Feel like doing a Steve Vai aesthetics thread. Steve and I share the same birthday (06/06), and while I've never been a ~huge~ fan of his music personally, I admire his embodiment of his own aesthetics. At his peak (IMO), he had this interesting xeno-magick-conjurer vibe going on
First thing I would start with re: Vai is not to talk about his music, or his clothes, or his bands, or his onstage persona
I'd start by talking about the guitar he co-designed: the Ibanez JEM. It's what you might call a "super-strat", designed for pretty serious abusing
The JEM:
- 24 frets (other guitars had 22, 21 frets)
- cutaways to make it easier to reach those frets
- more pickup options
- more whammy options
watch/listen Steve talk about his thinking – he has a hacker's mindset, modifying his tools to suit him. "I really wanted..."
a thing that people argue about is the point of the Monkey Grip. It doesn't help you play the guitar any better. What's the point?
I like to think it has the same point as the handle on the iMac. It makes it more approachable. It *invites* you to pick it up. It's about intimacy
here are a couple of cute bits – first talking about the claw – the scallops under the bridge that allow the player to pull the whammy bar up (for those wild squeal guitar sounds), and then the monkey grip.
Love hearing how Rich translated Vai's vision into reality
Now let's talk about inlays! Most guitar necks have either dot inlays or block inlays. These help you visually orient yourself on the neck, to find your position.
(Some cool kids play guitars with *no* inlays, maybe to show off how well they know their way around 😂)
now check out the JEM inlays! rather than use a series of discrete dots or blocks, Vai's design has a continuous "Tree Of Life" vine that runs fluidly through the whole neck.
Call me overdramatic but I find the Tree of Life inlay inspiring! question your assumptions and priors
switching up a bit – here's the story behind the multi-ring necklace that Vai wears
I remember seeing it multiple times and vaguely thinking "there's something about that", and I think it may have informed my thinking about talismans
some of Vai's aesthetics over the years
I think it's interesting that he started out with a sort of "traditional" psychadelic and hard glam rock aesthetic before evolving over time to his more "alien willy wonka" vibe
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Obama is still the only POTUS who was born after 1946. He was the only one born after the partition of India. Gandhi's assassination. the Berlin Blockade. the coinage of the term "Big Bang". Mao's proclamation founding the PRC. the signing of NATO. the Korean War.
only POTUS born after the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1952, after Everest was summited for the first time in '53, after the Fellowship of the Ring was published in '54, after the first Disneyland opened in '55, after Elvis dropped Heartbreak Hotel in 56, Sputnik launched '57
Barbie debuted 1959
Pantyhose also debuted 1959, big year for a particular kind of pervert
Muhammad Ali wins the gold at boxing in the 1960 olympics when Biden is ~18 years old
then JFK and Nixon have the first televised presidential debate also in 1960
at almost every threshold there are a bunch of people who set up a basecamp where they discuss how to cross the threshold. some of those people do go on to cross the threshold, but those people tend to then become incomprehensible to most of those who are still in basecamp
one might say “not all thresholds”, but in the model I’m presenting here I’d argue that thresholds that are easily crossed are not real thresholds. it is useful to demarcate the thresholds at precisely the boundaries people fail to cross
often the reason for this is that the people before the threshold are operating with a set of beliefs/assumptions that are incompatible with life beyond the threshold. My instinct is to say “this maybe doesnt apply to physical things like sprinting” but then, Daniel Chambliss:
over the years I’ve found there’s a discernable “signature” to the way people are confidently wrong vs the way people are confidently right. it’s hard to pin down to any one element though. it’s discerned more ecologically. confidently wrong has a clunky bluntness to it
the wrong tend to overuse words like “only” and “never” and often get kinda needlessly aggressive. it’s like they’re trying to bully you into accepting their position. the person who knows they’re right can be more chill and is often kinda laughing about it
A complication tho,
is when the person who’s right is also anxious, for whatever reason. This *does* happen often, and idk what the % of each quadrant is altogether. Probably domain-dependent too
I have a lot of thoughts about this, as someone who both tweets a lot and likes reading books
I think for starters a lot of people do themselves a disservice by comparing their current/adult selves with their tutorial zone kid selves who read when there was little else to do
second, I think as people accumulate socialization there’s a lot of “books I should want to read, books I’m supposed to read, books I ought to read” etc which muddy up the list of books you’ll actually read, which is the books you simply want to read
third, and this is related to the first point, I think people have this mental model of reading as something you set aside hours of uninterrupted time for. lots of ppl fantasize about reading books in 1-4 sittings. But they never quite have time for that. But funnily enough,
collection of 4chan posts that are extended criticisms or analyses of something, hit me up with whatever comes to mind
1. john oliver
2. harry potter
3. guy discovers that viktor from arcane looks just like him, then discovers the amount of porn of him, thirsty fangirls of him, and realizes that it's not his looks holding him back but his personality
connected a few dots i’ve been simmering on for years now
oversimplified: one of the reasons there arent ~“simple solutions to everybody’s human problems” is that what sets off a cascade of insight for someone at one tier of wretchedness can worsen things for someone below
the recent prevalence of the phrase “skill issue” is a useful example to gesture at. it’s a scissor that can cleave a peviously nebulous group into camps of people who feel energized and people who feel demoralized by it
for private individuals, this is basically a good thing. ish. mostly. sorta. you want to be at least mildly polarizing enough that the social reality around you rearranges itself to suit you.
or rather, we cant escape or avoid this. it’s always happening! similar pattern as: