March, 2018

Hi once more:

I have been writing about selling guitars to China, and some reports on how China has been modernizing.  I’m writing this narrative as I have been understanding it; I may be in error; but as far as I know I’m describing things as they are.  And I was in the middle of the “you don’t have to read this part because it’s too disturbing” section.  It certainly brings me down.  But here’s the rest:

Global warming has also affected rainfall patterns in China, exacerbating a growing series of droughts.  But while there is rain it washes over the mountains of waste I’d cited; it’s all junk that the U.S. can’t dispose of domestically.  In China the water runoff from the heavy metals in the junk, the electronics, the wiring, the motherboards, the switches, the screens, etc. leaches into the ground.  Runoff from rain as well as the low-tech washing, cleaning, processing, and reclaiming procedures used to salvage the gold from the gold-plating of parts, etc. plus the scavenging for other precious metals . . . has polluted the rivers in Southern China.  The water is a horrible color. The water table has been poisoned so that the water for whole provinces is undrinkable; China is now importing water into its cities for the first time. As I said, all of this is occurring on a vast industrial scale.

It is indeed occurring so on many levels.  “Racing to Extinction” is largely about exactly that, but from another point of view than being suffocated in discards.  Part of it touches on the Chinese fishery industry. The most shocking footage I saw is of one of the largest shark fin processing plants in the world; it shows  A VAST ACREAGE OF PILES OF SHARK FINS — mountains of fins of sharks that have been killed by the many tens of thousands (that month!) . . . and that could cover a football stadium several feet deep.  It is all done wholesale, with no thought to depletion of the oceans. It is all part of the same effort that humanity — as exemplified by the Chinese fishing industry — is hell-bent toward.

I was horrified to see these documentaries, and horrified to see what the Chinese are doing.  And feeling bad toward them. Until I realized that they’re basically boring holes in the bottom of the boat that we’re all in . . . and that we (the U.S.) are complicit in this.  There are a lot of American companies who have set up branches in China, and a lot more are fixing to do so. China wants to keep these foreign merchants out, but I think they’ll find ways in.

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O.K., YOU CAN START READING AGAIN

That’s about when I stopped being able to draw a line that separates “us” from “them” . . .

. . . and it started me asking where, exactly, do I fit into all this?  

O.K., I’m the clever little luthier who is making beautiful guitars.  Just what do my clients do to get the money with which to buy my guitars?  Is it honest work? Are there shrewd thefts involved? You know, these are questions that one just doesn’t ask.  Don’t even get me started on Banks . . . [except to ask: do you know where the word Bank comes from?  Well, before Banks as we know them existed, moneylenders first practiced their trade during the expanding economic growth and activities of the Renaissance; money was needed for trade, for commerce, for wars, etc.  The moneylenders were mostly Jews – by default, not genetic predisposition — because the Catholic Church forbade all Catholics from dealing with money; money was corrupting and evil. Anyway, before they moved into offices, moneylenders would set up in the town marketplace; they’d have their own spot just like any vegetable vendor, and they’d sit all day long on a little bench or stool that they brought with them, and do business with anyone who came along and needed their services.  At the end of the day they lugged their benches home and counted their money, I guess. The Italian for bench or stool is “banco”, and when you wanted money you would go to “the banco”. So there.]   And just what do the people whom they deal with do for the money that they pay my clients with so that they can pay me?  The thing is . . . the fact is that I am dealing with people who are dealing with people who deal with people who deal with people who deal with people who deal with people . . . who are ruining our air, our water, our food, our relationships with our fellow man, our animals, our land, and our sense of being human.  I have banked with Wells Fargo bank since 1972 – well before many of you reading this were born. This bank is not my friend; it is not your friend; it is not anybody’s friend. It is a criminal enterprise that has opened millions of accounts that their “owners” didn’t know about; and it funds projects that degrade the environment.  Read the news. But is there a better bank for me to move my funds to? [SEE SIDEBAR, BELOW]

You, by the way, are dealing with the very same people.

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SIDEBAR

*** The difference between Savings and Loan Organizations and Commercial Banks used to be that the former were only allowed to loan out as much money as they had in deposits; the latter were allowed to loan out many times as much money as they had in deposits, under the fiction that the government would cover losses if the bank failed.  This distinction is no longer in effect: S. & Ls (remember Charles Keating?) are now fully as dishonest as the banks are. How does that work? Well, besides helping to finance nefarious ventures that degrade the environment, and bilking millions of their customers as Wells Fargo was recently convicted of, and laundering money, etc. loaning out more money than you have is profitable (so long as the banks don’t all fail at the same time as they did in 1929) but it is inherently wrong.  For one thing, it inflates and devaluates all currency.  See, if the supply of goods is fixed, and the banks create six times the amount of buying power of the actual cash on hand (that’s what credit is, dude: buying power), then it’s the equivalent of having six times the amount of actual cash on hand . . . and prices will rise.  Why wouldn’t they? Result: everybody’s money is worth less – except for those who don’t actually work for a living but make money by getting others to do the real work for them. One of any government’s proper functions is to ensure that there’s a balance between the amount of cash on hand and the amount of goods there are; it keeps prices stable.  There’s a great Hugarian word: csibész (pronounced Chi’-base).  Look it up.

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How is this something to not think about?  And what is my relationship to it? Is my selling guitars into the Chinese market going to help or hinder?  And how?

Well, these are non-questions, I fear.  It’s a global phenomenon that I’m caught up in like a leaf in a river and that I have no influence whatsoever over.  We’re all caught up in it. Even if I sold no guitars to any Chinese dealer, they (I’m sorry to resort to such clichés as “the Chinese”) will buy all the new and used Somogyi guitars that they can find from my dealers and/or private sellers, and Bob’s your uncle.  I’m part of it regardless of whether I want to be or not; if not very much now, then certainly later.

