Art by Jim Pezzetti
I’ve finished the painting of R.L. Burnside today, except for the last coats of varnish. It’s easier to photograph with this matte finish than it is with the gloss. This is a terrible shot, but I don’t have enough light to work with. It’s enough to tell what’s going on in the painting, anyway. I’m happier with this version, so far. I don’t think I’ll bother destroying it again if I start to hate it again. When I get better photos I’ll post them.
Last year I painted a portrait of R.L. Burnside for a local show. No you can’t see it. Really. I loved the piece when it was finished, and made sure to price it so high that no one would buy it, because I wanted to keep it. After the show I hung it, and about a month later was sick of it, and disgusted with myself for not being able to see its flaws earlier. You can’t see it because I destroyed it. I whited out the entire panel, determined to start again. We’ll see how it goes this time. I’m nearly done, and happy so far. Cautiously happy.
R.L. tells a story on one of his albums about how two brothers, an uncle and his father were all murdered in Chicago– in separate events– within the space of a year. Oy. I decided to use that to flesh out the portrait. Below is a sketch of a small part of the painting– of the death of one of his brothers. All R.L. says about it is that his brother was fooling around with another man’s wife, and that’s probably why he was killed.
My next post should be the finished painting.
I took the 11s off the Artcore. They sound amazing, but my weak little fingers can’t bend ’em more than a half-step. I gots some working out to do. They don’t make ribbon- or flat-wound in lighter than 11s, so I’ve got some GHS ‘boomers’ 10s on now. Nice. $5 a pack, and the g-string (3rd from the thinnest) isn’t wound– so it bends mightily. Fresh outta the pack, they’re a little bright for me– I like a definite ‘clunk’ thus my taste for flats, but when they get old they sound a lot like flats. When flats get old they just sound like shit.
My harem has increased by one recently. I added a 12-string acoustic to my collection. A gift to me to use as a ‘sacrificial lamb’ to gain finish repair experience, it came to me unstrung with tuners uninstalled and sans bushings, and with a monster crack in one of the X supports just below the soundhole. It’s a 70’s “Orlando”– a Japanese factory-built brand I’m told– I’ve yet to find any more information about it yet. Someone had tried to repair this crack– about 2 inches long, passing completely through the support at the intersection of the ‘X’– with gauze and some sort of white adhesive.
The thing about 12-string guitars is that they’ve got, well, 12 strings. 12 steel strings. At standard tuning they exert a huge amount of pressure on the guitar. The fate of all 12-strings, sooner or later is to develop a ‘pot belly’, where the bridge is glued to the body, the face of the guitar ‘bowls out’– pulled out by these strings. This guitar had cracked probably because of this exact problem.
I was surprised that someone had thought gauze would fix the problem. They were probably thinking of that method of fiberglass building, using gauze and resin, where in the resin provides the strength, and the gauze is only there as a matrix to support the resin before it cures. If so, they didn’t use resin. They didn’t use enough adhesive, whatever it was. That left the gauze, like a sling. The whole point of gauze is flexibility, which is exactly what you don’t want in this situation– the guitar has flexed too far, and needs to be restrained.
I peeled off the gauze, and ran some superglue into the crack– at rest, it had about a 1/16″ gap, so that part was easy. Then I clamped the crack shut– had a moment of panic as the glue oozed out and almost glued my caul to the guitar– cleaned up and let it sit overnight. I had to order new bushings for the tuners, which didn’t exactly fit– a fair gap between peg and bushing, and new screws to mount the machines to the headstock.
Another oddity about this guitar’s condition was the saddle– the bit of bone or (in this case) plastic that fits in the bridge, and supports the strings. It was completely smooth– no notches for the strings to fit into. A 12-string is strung to play 6 notes, just like a normal guitar, except each note gets two strings, strung approx 1/16-1/8″ apart, tuned to an octave apart, or in unison. This pair of strings is called a course. They should be close enough together that they are easy to strike and fret at the same time, and far enough from each other that they do not collide while ringing. Since this saddle was smoothly curved (we calls it radiused) with no notches, the courses were all over the place, so that for the most part each of the twelve strings was equally placed– this is nearly impossible to play. How long had this saddle been this way? Dunno, but it was useless to me as is. I notched it by eye, guessing at the spacing between and within courses. I did okay, except I got the 4th course too close together. It rattles if I hit it too hard. I’ll get a proper saddle blank and do it right next time.
So this unplayable junker is playable again! Even with the crack repaired, it can’t withstand the tension of standard tuning without bellying out an alarming amount– so I have it in Open G tuning, which requires less tension, and I’ve been meaning to learn anyway. I can also tune it to standard, only a half-step back, and put a capo on the first fret if I absolutely have to have it in standard tuning. But I’ve already got 2 great guitars in standard, so I won’t be doing that anytime soon.
So I haven’t updated in a while. So sorry. The truth is that since I started to learn to play guitar, painting and drawing have been sidelined a little. I still do it, but I’d rather play than post here. Nothing personal.
A year ago this March I started playing guitar. My first guitar I ordered online– nice and anonymous, didn’t want to be embarrassed showing off how little I knew about what I was getting into by showing up at a store and fumbling about. It was an epiphone les paul, a stripped down model they package with a tiny amp as starter kits. All told, I didn’t do too badly for not knowing a god damn thing. But it didn’t take me long to be lusting after something without training wheels.
I sold that guitar and its micro amp last summer, and bought an Ibanez Artcore AG75. It’s the model for the guitar the fella in the picture is playing. It looks smaller on me– maybe this guy’s not so big, but more likely I was thinking more of an 335 size. Whatever. The guitar is like butter, especially after I put ribbon-wound 11’s on it. Nice.
