Liner Note #11

First off, a note from Cecilia, who had this to say: “Congrats everyone on getting the 100 requisite “points” to trigger bonus posts for the whole next month. Starting Monday Oct. 11th and running through Saturday Nov 13th there will be at least 3 story posts a week, which will bring us right up to DGC’s 1st anniversary! More news on what we’ll do special for the occasion later.”

Now to the fun stuff.

So, as you all may have noticed, keeping things in perspective isn’t exactly my strong suit. In honor of that, a bunch of today’s fun links have to do with either humongous or super-tiny guitars.

Monster-size flying V:

World’s largest guitar! I couldn’t embed this to you just have to visit the link yourself. This guitar is larger than the apartment in the Fenway I used to live in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC-49GnjdTE&feature=related

Super tiny guitar:

You’re all listening to DJ Earworm, right? Mash-ups have been around forever, but this guy does some that really fit.

The brain-breaking part for me is that he not only mashes up the songs, but the videos, too. And not just two or three songs mashed together. Like… 25. Like this one which takes the top 25 songs of 2009 and puts them all together into one:

(Official video got blocked, but the anime version is still up:)

Here’s one that I picked out for ctan. It’s a mix between Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” and Beyonce’s “If I Were A Boy.”

She tells stories about me all the time, so it’s time I told one about her. (ctan, I mean, not Beyonce.) She learned to play the guitar when she was about eleven, I think? It was her third or fourth instrument, depending on whether you count the recorder or not. She also played the clarinet and her grandmother had taught her piano.

What’s kind of funny is that she was never, ever able to play guitar and sing at the same time. She tried many times in high school and college and could never get the knack. She put her acoustic guitar in the closet around 1989 and didn’t touch it for several years. I forced her to buy an electric guitar around 1992 (the gray Epiphone that makes a few appearances in the story), which she played a bit in grad school ’92-’94, not incidentally when she first started writing DGC seriously.

Then she didn’t touch the guitar much for another several years–a little picking and strumming with a friend who moved here from Seattle, not much else. Around 1998 she was working on this section of my story. She dug the guitar out and had it on a stand in her office, but she didn’t play it, really, mostly just looked at it from time to time.

And one day out of the blue while working on writing the upcoming section of DGC, she picked up the guitar and BAM, she played AND sang this Tom Petty song. (“Free Fallin'”)

I suppose some people might say *I* picked it up and played/sang, but you know, I’m fictional. How would that work? And yet, she did something she couldn’t actually do, but which is totally second nature for me.

Let’s just say it was a pretty freaky moment for both of us.

Next thing you know we’re ripping through all the Tom Petty we could find chords for on the Internet, and Paul Simon, and I don’t even remember what else. The truth is she can’t play for shit, but she was getting the chords right and singing along without a hitch.

Then she finished writing DGC, packed the manuscript off to her agent, and put the guitar away. Both languished for about ten years. I’m pretty sure she can’t do it now. The singing/playing at the same time, thing, I mean. But I might make her try it again, just to see.