Free steak for the free-spirited

The other night, I took my wife out for her birthday. It was a very special occasion, because we get so few opportunities to go out for a nice dinner. We went to her favorite restaurant, which is a very expensive steak place with all of the entrapments of fine dining. The restaurant featured a well-attired wait staff who could recite the specials as if they were reading from a teleprompter and help you to make informed choices about the best wine to compliment your meal.

Though I’m not an uppity fellow, good service is a luxury I do enjoy. Actually, I don’t think it’s good service as much as it is that I enjoy seeing anyone take a time-honored charade seriously. I know very well that the waiters in these places are just regular guys like everyone else, but at night they assume the role of passionate servers. It’s a lot like going to the theatre.

We arrived earlier than our reservation time, but they seated us immediately since we had arrived before the evening rush. We exchanged pleasantries with the “cast” and ordered steaks. The meal was going very well. The room was quieter than I expected for a Friday night, which added to the experience. Our waiter returned to our table regularly to ask if we needed anything else. He refilled my Pellegrino several times without my even asking.

Near the end of the main course, I was involved in an interesting discussion with my wife when a shifty-looking character in a slick suit approached our table. In the dim light of the dining room, I could tell that his hair had the “wet look.” He leaned on an empty chair next to me and said, “Good evening, ladies!”

I looked over at the man, whose face immediately sunk. He was clearly mortified and delivered an apology that reflected more mortification than regret.

I’ve been through this several times in my life. Women, hairdressers mostly, often compliment me on how beautiful my hair is. It’s odd, but I’m always polite. I never take offense. I know as well as my wife does that I don’t look like a woman. I don’t dress like a woman, nor do I conduct myself as such. I often wonder about people careless enough to say “ladies.” I think they like the idea of saying “ladies.” They like the sound of it. It helps with the act. Theatre has a rhythm. Over the years, easily a dozen waiters have made the same mistake, looking only at my hair and continuing with the charade only to be shocked when I look at them. I’ve learned to play it well, because handled correctly, you become the boss. I’ve gotten free deserts a number of times. But that’s when it happens in a diner. It never happened to me in an expensive place. This was going to be good. I immediately assumed my reserved inquisitive tone. This is the one that conveys more curiosity than emotional reaction. Perhaps that what makes it so unnerving. Maybe I’ll never know.

“Excuse me, kind sir, but have you ever seen a woman with shoulders like mine?” (They are quite broad.)

The slippery guy tittered nervously, toying with the idea of digging himself in deeper by further abandoning his “role” and claiming that some of the women that come in this place…

“How about a woman with this much hair on her arms?”

The apologies started again. He was starting to lose his composure. It occurred to me that I still had more to do. He had unmistakably and irrevocably broken the “fourth wall” in this little piece of theatre, but now I could refuse to drop my role and carry on. This person had not identified himself and wore no name tag. It was like a game of chess in which he had inadvertently left a clear path to his queen.

“And who are you, exactly?” I asked. I was curious, but not irate. After all, wasn’t I just having an expensive dinner with my wife when I was disturbed by this oafish stranger?

The face of the man sank ever further and he almost mumbled. “I’m the manager…” and trailed off.

More apologies came and he soon skulked away.

My wife was entertained, but pensive. I told her that the incubation period had begun. Right about then, they were regrouping, trying to figure out how to repair the apparent damage. I told her that we could almost certainly parlay this into free desert. Our waiter returned with the desert menu and he apologized for his boss again. We ordered and then my wife noticed that a hostess had strolled by our table, looked at her and then jotted something down. She figured it was the table number. The waiter brought desert and informed us that the desert would be on the house. Nice.

Later, I asked for the check. When the waiter returned with the check, he informed us that our steaks would also be complimentary. Incredible. He apologized for the “confusion.” I examined the check. The bill had come to slightly over $150. With all of the comps, which included $80 worth of steak, the total bill was $67 and change.

It was good for us, what with Christmas and all. We really needed the price break. Everything your mother told you about your long hair was actually untrue. If you are free-spirited, you could even get free steak. Just keep your mouth shut. The less you say, the more they think you’re about to boil over. It’s a wonderful piece of theatre, if you’re into that sort of thing.

St. Paul and Guitar Hero

I’m not a video game guy. I know many adults, all men, who spend an inordinate amount of time playing them. They get into it with a fascination I remember having for Atari 2600 when I was eleven, only with a more obsessive approach. When I was eleven, I didn’t have a salary that would buy me any game I wanted, nor did I play for eight hours a day like some kids I knew. Some of the grown men I know who indulge in video games seem so sad to me. They squander years of their lives with it, wasting away in virtual worlds, preferring to atrophy in the one in which they live. They have few strong relationships and seem to surround themselves with enough juvenile distractions to keep them from really looking themselves in the eye. It isn’t that I necessarily believe myself to be superior, since we all have our shortcomings, but I’m honestly glad I’m not one of them.

