E-mail reaction, a couple days ago, to “In This Brokedown Country:”
nice. fun. but alas, I don’t post anything smacking of this or that side — now, for me, I am not one percent but half the country seems to identify with them — the conservatives
and when some time ago I posted [a] gallery of Occupy Wall St I got heaps of email lambasting me and telling me I was hardly non-partisan. So: though I enjoyed it I won’t post. Simply want to sail on my non-partisan way.
Inconveniently, civil unrest delivers a point of view that offends many people.
Anyone reading this knows I find keeping the peace for the sake of popularity an utterly baffling position. Particularly so for the last, say, five years, at least.
Readers know I like Gibson guitars. They may have read when I tried to do the company a favor by successfully pressing the Washington Post and others to drop website ads selling Chinese counterfeits of the iconic brand.
But it’s been increasingly hard to not be turned off by Gibson. And this is all due to its CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz.
With his company raided twice by government agents — the first time for buying blackmarket protected wood from Madagascar, the second time for impropriety with Indian imports — Juszkiewicz decided to go extreme right wing and cry about the alleged tyranny of the US government.
At one point, the Wall Street Journal tries to imply the real reason the US government may be after Gibson is because Juszkiewicz is a conservative businessman. This is done with the full knowledge that the investigation which led to the first raid was started during the Bush administration.
In the interview, Juszkiewicz is the very epitome of the bigshot from corporate America, the kind a great deal of the country is coming to visibly detest in street protests.
Juszkiewicz apparently believes in favors for corporate America. So what did he do, according to the WSJ?
Try to get President Obama to let him off the hook. And the Prez ignored him. The nerve of the man. Even his daughters have Gibson guitars, he said.
“[I] will say this: I wrote a letter to President Obama. I spelled out what happened. I said: You know, we got raided and here are the facts, I think it’s unfair. What do you think we should do? No response.”
Maybe the president is not a music lover? “He knows who we are,” Mr. Juszkiewicz says. “His daughters have a couple of Gibsons. [Mrs. Obama] gave a guitar to [the French president’s singer-songwriter wife] Mrs. Sarkozy. And we called up to make sure that he saw the letter, and he did. No response.”
You read this blog or just about anything else these days and you know this attitude. Laws are for little people, not for the wealthy, those who think of themselves as the drivers of job creation in China and capitalism.
At one point Juszkiewicz inexplicably goes into a riff where he tries to explain that guitars are too hard to play for average people while implying the company will expand into consumer electronic products for those who don’t.
Juszkiewicz presides over a company where all the everyman instruments are now made in China. This leaves the domestic end of the market priced so high in relation to, say, the wages of music store workers, that his instruments are now mostly only for the wealthy hobbyist or musician who can put it on the record label advance.
From the WSJ:
“Consumer electronics is a big target of ours because it’s a much bigger market than the M. I. [musical instrument] industry. . . . Right now we have a brand that people recognize and value. But only 5% of those people can buy something with the Gibson brand. . . In order to buy a guitar you actually have to play guitar. . . . You may say, ‘Wow that’s pretty cool to do,’ but . . . it’s like learning Greek. It’s not intuitive to sit down and start playing rock and roll. So guitar players reflect one in 20 consumers. But high-fi speakers [can be used by] 20 out of 20, so it’s a much larger market.”
So what does Juszkiewicz think is the next hot product? Expensive speakers. I can hear the air going out of the balloon six months to a year from now.
For the Journal, Juszkiewicz emits even more dipshit quote.
Gibson guitars do well during hard times, he says, neglecting to mention that if his high end guitars are indeed selling now it’s precisely BECAUSE the wealthy who buy them haven’t seen hard times at all.
“We did really well in the Great Depression,” the Gibson CEO tells the Journal. The company and its instruments were then nothing like now.
“Because everybody wanted to be like Woody Guthrie?” asks the paper, generating unintentional hilarity.
In answering the newspaper reporter’s question about sales during the Great Depression being good, maybe because everybody wanted to be like Woody Guthrie, Juszkiewicz seems to realize he’s dangerously close to stepping in excrement:
“No, I would guess not,” comes the reply. “He did play our guitar, though.”
Reading an interview like the one in the Journal can cause you to lose all faith in a brand. One can imagine the company would only improve if a criminal charge caused Henry Juszkiewicz to step down.
