Author: colter

Rain

Last night rain came down in a peculiar way. I could only hear it. I was eating my dinner and I heard the sounds, but looking out the window, I could receive no visual confirmation. Were I deaf I would not have known it was raining. I had to stare very intently at the leaves outside my window before I could see some wet effect on them. I opened the window, and immediately my view was crowded by those two cats that live in my apartment. We smelled the air and watched the ground turn dark with moisture. Good times.

A Full Weekend

Last weekend I got my violin fixed, went to Chris’s birthday party at Heather’s (birthdays on September 11 deserve twice as much drinking as regular birthdays we figure), went out on the river with David and Emily, then went to see Hero, which was quite good. Pictures from the river in the new Plog.

Dogs and Cats Riding in Limousines

Further compounding the blunt-force trauma to the soul that I received last night as described in the journal entry below, I also happened upon a television program on Bravo about Miami plastic surgeons. I thought to myself, “hey I wonder if my client Dr. Salomon is on that show? Nah, that’d be too weird.”

As I am quickly learning, nothing in the modern world can ever be too weird.

Dr. Jhonny Salomon (not to be confused with Dr. Johnny Salomon, or Dr. Johnny Solomon, or Dr. Johnny Salamon – don’t click the links, I’m just helping optimize him for multifarious misspellings) is in fact being featured on this show on Bravo called Miami Slice. He’s a plastic surgeon in Miami and the show is another in a series of reality shows that goes beyond the usual Lifetime or MTV plastic surgery case studies, and into the personal lives of the doctors themselves. The show throws in a healthy dose of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous/Cribs flavor as it shows off the lavish lifestyles of these plastic surgeons. I watched one doctor send his dog to the vet in a limo. I think I was too numbed from the cruel existential irony of the Pat Buchanan episode of Hardball to realize that every hour of television probably provides me with some support for the coming Apocalypse.

An amusing side note is that, in Jhonny’s bio on the Bravo website, Bravo refers to Miami as “a city where true love is often difficult to find.” My soul couldn’t help but cry quietly in the darkness for the plight of lonely plastic surgeons everywhere who are just looking for true love, for something…real.

Dog and Cats Living Together…Mass Hysteria

I was just flipping through the channels (yes, Comcast still hasn’t disconnected my cable) and saw Pat Buchanan on Hardball with Chris Matthews. Ordinarily I wouldn’t give either of these savage twits the time of day but since The West Wing was on commercial, I figured what the heck and gave them a couple of minutes to speak to me. What followed was nothing short of a paradigm shifting without a clutch.

On this day, September 7, 2004, I fully agreed with every word that spilled from the mouth of erstwhile Presidential candidate and noted religious whack-job Patrick J. Buchanan.

I screamed in a toxic mixture of confusion and relief, which I imagine is how people must feel when Spiderman saves their child – suddenly this insect-man-thing comes to the rescue out of nowhere? Seems old Pattycakes is breaking from the party line and writing his own Bush administration-dissing tome. It’s called, ever so cleverly, Where the Right Went Wrong. Click this link to the Drudge Report’s list of quotations from Buchanan’s book and read along at home. Periodically pause to remind yourself that this is the man who called AIDS “nature’s retribution” to homosexuals, and who said “our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity.”

Looking at the quotations from his book, I could not ask for a more striking sign of the Apocalypse than the fact that, at least for today, Pat Buchanan provided me with a voice of reason and a breath of fresh air. Were I looking for a surer sign of the End Times, I have found it. What does it say about this administration when the liberals are standing hand in hand with the likes of Pat Buchanan?

“Right Next to Interesting Failures”

HighballAs many of you know, one of my favorite movies is a little independent film called Kicking and Screaming. Recently I discovered a film called Highball, whose cast is composed almost entirely of Kicking and Screaming alums. IMDb has it listed as having been written and directed by Noah Baumbach, yet the DVD case says “Ernie Fusco” for director and “Jesse Carter” as writer. IMDb is smart enough to know that these are pseudonyms, but I have to wonder why. Contractual obligations? Further compounding the mystery is the fact that, watching the DVD, one gets a sense that it’s a demo reel for a proper motion picture to be made later. The editing is patchwork in places, the lighting is awful, and sometimes the audio isn’t properly synched. At first I thought it was my machine, but no, the film is in fact, shoddy. This is unfortunate because there’s actually a good film going on underneath it all. Arriving two years after Kicking and Screaming, Highball features a near-reunion of the former’s supporting cast (most everybody’s here – Otis, Max, Chet, the video store guy, the “you’re pretty” guy, the writing teacher, the EuroTrash guy) as well as the distinctive dialogue-over-dialogue style that marks the work as Baumbach’s. Highball is also noteworthy for the appearance of Ally Sheedy as Ally Sheedy, Rae Dawn Chong as Rae Dawn Chong, and famed director Peter Bogdanovich as a random partygoer who does an assortment of spot-on impressions of Jerry Lewis, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and more. How weirdly wonderful is this film?

