This was written in June of 2018

I don’t know if I’m just getting grumpy in my old age, or if I just am tired of all the lies that I soak and marinate in every day via all the media. Oh, you know: 

I’m your friend; I’m here to help you. You just have to . . . 
    buy me; 
      eat me; 
         drink me; 
           smoke me; 
             admire me;
               be happy with me;
                 have faith in me; 
                   be beautiful with/for me; 
                     fuck me; 
                      own me; 
                        trust me;
                         use me;
                          wear me; 
                           be loyal to me; 
                             send me a check;
                               have a nicer car; 
                                vote for me;
                                 keep up with me;
                                   be more with it; 
                                   etc. etc. etc.
                                    etc. etc.
                                    etc.
                                    etc.
                                    etc.
                                    etc.
                                    etc.
                                    etc.

Anyway, I went to my bank two weeks ago, to make a bank wire transfer.  As it happened, I was directed to a newbie bank officer with whom to do the necessary paperwork.  Being a newbie, he was accompanied by a (female) supervisor who helped him through the various steps.  I’d never met either of them before, and between the three of us we did this task in about 20 minutes.  The next day I got a follow-up email telling me the status of the wire transfer.  The email said:

“Good Afternoon Ervin,

I just wanted to follow up with you in regards to the wire we processed yesterday at the banking center. As we discussed it will be going out Monday due to it being late in the afternoon. And I wanted also to thank you for your continued business with us.  Your relationship is important to me and I appreciated having the opportunity to assist you. My goal is to help you succeed financially and to provide you with an exceptional level of service, while ensuring your service requests are met. 

If you have questions, or would like assistance or information please call me using the information below.  

Thank you. We appreciate your business.

(The guy’s name appeared here, without a “yours”, “sincerely”, or other sign-off word or phrase)

I sent him the following response:

Hi, Mr. ________;

Thank you for getting back to me, and I appreciate your help in the matter of the international wire transfer.

 You emailed me the standard politenesses about appreciating my business and eagerness to assist me. It’s nice of you to say things like that; but if you’ll forgive me, that is not my experience of Wells Fargo bank. I’ll tell you up front that this is not your fault; it’s just that banking at Wells Fargo is unpleasant for me. 

 Over the years I have seen Wells Far-to-go turn from a reasonably friendly bank full of people whom I’d see every time I went there into a building that is perpetually full of strangers.  I’ve seen tellers, officials, loan officers, managers, personal bankers, credit card staffers, portfolio advisors, etc. come and go countless times. The parking lot attendants have longer tenure.  There’s only one person left that I recognize from long ago: ______; and she’ll be retiring soon.   _____ has been around for a while, and so has that very nice ______ (?) fellow whom I sometimes bring a coffee for.  But everyone else is a stranger to me.  

I met you and Ms. _____ for the first time only last week, over the matter of the bank wire transfer.  You greeted me when I walked through the door.  In the past three months I’ve been greeted at the door by three other people whom I’d never seen before and have not seen again.  As things are going, both you and Ms. _____ will both soon leave and I’ll never see either of you again.  The very nice connection I made with her will disappear forever.  Wells Fargo is not really there to help me, I’m afraid.  If it were, there would be familiar faces for me to feel comfortable with, and to have built up some familiarity with and create some sense of community.  Frankly, I have a more personal relationship with my grocery store checkout person, whom I at least see most times I go there.  But this is not your fault. 

A bit of history: I’ve banked at that branch of Wells Fargo since before you were born.  As I said, you and met for the first time only last week.  I am twice your age and I come from a different generation and culture than you do.  It would be polite for someone in your position to address me as Mr. Somogyi.  You have, as far as I’m concerned, no license to do differently.  

It’s a bit awkward to point this out but, while it is common in this culture to casually call people by their first names, ours is a professional/commercial relationship in which we are not friends or equals.  You don’t know me; I don’t know you; and you are paid to deal with me.  As a matter of fact, Wells Fargo makes the money with which it pays you directly off my patronage, and that of others like me.  I’m fairly responsible about things like how people address one another; I was brought up to call my elders Mr. or Mrs., or even Ms.  You may not have noticed that I am at least three times your age.

Please forgive me for this longish letter; you’ve done almost nothing to deserve it.  You are not responsible for the bulk of my frustrations.  I’m sure you have your own troubles.  But you should have some idea about manners.

