Drive Blind

Building a Jazzuar, Part 1

Some time shortly after I got married, about two years ago, I started to think about getting a new guitar. Not that there was anything wrong with any of the ones that I have, especially my dream guitar, but I thought that it was about time to start to look around again. I think that I was listening to a lot of My Bloody Valentine around that time, so my thoughts started to drift towards guitars with a tremolo bridge, something none of my others have. Looking at the cover of Loveless, it's no wonder that I became fixated on what I learned were called offset-waist models, such as the Jaguar and Jazzmaster. I like my Telecaster, I've never been a big fan of Stratocasters, but I hadn't ever really paid attention to those other models Fender makes. This might be a bit odd, since some of my favorite musicians - MBV, Elvis Costello, Nirvana, Sonic Youth - play these instruments.

Around the same time, and not entirely unrelated, I was looking for new projects to keep myself busy in my recently set-up woodshop in the basement. I ended up talking a lot with the guy who sat beside me at work since I knew that he had studied under a luthier (guitar-maker) and had made some instruments of his own. He pointed me to a lot of good resources if I was really thinking of making my own guitar. His recommendation was that I start with something cheap and easy, like the $200 Strat kits that come with everything you need. However, I knew that if I was going to spend my time building a guitar for myself, I'd at least want to build something that I'd really want to play. Unfortunately, none of the kits I found really fit that bill.

All my reading and surfing kept bringing be back to this one store that really seemed to have everything that I could want if I were to build my own guitar. Warmoth sells just about all of the materials you need to build a guitar or bass for yourself. Whether it's the body, neck, raw wood, pickups, or hardware, it's all there, just begging to be put together. I focused on their showcase section, which includes necks and bodies that have already been shaped, routed, sanded, and sometimes finished. I was starting to think that I'd really like to build myself a Jazzmaster-style guitar. I think that I just really liked the look of the big pickups and I was a little wary of the short-scale necks on the Jaguar. Soon, though, I focused on an unfinished Jaguar body that was on sale for only $129. It was a three-piece body and I was assured by my co-worked that that doesn't really matter if I'm just going to paint over it with an opaque color, anyhow. I found a Jaguar at Guitar Center and decided that I was perfectly comfortable with the short-scale neck, so I started to compile my first order.

Rather than order a pre-made neck from the Warmoth showcase, which wouldn't have saved me too much, I focused on ordering a custom neck, for which I was able to specify everything down to the fret height. I chose a birds-eye maple neck with a Pau Ferro (really nice grain pattern, although it looks very close to a standard rosewood) fingerboard and a CBS-era Fender style headstock. I also spec'ed out all of the knobs, control plates, electronics, and a blank pickguard plate to cut myself (much more on that later). I stuck with my desire for the Jazzmaster pickups, so I went to eBay and got a couple of those, along with the standard white pickup covers that would be replaced later with black ones. I decided that I was going to paint the whole thing Olympic White with a red pearloid pickguard. So, I put in my order and waited about a month and a half to get everything; most of the wait was for the custom neck. At this point, I thought that I'd get some paint, put everything together, and bang, I'd quickly have myself a brand-new guitar.

Well, of course, things never quite work out that way. Over the next couple of posts, I'll talk about what went right, what went wrong, what I learned, and what resources I used to put this beast together. From first thoughts to finished product took me about a year and a half. There were a lot of breaks in there. Some were because I was just too busy with other things, and some were that I was frustrated with my lack of progress or paralyzed and/or confused about the next step. I learned a lot with this project and hopefully some of what I write here will help someone else if they want to try to do the same thing.

Listening with Fresh Ears

I mentioned a few days before Declan was born that I had been working on putting together a playlist for the little guy's enjoyment. The songs on this playlist pulled from the little bit of baby and kids music we have, but also included a lot of fun songs, baby-related songs, and songs that he just needs to hear before he gets too old. As with any playlist or mixtape, putting it together was a lot of fun. What's really great about this one is that it's always growing as I find more songs to add, and eventually when he starts to respond to songs that he's decided that he likes. Right now, the only limit is the size of the 1st gen iPod nano on which his music is stored and played.

