The Sunday Ishmael - 5/4/2020

 THE DISEASE OF CHOICE
(no, nothing to do with coronavirus - mrs ishmael)

  From its construction in August 1961 until its demolition on November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall  separated West Germany from the East.

I met some  former East Germans a few years back and whilst they were pleased that they could now easily travel they weren't too impressed by consumerism;  there were now sixty beers available in the stores where once there were a handful, but there was also widespread, visible prostitution and a big upturn in the non-medical use of drugs business; they could buy all sorts of jeans but they were unsure about jobs - they were both university lecturers and worried about tenure and salary and pension in the new market-led world.  Too much choice, they said, too much choice.

Back when I was a retailer I had a customer, sort-of. He was a nice, pleasant man, Phil; single, thirties,  maybe a teacher, lived in one of those Victorian terraces in Harborne; modest and  polite, he had previously bought something from me, so I guess he was a proper  customer, I can't remember what he'd bought, probably a bookcase; he said  he was looking for a  desk, would I ring him if  one came in?

This was in the 'nineties, when everyone, all of a sudden, wanted a desk.  Not sure how that happened, maybe it was the invention of the Executive-style Barrat home, some flimsy, poorly-built breezeblock and plywood shithole with what they grandly called a study area, usually a space under  the oak-effect staircase and somebody who spent his days selling biscuits or windows at a junior management level would discover that he couldn't manage without a home desk to sit at and lecture his wife'n'kids;  this affectation - I think it was before the explosion in desktop PC ownership -  soon spread to - I dunno what you'd call them - people like me, I suppose, slightly educated, pretentious, delusions not of grandeur but of scholarship; the new middle class, people like Phil.  

Desks, anyway, or bureaux, library tables - anything that hinted at studiousness, put one in the shop window and  there'd be a screech of brakes and somebody'd come charging in, saying: That's perfect for my study area, or my library area; one customer, now a professor  of headbanging studies at the University begged me to sell her my proprietor's desk, a huge, old, sloping mahogany railway station clerk's desk, with space for three clerks, on which I wrote invoices; such things I could write, mr ishmael, she simpered, on a desk like that.  It's no good to you, doctor, I said, look, it slopes, your typewriter'd just fall off it.  Oh, yes, where would we be without tradesmen, like you, you're all so practical, she sighed dizzily, like the Edwardian Country Lady she imagined herself to be, even though she lived in fucking Moseley. 

 Desks, anyway, writing tables, that type of furniture didn't hang-around, gathering dust.And so I phoned Phil quite regularly and he'd come in on the Saturday morning.  Over a few months I showed him every type of desk, some simple, utilitarian, some grand and opulent, many in-between, handsome and  practical, pieces that would grace any space, even that one under the stairs. The thing with furniture is that you just need to put something on it -  a vase, a lamp, a book - and it comes to life and people can more easily imagine it in their own staged lifestyle, their own displayed set of informed consumer choices.

I showed him, once, a Victorian mahogany partners desk, it was too expensive;  I showed him a 1940s teachers' desk, the Abess, they were called, they were brilliant, solid oak, kneehole,  all sorts of drawer configurations, tricksy shelves which pulled out from above the top drawer, mine were all restored, as new, maybe better, everything worked, everything shouted Oak!  Teacherly! I sold dozens of them, scores. Phil didn't like the handles.  I showed him oak rolltops, like the sheriff always has, in the Westerns, single-curve D-tops and double-curve S-Tops, some dark,  some blonde and golden,  all with a forest of internal and external drawers, some with a leathered top; sometimes I even had a matching oak swivel chair.  They were great.  I wish I'd kept one for myself. Phil liked them too, it was just that there was an ink stain, which he couldn't live with.  One time he said, It is great but I worry about the rolling mechanism. 'Sokay, Phil, I always have them renewed, look, brand new.  Yeah but that detracts from it, in a way, doesn't it?  Gosh, I showed him, bureaux, bureau-bookcases, secretaires, none of them were quite right.

