Nessie Notes - Tour Diary and Travel Tales: May 2005

here she is, the undoing of my monogamous relationship with mabel. my new to-be-used-in-america-guitar is the one on the right with the cutaway....nice, huh?

opinions, please, and the betrayal of mabel

hi all,
so out of curiosity, if i were to enter a songwriting competition, which of my recorded songs (that being the key word), should i enter? keeping in mind, also, that it has to be under 5 minutes long, drat it. they don't realize how verbose i can be at times. drop me a line at info@vanessapeters.com or post a comment here and let me know which song says to you "i will win a contest, darn it, or fizzle out trying!"

so i have a confession to make.

i too have been sucked in by the great beast known as EBAY. yes, even over here, thousands of miles from you all, i have been clicking away like a mad hatter, betting my dime against the dimes of others, in the hopes of obtaining a new....

guitar.

yes. i am an evil, traitorous wench. at least i feel that way. a little. because beloved as my mabel is to me, i can't bring myself to cross an ocean again with a guitar. it is just such an amazing hassle, and besides that, dangerous for the guitar. both times i have traveled with her, she has suffering life-threatening injuries, and on her most recent trip to see miracle-luthier-carlos, he informed me that if i traveled with her again across an ocean, and she came back wounded, he would refuse to fix her out of principal. and he is right. the sane thing to do would be to keep a guitar in italy and one in the states.

the only problem is that i LOVE my guitar. LOVE IT. she has suffered so many nicks and bumps and breaks and bruises and still she is shiny and lovely to me. she has a ribbon tied around her head, a testament to her most serious injury, when she was beheaded in the summer of 2004 (God, was that only a year ago?). she has been signed by sarah harmer and aimee mann. nearly every song i have ever written has been written with her help, save the first few on mirabilandia. how can i leave her behind and take up with another? it is betrayal of the highest order.

and yet, there it was. a Norman B20 HG cutaway, gleaming and glistening, hardly used. bidding was at $145 when i saw her. $145??? A mere pittance for that guitar. Mabel is a Norman B20 (the same, just no cutaway) and I think she cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $500....but I am consisently told by other guitarists that she sounds better than some Martins and Taylors that cost upwards of $1000. So to find this other Norman, nearly identical to Mabel, starting at $145 was more than I could resist. BID NOW! said the button, and so I closed my eyes, and I clicked.

and by golly, I won. Not at $145, mind you, but at $255. Not bad for a nearly-brand-new, blemish-free guitar, complete with a tuner, strap, hard case, and new strings. This new guitar will be waiting for me in the States when I arrive on May 31st. I haven't yet broken the news to Mabel that she isn't coming home with me....and that she may never again. She may become a permanent expatriate, learning to speak Italian better than English (her English is already shaky, as French-Canadian is her native tongue). I hope she will forgive me for this act of reckless internet purchasing. I swear, I did it for her own good. She could not have sustained another Rome-Amsterdam-Detroit-Houston and then Dallas-Newark-London-Bologna. Could you??

So, let me know what you think about that best-song-under5-minutes-that-I've-got thing. I'm curious to have other input...

see some of you in less than 2 weeks! tell them all i'm coming...
love
vanessa

the thing about computers

is that you just can't trust them. this simple truth i am learning all over again.

then again, it is due, in large part to my own stupidity, that *all* of the short stories i have ever written, 90% of the poems, my entire 2001 journal from the first year i spent in italy (when i wrote "mirabilandia"), the first songs i ever recorded, back before i had delusions of mini-grandeur.... all of that is no more. may it all rest in peace.

certainly, somewhere, some of this exists on paper. the songs (acoustic covers of moribund tunes like "fake plastic trees" by radiohead, "save me" by aimee mann, and various tunes by sarah mclachlan) exist on a cassette made for a boy in november of 2000. i have to say i am not sad to see those songs disappear. that boy, who is my best friend and webmaster, is also on the disorganized side, so i can rest assured that those songs have disappeared into thin air, thankfully.

the loss of all those words makes me sadder. it sounds stupid, but i feel much more comfortable writing on a computer (if you have seen how fast i type, you understand). in fact, it is quasi impossible for me to *really* concentrate while i am writing unless there is a keyboard under my fingers. of course the danger that accompanies that is that one day, your computer will go on the fritz, you will think that you have backed everything up, and you will give the go ahead to the computer repairman to reformat your hard drive, and you will not realize until long after the fact that a large majority of your files were in fact NOT on your jump drive, and have now been obliterated.

surely, in a box somewhere, i can find printed copies of the poems and short stories. the journal, no, though it maybe be on a 3.5" floppy somewhere. it is this elusive "somewhere" that is the problem. when you live between continents, and your parents are gracious enough to house your earthly possession in 20 boxes in the garage, you are hesistant to test their patience by sorting through all of that STUFF like a madwoman, papers and dust and 11th grade memories flying through the stuffy air of a garage in the summer.

still, in a certain sense, i feel a little lighter. all of those self-confessions, all of those poorly wraught turns-of-phrase, all of those shakespeare essays that probably really weren't that good.... all of that has left me, and i have a chance to rebuild my written history for those that stumble across it 50 years from now. assuming, of course, they can figure out how to work this poor ol' laptop that until yesterday was still running windows 98.

i am on the verge of some sort of major sociological discovery about what it means to be an expatriate, but that will have to wait, because it isn't fully formulated. but it is coming soon.

"pig earth" by john berger is fantastic. "the house of sand and fog" by andre dubus III was good, but goodness was it sad. "little films" will be the next vp & icom album, and, as they say, the cameras are already rolling.

words scribbled on paper, or trapped in an electronic chip of memory, or melodies etched on analog tape...where does it all go?

see you stateside folks in just a few short weeks!
vanessa