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I was happy to come across this article, “Revealed: The Real Guitar Heroes,” which features a new book, Instrument, by photographer Pat Graham.

(Check out Graham’s awesome blog, here.)

In the article, various musicians discuss their favorite instruments. I particularly liked Peter Buck’s description of his beloved guitar, because it so closely matched what I’d already written in my upcoming Young Adult debut, Before You Go (July, 2012).

Before we get to Buck and his guitar, here’s a brief section from my book, written over a year ago. To set the scene: Jude and Becka are hanging out together for the first time after work; they’ve walked the Jones Beach boardwalk on a cloudy day and are now playing putt-putt golf. Becka tells Jude that she’s saving up for her dream guitar:

This could be what Becka’s dream guitar looks like.

“What kind of guitar do you want to buy?”

“Rickenbacker 330,” Becka answered.

“You like that jangle sound, huh?”

“John Lennon, Johnny Marr, Peter Buck, they all played Rickenbackers,” Becka said. “You know Guitar World in Massapequa? That’s where I’m going to buy it. I’ve got mine all picked out.”

“Tell me,” Jude said, tapping the ball into the hole. He didn’t bother to fill in the scorecard. Jude hated those ultracompetitive guys who took things like P.E. way too seriously. He and Becka randomly cut over from the third to the eleventh hole. Nobody was around, nobody cared, and this one has a fake pirate ship in the middle of it to enhance the awesomeness.

“You should see it, gorgeous guitar,” Becka enthused. “Semi-hollow maple body, fireglo finish, rosewood fretboard with dot inlays, single-coil pickups –”

“Wow, you know your stuff,” Jude said. “That’s not a cheap guitar.”

“Almost two thousand balloons,” Becka said. “My parents are willing to go halfsies.”

“Halfsies?” Jude laughed.

“You know what I mean,” Becka protested, a hint of color rising to her cheeks. “I’ve been staring at that guitar for the past year. It’s my goal for this summer. I need that guitar.”

Jude knew exactly how she felt. He was always coveting a new guitar, or conside

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Hoboken, the humble and fantastically corrupt city in which I live is trumpeted as the birthplace of Frank Sinatra and baseball. The first birth is indisputable, the second is contentiously debated. There’s little doubt that The Cake Boss is filmed here, as evidenced by the hordes of salivating families who stand in line outside of Carlos Bakery for hours on end, just to get their pictures taken with a cannoli. For the most cynical of hipsters, Hoboken represents the type of gentrification they despise: in other words, the type of gentrification that doesn’t incorporate whimsical facial hair, fixed-gear bikes and artisan pickles. So it really gets their goats when they have to schlepp across the Hudson and mingle with us rubes, because Hoboken also happens to be home to Maxwell’s, one of the most intimate and celebrated music venues in the New York City metropolitan era.

The story of Maxwell’s, named after the old Maxwell House coffee factory that once dotted our shores, is well known to fans of the rock and roll music. In the 80s, an impressive slate of indie bands and up-and-comers graced its tiny stage–Nirvana, REM, The Replacements, Sonic Youth, Husker Du, etc. Local pioneers the Feelies and Yo La Tengo made their names here. Bruce Springsteen filmed his Glory Days video at the bar. Rock star investors saved it when it ran into troubles in 90s. And so on.

These days, the hot tickets are the kids on the cusp of breaking big. For instance, Titus Andronicus, everyone’s favorite anthemic Civil War appropriating rockers, played a few nights ago. There’s something to be said for seeing a band with everything to prove playing a tiny room that holds a couple hundred folks at best. I tend to miss these shows because my ear isn’t to the wall anymore. However, I do pop into Maxwell’s for some of the nostalgia acts that swing through regularly. Last week I caught a Lemonheads show, as I’m wont to do.

Most people know the Lemonheads from their early 90s cover of Mrs. Robinson (which they’ve basically disowned) and their alt-rock hit Into Your Arms. The bouncy, neo-hippieish videos for both begot unfair comparisons to bands like the Gin Blossoms and lead singer Evan Dando’s good looks made most think the band was more marketing than substance, an accusation echoed by the kids from Boston who hated preferred the Lemonheads scuzzy (and, frankly, undistinguished) punk adolescence and hated the addition of Blake Baby of Juliana Hatfield. It’s a shame really, because Dando, essentially the only real member of the Lemonheads since the early 90s, is a warm-voiced singer and a born songwriter who crafts hooks and melody better than 99.99% of his peers.

And he’s also a bit of a prick. I’ve seen him walk

Michelle Rafferty, Publicity Assistant

It starts with a simple question: Did the totem fall? And then turns into a mind warping exercise of  “who incepted who whom?” and “how much was a dream? Am I dreaming?” Christopher Nolan’s Inception has given us hypothesizing hemophilia, for the moment at least. But for some people our real, sans IMAX dreams are enough to sustain a lifetime of “what ifs.”

Dr. Rosalind Cartwright has dedicated her entire career’s work to studying sleep, and in her new book The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives she proposes a new theory on the confluence of our dreaming and waking selves. Here Cartwright reveals the scientific truths behind Inception and why, once we resolve Leo’s unconscious self, we should start tending to our own.

1.) In Inception, Ellen Page plays a “dream architect.” Can we actually influence what people dream about?

That answer is: A little. If I drip water on you while you are in REM sleep (when most dreaming happens), you may tell me you dreamt it was raining. You would already have a dream story of your own creation going on but the water can be added to that dream as “Suddenly as I was trying to escape from this guy it started raining.” If I play a tape with the name of the love of your life over and over, you may begin to dream of that person. But what you dream of that person is what your unconscious needs to express about them. Dreams have an imperative of their own and resist our meddling.

2.) In the film, dream death automatically brings the dreamer back to consciousness. I’ve heard that we always have to wake up before that moment of death in a dream. Is that true, can we not “die” in our dreams?

Death is not a common theme in dreams—unless you are elderly or very ill when death is a topic on your waking mind—and we do not often dream our death occurs even when we are falling from a height. We typically wake ourselves up before we hit the ground because our unconscious memory bank has no helpful images stored to handle the emotion in the dream. But others do dream of their own funeral or see themselves dead in the hospital. These dreams are rehearsals in fantasy for what is to come.

3.) The Inception crew can only escape from a multi-layered dream (dream within a dream, within a dream…) through a carefully engineered “kick” or that leg jerk that wakes us up when we are dream free falling. Why is the “kick” so common an experience in sleep?

This is very common especially as we are falling asleep and the muscles relax. We often experience the need to resist that falling sensation and “save ourselves” by abruptly tightening the muscles again. This is called the hypnic jerk. It is a normal response and benign, except that we have to start over to fall asleep again and another hypnic jerk may happen again.

4.) Through a special machine the crew can enter one subject’s unconscious together. Is this something that people actually think could be possible? Has there ever been any record of people sharing dreams?

Very occasionally identical twins who share so much common experience will have dreams that are very similar. Also people who share their waking experiences and tell each other about how they feel about it will have similar dreams on the same night. The next day one can finish the dream story the other is telling because they have had the same dream. None of this is magic or even science. We can know WHEN y