The desks all sold, anyway, and I didn't begrudge the time spent with Phil the Desk, as he became known. Having an antique furniture shop is like being an adjunct to social services, or Relate, couples'd grow murderous over the choice of a pair of bedside cabinets or an oak Welsh dresser and there were often spouse-war encounters which went nowhere, or took a bit of time.  But I started to think I was conspiring with Phil, agauinst his best interests.  He didn't have a partner and he seemed to be  obsessing  about the perfect desk. One Saturday I had showed him a simple, red walnut, burgundy leather-topped, two-drawer   Victorian writing table, this one here, actually, which I have used for over twenty years and on which I have written everything here.

 Yes, it is nice, simple, a good size, two good long drawers;  said Phil, it's just that, Oh, if only the leather was green.  I had previously shown him several similar, green-leathered writing tables but I let that pass and said to him, instead, not at all unkindly, without any irritation but just in a spirit of curiosity, man-to-man: Sometimes, Phil, it's the quest, the search, which is really important, rather than some eventual prize...you know, the Holy Grail, the Lost Chord, sometimes it's just the searching.......?

I never saw him again.  I have never forgotten him, and in our lives Phil the Desk has become shorthand for a malconstruction, a misdirected effort,  a confusion about purpose, window-shopping as reality.

If Phil had wanted a desk he would have bought one of those I had shown him, he just liked looking for a desk. I had shown no irritation or impatience towards him;  I wasn't crass,  but I sometimes wonder if I was indelicate.  That I still struggle with it, twenty years on, makes me uncomfortable.

I was thinking about Phil quite a lot, these past few months, as I have been strugg-a-ling, as we now say, to buy a decent acoustic guitar.  I already have several but they are mediocre, mostly.  Richard Thompson, and he oughta know, once said that one in every  fifty Yamaha F 310's is absolutely brilliant and the rest are just OK.  He's right. I have a brilliant one  bought used and an OK brand-new  one which needs to be corrected in a couple of places and then may play a bit easier but probably sound the same;  the brilliant one plays and sounds beautifully but is just a bit small and a bit toneless.  I also have a Yamaha electric, a Fender-inspired Telecaster which is very highly-praised and well  reviewed but I don't actually play electric guitar.  I wanted a good, six-string  acoustic and I spent months and months searching and researching.  I have never had enough spare money to buy the instrument I would really like - either  the Gibson Dove, the one that Emmylou Heartbreak plays and the Martin D45 are at least  three grand - more for an old one - and you can buy a stonking BMW for three grand.  This time I wanted to spend no more than a thousand pounds.

I started-off cheaply. Gibson Guitars own Epiphone Guitars and license to them the right to copy Gibsons as well as making their own designs. Epihone is a good brand, John and George Beatle played them and Elvis Presley played a big Epiphone acoustic, the woods aren't as expensive as in the Gibson, nor are the tuners, but they are fine and cost  much, much less than the Gibson or its rival, the Martin.

I sent for an Epiphone FT 350 SCE, fitted with  the Gibson-developed Min E Tune system, an on-board tuner which tunes the guitar automatically to any of 18 possible tunings.  I love open tunings - where six strings are tuned to a chord or a chord variation.

It is relatively simple in an open tuning  to play unusual progressions and modalities, creating a drone sound unachievable in conventional tuning and making possible full barre chords with just one finger.  I have developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome in my left hand and twisting and tweaking guitar tuners hurts like Hell; this Epiphone robo-tune sounded ideal; it was about four hundred quid, the Gibson J45 equivalent costs aover two thousand pounds.

The Epiphone, though, didn't work. It was a nice enough instrument, easy to play and very bright - actually too bright, too poppy - in tone.  I don't have perfect pitch or anything like but I can hear flats and sharps well as anyone and on this Epiphone, bought through Amazon,  whatever chord I chose from the automatic tuner's bank the b and e strings were just a fraction flat and it was impossible to correct them manually.  Drove me fucking mental.  Big Bill Broonzy may have been able to jes' push them strings back into tune as y'play 'em  but I'm not. I sent it back and tried a replacement but that was just as bad. It was disappointing.  I could have improved the tone if only the fucking thing was in tune, but it wasn't and would never be.

