kevin murphy

Hello.  Kevin here.  I'm not available at the moment, but if you need to reach me, I'll be here.  

That may not be easy, though.  Neither 3 nor 4G up here.  No broadband, phone in the cabin doesn't work. The only bars around here have Miller on tap. Tell you what though,  I'll get back to you just as soon as I return.

 Can't say when that might be.

A couple of weeks ago, first in Chicago and then in Minneapolis, I got to do one of the things I quite love, to sing onstage and make an ass of myself at the same time. This time it was with with my Rifftrax cohort Bill Corbett, as part of the growing W00tstock Nation.  

To share the stage with these gentlemen above, the W00tstock Four - Paul Sabourin, Adam Savage, Wil Wheaton Storm DiCostanzo, well was about as much fun as you can have on a stage.  The audience came to laugh, and did so consistently for hours.  Laughing with the ever-growing W00tstock Army, people  like John Scalzi, Molly Lewis, My old cohorts Bill and Trace, Peter Sagal, Tim Cavanaugh, Bill Amend, Tim Bedore, Len Peralta, Jason Finn.  I mean what the hell am I doing up there?

Easy.  I was up there to have a good time, hopefully help you have a good time, meet all these people, act like an ass in front of a crowd primed to have a good time.  

Backstage was just as much fun, but in a way I didn't expect.  I ought to have expected to see Adam Savage comparing physics notes on superhero powers with physics professor Jim Kakalios, who gives a hell of an entertaining lecture on that very subject. I ought to have expected to see Neil Gaiman hanging out backstage not merely for his closing number cameo, but for the whole four-plus hours of the Minneapolis show, simply because he likes these people.   I certainly didn't expect to close down Grumpy's Bar with drummer Jason Finn.

That's Bill Corbett, Paul and Storm and I singing Bill's ode to Admiral Ackbar, "It's a Trap."  

I might have expected at least one or two of these folks to act like prima donnas, but no.  Gracious to the last, bearing far more social skills than one might expect from the stilted stereotype of a geek or a nerd.  No, see I've been to show-biz soirées and tony book shows and encountered various degrees of asshole, people who are so bad at simply being nice they no longer pretend to be.  It's one of the reasons I ran screaming from the TV business.  

But these guys?  These W00tstockers?  The word avuncular was designed for them.  Gentle folk all, whose only motivation to be there was to make a good time better.  And not a clunker in the lineup. And I thank them all, because they agreed to do this:

This will be the second post in a row in which I've mentioned Rosanne Cash, but I have my reasons. This post concerns a guitar, her guitar, a pre-war Martin, stolen in 1979.

How the hell would I know?  Why should I care? Because I use Twitter.  I'm a twitterer.  It helps my business and encourages compact, no-bullshit prose.  The personal benefit is that it entertains me, and I get a small peek into the lives of some people whose work I've admired and enjoyed for years. One of those people is Rosanne Cash, a woman who has transcended the mantle of family talent and fused for me the meaning of a true crossover artist. Lady can rock, but she can also croon, swing, kick back.

If there's any theme I've gleaned from listening to her music over the years, it's Rosanne's inherent ability to face sadness.  That theme hit me like the surf last Friday when I read this:

Thanks SO much to everyone who RT'd the specs on my stolen guitar. Once more, just to get it out there far and wide: http://bit.ly/9BQqa0 

Which led to a page at the Stolen Guitar Registry.  Here you'll find a description of the guitar - a 1942 Martin D-28 herringbone.  Rosanne has offered a thousand dollar reward for it.  Now stolen guitars make it far and wide,around the globe, through pawn shops, flea markets, online exchanges, all the usual ways purloined goods are trafficked. But this guitar, a pre-war Martin D-28, the same model used by the likes of George Jones, Hank Williams, Elvis on up to Steven Stills and Neil Young.  Paul McCartney wrote Blackbird on his.  This is a wanted guitar, and no doubt Rosanne's instrument has been sold and resold and has traveled like a gypsy to wherever it might be now.

But here's what hit me, the description line:

1940's era Herringbone D-28, in case. Stolen off the curb at LAX, April 1979. Note in sound hole "To my daughter, Rosanne, love, Dad. Johnny Cash"

Damn.  It's a short story.  It's a song lyric.  It's a found photograph. It's heartbreaking, devastating, true, timeless, worn in, lived. And the guitar, a wanted instrument, becomes something from the Empyrean, whose value to its owner contains the meaning of "priceless", and whose possession by anyone else can only be understood as cowardice, and whose return would be an act of sincere compassion. 

And here's why it hit me: My own dad died in 1992, and ten years before that after I'd reached a certain milestone in my life, he'd bought me a Gibson F5 mandolin,an icon in its own right, which I still own and play and will never, ever sell, so don't ask. If it was stolen, it would break my heart, and I don't know if I could ever let it rest.   There's a bit of my dad that lives in that instrument, resonates when I play it, at least for me.

