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Mosaic tile: Disregard
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estebanana
Posts: 9413
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: Mosaic tile: A modest Remembranc... (in reply to estebanana)
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All those ribbons of veneer were drawn through this little gem. The purfling line sizer. It's a plane iron held vertically against a fence, which is a block of hard oak. the blade slides and narrows the gap between the cutting edge and the fence; it can be adjusted to take a shaving well under .020" The veneer I use for rosettes is usually between .020 and .015" Which is like two business cards thick or less.
Eugene taught me to take this tool, I've had it for that many years. He also gave me a fret hammer upon which he copiously French polished the plain handle until it looked like glass. I grabbed the hammer some years ago with some red paint on my hand and got the handle all messy. Tomorrow I'll see where the stupid hammer is and see if I ever cleaned it up. I felt kind of bad I got the handle dirty, but then again French polishing hammer handles is fairly obsessive compulsive. I probably did him some kind of karmic favor by undoing the compulsion.
He was a very funny guy, not funny as in good at telling jokes, but funny at his completeness of learning or doing a task. Once he cornered me in the shop and went on a tangent about the Federalist Papers, an obscure US political governmental document most people have never read. Gene was fairly conservative, he took the rant into the realm of guitar making, he did that more than once. Even before the US was so obviously and politically polarized between right and left he divided guitar makers into a liberal and conservative wing. The steel string guitar makers who used burl wood rosettes and did cutaways and tarted up the binding and purfling with blingy garish colors he called Liberals, dirty liberal guitar makers. A rant he intoned from time to time was that the sightless liberal American steel string builders were corrupting the understanding of the Spanish guitar and committed the heresy of trying to build Spanish classical guitars with the incorporation of liberal steel string order of assembly, and the addition of tasteless bling elements. The Spanish guitar he maintained was regal and the Americanos were trying to gringofy the royal line.
Once he ended one of these rants with the regret that "In the revolution that is coming to this country I will feel bad, I will have to shoot my all liberal guitar maker friends in Berkeley." Then he laughed because he knew he was not going to really kill anyone, but the metaphor was not lost on me. Gene was an iconoclast in a world of liberal weenies. Politically I found Gene rather abhorrent, but not unreasonable in terms of talking. He was not dumb in that he knew he was an iconoclast and understood how much trouble iconoclasm can cause a creative person. Gene "suffered from integrity" as my sculpture teacher Richard Berger liked to say of those for whom artistic conscience was bother some and a painful thing to challenge. Some people have radical integrity at an art and some don't. Richard and Gene both had it in them as big as a blue whale. They are both gone too, which is no fun for me because the numbers of those with whom you can commiserate dwindles.
Which why you should appreciate Anders the dirty liberal who uses hippie soap and hippie olive wood branches to make rosettes. He would as much piss on a pre-made rosette as put it anywhere near a guitar.
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 19 2017 14:57:11
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estebanana
Posts: 9413
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Mosaic tile: A modest Remembranc... (in reply to Tom Blackshear)
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quote:
I don't favor this, as Eugene and I were of the same spiritual belief in Christ as Lord and Savior. Eugene from a pure and simple faith and me from a Messianic Jewish POV for the past 40 years, But we were taught to love all men regardless of their religion.
In other words I can love you regardless of your personal remarks, but I would find it more constructive if you would refrain from what I feel is out of bounds for this list, so let the moderator be the judge here.
What say you, Mr. Moderator?
I grew up in the retail business where we didn't talk about politics, religion, or the old man, unless it was a private matter, and then it was hard to say that it did much good to win friends and influence people.
So perhaps Stephen might want to adjust his idea of Eugene's conservatism, which was ultra conservative with much insight in today's liberal thought process, and change his tone, no pun intended.
And it is important to realize that this doesn't give us poetic license to hide our inner thoughts, other than to be fair with our information.
There is no lovelier craft/pursuit than building guitars, imho
Looky Tomasito,
If you read one of the four or five articles Gene wrote over the years for the GAL publication you will see that Gene himself uses the concept of karma in a metaphorical way in his own thinking and his own way of explaining how he does things. Using a metaphor that describes a karmic transaction does not in any negative way encroach upon the fact that Gene's father was a minister and that he came from a straight forward Christian background. Gene also used a lot of 1960's slang and idiomatic language from that era because he was deep in the NY and CA music scenes where that language was used. It was not unusual hear Gene himself use the word 'karma' in some context, or to say "Wow that is cool baby!" His vocabulary and the way he framed narrative owes something to 60's culture and language.
The other fact I might point out here is that I actually knew the guy in person and spent hundreds, if not thousands, of hours with him either in his shop, out having coffee, at concerts, flamenco happenings in bars, having lunch or dinner together, or just chatting on the phone. I knew him as a pretty good friend who was a human being with faults and greatnesses. I understand you knew him via the telephone with an occasional call through the years. When I write about him, it is my narrative not yours, you can't ask me to direct my narrative in such a way as it pleases only you. You really only knew him through the telephone, I knew him through the nuances and gestures he made when speaking plainly and openly in person. One can tell much more about a person by reading through their body language as they talk to you; and on top of that, I'm not done with my narrative.
If you ever read a good profile about someone, like say a John McPhee portrait of an interesting person published in the New Yorker Magazine, you will see that it takes many entries for an accurate illustration of a person to blossom out. I remember essays by McPhee on such individuals as Euell Gibbons or some guy who made birch bark canoes, or his excellent rendering of Thomas Hoving the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One thing that karmically linked all these folks is that McPhee did not pull punches when describing the personalities of these humans. He did not say "Oh, they are wonderful and great and beyond reproach...", he dug into each one and examined the dirty underbelly of each personality. And it takes time to create a complex picture of a human being. Often a literary gambit for showing a person you want to write about is to foreshadow a personality with some shots over the bow, really maybe take them down and trash them a little bit. The purpose of that could be to use that negative review as a basis or point of argument to show exactly how that person dealt with adversity, or as tool to set a counter argument later that the reader will find more interesting; the reader could be impacted more by a complex self contradiction by the writer which eventually sorts itself into a more complete picture of the subject. The writer has to find their own voice when constructing a complicated counter punching narrative, external voices usually just get in the way.
Here are three important things:
One - I will outlive you and I will tell your narrative from my point of view. That should scare you, when I have a pencil in my hand I am either a wicked son of a bitch or a saint. I have to be quite motivated to employ my full understanding of fairness when summing a person up. In your case frankly, I lack that particular style of motivation.
Two- Stop saying you care about others and then demand your own way or that they comply to your style of personal religious jurisprudence. If you want to preach a sermon, be my guest. Start your own topic for a discussion of how you see guitar making and religions doctrine intersecting. I might even read it.
Three-- Don't start a war with me, you will lose. In the words of Ronald Reagan - I refuse to take advantage of my opponents youth and inexperience. However I will drop my Reaganesque geniality if you continue F-ing with me and I'll wipe the floor with your literary carcass.
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https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE |
Date Mar. 19 2017 23:49:05
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