I usually can not stand going in to Gitar Centor because of the false idolatry on the walls and false promises of "if you buy this, then you're gonna MAKE it!" I just learned to use them for the lifetime warranty on instrument cables and peaking out on some amps.

BoBo and I would talk about playing in GC to leave all the pedals on a feedback loop and letting them self oscillate against the masturbatory guitar lickin but the following is so awesome. Apprentice Destroyer seems to have masterfully expressed those wishes to use GC against itself for marketing crap and illusions. Its the best expression of anti-establishment I've seen utilizing GC by appropriating their in-store instruments to make this work. Sounds pretty good.

This image I took with Photosynth, its a 3-d image I took with my eyePh$ne at Joshua Tree which is not too far from southern california. I heard the Joshua Tree from the iconic U2 record cover is dead. Maybe it died when Bono converted to poser-swami and was no longer the leader of our dancing march to take back the streets. I found this person's amazing efforts to find the tree and even came across a plaque acknowledging the death of U2 Joshua Tree. U2 Joshua Tree is dead

intro

Chon and the Kern. from Beaux Gest Mingus on Vimeo.
This was made a few years ago along the Kern River by film maker Beaux Mingus.

My most recent visit to Bakersfield has inspired a tendency to chronicle such things as my friend has. While helping my dad install new ceiling lights, we turned the power off in the entire house and the silence was stunning. No humming kitchenware, no blue glows from bypassed appliances, no lamp signals, no pulsing time signals and although the flashlights remained as a reminder of our dependence, I was reminded that at least I would have my acoustic guitar to continue being creative if such darkness was a reality. I wonder, how reliable are hard drives or disks (pfft disks. HAH)?

It's amazing we have a few codices to represent generations of peoples such as the Mayan but would their hard drives last? The only reliable disk that comes to mind is encapsulated in the Voyager crafts spearheaded by Carl Sagan. Having the power off reminded me that memory is a beautiful craft - we are the archivist and have been remixing over nighttime fires for generations. These practices may be less reliable because of the tendency for memory to to modulate the image but their authenticity remains. When the lights go out our stories will remain as long as we continue to breathe and recite.

I'm not a woodsman, the beige suburbs and gray city is my jungle and the I-5 is my river. While dependent on the wifi clouds and energy companies for now, this is my medium to etch on our eyes and ears. This is the best effort I can afford and its an experiment worth trying. I hope this practice will help me remember the melodies, hues or flickers worth reinterpreting over future fires and secretly it is my wish that the artifacts presented here are appreciated enough to survive as a hiccup in your memory stage. Hopefully we'll find a smile surface when something from here comes to mind in a quiet drive or the next outage.