I just wanted to say that I am proud to be Indian.

Happy Independence Day India!

Jai Hind.

Women I know think it’s slightly crazy and most guys I know think its totally bad ass.   As I was starting my first cut-throat shave my wife posted on her Facebook:   “So Sid has started shaving with a straight razor. Let the countdown to widowdom begin.”  

L O L.   In reality, I’ve had a thoroughly enjoyable time learning how to shave this way.   So far I haven’t had any serious mishaps.

I first had the idea to do this about a year ago or so.   Over the last 8 years or so the price of my Gillette Atra 2 cartridges have steadily increased.  As time went on, not only did the prices go up but availability has been greatly reduced as well.  So I briefly thought about switching from the razor my dad gave me  22 years ago to one of these new-fangled Mach 3 shavers with some crazy amount of blades.  More blades do not make for a better shave. In fact, studies have shown them to push hairs back into the skin causing irritation and bumps for many men.  And cost? much more than my old Atra 2′s.    And forget about electric razors – they don’t work for me at all.  (Besides a shave without hot water just seems uncivilized.)  Around the same time, I started moving away from aerosol shaving creams and lathers.  They are cheaper, but also end up in landfills with my discarded razor cartridges.

A perfect 50/50 split of economics and going green.

After these 2 weeks I can now definitely say I am never going back to shaving with replaceable cartridges and I am getting some of the smoothest, closest shaves I’ve ever had!

First off, the best job I’ve ever had in my life came to a sudden end.  Activision shut down my studio  Underground Development.

Then we learned we had to move as our landlady just had a baby. She and her family we’re going to move back into her condo when our lease was up. We just moved last year!

If you read my last post, then you know my wife’s grandmother passed away recently.

It hasn’t been all bad though.  I’m back working on The Sims franchise at Electronic Arts.  I’ve joined a great team, and I’m an artist doing art for a living- making video games!  I am living the dream!

Finally, we’ve moved into a wonderful flat in our favorite neighborhood in San Francisco.  I love the Inner Sunset!

I’ll be back later…

I want to tell you about my relationship with Po Po.    I dated and married her oldest grand daughter.  It didn’t matter to her that I wasn’t Chinese.  Infact, a few years later she started saying that somehow an Indian would marry into the family as some sort of karmic repayment for the treatment she received from an Indian doctor in Hong Kong when she was pregnant and carrying my future mother-in-law.    On our wedding day, Po Po gave me a huge hug and a kiss on the cheek and in her broken English she said loudly “My new grandson!”  She was an amazing cook who would not let me leave her home without eating. It didn’t matter if I’d just come from a meal with my parents or if I had eaten somewhere else.   She was very sweet to me, and her generosity was beyond anything I deserved.  For awhile we would come home with 2 bags of homemade pork buns – 1 for me because she knew I didn’t like the meat as sweet as everyone else did.  Earlier this year I had a sore throat and she said I should suck on pieces of ginger. She said she’d give me some. What she gave me was a bag full of ginger the size of my fist!  These are just a few small examples.   We didn’t communicate much verbally due to language – but somehow affection and respect where transmitted.

I will never forget the generosity, acceptance, warmth and affection that showed me.  Rest in peace Po Po.

I used  ball-point, Pigma Micron 05, and Sharpie fine point  pens.  Pictured: Om, Toshiro Mifune, Hunny Bunny and some random model from the UK magazine “Continental Film Review” from the 60s. (See this and more of my work in my gallery.)

My latest digital painting. This one took about 28 hours or so. (click here for larger version)

I wanted to introduce you to the newest member of my arsenal:  My Res-O-Glas Valco Airline “JB Hutto” reproduction.  It’s angular futuristic appearance led to some players calling it the Jetsons guitar!

A few months ago I wrote about the guitar I was designing from parts. (http://mrsidslounge.com/archives/948)

Then, a few weeks ago I posted a photo of my current guitar collection.  (http://mrsidslounge.com/archives/1001)

I picked up this beauty on February 12th, and since then I’ve been playing it practically everyday.  I figured maybe it’s time to finish this story!  This is my reproduction of the classic Valco Airline  fiberglass guitar built between 1958-1968.   Valco also sold these guitars under the brand names of National and Supro.  I ordered most  of the parts online and had guitar building and repairing GENIUS Keith Holland put this together for me after I was referred to his Guitar Hospital in Los Gatos, California.