So my first reaction to Rosanne's Stolen Guitar Description was to pick up my mando and croak out a tune to the words.  Before I finished a verse I realized that I would not be the one to do this.  It could only be Rosanne. The words belong to her, the guitar belongs to her, but what the guitar means to her belongs to the infinite heart of the world.  

Think of the story these words unmask. Imagine what kind of journey that guitar has taken.  Immediately my mind bounces to Johnny's song "Tennessee Flat-top Box" and how good it would sound coming out of this guitar.  And the imagery - I mean, if your Dad was actually in your guitar, even in an inscription, the meaning and the emotion of the thing would pour out of it and become part of the tone.  

You know that tone.  You've heard the D-28 sound and never known it as such.  It's out there, backbone of some of your favorite songs, but now it's different, there's an ancient connection, father and daughter, that lives in the wood of this thing. The D-28 Martin will never mean the same thing to you now.  It's an angels' harp in a beat-up case. 

So I imagine a song, and the song I imagine starts with that description on the Stolen Guitar Registry, and ends when the guitar comes back home.  Or doesn't.  See, in a song it doesn't matter.  Joy and pain walk arm in arm in a song, and so Rosanne, having told us about it, gives it to us, and hopefully receives something in return.

I truly hope that you get your old Martin back, Rosanne.  But either way, if you haven't already, think about writing that song...

-kwm

Photo by Alex Brown. http://alexbrownphotography.com/

SAD LUNCH
By Kevin Murphy 

Based on a series of tweets sent April 1, 2010.

Had lunch with Joyce Carol Oates - sliced bitter heart on stale rye, with raddichio slaw, served on an obituary page. I drank unsweetened cranberry juice, she had wine mixed with myrrh. Dessert was a warm brownie made of dryer lint and cigarette butts. It fell on the floor. We ate it anyway. 

I offered to pick up the check. She heated the butter knife with the candle and burned me with it.

We parted ways, I took a taxi. Cabbie said, "Where to?" I said "Away from all this misery" then I threw up in the ash tray. When I got home, I looked in my doggie bag. it was filled with the salt of human tears. Oates had switched bags on me again. 

The End.

# # # 

Notes on "Sad Lunch" by Kevin Murphy

This morning I noticed that Rosanne Cash, who I follow on Twitter, had written that she needed a good cry, and a reason to have one.  Soon after, Rosanne wrote that now she'd been plagued with enough heartbreaking stories to make her want to slit her wrists, and that her well-meaning followers should knock it the Hell off. Since I always assume that humor is a way to navigate sadness, I tweeted her thusly:

@rosannecash You want sad, you should see the lunch I have

To which Rosanne replied,

@kwmurphy Haa.

Apparently I had succeeded.  At least she didn't block me.  But then I remembered that some days before, my friend Veronica Belmont had written of sadness:

Life's too short for my lunch to make me this sad.

To which I had replied 

@veronica "Sad Lunch" is the name of my post-Cyberpunk short story collection. 

To which Veronica replied that she'd like to write the foreword. Which was all so very wonderful and flattering, to have an internet icon and one of my musical heroes appreciate a joke at a time when perhaps they needed one.  So by abstraction, keeping in mind that humor is a way through sadness, I set out to write the most ludicrously depressing set of Twitter vignettes I cold imagine on this day, this extraordinarily fine April First in Minnesota.  

My mind as always shot back to the writing room at MST3K, where funny seemed to be in the air conditioning, and sadness was kept at bay during working hours. Mary Jo Pehl, I believe, had been reading some Joyce Carol Oates, that prolific and, well, even more prolific short story writer.  I've never taken to her.  I don't find her funny.  Oates, I mean, not Pehl.  MJ brought up the title of one of Oates' stories, "Because it is Bitter and Because it is My Heart." The context seemed to be in part wondering how she could know what her heart tastes like.  This might have led to the subject of lunch, a subject that was never far from our lips.  So in writing this dumb little assemblage of tweets, I have done so with compassion for the sad, and with fond memories of people who made me funnier that I ever could on my own.  

-kwm

 My thanks to Alex Brown for giving me permission to use her wonderful photograph.  Find her work here.

Please pay attention, this is for your benefit.

If Paul Hogan taught us anything about survival in the outback or on the city streets, he certainly demonstrated that the ability to discern a knife from other, less useful and possibly extraneous objects is crucial.  

Sure you laugh now, until you find yourself trapped in a canyon by a bloodthirsty koala and all you have going for you is an under-ripe piece of tropical fruit.

This stuff may seem elemental, but you'd be surprised how many Americans, Europeans and even Asians find it difficult to distinguish weaponry from footwear. 

I know.  I was thrown when I first saw it too.  Absolutely gob-smacked.  All this time I could have mistakenly had a prominent American cleric strapped to my waist.

This entry was provided as a public service.  Please, before traveling anywhere, be sure you know how to recognize a knife from a member of the mustelid family. No matter how cute it is, it will do you no good in defending yourself from kerchief-wearing eighties street toughs.  

All right then, we can all rest soundly tonight.  You're welcome. 

Special thanks to those of you who corrected my taxonomy of the ferret.