Side Quests

Oh yeah, life goes on.

Squatting down in the yard, hands sticky with watermelon juice, hair blowing in my face, sun in my eyes, I thought I could see one too many sharp points at the end of that chicken’s face.

“I think Pepita has a split in her beak,” I said to Bridgette. It was hard to tell; chickens move unpredictably and fast.

A quick internet search revealed that this was indeed a possibility with a number of implications and prescriptions: the beak could end up too long, preventing the bird from being able to pick up food by pecking; the beak may need to be superglued and wrapped until it grows out; the beak may need to be trimmed; the beak may fix itself. One article compared a long split beak to a lady with long fingernails who can do everything that someone with short fingernails can do, they just have to make it work a little differently.

That evening, we made an incursion into the coop and scooped her into the light where we could see better.

A chicken’s beak is made of keratin, the same dense, rigid protein that makes up fingernails, hooves, horns, and hair. They normally file it down themselves by swiping it side-to-side on the ground as they move about. The end of the beak is hard and dead, just like the tip of a fingernail, and as the beak gets darker and closer to the face, it is filled with blood vessels. And this, as unnatural as it seems at first, means that it can be trimmed.

We took a pair of nail clippers and I snipped the two points down and let her back into the coop.

What is life but a seemingly endless series of “side quests” that both distract and enrich us? And what is the main quest anyway? It depends on who you ask—I’m with those who believe that it’s whatever you’re doing right this moment, in the present. Still, attention spans and energy being limited (proportionally to each other, even), things get picked up and put down at will. The carburetors for my bike are still on the bench where I left them two weeks ago, even though I did finish cleaning them and they’re ready to go back on. I’m restoring another hand-crank 16mm camera that is almost done, except it’s not—I put it back in the case anyway because I had to leave town for a few days. This newsletter has been quiet… until now.

Which is not to say that I haven’t been busy:

I did set up a mad scientist laboratory in my garage and shoot the film that was the subject of last month’s newsletter about pre-production. At the time of writing, I’ve already gotten the film back from the laboratory, edited the footage, and shipped it—more on that project when the artist releases the video and I can share it. I’m now back in pre-production for the next 16mm project, which shoots later this month. In this year alone, I’ve been asked to do more film projects than I’ve been asked to play shows. I’m still working through how I feel about that. More than anything, I’m grateful to have my camera and my creativity in demand.

I went to Newport, Rhode Island for the second year in a row to attend the 2024 Newport Jazz Festival. It was the festival’s 70th anniversary, and as emcee and attaché Christian McBride was heard to have said at the start of the weekend, the history of this festival is essentially the history of jazz in post-war America.

I can’t believe it now, but I didn’t take a single photograph or video with my phone the entire time I was there.

Highlights were: Meshell Ndegeocello ripping a set of entirely new tunes—see her band on this tour if you have any chance whatsoever; legendary bassist Buster Williams with funkmaster Lenny White on the drums; the Anat Cohen Quartetinho playing vigorously angular but weightless jazz; Brazilian pianist Amaro Freitas; drummer Makaya McCraven, who sat in on at least three sets that I witnessed; Thievery Corporation—to my surprise—with a cavalcade of guest vocalists and rappers that just kept getting better; Cory Wong bringing funk for optimists with impeccably compressed electric guitar; Brandee Younger doing Coltrane (Alice); Sun Ra Arkestra (albeit without its oldest and final original member Marshall Allen); Robert Glasper’s Dinner Party group with Kamasi Washington on saxophone.

Lowlights were: Elvis Costello’s shambling bespoke band that, by his description, was convened only the day before to rehearse. It was a ragtag group comprising pianist and original Attraction Steve Nieve, bassist Endea Owens, a three-piece horn section, and some young weirdo playing all the beats out of a laptop. When Ableton Man was not triggering horrendously produced electronic beats, he was crouching down on the stage and singing along performatively. Costello kept waving his arms frantically at the horns, conducting in a different time than the music, and to visibly confused (dare I say perturbed?) reactions. The whole thing was disappointing, uncanny, and slower than decaffeinated Dead & Co. The only high point of the set was a bass solo, and even that was carelessly arranged by Costello (“Go ahead Endea, play them something while I walk over to the piano. Isn’t she great folks?”). Nothing like being thrown a hot potato, and as the set dragged on, the nervous energy in the faces of everyone on stage except Elvis never dissipated.

