Burn This Disco Out
Fender Malibu
Originally uploaded by Ghostly Penguin Display. A few days ago we watched a movie called The Guitar.
It's one of those "X # of days to live" plots, in which a woman finds out she has cancer and only has 1 month left. She goes on a spending spree, renting a huge apartment (which she intends to die in before the rent comes due), ordering every expensive piece of furniture and clothing thing she can think of and eating massive quantities of lavish food (although she never seems to gain any weight). The only thing that she really wants though, is the red guitar that she saw in a store window when she was a little kid. She tracks down an identical model and spends the last month of her life locked in her expensive apartment learning to play her beloved guitar. But wait, she starts getting pretty good and can't believe that she learned so much in a month. She consults with the outside world and finds out that she has been locked away for THREE months, so she decides to go see her doctor (who is Janeane Garofalo) and ask her why she isn't dead yet. It turns out that her cancer is magically gone and she has a long life ahead of her. This is great news, and also kind of bad because she gets kicked out of her apartment for not paying rent and she's now living on the streets with no job, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. On top of that she is having an affair with a pizza delivery woman whose husband is in the mafia and another affair with a furniture delivery man who has a wife and child. She has to sell all of her possessions except, you guessed it, the red guitar.
It may seem like an ambiguous tale, but clearly the moral is "if you see a guitar you like you should just buy it because it will make you happy and possibly cure your cancer." This is a roundabout way of saying check out my new guitar! It's a Fender Malibu, an updated version of the old surfin' beach guitar, now with electronics and a built in tuner. I fell in love with it immediately, with its scaled down size, Strat headstock, white tuning pegs and rectangular fret inlays. I've never seen such a cool acoustic guitar.
I didn't stop there though. I also got myself a new bass. It's a real Hofner, not a knockoff like my other one. And it's green!! Technically it didn't really cost me anything. I traded in my 1970s Rickenbacker 6 string for store credit and it was exactly enough to cover the Hofner.
Even more impressive is Karla's new electric tenor jazz uke. We're going major, and all because of a cheesy movie that no one has ever heard of.