It’s hard for me to articulate whats I think should happen in the Middle East. Mostly it’s hard because it sounds like I’m just a mealy-mouthed compromise artist.
But sometimes you need to be a mealy-mouthed compromise.
The prosecution of the Jews in Europe during WWII should not have happened.
The displacement of the Palestinians after WWII should not have happened.
But absent at the very least a time machine, here we are, lifetimes later, and there is a large and growing deprived population in Gaza and the West Bank, and there is a nation-state called Israel with a large and growing population.
Neither population will vanish in a flash. Nor should children be made responsible for the sins of their parents.
Israel must compromise and adopt a two-state solution; Palestinians (through Hamas or some other entity) must accept the existence of Israel in some form as part of that two-state solution. Until that happens, people will die on both sides for stupid goals. Not ideals or even principles–stupid positions.
It sucks to have half a loaf. It sucks even more for both sides to fight over who gets the whole loaf when they are killing children. Because children are not just dying; both Israel and Hamas are actively killing children.
There is no “good guy” here. There is only evil.
So protest against Israel’s actions. Protest against Hamas’s actions. Protest for peace. If that means calling for return of the hostages, so be it. If that means calling for your university to divest from businesses that do business in Israel, do it. Use every lever available to tell both sides to fuck off and make peace.
I’ve talked about The Guitar’s Friend before. When I was young, it was my guide, my guru, my way of understanding guitars as musical instruments and as things. I learned about strings, I learned about woods. This was how we learned things in those days–this and, before long, the bunch of friends I made who knew music.
Here’s a page from the book:
There was always something about the shape of the F-30 that got me. It wasn’t to be. My first good guitar was an Ovation Country Artist (made in Connecticut). It was followed by a low-end Gibson electric, and that was ultimately followed by a Martin OO-18 (sometimes 00-18, depending).
The 00-18, named Samuel (Sam for short), became my musical friend for life. At this point, Sam and I have known each other for (roughly) 45 years. You can read about him here, here, and here. And a few other places as well.
The reason I never owned the F-30 wasn’t that it was super expensive or anything; it’s that nobody in my area carried Guild guitars (as far as I knew) and this was before the Internet, O Best Beloved, and things got handled through the yellow pages and word of mouth. And even had the Internet existed back then, what kind of bloody fool buys a musical instrument without first laying their hands on it, stroking it, and listening to it speak?
Nope.
Now I’ve got lots of good guitars. Sam; an (still as yet) unnamed Takamine hybrid nylon-string; and Rose, my frankensteined electric. I’ve touched some of the guitars I wanted as a young person–I have held in my hands and played an Alembic. I owned (for a few years) a Giannini Craviola. It’s been my privilege to play Martin D12-35s, harp guitars, all kinds of things. But those childhood romances sometimes stick in your head.
Last weekend, T was going to a conference in Providence, Rhode Island. You know, that town that forms one end of the Eagles song about Paradise? Nice place, actually. Anyway, we were working on a paper for another conference, and figured that if I went along, I could get some peace and quiet while T conferred and get good work done on the paper at the same time. That’s what happened, but by Saturday afternoon I was burnt and the conference was over, so we packed up and headed back toward Connecticut.
Now, thanks to Child Process 3 (and their spouse) we have developed a habit of antiquing. And so, on the way home, we stopped in at a couple of places. One of them turned out to be in the town of Westerly, RI.
Guild guitars, from the time I was in second grade (or so) through the ’90s (at least) were made in Westerly, Rhode Island. It was the factory’s third home, after Manhattan and Hoboken. So I kind of figured that during the antiquing, I might find some memento of the Guild factory–a badge, a catalog, something like that.
That turned out not to be the case, but a couple doors down from the antique place was a door with a sign hanging above it that said “Frets.”
Figuring this would be a fun place to spend a few minutes out of the rain (it was very gray that day), we popped into Frets. At first I thought it would be full of inexpensive plywood guitars (not judging–much) and electrics, but that proved not to be the case.
While the shop window was filled with broken guitars, necks, bodies (oh the humanity!!) and the first ten feet or so of the shop did have some lower-end instruments, once you got to the main room, two things hit you in the face. First, cigar smoke (the shop is next to a cigar lounge). And second, a number of beautiful guitars, most costing significant amounts of money. There was a 1960s Ovation thin-line electric. There were Guild electrics and acoustics. There was a 1970s-era Craviola. There was a Martin D12-35 with a $5,000 price tag. Gibsons, Gretschs, you name it. And sitting there on consignment?