I can almost hear you thinking, hey, wait a minute; the people you’re dealing with aren’t doing anything like that.  What are you thinking? Well, as I said, the fact is that I’m already in the mix.  We’re all already in the mix. How long has it been since you’ve purchased anything NOT made in China?  As every Buddhist knows, I have no control over anything other than myself. Not only that but, as every psychologist knows, I also don’t have nearly as much control over myself as I want to think I have.

Ethical behavior is the only thing that makes sense to me.  But it’s easier said than done.

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REFLECTIONS ON MY LIFE

It is interesting for me to contemplate all this at this point in my life.  As you know, I have recently had a life-changing event, the significance of which is that I see that I am at the end of my career and my life.  At least, relatively at the end.  And because of this I have a new perspective from which to look back on my life as a whole . . . and to assess its significance, as well as to think about how I want to live the rest of my life.  That realization is that I do not want to work six days a week as I’ve always done.  I want time to think.  I want time to relax.  I want time to do art projects in wood.  I don’t want to have to prove anything to anyone.  I want to be happy, not just busy.   And, largely, I don’t find the prospect of breaking into another new market all that exciting – even without the complications I alluded to above. Been there; done that; got a t-shirt full of sawdust, wood shavings, and sanding dust.

So, it’s seeming to me that the “significances” of my life are several.  There are personal relationships, of course, and family.  There is “growing up and being successful”.  There’s the “being a good person” component.  There is also the “being young and then growing old” one. Some people count the notches on their shillelagh or will have their final bank balance or College Board Scores carved on their tombstone.  And there is also the “how do I fit into the world?” component; you know, the socio-economico-political-cultural-ethical one.  Well, (if Trump and Kim-Jong-Un don’t destroy the world first, that is), I will have trained and taught a number of talented guitar makers who will be important and prominent in that world market.  I will have made that possible.

When I was starting out, years ago, I couldn’t have imagined any of this happening.

This is the end of part 3.  Part 4 is next.

March, 2018

Hi again:

I was describing the rumbling growth of the guitar market in Korea and China.  You can’t have growth and economic bubbles without rich people’s gambling speculatively on the chance of getting even richer.  It’s beginning to happen in China now; I don’t know what they want to call themselves politically, but their economy is Capitalism on steroids.

Socialism and Communism?  Hah! No way, José.

China has already had one real estate bubble burst, and no doubt more things like that will happen because no one is doing anything to keep any of them from happening.  It’s like what happened in our own bubble of 2008 in which several million people lost their homes because of the criminal depradations of our own Banking, Lending, and Home Mortgage institutions . . . and no one has ever been held accountable for it . . . and has been continuing since.  We all know that those wily Orientals (shades of Earl Derr Biggers, Charlie Chan, and Fu Manchu!) are great at copying things. Well, they’re copying Capitalism with a vengeance.

Anyway, I am beginning to be invited into this new and growing market . . . which I think I’m managing to make sound quite distasteful.  Dealers (who are attending the NAMM show I described earlier) are eagerly and hopefully approaching me and other luthiers like me . . . like . . . uh . . . like moths to a sock.  In my case this is because I am prominent in the world of guitar making; they want to have my guitars because to carry merchandise from a prominent Western luthier will get them an edge with publicity and sales.  I think they’d promote my guitars as being the best, exotic, expensive, superb, and almost magical . . . and will probably help cure baldness and impotence.

As part of this thrust, I’m being interviewed and filmed a lot these days. Part of this interest is coming from new Chinese guitar magazines (there’s even a Chinese edition of Fingerstyle magazine!).  But also, as I’m part of the rapidly aging American lutherie community (and that includes makers of guitars, banjos, mandolins, violins, etc. etc.), I am being interviewed and filmed and recorded and being sent questionnaires by American institutions, museums, archives, etc. that want to preserve pertinent historical record.

I mean, once we’re dead we are no longer available to be interviewed and allowed to tell our stories.  (Where were these people when I was younger and needed the attention???). Anyway, I’m spending more time than ever before receiving visitors who have these projects to carry out.

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CHINESE GUITAR FACTORIES:

The Chinese market is very competitive.  There are hundreds of guitar factories in Guangzhou, in Southern China.  It’s a huge city that is made up entirely of factories and dormitories. They make EVERYTHING, including guitars.  

I’ve been approached by two of their factories to this point, as well as two distributors.  One of the factories has paid me for a consultation. This is a pretty impressive outfit; they are young, smart, eager, motivated, well funded, and focused.  They showed me pictures of their facility: it’s impressively large. The factory floor is meticulously clean, and dotted with state-of-the-art computer-operated machinery that cranks out (they told me) 125,000 guitars a month.  Wow. These are mostly $100 and $200 guitars, but (did I mention?) the market is huge and growing. And they are eager to start production of a limited number of handmade guitars that were better. That’s what they wanted to consult about.

A number of my colleagues already do business and/or consult with companies in China.  They have contributed guitar and inlay designs, and have helped teach the Chinese workers how to make and assemble guitar parts.

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SIDEBAR:

Speaking of a huge and growing market, I was listening to an interview on the radio recently, with an American developer of golf courses; he was selling golf courses to the Chinese.  The interviewer commented that golf wasn’t really a Chinese game, so he wondered how much business this guy could do. He replied (quote): “well, essentially zero percent of the Chinese play golf, but zero percent of one-and-a-half billion is still a pretty good number”.  No, I didn’t make that up.

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THE GREATER ECONOMY

From what I’m seeing, it is looking as though China will be the dominant economy in the world in twenty or so years.  The sheer sophistication and scale of the productive machinery that I’ve gotten a peek at is stunning: robotics, laser machinery, CNC automation, etc.  And what isn’t automated is attended to by handwork carried out with the focus of a sweatshop on steroids; factory employees put in incredible hours to meet inflexible production quotas.  The work ethic is unreal.

