arghablog

Dial Double Zero

December 13, 2008 · 6 Comments

Oh my god. I am speechless. Trembling – I can’t even tell you what I’m feeling. 

I have been haunted by a documentary I saw in about 1978 for 30 years. It was about Ray Bradbury and the process of writing, and featured a story he was working on called “Dial Double Zero,” which was dramatized intermittently throughout the documentary. I spent about 10 years trying to find that story. I remember looking in card catalogues, talking to stuffy librarians. Since the advent of internet, I’d google the story every now and then, and gradually I found out the backstory that the documentary was about a story that never actually was published, and that several other people had the exact same memory of it that I did. Haunting and mesmerizing. Apparently it was a documentary that aired only once, on NBC only on the West Coast, and then was rented out to schools such as mine – the John F. Kennedy elementary school. A few years back I saw it was available as a DVD, but I was too frightened to purchase it. I didn’t want to spoil that childhood memory. What if it wasn’t as magic? 

Well – I checked tonight, and as I suspected it might be, it’s on YouTube. I am freaking out. I am embedding it here in three parts. I haven’t seen it yet. Tell me what you think. 

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poor old arghablog

November 24, 2008 · 2 Comments

Wow, it took three days for Sax & Sons to get more hits than arghablog has had in its entire WordPress existence (about one year). I’ve gotten some nice comments about my writing – and I do like to write – but it’s the loyal, faithful readers of arghablog who have known about it all along. I guess having identical triplets is more interesting than rambling about bagels…what can you do?

Anyway, I’m assembling a little best of – here are some of the posts into which I poured my heart, both at this location and at the old website. These constitute some of my favorite writing I ever did, and have been read by so few people I feel at least slightly justified in this little best hits collection. All six of you arghablog loyal readers have meant more to me than you can ever know.

1. Sundown - a sad one from the old site. 

2. Adieu CBGB – some musings on an old haunt, and my old band

3. 25 Halloweens Later – a memoir about my dad and mallomars

4. M Shanghai String Band – From The Air - the best review I’ve ever written

5. Words and Music – Ooh Ooh Child – some aesthetic musing

6. Some thoughts on bagels - just what it says

7. Some thoughts on bialys – even better than #6 

8. Judy Johnson’s Coming of Age – a little tribute

9. A Return To the Falls – remembering Chris Hume

10. Appreciation – thoughts on the end of a teaching semester

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A new blog?

November 21, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Hi everyone – there’s a whole new blog where I’m talking about some stuff I’ve been deliberately keeping out of Arghablog. Despite rumors to the contrary, Arghablog is not dead – but it does seem to be on hiatus. 

Meanwhile, if you miss my incisive wit and acerbic sharpness, it’s all still there at Sax and Sons – my new identical triplet blog (everyone should have one!!)

See you there, or back here!

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Old Guitar New Guitar

August 27, 2008 · 1 Comment

Old Guitar

Old Guitar

It’s genuine slothfulness that keeps me from posting photos of the two guitars in question (Update: Squirk has cured my slothfulness!). Use your mind’s eye. The new was reported about recently, so scroll down a bit. The old one my dad built. I inherited the thing after he passed away, and I showed it off to a few friends and then didn’t really open the case much. But then one day I did and discovered that the headstock was cleanly cracked off the neck (actually not so cleanly). Horror of horrors – and I who broke everything I touched hadn’t been anywhere near this thing. Through channels I made my way to Don Alfieri, a luthier on Long Island, and gave him the guitar to work on. Was it worth fixing? No way to tell, it’s a one of a kind. How long will it take? Quite a while. How much will it be? We’ll see. And then for the next, what, sixteen months, maybe 37 coats of lacquer, a hundred dollars here, a hundred there, hundreds upon hundreds, and one day the guitar is fixed, and turns out to be a simply brilliant instrument. My dad had a couple of How To books, and he just followed the directions. My sister designed the label. And here some seven years after his passing, was this miraculous guitar. I took it to college.