Years ago my bank branch was full of visible and audible activity.  Now, when I walk in it’s almost deserted.  There are two (or occasionally three) tellers at ten teller’s windows.  The other seven or eight windows look like cemeteries waiting for a visitor.  That’s probably because everyone is doing electronic banking.  But I’m old-fashioned and I go to the bank.  And these days that feels sort of like sitting next to the girl no one wants to dance with; the effect on me is somewhere between disconcerting and creepy.

Mostly, however, it’s not that the bank is inefficient or thoughtless or greedy; your employer is a criminal.  You work for a criminal organization.  Wells Far-to-go claims to be benevolent and civically responsible, but it famously opened MILLIONS of unauthorized accounts for its customers without their knowing about it.  It didn’t really have to do that, you know; but it did because it could.  It refunded the money, of course (or claimed it did); but it did so unwillingly and under threat once the secret was out.

My honest opinion is that Wells Fargo’s board of vastly overpaid directors should rot in a Nicaraguan prison.  A few people did lose their jobs over that act of out-and-out piracy, but not much more than that happened.  Wells Far-to-go participated in the financial debacle of circa 2008; it also has financed and continues to finance all kinds of corporate projects that devastate the environment and is PRIMARILY focused on making money for its already moneyed customers. Its mortgage track record ranges from unsatisfactory to horrible; I know that from experience and from others who have spoken with me.  I also have a friend who is a financial attorney, who has spoken with me about having had way too much experience with how utterly shabby, shady, and corrupt Wells Far-to-go’s behaviors and policies on the whole have been.  

I’m embarrassed to be one of Wells Fargo’s customers.  Not that most of the other big banks are any different.  But I don’t know of any more benign bank to put my money into. 

You are a youngish man trying to make his way through life and who has found a career with this institution.  And you are simply doing your job. I mean you no ill or disrespect whatsoever.  As far as I know, you are not dishonest and you are not in a position to engage in malfeasance.  You should, though, observe the niceties of acknowledging your elders with some politeness; and in your job most of the elders you meet are not your friends; you’re engaging in monetary transactions.  I’ve met people at that bank over the years that I’ve honestly liked.  However, I’m unable to like Wells Fargo itself. 

Once, a long time ago, the bank had mounted a promotional campaign that advertised business loans to small and struggling community businesses. Being young, and starting a struggling small business, I applied for such a loan.  The bank official I spoke with seemed to be kindly disposed toward the young and naive young person I was at the time, and told me straight out that despite what they say in their advertising the bank has little to no interest in that kind of activity, and wouldn’t loan me anything.  Those weren’t his precise words but that was EXACTLY what he said to me.  Ditto with my mortgage some years later: Wells Far-to-go said yes almost right off the bat, of course; and then it said no.  In the world of sales, this is called bait-and-switch.

Today, a bank wire transfer should go through to any place in the world in microseconds.  I’d give the paperwork, etc., 24 hours, max.  As it is, I was told that it may take five to ten business days . . . during which, in addition to the fee that I was charged, Wells Fargo gets to use my money gratis for that length of time.  As far as service goes, whom exactly is that a service to?  Well, it is business as usual, is it not?

I may or may not see you next time I go to the bank.  If I do, I’ll offer to bring you a cup of coffee.  Ditto Ms. ________.  Nothing of what I’ve been writing is your or her fault . . . although, as I intimated above, I’ve been subject to the bank’s various business practices for as long as you’ve been on this planet (and I think Ms. ________’s lifetime too).  Finally, Wells Fargo has made money off me every month and every year of that time.  Coffee-wise, I usually go to the place up the block; they have decent coffee.

Respectfully (toward you, not the bank), Ervin Somogyi

November 12, 2018

Someone asked about why I don’t post photos of current builds, comments, updates, etc. on the lutherie discussion forums.  Well, there are several reasons.  Mostly, I just don’t have the time.

I think that the Acoustic Guitar Forum is mostly a good thing; it gives individuals a chance to show off their latest work and get comments and information and support.  I particularly am impressed by the postings such as one that I saw by JESSUPE (Jessupe Goldastini).  What a painstakingly original and unique piece of work he’s accomplished!  I have myselfposted my thoughts on various internet sites in the past.  I did quite a bit of this some years ago on the ANZLF (Autralia/ New Zealand Luthier’s Forum), as well as on this one, and on a third one the name of which I’ve forgotten.  These were mostly good experiences.  But spending time on internet forums at this point in my life is not really for me; they can really soak one’s time up.  And, frankly, not everyone behaves well.

