Author: admin

Inside a wooden cabin of a building nestled on the outer edge of Silver Lake, Reuben Cox started messing around with a guitar and accidentally created a new chapter in the history of rock and roll.

It was 2016 and Cox, who runs Old Style Guitar Shop — really more of a guitar shack — had gotten an idea while taking photos at an Andrew Bird recording session. Producer and musician Blake Mills had brought out a 1950s Harmony electric banjo, which featured a removable rubber mute that could be wedged against the strings. It was a funky little instrument, and the muting device — designed to take the musical edge off, essentially — caught Cox’s eye.

The next day, Cox started tinkering around to see if something like it would work on a guitar and ended up wandering around Home Depot in search of the right part; in a Dadaist twist, he found the plastic he needed in the toilet aisle. “Very Duchampian,” he told me, laughing as he remembered the process in an interview from the shop. But instead of having the mute applied after the fact, as with the banjo, Cox designed his device into the guitar, with the mute becoming the bridge, where the strings rest near the sound hole. “I was like, ‘Oh, well, let’s try this and see what happens,’” he says. “And it ended up being a bull’s-eye.”

First through Mills and then through word of mouth, the rubber bridge guitar, as it’s come to be known, became an Excalibur in the guitar community of Los Angeles and abroad. Musicians started lining up to buy or commission one — either electric or acoustic — compelled not so much by what the rubber bridge sounds like, but rather what it doesn’t. With the rubber dampening the fullness of the notes, Cox’s design makes a guitar resemble a banjo or a plucked violin — and for guitarists in search of something fresh, that lack of resonance actually serves as an inspiration point.

“If you’ve been playing guitar for a really long time,” Cox explained, “your hands go to the same places and you repeat yourself. It’s this different sound, and it jumbles your mind in a way, and everything feels new. For a lot of people, songs would just pop out of it.”

Without ever being formally advertised, the rubber bridge’s popularity grew, and its presence — gentle, sparse and somewhat haunting while never crowding any vocals — started to float in on all kinds of notable records. Mills played one on Bob Dylan’s “Rough and Rowdy Ways”; Aaron Dessner of the National put it on Taylor Swift’s “Folklore”; about “80%” of the guitars on Phoebe Bridgers’ “Punisher” were said to be rubber bridge; Jeff Tweedy, who uses rubber bridge guitars regularly on Wilco albums and tours, said in 2021 that he had bought “at least” a dozen of them from Cox directly.

“It makes it sound like those high notes are even harder to play because they choke out,” Mills explained to me in a video interview. “But something about how that sounds sort of fragile is really moving. It’s kind of beautiful.”

For a while, the only way to get a rubber bridge guitar was to get one through Old Style or attempt to make one yourself. Cox then started doing rubber bridge conversions on budget-friendly Recording King guitars in order to keep up with demand and have something around for people to buy. And soon small-scale guitar craftsmen, known as luthiers, began to sell their own rubber bridge guitars, which Cox said “bemused” him. But the bemusement stopped in 2024 when Orangewood, a Los Angeles-based guitar company founded in 2018, began offering a mass-manufactured acoustic/electric rubber bridge guitar, which it dubbed the Juniper, starting at $395.

The Orangewood model uses a similar style of pickup, flatwound strings and tailpiece in comparison to Cox’s guitars, he says.

***

Fitting into the lineage of other prominent guitar innovators like Leo Fender and Ted McCarty, Reuben Cox doesn’t even play guitar. He can hit a few chords, sure, but insists that he has no musical talent, and was only drawn to building guitars as a hobby — and a way to bring him into a particular social orbit. “I just love being around musicians,” he said, “and people using instruments for their intended purpose.”

When I arrived at Old Style recently, the shop wasn’t yet open, but the Band’s “Lonesome Suzie” was playing inside, where Cox, 53, had been getting work done anyway. Tall, with shoulder-length hair and clad in head-to-toe denim, he looked like he could be in a rock band himself. It quickly became clear, though, that he’s more of a mad scientist. There were cobwebs in the corners and work permits crudely taped to the wall. Guitars were strewn all over the place — some for sale, some being fixed and some just in the process of being scrapped for parts. “It doesn’t even work,” Cox told me, pointing to a bizarre guitar with a “Walking Dead” paint job, which he said a neighbor gave to him. “He’s like, ‘Do you want this?’ And I was like, ‘Sure, I’ll take out your trash.’”

