Monday 20 February
The Greatest Guitarists of All Time

Filed under Reviews

I care more about the ambitious Sigma Chi boy down the road’s plans for next year in his bid for house pledgemaster than I do about whom the editors of Rolling Stone think, this year, are, in order, the top 100 guitarists of all time. It is the exact sort of non-journalistic ad-seller that makes me pine for the demise of magazines that’s not coming as quickly as those prognosticating the end of newspapers seem to claim. There’s nothing to be said about RS‘s actual list, except guess where they ranked Jimi fucking Hendrix.

Here, though, are the letters RS claims in its 19 Jan 2012 issue to have received, which are, alone, a source of robust comedy:

THANK YOU FOR THE 100 Greatest Guitarists issue [RS 1145]! In a time when we find ourselves so preoccupied with political, economic and climate-change woes, it was so cool just to kick it all aside and read up on and debate some real heroes [sic]. I may not agree with some of the rankings or omissions, but I felt your four choices for the covers said the most. Those guys rocked the world like no one else. —Jeffrey Gennett, via the Internet

I WAS IMPRESSED WITH THE group of judges you assembled. The results were dynamic [sic]; it was great to see musicians reflecting on fellow guitarists who influenced them. —Andy Olavarria, McCall, ID

I SPENT AN AFTERNOON completely obsessed with the “100 Greatest Guitarists” list. Absolutely nourishing stuff! It was brilliant [sic] to put together a diverse panel of players, have them vote and gather the stories about why their world was moved by another musician. —Kevin Bedard, Pine, CO

I’VE READ YOU SINCE I WAS a young twerp with braces. Now I’m an older twerp who plays drums in a band. I was very disappointed to see that your list reeked of sausage. Where was Maybelle Carter and Carrie Brownstein? Where the ladies at? —Rebecca DeRosa, Brooklyn

I AM FLATTERED AND A LIT-tle astonished to be included in your “100 Greatest Guitarists” list. I wanted to point our, however, that Wilco’s song “Spiders (Kidsmoke),” singled out as one of the examples of my work, actually features extended guitar forays by our leader, Jeff Tweedy, not me! I wasn’t even in the band when that song was recorded. Got to give credit where credit is due. But thanks, everyone. —Nels Cline, Number 82, Wilco lead guitarist [emphasis added]

Two lessons, here. One, never listen to what a male Rolling Stone reader has to say. Two, don’t subscribe to three years of RS on supercheap Web discount because you think it’ll help you stay connected to what’s going on in music these days.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-02-20  ::  dave

Sunday 5 February
Very Good Paragraphs

Filed under Very Good Paragraphs

From Alan Hollinghurst’s new one, The Stranger’s Child:

She could really play, couldn’t she?—that was Paul [Bryant (!!!)]‘s first feeling. He looked around hastily at the others, with a bashful grin on his face. Was it Chopin? He saw them all deciding, staring at each other, frowning or nodding, some leaning to whisper. There was a noiseless sigh, a wave of collective recognition and relief that almost made the music itself unimportant: they’d got it. He didn’t want to show that he hadn’t. He had never seen anyone play the piano seriously and at close range, and it locked him into a state of mesmerized embarrassment, made worse by the desire to conceal it. There was the noise itself, which he thought of vaguely as the noise of classical music, sameish and rhetorical, full of feelings people surely never had, and there was the sight of Mrs. Keeping in action, the plunges and stabs of her bare arms up and down the keyboard. She wasn’t a large woman—it was only her presence that was crushing. Her little hands looked grave and comical as they stretched and rumbled and tinkled. She rocked and jumped from one buttock to the other, in her stiff red dress, her black wrap slipping—it twitched and drooped behind her as she moved, with a worrying life of its own. The riveting, but almost unwatchable, thing was her profile, powdered and severe, shaken by twitches and nods, like tics only just kept under control. He stared, smiling tightly, and covering his mouth and chin intensively with his hand.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-02-05  ::  dave

Saturday 28 January
“Brothers” — Emmet Otter’s Jugband

Filed under tabulature

The song that everyone’s been waiting for, just in time for the end of January when the Xmas season is so far away not a soul wants to think of it. “Brothers” isn’t in any way a holiday song, but those unfamiliar with the movie you’ll find it in should head over here and start reading. I’ll take anyone in a battle royale to the cold, grueling death over whether there’s a better Emmet Otter song. (“Riverbottom Nightmare Band” fans I’m looking in your directions.)