Publishing the whole playlist here would be a bit too much, so I just picked out some songs that, for the most part, came from the "baby-related songs" category. Some of these are obviously just selected by typing "baby" into the iTunes search box, but I like to think that some others are more inspired and thoughtful choices. I'm proud of how this has turned out so far and of course welcome any suggestions for additions to his musical education.

Your Mother Should Know - The Beatles
Cry Baby Cry - The Beatles
Good Night - The Beatles
I Don't Want to Grow Up - Bill Frisell & Petra Haden
Father and Son - Cat Stevens
Baby Did A Bad, Bad Thing - Chris Issac
My Father's Eyes - Eric Clapton
Ode To My Family - The Cranberries
Fortunate Son - Creedence Clearwater Revival
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue - Bob Dylan
Baby Genius - Eels
Lullaby - James
Beautiful Boy - John Lennon
Stop Crying Your Heart Out - Oasis
Me In Honey - R.E.M.
Baby You're My Light - Richard Hawley
Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In the Shadow - The Rolling Stones
Be My Baby - The Ronettes
Stop Your Crying - Spiritualized
Stay Up Late - Talking Heads
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters, & Wives - Voxtrot
Eat For Two - 10,000 Maniacs

And Then A Sheer Drop

"15 Step" from last night's Grammy awards show. Yeah, I'm biased, but this was the most original performance of any of the songs on the show last night.

The Grammys

I'm going to do something resembling liveblogging the Grammys tonight. Since liveblogging is so passe in this world of Twitter, I guess I'm just going to post a lot of things on Twitter. I hope that this is really worth watching.

A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Robyn

Yesterday I learned that one of my favorite artists is going to be back in Boston for the second time in less than six months. Robyn Hitchcock is going to playing at the Paradise on April 13th and this time he's bringing the Venus 3 along with him. For the uninitiated, the Venus 3 is his backing band consisting of Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, and Bill Rieflin (three fifths of R.E.M.'s current touring contingent). Naturally, with Peter in town, I'll be sure to be there. I last saw RH & V3 was a few years ago at TT's. To see anyone from my Favorite Band Ever in town is always a treat, as well as seeing Robyn back in the US again. He just played a show featuring his album I Often Dream of Trains at Somerville Theater at the end of 2008 and was in Northampton doing a solo show earlier in the year. I highly advise anyone who hasn't had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Hitchcock live to join me at the Paradise. I've never seen any other performer who's so thoroughly entertaining from beginning to end as Robyn. Sure, he's one of the more (the most?) quirky guys to string together some words, but you can't help but be equally amused, confused, and entertained.

After hearing the news of Robyn in Boston more Hitchcock-related news seemed to pop up all around me today. First, I saw a bit about the band's new album on Pitchfork and then he showed up on the list of musicians who are on Twitter. The Twitter posts attributed to him haven't been updated in a couple of months, but they do seem to be sufficiently-quirky enough to be genuine Hitchcock.

If you saw Rachel Getting Married in the theater then you surely caught Robyn's two songs featured in the movie. You can check these out here. After starring in the Jonathan Demme-directed concert film Storefront Hitchcock, Robyn has shown up in a few of his films including Rachel... and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate.

Finally, I came across another news story detailing Robyn's plans to write a musical based on Magnum Force, the sequel to Dirty Harry. On the first RH & V3 there's a song called "A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Briggs," based on this movie. Nothing is too strange for this guy.

Welcome

I've been a bit quiet here for a while and this picture above should tell you why. Just before Christmas we welcomed a healthy little baby Declan into the world. The six weeks since then have been really great. Both my wife and I have had plenty of time off of work to get to know him and get acclimated to having a little person living with us.

Of course, you can find lots of pictures of the little guy on my Flickr page. I hope that it won't be this long before I post again. I've just set up this site with the latest version of Movable Type and have a new desktop blogging tool, Blogo, that seems like it's going to make posting just a bit easier, which is exactly what I need.

