hi folks - sorry i haven’t posted this week, but i’ve been through some hard times since wednesday.  here’s the rundown:

wednesday afternoon I was involved in a very serious car acccident, that i was very lucky to have survived.  although i’m still sketchy on the all the details, what basically happened was this:

i was riding to lunch with my supervisor in the passenger side front seat.  we were on a major, busy thoroughfare here in the city (4 lanes of traffic, plus a middle turning lane).  we pulled into the turning lane with the car facing sideways to oncoming traffic.  what apparently happened, because i honestly can’t remember, was that a vehicle in the oncoming traffic that we were waiting to go across, changed lanes forcing another car to swerve to avoid a collision.  when this car swerved they lost control of their vehicle and came into the middle turning lane broadsiding the passenger side of the car i was sitting in at about 40 mph.  i’m still here today for two reasons, really: 1) the car that hit us missed my door by about 1 foot crushing the passenger rear-side of the vehicle and not me.  2) i was wearing my seatbelt and the car we were in had passenger side-door airbags that stopped my head from going through the passenger side window.

all in all i was very lucky, that i only suffered a severe concussion,  major short term memory loss, two messed up lower right ribs, a bruised shoulder, arm and hip, and some wicked whiplash in my neck.

i tried to go to work on thursday, but after being there for two hours my vision started to blur badly and i got very weak, so i went back to the docotor.  he checked my head again, and also concluded that i had a pre-existing bacterial infection which was aggravating the trauma of the accident.   in addition to all that, i still can’t remember most of what happened wednesday, and until last night i was having some extreme anxiety.  my resting pulse was between 100-12o beats per minute.

now that i’m all doped up on meds, today i feel better but extremely sedate.  however, i’m coherent enough to type this entry, and my vision is much better.  the head doctor thinks that what i experienced yesterday was a lingering effect of the concussion.

all in all, this is by far the worst car accident i’ve been in - i had a mild concussion when i knocked my front teeth out years ago, and i’ve dislocated my shoulder a couple of times, but this is about as a serious a trauma as i’ve had in a while.

i hate for this entry to sound to dramatic, as i am going to be okay - however, i did want to give everybody the full update.

i plan to spend the rest of this weekend recovering.

Last weekend, i watched a lot of football. LSU vs. South Carolina, Colts vs. Texans, Packers vs. Chargers… a lot more than i’m used to watching. It was also the first time that i heard the phrase “Gadget Play,” and I ended up hearing that phrase quite a few times this weekend. A Gadget play is an offensive football play that involves cleverness and trickery to fool the defense. It’s quite risky, because if the defense catches on then you can potentially lose yards or posession of the ball. However, if it can be executed as designed, it usually gets touchdowns or first downs. And what’s more, it is unequivocably the most fun and exciting play to watch for the fans.

Like in the LSU game, instead of having the punter kick the field goal, for example, the quarterback Matt Flynn could act like he was setting the ball on the ground but instead flip it over his shoulder behind him, and the punter catches it in the air and runs it in for a touchdown. The fans go crazy, the announcers explode, and the whole team gives high-fives. LSU coach Les Miles watched the play with a smirk on his face and tounge in his cheek, seemingly thinking “This is working out just… like… i planned.” South Carolina coach Steve Spurrier watched the play and also couldn’t help but to smile and shake his head, thinking “Boy, Les, you put one over on me. I would’ve done the same thing.”

Gadget plays, when successful, are the only plays that get talked about after the game. They get put in the “highlight” reels, the “best-of” moments, and the coach’s playbook hall of fame. Even though those touchdowns are worth the same as every other touchdown, and even if they don’t eventually win the game, gadget plays get posted onto youtube and made immortal.

I wouldn’t mind a gadget play in my life. Something that will make my fans go wild and even amuse myself.

I could use a little cleverness
to make my job near effortless.
End up on top,
with a place to prop
my feet upon a cherry desk.

Yes!

In other news, dad let me borrow his african Kalimba, a musical instrument with a beautiful tone. It is also cool in that it takes minimal skill to improvise an interesting tune. I spent 15 minutes last night before bed just plucking out notes and ended up falling asleep listening to it. Look forward to some recordings in the future. Jon needs to get his banjo-picking self over to my place and we can finally start playing some music!

Some great writing about the seminal frailing banjo records aptly titled “Clawhammer banjo”:

My feelings run along the inverse of old Sam’s: I think Scruggs-style bluegrass flattened out the banjo, the way rocknroll mashed down blues and country musics. Post-Scruggs banjo is flashy impressive fun, but it blows right by me like a circus train. Old-time banjo, though, unreels light as a thread, and its shadow is monolothic, an Appalachian stonehenge. If you can link bluegrass to assembly lines and rush hour traffic and dishwashers, where do you find the material analogue for clawhammer banjo? It’s a gestalt, a confluence of diasporas, trade winds and tragedies. Slavery, potato blight, coal mines. Africa, Ireland, the ragged Blue Ridge.