For the time being, as I said, China is only beginning to find out and learn about and appreciate handmade guitars.  There is a lot of new money there and rich Chinese are happy to buy expensive American things.  They’ve started with American cars; they are inching toward guitars. There is, as in the U.S., a rapidly developing 1%-vs.-the-99% of their very own, although, no one really talks about that. They just report Economic Growth statistics baldly, in terms of abstract things like market penetration . . . it all sounds evocative of the Wisdom of the Ancients, and just as hard to interpret or understand.

It is one thing to say things like “China is modernizing and growing at remarkable speed”.  It is another to have some understanding of what that means.

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SOME REALLY AWFUL STUFF; YOU MAY WANT TO SKIP THIS PART

The factory I cited above, that is cranking out 125,000 guitars a month, is one of the bigger and more sophisticatedly tooled up ones.  But it is one of hundreds. Can you imagine the sheer amount of wood that is gobbled up in the making of these instruments? They’re mostly plywood, and they look very clean and pretty.  But My God . . . that’s a lot of precious wood being turned into these things.

A LOT of wood.

I’ve recently become aware of two documentaries about current China that have had an impact on me.  One is titled “Manufactured Landscapes” and the other is “Racing to Extinction”. They’re really horrible.  One of them features the city of Guangzhou, which is a big city made up of factories and dormitories. There are factory complexes larger than football fields in which thousands of young Chinese men and women slave away at work stations, all day long, every day, assembling parts and pieces to all the electronic goods that we buy — from on-off switches to the equipment that will have those on-off switches.  This is not skilled, meaningful work. It is capitalist piece-work. All of these products will sooner or later wind up in a Chinese, American, or European landfill.  Actually, probably European or American; many Chinese factories are for export only.  You can’t get what they produce, in China.

There are HUGE MONTAINS OF JUNK outside another city whose name I can’t pronounce — very largely electronic waste, but really including everything made of plastic and metal and glass, that has been shipped to China from the U.S., and probably Europe.  China is one of our dump sites, and has been for a while. Africa has been another. And I’m not kidding about the mountains; they’re unbelievable in size; all the millions of computers and electronic stuff we get rid of every year wind up there.  They’re made to not be fixable, and we don’t have the capacity to absorb such amounts of recycled waste; the current watchword is N.I.M.B.Y.

Well, see, we don’t actually recycle it; we export it; the Chinese recycle it . . . badly and inefficiently and pollutingly. There is footage of Chinese people going through these mountains, looking for this or that to salvage, in very low-tech ways.  Yet the scale of the waste from these efforts also staggers the imagination. The cities near these mountains of junk look like recycling yards themselves. There is junk piled up everywhere; in the streets; in the yards; in the fields; in the houses. None of it is under a roof or other cover; it’s all out in the open.

This is the end of part 2; part 3 follows, if you’re interested.

March 2018

Hi:

I hope this letter finds you all well.  I’m doing o.k. in spite of (and along with) my various medical adventures.  I sort of think that I’m in better shape than a lot of the rest of this country, actually.  But let’s not get into that.

Things in my life are progressing . . . slowly.  My life is becoming interestingly complicated. For starters, have too much work to do; I simply don’t have time to do it all — unless people are willing to wait longer to get guitars from me.  I’m getting more commissions now that I’m old and famous and decrepit; I guess people are thinking to order their guitars before it’s too late. As I have more projects than I can cope with, I’ve hired (for the first time ever) a personal assistant to help me organize my priorities and my use of time.

With my new assistant’s help, I’ve organized my building efforts into building four guitars at a time.  Each set of four takes me about five to six months to make.

Why does it take so long?  Well, for one thing, it’s not at all the same as putting four sets of woods through the same paces and procedures and more or less cookie-cuttering four guitars to completion.  I’m a custom maker, so each guitar will be different in some ways: different woods; individual treatment and thicknessing of woods; different rosettes; different models; different neck and fretboard measurements; different scale lengths; individually made and sized bridges; individual voicing for different target sound (the voicing on each guitar that I make takes me two days) ; different peghead veneers; individual intonation work; different ornamental touches and inlays; sometimes different finishes; different neck measurements; some guitars are cutaways or not; some guitars have fanned frets; some guitars have twelve strings; etc.  Also, we make our bindings, head blocks, bracing, necks, etc. rather than to farm them out or subcontract them. Finally, some guitars are “special” projects and take forever. Four such sets of specs is the most that I can juggle around at any time. Anything more than that and I lose my focus.

Besides that, I’ve always worked slowly.  I do an awful lot of the work by hand, with hand tools.  I don’t cut corners. If I did, I’m sure I’d dilute the quality of my guitars.  Worst of all, I’m artistic; that always takes time. I also teach, do repairs, and do administrative work (paperwork, endless emails and correspondence, record-keeping, finances, bookkeeping, and keeping track of the work flow) alongside of my building.  I cannot separate or eliminate any of these activities. Plus, you probably know that I’ve written two books; well, I’m writing another two-volume set now. And I still go to guitar shows, which soak up a lot of time and energy.

And I receive visitors.  This is increasing, for some interesting reasons, and it eats into my time; I’ll get back to this point later.

Finally, I have varying amounts of help at work, depending on how many apprentices I have at a given time.  A year ago I had three; now I have one, and he’s on maternity leave as he just became a dad. I expect another apprentice to begin his studies with me this coming Summer.  All in all, I have less help than usual these days.

And here’s what else is going on with me:

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HEALTH

My last health/mental-health report was of the aftermath of my heart’s having stopped pumping blood, and the installation of a pacemaker to keep a somewhat wonky muscle functioning regularly.  (Well, it has worked hard for many years now and never took any time off, so I sort of understand that it might want a break.)

