I imagine a fire eons ago. You can’t stare at a fire—even a fake one in an electric fireplace—for long without going back to those fires before history when we as a species made our bargain with the wolves. I wonder what it must have been like to hear those other social hunters out there in the night. To know how much they were like us.
When did that first wolf wander into some human encampment? Perhaps he said, if you give me a place by that fire and a share of what you kill with those nice fancy spears, knives, bows, rifles and ICBMs, I’ll help you track and hunt. I’ll warn you of danger at night. Someday I’ll rescue you from rubble and sit down when I smell cancer in your bodies. Mostly, though, I’ll stick with you even when you least deserve it.
Over time, Wolf traded in some wildness and size, domesticated himself just as we were doing the exact same thing. I read once that a key difference between Homo sapiens and our Neanderthal cousins was that they didn’t domesticate the wolf. That they somehow passed on this alliance with an animal that would be protector, partner, ally and friend.
We evolved together, us and the dogs, and that’s a large part of why it seems so right to live with dogs and so unnatural (to me anyway) not to have dogs around. But then dogs are wolves at heart, and bargaining with wolves can be a tricky thing. The wolf is likely to win, and he’ll make you not mind losing. For instance, my wife and I go to work every morning to earn the bread to put the beast into their bowls, and they lounge at home all day.
Sounds like that wolf that wondered into that ancient camp may have won that one. But that’s okay because to paraphrase The Stranger from The Big Lebowski: It’s good to know they’re out there takin’ ‘r easy for all us sinners.
Today is election day, but I voted early as I usually do. I don’t know that I could say that I am more or less enthusiastic about voting than I have been in the past. Fortunately that doesn’t matter. Since I live in Texas and voted mostly for Democrats, my vote doesn’t really matter either. Such is the way of things here and I’m used to it. It’s why I don’t bother with my torch, pitchfork and revolutionary hat. We don’t throw our bums out in Texas.
My official for-what-it’s-worth prediction is that the Democrats will lose the house and hold the senate, which is pretty much conventional wisdom. Here in Texas, Rick Perry will win yet another term as governor, making him the longest serving Texas governor and one of the longest serving governors in US history. They say he has presidential aspirations, though I’m not sure if his aspiration is to be president of the US or a newly seceded Texas.
It is an odd choice for voters today. Vote for the Republicans who created many of the economic and budget problems we face or double down on Democrats who have demonstrated ineffectiveness in solving them. Here is the problem of a two-party system distilled: either/or without a pragmatic middle is barely a choice at all. I don’t know what the real answer is other than viable third and fourth parties. Maybe that isn’t an answer either.
As for me, I went with the Democrats this time out. I’d like to be able to take the GOP seriously, but it’s hard to get behind an anti-intellectual party that doesn’t believe in good government. It would be like going to a dentist who doesn’t believe in dentistry. Whatever happens tonight, though, I suspect I’ll be wishing for something stronger than Novocain.
Last summer while walking around San Francisco, I took a few random snaps with my iphone using the Hipstamatic ap. I liked the way they came out and so while we were in New York earlier this week, I made it a point to get some Hipstamatic shots from my walks around Manhattan. My favorite though is one R. shot of the Thelonious Monk car we rode up to Beacon near Poughkeepsie to visit some friends.
I think I should take a walk around downtown Austin one of these days and try to do some Hipstamatic Austin scenes.
I like this Flickr slideshow embed thingy. I’ve had a Flickr account for several years now, but I’ve never done anything with it. I think I may try hosting photos there instead of here, though I haven’t quite thought out the pros and cons of doing so.
I took these pictures with my phone when we were in San Francisco back in July. They’re just random scenes done while walking around the city. I had my real camera with me, but was (and still am) intrigued by the idea of using the phone for snapshots, especially with the odd moody renderings you can get with the Hipstamatic app. Click on them to see them full size on the image page.
You don’t have much control over anything other than composition when you shoot with a phone so there’s a certain amount of surrender involved when you’re used to having the kind of control and instant results you typically get with a DSLR. Using a phone you give that up and you even have to wait a few seconds for the image to “develop.”
It reminds me of the wonder photography held when I was just starting out, the way I went about seeing the world in whole new ways, noticing light and shadow and shape. I suppose any new tool can make something new again, but when applied to photography, it allows us to experience the whole world in unexpected ways.
The past few weekends we’ve been getting rid of stuff. The kind of stuff we don’t need or even really want, the kind of things that make us ask why did we keep this? and then say I can’t remember. Old clothes we haven’t worn in years, books we bought and never read or only read once with no intention of rereading. We’ve been taking it one room per weekend and going through, bagging and boxing things up for Goodwill and Half Price Books. It feels good.
A colleague of mine recently said he thought it was a sin to keep things you don’t want or need. I don’t have his Catholic conception of sin, but I do find myself in agreement. We Americans collect so much, so much we don’t need, so much we don’t even want, most of which will just be tossed by our descendents. I’m not arguing for stripping down to the barest essentials, but it’s been good to go through the house, looking at everything and asking questions like ‘Why do we own this?’ ‘Do we want this?’ ‘Who gave this to us?’
Sometimes, it seems the artifacts of our lives pose as many questions as we might have hoped they’d answer beyond whatever perceived need prompted their purchase.
Books are like that and used to be hard for me to get rid of, but now even those are easier to part with. I tend to keep cookbooks, guidebooks and assorted references. Poetry books stay since I’ll pick those up and reread through them randomly. Novels I’ve read and don’t intend to read again are the first to go, which is odd since I’ve written a few novels and am trying to get one published, but as artifacts, those are the books I generally feel the least connection with, though I can’t imagine parting with my Lord of the Rings, Philip K. Dick, or Don Quixote. A few others. Enough to have a room full of books when random heady inspiration is needed.
