The Author: Changes Around Here

You might have noticed the name change of the blog and the business -- along with the color scheme taken from the original source for "my" logo -- an Oahu "The Guitarist" rag from 1941. The business name hasn't really changed: I've been doing business dollar-wise under my own name almost the entire time I've been doing this.

The real change is that I want to divorce myself from the antebellum moniker. I started using it when I was doing most of my business as a lark back on Dear Old eBay and wondering if the job would stay put. It has, so I've wanted to take the leap forward for a long time. The antebellum bit started as a Latin reader's joke -- it literally means pre-war. I was working mostly on pre-'40s instruments. I didn't think it'd stick and in this particular era and its continuing troubles I don't want anyone to mistake it as anything other than a label I used for instruments. For those not in-the-history-know, outside of this rarified world, antebellum has a totally different connotation.

Before second grade I was living in Los Angeles and going to a magnet school. It was diverse -- kids of all stripes and backgrounds -- just like the city itself. Star Wars geeks were mixed with lowriders, Hammer pants, movie cowboys, mariachi bands and the whole garbled history of various waves of Asian cultural immigration. I was mixed-up in culture and food from all over the place. My mother is an anthropologist, for goodness sake. I was dragged around the country (and often outside of it) as a kid and peoples' customs begin to blend into a deliriously-rich panorama of odd folk tales and half-remembered stories as you get accustomed to them all.

When I moved to semi-rural Connecticut and went to school there, it was the whitest place I'd lived in at that point -- and a mix of working-class kids, middle-class professors' kids, and upper-class dandies in polo shirts. It was truly the first time I'd daily heard kids of all social levels hurling about derogatory phrases about people, countries, and ethnicities they'd never even met or been exposed to before -- all the usual racist words you could imagine being used as put-downs. I remember the first time I heard someone call another kid a "dirty Mexican" (said target was as Irish-looking as you can get) and trying, in vain, to get that wrong righted. My mom worked a lot with a clinic in East LA, and that kind of bull hit close to home.

For me it was a shock at that age and it still is even now. Fortunately, that state has graduated to a somewhat more mixed land and that type of thinking has begun to die off (more or less) as people, you know, mingle. It's hard to talk down about people you actually know and become fast friends with.

So -- I figured it was time to change. I'm not sure what I'll do about the website domain and whether I will change it all to jakewildwood.com (for now it will remain at the ante address), but I do know that I will be mixing my public personas -- guitar doctor, musician, contented Vermont resident, and music history buff -- all here on one site in the near future. I just need a little time to iron it out.

In other news, all photos will now be square as that's the way the net operates images most successfully these days. It also makes it easy to post things to my Instagram page. At some point I might start doing soundclips as videos, but until it's easy as pie and fast to do it, they'll remain simply audio.