I’m not the sort of guitar player who does well with riffs and ditties, particularly in folksy/bluegrass/jugband genres. But lemme try to get the opener down to give you an idea:

e-----------5-3-|------------|
B-------5-------|-3-3-3-5---:|
G-5-7-5---5-----|---------5--|

F
How much alike we are! Perhaps we're long-lost brothers?
                        G7
We even think the same! You know, there may be others.
Am                                   C/G  C/A  C/Bb   C/B
                 We can always use a friend.
Am                                                         G  G7  Gadd6  Gadd5
This family just keep growing! This family doesn't have to end!
C
Brothers!
C
Brothers!

Verse 2:
So many things to learn! But we'll enjoy each lesson.
Problems don't worry us when half the fun is guessin'.
                 Live a lifetime of surprise.
We'll all become musicians, and leave the wonder in their eyes.
Brothers!
Brothers!

Then there’s a fancier ditty than the one that opens the song and a kind of G7-C ending. Note the ways the notes walk up and then down in the chorus.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-28  ::  dave

Friday 27 January
BlogWeek, Final Day: Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it® Notes

Filed under Books + Endorsements

To end the chiefly spiteful/sickly BlogWeek on a positive note, The Cupboard has just release its latest volume: Lorraine Nelson: A Biography in Post-it Notes. This was the winner of our first-ever contest, and it’s also (essentially) our first-ever work of nonfiction. A happy union.

It’s about a person who may be real and a job that feels all too real. Michael Martone (whose new book, Four for a Quarter is the exact sort of thing we would have loved to publish, if [when?] The Cupboard ever prints full-length books) selected the book among the finalists. Here’s what he had to say on it:

It’s made up of surprising but complex asides, elaborated and compacted articulations that scale beautifully into a durable and brilliant skin, a chain mail of associative links and leaps. The language is massive and minute, mute and malleable. The whole piece performs the paradox, recombining the airy ephemeral with an adhesive that does, in fact, stick.

Lorraine Nelson‘s one of our best volumes ever, and only $5. You can order a copy here.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-27  ::  dave

Thursday 26 January
BlogWeek, Day Four: The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Filed under Reviews

The problem with The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is the problem with all the past alternate Zeldas: redundant parts that get tedious and turn play into chores. Start with Ocarina of Time which is flawless. God, remember Ocarina of Time? Yes, there was that wacky goosechase/errand boy mini-quest where you had to pass successive objects from one lazy Hyrulian’s hand to another, but something about this felt to me heroic—or at least a form of good citizenship.

Then we got Majora’s Mask, the central conceit of which was (if memory serves) that you had to keep living the same three days over and over again, doing things differently each time to make your way toward Zelda. (Maybe? I never got to the end.) Redundancy and repetition. I never felt comfortable in that weird world, nor did I feel gallant and ambitious in my discomfort.

Next is—wait, I’ve got it wrong. They don’t exactly alternate between good and bad, because next was Wind Waker, which started out nice and graphically cool, but then (again if memory serves) you’re tasked with going on your little raft back to all these tiny islands you hit up earlier in the game, in, I think, a certain sequence. Just to get an item you need to continue in your quest.

This is the point I’m trying to make: it seems that alternate Zeldas take these kind of narratively lazy shortcuts as a means of prolonging game play, where rather than move little Link forward and onward, they stick him in a kind of recursive loop for a few cycles. The effect is either like being a hockey player in a penalty box, or falling down a chute when you want to climb a ladder.
(more…)

2 comments  ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-26  ::  dave

Wednesday 25 January
BlogWeek, Day Three: Cabana Soaps

Filed under Endorsements

One shame in being sick is the way you let yourself go in terms of showering. I showered Sunday for the first time since Thursday morning. Is it gross? I was glad for the cinnamon sweet orange soap we had in the bathroom. Really? I’m going to blog about soap? I’m going to blog about soap. Cabana Soaps bills itself as a sensory experience, and this is accurate. It’s saying little of a soap that you get to smell it while you wash with it. Every soap smells. Cabana Soaps smell better than most soaps, but they feel good. I feel like I can feel how good glad my skin feels when I use them. Also: Zac when he makes soap uses nothing artificial. It’s to other farmers’ market soaps what other farmers’ market soaps are to Dial or something. He’ll ship some to your house!

3 comments  ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-25  ::  dave

Tuesday 24 January
BlogWeek, Day Two: Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84

Filed under Books

From the end of the fall term until last week, I read 1Q84 (pronounced, right?, /kyoo-teen/ eighty-four?), and I regret the time spent on it. It’s 925 pages. By the end I felt I’d wasted a lot of good hours on a book that should have been 325 pages. Is it a problem with late-career writers, nobody editing them back to decent lengths? I couldn’t finish the last Stephen King book I picked up—Lacey’s Story, was it? Lisey’s?—because after a couple hundred pages I wasn’t halfway through.

