Thanks,

The Central Scrutinizer.

Ninety-two years ago to the day the flower of British youth was donning soup-bowl helmets and fixing bayonets to long bits of wood in a dull region of France called the Somme, before clambering out of holes in the ground to see how many pieces of hot metal they could collect in their bodies.

Their noble sacrifices on that day have enabled me, a lost toe-rag of generation No-Idea, to idle my life away doing very little in the way of work in foreign parts and squander what pitiful wealth I have gathered on other, altogether less lethal, long bits of wood.

Here they all are, resplendent in a bad 1970’s-look photograph capturing the essence of that legendary factory of audio goodness, Easter Island Studios.

Now, as in some other Pacific islands’ cargo-cults of the 1940’s, I’d like you all to bow down before the assembled deities of Fenders Telecaster, Jazzmaster, Jazz Bass and Precision Bass, Yamaha 12-string acoustic, Rickenbacker 4003, Gibson SG Standard, Epiphone Les Paul Custom and cheap 6-string Ovation copy of dubious provenance.

Guarding the rear of the temple are a pair of stern-faced Marshalls, whilst hovering in the air are Korg and Roland synths, an Akai sampler and a pair of digital recording workstations courtesy of Yamaha and Roland.

And lo, it was good.

Feast your eyes, dear readers, on the dreadful scene reproduced above, and let the full horror sink in. Oh so wrong, oh so wrong on so many levels.

Many of the principle ills of this vacuous age are shamefully on display here.

Words escape me.

And the worst of it is, I am related to the two objects on the back row, right side.

Almost certainly a female was behind the organising of this atrocity.

Nuff said.

See, it’s like this. Audio is a very personal thing. Some folks like it bassy, some like it shrill, but I strongly suspect that the majority of slack-jawed apes who don’t know jack about music wouldn’t notice the difference no matter what was clapped onto their greasy heads.

Not me, though. And therein lies the problem. Buying new earwear is very difficult, since there is no real way to assess beforehand if a pair of headphones are going to match up to my exacting criteria.

Yeah, yeah, you can try out cans in some stores, but this never really works since the store is usually very noisy and the muzak piped through is usually not something you’re used to.

But, you cry, what about the technical specifications? Aha! Good try, kind madam, but alas, this is, to all intents and purposes, useless. You can compare frequency responses and impedance till you’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t translate to what the damn things actually sound like. Two pairs of headphones with identical specs will sound different due to a whole host of factors such as materials, construction, fit, etc.

Well then, how about going online and grabbing yourself a fistful of reviews? No sir! Wrong again! For one, human beans have this annoying habit of talking up their recent purchases as a kind of justification. I mean, if you’ve just forked over $300 for a set of earphones and they turn out to be decidedly average or even indistinguishable from a cheaper model, you’re not going to trump your dumbarsed failure to the world, are you? No, you’re going to go online and spout forth about how great they are.

Secondly, how does one review sound? It’s notoriously difficult to describe in words how a pair of speakers sound. Even if you get around the audio-geek terminology, there’s still the fact that the description is going to be meaningless unless you are au fait with the other models used as comparison.

Price! You can judge how good they are by the price, right? Wrong! Exhaustive research in this area (me wasting money on multiple sets of unusable headphones) reveals that just because a pair cost more than another pair doesn’t mean that you are going to like the sound more.

So, it ll boils down to potluck, really.

Take the case of the iPod. Well, not the case, but the earphones. I’d been a staunch advocate of the stock buds over the last three years or so. They sounded alright to me, so why change them? True, when you’re on a noisy train it’s kind of difficult to make anything out without cranking the things up to ear-damaging levels of volume, and true, they are somewhat lacking in the bass department, but hey, if you’ve never heard any others, they’re fine.

Let’s take a trip back to last December. I saunter into Osaka’s Apple store and, feeling a little down, make a rash impulse buy of some new earphones. I check reviews on the ‘net on my cellphone, and stare at the technical specs on the back, knowing full well that they mean nowt, but I still go ahead and get ‘em. Hell, it’s only $50 - why not? And bugger me if these little gems don’t turn out to be just wonderful right out of the box!

Here they are now, the cheeky little German Sennheiser CX300’s…

Great sounds - good bass, but still nice ‘n’ sharp up top, and what’s more these beasts are powerful - I can hear every detail of the music on a crowded train with the volume only at around 20%. They shut out a fair bit of the background noise, too.

The only drawback being the ‘slimy‘ feel of the cables, which seem to amplify and conduct any wind or even rustling against clothes. Not show-stopping faults, though.

Well, I’d finally lucked out on the audio front. And of course I should’ve stopped there, happy as I was with the sound of the new earphones. But oh no, like a couple halfhead I was seduced by the talk of the nerds on the web, who mutter things like, ‘If you’re going to be spending $400 on an iPod, why would you then only spend a trifle on the part that matters, the part that actually translates those tunes into sounds for your listening pleasure?‘

So of I went and bought a pair of Audio Technica ATH-CK7’s for $100, universally hailed on the Interweb as high-class earphones with superlative performance….