I got sick the month after I got my pacemaker, with a horrible bronchial infection that lasted three months.  It’s been flu season (and a very bad one at that) so that may have been implicated. Also, the Santa Rosa fires occurred; they made the air foul as far as 90 miles away.  That blaze was a clusterf**k of PG&E equipment breakdown, bad communication, lack of communication, and the state’s Emergency Warning System’s being asleep at the wheel; as a result several thousand homes burned to the ground.  In any event, the air in Berkeley and Oakland was hazy and we could smell the soot. That didn’t help at all. For me, I think that was the straw that broke the camel’s back, as they say.

I’m o.k. now.  But I did lose a lot of time with all that.

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THE NAMM TRADE SHOW

I got well just in time for the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchandisers) show.  It’s the world’s largest trade show for the music business; it’s where manufacturers introduce all their new products and lines to the market.  NAMM takes place in Anaheim every January. There’s nothing in Anaheim, really, except for this event and Disneyland – and the NAMM event is as loud and colorful as a Disneyland for musicians and musical merchants could get.  If you’re in the music biz at any level (retailing, import-export, sheet music, guitars, kazoos, music magazine publishing, strings and accessories, violins, ukuleles, accordions, drums, recording equipment, wood supplies, specialty supplies, woodwinds, horns, microphones and amps and special effects electronics, tuners, stands and displays, straps, tambourines, music machines, harmonicas, pianos, basses, cellos, musical computer programs, musical gizmos of all kinds, etc. etc. etc. etc.) you will go, or send someone to, the NAMM show.  People come from all over the U.S. and Europe, of course . . . and from as far away as Tokyo, Singapore, and Guangzhou . . . to see what’s new and to place wholesale orders for the following year. The convention facility itself is as large as an airport, and it’s for music biz people, retailers, and media only; the public is not allowed.

And why am I telling you this?  Well, it has to do with the sheer size of the event, combined with the state of the music biz market . . . and my position in it.  I’m visible and interviewable.

So, every January and into February, visitors visit me before and after NAMM.

This year I had visitors from Germany, China, Japan, Korea, Alaska, and mainland U.S.  They come to visit, refresh the relationship, talk business . . . and to interview me. I gotta tellya, you’d be surprised at how many music magazines there are out there, and they’re all looking for things to feature and write about.  There are even – for the first time – music magazines in China. Their music biz is opening up to non-Chinese rhythms, instruments, and merchandise at a rapid speed.

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KOREA AND CHINA

I am beginning to be courted by guitar dealers and stores in Korea and China. I remember that thirty or so years ago my work was being discovered in Japan; it was an important period of interest, excitement, growth, expansion, recognition, etc.  Of course, the Japanese market has grown, developed, and changed remarkably in that time, and contemporary guitar makers are now known and their work is accepted easily in the marketplace.  Stores carry inventories of known luthiers’ work at prices that are commonly accepted.  There are talented young Japanese luthiers now, whereas there were hardly any when this all started.  There are also guitar shows and exhibitions and supporting media (books, music, magazines, YouTube and the internet, recorded music, etc.) which didn’t exist previously.  There are also loads of guitar performers and music; and so on.  An entire industry has grown around this.

In this time period the Japanese economy has shrunk, though.  It had its huge spurt of postwar growth, but the bubble burst in the 1990s and it’s been struggling to maintain itself since.

Growth is just beginning in China and Korea, however.  Their markets are like a giant that is beginning to wake up.  There is excitement, confusion, ferment, activity, and opportunism.  They have a class of recently-become-very-rich entrepreneurs who have benefited from their population growth and the migration of rural people to the cities where industry and tech will give them jobs . . . and the people who have been in the real estate biz have become very, very wealthy.  The new middle class has disposable income and is looking to buy expensive and exotic American goods, starting with cars. American guitars, too, are so exotic that they sell for huge prices.

Some Chinese believe that these imported instruments are very, very, very, very special and good.  Well, some of them really are.  But in China there is no prior experience against which to form reliable opinions; I heard that a Santa Cruz guitar was recently sold there for $43,000.  That’s ridiculous by our standards, because they normally sell for a fraction of that amount.  With all due respect to Santa Cruz guitars.

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In this regard, it is a bit like the Dutch tulip-mania of the 17the century.  Tulips were introduced to Europe in the 1550s from Turkey and blossomed into popularity in the 1590s as botanists noticed how well that flower thrived in those climates.

Interestingly, somehow, tulips got sucked into the world’s first recorded speculative bubble. In late 1636, at the height of tulipmania, prices rose to extraordinarily high levels and a single bulb could sell for more than ten times the annual income of a skilled craftsworker!  [Rich] people were going crazy for these things. The bubble burst in February of 1637, investors were ruined, and tulips became affordable to the common man. [For more information, see Wikipedia.]

Historically, this mania and the money that was spent in it were made possible by two things.  

The first was that the Dutch developed many of the techniques of modern finance.  They created a market for tulip bulbs by making them into durable goods; one element of this was that the practice developed of buyers (in this case florists) signing contracts before a notary to buy goods (in this case tulips) at the end of the season, at a known and agreed-upon price.  They thus were effectively creating and making futures contracts . . . as well as the phenomenon of short selling.  Then, as tulips became popular in France and other countries, and there began to be real money to be made in this flower, speculators began to enter the market.  

The second thing was the context for the first: the Dutch economy.  Holland was a colonialist power (as well as a trading and exploring one), and its Dutch East India Company was at that time the most powerful economic entity in the world.  It was creating a powerful national economy, as well as an economic aristocracy, by (among other things) draining the Indies of its resources. It did so in well-documented Robber Baron style.  The Dutch East India Company actually became the de facto government of some of the countries and provinces it did business with.  No, I’m not making that up.‘

O.K.; that’s it for this segment.  Part 2 of this narrative is coming right up.