Noname had no game when a laptop error prevented her backing tracks from playing and her five-piece live band hung her out to dry in silence while she tried to ad lib and joke with the audience for nearly 20 minutes. You had to wonder: what could the backing tracks do that a five piece band couldn’t? Or did they just all resent each other so much that they wouldn’t even keep up a soft groove to occupy the awkward silence?

Andre 3000 seemed to be almost trolling the audience with his “improvised” flute work.

There were rampant technical issues with the sound all weekend. I don’t know if they were using a rare/new console that few touring engineers were familiar with, but many of the biggest acts on the headlining stage went without PA for up to three songs. From the audience, we could hear things amplified through the stage monitors, but instruments, voices, and entire chunks of the band were missing from the audience mix. Other times, engineers seemingly pushed reverb sends in error instead of main faders, uselessly boosting quiet, echoey vocals to the edge of feedback. At some point, they would realize their error and the lead vocal would burst through the mains like the Kool-Aid Man taking down a cinder block wall. A persistent hum blasted through the mains for the entirety of Meshell’s set (a testament to the power of her band is how moving the whole thing was in spite of it). What made it worse was when the hum crackled and disappeared for a moment… and then came back. Speaking as a former full-time engineer with festival experience, none of these issues are unsolvable, and quickly at that. At times it was bewildering (you solved the hum for a second! Whatever you did, do that again!).

All in all, I don’t feel that the three days of music were as impactful to me as they were last year, but I am nonetheless spiritually tanked up and inspired to return to my own work.

Earlier this summer I completed a scratch-built tube amp for guitar. I have built microphone preamps, tube hi-fis, and other signal processing electronics from pre-assembled kits, but this was the first time I had attempted a guitar amp, and I did so without using a guide or a kit. The main thing you need to be able to do is solder (which just about anyone can pick up with a day’s worth of practice and guidance), and almost everything else about the process is determined by your attention to detail and patience. I’ve always recommended electronics as a hobby to anyone who needs to de-stress and zone out. Soldering a PCB is like building a beautiful, colorful, functional microcosm with all the complexity of a mandala.

For this project, there is no printed circuit board, and the ur-text for deriving an amplifier out of thin air is the circuit diagram. This diagram was patented by Gibson in the early 60s, but there appear to never have been any GA-1 RVTs produced for commercial sale. There is a single piece of evidence online of an amp sold with this model number and a Maestro badge (Maestro was a Gibson subsidiary that, among other things, made the fuzz pedal that was used for the guitar riff in “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”), but most other information is scant and limited to speculation on the kind of message board where this schematic would be posted online.

I started by reading the diagram and spec’ing all the necessary electrical components based on the values indicated: mainly capacitors and resistors. Working with a design that pre-dates the mainstreaming of semiconductors and ICs (integrated circuits, or chips) means fewer components and simpler (if larger) circuits. An amp also needs things like a speaker, a reverb tank, footswitch, etc. When I made a measuring mistake with a pre-fabricated chassis for the electrical components, my brother stepped in and welded me a stainless steel chassis to my exact specifications. With the help of YouTube (as always), I learned how to translate the circuit schematic; first into practical, more “realistic” wiring diagrams on paper, and then finally putting everything together in 3D space with point-to-point wiring and solder. A video series online by someone who had previously made this amplifier provided a handful of suggestions for modifications to make the circuit more modern and/or efficient, and I applied nearly all of them.

