The Magic Spoon

So!  Those of you who follow my twitter may remember me tweeting about getting a new instrument…or you may not. I told people they would have to guess what new instrument I got, and @citydifferent asked if he could have an mp3 of me playing it if he guessed correctly (was it happened, he did), which I thought was pretty fantastic. He’s going to have to wait a while, though.

Not only have I no idea how to play the blasted thing, but I’ve never played a chorded instrument before at all…unless you count things I played before I was ten. I don’t count that, though, because though that would make the number of instruments I play round up to a tidy six (even then, you’d have to count the miniharp as an autoharp), it would also make me feel a bit foolish if anyone ever, you know…asked me to play them.  I really can’t.

So! How to wrap my head around the idea of chords, after years of playing things where notes were tidy and one-at-a-time, and sometimes (piano, pennywhistle, sweet potato ocharina) even arranged helpfully in order?

OBVIOUSLY, the answer is to lay the instrument itself aside and head to the sewing room!  YEAH!

The thing, being the cheapie that it was, came with a cheapie bag. This Will Not Do! At least, not when I can take it apart and make it look MUCH cooler. This will likely be a bit of a work-in-progress, as not only have I not picked out the fabric I want to use on the outside, I don’t even really know what I want to make it out of.  I do have a few things I want to use, though. I want to make use of the plastic ironing idea laid out in this post.  Hopefully this will protect against rain and unexpected bloodbaths. If I should need a total seal I’ll just line the inside seams with hotglue, I guess. I’d like to have knitted fabric in there somewhere, because…umm, I like knitting?

I also have this cool patchwork fabric that I made for a set of curtains ages ago.  They’re basically patch-worked out of several pairs of jeans, and sewn with silvery thread that glitters beautifully, especially against the darker fabrics. They look really neat, I think, but they weren’t working as curtains: they weren’t on my windoes so they aren’t doing their job! The obvious answer is to cut them up and use them for an instrument case.  Or I could just use my old black trousers from school, the ones I got to do tech for the school theatre.  Ah, those were the days! Where I keep coming blank, really, is quilted fabric to add a bit of softness. I have canvas and plastic for strength, stiffness and waterproofiness, but what about a bit o’ padding?  STAY TUNED. Future rambling will most likely occur.

She wasn’t anyone I knew.

I met her once, in a bar on fifty-second street.  You know, one of those places where everyone orders gin & tonics, because at least you know that will taste bad in a way you’re used to, and all the other stuff behind the bar has labels you’ve never seen before, tequila complete with a worm five years dead.

We were dancing to the jukebox, Iggy Pop was playing.  He’s really hard to dance to, I don’t know if you know that. We gathered up all our pennies, poured them into our two pairs of cupped hands; we fed them into the aged jukebox one by one by one. She flipped through the options, even though there were only five and four of them were Travis Tritt or someone who looked and sounded just like him. The little mechanical arm extended, plucked up the album, fed it into the slot, and those vomitous guitars and arrhythmia drums started up: a musical tribute to late nights, too much drinking, sickness and decay.  The kind of explosive life that never comes easy, because you’d never ever want it to. We looked at one another, and I saw we both liked him for the same reason.  Iggy Pop wasn’t afraid to let brilliance be something ugly and disgusting.

We were both  tired of pretty things and pretty music, see.  I think that’s why I remember her: she rolled her eyes at Cyndi Lauper, she had nothing good to say about any of the pop starlets that put out videos on MTV, no matter how creative or original they were.  She wanted her music mainlined, she wanted it to make her afraid. She wanted to live and die running for her life. It could be something told me that, even then, but I doubt it would have changed anything.

In the end, we decided that Nightclubbing was too hard to dance to and oozed our sweaty bodies into a booth, the cracked naugahyde catching on her lace skirt and leaving long scratches on my bare thighs.  We ordered a pitcher of some disgusting mexican beer, and drank it fast so we wouldn’t have to taste it. The stuff still made bile rise in my throat. I slid a few safety pins across the table, for her skirt. She asked if I wanted something to eat.  I looked her straight in the eye and said “Maybe you.”

She wasn’t anyone I knew. We danced to Iggy Pop, this one time, and the only picture of her in my head is her smeared mascara as she let the early morning chill hustle her onto the train. I still vomited when I heard the news; I didn’t cry.  I like to think she would have approved.

Lady Gaga, since I realised she existed (on New Years Eve) has been a conundrum for me. She seems – now maybe I’ve going out on a limb here, maybe I’m looking for Interesting because I desperately want to see it – actually interesting. Actually creative. Disgust with modern popjunk notwithstanding, her outfits are cool and it’s nice to see fetish fashion in the limelight, even given my hatred for fetish footwear. You know what? I’m too tired to reject. Her outfits are pretty, and I like them. Her songs are catchy as hell, and I have a funny idea that she could make decent music if she wanted to. So why doesn’t she?  *shrug* Maybe she just doesn’t want to, for the same reasons I could make more ‘real art’ and fewer drawings of pinup girls with elaborate hairdos.