Contrary to what many of my friends think, I am not a Luddite. I thrive on and quite enjoy many aspects of modern technology. Professionally, I could not get by without SketchUp. Recreationally, the first thing that comes to mind is access to so much film and music of all recorded history, often conveyable in seconds, which they all tire of hearing about. Q.E.D.
A Luddite, as the term has come to be used in modern parlance, is someone who eschews and decries technology. What my friends misconstrue of me is that I have the strange belief that we cannot and should not allow technology to replace certain aspects of life, especially the creative life, and especially the direct connection between the brain and the hand that has proven so successful over the previous ~10-ish centuries of civilization.
The works and thoughts displayed on this page are the product of that connection. More than just hobbies, these are the things that I do when I’m off the clock, though if I’m persistent and fortunate perhaps one day they will be the things I do on the clock, as it were– primary rather than secondary pursuits. In the meantime, they shall reside here.
Things of worth take not just minutes or hours but years, and often centuries, to ripen. When we work well, we work across ages. Contrary to contemporary instinct, which is to work horizontally– replacing one “now” with the next “now”– things of true value are vertical: those things that would be recognized as such by a time-traveller of both the future but perhaps more especially of the past. Would Mozart enjoy the Beatles? I think so. Bach, though, may find the Beatles too undisciplined, but I expect they found him rather too disciplined– as probably did Mozart.* I wonder what Beethoven would have thought of John Lennon’s reinterpretation of the Sonata No. 14 in C# min. Op.27, #2 ( aka “Moonlight”) into “Because” by reversing the chord pattern. I’ve a feeling he would have preferred it to Glenn Miller’s (not too shabby and crowd-pleasing) version.
The works on this page are not necessarily done well, and much are ephemera. They are put here as examples of what G.K. Chesterton meant when he said, “If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.” As he further pointed out in that brilliant book, What’s Wrong With the World, all parents are amateurs, and yet we are (mostly) better off for having raised our own children since time immemorial. I plan to explore this topic in greater detail in this space, as “writing” is precisely one of those amateur activities I intend to place here.
As well as the following.
Pencil & ink sketches, watercolors, cigar box guitars, road trips, movies & movie maps (wha??), blues, opera, Elvis & Sinatra, barbecue & cast iron, architecture, baseball, acerbic opinions, trivia, and minute absurdities…these are the denizens of my daily life that inform and are informed by my work. In other words: analogous.
Analog.
A log.
Analogous.
The Analogue.
*I have a mental game I play while at work. I put my entire 5,000+ album library on shuffle and picture the next ten artists in the queue sitting together in a green room waiting their turn. What would they say to each other? Example: Janis Joplin, Son House, the Grateful Dead, Guillaume DuFay, the Carter Family, Nat King Cole, the Earls of Leicester, Django Reinhardt, Crosby Stills & Nash, Gaetano Donizetti: the answer is, they would quickly find a lot of common ground, even with language barriers, especially if they had instruments at hand. And after about a half hour it would likely be Jerry Garcia leading the conversation.