Wasn’t thinking of anyone in particular when I drew this, but it looks just a little like a young John Lee Hooker to me. It’s a rough sketch with rougher color– I don’t do too many preliminaries before painting, but it was a slow day at work.
In The Dictionary of the Khazars (a book I recommend highly), Milorad Pavic writes of a swordsman trapped in a cage of his own swordstrokes. I’ve been fascinated with the image since I first read it, and return to it regularly. I should probably paint it to exorcise it from my imagination.
The things that occupy us shape how we perceive the world– or at least, how we interpret our perceptions. This fellow may be imprisoned by his chosen path, but am I similarly snared, not by strokes of a sword, but those of a brush or pencil?
Just read that R.L. Burnside (allmusic.com) died yesterday, after an extended stay in a hospital in Memphis. He recorded several blues albums for Fat Possum(one of the few record labels that I am conscious of, and partial to), and is to me one of the greatest bluesmen. His style of playing far removed from the strict 12-bar blues canon. Unlike many modern blues artists, his work was not a stale, immaculate preservation of the blues of a particular period of time, but rather, the blues incarnate, alive, raw, and kicking really, really hard.
R.L. Burnside was one of the first blues artists I paid close attention to, because Fat Possum was releasing hip hop and electronic remixes of Burnside’s music. Before Burnside, I knew nothing about the blues, thinking it an old and outdated form of music. But hearing how easily the blues blended with modern styles got me wondering.
Fat Possum’s gamble– to try to draw new listeners by mixing blues with popular styles– paid off, at least as far as I’m concerned. Soon I was submerged in the blues, and eschewing the remixed versions of Burnside’s songs for the originals because by being combined with modern music, as powerful as they were, they lost so much.
The remix albums are a good start, a smoother transition into a music that is so raw, powerful and personal. But by far his better work is that without drum machines and digital distortion. My current favorites are “Too Bad Jim” and the live album “Burnside on Burnside,” which is nothing short of phenomenal. It is worlds away from the “inside a glass case” museum-style blues which stems from the 60’s revival, and proof positive that the blues can be vibrant, current and relevant.
After all, like R.L. said himself, “the blues ain’t nothin’ but dance music.”
Yesterday was thumbing through the Vancouver Zombiewalk 2005 photos at flickr and wishing I lived in a city that would spawn such spectacles. There are at least two Zombie Jesuses in the flickr footage, which gives me a warm tingly feeling all over.
News of the zombiewalk made me very happy, and I spent a couple of hours drawing zombies, revenants, animated corpses, ghouls, etc. Drawing the living dead is fun and easy. You can be real loose and scribbley, in fact, often tightening up the drawing often results in cheesy over-realized cartoony zombies, which are not as much fun as the scraggly, torn and filthy shamblers who look as though they pulled themselves up through six feet of mud and sod. Deformations in shape and proportion are obviously the result of decay and the particularities of each revenant’s death, rather than evidence of lack of skill or foresight on the artist’s part.
I highly recommend it. Thinking back, it seems that I drew nothing but zombies between the ages of 13 and 17. Well, there was one other common subject, but those drawing were all shaky because I couldn’t hold the paper with my other hand because it was– nevermind.
I just read Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. This is really an eye-opener for me, who so far have pieced Blues history together from various websites and cd inserts. The popular history of the Blues is quite different than what evidence suggests. The book has a lot of myth debunking, and at the same time, the author tries to be as upfront about his own ‘predispositions’– which are generally in line with popular history, and the romantic view of the bluesman as an outsider, or naive artist.
Throughout, the author reminds the reader of the danger of genres. The only purpose of genres is to make records easier to find in a record store. And yet we tend to apply them more universally, drawing arbitrary lines between artists and albums. Thus you end up with people arguing whether ‘Mississippi John Hurt’ is blues or country, rather than simply enjoying his music. We forget that we’ve arbitrarily and subjectively applied these labels, and treat them as if they were natural laws. We seem to do this more often than not, in most areas of our lives.
I’ve only been able to use 2 genres consistently and without confusion, and I wish to apply similar logic to other areas of my life as well.
My music collection is sorted thusly:
Genre 1: Music I like
Genre 2: Music I don’t like
Genre 1 I keep, Genre 2 I leave at the record store.
Works for me.
We’ve all been told at some point that two wrongs don’t make a right. Most of us have found proof of this in our lives as well. It makes sense. But the statement implies that at some point, some number of wrongs will, finally, equal a right. The question then becomes, “where is the threshold between rightness and wrongness?”
I don’t know where exactly the threshold lies. But I have seen proof that it is possible to cross over; to pile wrong atop wrong, one after the other, until the result– somehow– becomes right.
Last night I watched Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter. It is not so much a movie as it is a careful experiment to discover the wrong-to-right transformation threshold. Everything about this movie is wrong. The acting, the dubbing, the sound & visual effects, the editing, the choice of film and soundtrack– everything. And the result? To put it mildly, I was thoroughly entertained. As bad films go, this one is really good– because they managed to cross over that threshold.
It takes an incredibly strong determination to fail in order to make a film like this succeed. I hope they make a sequel.
I saw Santa Claus today. An old man, with a big belly covered by a red shirt, long white hair and beard. He had a baseball cap on his head, and a bag slung over his shoulder. The sack wasn’t full of toys though. It was a large clear garbage bag, filled with soda cans. I saw him picking through a trash can in front of the mall downtown, as I was driving to work. Looking for more cans, I’m sure.