These “what I’ve been up to” letters each take me several days to write. I keep on adding and changing things, and deciding what to include and what not to mention. I don’t really know whether this kind of material is interesting to general readers, or T.M.I., or refreshingly candid, or embarrassingly personal. Well, I figure that people can simply stop reading if this stuff doesn’t float their boat. As for me, this is simply what is going on… and it is what it is. I’ve also sent these letters out to people I actually know, because I thought they’d be interested. But, as I said, if this is T.M.I. for any of you, then by all means go watch the televised national poker championships.

In any event, I’m doing fine after I got my pacemaker installed. I took three weeks off from work and I’m back at it and getting things done — although at a less-than-frenetic schedule. And I’m in a rather interesting mental space these days, pursuant to my cardiac… ah… adventures.

I mentioned in my first letter than I had realized, to my great surprise, that I might easily have died had the heart/fainting thing gone down in any slightly different way. I could have easily been driving, for instance, and killed myself and/or someone else. Or I could have cracked my head open when I fell. Or I could have been operating a power tool and done great injury. But I didn’t die. I did suddenly feel that I could see things more with fresh eyes, and regard as a gift every day and every thing I do, every meal I eat, and every conversation I have… including writing this letter to you.

That feeling is an awesome gift, the more so because this is the first time I’d ever experienced it. I still feel it a month later, if not quite so intensely.

Also, three new things have surfaced in the past few weeks that I want to tell you about. And… it’ll take another few pages to do so. I’m sorry if I’ll seem to be going on and on… but I can’t do this in a sound-byte.

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The first new thing is that I seem to have lost my desire to eat compulsively. For the first time since I-don’t-know-when, I’m not stuffing my face. Somehow, I am losing weight without a diet, a regimen, a plan, or anything else that I can put my finger on. It’s just happening… and I’m feeling very comfortable with that. Popular thinking about compulsive eating is that it is emotionally rooted and that overeaters are in fact seeking comfort and safety that they otherwise don’t feel. I’m sure this is largely true. But, somehow, I seem to have not been feeling off-balance enough that I need to shovel in comfort food. I’ll have something more to say about this further on.

I remember that when I fainted last month I simply blacked out, with no warning. I just keeled over and, as I said, I didn’t break my head open. I woke up a minute later (they told me I was out for about a minute)… and then fell over again about ten minutes later. Ditto about the head cracking open. But something shifted in me in those episodes, and I am slowly finding that I’m now not quite the same person as the one that collapsed (even though that person and I would be superficially indistinguishable, as in in a police lineup or beauty contest).

One of the differences between the old me and the new me is that I have, for the first time, a pretty real sense that, well, yes, I was lucky in that I didn’t die… but… I will die. It has certainly made me pause.

I will die. I’m 73 years old and this circumstance is, as the saying goes, right in front of me. I’m not being morbid, by the way; I’m being candid. Do you know the feeling you had when you were in school and your teacher gave you a lesson that you learned by rote… or one of your friends told you something that you thought you understood… and then at some point it all clicked and you really understood it!? It’s like that with me. It’s as though I’ve woken up in a place where everything looks the same, but everything also looks different than it looked before. It feels weird, and it also feels completely natural.

Sorry if this is T.M.I. If it is, please stop reading and go do something else. Anyway, I repeat: I’m not being morbid. I’m calling it as I see it.

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Another thing that I’m aware of is that I have lost my impetus to work, work, work, work, and work as I’ve always done. It is at this point surprisingly effortless for me to slow down… or perhaps stop entirely… and just think. And maybe smell the flowers. I’ve ALWAYS worked six days a week and now, for the first time, I don’t want to work six days a week. I want to take time for myself. As I said, it’s just a bit new and strange. The oddest thing is that this brush with mortality hasn’t frightening me; it’s managed to make me feel appreciative and, well, liberated… in a way that I have not experience before.

Who knew about this kind of thing? And why wasn’t I informed sooner?

Well, I’m rambling. But I do think this all goes some distance in explaining my loss of interest in compulsive eating. I somehow don’t need to hide behind food. Or deaden myself with it.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

There’s something else, too: I took three weeks off from work after I got back home from the hospital. Part of that had to do with the fact that I was sore from the incisions they made. And I was tired, a lot; it took my body some time to adjust to the pacemaker. I also was feeling lightheaded whenever I stood up (the medicos call this an orthostatic episode, when blood supply to the brain is momentarily reduced), and I was nervous about falling over again. That lightheadedness has mostly gone away and I feel that I can sit down and stand like I’ve always done. [NOTE: it helps to keep well hydrated.]

Most importantly, though, I used the time to reorganize my very cluttered room, which has long served as a combination storage room and office. I got rid of a lot of stuff (astonishingly easy once I got over my initial resistance!), made space, and converted the former office into a combination den and man-cave. I bought an EXPENSIVE easy chair that is VERY comfortable (I’ve never had anything like that before), got a flat-screen t.v., and cleaned the place up so that it has become something much more inviting than it ever was before. All of this was a high time a-comin’.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

One thing that has to be mentioned, I think as background to all this, is that for a long time I have felt tired. Even drained. I think I have been approaching burnout. I haven’t taken any time off for a long time, but/and I couldn’t back away sufficiently from my life to get this feeling in focus. It is coming into focus better now, though. I think my body and soul have really needed me to get off the merry-go-round and these events have conspired to get me to do that.

