Not long now before the video's ready.
My guitar and my girl.
Don't stop 'til you get enough.
I'm back from three days of silent retreat in the middle of Devon. There wasn't any sound: not beyond the birdsong, people breathing, oaks rustling, and a man in my dorm with night terrors.
There was music inside my head. Sometimes, it was empty, and compulsive, like the middle of a Robben Ford solo I'm trying to nail. At other times, it was dreamier, more open-hearted: like this Wes Montgomery tune I want to spend more time with. Then there were those sincere, naive songs, songs I sincerely and naively love - Morrissey, Brel, the Pretenders.
There was a book I found in the library. It got me thinking about music and the guitar: and what these two things really mean. Its name is 'Talking Zen', and it was written by Alan Watts, a legend of the 60s counter-culture. Apparently my mystical grandma had his books, back when my Mum was growing up.
Here's the passage that struck me:
When the process of education or acculturation has been completed, we need a cure for it. Education is like salting meat in order to preserve it; when we are actually ready to cook the meat and eat it, we need to soak some of the salt out [...]
When we watch a child who is really just dancing for fun, we say, "That's delightful." The child eventually notices that this is a way of getting attention and becomes self-conscious about dancing. For our part, we send him to dancing school where he becomes stiff and wretched, and only after many, many years of practice does the child, now a young man or woman, recapture the spontaneity of childhood as a dancer.
You get the idea.