And how are they? Shite! The moment I plugged them in I knew I had made an egregious error and that the folks on the net were deaf fools to boot. The thing that struck me immediately was the lack of power - a very weedy output requiring the volume to be cranked right up. Next, the bass. Where was it? Practically non-existent! Even worse, the flat tinny treble added a nasty sibilance to everything - yuck!

Well, knowing that it is sometimes just a matter of getting used to things, I gave them a good go for a couple of days, but they were nowhere near as good as the CX300’s, which cost half the price. Doh!

Which just goes to show that the folks on the net don’t know shite, unless perhaps they like their music thin, shrill and weedy.

And the moral of the tale? Caviar Empty, as the Romans used to say, but I prefer Confucius‘ more specific ‘The wise man pays no mind to tin-eared knobs who try to get you to buy the same crappy overpriced headphones as they’ve got.’

What’s great about this clip is how my pot-belly stands out most wonderfully from under my cheap Uniqlo shirt, not to mention the horrendous gaffe I make during the latter part of my little ‘improv‘.

Hey, at least I should get bonus points for playing music of my own devising rather than churning out AC/DC covers, which is what most YouTube folks with Gibson SG Standards are doing.

I await the torrent of abuse and dumbarsed comments from the hordes of 14 year-olds who inhabit cyberspace…

Now you might think that buying shitloads of guitars is somewhat cooler than trainspotting in that the instruments of rock are intrinsically far less anorak, but consider this: trainspotting is at least a cheap option. Aforementioned rainproof clothing item, notebook, biro, horrible hairstyle and you’re ready to go. Alright, those thick glasses might set you back a bit, but it’s still going to be cheaper than the $8,000 plus I’ve forked out over the last year for musical bits ‘n’ pieces.

Here’s the latest addition to the ardle collection, grabbed today from the Yamaha store:

Yep, it’s the Fender Jazz I’ve had my eye on for a while. Varnished maple fretboard and gorgeous amber transparent finish to the body - what a stunner!

Now all this acquisition of gear with ‘jazz‘ in the title by no means corresponds to a shift on behalf of your narrator into the beardy world of free improvisation and beats you can’t dance to, oh no. It’s just that Fender totally misnamed their instruments. The Jazzmaster guitar I bought last week in Osaka eneded up being the axe of choice for grungers and alt.rock stars the world over, and likewise, the Jazz bass is actually a brighter and punchier beast that its ostensibly rockier counterpart the Precision.

So no, I won’t be sucking on cheroots in dark basements, I will be ploughing the post-punk furrow as earnestly as I ever did.

And yes, this little purchase does mark the end of the line as far as acquiring new instruments goes.

Until I see something else that is ‘vital’ to my sound, that is…

And the worst of it is - a local Hiroshima store has a sexy Fender Jazz bass going for a song…..can I resist?????

Amazingly, although I’ve been to Kyoto dozens of times and even lived there for a while, I still found numerous new bits to explore, and the photographic proofs will be up on ardle.net just as soon as I can be arsed.

And again I find that I rather like Osaka, most probably because (a) nobody knows me there, (b) I know a secret ‘Starbucks‘ where you can always sink into a nice deep brown sofa, and (c) it has shitloads of well-stocked guitar shops.

‘Twas in the latter that I had another little wallet-emptying incident. Well, I was in the market for one of the following: a Rickenbacker 330 or 620, a semi-acoustic or something with a tremolo. No Rickenbackers showed up, which was kind of a relief in a way, since the loss of ¥220,000 tends to offend.

Next, I clapped my peepers on a browny Epiphone Casino semi-acoustic with a rare add-on Bigsby tremolo. Aha! Kill two birds with one plectrum, eh? I didn’t like the shitty colour much, but I plucked the little fellow off the stand and plugged it into a huge amp. Hmm. None too impressive tone-wise, crappy action, and the Bigsby was a big ungainly monster which quite frankly, blew.

I then noticed a red Fender Jazzmaster. Now I’m no stranger to these puppies - I’d actually used one in a real recording studio in Berlin circa 1991. It has a tremolo. It has that cool twangy Fender sound, and yet is not a cliched crappy-looking Stratocaster. It has underground music kudos, being the axe of choice of folks like J.Mascis out of Dinosaur Jnr. Only one problem - I hate those dark-wood Fender fingerboards. Now your Strat and your Tele have light varnished maple alternatives, but not your Jazzmeister.

