It’s on days like today that I feel both incredibly fortunate for all of my family and friends, and at the same time, sort of depressed that I have so many other obligations that take me away from them. I look forward to one day in the future when I don’t have to spend some significant portion of my holiday driving to, and eventually away from, most of the people who know me best.

These articles are already getting a lot of link love around the blogosphere, but I’m putting it up here for those who may not have seen it yet:
Paris I love you but you are bringing me down - a series of dispatches from Rosecrans Baldwin about his experiences living in Paris.

Of course, in a bleary-romantic way, I wish I could write humorous, slightly disgruntled observation pieces about my life in Paris. Maybe some day.

The BBC has a nice overview of the rising cost of food prices that is occurring around the globe. Many countries have been seriously affected, and the BBC has nice spotlight on the Egyptian bread crisis in particular.

I’ve noticed my own food buying habits slowly shifting over the past few years. For the purposes of full disclosure, I don’t make very much money, so perhaps I’m not representative of others in my age group with my level of education, social background, etc. However, I’ve been slowly cutting certain food items for the sake of sheer practicality and I suspect I’m not alone. I rarely buy beef more than once a week, if even that frequently. Some dairy products, milk especially, I regard as a kind of luxury. I used to drink milk as a child with almost every meal. Now, I feel guilty about just having a “glass of milk” by itself - I need it for cooking, cereal, etc. The cost of buying milk to drink all the time (by myself I could go through a gallon and a half a week), just seems ridiculously lush.

I find myself having lots of conversations with friends and co-workers over rising costs in general: gas, food, various “insurances”, housing costs - as a young person it’s hard to maintain a positive attitude about the general direction of the middle and working classes, such as they are these days, when even basic items seem to be approaching a prohibitively expensive level for the average american.

The following is part personal story, part guitar geek-out. Consider yourself warned.

I haven’t written much here about Django Reinhardt, the french jazz guitarist who pioneered a unique approach to swing-era jazz music, but I guess that’s because I haven’t really been able to come up with a coherent way of articulating how I feel about Django’s music.

I got into Django’s Reinhardt’s music as a guitarist looking for a solution to a technical problem - I needed a right-hand plectrum technique that provided great tone, articulation, and translated from an electric playing situation to an acoustic situation. The dominant plectrum technique used by most guitarists these days, alternate picking, sounds just fine on an electric guitar. However, in my opinion, it sounds weak on an acoustic - alternate picking gives you a thin, muffled, non-dynamic, slurred sound without the additional volume provided by an amplifier.

Django, and the guitarists who’ve followed in his footsteps, played primarily with a down-stroke or rest-stroke technique that floats the right hand above the bridge of the guitar. Not only is this a more comfortable and efficient position for your hand when playing, the rest stroke technique uses gravity to provide the power that will give you a clear, loud, well-articulated tone when playing a guitar un-amplified.

Classical guitarists float their right hand when playing (as opposed to anchoring the right hand with the pinky or ring fingers as some players are apt to do) as do all kinds of other stringed instrumentalists. So, despite the hegemony of alternate picking in the rock, jazz, blues guitar world, their is a historical precedent to playing primarily with rest strokes.

Consider the following two examples: Django playing here and Peter Refela playing a composition of Farid el-Atrache on the oud (a kind of middle-eastern lute) here.

Notice anything similar?

Both players are using the floating right hand and playing primarily with down strokes (rest strokes) although they are playing very different instruments and very different music. And both players achieve fantastic speed, articulation, and tone (recording quality not withstanding).

Lots of players would love to sound like those two guys, and I am one of them. So for my own playing, I decided to study Django’s music in the hopes of improving my technique by learning how to play primarily with rest-strokes. However, not only did I end up learning a new technical skill, I ended up falling in love with a whole genre of music I hardly knew existed before I embarked on this project.

I know what you’re saying though, “How does a guitarist who lives in the birthplace of jazz and blues in 2008 fall in love with French jazz from the 1940’s?”Well, in part two, I’m going to try and riff on what I think is so interesting about Django Reinhardt’s music and why I think it’s relevant in our post-Britney Sufjan Stevens age.