Aside from all that, I have put everything I know and think about how guitars function, into my two books.  My information is all there.  Really: I’ve kept very little back except the specific thicknesses of my guitar woods.  This is largely because there is no specific target thickness: each guitar top is a bit different in thickness.  This is itself because I’m going for a specific stiffnessevery time, not a thickness.  Each piece of wood is a little bit different, and it’s meaningless to give one number that would include tops for Jumbo guitars, and OM guitars, and OO guitars, and everything in between . . . that would furthermore include no information at all about bracing, string gauge, scale length, voicing procedures, doming, selective thinning within the same top, and the specifics of wood selection.  PLUS: there are by now fully two dozen HOW-TO books that will give one or another specific number for top thickness.  So the best I could do is to give an average thickness.

GOOD VS. BAD TEACHING

I produced a DVD a few years ago of a lecture that I gave in which I listed and explained the factors that are responsible for a guitar’s sound: voicing work, bracing, materials stiffness, and vibrating modes of guitar tops.  I laid out everything that I’ve discovered and use that I consider important.  I even brought some guitar bodies that had been voiced to different degrees of completion, and tapped on their tops to illustrate the progression of tap tones in my voicing work.  Such tap tones audibly reveal how a guitar top “opens up”, and I find them indispensable as guides.

At the end, when the audience was asking questions, someone asked if they could see the final shapes of my bracing (that was producing those tones that had reflected my voicing efforts).  I responded that he’d have to take my voicing class to see that level of the work. That may have been a mistake, and I got some blowback from it as the word spread that I was stingy and secretive with my work.  I regret having sounded so flip and glib.  I wish I’d had the presence of mind to have said the following — or something like it:

“I’ve described every principle and consideration that I find important in dealing with guitar sound: wood stiffness in guitars, optimal bracing, top vibrational motions, torque and string pull, an evenness of the vibrating gradient, the Cube Rule of stiffness, guitars as projectors and as diffusers, and top doming. [NOTE: this stuff is all in my books.]  I’ve told you what I think, and why I think it, and I used visual aids and diagrams. I’ve talked about how I came to discover these important things, and even what mistakes I made along the way.  And, mainly, these are precisely the factors that I work with as I make guitars the sounds of which everyone likes.  Now, if I just show you the shapes and profiles of my bracing . . . youwillimmediatelyforgeteverythingIsaidandgohomeand copywhatyou’veseenmedo.  And that, in my opinion, is really bad teaching”.

I said above that it may have been a mistake for me to refuse to show my final configuration of voiced bracing to the audience member who asked to see it.  That’s half of it.  The other half is: Are you kidding me?; you expect me to show you what it’s taken me four decades to figure out, just for the asking — and then criticize me when I say no?  Pal, I just told you ALL the things that I think about in order to do the work that I do.  I owe you that because I promised to speak about these things.  But I draw the line there; that SPECIFIC stuff is entirely proprietary. I do not owe you to show you the specific fruits of forty-plus years of my learning curve just because you’ve bought a $10 ticket to a presentation I’m making.

I wish to be a cheering section for the honing of one’s own thinking skills.  Also, I know something important that a lot of younger people don’t: things acquired without effort or equitable exchange — sort of like sex on demand — have no significance.  You can stop reading now, by the way; I will post further postings on this matter but they are merely additional commentary.

Speaking of the internal cues that signal “it’s all right; it’s done and you can stop now”, I am reminded once again to Donald Trump. He has a big mouth and constantly demonstrates that he lacks any sense of propriety or boundaries – even a sense that things might be precariously out of balance and dangerous. And he cannot stop himself; not now… or ever. He’s missing any sense of “it’s done; you can stop now” — which is, in everyday life, a person’s ordinary and necessary sense of closure and satisfaction in things large and small. Trump doesn’t have that self-regulating function.

