John Wise

I’ve been trying my best to reassure myself that I’m only experiencing allergies, but after two days I might have to concede this is something other than. What is certain is that my mind has taken on the thinking capacity of the oodles of snot that are leaking out of my nose. Great time for watching Youtube as that’s about all I can process, though it is triggering my online shopping buttons. A couple of weeks ago I stumbled upon Guga Foods, an enthusiastic steak gourmet, and I must have watched 20 videos of him aging and cooking all sorts of amazing cuts of cow including some pricey pieces of wagyu. Then on Monday night, I discovered The Food Ranger, this Canadian guy who speaks fluent Chinese and is traveling through China capturing the flavors of some incredible-looking dishes.

Some background to all of this: On Monday I saw a podiatrist to finally deal with an on-again, off-again ingrown toenail that has vexed me for over 35 years, so I needed to stay off my feet. Getting congested then simply added to the need to stay off my feet. Back to Trevor James at The Food Ranger: this foodie will try anything from water bugs to intestines, lungs, and the stinkiest fermented green mush that failed to impress him. Along the way he dives into some seriously amazing looking dishes I can only dream of trying as Arizona is NOT known for authentic Chinese food. While I do a fair amount of shopping at Lee Lee Asian Grocery, even they do not have everything I could need and so seeing all this preparation and slurping of chili noodles I have been impulsively buying everything I need to replicate some of the dishes I have been introduced to.

There are more than a few things I need to get done, but I’m not feeling it and so I’m languishing in the pit of I don’t care. I’ve napped twice today and watched all the videos I can take so I needed to get out and do something, such as typing up this brief blog entry that ends up being an admission that even I can indulge in mindless entertainment when it suits me. Feeling mindlessly blah sucks. Can’t wait to pick up Caroline so I can start whining about how bad I feel. Sympathy is a dish that tastes best through the hack of exaggerated illness. I wonder if there’s a show for that?

With only about 300 people in attendance, Nils Frahm offered up two hours of beautiful sounds flowing out of a dozen synths and keyboards that traveled with him from Germany. Throughout Nils’ performance, this one-man orchestra had me thinking about Bach and how he might have seen a single man working the 12 keyboards on stage. Caroline had brought up an interesting point that it might have been the magic of a dozen instruments remaining in tune for the duration of the concert that would have most intrigued Bach. This got us thinking about how an instrument would be brought into tune back in the early 18th century and on our way out of the show Google let us know that the tuning fork wasn’t even invented until 1711. Well, that opens up the can of worms of trying to understand just intonation, meantone, and equal temperament for tuning. But this is not going to be a lesson about the history of tuning, it is about seeing Nils Frahm.

Pulling sound from so many instruments while utilizing loops and a judicious amount of chorus and echo that Nils was actively working helped lend the impression of a man frantic to keep all the plates spinning for his live performance. His two hours on stage was just long enough to satisfy us and we were able to leave happy in our knowledge we’d seen a brilliant artist at play.

Yikes, it’s been four months since Caroline and I left the Phoenix area and that’s just far too long. We were originally supposed to meet someone today we’ve not seen in a while, but he had to excuse himself from our date late on Thursday. I’d like to have pushed us out of town for a short road trip after learning this, but a talk about Josef Albers by Claire Campbell Park at the Heard Museum caught Caroline’s eye and so that is keeping us here this weekend. Until that begins at mid-day I’m cleaning up where photos belong that have ended up on my blog and were scattered across my Notebook while Caroline is busy with her newly acquired Appalachian dulcimer in her lap.

It was gifted to her with the person calling it a mountain dulcimer, but that’s a variant name along with Kentucky dulcimer and some others. My favorites are nicknames such as mountain zither and hog fiddle. From now on this is Caroline’s hog fiddle. Tuning it was hard on the ears, but as she strums it afterward the drone that is resonating out of it is quite appealing. Her new old instrument came from Hill Country Dulcimers out of Fredericksburg, Texas, a store that is now defunct. From the dulcimer, she went on to her ukulele to serenade me with “All My Loving” by the Beatles. Then just before we are about to leave for the museum, I see that Nils Frahm is playing in Phoenix tomorrow night and I snag two tickets up front.

