(second block, fourth letter of the prisoners' quadratic tap code...)

image
...am here to tap through the walls.


Fri Jun, 18 2004

Not Me

This, just out to Bob Hunt's Individual-Sovereignty group:

> From: Mike Schneider
> Sent: Friday, June 18, 2004 5:31 AM
> Subject: [I-S] Billy on a Banjo

> There's still time to, oh I dunno, buy a smallish
> apartment building in some Asian tiger with
> relatively loose social customs,...

I'm now having the same problem with you that I'm having with Kennedy, after his recent taking of my name in vain. It goes roughly like this:

"I don't know how many times I'm going to have to tell you."

I am an American, Michael. Try to understand. I've been around the world enough to know -- mind, body, heart and soul -- that there is no place else for me to be. There is no other political ideal worth fighting for than that which was born -- for the first time in human history -- right here on this continent, and which is, to me, inextricably connected to this land.

In his "November 1916" installment of the "Red Wheel" series of novels, Solzhenitsyn brought me to tears with his story of Colonel Vorotyntsev taking leave from the front, experiencing the compulsion to get down on his knees and kiss the stones of the square at the Kremlin, all because of how the history of his homeland moved his heart. I understood that completely.

I don't know how to impart that, but it is as real in me as I am, in myself.

I've told you before and I'll tell you again right now: I would happily die in an American prison before I ever ran away from this place.

This is it: this fight, in this place. When this light goes out, it could be a thousand years before it fires again, if ever.

I'm not going anywhere.

Jun 18, 04 | 1:30 pm

AxeBites

Various guitars I see floating by, mostly Gibson and mostly eBay.

Early Norlin ES-335 -- 1970, in Walnut ("ES-335TDW"). This is a period-piece look and feel, and arguably the sound as well but that's to cut things very finely. A "classic" 335 would be the original of 1958 in the Sunburst or Natural finish, or the Cherry Red of 1959; the Walnut of 1970 (second year of that finish offering) is not really a "classic" 335. In the history of the Gibson aesthetic, this is analogous to, say, vertically-striped polyester bell-bottoms or Bahama Blue shag carpeting. None of this is to say that they're not cool guitars, and this is a nice one. Excellent photographs.

Chrome hardware, featuring the trapeze tailpiece (like my L-47 and I've always liked it) and ABR-1 bridge with period-typical nylon saddles. Bound rosewood fretboard, with small block markers, and then the crown inlay at the machine head. These would be the T-top Humbuckers. Vintage Nazis would moan that the upper bouts are pointy (the body templates were wearing-out in the factory) and the fourteen-degree machine head with the volute signals a sometimes not-fun era of the line, but these things really do rock or moan or whatever you want a 335-type semi-hollow to do. ...which, of course, is because it really is a 335.


In the months since I've let AxeBites languish all to bleedin' hell, Gibson's Robot Guitar technology has sifted out to other models than the original Les Paul application. I don't know how it's going: I still haven't even seen one of these self-tuners. I don't see piles of them burning on the sides of the highway, nor reverent hangings in display cases over bars, so who knows? This 2008 Robot SG is ready to rock in the Metallic Red. Nickel hardware; it's the stoptail wired for data to send to the tuners, with dual Humbuckers. It's a bound rosewood fretboard, but I really like the single-bound machine head with the crown inlay. That's a real cool old-school look, right there, to set off that crazy-ass color. {nod}