Turntable's Working Right Again Thanks To Old Fashioned Craftsman

The turntable is old.  From the sixties, and it had a serious problem:  the arm didn't lift high enough when the record was finished and it scratched its way back.  The only way I could safely listen to a record was to be careful to catch the arm when the record was done.  You know I'm going to miss my cue now and then.

I'm listing to Aftermath as I write this thanks to Jan Ok Han who runs Sunset Service out of his house.  I got his name from Obsession Records a while ago and I finally called him a couple of weeks ago.  He repairs electronic equipment, like turntables, and he also teaches guitar.  When I dropped the turntable off we had a wide-ranging conversation that included a history lesson on Korea and Japan and information on classical guitar in Anchorage.  That's what I meant in the title about old-fashioned techie.  

There are folks at Best Buy or the Apple store who will take time to talk to you about your computer or camera, but Mr. Han is really an artist who takes great interest in and care of items he works on.  He explained to me in detail what he was going to do and today, what he did.  No giant corporation is tracking data in this transaction.  This is an interaction of love (of what he's doing) and trust between the customer and the  craftsman.  There's both the time and interest for there to be a human interaction rather than just a commercial one.  

Here he's showing me his own guitar which he repaired.  He was showing me how the finish where he repaired the hole wasn't perfect.  It was hard to tell.  He doesn't repair guitars for others now.  This one took too long to do for a customer he said.  

David Oistrahk is playing Prokofiev now.  It reminds me of an incredible concert I went to in Florence the year I was a student in Germany.  Oistrakh was magnificent.  There was a standing ovation at the end, but most of the people left.  There were maybe 40 people left in the audience, yet he played another encore.  It was one of those concert experiences when you leave your body and fly with the music.  

Thanks Han for the pleasure of meeting you, for fixing my turntable, and reconnecting me with Oistrahk right now.