I don’t like Buell Kazee’s voice — with his theatre-organ vibrato and rolling R’s he sounds to me like the Cowardly Lion — but his clawhammer self-accompaniment is otherworldly. On the old recordings, his frailing on an open-back banjo sounds spectral, detached from the plane of the song. It curls leviathan-like beneath the surface.

Hobart Smith, Roscoe Holcomb, Uncle Dave Macon: their frailing styles work to wildy different effects, all compelling. Ralph Stanley’s clawhammer tunes have a lightning crackle missing from his up-picked stuff. And there’s Clarence Ashley — my favorite by a mile. Everyone loves “The Cuckoo” and “Little Sadie,” and there’s a reason for it. The whiplash tempo, the galloping snap of his thumb off the fifth string, the unhinged alto drone of Sawmill tuning that gives his blues licks almost Asian harmonies. His technique is austere and ineffible, light as breath but old and deep as a limestone cavern.

I’m right there with this line of thought - frailing banjo, with it’s unique tunings and rhythmic drive, often times sounds both incredibly archaic and strangely modern at the same time. A truly beautiful sound, built from the diasporas of so many different groups. As a cajun, and therefore, a member of a diasporatic (is that a word?) group myself, I’ve often felt a deep connection to the stories of misplaced peoples - the jews, the irish, the west-africans, the indigenious americans. although it was a hard road to get here, i’m glad all these people have had a chance to mingle in this country and produce the kinds of music that made me want to be a musician in the first place.

Speaking of tunings and musicians, check out Alex Ross interviewing Yo-Yo Ma. This is a great read, especially Ma’s take on what really constitutes a musical tradition:

One core value, Ma said, had to do with intonation. He pointed out that schemes of tuning are not consistent within Western classical music and that they vary widely from place to place. What matters, he said, is that different kinds of music require idiosyncratic tunings, and that learning the tunings takes you toward the core values of the art.

An interesting commentary - I’ve always played with altered tunings and have always felt that those tunings really reflect what Ma considers the ‘core values’ of a tradition.

Although standard tuning on the guitar is a piece of genius in its own way, it’s also the compromise that allows the guitar to be such a universal instrument that can be adapted to play almost any music. As I believe Chet Atkins once famously said, once you change the tuning of the guitar, you’re not playing a guitar anymore. You’re playing something else.

While I think that is only partially true, I sure have been enjoying the altered (and sometimes bizarre) tunings that a lot of banjo music is played in.

Today is also the first day of fall, the autum equinox, although it didn’t much feel like it outside. I have a feeling that this year it’s going to be a sprint to the winter solstice - time has been passing faster than ever it seems, these past few months.

i feel like i’ve been out of touch with everyone for a long time. it’s already mid-late september and i haven’t posted on the blog or gone over to ben and jon’s in ages. all of a sudden, i woke up yesterday morning and it was cool outside. Genuinely, honestly upper 60’s cool. the sky was completely cloudless. cool, cloudless, autumnal… when i closed my eyes i was transported to a grassy hillside, with towering red-brick buildings above, crunching yellow and crimson-brown leaves on my way to the Mercer engineering building. that stark blue sky, wide and deep and dark in the fall, with the dried-up sun leaning low in the sky, inspired poetry during my freshman year. i open my eyes, and the faded light from that 4 year old memory was obscured by the intensity of the morning rush. just a few seconds of total recall can coat your thoughts with favorite, nostalgic lingering flavors of the past. now that i think about it, since those 4 years have fled by, an incredible number of significant changes have occurred in the world.

it’s been hot and dank for so long here in south LA that the change in temperature + humidity was like a change in mood.

so my nearly 4-month old marriage is going pretty well these days. i had a plan to post a little update on our complex, developing relationship. the premise is: marriage is a whole new world of joys and pains. however, the familiarity of it all is completely disarming. we’re both, essentially, the same people we were before we got married. but everything is different… and i didn’t think it needed to be different. anyways, i was going to write a bit about it, and then last week desiree showed me her take of things, which she posted on her blog, and i think she says it very well. so read that.