Making something out of nothing has become the specialty of Old Style. Cox opened the shop at age 37 during the financial crisis in 2010, with less than $10,000 in savings, and just had to make it work somehow. He was previously a photographer who taught classes at Sarah Lawrence in New York, but when his then-wife, who worked in the music business, took a job in Los Angeles, he decided to attempt to turn guitars into a career. After he rented an affordable spot on Hoover Street, he started learning on the job with the help of “lots of YouTube-video watching” and a willingness to “choke down sawdust.” Every aspect of running the store was uncharted territory to him. “I had no idea what to charge,” he said.

Most guitar shops cater toward high-end collectors — “blues lawyers,” as they’re disparagingly called, who have money to burn on new and used instruments that can cost as much as cars. But Old Style, with its ramshackle vibe and low prices on salvaged and Frankensteined instruments, started to cultivate a different clientele: young and working-class musicians, to whom the function of the guitar is often more important than its collectability.

“L.A. is full of musicians,” Cox said. “And they’re always looking for a new sound that’s going to inspire them.” Once they have the “conventionally attractive sounds accounted for in their collection,” he explained, it becomes a search for “the other sounds.” You may want, say, “a guitar that sounds bad on purpose.”

The rubber bridge guitar was born partially from Cox being the type to “throw pasta against the sonic wall and see what sticks.” It was also an attempt to give musicians like Mills a new weapon to work with, usually on the cheap, with a refurbished guitar most would have thought was bound for the dump. “He’s not afraid of taking a chance on something that could easily be overlooked as worthless,” Mills said. “He’ll have seen something in it of merit.”

After Orangewood started selling its rubber bridge guitar, Cox never considered filing a lawsuit. As a small-business owner, he didn’t have time to figure out how, for one, and he didn’t feel like the rubber bridge was something he could really claim ownership of either. This is a key issue in determining just how much of Cox’s design is “original.” There have been many attempts to create muting devices on guitars over the years, including some from major companies. The Gretsch Country Gentleman that George Harrison played on the Beatles’ “Ed Sullivan” appearance, for instance, featured a crude flip-up muting device.

But the function and aesthetic of Cox’s design and Orangewood’s Juniper model are similar, Cox says — and Orangewood itself cites Cox on its website as “developing and popularizing” rubber bridge guitars. Cox remained silent as the Juniper began to show signs of widespread popularity — it’s now available at Guitar Center — but some musicians insisted on coming to his defense on their own.

Meg Duffy, who makes music as Hand Habits, asked to be taken down from Orangewood’s sponsored artists page, which currently includes Jensen McRae and Billie Eilish, due to what she says was the product’s similarity to Cox’s design (You can see Finneas using a Juniper on Eilish’s NPR Tiny Desk Concert.)

“He’s definitely not the first person to ever put a mute on a guitar,” Duffy told me on a video call. “But this specific rubber bridge — it’s so Old Style. It’s just so obvious where and how this happened.” Mills noted that Cox is “really sweet and supportive” of Southland musicians, which is why he believes this touched a nerve: “I think the idea that he’s been disrespected is what makes this such an emotional thing for the community.”

***

After the Juniper was released, and as the fallout started to trickle into public view, Orangewood reached out to Cox about some kind of settlement or agreement. But according to Cox, any deal would have had to include his sponsorship — something he didn’t want to provide, given how he alleged they only offered once there was a smoldering PR fire to put out.

“I think I was just kind of saddened by it,” Cox said, referring to the whole saga, which he is speaking about publicly for the first time. “It’s beyond my control, and it just happens to be relevant to my life, because it’s something I’m selling too. It’s a bummer. There’s nothing very sportsmanlike about it.”