A 1979 Guild F-30.
I picked it up.
Inside was the label–that guitar had been made in Westerly.
I played it. It was darker than Sam. It had bass. Likely because its body was a full inch (or more) deeper than Martin OO guitars. So it wasn’t that much bigger, but it had a depth to the tone that I’d never heard before.
I put it down.
It was a lovely instrument, but Sam was sitting at home; I already had a nice guitar, and I hadn’t yet got all the notes out of it.
After a few minutes I inhaled deeply, coughed (damn cigars!) and we headed home.
But what sat in my mind was that the next weekend–this weekend–we would be heading to the next conference to present our paper. And that conference was in Newport, RI, and Westerly was on the way. I asked T if she thought it would be crazy of me to buy that guitar. She didn’t think I was crazy.
But I put it out of my mind. Or tried to. And when I got home, I played Sam and was convinced I would never see that F-30 again.
T knew better.
So I made a deal with myself. I would take Sam on the trip to Newport. I would play the guitars side-by-side so I could compare their tones. And then I would either walk out of Frets a free man, or I would have two guitars with me.
The day came, and we pulled into Westerly and went to Frets. The F-30 was still there, sitting between a pair of Martins. I put down Sam’s case and pulled him out. I ran through a few things. Then I got the F-30 and did the same.
There was no comparison. Both guitars sound excellent, but they sound different. I looked over the Guild, noticed a couple of issues, and spent the next hour or so talking to the store owner, Zak. Yes, the saddle is very low; yes, it’s going to need a neck reset at some point in the next ten years or so that will probably cost 50% of what the guitar was priced at (and because the F-30 is a vintage guitar, that is a very non-trivial amount). No, the machines and pins aren’t original. It’s been damaged and repaired.
Didn’t matter. I bought it. And now I’m going to squeeze every last note I can get out of it. Meet Gilbert.
A few months ago, I took my little Martin OO-18 (about which I’ve said much here) to a guitar shop to get an estimate on some work. Specifically, I’ve worn down the frets a bit, and I thought it might be time to get those taken care of.
The repair person took a look and indicated that they’d be a little shy about working on a “vintage” Martin.
So yeah, it’s 51 years old this year (according to its serial number) and I’ve owned it for about 45 of those years (it languished for a while in a music store in St. Paul). So it’s over 50 years old and I guess that makes it vintage. Huh.
Well, I turned 66 years old this past March 23 (I forgot–things got kind of crazy) and so I guess I must be vintage, too.
And now a word about the road whose logo I’m borrowing:
Route 66 ran from Chicago to Los Angeles, and I rode it in a gold 1965 Plymouth Fury III with my parents and my brother back in the day (by which I mean 1968). We headed from St. Paul to San Diego, and Route 66 was the way to go. We could see the construction of the interstate highway system going on around us, but couldn’t imagine that anyone would need anything grander than 66. It was called “the mother road,” and gas stations were named for it. Ray Bradbury wrote stories about how ’66 was being bypassed by the interstate.
Route 66 officially ended around 1985. Today, bits and pieces remain. Like me (made up of bits and pieces). But like Route 66, I’m still here. So don’t forget to…
Well, I guess it has. I hadn’t written anything here since January, and here it is March.
Sigh.
Life has been extraordinarily busy the last little while. T and I are working on a book; I have several cases cooking along (slowly, but they require attention); and I’m teaching two college-level classes.
Plus, there is the occasional day when the rain and/or cold and/or wind stops, and I absolutely have to get on my bicycle and ride.
And have I mentioned the music? Friday afternoons have become the time to make music; a bunch of us with guitars and voices get together and just shoot out tunes. Some of them are good, some of them we remember all the words to, and some are just weird. Example:
That’s a song I hadn’t heard since I listened to the Doctor Demento radio show back in the 1970s…all of a sudden one of the group started up on it and, well.
OK. So the family situation remains much the same. Seven of us living in a house that would really be OK with three, perfect with two.
The cats are doing well, at least.
T and I are rewatching The Good Fight, which I can heartily recommend. You at least have to love the opening credits.
Oh, and if you really want to read something satisfying? There’s always the 11th Circuit. Check it out.