Living life like that, carrying a nameless discomfort around day and night, year after year, without it ever reaching orgasm (release or closure), must be a living hell. It does go a long way toward explaining Trump’s chronic insomnia. And maybe his compulsive licentiousness. He lacks the capacity to feel satisfied, even with his own prior decisions— although they are decisions in only the most primitive and unreliable sense of that word. Clearly, when one gives such people power they become dangerous. And one wonders why that person’s supporters have allowed that to happen, and for what reasons.

On the other side of the divide, people who are technicians (as opposed to those who rely heavily on internal cues) use precisely those left-brain tools: they stop when they have met the explicit requirements of their job assignment or task. Are they “right” or “wrong” to do this? Neither. They’re just following a different brain-map and a more or less mechanical set of “assembly instructions”. If we were looking at two guitar makers operating out of these different mindsets then we could say that one would essentially be making a sculpture and would stop “when it was done”, while the other would be using the Numbered Instructions Model, and would stop when the instructions ended. If these individuals were painters then one would essentially be painting from a live model and the other would be painting by numbers — much like Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara had been doing when he was managing the Viet-Nam war; he’d been head of General Motors before then and his idea of running the war was to run it exactly like he’d run General Motors.

In the half-brain version of the previously given example of Engaging With An Enemy, the resolutions to such a task are unsatisfactory indeed. If you needed to engage with the enemy and had only a calculating brain, you’d very probably make up your mind that only one result was acceptable and go for it without flexibility, re-evaluation, or room for new input. Ecce Robert MacNamara – as well as General William Westmoreland and, later, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. If you had a Trumplike brain you would be announcing a new goal for the challenge every week and the troops in the field would be spinning their wheels until at the next election. The ineptness shown in these examples is breathtaking.

If these are silly examples they are also tragic ones, but they go to something that is equally basic to a certain kind of guitar making. For instance, my students have had a few breakthrough experiences in exploring this in their own guitar work. They’d ask me for an opinion of a bridge or rosette that they’d made… and perhaps be surprised that I was sort of lukewarm in my reception of it. We’d then sit down and discuss what I was seeing vs. what they were seeing — and what that was all about.

Those sessions never fail to be interesting: these individuals will have never yet been asked to sit down and simply look at something— and I do mean simply look at the thing, and think about it exactly as it is in the moment in and of and by itself, and how its various parts fit together, and how it fits into its own greater context, and certainly without anyone telling them what they should think about it.

They may have read books on how-to, or heard lectures about aesthetics, history of design, or concern with market value or the luthier who made a particular guitar, or had been made aware of other people’s pre-judgments and aesthetics (and unconsciously making these individuals into points of reference for how they should think about their own work)… but they had never been asked to think for themselves and have a sense of what they themselves really thought. I ask that one just look at something and get a sense of what it really is, and what one likes about it or dislikes about it, as it is at that moment… without me suggesting to them what they should think… and then talk to me about it.

About the political thing: it is clear to me that in that realm, too, people have never been allowed nor encouraged… to… uh… simply… think… for… themselves. But that is a great way to get in touch with a sense of whether “it’s done, I can relax now” or not.

Anyway, who knew that guitar making and politics were so intimately connected?

I’ve been writing about the creative process, which is a significant part of my own work. Although I don’t have formal certification or credentials in this area, I consider myself to be knowledgeable in matters of creativity and the workings of the human brain; I may not be an “expert” but I am certainly a well informed amateur. Part of my education in these matters is that I notice things in the world around me; and I do a lot of writing. Writing helps me to sort out the things I’ve noticed and make sense of them. It helps me to discover things I didn’t know that I knew, or connections that were there to be made but that I hadn’t made yet. I think you might enjoy some of my mental meanderings as regards creativity.

We can start with the fact that I am a guitar maker. And, as a guitar maker, I want my instruments to “look right”.

“Well, of course,” one can say. “Who doesn’t? But what does that actually mean?” Well, it means one of two things. Either someone is completing a project whose parameters and details have been decided from the outset, or one is doing something personal and winging it on a creative impulse. In the first case the project is “done” when the recipe has been fulfilled; the thing “looks right” because that means the same thing as having followed the recipe. Alternately, when one is approaching a “creative” project in a mechanical way, and the project has to be delivered by a certain deadline, the place to stop is when the time allotted has expired; the project is done, by definition. In the second case there is no recipe or fixed deadline to rely on; the project is “completed” and the thing looks “right” when it “feels” right and one “knows” that nothing else remains to be done. Thus, the right look actually has two distinct meanings. To illustrate them one can imagine a project that entails engaging with an enemy. When the project is done in the army way it is completed when the enemy is dead. When the project is done in the creative or personal way, it may be completed when one has won the enemy over and befriended him, or negotiated a peace with him.