It’s not easy to explain, but, mainly, I have been feeling (to me) astonishingly calm in the aftermath of all this. I mean, nothing external has really changed in my life: I still have bills to pay; Berkeley/Oakland hasn’t changed; traffic certainly hasn’t changed; I haven’t gained 30 I.Q. points or gotten plastic surgery; I still have work and chores to do… but, strange though it feels to say it and strange it may be to hear it, knowing that I’m going to die feels liberating. Who knew?

I have nothing to compare any of this with. It’s new for me. I have never even had a conversation with anyone about this kind of thing. Ever. One might say that I just seem to be o.k. living with no map, or perhaps having only a very fuzzy one. At least, for now. I might also say the same thing using different words: it’s as though I’ve been traveling on a long road and all of a sudden come to a section where the road has washed away by a flood or landslide or something like that. At present, I’m standing at the end of the old road and looking to muddle through this featureless new territory until I can find my road again on the other side. It’s interesting. And, largely, it’s free of a sense of… I don’t know… heaviness, urgency, and needing to accomplish things that I’ve been feeling for such a long time that it’s felt absolutely normal to me.

I certainly don’t know what it all means, yet. I am back at work, but at a slower pace. I have been slowing down the past few years anyway simply because I’m getting older, and as I mentioned I really have been feeling used up for a long time… but without really paying attention to it. I mean, see here now: I’ve been busy, dude! I’ve had work deadlines to attend to and responsibilities to discharge, you know?! I say again: I’m not being morbid in any of this. Rather, to put it in a yet different way, it’s sort of like getting lost on the way to work and winding up in some unknown place, and discovering a half-buried lost city. I want to tell people about it.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

The feeling of liberation seems real to me. When I fainted I remember that I suddenly felt very dizzy and just collapsed. It took literally two seconds. I realized, after I came to, that I had heard a sound of a thud at the time of my fainting. That, it turned out, was my head hitting the floor. It’s strange hearing something when I’m 95% unconscious; but it really was lights out, period. That might just have been the whole ball game, right then and there. There was no pain.

There was no light at the end of a tunnel either; everything just went black. But then again I’m a Taurus and Tauruses don’t do lights at the ends of dark tunnels.

So, anyway, right now I’m not particularly fearful of life. Or losing it. I’m accepting it as something I have not much control over. I would be disappointed if I died right now, because I wouldn’t have gotten to do all the things I would have wanted to do (such as using up all my wood stash in the making of lovely guitars) before checking out.

I’m still working all this out. More later.

Love, Ervin

I’ve been feeling angina for a few weeks now, and also feeling very tired. You probably know that angina is discomfort in the chest, normally attributed to blood flow that is insufficient to the needs of the body’s muscles; the heart is straining. I’d also been experiencing some dizzy spells. So I made an appointment to see my cardiologist in early August.

On the very next day I had two fainting spells: I just keeled over with no warning. Fortunately, I didn’t hit my head hard or break any teeth out or anything like that. I was lucky in that. 911 was called and I was taken by ambulance to the emergency room at local Summit hospital, to be checked out for what was going on with me. It speaks to my childishness that I felt embarrassed for inconveniencing the ambulance crew in this way.

Speaking of angina, by the way, you should know that there is no truth to the story that when a staffer told then-president George Bush that Dick Cheney had “acute angina”, he said that that was silly: men don’t have anginas.

In any event, to make a long story short, I spent five days in the hospital. I just got out a few days ago. I had a bunch of tests and procedures done on me while I was there. Fainting can be brought on by a number of things, but one of the things they worry about most is heart problems… which I have; you may already know that I had heart bypass surgery in 2004.

It turns out that the heart can have three main kinds of possible problems: (1) something wrong mechanically (with the heart muscle and valves), or (2) something wrong with the plumbing – that is, obstructions to blood flow — or (3) something wrong with the electrical impulses that regulate the heart’s beating. Remarkably, the heart has a different system that’s in charge of each of these different functions; knowing this makes me understand a bit better what a miraculous piece of engineering the heart is. Not only that, it is the only muscle in the body that never, ever rests. It can go on beating for a hundred years. That’s pretty impressive, really.

Parenthetically, I am impressed with how complicated it is to run a hospital. When someone like me comes in with an immediate problem the doctors have to scramble to diagnose and deal with what’s going on. They have to book access to various rooms and equipment, consult with various specialists, and to assemble the teams that will run the equipment and do the procedures – and interpret the results. Not least, someone has to schedule and coordinate all this in the face of the fact that the needed facility or equipment will likely already have been booked to deal with someone else’s not-so-urgent problems that will no doubt have been scheduled weeks previously. So between this and that and the other thing, it took three days before they were in a position to take a close diagnostic look at just what was going on with me. Until then they drew blood, took X-rays and gave me a CT scan, looked at my vitals, took bets on how long I’d last, etc.

Before I could be given either of the catheterization procedures they had planned for me, however, my heart stopped spontaneously… for 4.2 seconds. The nursing staff noted this because I was hooked up to all kinds of telemetry. I must say that doctors were grateful to me for having been helpful enough to provide them with such a major diagnostic clue; the electronic telemetry of the event solved a lot of the mystery for them. I think I heard champagne corks popping down the hall.

They rushed to bring in an E.I. specialist (that’s cardiac-electrical stuff) and gave me an electrocatheterization procedure (it’s called something else in hospitalese, but never mind that). This is when they open up a vein in the groin and insert a loooong thin wire that they snake into the heart. That wire is used to test various electrical nodes in the heart. They were able to induce another heart stoppage in a bundle of cells called the Bundle of His (named after Swiss doctor Wilhelm His who first identified it and its functions; it acts sort of like a spark plug). The reason for my fainting, it seems, was that I was experiencing episodes of my heartbeat stopping. The official medical term for this is syncope; it’s not exactly the same as a heart attack, but it’s a bad thing anyway. With no blood pumping, and the brain receiving no oxygen, one begins to function like our current president.