The CEO also plugs his newest offering, the Firebird X, a robot-tuned guitar equipped with, no joke, Bluetooth, priced for the princes at $5,500.
Woody Guthrie, of course, wouldn’t have been able to afford it. (He did say he was for “singing for the plain folks and getting tough with the rich folks.”)
I have the best song for the new tourism trade association campaign to boost America overseas. It’s “The National Anthem!”
What better way to show off our best side than to indicate that after a long time, yes, some of us still do have a grim but inviting sense of humor. And that we’re able to ridicule ourselves.
Say hello to “the United States of Awesome Possibilities” as it looks to visitors from abroad to help lift it out of the economic doldrums.
By soft-pedaling patriotism, the newly-formed US national tourism board tasked with getting more tourists — and their money — onto US soil is reinventing the nation as a hip new land of diversity and possibilities.
“We’re rebranding America for the first time,” said Jim Evans, chief executive of the Corporation for Travel Promotion, ahead of the World Travel Market that opened Monday in London.
“Over the last 10 or 12 years, people have seen America as unwelcoming as we’ve focused on security …
Central to that message is a pixelated “USA” logo, unveiled Monday in London and a world away from the Stars and Stripes, that is meant to represent what the corporation calls “the United States of Awesome Possiblities.”
“It is not about patriotism, flag-waving or chest-beating,” says the corporation in a capsule explanation of the design. “It is meant to be welcoming, unexpected and inclusive.”
“We have to rekindle the romance with the United States,” Chris Perkins, chief marketing officer at the Corporation for Travel Promotion, told AFP.
“It pains me, as a proud American, but we’re viewed as arrogant and brash …
Of course, in addition to curbing the national image as brash and arrogant, we could do with a lot less of the patently phony and stupid, too.
Welcome to the US of Penitentiary … we all get here, eventually.
We lock up the poor for all the rich. And we do it right, without no hitch!
Welcome to the United States of Greed. It’s the only country you’ll ever need! If you’re into frauds and useless devices, Uncle Sam — the best of choices.
Welcome to the United States of Security! We’ll check you now for purity!
If you have gold and your ass don’t smell, we won’t bomb you straight to Hell!
Into the intersection of these trends comes a fascinating, one-of-a-kind new instrument called the You Rock guitar ($200) from Inspired Instruments.
Its solid plastic body is small and not as heavy as wood, but much more substantial than the hollow plastic that most Guitar Hero heroes are used to.
You play real steel strings with your right hand. But they’re only six inches long; they don’t continue up the neck. Instead, your left fingers, on the neck, press what turn out to be only touch sensors.
Since the You Rock can get its power from four AA batteries, it’s an incredibly portable and private practice instrument. You can play when you’re in a rowboat, up in a tree, next to a sleeping partner — all places where ordinary electric guitars would fear to tread.
And you’re not just carrying around one guitar; you’re carrying 100. The You Rock is a full-blown synthesizer. It can sound like a gentle nylon-string acoustic, a rich 12-string folk guitar, a screaming heavy-metal ax — even an organ or a string section.
Electric guitars went portable on AA batteries a long time ago. I’ve attached a pic of a Korg Pandora — mine — a processor that runs on two AA batteries, one that pumps earbud and can make your electric sound like Keith Emerson with ELP at the Isle of Wight, or “a rich 12 string folk guitar. You get the idea. It’s around five years old.
Third, there’s You Rock mode. The guitar’s control panel (colorful square buttons on the top edge) contains 25 song loops — a professional backup band laying down grooves for you. It’s great fun, and great practice, to play along. There’s also an audio input so that you can play along with music from your iPod or another source.
Been done. Everyone has a pocket amp you can plug you iCrap into nowadays.
For example, the You Rock can connect to GarageBand for the iPad. Can you imagine? An entire multitrack recording studio now fits into a backpack.
Lots of multi-track recording studio kit already fits into a backpack.That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to do anything listenable with it. Often, quite the contrary. And there is something to be said for a real studio.
Now, I’m a musician, but not a guitarist.
One of my old Korg Pandoras. A rock band/rehearsal tool in a box.
A newer model, made to also be a sound card for any computer. One version of the Pandora was a 4-track studio that recorded to a small removable data chip.
The Pandoras come with bunches of preset tone applications, for making you sound like an arena-rocker.