Fujifilm X20, 28.4mm, f/4 at 1/800. Emulation: Fujifilm Velvia, ISO 100.
The other day, my daughter and I were having a discussion about the relationship between photography and art, occasioned by an essay in Janet Malcolm’s Diana and Nikon, one of my favorite books on photography.
Malcolm writes about the early, “photorealist” days of photography, in which photographers posed their subjects, much as painters had done, in an effort to create “art.”
I have always thought that so-called “street photography” was superior, capturing the Cartier-Bresson “decisive moment.”
But when I look at this photograph, I do not know which it is. Is it a quick snapshot of the time and place, or an attempt to look like an old master’s portrait of a rose?
I took it just over a week ago on the grounds of the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. I took it because it was the only rose blooming in the Red City as far as I could see (there may have been many more in the gardens of Generalife, but, if so, I didn’t notice those). It was afternoon, and the light was just starting to dim a little (sunset comes late to Granada, even in January).
This image is straight out of the camera. It just happened this way. So is this reportorial street photography, or “art”? 
(NB: I’m in Spain right now, but when I return home, I hope to post a photo of Pat from 1981)
When I was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, I changed majors fairly frequently, until I found myself in the Department of Sociology. I took an introductory course and it just wowed me.
Now, I realize that an undergrad degree in sociology is essentially what I like to call a “Ya want fries with that?” degree. That is, it doesn’t get you anywhere.
I was fortunate in that I found myself then destined for a career in sociology, and one of the reasons for that was Pat Lauderdale. It’s important to note that I never had a course with Pat, but through a series of discussions formal and (mostly) informal, he became one of three advisers on my honors thesis. What had started out as a paper on deviance–specifically, the social psychology of male homosexuals–became a 100 pp. (+/-) discussion of the way a group could become politicized and reject the label of deviance.
Pat taught criminology and deviance, but with a political understanding that much of crime and deviance was a consequence of who got to make the laws and describe what was “normal.” He an another adviser of mine, Jim Inverarity, wrote a book, Law and Society, on the topic, and that book is still important. Pat and Jim and my third advisor, the late Harold Finestone, wrote recommendations for me to a whole bunch of schools, and I ended up attending the University of Chicago thanks to them. We spent a lot of time together, and I remember watching Altered States with Pat and several other grad and undergrad students and discussing sociology as an analog to the kind of human experiments in that film.
I was last in communication with Pat, very briefly, a year or so ago; I learned just this morning that he had passed away in November.
First thing first: If you get the opportunity to fly to Spain, and you have a choice, I highly recommend that you fly Air Iberia,
Four years ago, T and I flew to Portugal on [some other airline] and it was OK. Iberia blew me away with the service and the food. The Food. Best airline meal I’ve ever had, and likely better than most meals I’ve had while away from home. And later, a lovely sandwich for breakfast. OK, I’m overenthusing, but it was good.
Second. Driving in Spain can be challenging. We flew into Madrid around 5:00 AM local, went through passport and security, then boarded a puddlejumper to Grenada that delivered us at a little after 8:00. Then we got our car, a Ford Fiesta from Budget. Did you know that auto insurance in Spain is $$? It is. But never mind that. We drove the A44 south from Grenada, which was fine–a modern highway, and a place to get used to manual shifting after almost a year and a half. My only gripe with the A44 is that speed limits change often; shifting 10 KPH up and down within very short distances. Then we swung over on the twistiest, turniest, rise-and-falliest road it’s been my pleasure (?) to drive: The A346. It’s a two-lane road hung off the sides of lots of mountains, and you never drive in a straight line for more than about 50 meters. It is f**king exhausting to drive. Take a look at a map.
Then we got to a one-lane bridge, leading into Orgiva, and we thought our troubles were over. Except that Orgiva is a beautiful old town with roads that twist and turn and Apple Maps is not a very good navigational system there. I am 100% convinced that we drove much of that route the wrong way on one-way streets. Finally, we found the road to the Vrbo we had reserved, but I overshot the driveway (I had been awake more than 24 hours by then). That’s when I discovered that I didn’t know how to shift a Ford Fiesta into reverse. I could not make it work at all. So, the road being narrow–and thus prohibiting a turn–and hilly–thus providing for gravity to do its work–I made my way to a widish spot, pointed the car up an incline, and let it drift back. Except. There was an irrigation ditch and I discovered that I was stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea (so to speak). A passing motorcyclist saved my bacon by figuring out that you had to pull up on a collar on the shift lever to get the car into reverse (new to me). We were able to get the car unstuck and drive to the Vrbo, which had a hellishly steep driveway, but we made it, and I haven’t touched the car in the day and half since.