One interesting way to get a handle on these distinct aspects of “the right look” has been through studies of the brain – about which some interesting research has been done lately. Some of this research has focused on certain unfortunate individuals who had, for one medical reason or another, needed to have the entire right or left lobe of their brains surgically removed. This horrible circumstance presented a unique opportunity for studying such subjects after they returned to “normal post-surgical life”. Except that their lives were not “normal” any longer.

The Right half of the brain, the scientists have told us, is responsible for imagination, emotion, lateral thinking, creativity, intuitive connectivity, and capacity to appreciate beauty. The Left half is the critical mind: it carries out the functions of linear thinking, logic, assessment, planning, and calculation. And the surgical recoverees were observed to have new deficits in their mental lives that were, unsurprisingly, a direct function of which half of their brains they’d lost.

[EDITORIAL NOTE: the concept of strict division of right-brain/left-brain functions has taken some hits lately as the scientific community has published studies on the plasticity of the brain and how one half of it can learn to take over some of the functions of the other half. Still, if one really only has one half of a brain, I think we can be given a bit of slack in being categorical about how the brain works; if there is only one half a brain, there is no other half to share plasticity with. Also, even though having only half a brain is an extreme circumstance, it can be useful to push something to an extreme in order to make a point about, or to get insights into, that thing. Extreme doesn’t necessarily invalidate.]

Individuals who lost the emotional part of their brains were found to retain memory as well as verbal, computational, and mechanical skills. But they lost the ability to make personal on-the-spot decisions based in personal preference — such as we all make a thousand times a day without even stopping to think about it. Such people would be completely stymied, for example, in trying to figure out where to go for the weekend, or even which breakfast cereal they’d most enjoy eating — without making long lists of these choices’ various pros and cons. If Mr. Spock had lost his right brain just before the Klingons attacked the Enterprise then he’d have to make lists of every possible scenario involved in responding to the attack, and they would have taken over the Enterprise before he got halfway through with that list.

On the other hand, individuals who’d lost the left halves of their brains couldn’t plan their way out of a paper bag. They couldn’t hold thoughts together. Their lives were dominated by impulse. They’d lost the ability to engage in calculation and goal-oriented, systematic (first-this-then-that), exploratory (what if), critical (i.e., if-this-then-that type), or even ordinary sorting-this-out-from-that thinking. Most terribly, they had lost the capacity to feel personally invested in anything, in the moment – which has everything to do with getting the normal internal cues to any sense of “rightness” or “wrongness” of anything. These people became incapable of making assessments. Their “thinking” also lacked any sense of complexity, comparative significance, consequences, depth, flexibility, or carry-over. They really were stuck in the realm of impulse. And, needless to say, they were as incapable of meaningful personal attachments as they were unable to engage in disciplined behavior.

Ecce Donald Trump who, as I write this in 2017, gives every sign of being genuinely brain damaged in this way. He seems equally upset by being given a bad tweet by a nine-year-old as he is by a criticism from a head of state. He has no sense of proportion or carry-over; he doesn’t remember what he said last week; he spends time insisting that Mexico to pay for a wall instead of appointing the ambassadors, officials, and functionaries who would be making the government function. With Trump the dial is always set at the same number and the oven is always set at the same temperature regardless of what’s being baked. Please, re-read the previous paragraph.

An ability to sense the “rightness” or “wrongness” of things, just mentioned above, brings us to the doorstep of art and design — in which the dominant mindset is the striving to arrive at the internal cues that signal “it’s right and it’s done and I can stop now.” The striving can be endlessly modified by training and experience all life long; but the artist (or cook, athlete, gardener, fisherman, etc.) stops only when he knows it’s time to stop; short of that, he keeps on working, expressing, and seeking. There is otherwise no calculation, statistic, timer, rule book, syllabus, recipe, blueprint, or deadline to otherwise tell him that his task is complete. Those are all left-brain tools. The artist simply stops when he “knows” that it’s time to stop.