Early off in school I was a singer-songwriter and I made my name (such as it was) on this unique machine. One of a kind, with a blissfully low and clean action, and a sound so distinctive that I can pick it out on a recording these twenty years later. I spent so many hours with that guitar. Late nights, writing. Bouncing my voice up against it, traveling. I had revelations, growth spurts, countless Eureka moments (a good, unexpected chord change is the whole, hot universe unfurled). I performed, and quietly looked down on all those

New Guitar

poor guitar-slingers with their Takamines, their Guilds, their Ovations, even their Martins. I had something special, we were tight.

At some point my guitar playing slowed down. I became a composer. Two paths diverged and well, I took the one less traveled (for better or worse). The guitar sat in my overheated dorm room for a semester or more, and one day I went to play it and the action had crushed down. The strings hugged the fretboard bitterly, and the guitar’s resplendent, songful voice was reduced to drunken, angry scratches. I managed to make the thing sound a little with a capo, but the golden era was over.

Years later in my New York apartment, the case fell over, the headstock separated again. Went back to Mr. Alfieri, this time with neither the time nor the funds I had had at my disposal last time (as an 18-year-old with no rent to pay), and he gave me a less holistic repair. The instrument played, but the action was troubled and the finish scarred. My choices were rough ones – drastic measures, none guaranteed to yield a result. (No telling how a unique instrument responds to rejiggering).

So I have suffered these many years with a crippled but beloved instrument, and only recently did I acquire (again, this is described somewhere on this blog, not far from hear I reckon) a replacement. A flawless instrument, a Martin, the D18 Golden Era (this a reference to a different golden era, though, a time before I was even hatched). The guitar has depth, versatility, brilliance. It is lovely to behold. But I can never love it the way I love that ailing grandmother, she who sits in her cage and remembers her youth, when diva-like she owned the stage and filled small halls with wonder. My father endowed her with a bold and brassy soul, a singular essence that can still be coaxed on occasion, though few (other than I) will tolerate the belches and hiccups and squelched, clawed-out tones she produces.

I’m trying to find new love, spending my nights with the new brunette, she has all the right moves. I’ve even (finally) started writing on the new guitar, melding my heart and mind with that shining concoction of wood and brass and wire. We may grow to love one another indeed – but it’s still primarily a lust thing now. Lust and guilt, but clean and round. Building my calluses with another, and life goes on.

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Wanes and wanes

August 25, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Oh dear reader, if I had only committed to cyber-print a mere tenth of the brilliant blog posts that have coursed through my imagination over the last several days, you and I would be on better terms. The big one, which may yet be written, is called “Summer of 88.” It’s a reflective sort of memoir about that summer, which was strangely pivotal for me (I see now). I drank a lot of MGD, tried to read Kerouac, but I’ll have to save you the rest for when I really sit down to write (I hope it happens). This posture, huddled and sprawled with textbooks and workbooks surrounding me, is conducive to no great creative fit. 

Lately I am haunted by Hume anew. Have been in touch with some old friends, and some new ones. Through one thing or another I found myself back at my defunct website checking out the Hume virtual shrine. The music is harder and harder for me to listen to, and the emails cut me to the core. I look at that one sided correspondence (and I have the other side to look at too, but it was just thoroughly unworthy of posting publicly) and can’t help this growing feeling of responsibility. His music, the silly and the serious, all so haunting now. It sings from the beyond. Unheard, unknown, resting in trunks and folders, odd corners of the inter-world, it is a yellowing, crumbling tragedy. That stinking feeling of responsibility I hate. Because no-one, only everyone, is ever responsible. We all played our little part in making this world what it is. We are all culpable, no matter how many times our shrinks and mothers and lovers tell us otherwise. 

I will have more for you. I feel it coming on.