There are, I learned, specific “bundles” of specialized cells in the heart, that have different functions. There’s one that’s called the Widowmaker, because if it misfunctions then it’s game over; the others, they can do something about them if caught in time. They checked out my own Widowmaker and it seems to be doing well. With a name like that I expect it to hit men more than it hits women, but I’m sure it’s equally a Widowermaker. For more information on any of this, I refer you to Wikipedia.

I now have a pacemaker installed. Its function is to jump-start the heart in case it wants to take another coffee break during working hours. It is installed under my left clavicle, and that part of my body is a bit sore. The pacemaker is not large; it’s about the size of two fifty-cent pieces; and some wires go from it into both of my heart’s atria (the upper chambers). They had a representative from the company that produces these show up the next day to check that the placement, circuitry, and wiring were correctly done and that the wires were working as they should. These things can be programmed to function in various ways, to work at different speeds and settings, depending on just what kind of spark might be called for. It’s interesting to know this. And I’m instructed to not move my left arm very much, or lift it above shoulder height, for six weeks in order for the newly installed wires can… uh… blend into the flesh they’ve been inserted into. I’m not much motivated to move my arm: the incision site is quite sore. So, anyway: no more weightlifting or tennis or calisthenics for a while. I also have two newly made incisions in my groin to recover from… which is also sore.

Interestingly, I’m told that the pacemaker’s job is actually to just step in when it senses any irregularity in my heart’s electrical impulses; otherwise, if the electrical impulses are working, the pacemaker backs off and stays quiet. So, according to what they told me, the average pacemaker is inactive most of the time.

I was also given an angiogram the day after I got the catheterization; this is where they insert another catheter into the heart — once again starting at the groin — to take a look at whether there are any blockages to blood flow in the heart. If any blockages are found then a stent is introduced, to open them up (that is, if the blockages are not impossible to reach without risk of damaging something). Mainly, the doctors needed to determine whether I also had a problem (besides the electrical one) because of narrowed or blocked cardiac arteries. These can cause the electrical problems that I’d been having.

Apparently, and happily, I have no arterial blockages in my heart. That’s good news. And, according to the arcane medical taxonomy that is brought to these matters, I did not have a heart attack. I had Syncope. I think the difference is that with the latter the heart simply stops; with the former there is trauma and damage to the heart muscle. At least, potentially… depending on how quickly an intervention might occur. But there are so many other words for heart problems: ischemia, angina, fibrillation, infarct, stenosis, romantic breakups, etc. Will Shortz could probably come up with a crossword puzzle made up of only these kinds of words. But, well… none of them are exactly good news.

I might mention that my doctor was quite pleased to report that my bypass grafts, installed in 2004, were clear and unobstructed. He said that half of these things clog up again within ten or fifteen years! Wow; no one had told me that before. Well, it’s been 13 years for me and I seem to be all clear in that regard. Now, I’m simply going to be setting off airport security alarms. I hope my heart can stand the excitement.

I got home last Saturday and I’m very tired as I write this. I’ll recuperate and be back to normal, more or less, in four to six weeks. But I also am amazed at the luck that was with me in how this all came down. As I said, I fainted twice at home… and didn’t hit my head on cement; I hit it on carpeted wood flooring instead. The fainting came on without warning and without time to react. I simply collapsed. It was most fortunate that I wasn’t driving. Or crossing the street. Or up on a stepstool or ladder. Or leaning over my table saw. I could easily have killed myself and/or someone else. Things could have been so much worse.

I have to also say that I am grateful for the way the hospital nursing staff took care of me. They were kind, competent, professional, hard working, and without exception pleasant and friendly. On a chatting level, almost all the ones I met are multicultural and multilingual, and bring with them a wi i i i i i ide range of interesting life experiences. One of them, I found out by just talking with him, speaks seven languages! What an amazing bunch! If I were running the hospital I’d be giving them stock options.

Finally, having a pacemaker will add $300 to the cost of any future cremation that I might be subject to; it costs that much to remove it. If it is not removed then the oven blows up. Perhaps a burial at sea (you know; a sack and some rocks?) would be the way to go?

In any event, I intend to take it easy and recuperate for a while now. I am tired.

-Ervin

August, 2016

I celebrated my 72nd birthday last May. Wow. I remember that, in college, I imagined 45 as being old. Wow again. I am doing o.k. these days, although tangibly slowing down. I have more things to be thankful for than I do things to moan and groan about (the complete list is of the latter is available on demand, though), and more work than I can handle. Also, aside from making guitars, training apprentices, writing, and having a home life, I am spending some time thinking about end-of-life issues. I am entirely a part of nature’s cycles of life, right up there with trees, jackrabbits, octopuses, and spiders… and I am 72 years old. I think about retirement, but I doubt that I will; when people ask me about that I tell them that if I ever do retire, I’m thinking of getting Michelins.

In thinking about retirement-type matters, the one about whatever legacy I can and will leave behind comes up. That likely legacy comes in several packages. The most visible one is my professional achievements, reputation, work, and all that. The second is to watch my daughter make her way through the world; she’s a lawyer, and a competent one, and is very happy at this point in her life. Then, there are my writings and publications. And then there is my place in the world, as a human being, in real terms. Well, as a friend of mine recently quipped, he started out with nothing, and after all these years he still has most of it. One of the things I haven’t had a lot of in the past, but that I’m earnestly working on having a better grip on, is the ability to say no to others, in favor of carving some time out for myself and my personal happiness. You know… as opposed to working on other people’s projects and catering to their needs all the time. Saying “no” in the proper way is a respectable skill set that I’m only slowly and lately acquiring.