It’s three years old. Be a nuisance and send this link to Mr. Pogue.
It’s worth noting there’s a certain physical pleasure that comes from playing an acoustic or electric guitar. It’s a nerves in the fingers, hands, touchy-feely, sensory satisfaction kind of thing. The device reviewed in the New York Times apparently goes to some length to defeat that.
It’s also worth mentioning that having your stuff profiled in the New York Times by some heevahava is better than being given a gold brick.
Nice job, get crap for free because of where you work and then make the company that gave it to ya really happy.
Chinese-manufactured Stratocaster electric guitar, famous around the world. Invented here in California, promoted worldwide by rock ‘n’ roll, now made in much greater number there than here. Those we still make are for the wealthy and major label musicians. Everyone else, including me, gets the China-made copy. The parent company, Fender, keeps a domestic business that’s mostly a custom shop, goods designed by people with good opinions of self-worth but who are not so strong in the way of improvement or innovation.
Same as above. In the Seventies there was a real big Fender factory in
soCal. Now they’re all in China. The blue box, an Adrenalinn III, is not made in China, although its computer chips are. Shot at Studio Dick D.
The real China toilet that inspired “China Toilet Blooz.” The seat blistered as above one week out of its box. It was the third we bought in Pasadena So we left it.
Truly, corporate America has been so very bad for most Americans in the last decade, all brand loyalty should be well and truly dead.
The human thing to do is not even buy Fender-branded guitars made in China, but to get another less famous brand doing the same pieces. In the pic above, it’s a Jay Turser.
In fact, one might encourage Chinese business to simply dispense with their American partners and replace them with new names including the multi-nationals out. If possible.
I’d support that.
Weapons, of course, are mostly all still made here.
Wood ducks and one Canada goose who blutzed into the photo looking for a handout, at the Arboretum in Arcadia. Not made in China.
Warm-up before going to a Halloween party as myself, with guitar, to play a few songs.
Honeytone $20 9-volt battery driven made-of-plastic-in-China amp from Guitar Center, not priceless that’s for sure. But handy and a conversation starter. And it sounds just barely OK if you know what you’re doing.
Was going to post a photo of the original China Toilet Blooz toilet seat, which didn’t make the video. Maybe later.
Posting will be light. Spending time with a friend debilitated by a hard regimen of chemotherapy. Once again, reality shows there’s been no innovation. Unless you call carrying a fannypack purse/pump for the poison strapped to you a wonder. The poisons aren’t new or better since the Eighties. And they’re still very much toxic.
Which is why they get the view counts in the first place.
By no means are these songs “hits.” But they do get views and, apparently, the algorithms notice.
Second situational funny, the constant juxtaposition of “The Pothead Anthem” by Janis Joplin — at the top of the “recommended videos” column — on an increasing number of my properties. (See here. I’m so lucky.)
LSD, short for Life Sex & Death was a band that enjoyed a mercilessly brief bit of publicity in 1991 just as DD was arriving in SoCal.
The band’s hook: An alleged homeless man named Stanley fronting a fairly regular-sounding LA pop metal act. The album was called Silent Majority, was on Reprise, and spawned a couple videos, one of which, entitled “Tank,” enjoyed some popularity on Beavis & Butthead.
It was a favorite of mine, trending toward so stupid it had to be done by a few possessing some innate cleverness. It’s heard to best effect on the song, Some Fuckin’ Shit Ass. (Google it, found on YouTube, where the video shot at Cain’s Ballroom leaves a bit to be desired in sound quality.)
The most interesting and hilarious bits re LSD are shown by juxtaposing two videos.
The first, featuring a fellow named Chris Stann on vocals, was obviously made well before LSD made it to Hollywood. It’s bog standard hair metal complete with dancing girls in scanties. Wait for the singer to appear.
The next video of the same band is a year or so later.
For it, the singer is the same guy rewritten, made over as a stagy homeless man, a gimmick the record companies in LA found irresistible. Gone is the spandex and big hair, replaced by a tattered bum suit, black spectacles and the mien and physicality of someone mentally ill. The dance moves, however, are the same.
And so is the wireless microphone with what looks like a broken flashlight attached to the bottom of it.
It’s a fabulous transformation in rock style! And as with most things I like the general public recoiled in horror. Pearls before swine.