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Summer wanes

August 18, 2008 · 1 Comment

I was reminded tonight that there once existed another arghablog, and that it still moulders out there in the inter-thing, safe from my prying eyes or editing hand. My old web site is still up, but it’s almost a year since I’ve had any of the files at my command. So I’m essentially projecting this horribly unprofessional and out-of-date message to the world, and I just haven’t – all summer long – mustered the strength of will to suck the existing files in somehow, reshape them, rebuild, redesign, and republish. It is the 800 pound gorilla in my life, that old website of mine, and just recently people have been commenting on it, both yay and nay. A few days ago a close family member found this inspired post and was nice enough to leave a comment. But I haven’t checked the comments in months, so it took an honest to goodness phone call to have me go see what the good man had to say. And there – in the “pending moderation” file – I found a good year’s worth of comments. Passersby, family and friends of those eulogized in my space, admirers of Josh Gibson, sellers of odds-and-ends commodities, professional people trying to reach my wife. All these comments awaiting moderation, and I so rudely neglecting them these many months. 

We bloggers – especially those of us with circulations under, say, 40 – toil for love, (and whether by that I mean self-love is for all 39 of you to decide), and are by no means immune to the gentle lauding of kith and kin. So as I sat reading these happy comments on a blog that is in point of fact mouldering, a discernible warmth soothed my breast. I resolved to blog again, furiously if fitfully, with purpose, or even better, without. I stand before you, 39ers, bearing my addled, silly soul. Judge me harshly if you must, I will love you all the same for having just shown up. I am a lousy and unfaithful servant in the blog trade. You can do better than this and it pains me only slightly that you do, day in, day out. But every now and then I promise to keep showing up, whether with Judy Johnson perched atop my head, or with Dewar’s-induced slurred typing, or with contemporary opera (that most awful of phrases) on my brain, and have a hardy spew for your and my benefit. I will blog without photos, without sensical titles, without warning. My blog matters, it’s been here almost 2 and a half years, and doggonit I’m good enough, strange enough, and deluded enough to age it further. 

Was I saying something? Might have been. More next time, faithful readers and friends. Forgive me and accept me, as you know I would you.

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If I am a musical thinker

July 29, 2008 · 5 Comments

I’m having funny days. Bits of opera composing (it goes on and on – I think I finished a scene today though…I mean except for the very end part), then lots of cooking, preparing of food, shakes, protein, weird stuff is afoot. Late nights I finish bottles of wine and practice fingerstyle guitar. I’m getting a feel for it – and I have the best guitar calluses of my life. You could lance these things and I won’t know, I’ll just keep sleeping or petting the pet cat. I’m learning tunes by Pete Seeger and Dave van Ronk and all the other ones. Every tune. I’ll know them all come autumn. It’s so strange for me, because the guitar to me previously had been only about writing. To hold a guitar was to be trying, vainly or otherwise, to write a song. Except for that brief period in college when I studied classical guitar for about 6 months and practiced so hard I gave myself shooting pains and couldn’t even lift a fork. Those were times. Anyway, I’m building chops, gathering a new understanding of my left hand. The plan is kind of twofold. 1) I hope soon to start writing some fingerstyle stuff – I’m trying to expand my thing; 2) I hope to have flashy impressive stuff I can play next time I go to a store to buy a guitar. Because that’s really where it’s at, you know. 

I grilled shrimp tonight on our little habachi. Almost burned the house down – I gotta get a bigger grill. Anyway, I was grillin’ away, the smoke getting right up in my face, crawling around manipulating the too-big charcoal chimney, then grabbing the errant red-hots before they could fully incinerate the old wooden deck. Shrimp is too much trouble, but it still tastes good and I’ve taken to liking rose wine. All this wine, but not really all that much in the scheme of things.

Suddenly it’s morning. What happened?