MY WORK LOAD

I mentioned that I have more than enough work to do. The main reason that I am so busy is that, as my friend quipped, I really did start with nothing and worked without ever advertising myself commercially, and then managed to have myself be “discovered” by the larger public, all within the past few years. This has happened very largely through the internet, YouTube, magazines (I seem to be interview-worthy now; where were these people earlier on when I needed them?), social media etc.

The upshot is that is now not possible for me to continue to be the semi-anonymous little old guitar maker whom only other guitar makers as well as the more discerning members of the public have heard about. I am now a point of reference for people from places all over the world, with all the correspondence, multi-tasking, and administering that entails. It’s quite a load, especially at a time in life when everyone else normally goes out and buys Michelins. Otherwise I am greying, aging, sagging, and wrinkling with world-class grace.

On the “training” front I’ve recently taken on an 18-year old intern. He’s a friend of a friend of the family and he’s taking a gap year between high school and college, with the intent of seeing something of the real world and broadening his mind. He does not intend to become a guitar maker. Otherwise, he’s a young genius, a young science-whiz who is much brighter than I am, and he’ll be a millionaire when he’s an adult. No, I am not kidding. It is an interesting experience.

AN INTERESTING PROJECT

As an example of the work that I have been doing lately, I completed an interesting guitar-making commission for a client last year… that was unique enough to make us think about filming a ten-minute long YouTube clip. The initial commission was for three guitars that were identical in every way except for the choice of topwoods – which were to be European spruce, Sitka spruce, and cedar, respectively. The project soon morphed into a something more seriously academic: a methodical exploration that was intended to pin down and document the specific tonal differences that these woods carry.

Guitarist Michael Chapdelaine was brought on board to play, and record, and be filmed, playing these guitars. He edited our initially conceived short YouTube film and released it; you can view it here. Next, the videographer we hired wanted to expand the project and is presently applying for grants funds to finance a more ambitious documentary, for public television. This may or may not happen; we’ll see. In the meantime Michael Chapdelaine, on his own initiative, put out a CD featuring these three guitars. It is titled “The Somogyi Incident” and shows off the sounds of these three woods very nicely – particularly if played through a good quality sound system. Michael plays on each of the three guitars, and identifies which guitar is used for which track, and at the end plays the same song three times over, each with one of the guitars. It’s a brilliantly thought out production that highlights the tonal possibilities of these different woods – and the do produce audible differences. I recommend it to your attention.

I am now writing the whole experience and up as a report and an analysis of the relationship between specific wood species and their tonal possibilities. I also pause and reflect that, formerly, I would have simply made the guitar (or guitars), delivered it (or them), and that would have been it. But this new kind of thing has take time, planning, coordination, and effort… and this particular project is still not completed. It may take another year.

OTHER PROJECTS IN MY BUSY LIFE

I’m also writing my next book; actually, it’s likely to be a two-volume set just like my first one. That first set was published in 2009 and was well received; it has generated an enormous quantity of correspondence, requests, calling things to my attention and giving me information that I didn’t have before, telephone calls, corrections of typos — all in response to something that I said or didn’t say or didn’t say clearly enough. So much thinking and writing and new information have come out of these discussions that I noticed that I have enough material for another book project. All in all I am beginning to feel a little bit like a celebrity. . . but without the paparazzi, the notoriety, the autograph seekers, the toned body and suntan, and certainly without the money. Maybe a couple of racy centerfolds might help. (I might mention that one of my guitar-making colleagues had the idea of a nude guitarmakers’ calendar a few years ago, and put out the word for submissions. He failed to get twelve (my own submission was unfortunately wasted), so the project was abandoned. I think it was a silly idea, right up there with, say, calendars of nude photos of politicians, defense department subcontractors, therapists, jazz musicians, podiatrists, or city councilmembers.) I might also add that writing a book — any book — is endlessly time-consuming in its own right; my first books took me 8 years to write.

The main thing I am doing these days, besides teaching and making “Somogyi guitars” as people have gotten to know them, is making guitars that carry some rather extravagant ornamentation. I seem to be attracting clients who are older, more discerning and mature, and who have some money to spend, and who want something unique that they will leave to their children… rather than to go around buying and selling and swapping guitars as is often the case. This phenomenon did not exist when I began doing this work: handmade guitars have only relatively recently become “collectable”. Also, making unusual guitars is fun.

There are no limits to the kinds of inlays and ornamentation that one can put on or into a guitar. Art is forever and infinite, and many luthiers are doing artistic work of one kind or another. Rather few are copying my own artistic style, mostly because it’s so painstakingly time-consuming. I’m including three jpegs to give you an idea of some of my new projects. They are all hand-done wood inlay and wood carving: no paint, no decals, no laser work, no shortcuts.

May, 2013

I cut my finger on my table saw, in a moment of carelessness. (Duh!) It of course happened at the end of the day, at the end of a run of cutting and slicing, and I’d allowed my mind to wander just a little bit. . .

I must say that I’m glad that I have a SawStop, which is the table saw that has an shutoff relay that kicks into action the instant a finger (or anything with a finger’s electroconductivity) comes into contact with the blade. Had I not had this tool the cut would undoubtedly have been much worse… and a life-changer for someone like me who uses his hands and fingers with precision.

The story behind the SawStop is that, a few years ago, the inventor tried to interest the commercial table saw manufacturers in making this tool; but every single one of them turned him down, citing concerns of too-great cost. So he went into business for himself. Statistically, I’m told that 30,000 fingers are lost annually to power tools. One of them might have been mine; I’m lucky to have only needed stitches. For those of you who don’t have such a table saw… do think about getting one.

There are currently reports of woodworkers suing the makers of their table saws because they did not install such a useful safety device on their machines when there is/was such technology easily available. Somehow, I’m on the side of the woodworkers on this one, caveat emptor be damned.