Student Affairs
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The on-line magazine about
technology and Student Affairs
Gary D. Malaney - Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst
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Stuart Brown - StudentAffairs.com
Executive Editor
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Student Affairs Gary D. Malaney - Univ. of Massachusetts Amherst Editor Stuart Brown - StudentAffairs.com |
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Appleworks, Punk Rock, and a Do-It-Yourself Guide to Electric Guitar Repair
Brian Cremins It happens every semester. In fact, it happened again just a few days ago. “Can I e-mail you my paper?” Each semester I provide the same answer for my American literature students: “No. My computer will not open any of your attachments. It refuses to. It hasn’t learned the protocols. It has issues. It’s fussy and leads a life of its own.” My students usually recoil in horror when I admit that I do not own a copy of Microsoft Word. “What are you using?” they ask. “Why, Appleworks, of course!” I proudly respond. At this point in the conversation the student usually hesitates, then asks, “Why don’t you just buy a copy of Microsoft Word?” I shouldn’t blame my students; I get the same questions and the same look of frustration from friends, colleagues, and family members. “Why doesn’t he just buy a copy of Word like the rest of us?” I have been trying to come up with an answer to this question as I prepare to send this essay to my editors, also Mac users, who will inevitably ask me, “Can’t you send us your new article in Word?” My allegiance to Appleworks and my now obsolete (though still fast and functional) slate-grey iMac can be traced directly to my years as a guitar player and, more specifically, to the first guitar I ever owned. I have always been attracted to low-end, do-it-yourself technology, which may explain my continued affection for Appleworks (what? You mean you’ve never heard of it either?!). My first guitar was not a candy-apple red Fender Stratocaster, or a TV-yellow ‘57 Les Paul Jr., or a George-Harrison-like sunburst-colored Rickenbacker 12-string. Instead, it was a red-sparkle plastic Smurfs guitar with nylon strings. It looked like a toy––in fact, it was a toy, but to me it sounded like Jimi Hendrix’s white Stratocaster. Well, at least to my boyhood imagination. First of all, let me fill in the blanks for some of our younger readers: the Smurfs were a group of fun-loving blue creatures with white hats and trousers who were very popular on American television in the early 1980s. Also popular were Smurf figurines which were traded by the boys and girls in my third-grade classroom at St. John the Evangelist School. The little creatures were ruled by the venerable Papa Smurf who, unlike his brothers, had a white beard and a red hat and trousers. Some of you may also recall Smurfette, the only female member of the community, who wore a white dress and had very long eyelashes. The Smurfs, a European import, were the subject of an endless series of products––games, comic books, mugs, plates, bedsheets. They were also featured on plastic toy guitars. Which is where my mom and I come in... In my junior year of high school I spent several months trying to convince my mother that I wanted to learn to play guitar. She was skeptical, as all moms should be. However, she suggested I find a suitable student guitar, one I could use to “learn all my chords.” She gave me five dollars and I made my way to the local toy store, where I found an aisle filled with (you guessed it) those dreaded plastic toy guitars. (Did I mention that this all happened when I was fifteen?) Then and now, five dollars will not get you very far when shopping for musical instruments. Fully aware of the possible consequences of my budgetary constraints, I politely asked one of the store clerks, “Do you guys have anything for less than twenty dollars?” I realized after I had asked the question that I had been speaking more loudly than was necessary to hide my embarrassment. The clerk, who was about my age, said, “You mean kid guitars?” “Yeah,” I said. “Kid guitars. Like, ones to learn chords on.” “You mean like a gift?” “Yeah, a gift. You know, a cheap guitar for learning songs. Nothing fancy.” This young man took his job very seriously and, leading me down an aisle as long as the 405 in Los Angeles, proudly pointed to a bright-red guitar covered with drawings of little blue Smurfs. Each of the Smurfs looked happy and content in their immaculate white hats and pants. “This one is perfect for a little kid. My sister has one,” he said. “She’s five.” I paused. “Do you have it in blue?” “Just red,” he said. “It looks real rock-n-roll, doesn’t it?” “Yeah,” I said. “My sister, uh, will love it too, I bet.” And so began an adventure in low technology which would last for the next six months. As soon as I got home I drilled a hole in the back of the guitar and found an old battery-operated microphone. I decided I would transform the toy into a working piece of punk rock machinery. I slowly peeled off most of the stickers on the face of the guitar. The Smurfs were gone, replaced now by images of my favorite bands like The Replacements and Hüsker Dü and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t practical, it wasn’t a “real” guitar. Since it had been designed for five year-old children, it was also much smaller than it should have been for my fifteen-year old hands. When I strummed an A-chord, it sounded...well, like an A-chord being played on a $5 piece of plastic. One Saturday afternoon, however, while the rest of my family were out shopping, I plugged the microphone, which was now sticking out of the back of the guitar and held in place by layers of sticky grey duct tape, into my ancient stereo system, which was about the size of a small refrigerator. The results were nothing short of miraculous. The walls of our living room shook. The guitar began feeding back on itself, and, as I moved the fingers of my left hand from fret to fret, I could hear the frequencies shifting as that little guitar struggled to keep pace. I not only played an A chord, but a D and even a G and an E. I rushed to the volume knob on the stereo and turned it up again and again until it was in the red zone and my ears were singing in tune with the speakers. In all the years since then, and in all the “real” shows I’ve played with “real” guitars, I have never again generated so much pure, beautiful, shimmering, NOISE. Minutes later, I heard my younger sister exclaim, “MAKE HIM STOP!” and I knew my family was home. This brief moment of musical bliss had passed and, like Coleridge and his vision of Kubla Khan, I would spend the next several years trying to duplicate the sounds I’d made on my beloved, though much maligned, plastic guitar. I’m stubborn and too old-fashioned for my own good. I struggle on with my Appleworks program, and I’ve even been known to play a game of Asteroids on my iMac now and then. One of these days I’m also going to track down an Atari 2600 and play a rousing game of Ms. Pac-Man or Q-Bert. You may ridicule me, as my students have, for clinging to Appleworks, but I enjoy working with it precisely because it has so many limitations, at least in comparison to Microsoft Word. Working with and around those limitations tends to bring out the best in me. This is not to say I would ever trade my candy-apple red Fender Jazzmaster for another Smurfs special, but I would never have graduated to the Jazzmaster if I hadn’t learned all those chords (and how to make all that noise) in the first place. I learned to use my imagination instead of placing all of my faith in that cheap guitar and as a result learned to think over, under, sideways, and down the problems it presented to me. So, laugh at me if you will, but, as far as I am concerned, Appleworks is very punk rock. As Emily Dickinson once said, “I dwell in possibility,” but in this modern age I also embrace limitations––my own and those of the technology I depend on everyday.
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