In all, the project took about 60 hours spread out over some months while I did the early research and buying. I did not build the beautiful lacquered tweed cabinet; maybe next time. The amp has worked from the first time I flipped the switch and every time since then. It’s quiet—only 5W or so coming off the power tube—but it has very intelligible clean tones and starts to break up and overdrive in a gratifying and responsive way (that is, responsive to the force of one’s playing) when the volume is anywhere over 60%. For its low power, low tube count, the amp is very economically designed with reverb, a self-oscillating tremolo circuit, and a single tone knob that rolls off the hi/mid tones in a graduated, interesting way. I took it on some guitar gigs this summer where space was limited and I really needed a small footprint, and it performed magnificently on 8-10 hour days in the orchestra pit.

I’m on some other wild shit as usual from day to day, but this newsletter isn’t intended to be a roundup of life’s games. As Texans (and earthlings everywhere) anticipate the end of the hottest global summer on record in as soon as a few weeks, reflect on the good news in your life.

What Am I Watching?

I must admit to a certain niche perversion: I love witch burning scenes in film. With ourselves so far removed from this and other violent eras of hysterical human behavior, and predating as it does things like photography, a witch burning is something that we can only imagine or fantasize about, which makes it perfect for the movie treatment. Plus, fire always looks awesome on film. Always. I’m not an expert historian, but to my eye there is a visual language for this specific tableaux that originates with the Danish director Carl Th. Dreyer, who took an appreciable swing at envisioning it—inasfar as the act itself pertains to the institutionalized corporal punishment of women, if not supernaturally—early in the history of cinema with The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), and then again, more expertly, in his film explicitly about witchcraft Day of Wrath (1943).

The tropes are these: a large pile of wood, unlit but looming menacingly next to some kind of wooden gallows or scaffolding. Shots of a curious and volatile crowd. The witch being pulled in ropes or chains toward the doomed site. Commotion and gnashing on the soundtrack. Images of bondage. Sweat and blood. In essence, the lead up is always a perverted version of the Passion, stumbles and falls included. Then there’s a bit of creativity in deciding how it goes: is she lashed to a sturdy post on top of the pyre, wailing and sweating while the flames lick up from the bottom of the screen? Or is she tied to a ladder and raised above, to be slowly lowered by impassive policemen? Is the tension built sufficiently out of the shots that preempt her death, or does the scene move too fast and not make sufficient use of the visual vocabulary? Does the fire look corny and obviously 10 feet closer to the camera than the person, or does it really seem that a human being is burning alive for the sake of a theatrical audience?

Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General (1968) features an impeccably produced witch burning with a couple of fresh and sickening angles included. The film was the 24-year-old director’s third and final feature before he died of an accidental barbiturate overdose. Tensions between Reeves the ingénue and Vincent Price—who was cast by demand of one of the producers (read: financiers) of the film—were apparently thick. After snubbing Price by not being present at the airport when he arrived, Reeves approached him on the first day and told him, “I didn’t want you and I still don’t want you.” They bickered ferociously on set. To his unendingly genteel credit, Price later regarded his performance as one of the finest of his career, and after Reeves’s death he spoke highly of the film, saying that only after seeing it could he understand what Reeves had really wanted of him on set and why they had fought about it.

Aside from the burning, Witchfinder General follows the story of the historically real Matthew Hopkins, who rode from town to town in England in the 1640s drumming up cash by identifying witches, extorting confessions via torture, and collecting payment from the church. The real Hopkins, who also died in his 20s, wrote a book called “The Discovery of Witches,” and many of the acid tests that we associate with witch trials (do they sink or float? Do they bleed when pricked?) are elucidated therein. In the film, a concerned father who knows that Hopkins is arriving in their small village attempts to hasten the marriage and departure of his young daughter to an army soldier, but the soldier must return to his deployment and the daughter is unable to leave before Matthew arrives, looking for a witch.

This film is usually grouped with The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) and The Wicker Man (1973) as the “Unholy Trinity” that forms the origination point of the sub-genre folk horror. While it’s not particularly gory or scary, in tone and in tenor it might be my favorite of the three.