Casting my misgivings aside, I plugged in and ran through a few licks, and blow me if I wasn’t blown away, not only by the cool grungy sounds, but by the slick and speedy neck and fingerboard! Of course I bought the darn thing immediately, dragged it to my secret Starbucks, and sat there nonchalantly sipping a Coffee Jelly Frapuccino while a whole succession of birds eyed my red instrument appreciatively.

I am speaking, of course, of the venerable old Chinese game of Go. For those of you not in the Know about Go, I will elucidate. It is a contest between two sides, viz thems that haveth the black bits and thems that don’teth. They have white. Black’s job is to try to defeat white by means of placing his bits in annoying locations on the square board, which is made up largely of squares and some empty space in between. White must try to do exactly the same, except that his bits are of a different colour. Obviously.

The great thing about Go is that there are no rules. A player may thus place his bits anywhere: on the corner, in the middle, under the table, or deep inside a large soup tureen. Bear in mind, though, that some of these moves may be disadvantageous or illegal.

A game begins with a heated debate over who gets black, since black goes first. After all acrimony regarding the outcome of these delicate negotiations has died down, black slaps down his first bit. There then follows an enormously tedious stretch of alternate bit-putting-down which ends only when it is agreed by consensus that the game can go no further or the cafe closes and forces the warring factions out onto the street.

Much has been written concerning game mechanics, but I will only mention her that the general strategy is to get one’s bits into such a configuration that they are encircling the enemy bits, although it must always be born in mind that just one twattish misplacement can result in the entire edifice upending itself so that the hunter has becomes the hunted, and it is your very own bits that are now ‘in the bag.’

At the tactical level, there are only a few basic moves: the ‘round the back‘ placement, which is very annoying, and has no known antidote; the ‘Western Front Trench Foot Deployment‘, which is only used by idiots and people who think that Go is the same game as Othello; the ‘Flip-Flop‘, which occurs when one player has not been paying much attention to the situation.

Much of this will not make sense to the non-player, I am well aware, but to bring in an analogy, try to imagine a crossword puzzle in which there are no clues and you can put any letter down anywhere. Gibberish ensues, but then suddenly you notice than you can form the word ‘discombobulate‘ across the centre. This is almost completely nothing like a game of Go.

A game of Go usually ends when it is over. There are two recognised ways of judging when this has happened: first, the gentleman’s agreement. Here, the two expert players can tell at a glance that white hasn’t got a cat in hell’s chance, usually because he has only three bits left on the board, compared to his opponent’s two hundred and thirty-seven. However, if things appear to be a bit more even, and the bits are all in strange snake-like coils, then another method is utilised. Here the two players harangue each other verbally or beat each other with rolled-up newspapers until one backs down and the other proclaims a dubious victory.

Well, the first game of the season between myself and O’Hurley resulted in the flopping out of a mildly non-victorious endgame in which a personage other than myself might possible have just scraped over the finishing line a tad sooner than me, as it were.

Last Saturday, however, an entirely different stripe of game ensued. Judge for yourself, dear reader, as you peruse the pictograph below. I am playing for the red team, and that terrible countenance bulging into view is none other than O’Hurley himself:

Yes, a clear case of victoryness for my good self, achieved by sheer bravado, three double espressos and a kamikaze attack along the Ypres salient.

Another, and slightly divergent and most certainly heretical, account of this epic battle can be found elsewhere.

Oh, and I hate Japanese gardeners. They suck. They are stinking crusty old gangs of farting coffin-dodgers who wreck everything they touch and charge you huge amounts of money for the privilege.

A few years ago I had a garden full of big beautiful trees whose name I can’t remember. Enter the gardeners. Their idea of pruning was to just lop the top off all of them. Hey! - instant ugliness and half of them died a few months later. For this great work they were paid $1000 (not by me, I hasten to add).

Last summer the shitheads return, not at my behest, of course. While I’m away in France they go about their dastardly work and once more hack up half of the trees. I am incensed upon my return. Beautiful lush trees have been pruned back to ugly stumps. “Don’t worry“, I’m told, “they will grow back.” Then why prune them?!!!!

And now guess what - not only have they not grown back, I discover that seven trees have actually died, and many others are diseased and on the way out. So I do a little research on the Interweb and find that the practice of “topping” (hacking off the top) is nowadays only the preserve of barbarians and filthy illiterate peasants, like the morons in stupid hats who butchered my botanics. It permanently disfigures trees, and sends them into shock. If they survive this, they grow abnormally and faster than ever to compensate. They also become more susceptible to disease and death. Real pruning techniques involve only thinning out the tree whilst maintaining its natural shape. Those dumb-arsed retards!

A pox on all Japanese gardeners. May they all be found strangled to death by Ents, gormless mouths stuffed full of mulch, limbs hacked off into ugly stumps.

Oh, and please take a look at my nice new pictures from my holidays over at the ‘Photos‘ section. Here’s a sneaky little preview. Have a nice day! (unless you are a Japanese gardener).