Incidentally, it looks as though Baumbach may be getting some bigger exposure as his co-writing credit appears on Wes Anderson’s new Bill Murray/Owen Wilson feature The Life Aquatic. So he’s got that going for him…which is nice.

Wedding Bells for Schmadnan

Adnan got married last weekend to his longtime schweetheart Kelly. The nuptials were a traditional Muslim affair, wherein the womenfolk are separated from the menfolk while the groom and the father of the bride confer on the dowry. Then we had a nice steak dinner. Kelly was positively resplendent in the traditional garb, but I forgot to bring my camera. So I took pictures the next day of the wicked wedding ink:

I also got to meet up with the Adnan’s relatives, whom we stayed with during the 1998 European Tour. Pictured below are Adnan’s wife Kelly, cousin Umar, brother Farhan and cousin Nasreen. Umar is from England and Nasreen from Germany.

Could they be any cuter, I ask you? Sadly we weren’t able to hang out for more than a few hours.

The State of Guitar

Again with the old magazines, this time from Down Beat, circa 1963:

I’m not against progress, but I think maybe one of the things that keeps the guitar alive, and one of the charms of it, might well be the fact that no one has put a finger on *a way* of doing things. I think there is a certain danger when somebody decides he’s got the way.

– Charlie Byrd, 1963

This was something of a revelation to me, and it crystallized a lot of things I’ve been thinking about lately. The rock guitar community has pretty much been adrift since the mid 90’s in a sea of instrumental mediocrity, and while I’m sure many hipster record store employees would posit that rock guitar should never involve virtuosity, I think that people are still waiting for another Jimi Hendrix or Eddie Van Halen to come along to inspire today’s 13-year olds to pick up the instrument and work hard toward playing the ever living shit out of it.

After reading Charlie Byrd’s comments from 40 damn years ago, I now realize that the odds of this happening are now double what I thought they were. Worse, the reason is the very guitar method that I followed: modern guitar magazines and their easy, pervasive tablature methods. Tablature, for those who don’t know, is a super-easy system of learning how to play the guitar without working too hard. The problem with lots of kids learning to play guitar quickly and easily is that kids get a weak grasp of music theory, but worse, the ones who might otherwise be forced (out of disdain for the dogma of music theory perhaps) to invent their own approach are given such an easy route to tread that they have no incentive or oppoprtunity to innovate.

I’ve always defended modern rock guitar methodologies to the purists who derided its lack of discipline, but I now wonder if tablature isn’t killing the guitar in a way. I had always maintained that genius is genius and it will always rise above, but when there’s no resistance to the rising, if the rise is easy, does the rise have a reason to occur? To climb, you have to have something to push against. If a genius kid came along and learned through tab methods, would he develop more quickly or would his talents merely atrophy for lack of resistance? I’m going to think more on this and see what I can figure out.

My New Babies and Garden State

Here are some pics of the latest additions to the herd. I just got the white one yesterday from Zappa.com. It was custom-made for Dweezil Zappa by the Fender Custom Shop. The other is from Fender’s Japan Custom Shop, it’s a signature model of Richie Kotzen, available only in Japan (where he probably has more fans). I traded my Fender Kotzen stratocaster for a Fender Kotzen telecaster. The neck on it is HUGE, like a baseball bat, and that’s not an exaggeration.

Fender Dweezil Zappa Custom
Fender Richie Kotzen telecaster

Jessica and I went to see Garden State last night and it’s fabulous. It’s a sort of existential romance for 20-somethings. Certainly an auspicious debut from writer/director Zach Braff. The soundtrack is utterly flawless – I’ve been excited about this movie since I saw the trailer, which featured Frou Frou’s “Let Go” as a theme. The song plays during the movie’s climax and I don’t think I’ve ever been so excited to hear a piece of music in a movie. It was perfect. In her blog, Frou Frou singer Imogen Heap says she still hasn’t seen the movie, but I think it will make her ecstatic. She’ll definitely see a record sales spike this month. Jessica and I went out to Barnes & Noble after the movie to get the soundtrack – when we got there, two girls were already listening to it. Fortunately one of them already had it and was just playing it for a friend, so I got the one copy available. It has some great tunes by the Shins, Zero 7, Nick Drake, and, not to draw more comparisons to The Graduate, Simon & Garfunkel.

Like Imogen Heap and Cameron Crowe (two of my favorite people), Zach Braff has an insightful blog that gives a closeup look at the business of doing what you love and getting paid for it.