Thursday, January 17, 2019

Just after arriving in Atlanta, in the Fall of 1968, and needing some furniture for my new home with Johnny Lowe and Bill Mello, I purchased...at an auction on Spring Street....an old, dilapidated Chinese 'throne' chair......in the fashion of my usual practical consideration and aesthetic sensibility......Within a year, I had 'decorated' the music room with the then fashionably high tech electronic equipment.....you know...big, McIntosh tube amplifiers, big KLH 12's with external crossovers, big Revox tape recorder and big Thorens turntable.....Well....BIG!...everything was so BIG.....I even 'upgraded' the already big speakers with a pair of humongous planar electrostatic panels.... from a failing startup manufacturer of 'conceptual' electronics....thank you Garland Christopher Keeler......in Canoga Park, California...(acquiring, thus, a pair of huge, wooden shipping crates, later used as substrata for an encaustics project, utilizing a thousand colored Crayons that I found at Peachtree Quality Salvage Company) So.....for aesthetic balance, the decor of the music room had to be scaled on the 'big' side..... This decorating challenge was met by housing the pre-amps, amps, tuners...well...all that 'Stereo'...and later, Quadraphonic.....equipment in an English Tudor cabinet that was originally designed for a room, several times the size of my 'music' room, a 17th century Welsh chest that conveniently housed all of my 33RPM records.....and, of course, a 'chair', placed in the 'sweet spot' for perfect aural perspective of the new 'surround sound'......The Chinese 'throne' chair was, if not very comfortable or moveable, 'perfect' for its unusual new function......... So, pages and thousands of words later....and a couple of years.....having ditched my 'career' perspective at Saks, Macy's or any other 'employer'....I sold everything and moved to Europe........Years later, with some newfound wealth, I came across the 'listening throne', now ensconced in a fancy-smanchy upscale antiques store......It had journeyed from my music room to Mike Deasy's antique store.....to Atlanta Decorative Arts Center, via a couple of 'in-between' owners....finally landing in a Museum-setting.......and more and more words...edited out of this short bloggy entry.....it came back to me, with new 'museum' restoration and French Polish, and has remained, sans its earlier room companions.......now overseen by a painting entitled "Vanity".....I think I'll dig out James Burke's series, on VHS...of course....on "CONNECTIONS".......Much of our lives is just Happenstance, isn't it?.......and that 'happenstance' varies, vastly between the Lives of the inattentive and the hyper-vigilant......