In response to interview requests, Orangewood co-founder Eddie Park asked that questions be emailed. In response to the questions, he provided a statement on behalf of the company.

“Since Old Style’s focus has always been on repurposing vintage guitars and selling locally, and there were other builders who were making rubber bridge guitars before our release, we moved forward with the project,” the statement read in part. “The intention was to add an affordable option out there — and we hope players can see the value in both a vintage mod and modern built versions. … With that, we’ve had some conversations with Old Style at a few different points over the years, and it’s still our hope to find a path forward to serve the broader guitar community.”

The history of guitars has been written on a steady stream of ideas and constructions passed between builders and players, often in ways that irked the original creators. Early Fender guitars, for example, bear an obvious resemblance to the midcentury electric guitars of Paul Bigsby. In the end, Bigsby was incensed by the actions of Leo Fender, but that upset is just a footnote on Fender’s path toward creating some of the most beloved instruments available around the globe. (In an ironic coda, Fender bought the Bigsby name in 2019.)

“Most things are just a twist on a fairly basic idea,” said Brad Tolinski, who co-wrote “Play It Loud,” a history of the electric guitar, and was the editor in chief of Guitar World for 25 years. “If [Cox is] producing a good idea, inevitably somebody else is going to come along [and mass produce it], especially if it’s not patented or manufactured in a professional way.” Tolinski added that he believes Cox’s territorialness on the matter is “almost not in the spirit of the history of the electric guitar, which is basement innovators coming up with cool ideas and sharing them with the world at large.”

Regardless of how he feels about Orangewood specifically, Cox doesn’t seem too bent out of shape about the way things have gone for him, generally speaking. After all, when your quixotic midlife career change succeeds the way his has, there’s not all that much to complain about. “I’m just not that aggro about money,” he said, shrugging off the Orangewood drama, and pointing instead toward the musical rewards of his work. “I’m a hidden footnote on a Bob Dylan record. How could I not be psyched about it?”

Cox truly doesn’t want anything from Orangewood at this point, he said; all he asks is for it to “leave me alone.” He’s just “trying to live my life in this shack of a shop,” he said, where he wants to continue working on guitars, looking for the next idea that might inspire musicians — and maybe guitar companies as well.

“I keep hoping I’ll stumble across a new trick to have in the shop here,” he said. “But I haven’t found it yet.”

He was an unbeaten professional boxer for three years until financial and mental health struggles forced him to retire, but Billy Long Sr went on to punch well above his weight in saving disadvantaged youths with mentoring that has now inspired a successful British film-maker.

When his son, Billy Long Jr, was facing the challenges of autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and bullies linked to local gangs, Long feared the worst. He decided to protect him by home schooling him and created a boxing gym in a garden-shed on a council estate in Chelmsford, Essex.

It was barely bigger than a portable building but, in that space, he coached him. After three years of training, he watched him become the junior national boxing champion, before being picked to represent England, and guided him with the England coaches to win the European Junior Boxing Championships in Bosnia in 2024.

Not only did Long Jr win gold, but he made history by never losing a single round, which is considered extraordinary.

Perhaps his greatest fight was showing that autism can be a “superpower” rather than something “negative”, his father says.

Long Sr’s coaching began attracting local youths, inspiring them to stay away from juvenile delinquency, drugs and knife crime. He opened Longs ABC, a club with three rings on a small industrial estate, and created a boxing powerhouse that has produced four national champions, including two female ones.

Now Long Sr and 15-year-old Long Jr are working with Nick Moorcroft, whose films include Urban Hymn, an acclaimed coming-of-age story about a young offender, played by Letitia Wright in her break-out role.

The idea of seeing themselves on screen seems “surreal”, Long Sr says.

But Moorcroft was inspired by their “powerful and uplifting, triumph-over-adversity story”, describing Long Jr as “one of the most gifted athletes in the world, whose autism actually helps him with a hyper-focus”.

Ironically, Long Sr says that, initially, his son had not seemed “naturally talented” as a boxer. He and his wife, Samantha, ignored those who cast doubt on whether he had the mental and physical strength to compete.