We’ve walked, instead. It’s about a kilometer from our place down into Orgiva proper, which is a beautiful, windy, twisty old city. We’ve had some great food, met some friendly people. Yesterday was travel; This morning, I slept in until noon, and it felt great. We walked into town and spent the afternoon eating great Moroccan-style food, buying and eating oranges (a big part of why we came here) and exploring and shopping. Here are some photos. Hopefully, more to come:
That’s Don Quixote in the Santa hat, by the way, outside the town library. It’s supposed to have 300+ copies of the novel, in many different languages. More on that soon, perhaps.
As you may (or may not) recall, I recently decided to install wheels without a hub dyno and to use a Velogical test unit. That was most satisfactory, but the unit was on loan, and I wanted to set my bike up in a more permanent fashion.
As I mentioned then, I ordered an AXA Traction Power Control dynamo. These run about $30-$40 from dealers overseas (hard to find in the US) and require a mount. I chose the Busch & Mueller aluminum stay mounting bracket, about $25. The total was thus much less than a Velogical dynamo and more securely mounted, though (perhaps) not quite as pretty.
Here’s what things look like as of today:
In this image, you can see the AXA dyno in its engaged position against a Velocity Quill rim, and you can also just see the B&M mount (I’m not the world’s best photographer).
It was a drizzly day here, so I decided it was a good idea to run my lights. One of the things I like about the AXA unit is its large rubber-coated roller. It’s not as nice as the Velogical’s O-ring, but like the O-ring, the driving ring of the AXA is replaceable (I got a couple of spares at the same time as the dyno) and it’s larger diameter than most sidewall dynamos.
Because the driving roller is rubber-coated, it can be run on the rim rather than on the tire sidewall–a concern of mine, since the tires I use (Panaracer TSERV) appear to have rather fragile sidewalls. And because it’s a large roller, turning resistance is much lower than with, say, the Dymotec I tried about ten years ago. And it’s a great deal lower than with most cheap sidewall dynos that use metal rollers that have to engage the tire’s sidewall. Also, using the B&W mount allowed me to find a spot on the seat stay that worked (IIRC, I used a stamped mount for the Dymotec, and that did not work well).
So, what’s to like, what’s not to like?
Like: It just works. The rain today was not a problem (though a real downpour might be–time will tell). Rolling resistance, as mentioned above, is pretty low. It has a connector that allows for easy hookup of both headlight and taillight (I’m still using the Edelux 1.0 in front, with a B&M Toplight in back). There’s plenty of power to get the lights running fast, and there’s no load on the rider when the dynamo is disengaged.
Dislike: It looks a little clunky; while engagement is easy (press down on the ridged silver pad), disengagement takes a moment–you have to push down and swing the dyno away from the tire. It’s not as easy as throwing a switch. There’s a lot less noise with the AXA than with Dymotec, but that may be because it’s located in back, where it’s harder to hear. But the noise is ugly. It’s a whine, compared with the Velogical’s hum. That’s likely because of the tread pattern on the roller, but it is a little annoying. It took a little time to set up–because not only does the mount need to be in just the right place, the dynamo itself, when engaged, should be located on a perpendicular line that runs from the axle straight to the rim. That’s not easy to do, but if you don’t set it up right, the roller will not run efficiently on the rim.
But once it’s set up, it’s pretty good. I don’t think there’s significantly more weight with this installation than there was when I used a dyno hub, and now I have the advantage that I can use virtually any front wheel. 
Do I recommend it? You bet. At about 1/3 (or less) the cost of a Velogical unit, you have a reliable power source adaptable to nearly any bike. Spend a little money on LED head- and tail-lights and you can come out of the darkness. Just like Little Steven.
Hopefully, in a little less than a month from now, that first statement will no longer be true. We’re set to fly out on January 2nd and spend ten days or so not worrying about anything.
I kind of like the Beatles, too, but that’s another matter.
Inter Alia (AKA Law School is So Over) 