Wonder Land
So this is the new year,
And I have no resolutions
For self-assigned penance,
For problems with easy solutions.
—Death Cab for Cutie, “The New Year”
As I sit, flipping through photos, editing, and editing out, I'm almost always listening to music.
Music has always been an integral part of my existence. Growing up, my grandparents had the good sense and taste to have a massive cabinet record player (8-track player built-in, too, as a modernized backup plan) that was stocked with vinyl (all of which I wish I could get my hands on now)... Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, not to mention the comedy stylings of Lily Tomlin, Bob Newhart, and Bill Cosby (little did we know on this one, but alas...).
Someone put a trumpet into my hands in 4th grade, which turned out to be a silver Yamaha played by the one and only Doc Severenson, he of the Johnny Carson house orchestra. Side note, to this day, I still don't know if it's entirely true or something the local instrument reseller told my mother as a way to convince her to shell out more money than her car, but I'm sticking to the story for both of us.
Incidentally, it was the year I also got glasses and braces, so, as they say, "hello, ladies."
Over the next eight years, I became a solid band geek, choral jerk, and theater... well, the phrase in those days is certainly not one that we'd use now. Still, honestly, I was unabashedly proud to be with the stage folk, and I'd wear that moniker proudly today, in solidarity. I even won a cash prize and school award to usher me towards my imagined goal of music school and teaching music to students; the marble block and engraved faux gold nameplate site on my bookshelf still.
Alas, teaching music was not to be my "thing." I quickly realized that teaching would not be my path of choice (or, as it turns out, least resistance) and switched quickly to performance at THE George Washington University (a renowned music school?). I double-majored in music and English (it, too, was a subject that came easily), took on vocal training, and even had an odd and oddly successful band in DC (Six Cent Shooters, shoutout circa 1992-1993).
Somewhere in there, I developed staggering, violent, paralyzing stage-fright, and I shelved performance, moved over to English, and my course was (re)set from there. However, music stuck with me, and I combined those two interests into other venues: managing an indie music store, writing album reviews for a UK zine, and consuming and absorbing music at every turn.
All through that, I was taking photos with my old, trusty Canon T-50, which my mother had spent probably too much money on at Sears in St. Johnsbury's once-bustling Green Mountain Mall, sometime around Christmas of 1987. Photography was always an undercurrent hum, and the music was the creative melody. I shot photos of friends, I shot photos of landscapes, I shot photos of friends’ bands... all film, all the time, baby.
Where is this going? Who knows. Magnets, my friends.
So, as I sit here, listening to the transcendent Transcendentalism, plucking away at 0s and 1s that you can see in the gallery below (and buy prints HERE), I'm reminded that creativity is always there. It wears different guises, arrives in different garbs, and keeps strange bedfellows. Rest assured, there is no mystical muse who brings the gifts, though, and only in the work do we discover the "muse" who sings so sweetly, flips the switch on flow state, and does that thing she does.
