THE CASE AGAINST CONNOISSEURSHIP

I like nice things.

I’m not ashamed of it; In fact think that having an appreciation for objects that were made with care and intentionality is a sign of intelligence. It takes time and wisdom to know and understand what’s involved in creating the things that fill our homes and lives, and knowing makes us better people overall.

Caring about the quality of things has made me a better chef; I eat every day after all, so why not learn how to cook? I even grow some of my own produce- the one way to guarantee freshness and flavour. Paying attention to how my family uses space has helped me choose a house that, while not big, is efficient and well laid out.

And I’ll admit that I appreciate a luxury item or two, even if it’s something a bit unnecessary. I have a few more shoes than I strictly need; if you buy quality they’ll last a good long time.  But I paid extra to get more beauty and flair (and options) than I strictly need. As my grandma used to say, if you skimp on a luxury then it isn’t one.

And I am a professional maker of things, not just as a way to earn a living, but a lifelong devotee of a demanding and exacting craft. The guitars I make for sale need to meet some pretty high standards of excellence in order to find buyers willing to pay the price I need to charge to keep the lights on.

Other luthiers are also well aware of the economics of fine craftsmanship. They know that the the only way to make a living is to sell guitars in the top price bracket, with dividends increasing exponentially the more rarified the product (and its corresponding price). At the highest levels, some luthiers create guitars that are virtually flawless even to my practiced and critical eyes, that leverage the inherent beauty of the rarest of woods to create jewels of sonic perfection, with tone quality and sustain that would rival a choir of angels. If you were ever to see one of these rare birds in real life, you might have to don fresh white cotton gloves to hold it, never mind actually touch it. Quality indeed.

But as a player, my favourite guitars that I have owned have been, well, nothing special. Really: an old Harmony archtop, lurid orange varnish and all; a nineteen-seventies-era Japanese twelve-string with a tailpiece and ladder bracing; in my rock band days, a battered (and repaired) eighties Peavy spattered with paint and covered with more cigarette burns than tolex, at least until I recovered it out of mercy for my audiences.

Why is this?

As someone who knows guitars inside and out, I know how to recognize one that was made with care and attention to detail. I can almost certainly tell you the name of the wood used to make a given part of any guitar, in both english and latin, and probably the price I’d have to pay for a guitar-sized chunk of it. I’ve played dozens, if not hundreds, of the finest guitars being made by contemporary luthiers. I know what quality looks like, and I know how it sounds. This is the essence of being a connoisseur: the word means, quite literally, “one who knows”.

So a connoisseur knows a lot of what there is to know about guitars. But do they know themselves? A good question to ask is: what moves you? What makes you sing in the shower, or drum your hands on the car steering wheel, or dance while you cook dinner? And the answer is, surprisingly often, not a quality guitar.

An awful lot of my favourite music, and probably yours too, has been made on frankly substandard gear. Maybe when they recorded the album someone made sure that the instruments were in tune (at least for one take), and mixed carefully to cover up the imperfections of a given performance. In a live show there are few places to hide; but on the other hand, it’s a live show, so energy and adrenaline and abandonment to the groove render any mistakes moot. If you’re feeling it, you don’t care if the intonation on the guitar is off. When you’re deep enough in the pocket, there are no wrong notes.

So when someone buys themself an expensive guitar, they’re chasing a sonic experience that was clearly so much more subjective than than it was objective. It’s like trying to catch magic with a bear trap. Better to be humble before fate, and seek lightning where it has not yet struck.

Whenever I finish a new guitar and think to myself that it is objectively my best work yet, that the world will finally recognize my genius, that I have finally unlocked a new level of excellence, I retain humility by reminding myself of the finest wine that I ever drank.

In 2008 I took advantage of a rare era of peace to visit southern Ukraine. Before immigrating to Canada, my wife was born and grew up in Odessa, back when it was still under the grip of communist russia’s stifling dictatorship. With our three young daughters in tow we visited remaining relatives, and she marvelled at the transformations that had occurred in such a short time, occasionally punctuated by rude reminders that some had not.

We made our way to Ismail, a small city near where the Danube joins the Black Sea, to visit her grandmother Mousia. We were too late for her grandfather Vanya; he had died the year before, and never got the chance to meet his great-grandchildren, or me.

They were both survivors of the multiple and overlapping scourges of soviet collectivization, then artificially induced famine, then invasion by Nazi Germany, then counter-invasion by the savagely brutal Red Army, then the slow stagnation and erasure of individualism by a corrupt and unresponsive far-away oligarchy. But through it all they stubbornly found a way to thrive in the blood lands of old Bessarabia.

In the wreckage of the worst war the world had ever known she found him, half-starved and illiterate, but handsome and charming enough. She fed him and taught him to read, and soon they married and built themselves a little house from the crumbly local limestone in that uninspiring soviet city. Remembering the hard times, a garden and root cellar were a must; eventually they added conveniences like indoor water taps, though when we arrived the indoor toilet was only a very recent addition. With great success they grew cherries, wine grapes and vegetables, reared chickens, fed the neighbourhoods cats, and raised two children in that little garden.

As if to make up for the privations of her own childhood, Babushka Mousia fed us copiously, and constantly. For our first dinner together, we picked fresh cherries to fill pierogies, and all the children joined in to fold them into the dough. Babushka disappeared into the root cellar and returned with prizes from the previous years’ harvest: homemade pickled cucumbers and peppers, and a large jar of cloudy deep-red wine. It was the last that her husband had made, put away the autumn before he died.

Toasts were made to those present, and those not; food and love were served in equal measure: as much as we could take. As the light faded, children dozed off in well-practiced arms, and conversation turned to goodnight wishes, warm and sleepy and happy from Dadushka Vanya’s parting gift.

But how did the wine taste, you ask?

Simple, perhaps; even coarse, perhaps; …well on it’s way to becoming vinegar, perhaps. But that didn’t matter; because in it was inscribed the texture of the man who made it. For a brief time I felt I knew him, though we had never met or even spoken; proud, stubborn, even a little vain, but who loved his children as fiercely as I do my own, and spoiled his grandchildren as much as I hope someday I might.

My point is that any designation of quality cannot be and will not ever be objective when we’re talking about anything made by a human. We should do the best work we can do by our own personal set of standards, but once that work leaves our orbit it is no longer ours, or good, or bad. Whether it’s a song, a guitar, or a glass of wine, the final judgment is in the stories of those who experience it. And all we should hope for is that they have stories to tell, because that means they have lives being lived.