Upon arrival at the Heard Museum, we filed into the Steele Auditorium and took two seats in the front row close to today’s speaker: Claire Campbell Park of Tucson. Caroline had taken a workshop with her a couple of years ago or so regarding blending colors on the loom which also included color theory. Today’s talk is about one of the more influential artists regarding teaching art in the 20th century Mr. Josef Albers. While Josef’s wife Anni Albers was highly influential in weaving, Caroline hadn’t learned of her or her husband’s work until the workshop with Claire. The couple got their start at the Bauhaus in Weimar working next to the likes of Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. As the Nazis took to power and forced the Bauhaus to cease operations the Albers moved to Black Mountain, North Carolina, where they joined the faculty of the Black Mountain College. Now long gone the college once played host to the founder of Bauhaus Walter Gropius along with John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Allen Ginsberg, Willem and Elaine de Kooning amongst a number of other notable artists.

Back home Caroline with the same love that she has made all of these socks with, will hand wash them. I’m very well aware of how fortunate I am that not only do I wear custom-fitted unique handmade socks every day, but my best friend cares enough to ensure these socks last as long as possible by hand washing them. As these socks are hung up to dry I will not be going barefoot as I have 11 others pairs that I get to choose from. Not only that but we probably have about half a dozen other skeins of sock yarn that are destined to wrap my feet in love. My socks are priceless when you consider the following: take the minimum hourly wage you’d charge someone for your line of work and multiply that by the roughly 40 hours it will take you to fit and knit a pair of these socks. Now add to that cost an almost negligible price of the yarn of between $20 and $35. With all of that in mind, I value each pair of these at something near $2,000 for a total of approximately $34,000. Even the heels of my socks have gone through various iterations until Caroline found the design that felt best to my sensitive feet. Some other details about these socks: I chose my own fingering weight yarns when we are out traveling in places such as Portland, Newport, and Cannon Beach, Oregon; Haines, Alaska; Asheville, North Carolina; Española, New Mexico; Frankfurt, Germany; Budapest, Hungary; and Vienna, Austria.

Over the previous month and a half, my spleen has been vented. Twenty-nine posts tagged as Thoughts. Those writings were mostly drafted in the last quarter of 2018 though more than a few were written quite recently. All of them were rewritten and often butchered from their original rough forms that laid out some thoughts and ideas that were floating through my head. Sometimes I returned to the document three or four times for editing before it was edited three or four times more times after the text had been slotted for publishing on my blog.

Things were hardly complete at that point as there are nearly always flaws in logic and run-on sentences that require the finessing hand and mind of Caroline to proof my writing so I don’t appear “too” idiotic. Then it’s time to find a photo and publish it.

Back in January when I decided to purge the random files scattered throughout my computer that were in various states of completion, I wanted to put to rest what loosely felt like a thread of laments, though I was never certain that anything tied them together. Well, there was one thing: I wrote everything while sitting in coffee shops. So I thought of these writings as my “Coffee Shop Series” and to that end, I snapped a bunch of photos while visiting some of the places I did my writing at and used bits and pieces of those images for the blog entries.

Now I’m done.

Why then call this entry “The Crumpled Straw Wrapper?” One day, while talking with yet another stranger in a coffee shop regarding what I was doing, I explained my subject matter and rejoiced that shortly I’d be able to move on from what was feeling like non-stop laments. I told this person that as soon as all these blog entries I’d staged were finished that I was looking forward to writing about anything else maybe even about a crumpled straw wrapper that I pointed to.

That piece of trash, which earlier had been the sanitary wrapping of a length of straw, now laid discarded, poking out of a mini trash bin on the counter. Its single-use function was now depleted and it would likely find its way to the landfill. How long ago were its constituent parts found in another form? Maybe ten or twenty years ago a spruce, pine, fir, larch, or hemlock tree was planted in a grove. While thinning these new trees they were sent off so their softwood could be turned into pulp that would become various paper products.

For decades we have mindlessly used these conveniences without any regard for their impact beyond assuaging our anxiety of germs; though I’m not at all certain that is a conscious decision either. Then all of a sudden, midway through this last bit of typing, I’m becoming aware that I’ve started moving back into more lament. Maybe there is no escape from these tangents where I take out the grump for exercise so I can discover something else to complain about?