The Isle of Marm

Anthropomorphic Banjo, why you so crazy?

I don’t know, kid.  Why are you talking to a banjo?

…You are aces, buddy.  Aces.  Let’s take a walk.

Youtube Discourse Notes:

• “mailing it in”:  Does that imply more effort than the conventional “phoning it in”?
• Not sure how I feel about the OAD vs. the OED.  Back when I was a debater, I used to cite the “Mariam Webster Dictionary”.  It was a tiny notebook with a doodle of Me and Webster on the front, which did not matter as it was a verbal citation and we were high-schoolers.  In any case, it was terrible, but over time it was filled with some useful definitions.
• TV programming makes internet commentators say some pretty salty things.  I love TV.  I don’t understand the saltiness.

Video in question:  LBucks and SNicks sing some ruminations on not returning.

I searched for this hoping to figure out what my fingers were doing wrong in terms of syncopation.  Answer: everything.   Boo-urns.

Dispatches from The South—Day 625:

Guess which one of your friends now will spend roughly 2% of any given day pantsless* and playing the banjo?  Depending on which “you” you are, that is potentially a difficult question.  It’s come up before, though.  The Peter Buck tag, the Steve Martin tag, the Lindsey Buckingham tag, the 161 banjos tag, any of them: I said I would, and I did.  That’s how it works.  All I’ve got in the world is follow-through.  Follow-through, my friends, and ..uh…my thermos. 

This is my first fretted instrument. (Child of immigrants —> Immigrant instruments trifecta —> Piano, Violin, Accordion/Texas —> fretlessness—and yet always uncomfortably worried about something.  Also: good at math.)  On frets: this is crazy!  Not in an entirely bad way.  Also: not at all like Guitar Hero/Rock Band.  Nor like playing a violin like a ukelele. I was pretty okay at that.  My left middle finger is not a super-fan, but he is taking one for the team.  He knew the risks when this was ordered a couple weeks ago.

There are about 20 things I should be doing, but instead I will live in squalor and teach my fingers some new things.  I was right to worry.  I’m oddly obsessive and this is like discovering sex.  But 5 strings, so I guess more… quinque.  I hope you looked at this hoping for provocative Latinates!  You cannot hem me to a single entendre.  That’s not how it works.

*Pantslessness may not be technically key, but given the last 2 hours, there is at least a trend toward playing while lying on the floor in a state that the state might object to.  I still don’t have chairs and I have a short torso, so there are few ways to extend the my lap to shoulder distance.  I could stand, but my makeshift shoulder strap (from a laptop bag) feels like it adds weight.  Anyhow, I think the resonance would be totally different if I were fully clothed.  I will consider more publicly acceptable attire on the off chance I need to leave my home.  I probably will have to, toga Tuesday is not recognized as an acceptable sartorial choice in the grown-up lab environment.

In terms of acquisition force-ranking, “banjo” apparently outranked both “furniture” and “laundry machine”.   It’ll be much easier to move.  That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

…And this. That’s all I need.

Follow-up:

I don’t quite know what is wrong with me, but it is ever unsettling, whether they started there or not, when things inside my head suddenly become things outside my head.  It’s the suddenness, maybe? 

Also: don’t know why “Cletus de Milo” is so amusing to say.  He’s probably my favorite Hill-William, though.

At My Most Beautiful  (c.a. 2003.)

I usually will give as good as I’ve got with the tools that I have, without too much obsessing about what better tools are available, but can you imagine the awesomeness (and I mean that in every possible way) of what I could do if I still had cheap, regular access to an MRI?  I would do some great things and tackle great problems.  But I would also do some totally squirrelly things.  Maybe actually involving squirrels.  But probably with people. 

As day 500 in the South is here, the inclination to purchase a banjo has also risen again.   It’s not even cheapness stopping me; I am literally panicking about spreading myself too thin.  Hah, I will not be too thin.  Spreading my resources too thin.  Spreading my non-monetary resources too thin.  I think I may have put it to bed, after having closed the checkout screen that has had its own open tab for a week.  125 days from now the alarm will go off again.  There is something pleasant about the idea of acquiring a 5 string banjo on my 5x5x5x5th day here.   Potentially even auspicious. 

Yeah, this is like my putting off my “turning 30 angst” by deciding that I wouldn’t be over 5 bits for another 2 years. 

I was taking a walk earlier and had one of those moments when I realized exactly how I’m gonna die.  Probably not.  I think it is like the feeling I have whenever I see the yellow mustang that has been maybe stalking me for years, maybe driven by Max von Sidow and Death.   Which has come up here before. 