I looked at every make of guitar.  Fender make acoustics as well as the ubiquitous Strat- and Telecaster and, God bless them,  they are very good at making solid wood electric guitars but their acoustics are run of the mill, at a coupla hundred pounds.  I looked at Gretsch but I tried one of their twelve strings a while ago and it was a monster to play.  I thought about Takemine but don't like the way they look. I wanted something that looked nice, something, that, even if you'd never seen a guitar, said Quality to you.

I then looked at Martin acoustics but their cheapest model, in solid mahogany at around £800 I had tried a few years ago and it wasn't a patch on my Yamaha F310. I thought it was fucking rubbish. A decent Martin would be around three thousand pounds.

So I looked  at Gibson proper;  they do a a J35 at around £1,300. A reproduction of their 1935 Jumbo acoustic, it looked lovely, absolutely lovely. I'm gonna have a Gibson, I said to myself.

And then I thought, well, these cheapish Yamahas are quite good, I have a Yamaha keyboard which, altough I never touch it, is really very good and Yamaha do make some very highly praised expensive guitars.

At this point, a few weeks into my search, I thought I was coming down with the Phil the Desk syndrome. It's just a fucking guitar,  I briefly thought, any decent brand name'll do. But it wouldn't. The more you learn the more choosy you need to be. Scale length, neck profile, fretboard width, body shape and construction, tuners and most importantly the tonewoods; what is the fucking thing made of and how will it sound, not just how will it play but how will it sound? Different woods have differing tonal properties, generally the acoustic guitar top is made of a softwood, its back and sides  and fretboard of different  hardwoods such as mahogany and rosewood; individually and jointly the timbers produce a characteristic sound; the  woods are dried, cut, steamed into shapes, and glued together with internal braces holding them together - and apart -  against the quite  significant strain of six or twelve tightly wound steel strings trying to pull the whole thing apart. Guitar construction, it really is a jungle out there.
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CATFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL

I am a two-time vegetarian, once in my early twenties and now for this past couple of years.  I have always been what others would describe as squeamish,  sentimental about animal welfare, even the phrase sounds pompous, not as pompous as carbon footprint but getting on that way.  Animal welfare, almost a contradiction, seeing as how God, Himself, gave us dominion over them.

As a child I always fled from scenes of animal or insect torture,  the rough boys did it, setting light to little creatures, jeering, pulling their legs off, I hated them then and I hate them now; sadism as bravado, fox-hunting as rural housekeeping.  

One time, in Herefordshire, I was doing a delivery in my van; it was a smart, shiny van and I was relatively smart behind the wheel but as I drove through a small group of horse-borne, dressed-up, braying countryperson arseholes,  they abused me something rotten, imagining that anyone near them in a van must be a hunt saboteur,  they looked fucking evil and I still see their cousins and boyfriends, most days, on the Tory benches,  they all look like animal-torturing rapists, to me, Tory MPs. 

Huntsmen, butchers, slaughtermen, trawlermen, fuck 'em, I don't like them, I don't like what they do, and I especially don't like their relish for it.  Hunting a fox down, dismembering it and daubing its blood on the forehead of a child, fuck that shit; I'd hang the bastards from an ash tree, do the world a favour; it is said in criminal justice circles that in the past of a sadistic serial killer is very often a history of cruelty to animals;  I don't know but I wouldn't be surprised.

I knew a butcher, one time, he was also a small-scale beef farmer, killed his own.  He cooked  the most amazingly tasty roast beef in the back of his shop and sold it by the quarter-pound, sliced on one of those Hobart push-pull slicing machines, thin slices dropping onto a piece of featherlite paper held in the palm of the slicer's hand;  it really was wonderful to eat.  

