New York, New York

Broadway, Madison Avenue, Wall Street, here we come.
And I did not do it My Way, by the by, as that is a road for half-wits, no matter how talented.
Take ye counsel from every wise man. Or wise woman. I think I know more wise women, at this point, than I know wise men, and one of the wise women simply nodded and grinned when I passed through the kitchen on this wonderfully sunny mid-day in the Kootenays and said I was on my way to talk to Hammacher Schlemmer about the chord-teaching guitar they feature on page 77 of the latest catalogue.
For most of my life, of course, I could only have chuckled and snorted my way through the pages of all that stuff they offer to people with, generally, more money than they know what to do with. Such a catalogue had no business in the house of a man who had taken a Franciscan inspired private vow of poverty. But then along came the parental estate, God bless it, and various bits of information being fed into the electronic surveillance of the moneyed classes, and the HS catalogue began showing up in my mailbox. As John Lennon wrote, Let It Be, and see what happens. Some of the stuff is genuinely useful, and I am, after all, the creator, at Shawn's instigation, of the great Gaetan Renard, at least one man of the universe who knew how to spend his money wisely.
But I am not a technician. Well, not an electronics technician. Actually, with MT's help with a yard or two of elastic fibre I've got quite clever in the manufacture of something that may turn out to be a most formidable enemy of high blood pressure. Maybe HS might like to talk about that, too. But for the moment we'll stick to music. Music, and phenomenal amounts of money insofar as it is generated in the process of genuinely useful manufacture. New York knows all about money, or did know before it let all those mortgage managers screw things up on the grandest possible scale. Mammon, Mammon, Mammon.
Money has a use, of course. And people with money even have a use, when they know that it's there for using wisely. So the question is, can money create a truly useful electronic teaching system with an instrument? The guitar manufacturers, whoever they are, have definitely been up to something useful. When the wheel came along, and before that fire, only fools denied the God-given advantage to mankind's struggle to get back to Paradise. So now, only fools will deny the possibilities in impeccably efficient instruction techniques in a guitar that speaks according to the norms of mathematics.
I emailed Hammacher Schlemmer. But then, I've emailed a lot of people. My agents have written to a lot of people. Some of them have woken up. Some have not.
The entire state of Georgia failed to wake up when I announced that I was prepared to write an opera based on Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind". New York could easily be just as thick.
Tune in next week, when the Lone Ranger says . . . . .