Inkscape is a software for creating vector graphics, and boasts many features of professional graphic software like text kerning and beizer curve manipulation. the kicker is that it’s free! it runs on windows, linux, and mac under X11. when i first got it a long time ago, i thought it was pretty obtuse and it ran very slow. however, i recently opened it up to create a diagram of sorts and found just the opposite… it is extremely powerful and the help file shows the in-depth functions for doing just about anything. Here are some examples of some graphics that one could make with inkscape. Since i have such wonderful tools at my disposal, you can expect a little visual refreshment to be coming to davidcomeaux.com et al. in the future. I know, it’s exciting. you should forget i said anything so that when you click on the bookmark one day and everything has changed you can be like “Wow that is so refreshingly surprising! and it looks great too!”

i got a haircut recently. haircuts are mostly sense-driven experiences for me… i have a propensity to fixate upon touch to my head, neck and back. Not so much erogenous zones, more like comforting and relaxing. i think it goes back to the days when mom or nanny or grandmere would tickle the kids’ necks and backs. Nowadays, the feeling manifests itself in immobilizing comfort… Julie, i know, still has this response to back-touch as well. much like a puppy getting a belly rub, we will orient ourselves as to provide easy access to the surface area in question, and essentially pass out. all of our brain functions are temporarily suspended to concentrate on the curious and immensely soothing feelings coming from our nerve endings, so it takes great effort to speak or move otherwise. So when i get a haircut, and this has been the case for my whole life, i tend to close my eyes and remain silent. starting with the shampoo, i am paying for professional, functional touch that serves 2 purposes: hygeine and relaxation. I happen to enjoy it quite a lot. Curry Smith has a story, that i remember always, about getting a professional shave in pre-katrina new orleans. I hope one day i can get that experience as well: women get manicures and pedicures and facials and spa treatments, and men get shave and a haircut.

My wife does not have the same instantaneous reaction to back-neck-scalp touch that i do. I’d love to be able to offer the same kind of physical relaxation to her that i get from that, but it’s not that simple. Which brings me to my next question: everyone seems to have similar sensitivity (as far as pressure) scales as far as touch goes, but how do people develop different responses to touch? why are some people obscenely ticklish and others not? they both feel the same pressure and light force across the skin, but the brain’s pleasure/pain response can be completely opposite.

i don’t know.

Speaking of touch. The iPod Touch, which i would call the iPhone minus Phone, is incredibly cool. WiFi! Safari! in your hand! the whole internet! An incredible development for the much-more-than-music player. One day, WiFi will be everywhere, and devices like this are going to create the demand. Now, i’m no security expert, but the one roadblock to immediate ubiquity of Wifi is the relative insecurity of wireless data transmission. Not exactly a closed loop.

Speaking of security. Desiree and i watched the first two Bourne movies a while back and we agreed that they are pretty thrilling. Recently, we watched The Bourne Ultimatum. In the Bourne movies, the premise is that the CIA can basically do anything imaginable and get away with it. Something that i really doubt, however, is the ability for a small team of computer-using agents can pull up surveillance cameras, satellite imagery, bank transactions, practically any data that can be recorded in the entire world, instantly. I know it’s just a movie, but seriously? It should take at least days to find, let alone realtime-download, what they can pull up on their compy with 2 keystrokes. What surveillance cameras do you know that are accessible over networks with super-high-speed data transfer, that are remotely controllable, with an infinite resolution so you can zoom in and read the name of designer on somebody’s wristwatch? WTF? Sure, people are smart. but let’s be reasonable about the limits of technology.

Anyways, if you’ve made it all the way to the bottom of this entry, congratulations! i need to post more often.

last week, i posted the tuesday hate because, as we all know, it is often harder to love than it is to hate.

so, in light of that moment of darkness, this week i submit my act of contrition the way i was taught to - through confession.

i confess that i don’t really like my new schedule. sure, i’m ‘earning a living’ (whatever that is supposed to mean), but o lord, why hasn’t thou figured out a better way for us humans to get along and enjoy each other? must we all toil away so?

i confess that, although i don’t believe in buying items beyond what is immediately useful and necessary, i have an inordinate and irrational desire to acquire ice cream and houseplants.

i confess that i’m worried about falling in love lately. i confess that this is a ridiculous thing to worry about and that my time would be better spent worrying about more pressing concerns, however, i also know that, having been single for quite a while now, i’m starting to seriously buck the trend of serious relationships i had throughout my youth. i confess that i have no idea what this means.

finally, i confess that i love wednesdays, a day that i used to loathe. again, i find this change of heart inexplicable.

Although i’m struggling to find things to love this week, i can say without a doubt that i love the banjo and people who play it. i truly do believe that the world would be a better place if more folks knew how great it is to play that most humble of instruments.

other things i’m loving include oranges, the music of bill broonzy, and conversations with friends at work.

share some loves or confessions (or both!) down below - we are coming up on yom kippur after all.

In order to know, we must be capable of forgetting, abandoning, abjuring.

One way to look at a “renaissance man” is to say “He’s interested in so many things!” Another way is to say: “He’s already passed over and lost interest in so much!”

One way to look at a socialite is to say “He knows so many people!” Another is to say “He snubs and is snubbed by an incredibly large crowd!”

via nick currie

A. Headley really nails how I feel about my hometown. Just replace Houston with L-Town:

Houston isn’t real anymore. Driving down the freeways, the streets dappled with potholes, felt like taking a tour of the folds of my own unreliable brain. Houston is a sinkhole, a below-sea-level basin too flooded with memory to hold any new experiences.