But he soon knew his son would become a champion, he says: “I saw something in him and, over time, the hurdles that we’ve crossed are nothing short of a miracle … When most kids would quit, he would go one more round.”

Long Jr feels that boxing has saved him from going off the rails “100%”.

“When I’m outside the ring, I have my struggles,” he says. “But when I’m inside the ring, I feel in control.”

Long Sr, now 36, understands the challenges faced by disadvantaged youths today. His own teachers never gave him a chance, dismissing him as “stupid”. He got in with the wrong crowd, experiencing street fights with knives and trouble with the police, until his own father got him into boxing, giving him “self-worth” and leading to a professional career.

But he abandoned his boxing dreams in 2016 for the sake of his son: “My son has never been in trouble with the police. But at school he had severe learning difficulties and no one looked at him as I look at Billy. Now he’s got respect in the right way.”

Long also coached his two other sons: Mason plays for the youth team at Tottenham Hotspur and is a two-time boxing national champion, and Harry is emerging as a talented coach in his own right.

The film, titled Long Shot and shooting next year, is as much about boxing as overcoming adversity. The cast will include kids from boxing clubs across the nation. Long Sr and Jr will have cameo roles.

Moorcroft also co-wrote and produced Fisherman’s Friends and Finding Your Feet, two of the most successful British independent films of the past decade, but Long Shot is a particularly personal film.

When his parents’ marriage fell apart, Moorcroft was a troubled youth in that same area of Chelmsford, being expelled from school, diagnosed with ADHD, becoming a young offender and repeatedly being arrested as part of a street gang – until, aged 19, a chance encounter with a Hollywood screenwriter changed his life and led to a career in film and television.

He hopes that a film about amateur boxing will highlight the desperate need for government support. It was the ITV drama on the Post Office scandal, Mr Bates vs the Post Office, that had a real impact, despite an inquiry and years of campaigning for compensation payments.

“Gyms like Longs ABC provide havens in tough communities, offering discipline, mentorship and purpose through structured training,” Moorcroft says. “They channel aggression into positive outlets, build self-esteem, and foster community ties, significantly reducing youth delinquency and knife crime. Without financial support, many such gyms struggle to operate.”

He adds: “Knife crime and drug use are out of control. This sports transforms lives.”

Long Sr says: “In my gym, I’ve got Muslims, Christians, people from the Traveller community, Chinese, black, white – and we’re all friends. We’re all one community. That doesn’t happen anywhere, not in schools. There’s no divide in boxing – and we really want to show that in the movie.”

He adds: “When people join boxing gyms, they become part of something – and that’s a family. Boxing saves so many lives.”

Moorcroft is writing the script for Long Shot, having just finished directing his next film, Mother’s Pride – a comedy drama about the Great British Beer awards and the plight of British pubs – that will be released next spring.

“As a child, I was told when you die you go to heaven and heaven is where you eat cake all day and just get to hang out with your friends,” said the 29-year-old Chinese American novelist, who was raised Christian, and publishes as R.F. Kuang. “And this really, really disturbed me because I think the monotony of that eternal existence was really frightening. It seems like there could be no stakes, nothing would be precious because there would be no conception of time.”

Ruminating on what happens after you die inspired Kuang’s newest book, “Katabasis.” After the brilliant satire of publishing and social media in 2023’s “Yellowface,” Kuang returns to the fantasy genre.

Not unlike 2022’s “Babel,” “Katabasis,” out Tuesday, is a dark yet playful takeoff on academia — a setting the current Yale University graduate student knows well. It’s been the talk of BookTok and on publications’ most-anticipated book lists, and there are already plans to turn it into an Amazon series led by “The Walking Dead” showrunner Angela Kang. Kuang will serve as a producer.

Kuang, though, tries not to let pressure and high expectations get to her.

“I think I always get a little bit nervous before a book comes out, but I think it’s just not good to dwell on that because it’s not productive at all,” said Kuang, who already had several chapters of “Katabasis” written by the time “Yellowface” came out.