I'll write more about our new family member soon, but now I think I have to go see why his swinging doesn't seem to be stopping the crying.

Make Room for Baby, part 2

This is getting real. Some time yesterday afternoon the butterflies finally hit and it finally sunk in that as of this weekend, I'm going to be a dad. At this point, I feel ready for it, but I know that I really don't have any idea what it's really going to be like. Fortunately, that only scares the crap out of me just a little bit; the excitement part is still winning out. After having the plumber and electrician here this week, I feel pretty good about my list of things to get done. There's not much left on it, and one of the items is writing this right here. So, as I promised, here's a description of where the rest of the nursery came from.

Choosing the baby's room was easy in our place. We had known since we first walked through the open house that the small room in the back of the house was perfect for baby. At the inspection we realized that the room was unheated, a problem we've worked around for the past few years, but that's what we had the electrician take care of here yesterday. We had always described the room as yellow, but with only one window that was usually obscured by the door, it was usually pretty dark. So, we knew that the first thing we wanted to do with this room was paint it real yellow and not the darker mustard color that it was. Fortunately, we liked the first yellow that we selected and it even looked good with one wall left with the old color as an accent. It made the room feel much brighter, but there was still the issue of the door over the window.

Another project we'd talked about for years was replacing the door to that room with a glass-paned door. That project is done now, but the details of how that came about is probably a few blog posts in its own. It was one of those projects where nothing quite went right, most of which was a result of my first blunder - buying a 32" door to fit a 30" frame. Oops. With help from a few friends (thanks!) and much more time that I had planned, it finally was hung and really looks great in the room.

I think that our wall decorations are what I like most about the room. We decided early on that we'd like to have an animals theme in the room. It's a simple idea, easy to execute, and gave us a lot of fun choices. Vinyl decals seem to be The Hot Thing now and I became really interested in a few designs that I saw. When it came time to make a decision, I had a lot of bookmarks in my browser, but not a real idea of what I wanted our decision to be. When we were walking through a home goods store in a fun part of Montreal (I guess that could describe most of the city) we saw a decal that I think Maura and I both immediately agreed would be what we want for our baby's room. Birds on a Wire by ADZif was unfortunately out of stock at the store, but I snapped a picture of it with my iPhone and looked it up as soon as we got home. Fortunately, I was able to find a store that sold it for a very good price in the US and promptly ordered it. A lot of people have commented that the design looks like notes on a music scale, which is just what we thought when we first saw it.

One of the first things I found for our animals theme were these wooden wall hangings from Spot On Square. We like their whimsical design and the opportunity to choose a few that we want and mix things up. We didn't initially agree on which four animals we wanted to buy, but we are both very happy with how our choices look on the wall. The print on the wall beside the animals is from R.E.M.'s show at the Fleet Center in October, 2004. Of course, I was there. I already had this hanging in another room with some other R.E.M. tour posters, but I thought that the colors in this one and the fun design would make it perfect for our son's first R.E.M. poster.

Crib bedding seems to be made out to be the biggest decision a new parent will make before their kid arrives. Of course, we really liked some of the designs from Dwell Studio, but we certainly weren't going to pay $350 for a sheet set for a kid to barf on. We settled on the Circles sheet set by Dwell Studio for Target - more good design, much less money. For a time we had also considered Skip Hop's Mod Dots line, but the price for that was still a bit more than we wanted to pay. We did, however, end up with a pillow and lamp with that pattern. We weren't sure that we wanted the lamp until we picked it up to have a look at it and realized that it was a touch lamp. I loved lamps like that when I was a kid so I had to get one for my own son.

Finally, as I mentioned yesterday, I had to have some music in the room for the boy to listen to, and for me to enjoy when I spend time in there with him. We happened to have an unused iPod nano and my old Logitech 2.1 computer speakers available, so all I had to do was get an Apple Universal Dock and connect everything to that and there we go - instant audio system, complete with little remote control. I made a "Baby" playlist and used that to fill the iPod with any childrens' music we have, as well as lots of other good music that he needs to hear. Maybe at a later time I can detail more of what we're playing for him.