Parts:

• Res-O-Glas body kit from Guitar Kits USA (you can arrange the electronics as you see fit & use almost any neck or pickups!)
• Eastwood Airline Neck (fcustom Corian nut and frets filed down)
• Acoustic Rosewood Bridge base with roller bridge on top
• Tone Pro tuners
• Bigsby vintage-style tremolo (TP 3643-001)
• neck pickup: GFS  Power Rails Humbucker
• brigde pickup: GFS Crunchy Rails Humbucker
• electronics: 3-way pickup selector switch, coil-tapped humbucking pickups controlled by 2 push-pull volume knobs

This guitar is simply amazing!  I can play everything from Surf and Jazz to Thrash Metal.    The guitar’s fiberglass hollow body gives a rich full sound.  I play through a Line 6 digital amp modeler running through my Roland Jazz-Chorus 120 amp – allowing me to have a vast array of sounds to play with.   Tapping the neck pickup allows me to play fantastic sounding surf and rockabilly and when I’m playing Hendrix-style stuff the tone I get sounds better to me than my Stratocaster!   Using the bridge pickup alone can get me some serious hard rock and brutal heavy metal tones depending on the amp models I select.   I’m just starting to play with odd tapped and non-tapped  combinations of both pickups, but this is the first guitar I’ve owned that sounded wonderful regardless of amp or effects settings or whatever style I felt like playing.

It’s even cooler knowing this guitar is one-of-a-kind.   I might even  get around to posting some video of me playing this thing!

We’ve been in our “new” place for about 9 months or so now, and we’ve still only put up one piece of art.   Here is a giclee print of my work “The Searchers” on canvas. It is a great feeling whenever I see a piece of my digital art out in the real world.    This photo is from about 2 months ago…  yeah I  know, I need to post more often.

This is one of the few pieces of  my digital art that exists in a physical format.  You could say this is an extremely limited edition piece.  The only other one hangs in the home of my friend Mr. Jason Fanoe.

You can see this piece and more of my art here.

My Guitars (from left to right):

1. Agile Valkyrie (Gibson SG copy)
2. Agile AL-3000 “Rootbeer” (Gibson Les Paul copy)
3. Res-O-Glas Valco reproduction (custom built)
4. 2000 Gretsch 6120- Brian Setzer Signature model (1st edition)
5. 1994 Fender ’62 Reissue Stratocaster
6. 2007 SX-SJM 62

James Hetfield and the wall of green flames! *photo from Metallica's Facebook.

Last night Kristen came along with me to San Jose’s HP Pavillion, also known as the Shark Tank to see Metallica’s final show of the year.
It was a night of glorious, ear and earth-shattering, face-melting, shaking the pillars of heaven heavy metal! We missed opening band Volbeat’s set, but caught the last 3 songs by San Jose’s own Machine Head. Then after 30 minutes or so of anitcipation the lights all went down. The audience started screaming.

Then the moment we were waiting for came… Ennio Morricone’s “Ecstacy of Gold” started playing. (If you don’t know this dramatic piece of music…this is the music played before the final gunfight in the movie “The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.”) When this ended, crazy laser lights were all over the place as they played through “This Was Just Your Life” – the first track off of their latest album, Death Magnetic.

Overall, they played a set of 2 hours of music… and most of it was heavy including half  songs from Death Magnetic, songs off of Ride the Lightning, and of course fan favorites “Enter Sandman” and “Master of Puppets”. During their encore they played some cover songs by Diamond Head before ending the night by requesting that the audience be prepared to sing 3 words at the right time and for the venue’s lighting guy to turn all the house lights up so that the bad could see all of us. They then ripped into the classic “Seek and Destroy” off of their first album, Kill ‘Em All.

James Hetfield and Rob Trujillo bring the metal! *photo from Metallica's facebook page

The show was an amazing spectacle. Lights and lasers, 4 giant white coffins hanging over the stage were moving up and down, and yes, there were bursts of fire! The band has not lost their edge and sound aggressive, brutal and in my opinion HEAVIER than when they released their first album. It was an awesome night of music with many diverse groups of people coming together as one as they sang together, screamed together, and of course head banged and threw out the devil horns together! I can’t wait to see them again.

\m/

Thanks to Alan, Keith, Michael, Mark and Larry for coming out to the show with me!

Some details:
Body: Res-O-Glas fiberglass in the Valco Supro Airline style by Guitar Kits USA
Neck: Eastwood Guitars Airline reproduction
Pickups: 2 GFS Humbuckers from Guitar Fetish dot com

This axe is going to be a serious Rock ‘n Roll machine! I’m going for a modern minimalist look with only 2 knobs (volume) and a 3-way pickup selector.
Though I’m doing a modern take on this vintage design in general, I’m opting for a retro Bigsby-style tremolo system. On the electronics side of things, I’m skipping tone knobs entirely. More importantly I’m getting these humbucker pickups coil-tapped. I’ll have a wider spectrum of sounds available as I can switch from single-coil to double-coil pickup sounds on a whim.

Here’s a preview of I want this guitar to be:

Stay tuned for progress on this project…

That’s right! After skipping it last year the party is back on! Saturday October 3rd! See you there!

Recipe from the tag of a bottle of Cabo Wabo Reposado I received as a gift.