Almost exactly 10 years ago this weekend was the last time I misappropriated a boat.  And before that, by almost another decade, I was on a sinking one of these paddle boats about a kilometer offshore with every member of my immediate family; which led to a coast-guard guy in a kayak in Mexico escorting us back to shore.  Which is still, at most, only my third most dangerous swim ever.  

Grand-theft: boating.  What an awkward phone-call that would be.  Maybe …next month.  That’s Rory Gilmore territory.  (That one’s for you, CMC.  I can simultaneously make the Peter Buck reference and disavow that other one, right?)

Last night, in the shadow of the Wigsphere*, I almost bought this book.  I did not get through all 230 jigs, reels, rags, hornpipes and breakdowns from all the major traditional instrumental styles, as I was flipping through it in the back of a bluegrass show, but I did, for the first time, sort of feel like I maybe understood how to read tablature. 

(The standard 1st-generation American instruments trifecta when my brothers and I were growing up** was: 

1. piano,
2. violin, and
3. digital (from Texas or otherwise,)

where the music to be read or made was in standard notation or SOUND <channel>, <volume>, <pitch>, <length>.  Consequently, less exposure to tab and more exposure to Mr. Bojangles.) 

Arguably, that stuff was the more compelling reason to maybe bring it home—I’m not sure I want/need a book to fake things, I want/need a book to know things.  Maybe this’ll still happen.  I still haven’t acquired the banjo.  I just saw the book and needed to look at it.   I don’t know what about this cover struck me as so ridiculously alien, but I found it delightfully absurd. 

Lazy footnotes:

*It actually would have been pretty hard for the wigsphere to cast a shadow to where I was in Knoxville.  But it was downtown and I touched an ENORMOUS banjo.  Also, my GPS still refuses to recognize “wigsphere” as “world’s fair park”. 

**My sister, the almost professional musician, took some liberties with slot 3, including drums, saxamophone, clarimanet, and at one point or another, guitar.  (She thinks she’s soooo cool.  (She is.***)  She was a baby when I went through my accordion phase (I am not cool.) but we all have random instrumental pickup tendencies.)

***Here is a secret, which you should never tell her.
It is a point of Salieri-level agitation for lil’ sis that I have “perfect pitch”.  This was reported to her while I was in college by our former mutual piano teacher and reiterated by the music teacher she kept in touch with from our elementary school and the violin teacher in our school district, the latter of whom noted it as a negative thing, because it aided my (in retrospect, incredibly stupid) policy of not practicing as much as I should have, and led to my consequent near-illiteracy where sheet music is concerned.  (Which comes back to why I would approach tablature with cautious intrigue.)  It is the focal point of fairly regular “why are you wasting your gifts doing science” conversations.  I hate those conversations, for an assortment of reasons.  But that is unnecessary context. 

The delicious secret truth is that I just have solid relative pitch and intermittent tinnitus, which happens to come in at around 440Hz.  I’m thinking of telling her as a graduation present.  

Vaguely related followup:
The response to the birthday greeting yesterday was:
“Any new published books you can autograph and send me???”
which I responded to with a “no”, before some ego-surfing, which led to this: 
One’d think I’d remember, but I am not sure I believe that it was 250 pages.  I’m not sure it counts, really.  But it’s amusing to find it out there.   
(Yes, that’s my middle name, see also: VLAREM!)

The Banjo Singularity and The Abuelitos’ Living Room (Part n-B)

…everyone should have a Mozart to their Salieri.

…a lot of great people seem to have a background in the banjo.  The professor who tried to teach me quantum mechanics? Banjoist.  Lindsey Buckingham?  Banjoist.  My gentleman-friend, Lucky Day? Banjoist.  Peter Buck?  The list continues.  Maybe the awesomeness comes from how one is forced to learn?  I don’t know.  The part of me that is curious about abnormal psychology and the part of me that enjoys human subject work and the part of me that likes to make a little non-me noise—these parts represent enough of me that it has pushed the issue for a while.  So it was that I anticipated the banjo singularity.  And then I gave my talk and had dinner at the house of 161 banjos. 

Back to the narrative arc:  I finally went to the local instrument store and the guy behind the counter was terrible.  I am hesitant to use the word “douchetard”, but seriously?  Hooboy.  Maybe 1 minute into our interaction, patronizing the place became conceptually offensive to me.  I may have to drive into Knoxville.  Banjos and the wigsphere.

Day 289 in the South:  I remain banjoless pro temp.