having frets will take some getting used to; my fingers generally know where to go, but with the longer scale I have to spread them slightly farther than I would on a regular guitar. Fretless guitars are best played with a slide so I’ll learn how to do that.
I initially tuned to E-A-D like on a standard guitar and while that was fun, I think I’ll get more mileage from an open tuning, which is what a lot of the cigar box guitar sites recommend. Right now, I’ve got it tuned to open G (G-D-G) which lends itself to slide playing. Still, it’s a new beast and now that it’s built I get the fun of figuring out how to play it.
Coming out of my amp, it sounds old fashioned: tinny and mid-rangey like an A.M. radio. I like it. The piezo doesn’t pick up a whole lot of vibration since the lid is thicker than an acoustic guitar top and the box is thin. A pre-amp would probably be useful (there are kits to make your own) but I plugged it into an overdrive pedal and that works for now.
In all, this was a wonderful experience. I was telling a friend just last week that wish I knew how to make things. He said, “You make poems.” I nodded and while I love making poems and stories and content, there’s something immensely satisfying about the making of things. Especially things that work. I don’t know why, but it makes me happy. I don’t know how many hours I spent sanding and soldering (and re-soldering) but I really enjoyed the doing of it.
I plan to make more of these. I have a very cool cigar box that I didn’t want to ruin on my first build so I’ll be making it into a guitar one day. I’d also like to build one with proper electric guitar pickups, maybe a nice, growling, dirty humbucker. That will however be a project for cooler weather. One thing I vowed never to do again is build a guitar when it’s 103°F outside. In the shade. Thank goodness for TopoChico.
Now have a listen. The clip is about a minute or so. The 1st 30 seconds are acoustic and the rest is through the amp. The buzzing and crackling you’ll hear is the amp, which needs some work. The slide work is clumsy (you can hear me knocking it against the neck). I’m just guessing at the fingering since I don’t really know how to play a fretless instrument yet. Anyhow, enjoy (if that’s the right word):
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Yesterday, whilst engaged in some offline analog projects, two literary sites were kind enough to publish some of my work.
The first, Poets for Living Waters, “a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster,” featured 3 of my poems. The poems “A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea” (thanks for the prompt, Deb!), “The Desert Years,” and “Galveston, Last Summer” all appeared in slightly different form here at Coyote Mercury.
Thanks to the editors of these fine online journals for publishing these poems, and as always, have a look around. There is wonderful work to be found at both of these sites.
Last Friday, R and I took a painting class for adults at Marmalade Skies here in Austin. The class is called Pinot Picasso and it’s geared toward people who have never painted before. People like R and me. Actually, I have painted a few houses and I’m pretty good at it, but I don’t think it’s the same thing. At all. For one thing, this was fun.
The instructor was great, letting us explore and helping us out of holes all while talking about Roy Lichtenstein and his technique as well as general painting technique. We started with photographs—everyone else did people but she let us try dogs, which was new for her. In the end, much to our surprise, R and I had a couple of cool looking paintings of 2 of our favorite people (though I’ll need to go back and do one of Simon some time before he gets jealous).
What amazed me was how quickly the time went. How lost we both were in what we were doing. The instructor said, “We’re closing in 15 minutes,” and I looked around saw that it was dark outside and I had a nearly finished painting and an empty bottle of TopoChico in front of me.
I love making things, and even more, I love the act of making them. Most of what I make comes out in the form of pixels or food, but it was a thrill to make something I can hold and hold on to as I don’t do enough of that.
It’s the most fun I’ve had going out on a Friday night since I can remember, and I couldn’t wait to get home and show the dogs who weren’t interested once they realized they couldn’t eat the paintings.
The Pinot Picasso classes at Marmalade Skies at 183 and Anderson Mill in northwest Austin are held every Friday from 7-9:30, and each week they teach a different style of painting. We’ll be going back.
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Want to make a fast friend by saving a greyhound in Central Texas? Check these pups out. Or go here to find a greyhound near you. You can also go here to find out why greyhounds are running for their lives.
If you have dogs who need proven leadership, go here to find a cat.
Most Wednesdays, Matthew over at Lonestarters posts an interview with a different Austin blogger. He recently asked me to respond to some questions and today, you can read my responses. The questions were really interesting and got me thinking about this whole blogging thing I’ve been doing these past few years as well as the history of Coyote Mercury—how I started and how it’s changed—as well as about writing in general. Go read it and while you’re there have a look around. Matthew is new to Austin and Lonestarters is the ongoing tale of his adventures of discovery within this wonderful town and it’s good stuff all around. Go say hi (or howdy).
After a few days under the grackle tree, the blue sedan began to develop a white pox, which spread with each passing night. The automedics shook their heads in grim certainty, fully aware of the limits of their training and skill. Eventually, it was decided that the problem was environmental, and men with shotguns came and took determined aim into the trees before firing blanks into the upper boughs. Sometimes the grackles would scatter at the sound, flying off to local birdbaths where they would clean up before returning to their usual roost. The men, satisfied, moved down the street where they would take shots at the starling tree, pigeon tree, and a supposed second grackle tree that legend had it was located somewhere south of 16th Street. Despite the diligence of the men, though, the grackles always returned, and the slow infection of the blue sedan continued. After a month, no one remembered what color the car had been, and no one ever discussed its owners and what became of them.
grackle tree—
boughs shake and chatter
at the cars
Three o’clock in the afternoon,
central Texas summer day,
over a hundred degrees out.
I know there will be no birds,
nothing but grackles and vultures.
I still go out, and I’m not surprised.
Only grackles seem to like this heat.
The other birds hold still like
knots in the trees, silent waiting for dusk,
trying to keep their colors from melting
into the brown grass and faded leaves.
Overhead a few vultures soar on
steady outstretched wings,
folding sky and letting it move
around and over them as they ride
thermals up to more temperate
atmospheric zones. Meanwhile,
the grackles and I enjoy the heat
until the other birds begin to stir
and it’s time for me to go home.
These photos were taken last week at Muir Woods National Monument in Marin County, California, a short drive north of San Francisco. Muir Woods is part of the Golden Gate National Recreational Area. You can click on the images to enlarge and view at a higher resolution.
Muir Woods is an old growth redwood forest. It feels like a church or a library or a little bit of both. At least until the tour buses arrive.
The coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) is the tallest and among the oldest of living things.
The tallest trees at Muir come to around 250 feet, and the oldest ones are around 1200 years old.
The tallest and oldest trees at Muir Woods are relatively short and young for coastal redwoods which used to cover two million acres of coastal California and Oregon.
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