A short story about pedals.
Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2010 2:19 pm
A parody/derivative work extracted after my reading of the first chapter of Italo Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler.
I couldn't help but envision the passage being written about our/my obsession with pedals.
If on a winter's night a guitarist
So, you noticed on the internet that the Perseus fuzz had appeared, the new pedal by Catalinbread, who hadn’t released a new pedal in at least several days.
You went to the shop and bought the pedal. Good for you.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover of the pedal you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Pedals You Haven’t Played, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Pedals You Needn’t Play, the Pedals Made For Purposes Other Than Playing Music, Pedals Played Even Before You Plug Them In Since They Belong To The Category Of Pedals Played Before Being Heard. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Pedals That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Play But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Pedals You Mean To Play But There Are Others You Must Play First, the Pedals Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, The Pedals ditto When They Are Made In China, Pedals You Can Borrow From Somebody, Pedals That Everybody’s Played So It’s As If You Had Played Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Pedals You’ve Been Planning To Play For Ages,
the Pedals You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Pedals Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Pedals You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Pedals You Could Put Aside Maybe To Play This Summer,
the Pedals You Need To Go With Other Pedals On Your Shelves,
the Pedals That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Now You have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Pedals Played Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Replay and the Pedals You’ve Always Pretended To Have Played And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Play Them.
With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Pedals Whose Builder Or Effect Type Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Pedals By Builder Or Of Effect Types Not New (for you or in general) and New Pedals By Builders Or Of Effect Types Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).
You cast another bewildered look at the pedals around you (or, rather: it was the pedals that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.
You derive a special pleasure from a just-manufactured pedal, and it isn’t the only pedal you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object from the factory, the youthful bloom of new pedals, which lasts until the lexan faceplate begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the chipped top edge, until the pot shafts become bent, in the rapid autumn of Guitar Center’s used section. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which having been new once, will continue to be so. Having playing the freshly manufactured pedal, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You never can tell. Let’s see how it begins.
Perhaps you started leafing through the manual already in the shop. Or were you unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of antistatic packaging? Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm, and you begin undoing the package with your free hand, making movements something like a monkey, a monkey who wants to peel a banana and at the same time cling to the bough. Watch out, you’re elbowing your neighbors; apologize, at least.
Or perhaps the retailer didn’t box the pedal; he gave it to you in a USPS Priority Mail envelope. This simplifies matters. You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the pedal out of the envelope, rip out the manual and start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you; the light is green, you’re blocking traffic.
You are at your desk, you have set the pedal among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift a file and you find the pedal before your eyes, you open the enclosure absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the circuit of the pedal. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the pedal to the level of your nose, you tilt the chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it, the position of the feet during pedal sniffing is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited.
But doesn’t this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect, that is, not for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the pedal. Worse still if you belong---willingly or unwillingly---to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the pedal you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed.
In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the pedal at home. Now. Yes, you are in your room, calm; you examine the first control of the pedal, no, to the lost control, first you want to see how complex it is. It’s not too complex, fortunately. Complex pedals designed today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, you cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the pedals of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no mare than a hundred years.
You turn the package over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the box, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the pedal itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the pedal, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the pedal, too, this playing around it before playing inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new pedal, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the playing of the pedal.
So here you are now, ready to attack the first notes of your first jam. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the builder. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this builder had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as a builder who changes greatly from one pedal to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has built, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let’s see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. But then you go on and you realize that the pedal is playable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the builder, it’s the pedal in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.
I couldn't help but envision the passage being written about our/my obsession with pedals.
If on a winter's night a guitarist
So, you noticed on the internet that the Perseus fuzz had appeared, the new pedal by Catalinbread, who hadn’t released a new pedal in at least several days.
You went to the shop and bought the pedal. Good for you.
In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover of the pedal you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Pedals You Haven’t Played, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Pedals You Needn’t Play, the Pedals Made For Purposes Other Than Playing Music, Pedals Played Even Before You Plug Them In Since They Belong To The Category Of Pedals Played Before Being Heard. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Pedals That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Play But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Pedals You Mean To Play But There Are Others You Must Play First, the Pedals Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, The Pedals ditto When They Are Made In China, Pedals You Can Borrow From Somebody, Pedals That Everybody’s Played So It’s As If You Had Played Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Pedals You’ve Been Planning To Play For Ages,
the Pedals You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Pedals Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Pedals You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Pedals You Could Put Aside Maybe To Play This Summer,
the Pedals You Need To Go With Other Pedals On Your Shelves,
the Pedals That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
Now You have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Pedals Played Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Replay and the Pedals You’ve Always Pretended To Have Played And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Play Them.