It's the way you kill 'em, he said, that's wot do it,  them don't need t'be stressed, if them stressed, them all tensed-up, like, as them die, and them don't eat good; what yum gorra do, like, is almost sneak up on 'em, tek 'em by surprise almost, 'n'that way them die peaceful and them eats so much better. That may or may not indicate his less savage disposition but I prefer the thought of my old Worcestershire  butcher to those fucking horrible halal bastard degenerates; the Jews, too, they do it, don't they, and call it kosher.  I guess it stems from old Abraham, getting the knife out around his son's throat. To be fair, though - and who wouldn't want to be fair to Jews and Muslims, it's not as though they are two balls in the same Scrotum of Superstition, are they, now -  all the so-called great civilisations have practiced blood sacrifice, the Celts, the Greeks and the Romans did it on an altar or a cruciform, Uncle Sam does it from the sky and calls it Shock and Awe, Democracy's alias.

Those deep-sea trawlermen, mad bastards, cursing God if one of their nets or cages dare come up less than full-to-bursting with gasping creatures, every time I see one of those shots, with hundreds of fish floundering about gasping, often gutted whilst still alive, every time I see some smug, stupid fishmonger intoning, Look, you can tell they're fresh if their eyes are nice and shiny, I want to fillet the bastard and I care less and less when I hear of some stupid crooked  bastard boat owner's vessel going down with all hands; if they want to work in a  cruelty industry they should stay ashore and work in McDonalds, shouldn't they; probably not intelligent enough, most of them, not the ones I see on the trawler soap opera shows.  No use mournfully telling me about the true cost of fish'n'chips being drownded fishermen, down, down in the deep, I don't eat fish'n'chips.

I used to eat fish'n'chips and even after I stopped eating meat I would still eat a bit of haddock now and again, just for the protein, I told myself, but eventually that flakey fleshiness of a fish corpse made me gag and I can't do it at all, now;  same with eggs, everytime I think about what an egg is - it's a fucking egg - I want to throw up; milk, too;  eating the eggs and milk of other animals, that's proper barrel-scraping.

I don't mean to spoil anyone's dinner; I know how nice can be a leg of lamb or a bacon sandwich, a sirloin steak, pork and apple sauce; it's just not nice to me any more and stopping eating animals is one of the few things  which has made me feel  a tiny bit better about what an arsehole I am otherwise.  It was someone here, mr inmate, maybe, mr the noblest prospect, sorry, I can't quite remember, who said that since he'd stopped eating them he could now look all the animals in the eye.  I live in the country and in the bright months animals are very close to me and I, too,  feel a bit better about that eyeball proximity, not much, but a little bit.

Eating animals  is one thing, wearing them is another. There was a time, Before Textiles, before the bright lights and the big city went to our heads, when we simply had not developed fabric technology - no spinning, no weaving, no knitting and for warmth and eventually for status, we wore animal skins; early sailing vessels utilised  - as windcatchers - animal skins, reeds and tree bark; tents and teepees were also fashioned from skins and tree products.  Before wool, cotton, linen, silk and cashmere, everyone wore a leather jacket and fur boots.

I still have a battered old brown leather bomber jacket, not one actually worn by a bomber crewperson, I could never afford one of those;  the old jacket is just there, I may wear it one day, if the MadMax days ever come. I have tried braces but mostly I wear a black leather police-issue belt around my waist,  the same type for over thirty years. I'm only on my second and the first one is still fine, just that a couple of the holes are stretched, I could probably fix it but  I thought,  fuck it, I can have a new belt after twenty-eight years, can't I?  And these days I can only wear a leather watch strap, the metal ones are too heavy and the silicon ones irritate my skin;  leather, mrs ishmael tells me, breathes. Even with these few animal accoutrements I have  some way to go towards Veganism and PETA membership, which, I suppose, is my logical destination, except  that I can't stand those showbiz fuckers in PETA, or in anything else, really. I do stumble, however, towards a belief that we will never be better towards each other until we start being better towards animals;  torturing dumb bulls to death as entertainment makes it all the easier to deny the black children a drink of water;  fuck the Spaniards, Franco can come back tomorrow, as far as I'm concerned, and  kick their oily arses up and down the plaza