Tuba Skinny – “Shake It and Break It” – Royal St – 4/10/15… For the real skinny on tuba skinny visit their newsletter which can be found here:
http://www.tubaskinny.tk/

I bought a mail order tuba toward the end of 2024. That’s me holding it in the picture above. When I uncrated it, I hadn’t touched a tuba in fifty years. Tubas come in different pitches and sizes. Mine is one of the larger ones, a silver plated, four valve, Marzan CC, built by Boehm & Meinl in 1972. It came with two bells, an upright as shown in the picture, and a recording studio forward facing bell that I haven’t used yet. It’s not huge but it has a big bore (and it might be said it’s played by a big bore, but enough self effacement…) The tuba weighs 23 pounds and is 36 inches tall. The original owner played it for many years in the Syracuse symphony. I’ve had it for 21 months and feel like I’ve progressed from beginner to intermediate. I try to play every day. I take lessons from a young man who is a solid professional caliber musician. He says he’s noticed some improvement.

Here’s a pro playing an instrument not unlike mine…

We had a pleasant afternoon at the Vista Rod Run today. California car culture turns on the fact that we don’t use road salt here, so we don’t lose our vehicles to rust. A little Bondo, a little metal flake paint, and some chrome electroplating and I could probably make that RAV4 out in the driveway look pretty cool. Well, maybe not.

An observation: All the kids from Tom Wolfe’s “Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamlined Baby,” the girls with the bouffant hair-dos and the skinny guys in jeans with a pack of Camels rolled in the sleeve of their t-shirt have aged enormously. Enormously is actually right on point. The California car culture is boomer dominated, and too many of us are carrying a little too much weight.

Fifties Chevys seem to continue to dominate the custom restoration market. I noticed this in Escondido a year or so ago. One of the fanciest cars we saw today was a restored 1936 Auburn boat tailed speedster. It’s the one parked next to the Cobra in the short slide-show above. The show today was visually rich… stunning enamel paint jobs, fancy upholstery, chromed and sculpted metal. It was also rich in cultural referents… surfing vehicles, an honest to goodness little deuce coupe with a powerful engine under the hood. And countless one-of-a-kind custom cars, from an old Willys to a right hand drive MG that had seen service in the post WW2 Lancashire constabulary. Lots of sixties era VWs, some more Nazified than others… low-rider culture was well represented… I hope we visit again next year.

George Carlin said that Pablo Casals, when asked why at the age of 93 he still practiced for three hours a day, said, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.” I love that line, whether it’s true or not. And so, after writing for sixty years, I’m hoping to see some improvement myself.

Blogging is perhaps not the best way to practice writing because there’s always some technical detail to distract you. But I have a feeling that we’re approaching a period when the friends and followings we share in the social media can come together to provide readers for well written blog posts. I’ll never know, I suppose, since I’m unlikely to produce one. Still. Here’s the old Listics blog with a few new bells and whistles. This is a test post. Don’t read it.

Where Are We Now?

It was a great day filled with lots of “what-does-it-take” chores. A “what-does-it-take” chore is just what it sounds like, something that needs doing, that can be done in a short time and with little effort, something that’s so obvious and likely so easy that it gets pushed to the bottom of the priority list again and again. Trimming the clematis is a what-does-it-take chore. And what would it take to trim back that mock orange in the south lawn hedge? And cleaning up the peonies in what we laughingly call the “formal garden”… what would it take? It was a day for picking a few dozen daffodils to display around the house, a day for using up that roasted chicken in a pot of home made chicken noodle soup. What would it take to finish resetting the lannonstone wall at the back of the center lawn flower bed? It took more than I had in me, as it happened. There are still 12 humongous stones that need to be dug out and re-set. What would we do without root pressure from weed trees and the annual upset of frost heave? It would all be too easy.

What would it take to throw tennis balls for the dogs? Call me an enabler. They’ve got a tennis ball habit and I feed it. Didn’t expect the sunshine today. It was a pleasant surprise! What, I asked myself, would it take to get outdoors and use that sunlight?

…reincarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America’s naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio —Howl

Looking for some online clues about Newt’s intention to announce for the Presidency in March–spurred on by secret knowledge of gubernatorial catalyzed strikes, work stoppage, labor betrayal–angry, yet bemused by Republican attitudes about the law and how it need not apply to them, I stumbled into wood s lot and looked no Further than this link which today tops the column of Mark’s ever changing content: The Allen Ginsberg Project.

The Ginsberg blog–its sidebar replete with streaming audio, streaming video, links to critical essays, interviews, articles, photographs, research, memorials, tributes and a robust collection of the poetic works of Ginsberg and his friends–featured this week a post about the Gibney film at Sundance…

Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colors and moves everything.
— Hsing Yun

From 2024 until her death in the spring of 2024, Michelle Goodrich used her blog to teach some of us about design. Recently a visitor came here to Listics from the web archive, where Mandarin Meg’s blog lives on.

Michelle enjoyed serendipity. She was amused by coincidence. She liked it when we shared things we found bubbling up around the web, things that seemed somehow synchronous, or things that tickled our sense of deja vu. Here are a few of those things that happen to be stuck in my browser right now, today.

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Meg Pokrass, a new Facebook friend and a flash fiction writer made this…

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Elsewhere, Ashleigh Burrows, a Tucson “elder blogger,” was seriously wounded in the Arizona massacre this weekend. Here is her daughter’s update.
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I’ve been a fan of Paul Ford since the nineties. Paul’s a techie and a fine writer and editor. He’s metro-textual. His most recent piece, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted,” tickles me eight ways from Sunday. It’s worth reading just to get context for his neologism, “the Gutenbourgeois.” Read it here. Learn and laugh!

Somehow related to Paul Ford’s understanding of the web and the persistence of Mandarin Meg’s work, is this New York Times article about a so-called “digital library race.” Oddly, the information is presented in the Business section. Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the bizarre American ritualistic competitive model. Though the Times laments a “digital library divide,” most of us can simply be grateful for the work that’s being done, take advantage of the collections at Google books or theeuropeanlibrary.org, browse the Library of Congress 16 million item “American Memory” collection, and bear in mind that while old business models for electronic publishing (see JSTOR) hold us back from full participation in this amazing global sharing of the fruits of our cultures, ever more work is available via open access.

Walt Whitman's Cardboard Butterfly from the Library of Congress

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Meanwhile, back in the kitchen… it remains my good intention to mix up my very first batch of English muffins or crumpets today. There’s a first time for everything, but sometimes inertia is hard to overcome and I find myself reading the cookbook instead of cooking. For example, here are some of interesting food bloggers that I’ve been following (instead of baking): Mango and Tomato, One Bite at a Time, Florida Girl in DC.
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And really, there is a lot of other cool stuff on the Interwebz… take for example:

• How Paul Krugman found Politics (The New Yorker)
• The quantified self (a narcissist’s dream come true!)
• ZOMG Science (I’ll never stop linking unless they stop thinking!)
• Quashie (The approachable negro is in!)
• Everything is falling apart (Confirming your worst nightmares)
• Documents that reference Blackwater from Wikileaks current release (no wonder everyone’s in a tizzie)
• …and more, oh so much more…

But for now, play her off keyboard cat!