I recently
mail-ordered a forty-five dollar beginner’s acoustic guitar from a discount
music store online—one of those surplus places—I imagine there are thousands of
Mexican and foreign-made guitars hanging in, well, hangars, for miles on end,
the whole place smelling of pine, cedar, and rosewood, as they gather dust,
become birdnests or squirrel hovels, and hang there in wait like a mobile
attack vehicle from Star Wars with its droid battalions waiting to be deployed like
a sonic army of bad cover songs and the myriad complaints of the new guitar
player trying to learn major chords without the buzzing sound of poor form
before the technique and callouses are developed.
The guitar was
brought right to my door by UPS, and it was warm from riding from Colorado in
its triangular box inside of its rectangular box. I tore it open, tuned it up
and bent the strings—the humidity of the travel in a tractor trailers and vans,
and the Southern heat, had played hell on the lite gauge strings that come with
the guitar—and after several tuning attempts and basic strumming, she decided
to hold her voice and resonate as I proceeded to play for the next two hours
solid. The strings were thinner than I prefer, so I got pretty cut up—I have
not played regularly in a while.
So, I had a guitar
a few years ago named Inez. She has come to a mysterious fate, which I will not
get into, but, that being said, I decorated her lovingly with stickers,
drawings, knife-cut engravings, a Joy Division wave motion sticker on the
inside of her body which you could see through the sound hole, and she was a
dreadnaught, so when I played her I was vibrated throughout my body like YoYo
Ma furiously shredding at the Australian Symphony Hall on the last day of his
life. I was immediately, being inspired by the lost and misplaced Inez,
compelled to decorate the body of my new guitar in any ragtag way possible.
So, I went about
the Guthrie mode in my own way of “This Machine Destroys Fascism”—at this point
in my life, I am just trying to destroy personal depression. It just so happens
that, a few hours after receiving my guitar, I was going to Fellini’s pizza in
Atlanta and to Little Five Points. I thought about going by Junkman’s Daughter
to get some stickers for the guitar, but they were closed by the time we made
it over there. I decided to go into Criminal Records, which is just plain
awesome anyway, but they didn’t sell stickers. I asked the guy at the counter
if they had any free stuff then—nicest guys there in the world, and I left with
American Football, The Cars, Criminal Record promotional stickers, etc. for my
cheap guitar’s makeover into a Machine Which Destroys Personal Depression.
I got home and
placed the stickers on the guitar rather unclimactically. I wanted to cover the
whole thing up like an old suitcase stamped from every country on the planet in
its travels. I started looking around my bedroom for options—I asked my
roommate if she had any glue or Superglue, and yes, she did, so I was in
business. It only seemed logical that I would grab a pair of scissors and start
chopping images out of my giant one hundred and fifty dollar Joseph Cornell
coffee table collector’s art tome.
If you are at all familiar with Cornell, you know that
he would approve of me cutting up his own book of cut-up and found art in order
to create something “artistic” or to transform the mundane—of course, a guitar
is never “mundane”, but, at the price of a cheap guitar, at less than fifty
bucks, you may as well personalize it and make it into a conversation piece or
an outward expression of the graffiti of your mind. So, I got out the scissors
and began tearing into Cornell’s tome, or collected by others tome, NAVIGATING
THE IMAGINATION.
He was described as an “assemblage” artist—in terms of
the boxes he made with found objects--which I think is a misnomer to a degree—he
was definitely influenced by Surrealism and Dada, but I think that he saw his “assemblages”
as manifestations of his own internalized world and not external shells of
contemporary culture or modernism as some sort of critique or political
statement. His work appealed to a childlike sensibility of the game or the
diorama, and whereas Dadaists were attacking a war machine, per se, I always
felt that Cornell was attacking the potential loss of innocence in us all.
Chopping up a very expensive art book to paste things
on your guitar might seem like a bad idea to many of you—however, it seems like
he is here with me, Mr. Cornell, and I think that, once I am done with the
ritual of this guitar’s decoration, with its indie rock and Cornell
encrustation, that I will have a machine which kills some personal depression.
I haven’t done anything with scissors and Superglue for a long time.
Interesting sidenote here—as I played with pasting things on the guitar,
Superglue crusted over my new callouses, and so I could play even more.
Thank you, Joseph Cornell, for crusting my fingers with the epoxy maybe you even used upon your instrument[s]. Sorry to be so Romantic, however...
I have only gotten so far, but here is my Cornell guitar currently--
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