The story’s protagonist, Cambridge analytic magick doctoral student Alice, is obsessed with getting that holiest of academic grails: a recommendation letter from the department chair. After he unexpectedly dies, Alice decides to use a pentagram to enter purgatory and track him down. Only a handful of scholars have survived the journey. Classmate and frenemy Peter invites himself along.

Like the nine circles of hell from “Dante’s Inferno,” readers get swept up in the “Eight Courts of Hell.” As the architect of hell, Kuang lays the landscape out in great detail, from vast dunes to skeletal animals made only of bones held together with chalk.

Kuang researched different beliefs about the underworld and wrote “Katabasis” all while continuing pursuit of her doctorate in East Asian languages and literature at Yale. She spoke with The Associated Press recently about the “magick” of designing her own version of hell and the Trump administration’s targeting of universities, among other topics. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

AP: You must have had a lot of fun like designing each hell court. The Pride Court (a library) was a lot of people who had been very condescending or pretentious. Was that your own playful revenge for maybe sometimes annoying — be it well-intentioned — colleagues in academia?

KUANG: For sure, I — we had a lot of fun. I was bouncing ideas off my husband because he’s in academia as well. We were thinking about, “Oh, what are all the little annoying things that people do that couldn’t be properly called malicious but I think deserves a little bit of punishment in hell?”

AP: What made you settle on the time period of the 1980s?

KUANG: I just think the ’80s are very culturally fun for me. I’m a ’90s kid, so I just miss that. But I am also interested in the Reagan and Thatcher era. So I think the ’70s and ’80s are this period of backlash and the rise of neoliberalism and privatization against the sort of cultural advances that had been made during the ’60s. So in the ’60s, you have the civil rights era and then the ’70s and ’80s, you have the rolling back of a lot of those egalitarian movements.

I wanted my characters to be working in a space where it feels like there’s this widespread denial about the existence of structural oppression — and they are really raised by this mentality that if things go wrong for them then it’s entirely their fault and they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, which is devastating because then they don’t have avenues for solidarity.

AP: I have to ask you about a line from the book: “On both sides of the Atlantic, the conservatives were several years in power and this meant funding cuts for universities, shrinking departments, vanishing opportunities.” Total coincidence?

KUANG: Yes, but I finished I finished revisions before the election. So, I think even in November, we had no idea what kind of attacks on higher education were going to come on in the following fall. So I wasn’t writing about this political moment, but it does seem like we’re right back in the ’80s.

AP: You’re very much steeped in that academic world right now. How are you processing this political moment?

KUANG: All I can do is just keep doing my work. Because I think the final victory would just be to roll over and play dead and let the administration stop us from pursuing the lines of research that we’ve been pursuing all along. And they can make it as difficult as they can, but we shouldn’t preemptively just put our pens down and walk away.

AP: You don’t really look at people’s BookTok videos either praising you or reviewing your book?

KUANG: The last time I was on TikTok was two years ago, and it was fun but it’s a massive distraction. I believe pretty firmly that TikTok should be a space for readers. It’s actually this wonderful thing that, like especially younger readers, can get so enthusiastic about books and share their opinions and recommend things like that. That’s really, really cool, especially at a time where things like reading is kind of under attack especially with book bans and all that.

Introducing the 2025 Fortune Global 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in the world. Explore this year’s list.

Belfast councillor Micky Murray has requested an urgent meeting between council officers and representatives from Emerge festival following the death of a teenage girl at the weekend.

The Alliance Party representative said festivals are meant to be “safe spaces”.

Two other people were taken to hospital after becoming ill at the same event at Boucher Playing Fields.

A woman in her 30s remains in hospital in a serious but stable condition, while a teenage boy has received treatment and is expected to make a full recovery.

Police said enquiries are ongoing after a teenage girl died in hospital after becoming unwell at the Emerge music festival in south Belfast on Sunday.

Emerge, an electronic music festival, took place at Boucher Playing Fields on Saturday and Sunday, with more than 40,000 people in attendance.

In a statement, Murray said his “sincere condolences are with the loved ones of the young individual who has tragically lost their life in these circumstances”.

He urged people “not to speculate” while police enquiries are ongoing.