You can check out the rest of the pictures of the nursery on my Flickr page.

Make Room for Baby, part 1

After about nine months, we're almost there. Our first baby will be here in a few days, so of course we've been frantically preparing for his arrival. There are a lot of things to get ready for a little person to come live with you, but as with many new parents, we've focused a lot on his room. We realized early on that this would be the first room in which we'd have the chance to completely design it from the ground (or rug) up how we want it.

We made a point to empty absolutely everything that wasn't for the baby out of the room, as we really wanted to make this his and not clutter with our stuff. We do enough of that in our other rooms. In the end, only the bookshelf remains in the room now from its previous use as Maura's study. We moved her desk, books, and files into the room I was using as my study and music room. It's a bit more crowded in there now, but we've done a pretty good job of getting rid of extra furniture and items that we really can live without. After a few months, it's completely comfortable and I think having a room just for my little son is absolutely worth it.

One of the first decisions we made was that we didn't want to spend ridiculous amounts of money on baby furniture that wouldn't be useful beyond his toddler years. We were very fortunate that we were able to start off with a crib from Maura's sister. Our niece, who is almost three years old now, just moved to a small bed so the timing for them getting rid of their crib was perfect. Its white paint fit perfectly with what we were thinking for the room, so we it turned out to be a good start to our baby furniture collection.

I spent a few weeks scouring baby furniture websites trying to find just the perfect dresser and/or changing table. We decided that we wanted to get a dresser with a changing top that could be easily used as just a dresser after he's done with the diapers. While some of the Italian pieces were quite enticing, we just didn't want to spend >$1k on a baby piece. I had spent a bit of time looking at the Ikea catalog, as well, but hadn't found anything that I really liked in their room layouts and pictures. Still, that didn't keep me from wanting to go to the store in Stoughton to check out what they might have. Fortunately, in the kids' section we saw a setup that we immediately realized would work perfectly for us. They had on display two small Aneboda chests side-by-side with a taller wardrobe beside it. At just about 30" wide, the two low dressers were the perfect size for a changing pad and at less than $200 for all three pieces we knew that we'd found what we wanted. At first we thought that the dressers might be too low and that I should build a changing top on which we could raise the pad. After a while (or after my other projects took all of my time), we realized that the height was probably good as it is and that we didn't need anything else to add to the furniture.

The last piece of furniture that we wanted, or had room for, was a rocking chair. We've heard from everywhere how a rocking chair is indispensable for new parents. To put the baby to sleep, just keep rocking and rocking and rocking... As I mentioned, I was very inspired to make this just the room that we wanted it to be and that meant that I couldn't settle for a big, ugly, oversized fiberboard glider that's in every baby store. The only problem was that I wasn't finding anything else that I liked enough that would be as comfortable as the big ugly glider, because damn they are comfy. After a couple weeks of searching I found this post on daddytypes.com and immediately fell in love with the Eames rocker. I knew I had to have one. But again I wasn't going to pay $550 at DWR for a new one, so it was off to eBay. I discovered there that they made them with fabric cushioned covers and zeroed in on one that I HAD to have. I was sure that this was the one, but I was going to have to follow the last few minutes of bidding on it on my phone in a locker room before my volleyball game. I watched the price rise in the final few minutes, but I thought that it would still be mine, but with about 15 seconds left I was outbid and it was finally pushed out of my price range.

I spent the next two weeks bidding on any cushioned Eames rockers with no luck. In the end, it couldn't have worked out better that I lost those auctions as I found a blue polypropylene (no cushion) one on Craigslist. Maura and I went to have a look at it and were very pleasantly surprised at what we found. We brought along a pillow that matched our color scheme in the room and as we walked in the front door of the sellers' house in the South End, they said, "The chair will match that; we have the same pattern in our kid's room." We spent about 20 minutes chatting with them before taking the chair home and on the way out Maura said, "I think we just met our nursery design doppelgangers!" Without having sat in one before trying it at their place, we both fell in love with its looks and it's oh so comfortable to sit in. Since it's uncushioned, I thought that we could use a pillow or blanket on the back, but I think that these chairs are best without anything else there. We're happy that now we have a chair that will hopefully serve us well for rocking, nursing, and sitting up in the boy's room, as well as be something that we'll be happy to have for years afterwards.

