Here’s the causeway to Key Biscayne. I used to drive over that to work every morning. The waterway is a major drug and alien smuggling route, with regular boat crashes into the pylons as they try to run that gap just left of the highest point. The choppy water is standard winter weather. This view is south, toward the east end of Cuba a few hundred miles over the horizon.
I don’t like advertising. I consider it a blight. The only type of advertising that works on me is material that is highly informative of facts, particularly prices. If I know in advance there will be advertising, I keep a book handy. While some novelty ads are amusing, I generally find most to be misleading. I go out of my way to avoid purchasing certain products because of their ads. Like anything by Disney, Sony, and radio clips with speed-talking at the end. I’ve been trying to find an ad blocker that works on Opera.Charleston, South Carolina. What do I know about it? Not much. Plantations and the Hunley. Even their city web pages are dry reading. But I recall it as an expansive port with huge industrial tracts. I rode the bus through there in 2009 and it piqued my curiosity. That’s the Ft. Sumter town. I wonder if Boeing ever built the Dreamliner factory there.
This TV aired a movie called “Pacific Vibrations” early today. I watched it thinking it was [going to be] a documentary on tsunamis. Wrong, it was about surfing, the ultimate MDBA (male dominated beach activity), and it was so bad it was good. To me, there is just something so shallow and phony about thirty year old men who think like teenagers. Obsessed with the perfect wave as they drive their new Mercedez with a surf rack. Although I was too young for the surf era, it was influential to me as an ideal.
I thought surfing was a weekend pursuit for singles, though I don’t know why. Then finally (in 1991) I visited Malibu beach in California to discover it was all dumb aging jocks, ten and fifteen years past their teens. No women surfers, only men. But the movie showed, sadly for what was likely the last time in history, hundreds of naturally slim, young, white women in bikinis, all with long blonde unkinked hair, no tattoos, and no implants. To me, the ideal woman still lies somewhere along those lines. (My teenage summers were wasted working in lumber mills east of the Rockies.)
The day ended with a success. Trent the guitarist has been doing the homework, and is thus up to speed and already innovating within the framework. It would be wise to think about that. How many people were innovating well the first year even? Music is the one field I say learn the rules before you break them—we’re more average than we think.
We held our sixth practice and are now moving ahead rapidly. Anything is better than the standard “follow” the guitar method. In a few more hours, we should be able to play respectable arrangements of any tune we hear. That is what I’ve been shooting for the past five years.
My theory is that lessons make blues and rock guitarists go deaf. They can’t hear the world calling them level 80 douchebags. This is where I get to insert my montage that totally insults the other 17 guitarists that wasted my time since May 27, 2007, whatever that works out to. Left to right is how you see yourself, how women see you, and how I see you.
A short time into the future, I may post the new song list and possibly a recorded version to prove once and for all that anyone who listened and learned could have been the winner. I know how it must be to spend thousands on guitar lessons only to have somebody like me come along and say that’s not how it’s done. My counter-argument is that they all gotta grow up sometime. Get out of the bush league. Sample reality.
There are less apparent advantages, too. For example, anything we play can now be adapted in several novel ways without rehearsal. This can really spike up a room if the mood is wrong, and if a tune has to be repeated, it won’t seem as bad. I’d say things are really looking up.
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