When I tell people that I don’t really like living in Austin, most of them say, “Are you going to move back to Houston?” No, I tell them, because moving back to Houston would feel like moving backwards, and I’d rather move forwards.

This isn’t technically true. Since time only goes in one direction, there’s no such thing as moving backwards, not really. If I moved to Houston, I’d still be moving forwards. But it’d be like taking up residence inside my own head. Every experience I would have, every place I would go, would have cast upon it a corresponding shadow of something that already happened, or didn’t happen, depending on how reliable my memory is. “Is this happening right now?” I would ask myself as I walked into a coffeehouse or bar, “or is this happening six years ago? Or is it happening at all?”

not as easy as it looks.

These guys don’t do it for the fame. They don’t do it for the glory. The do it because they passionately love the painful process of making music.

Being a composer is hard, and as is evidenced in this video, lonely work.

Expensive Options:

Buy them a nice computer or other eletronic device.
Purchase an X-box 360 live (see item one).
Order large amounts of food to be given away at your discretion.

Cheaper Options:

Invent/purchase games that can be played by one person in the house (darts, solitare, etc.)
Set them up on dates with friends.
Buy them a season of their favorite sitcom (scrubs, Lost, etc.)

Completely Free Option:

Close your door. When questioned, yell out that you are sleeping. repeat as necessary.

Clothing:

T-shirt (mandatory)
Cargo shorts/pants (although shorts are preferable in the summer). Regular shorts will sufice if no cargos are available, but multiple pockets are a must.
Tennis shoes or the equivalent

Pocket Items (to be carried on your person):

Box cutter or small knife
Wallet
Change (for coke machine during break)
Pen or marker (for marking errant boxes, drawing pictures of co-workers, etc.)

Other tools/items that should be close at hand:

Tape gun
electrical screwdriver (preferably cordless)

And for bonus points:

a good book to read while on break drinking previously aquired soft drink, water, etc.

interrupting your regular broadcast of the tuesday love is a special inversion of that column I like to call the tuesday hate.  sit back, relax, and enjoy some good old fashioned ranting…

i hate buying off brand 1 liter yogurt.  dannon, in my opinion, is the yogurt manufacturer par excellence and the off brands really do a disservice to the standard that company sets.  unfortunately, about once a month, i am forced to buy an off-brand yogurt (or worse, store-brand yogurt) because they (the store) have run out of A-stock dannon.  albertsons is especially terrible in this regard.

i hate slow drains and their evil equivalents, faucets with poor water pressure.  in my current residence,  i am forced to deal with both on a daily basis and i believe that i experience what psychologists call ’significant cognitive dissonance’ because of my poor plumbing (which, incidentally, works fine in my housemate’s bathroom)

i hate the fact that some days i purposely set my alarm later than normal so that i can sleep more, when I know that the ensuing morning rush will effectively negate any of the benefits of those few precious extra minutes of sleep.

i hate that my bedroom window faces a parking lot. directly faces a parking lot.

everyone knows misery loves company - vent some hatred down in the comments, if you feel so inclined.

One really cool project I’d like to participate in if i had a hundred extra bucks lying around is the national geographic genographic project.

basically, the project shows you your deep ancestry traced straight back through your mother’s lineage (your mitochondrial dna) or your father’s (your y chromosome). just one cheek swap and a postage stamp is all you need to reveal your genetic origins.

this is seriously cool stuff, and you help to build a genetic database for research while you participate. talk about science and public interaction on the cutting edge.

Recently, my weekends have been split either a) visiting friends at their internships near and far b) going back to L-town to see ailing family and also regular family, or c) staying in B.R. while attempting to establish some off-work routine.

Well, now that fall is here, I no longer have to worry about option a. Option b presents a serious kind of moral quandary since I inevitably feel guilty if i don’t go home to see relatives who, at this stage in their life, really look forward to visits. Option c is extremely difficult to pursue during college football season.

So, although I find myself locked into the 8 to 5 during the weekdays, my weekends have been nebulous clouds of errands, guilty pleasures, family, friends, free time, and time that i wish i was free. adapting to the ‘real world’ work/play schedule has been more difficult than i anticipated.

on an unrelated note, players of stringed instruments should check out the fretboard journal. the blog alone is worth hours of quality music-obsession time.

Of course, I always want to write something meaningful and profound when my birthday rolls around. However, this year I find myself browsing the web looking for a quotable birthday anecdote. Perhaps that says something about the mentality of a twenty-three year old: a person who can find some wisdom in the thoughts and words of those who are yet still older than he is.

I liked this quote by one S. Clemens:

When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it happened or not.