With a zigzag dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Pedals Whose Builder Or Effect Type Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New Pedals By Builder Or Of Effect Types Not New (for you or in general) and New Pedals By Builders Or Of Effect Types Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new).
You cast another bewildered look at the pedals around you (or, rather: it was the pedals that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went.
You derive a special pleasure from a just-manufactured pedal, and it isn’t the only pedal you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object from the factory, the youthful bloom of new pedals, which lasts until the lexan faceplate begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the chipped top edge, until the pot shafts become bent, in the rapid autumn of Guitar Center’s used section. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which having been new once, will continue to be so. Having playing the freshly manufactured pedal, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue it, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You never can tell. Let’s see how it begins.
Perhaps you started leafing through the manual already in the shop. Or were you unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of antistatic packaging? Now you are on the bus, standing in the crowd, hanging from a strap by your arm, and you begin undoing the package with your free hand, making movements something like a monkey, a monkey who wants to peel a banana and at the same time cling to the bough. Watch out, you’re elbowing your neighbors; apologize, at least.
Or perhaps the retailer didn’t box the pedal; he gave it to you in a USPS Priority Mail envelope. This simplifies matters. You are at the wheel of your car, waiting at a traffic light, you take the pedal out of the envelope, rip out the manual and start reading the first lines. A storm of honking breaks over you; the light is green, you’re blocking traffic.
You are at your desk, you have set the pedal among your business papers as if by chance; at a certain moment you shift a file and you find the pedal before your eyes, you open the enclosure absently, you rest your elbows on the desk, you rest your temples against your hands, curled into fists, you seem to be concentrating on an examination of the papers and instead you are exploring the circuit of the pedal. Gradually you settle back in the chair, you raise the pedal to the level of your nose, you tilt the chair, poised on its rear legs, you pull out a side drawer of the desk to prop your feet on it, the position of the feet during pedal sniffing is of maximum importance, you stretch your legs out on the top of the desk, on the files to be expedited.
But doesn’t this seem to show a lack of respect? Of respect, that is, not for your job (nobody claims to pass judgment on your professional capacities: we assume that your duties are a normal element in the system of unproductive activities that occupies such a large part of the national and international economy), but for the pedal. Worse still if you belong---willingly or unwillingly---to the number of those for whom working means really working, performing, whether deliberately or without premeditation, something necessary or at least not useless for others as well as for oneself; then the pedal you have brought with you to your place of employment like a kind of amulet or talisman exposes you to intermittent temptations, a few seconds at a time subtracted from the principal object of your attention, whether it is the perforations of electronic cards, the burners of a kitchen stove, the controls of a bulldozer, a patient stretched out on the operating table with his guts exposed.
In other words, it’s better for you to restrain your impatience and wait to open the pedal at home. Now. Yes, you are in your room, calm; you examine the first control of the pedal, no, to the lost control, first you want to see how complex it is. It’s not too complex, fortunately. Complex pedals designed today are perhaps a contradiction: the dimension of time has been shattered, you cannot love or think except in fragments of time each of which goes off along its own trajectory and immediately disappears. We can rediscover the continuity of time only in the pedals of that period when time no longer seemed stopped and did not yet seem to have exploded, a period that lasted no mare than a hundred years.
You turn the package over in your hands, you scan the sentences on the back of the box, generic phrases that don’t say a great deal. So much the better, there is no message that indiscreetly outshouts the message that the pedal itself must communicate directly, that you must extract from the pedal, however much or little it may be. Of course, this circling of the pedal, too, this playing around it before playing inside it, is a part of the pleasure in a new pedal, but like all preliminary pleasures, it has its optimal duration if you want it to serve as a thrust toward the more substantial pleasure of the consummation of the act, namely the playing of the pedal.
So here you are now, ready to attack the first notes of your first jam. You prepare to recognize the unmistakable tone of the builder. No. You don’t recognize it at all. But now that you think about it, who ever said this builder had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as a builder who changes greatly from one pedal to the next. And in these very changes you recognize him as himself. Here, however, he seems to have absolutely no connection with all the rest he has built, at least as far as you can recall. Are you disappointed? Let’s see. Perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. But then you go on and you realize that the pedal is playable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the builder, it’s the pedal in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.
That was an awesome read...I'm impressed! 
There should be an applause smiley 