Cool Hand, Coolhand

My buddy Lucas just had an article written about him over on RGJ.com. In my mind he is remarkable simply for being a remarkable guy all 'round, but RGJ naturally made much of his being a one-handed guitarist. When he and his wife visited us in Thailand last summer we talked about his ideas for a prosthetic for a guitar pick, and his complaints about the stupid faux-hand deals the prosthetic companies tried to hook him up with. Rather than working with his natural range of motion, and trying to build a prosthetic around the way he played guitar already, their idea was to give him some sort of big rubber hand that would hold a pick. Since he already played the guitar quite well with his nub, this really would have thrown him off, effectively moving the guitar pick four inches past his nub into extra-corporal space; a bit like asking a two-handed person to start playing the guitar with a chopstick.

Currently he and his band are releasing their first album. Yours truly did the album art.

Champion of Irony

Being inspired, apparently, by one of our previous posts, that reluctant folkster Chago the Regicide has made his 2002 EP Champion of Irony available on the Internet Archive. He and I were chatting the other day, and he remarked that though he was plenty embarrassed by the music, he was equally embarrassed that it had been so long since he'd recorded anything. How ironic. El pobre Chago.

Things Music Makes Us Want to Do

Yesterday Jami walked up to the room from the studio, where she'd been sewing. I was hunched (I'm always hunched as the picture below will attest) over the computer, grumbling about the fact the Google wasn't loading (an earthquake, 7 point sommething, off the coast of Taiwan had ripped through a couple bundles of fiber on the ocean floor, closing markets all over Asia, as well strangling any web traffic from the western US), and I couldn't check sources for an essay I'm writing, and trying to annotate. "Some of this music I'm listening to makes me just want to live simply. You know, without much stuff." She'd been listening to Cavedweller, in all its Lo-Fi gloriousness. So I gave up, listened to our favorite troglodyte, mentally thanked JBB and the Quist girls for introducing us to Dirk and his music, and grilled pork and pineapple on our balcony, which we ate with sticky rice. I then spent the next four hours working on drawings for a project proposal in AutoCAD. Are we living without a lot of stuff if all we actually own here are a computer, a couple of hard drives, a couple of cameras, some clothes and a handful books?

Baskets of fire wood for our tiny Thai BBQ.

Quasimodo cooks.

Piña.

Living without a lot of stuff. On the floor.