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I invented a food

July 26, 2008 · Leave a Comment

For reasons that may someday be clear, we in my house have traveled divergent culinary paths. Judy Johnson is the simplest, in that he generally eats complacently from a can or a bag, albeit with the knowledge that he gets a bite of papa’s smoked fish product each morning. Then there are the two humans. I’m a vegetarian and I eat fish but I can’t remember why so don’t ask me. But me loving wife eats the meatballz. So I was jazzing up this whole pot of spaghettis and meatballz and sauce, with some popeye-stylin’ spinach on the side, when I says, I says… Why not blacken a piece of tillapia and create a mess of food for papa hisself? Really. 

So the dish is this: Cook sauce, (homemade, store bought, whateverrrr); set some aside before adding meatballz; blacken some fish comme ca: melt butter; coat both sides of fish – (like say tillapia) – in not too much butter; take out “blackening spice” and just be ridiculous with it. Poor the whole damn bottle on the fish, no-one cares; heat a cast iron skillet just by its lonesome for like 15 minutes, until it looks like touching it would send you and your next of kin to the urgent care center; throw the buttered coated fish onto the skillet and take the battery out of your nearest smoke detector; blacken both sides of the fish, explain the smoke to yer wifey, and then do this: grab some of the lubricated whole grain pasta into a dish, add sauce, sprinkle w/ some parmesan (in this mess store-bought pre-grated works fine) and then throw that slab of blackness right on top. Then add something green like spinach or lacinato kale or just a mound of pesto or carpet or somefin; and then just eat the damn thing and feel the spirit of all Italy and Louisiana course through you like electric current. It’s a Hurricane Katrina of a meal and needs to be accompanied by saloon water at the least. 

hiccup.

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The dump

July 20, 2008 · 1 Comment

The sidewalk sale went the way of the dodo. Ours did anyway, not necessarily the whole genre. The sky was threatening. I carried all the stuff down, and then it started to perspire, and then to outright rain. So we covered up with a tarp, and then I carried everything back up. Then I went and got a free coffee at Hilltop coffee, and since then the day has been a wash.

I am drinking lots of caffeine these days. Most of my blogging has been done during those periods of caffeine hiatus, so I thought I should be up front about that right here, since it seems like this thing might get going again.

Choice drink of the season: the double macchiato. Even though it makes me feel like an asshole to ask for one.

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Chance Encounter

July 19, 2008 · 1 Comment

High summer is here. Fans are a-buzzin’, and the going is somewhat sluggish. The thing about Maine when it gets seriously hot is there’s only completely inept institutional air conditioning to be had. The collective BTU power held in check by this northern state is up to the task of almost all the days of the year here – but the four or five moments in the hot season when you most need that department store blast of all encompassing frigidity invariably end in frustration. 

I went to the kitchen, leaning toward the freezer. I was about to pull out a gallon of Breyers vanilla when I remembered there was fresh cut watermelon, so I wholesomely turned my attention there instead. Out of the corner of my eye I caught a sparkle. In the anteroom, just ahead of the laundry hamper and still as a picture, stood Judy Johnson, staring. The heat has been hard on him, but moreso the absolute chaos that reigns in our apartment. We are moving rooms around, having a sidewalk sale, selling stuff on ebay. In short we are in transition, as bold a step as we could take without actually moving, and the cat’s bent out of shape about it. He still manages to find odd corners of unoccupied space in which to assume the strangest paw-dangling contortions, but he’s moody and prone to attack unprovoked. Now here he was staring at me in the kitchen, as I slobbered over watermelon with the kitchen door ajar, juice running down my chin. He stared as if to say “you strange person, tell me how any of the things you do make any sense at all.” I felt found out and guilty, and for one brief moment it seemed the only thing to do would be to offer Johnson a slice, as if that would make me even one ounce less ridiculous in his furry little eyes. 

The encounter passed and neither of us were injured or anything like that. It’s later in the same night and we’re both sweating it out, listening to the whirring fans, and thinking the about other person here – the smartest of us three – who called it a night some hours ago. We all do our part in this little abode. 

Tomorrow bright and early: sidewalk sale! So best be getting some shuteye.

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