Look: I like long novels. I liked Infinite Jest, Bleak House, Middlemarch, Portrait of a Lady. I’d like to read Moby Dick. I’d like to read Proust. I’d never argue these novels need to be shorter than they were (because of course history would immediately prove me wrong, as who knows maybe it will with the Murakami). I’m trying to find a solid way to show that the above novels justify their lengths (a tricky task given what we know of Dickens and pay-rates) in ways that 1Q84 does not, and I’m coming up empty.

Or maybe it’s this: if your novel is about one familyless man and one familyless woman and how they come to fall in love, and if you don’t move around in time or space much, and if your secondary characters could all fit comfortably in a Ford Excursion, you don’t have a 900-page novel in front of you. I don’t care how many air chrysalises are being built. I don’t care how swiftly your publisher hires Chip Kidd to turn your overwrought story into a design experience. No debut writer would ever be allowed to get away with this, and why isn’t that more of a problem?

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-24  ::  dave

Monday 23 January
BlogWeek Day One: The Appurtenances of Sickness

Filed under Endorsements

I’ve been sick this weekend with a throat thing and a chills/body-aches thing. Prescribed Chloraseptic throat spray has been mostly unhelpful, but 1000mg acetaminophen every four hours did fine work on the fever/chills/aches.

Before hearing from the on-call doctor that acetaminophen (which, like “Chloroseptic” I’d prefer to spell with another “o”) was best for body aches, I’d been taking ibuprofen. Of the Big Three in Pain Relief, I take naproxen sodium when I know I’ll be eating regularly, as it lasts longer but will upset an empty stomach. When I can’t eat anything (when, say, hungover) I take ibuprofen. I take acetaminophen never. Is it because I have this notion that it’s older? Or old-fashioned? I’m curious about what the rest of you take. I wish the doctors of the world would agree on some kind of heuristical method. I’d listen. Placebo effects are so strong with me that a doctor could say to get a haircut and dip my toes in bleach and I’d sleep happy and well each night.

Also, the folks over at Gatorade graped up the color of its Fierce Grape variety from what used to be a wrong-but-unscary deep blue, but somehow this has resulted in in a marked grapelessness to the flavor. I’d been a (sorry) fierce admirer, but no longer. Sorry, Gatorade. You’ll need to find another all-star athlete for your endorsements.

2 comments  ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-23  ::  dave

Sunday 22 January
Catching Up

Filed under Announcements

I still have a blog. I’ve got recent news and things to go over, and I’ll do them once a day this week, like vitamins we’ll all take to resurrect our blogging health. Stay tuned, friends. Thoughts are forthcoming on sickness, cleanliness, books, The Legend of Zelda, and Post-its.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-22  ::  dave

Tuesday 17 January
Raymond E. Myers: WWII vet, truck driver, active church member

Filed under Uncategorized

(From the Washington [Pa.] Observer-Reporter.)

Raymond E. Myers, 93, of Coal Center, Clover Hill, died Saturday, January 14, 2012, in Consulate Health Care of North Strabane, Canonsburg.

He was born June 5, 1918, in Claysville, son of the late H. Edwin and Gladys Fonner Myers.

Mr. Myers retired as a truck driver for Peoples Natural Gas.

He was a veteran of the U.S. Army, having served during World War II as an ambulance driver in the 4th Division (Ivy), and participated in several major campaigns in the ETO.

He was an active member of First Baptist Church in Bentleyville and member of West Pike Run Grange.

On March 28, 1942, he married Dorotha Morris, who died December 31, 2003.

Surviving are a daughter, Pamela Madden and husband Ted of Williamsburg, Va.; three grandchildren, Shani Madden of Alexandria, Va., Jenny Ward (Adam) of Fairfax, Va., and Dr. David Madden of Tuscaloosa, Ala.; a sister, Aldene Cox of Washington; and several nieces and nephews.

Deceased are four brothers, Harold, who was killed in action in World War II, Randolph, Roland and Kenneth Myers, and an infant sister, Corina Louise.

Friends are welcome from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Monday in Thompson-Marodi Funeral Home Inc., 809 Main Street, Bentleyville, 724-239-2255, where services will be held at 10 a.m. Tuesday, January 17, with Pastor Shirley Edgar officiating. Interment will follow in Maple Creek Cemetery, Fallowfield Township.

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to First Baptist Church, c/o Janet Ladisic, 113 Washington Street, Cokeburg, PA 15324. Visit www.thompson-marodi.com to leave a condolence message, order flowers and share photos.

 ::  Discuss  ::  2012-01-17  ::  dave