Chris Preston and New Aquarius Online

It’s tax season! I’ve done my returns already and this year I did pretty well. I gave various governments interest-free loans last year and now they have come due. So I’m in for a bit of a windfall. The windfall won’t be used for much of anything except for paying bills, but the prospect of “found money” excites even me.

American consumer culture hopes that you actually enjoy the act of making purchases. If I recall correctly, our crackpot president in 2001 suggested that best thing to do after 9/11 was to go shopping. Huh? Yes, this is my country.

Despite my aspirations toward an enlightened existence, I am American and sadly was raised in a culture of decadent consumerism. Whether I like it or not, even I am a consumer, albeit a selective one. I thought this morning about things that I actually enjoy buying. The purchase actually provides an enjoyment that is separate from the item. Weird, right? But then, I suppose I am as well. Here goes…

Six things I enjoy buying

1. Guitar Straps

Unlike some musicians I know, I’m not a guitar collector. I know some guys for whom buying guitars is a sickness. I can’t believe the collections they have. I call them guitar whores. How can you ever become one with an instrument with which you haven’t even a suggestion of exclusivity? To say nothing of the fact that guitars are expensive. But guitar straps? A wonderful alternative. They are the coolest. Like some people dig shoes, I love guitar straps. The smell of the leather. Finding just the right texture. Vintage or modern? Oh, the colors. The way they can be so personal and breathe new life into your old guitar.

2. Blank books

I’ve written frequently here about how I fluctuate between writing by hand and writing using a word processor of some sort. While I get a lot of efficiency out of typing and editing electronically, sometimes there’s nothing like the feeling of a pencil or pen scraping across just the right kind of paper. When the urge re-visits me, I never write on loose leaf, cocktail napkins or note pads. It’s difficult to be self-aggrandizing if my writing is not in some way enshrined from the start. That’s why I enjoy writing in blank books. They can have the most interesting covers and bindings and any kind of paper you can imagine. Scratchy, recycled, acid-free, whatever you fancy. If a writer’s ultimate output is a book, starting with a blank one means that you’re already halfway to your finished product! Shopping for just the right blank book makes me feel like I’m on a mission. What medium will satisfy me? How will this hold up for the ages on my shelf? Is this one suitable to be revisted again and again to examine my progress through creative and philosophical trials? The empty pages are a tangible form of the infinite potentials of my mind. Where some writers fear a blank page, I look at a blank book as something I can fill with the priceless artifacts of my existence. Picking the right one is a task of great significance, and a great way to procrastinate.

3. Blank tape/CDs

Related to blank books are blank tapes and CDs. (DVDs don’t give me much of a charge because I use them for backing up files. They eventually outlive their usefulness or dependability and are tossed on the fire.) I don’t buy blank tape anymore, since I’ve retired from analog recording, but back in the old days, there was nothing like buying a couple of new reels of 456, tightly wound, just aching for the imprinting of my test tones and precious, life-changing mixes. They had exponentially more infinite potentials than even blank books. They were bulky and heavy and came in large boxes you could label. Once I finished recording mixes and editing for an album and put those big master tapes back in their boxes, I could swear that they felt different in my hands than when I bought them. It all started with the purchase of blank reels of tape. A magical first step. To some degree blank CDs give the same thrill. They’re only little pieces of plastic but will hold music that never existed before I put it there. They can hold 80 minutes of it. 80 minutes of new music you can hold in your hand is never anything but exciting.

4. MP3s

At the very beginning of the wave, I had a thing against MP3s. I claimed up and down that MP3 was an inferior format for listening. To a degree, I suppose it is, but I had a revelation one day when it occurred to me that the bulk of my musical self-indoctrination had been through audio cassettes, the most flawed format available after 8-track and wax cylinders. Were those musical experiences any less valid because I came of age in the 80s, the era of the pre-recorded cassette? Absolutely not. I’ve since embraced their modern technological equivalent and never fail to delight in how I can purchase music at home, and be enjoying new additions to my music collection whenever I choose.  I enjoy buying them too, not stealing them. Much like I enjoyed buying cassettes instead of dubbing them from my friends. The music felt like it was truly mine to enjoy if I’d bought it myself. Whenever I buy a new recording on MP3 and my files are downloading, I think of Andre Gregory in My Dinner With Andre. He describes how the simplest things move him. He says something like “Sometimes I watch traffic lights changing and think, ‘How wonderful!’”