The latest game that some of my friends have embraced is one that many of them thought I would enjoy. It’s called Guitar Hero. You get to play this game, which is loaded with classic rock tunes, and pretend you’re playing guitar for points. I don’t know any more about the details, but it has been expanded to other instruments as well. They sell these plastic guitars that are used as controllers for the game. I saw a television commercial with a guy and his little toy fake guitar surrounded by chicks. (Trust me, chicks don’t even necessarily go for guys who really play guitar, let alone the sad little guys that pretend to…) As a guitar player, I have only one word for the whole thing. Lame. It’s just so lame. I spent a lot of time learning to play a number of instruments. Spending my leisure time doing the hi-tech equivalent of strumming a tennis racket like a five year old would be enough to give me pause about my life. It’s just so lame. I don’t see the value in perpetual adolescence, but our culture tends to encourage it. It sure makes some people a lot of bread. I think it has led to a generation of men who are very nearly spiritually bereft. It’s their own fault, since everyone has to decide what to do with his life, but it’s so awful to watch. There’s no power consumer quite like a complacent and spiritually bereft power consumer. How ugly.

I’m reminded of that bit Saint Paul wrote in Corinthians, which Todd Rundgren paraphrased in his lyric for “Real Man.”

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things.”

I think Paul was onto something, but it wasn’t the true nature of man, at least not the true nature of man bereft of spirit.

In the earliest days of radio, someone got around to wondering how they were gonna pay for all of the programming they wanted to produce, if everyone could just tune in and listen for free. Someone had the idea of producing a commercial. It was here in New York. The commercial was for an appliance of some sort, I believe. The day after the commercial aired, orders and demand for the appliance exploded and the company couldn’t keep up. Soon everyone got in on the commercial idea and our system of commercial broadcast media was born. The inevitable saturation occurred and making your product stand out became more important than ever. The marketing approach that still applies developed. I don’t know who the quote was from, but it went something like this: Don’t sell them your product. Sell them their hopes, their dreams and their fears and they’ll buy whatever it is you’re selling.

Is anything more perfect than Guitar Hero to illustrate this point? You can pretend to be the star you’ll never be. You don’t even have to learn the guitar. You can pretend and even gain the accolades of your friends if you do well at the game. It’s brilliant and apocalyptic in an Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, rat-in-a-maze sort of way.

If you look at it like that…

But I don’t. Originally, I was repulsed by the idea of Guitar Hero. As a musician, I found it to be stupid, juvenile and like I said before, lame. I’ve discovered however, that it wasn’t my musicianship that was driving that impression at all. It was the personality trait that brought me to learn how to play guitar in the first place. I’m a dreamer. I poured my heart into something I believed in when I learned how to play an instrument, myself. It felt good to be able to make those sounds. When I played the bass or guitar, I felt unmistakably that it was what I was born to do and that I had been given a special gift. I wanted to be a star too. Still do. But no matter how well my records sell, I know myself and my life is richer for it.

Making music is something so wonderfully human. Requiring both the right and left sides of the brain to work together, playing music can tap the full essence of human potential. Maybe that’s why it makes me feel so alive. No video game can give you that. The way I see it, it can only take it away. No video game company can ever sell that to me. No one, I mean no one, gets to mess with that corner of my heart.

But Guitar Hero isn’t about music. It just amplifies the fantasy of rock stardom as an archetype. Guitar Hero isn’t the end of civilization or modern musicianship. Anyone I knew who picked up a guitar just to be a star never ended up playing very well anyway. The music, even though it’s been moved off the radio and handed to independent artists as an underground art, is safe. Guitar Hero has just made our musicians’ club even more exclusive. Maybe one day, music will come back to the forefront and a slightly wiser people will know the difference between musicianship and stardom. Who knows? It’s possible then that musicianship and stardom will actually cross paths again. Or not. I think both scenarios have their place.

chrispreston.com and newaquarius.org

I’ve been trying lately to reconcile the existence of my two websites, which are chrispreston.com and newaquarius.org. The former is one that I’ve mostly used for my musical identity, for lack of a better description. For some reason I’ve always felt

I've decided to make my sites point to each other. It's just me, so why not simplify things for now?

The first thing I'm doing as part of this merger of my sites, is to make New Aquarius recordings available by download or on CD by mail order right here on my site. I’m really excited about that. Up until now, I’ve been relying on various companies to sell my music. Over time, it’s become expensive and a little exploitive. Most importantly, it’s starting to feel wrong being associated with them. I’m infatuated with the idea of music being distributed artist to audience. It’s time has come, I think. In a world where recorded music has become questionable commodity because of its industry, it’s nice to be able to work outside of the industry proper.

I hope to open a discussion forum about New Aquarius recordings and music as well as New Aquarian ideas. Who knows what else? The challenge will be to do all of that and still make more music. I’m optimistic.