We have been looking for a good rug to go in the room but I had thought that we probably wouldn't find one before the baby is born. Earlier this week we had started to focus on some Flor designs in red and were just about ready to order some samples that our nursery doppelgangers had recommended. However, yesterday in Crate and Barrel I found a great deal on a soft red ribbed wool rug, so we're going to try that in the room. Unfortunately, we won't be able to get it for a few days, so we'll have to add that to the room after the baby has settled in.

We're both incredibly happy with how the room has turned out. I'm very happy just to sit in there and enjoy the newness and be so happy that this is something we designed ourselves. I plan to follow up, hopefully tomorrow, with another post about the rest of our design choices in the room - paint, bedding, wall decorations, and of course, the subwoofer.

Callin' Out, In On Transit

The 25th Anniversary version of Murmur, remastered and with a kickin' live disc, is out today.

Where Am I?

Obviously, there hasn't been much going on here at Driveblind lately, though that doesn't mean that I've completely disappeared from the internet. Instead, I've found that I've just been directing more of my online energy in different places. So, if you're interested in finding out what else I've been doing, you can find me in some of the following places. I do have some ideas to keep this website going, so I hope to keep posting things here soon. Without getting into too much of the technical detail, I think I have to move this site from it's current host to someplace where there's a bit more automation for adding things like music, photos, and other widgets. I just don't have the time or knowhow to customize the whole site to my liking. With baby Lewis coming along soon, I know that my time situation won't get any easier.

So, come check me out around the web, become my friend, contact, or follower, and let me know what else you'd like to see from me.

Flickr - Here's where you can find many of my best, or just favorite, photos.

Facebook - Everyone else is doing it, so I am too.

Twitter - This is my newest web presence. It's much easier and makes more sense for my little thoughts to go on Twitter rather than on Driveblind.

Youtube - I only have a couple of R.E.M. concert videos up there now, but I think there will be more now that I have a real video camera and a kid on the way.

Last.fm - What music am I listening to? I really like this service, both for its records of my listening habits and its radio stations of related music. I've soured on this a bit lately since it's Mac client seems to crash the iTunes app every day or two.

This is the worstest

I really don't need to see Apple's marketing embracing one of my least-favorite non-words.

I Could Turn You Inside-Out

In the mid-1980's, there was no cooler place for a band to call home than Athens, GA. Of course, everybody knows that R.E.M. was leading the pack here, but there were a lot of other marginally-successful or locally-famous bands who were all really great in their own right. The Classic City's scene was documented in a film called Athens, GA. Inside/Out and this film is available for this week at Pitchfork.tv. R.E.M. performs two songs, "Swan Swan H" and "Dream (All I Have To Do)", in a chapel that they revisited last year for recording Accelerate. Back then, they were just four Southern guys with bad haircuts and there was no singer in the music biz who was more shy. I haven't seen this film in a few years (I bought the DVD when I was in Athens), but I remember being very impressed by a pair of musicians called the Flat Duo Jets. For anyone with any interest in where "alternative" music came from or where college rock started, this is essential viewing.

Wall-E

Pixar pulled off another great movie with this one. About ten minutes into it, I had to remind myself that what I was seeing was completely animated and not filmed. This is definitely one to see in the theater, although the the second half really might make you wonder about the large tub of popcorn and ocean-sized drink you're enjoying out of easily-disposable containers.

Dear Somerville

Who steals plants from in front of someone's house? I don't mean plants in a pot - these were hens & chicks freshly planted in the ground. Someone dug up two of the plants and took them. I wish I could be more eloquent, but you sir or madam, are an asshole.

Missing Something

"There's something I'm confused about. You got the second iPhone, but why is it called the iPhone 3G. What happened to the second G?"
-my wife this morning. She said that she's been thinking about that all week. I guess it's nice not to bother yourself with the intricacies of cell network naming conventions.