5. Bicycle and guitar tools 

Few things bother me more than paying “professionals” to do something simple that I could easily do myself. I hired a plumber once who spent about 7 minutes fixing a leaky pipe and charged me $600. The thing he had that I didn’t have was this new-fangled pipe-crimping tool that enabled you to make a permanent and reliable seal between two pieces of copper pipe without a blow torch. It made these flares and ridges and after bending the metal, the two pieces fit together like a puzzle and were completely water tight. The tool, he told me, costs thousands of dollars. Whether or not he was lying, his claim did appeal to my conviction that “the right tool for the right job” is an axiom for good living. Though I have no desire to plumb (is that what a plumber does?) I do want to keep my bicycle and musical instruments in good working order. Nothing sucks more than going to a mechanic to tighten a brake cable or a luthier for a seasonal neck adjustment. Last year, I bought a cable puller and have had good brakes for free ever since. Thanks to my discovery of Stewart-McDonald, I now own weird wrenches with bends in them that enable me to access the truss rods on my guitars without stripping them using a tool that doesn’t seat properly in the bolt heads. This is easy stuff. You just have to have the right tools. For the cost of a single service call to both “experts,” I can stick it to them every time the seasons change. :~) I love buying the right tools. Their purchase is an investment and as such, a guilt-free expenditure.

6. Coffee

OK, maybe coffee doesn’t technically fall under the category of consumer goods, but I do like buying it. I love choosing the right cup, establishing the perfect blend of coffee and milk, securing it with a convenient and pristine sipping lid. All of these things amount to a ritual of preparation for something completely unrelated, but in my adult life, I’ve learned that almost any activity or event you can imagine can be gilded by first purchasing a cup of coffee. The best part is that in most settings, it’s completely acceptable. Picking up coffee on the way to work, a meeting or a rehearsal is as commonplace as showing up wearing pants. Unlike wearing pants, it makes little sense, since the coffee is an arbitrary accessory that doesn’t really last and leaves an unsightly cup laying around until the first break, but who cares? The break might be a good time for coffee too, but for some reason coming back to a meeting after a break with coffee doesn’t feel as good to me. Somehow coffee at the start seems to say, “I’m ready to begin and regardless of whether I’m truly motivated by what I’m about to do, I shall eek some enjoyment out of it.” I’m confident that I’d have even loved the kindergarten if I could have stopped off for coffee before showing up. Nobody told me about it then, so I ended up pretty upset every time the bus came. Despite those scars that never heal, I’m thankful for the wisdom I now possess.

Since we’ve recently had a summer preview in the New York area (days of over 90 degree heat), spring has gotten itself a jump start. It usually takes one or two seemingly anomalous days to get everything to bloom handsomely. Within a week, those blooms are gone, only to be replaced by the impenetrable haze of summer. I know that’s how it always goes, but that isn’t how I think of it as I’m freezing my ass off on some New York street in February. In my recollections at those times, spring endures, if it would only come early…

As I sat under the cool breeze of an open window last week, the sweetness of the air enabled me to revisit two memories, both of which are based upon smells, of all things. I remember vividly how these two smells mixed with the spring air, making a permanent impression. As I considered them, it occurred to me that I think of these every year.

The first was the smell of my new acoustic guitar. I finally scraped some bread together in the late 90s for a quality acoustic guitar. I played every conceivable model and brand looking for something that would provide the right roundness of tone, but also the ability to cut and project. I had been playing the same lousy acoustic with a laminated top since I was 15 or 16. I’d grown immeasurably as a guitarist, but my instrument lagged far behind.

I settled on the Martin that I still play now. It was a special model that they only made for  a short time. It was part of their Certified Wood line. It has cherry back and sides, which is quite unusual, but did not tax the world’s dwindling supply of rosewood. Though the top is solid spruce, it was made from pulp wood, which is the part of harvested trees that usually just gets thrown away when they buzz the logs into square pillars.

Every time I opened the case of my new guitar that spring, the smells of the finish and wood along with the fragrant air filled me with immense joy. The potentials embodied in that new guitar made me giddy. Owning one’s first Martin is an event in and of itself (ask any guitarist you know…), and that instrument was sure to deliver me to new levels as a guitarist and a songwriter. Those grand potentials actually had a smell.

The second odor was that of the interior of my 1969 Chevelle, which I purchased fully restored around that same time as the guitar. (Man, I sure was rolling in it in those days.) I needed a new ride and I wasn’t interested in a new car, but I did find a dealership in Lakewood, New Jersey that dealt only in classics. Golden Classics was like a regular car dealership with a showroom, but they had only classic cars. Most of them were completely restored. (Sadly, it’s not there anymore.)

The “new car smell” is one that many people are familiar with, but the Chevelle odor was different from that one. It was the new vinyl of the seats and possibly the new carpet combined with the heat of the day, again combined with the spring air coming in the windows.