Just the other day, I took a stroll through the large corridors in the business complex where I work.  The most interesting aspect of my work place, other than the unexpected and incredible ancient transplanted palm trees that line the front parking lot, is the sheer size of the building itself - it houses about 40 or so business offices in total.   
 
The office space itself is spread out and connected by one huge main corridor, and a series of smaller interconnecting side halls.  These halls, at least when I walk through them, are almost always completely deserted.  Often, when I walk by myself through these big empty spaces, I try to imagine the people working on the other side, busy in their offices managing and producing and creating.  In the main corridor, there are huge skylights - pyramids with steel lattice scaffoldings that give the building a kind of spiritual sensibility - a  monastery where capital is endlessly accumulated and speculated over like some esoteric Talmudic text.  

Whereas the meandering layout of the building has always struck me as somewhat unorthodox, the  interior design is casual and modest: berber carpeting, a soothing taupe and ecru color-scheme, shiny burnished steel appointments, large glass doors. As I walked around just a few days ago, I noticed that the walls were being re-painted.  Loose-leaf printouts in arial black informed me that the paint itself was still wet, and not far from those signs was the painter himself, working slowly and rhythmically.    

Thinking back, I don’t think I have ever seen a person better suited to the job that they were performing.  This man was tall and thin, over six foot five certainly, and he could easily reach his rolling brush from the ceiling to the floor in one smooth, continuous movement.  His skill was evident - half the hall was already done since he had began that morning, and there was not one single discoloration or blotch on the entire job - a smooth, opaque surface of liquid color.  

I wanted to stand around and watch for a while, but of course, I did not.  It would have been rude and I had my own work to do.  However, as a kind of perfectionist myself, I can always admire a job well done.  To paint in this way, even on a commercial office space, is certainly a skill worth having, a job worth praising. The work that I do these days, modest though it may be in the big scheme of things, I try to do right to the best of my ability.  It makes me smile to see others doing the same.

Earlier this week, jon and i and our friend Adrian played some music. a 3-man jam! i wished i could have brought my recording equipment, because it was very cool. it was a very impromptu gathering. it gave me the chance to 1) play guitar, which i haven’t done in at least some months and 2) reaffirm that a 2-person jam is great fun, but a 3-person jam has the potential to be fantastic.

I recently completed my midterms week and am about to enter another lull in school-related activity. this week has been quite hectic. i have passed my first of two Apple certification exams, so that i can be paid by apple to do repairs on computers. I also surprised mom at work by meeting her for lunch in Lafayette where my exam was. That was nice.

half of my family needed medical attention last night. there was a great big thunderstorm, and oliver the dog, who has serious issues with precipitation, was in his usual terrified state at around midnight. Desiree put him on anxiety medication and he slowly got better. i had a sudden sinus attack, which culminated at about 3am, leading me to discover that there is not one kleenex in my entire house. des prescribed some sinus meds for me, and i laid up feeling my brain dry out. speckle, who tends to have digestion problems every now and then, decided that from 4-5 AM she would swallow copious amounts of air and shedded fur off of the carpet, resulting in dangerous gagging and the possibility for stomach rotation and future surgery. once again, dr. des to the rescue. she goes to walgreens at 5am and gets hydrogen peroxide, which is slowly squirted into speckle’s throat to invoke regurgitation to clear the air and bad ju-ju from her stomach. Speckle is shaken, but not stirred–oops i mean not hurt. Then, Des has to show up at work for 7 AM to treat injured/sick animals all day. What a life that girl has!

i think i made up that word: recencies.
recency: n. - things that have occurred recently. Ex. “David writes in his blog about the recencies of his life. Friends and family read along to keep up-to-date.”

well i just searched the internet and apparently it’s already a word with a slightly different meaning. i thought i made it up because the spellchecker told me it wasn’t a word. put that one in your text twist game and see what it says.

this post is extremely boring, and i’m almost sorry i wrote it. my writing is about as bland as my brain feels write now. Julie reminded me last night that at one time, i was a very expressive, creative writer. Even if it was just for fun, i could write something that was actually descriptive, alive, vibrant, and enjoyable to read. i’ll try to work on this.