Sometimes we find that the things we have carry some sentimental value. They were given by a loved one, they remind us of special times and places, and they are totems that aid travel through memory.
For many things, though, it just seems others can or will use them better than we will and so we let those things go. In doing so, we become a little freer and the house feels lighter and, strangely, more comfortable.
As much as I love fall in Austin, there’s still one part I never look forward to: the ragweed/fall elm gauntlet that gets me every year. Just as the weather turns nice and I’m ready to get outside and enjoy it a little, the autumn allergies have me running for the indoors. Some years it’s not so bad, but this year has seen especially high counts. According to the Statesman, yesterday’s count was the highest it’s been since they started keeping records in 1997.
It was back in the late ‘90’s that the Austin allergies finally got me. They get most everyone eventually, but for most people it’s the December/January cedar that gets their noses running and their eyes itching. I typically don’t feel the cedar unless it’s especially high. Still, live here long enough and you’ll develop allergies to something.
I visited an allergist about 10 years ago and got the full battery of tests. I asked, “What would be the most effective thing for me to do?”
He pulled down a map and pointed to Alaska. “Move,” he said. “Your allergies won’t give you problems in Alaska or…” He considered it a moment and then pointed to Florida. “Key West.”
I’m still in Austin, obviously. It’s only a month. Mid-September to late October and then just as fall really hits, my nose will clear, my eyes will dry and all will be good. I can’t win these battles with Mother Nature and so I just hibernate, limiting my outdoor time to short walks with the pups. And, of course, ACL Fest for which I will pay a hefty price next weekend when the ragweed gods will claim their pound of snot.
Fall begins tonight, at least that’s what They say. We’ve got some summer days ahead (though not everyday), but I’m excited even if it is like Christmas without snow or cold. There are many reasons to love fall in central Texas even if the leaves don’t change colors like they do up north.
Maybe it’s the light and the way it changes in the fall as the sun follows those migrating birds south. There is too much light here five months of the year. Everything seems blasted, washed out and flat. Photographs with white skies. The autumn light throws things into sharper relief so everything around jumps out, though it was all there all along, hidden in the haze of light that melts everything it touches into flatness. There are discoveries to make this time of year now that the heat no longer blinds.
Maybe it’s the southbound migrants passing through and the winter residents arriving. The orange-crowned and yellow-rumped warblers, the chipping sparrows and kinglets coming back. Fall and winter are great times for birding here since as many species are coming as going. So long, scissor-tails, swallows and kingbirds. Hello, ducks.
Maybe it’s the simple fact that being outside is enjoyable again. Now that fall is upon us, the weather is finally beginning to change just ever so slightly. It’s still humid but the heat behind that humidity is down, and I can once again enjoy creeping out of my air-conditioned cave to enjoy the world.
Most days, I take a walk at lunch. It’s an even mile around the facility where I work and, and I like to walk that mile. It’s good to see the weather and hear the birds, to feel sun and wind in the middle of a day spent in a windowless classroom. It recharges me for the afternoon and lets me unwind as well. When the planet begins to skirt close to the sun as it does in late April, my walks stop and usually don’t resume until mid-September since I can’t stand returning to class sweaty and smelly. I took my first lunch walk of the new school year yesterday, enjoying the calls of the killdeer that live in the fields around the building.
Those walks are the source of many of the micro-poems I post at (the new and improved) a gnarled oak so the micro-poems, like many of our plants, dry up a little in the summertime. So does a lot of my writing. I don’t know why, but it’s better to write when the world is cooler and darker. It seems there’s more to say, more of a need to say it. A fall bloom, if you will.
When I was in high school in New England, spring was such a joy. An annual awakening that seemed to lift everyone from the darkness. Here in Texas things are turned around. Here, it is autumn that awakens as I find myself celebrating the release from the blazing light and heat. Excited again by the opportunity to reconnect with the outdoors.
Or maybe it’s just football.
Whichever way, it’s fall. Time to get outside again.
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This post was inspired by Lorianne and Heather whose posts about fall got me looking forward to fall here even though it doesn’t feel that fall-like most days.
The latest, and sadly last, issue of ouroboros review is out. I’ve got a photograph in there. Look for “Rolling Bottle” on page 4 (you can read it online). The photo first appeared here at Coyote Mercury back in 2006 along with some others I took in Gruene.
Dave Bonta’s Woodrat Podcast is back. The first two episodes of this season are well worth the time. He finds very interesting guests and their conversations are always worth a listen, especially his interview with Lorianne DiSabato where they discuss nature writing, old school blogging and zen practice. DiSabato blogs at Hoarded Ordinaries, a site I’ll be checking out.
While you’re going around listening to the web, stop and have a listen to the poems at Whale Sound a mesmerizing project where NS reads poems written by other poets. She does a brilliant job with these pieces. I’ve listened to her reading of “At Ruby’s Diner” by Sherry O’Keefe several times and it just gets better and better each time.
And, finally, it appears there is another James Brush out there and I’m not talking about my dad. Count him and it seems we’re everywhere. Check out the other James’s site and dig his art at jamesbrush.com.
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):
I imagine a fire eons ago. You can’t stare at a fire—even a fake one in an electric fireplace—for long without going back to those fires before history when we as a species made our bargain with the wolves. I wonder what it must have been like to hear those other social hunters out there in the night. To know how much they were like us.
