Elwood, I had a lightning bolt about your guitar, and I appreciate it in a different light.
I don't know how many times I've slowed down to take a close look at parts of that guitar (I've got the major hots for your guitar, and might as well admit it), before it occurred to me that the grain was weird. I can't recall ever seeing wood grain in a vaguely-kitty-corner vector like that.
Even the guy who cut the Tele body out of the kitchen table made sure to make the grain perfectly perpendicular. On your guitar, though, that explains the added armrest of quilted maple, because there wasn't any wood there! It was truly air guitar.
My favorite thing about that guitar is that it's an inspired mix of genius and ... well, I wouldn't call it idiocy as much as questionable choices (I wish people gave me the same break once in a while).
As soon as I realized that, and why James F. Lewis hit the medicine cabinet a little too hard and whipped out his Harbor Freight stamping kit to emblazon his name on his masterpiece, I was reminded of the granddaddy of all questionable choices.
In his book about Michelangelo; The Agony and the Ecstacy, Irving Stone wrote that when a promising, pure white block of marble turned up at the quarry in Carrera, the workers considered it a sacred privilege to lug it to the top of a mountain so that Michelangelo could look at it in the first rays of daybreak. That's how he evaluated every piece of marble, and also where the inspiration for the piece took place.
In this piece, he saw the whole structure as a pyramid. He saw Mary cradling Jesus, a small, older woman with a full grown man across her lap. By making the lines in the sculpture form a diamond shape (see it?) he was able to subtly enlarge her and shrink Jesus. He made her features youthful to signify purity (common at the time)..
When Michelangelo designed St. Peter's Basilica, he made a special place for the Pieta. So he had the world's greatest masterpiece of sculpture in one of the world's greatest churches.
http://www.rome.info/michelangelo/pieta/ Michelangelo ... achieving a highly polished sheen that made it fairly impossible to believe the sumptuously sculpted figures began as a block of cold stone. Michelangelo's mastery of composition is evident in the unique triangular shape that conveys a stunning grandeur, and a profound knowledge of human anatomy served him well in his creation.
According to Giorgio Vasari, shortly after the installation of the Pieta, Michelangelo overheard someone remark that it was the work of another sculptor, Cristoforo Solari. Michelangelo then carved 'MICHAELA[N]GELUS BONAROTUS FLORENTIN[US] FACIEBA[T]' (Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made it) on the sash running across Mary's breast!
That was the only work he ever signed. He immediately regretted it and it haunted him for the rest of his life. He blamed that mistake for any problems that befell him for the rest of his 88 years.
Kinda puts James F. Lewis' poor impulse control in perspective, don't it?