Climbing into that car was like stepping into a period in history that I never got to be a part of but longed for with great passion. I drove it every day and I attracted a lot of attention with it. It was great connecting with other people who had a passion for classic cars, but there was a dark side too. There was always some older guy telling me that he used to have one just like it, even when I didn’t have the time or the inclination to listen.

I thought about guys like Bruce Springsteen who are accosted by people at all times, even when he’s arguing with his girlfriend or trying to finish his dinner because he has somewhere to go. That’s what it was like for me with that car. Bruce had to be cool for PR purposes. For me, it was just inconvenient. After a while, it gets really tiresome trying to be polite when even people waiting to make turns in the middle of intersections shout out the window to you. “Nice car!” (Do you have to say thank you every time?) “How much for that car?” I always loved that one. Get right to the point, right pal? (I know they weren’t interested in buying at all, only crashing it seemed.)

I sold the Chevelle in preparation for a move to New York City that never happened, but I’ll always love classic cars and I’ll always be grateful that I got to drive one.

The point of all of this talk about smells?

I think of my acoustic and my Chevelle as positive memories, yet much of what followed in my life after both purchases was exceedingly negative. I had major life changes, a divorce and a hiatus from music because of debilitating panic attacks, just to name a few.

Why then, do I remember these things so fondly? Perhaps because they were like spring. A snapshot, an instant, something that surprises us with its beauty but then is gone. These things drive me and see me through harder times, even though I deliberately choose to romanticize them. They are an unshakable reminder not to miss anything.

~

One more memory bears mentioning here, which is why I’ve come back to edit this one. I kissed my wife for the first time on a very warm day. We were sitting together in the sun, which is not something that I do regularly. Though I’ve kissed her thousands of times since, her kiss is even more powerful when we’re in the sun on a hot day. I realized that during the 90 degree summer preview I mentioned earlier. My senses were just electrified, and I was transported back by years. I think the more senses that are involved, the more vivid the memory. This has to be one of my favorites.

Last time, I wrote about the role of mindset in owning your thing. As important as “owning your thing” is to success, for me, language is a key element as well. What I say, even when I talk to myself, is absolutely relevant to my motivation and success. As a writer, words are important to me and I choose them carefully. Many people believe, and I agree, that language creates and reinforces feelings and behaviors. I’m always careful to use language that agrees with my target mindset.

For example, my neighbor, who’s a talented singer and recording artist, just put some new material on his MySpace page. He calls his act Voodoo Abstract. He has a very ethereal style that I can’t even get my head around sometimes. It’s clear that he’s serious about his work and that he has a great voice. However, I learned about the new tracks through a bulletin that was entitled “Some More New Shit!!!”

Now, I’m only talking about myself, and what works for Danny is what works for him, but I would never refer to music that I’ve labored over as “New Shit.” I just doesn’t inform my target mindset. I personally use that word to refer to things I don’t like much. (Such as the punk band I heard on Record Store Day…) Besides, there are innumerable ways that my music can be devalued on its own once I release it into the wild. I don’t have to help that along. Not that Danny is devaluing his music, but for me to use that word for new music I’ve created, one of the most meaningful things in my life, wouldn’t feel good to me at all.

I have a couple of other musician friends who routinely proclaim what lousy guitarists they are. Perhaps they don’t play as well as I do, but I always wonder what they’re after in reinforcing their limitations when they talk about what they do. It seems like they’re joking, saying things like, “I don’t need that great a sound for my lousy guitar playing,” and “well, we all know that I don’t have very much to work with here.”

Of all the instruments I play, I always say that electric bass is the principal one. After that is guitar, then keyboards. I work at it, and my new album has been requiring greater and greater keyboard skills, but my limitations on that instrument are the most noticeable to me. It’s only natural, since I’ve spent the least amount of time with it. However, I never talk as if I’m not a keyboardist, because in truth, I am. I refuse to talk about my skills at the keyboard as if they are not constantly developing. If I were to talk regularly with others about my limitations, I believe that I’d be serving to cement those limitations in a certain way. What a self-defeating thing that would be.

The first step to making something real is to state it. If my friends have frustrating limitations on their chosen instruments, but play regularly, it’s safe to say that they are probably improving, at least on the songs in their repertoires. Therefore both of the following statements they could make would be true:

1. “I’m a lousy guitar player.”
2. “I’m a guitar player.”

Option 2 is better. It affirms the skills they have acquired, whatever they are, and more importantly, doesn’t trap them in a state of defeat.

Unless of course, they have no desire to be anything but lousy at guitar and are quite pleased with the fact that they will never dedicate themselves to the instrument. In that case, I believe the following statement would be most appropriate. 

“I’m a guitar owner.”

Really? I have a few myself. :~)