Introduction / Our Story Up to Now
At a certain age (as many people that age do) I thought of myself as essentially an artist with a day-job. I didn't even really care who experienced my art or even knew I was making it, because I saw myself as the guy at the FRONT of that bucket brigade...the important thing was that I fill up as many pails of art as i could, and I'd worry about where they were going later.
I took photographs...mostly of abandoned buildings and ruined houses. I found a couple of these tucked into a book, recently, and they're actually okay (if I'd taken them on a better camera, or had access to a decent digital editing suite, they might really be something to see.)
I wrote poetry, most of which wasn't very good. Most poetry isn't very good, because finding a unique and interesting way to say something involves first writing your way through all the boring ways, which involves realizing that you, yourself, are--despite how desperately you might WANT to be interesting--instinctively boring. I learned a lot in the process, though, and if I've written better poems since then, it's because I wrote those not-so-good ones first. Poetry is probably the art-form I've had the most comfortable relationship with, over the course of my life. It's certainly the one that has drawn the most comment from others, and the one I was instinctively able to critique the earliest. I could pick out weak metaphors, botched meter, forced rhyme, and lazy imagery long before I could recognize stereotypical plot, awkward chord changes, bad use of color, etc, and I think that's why I always felt more assertive about my poetry than other endeavors...I was always a harsher and better-educated critic than most of my audience, and I knew it.
I started a lot of short stories, but had a motherfucker of a time ever finishing them. They had a way of becoming novellas, and then of getting backed into corners I couldn't see my way out of, where the next thing that seemed like it logically had to happen wasn't interesting to me, and I didn't ever get around to writing it. Mainly what I learned from that process was that telling stories is hard, and telling them in a unique way is even harder.
I also played music. I wanted to make music with technology from the moment I realized it was an option. In this, I was going radically against type...mine was, to put it kindly, not a musical family. My younger sister played flute (quite well) in school band. My mother took cello lessons for a little while when I was very young, and also had an acoustic guitar I have still to this day never heard her play. My father briefly attempted to pick the cornet back up (he played it in school) but the family banded together to crush his dreams in pretty short order, mainly because brass instruments have no volume control and Dad couldn't see what was wrong with practicing at 8:00am. My parents never watched MTV; on the rare occasions when I saw it at a friend's house it seemed alien and terrifying to me, full of shrieking people with pink hair who weren't wearing enough clothes (this was the eighties, remember.) And Mom and Dad were pretty intensely Christian for most of my young life, which meant that I was discouraged from any interest in popular music beyond borrowing my mother's tapes. So it would simply be a lie to say that music ever came naturally to me, but I damn well made a racket with my friends, anyway, using whatever secondhand equipment, cheap software, and raw innovation I could get my hands on, and some of it turned out okay...at least, within the parameters of what we were trying to achieve, and accounting for the fact that everything was being done either in the bedroom of my two-room apartment (the bed eventually ended up in the living room, never to return to its rightful place for as long as I lived there) or the basement of the townhouse I later shared with my girlfriend and her daughters.
But shit happens. To shorten years of my life down to a blurb:
So I quit. I traded money for time. And now I'd like to put that time to good use.
I took photographs...mostly of abandoned buildings and ruined houses. I found a couple of these tucked into a book, recently, and they're actually okay (if I'd taken them on a better camera, or had access to a decent digital editing suite, they might really be something to see.)
I wrote poetry, most of which wasn't very good. Most poetry isn't very good, because finding a unique and interesting way to say something involves first writing your way through all the boring ways, which involves realizing that you, yourself, are--despite how desperately you might WANT to be interesting--instinctively boring. I learned a lot in the process, though, and if I've written better poems since then, it's because I wrote those not-so-good ones first. Poetry is probably the art-form I've had the most comfortable relationship with, over the course of my life. It's certainly the one that has drawn the most comment from others, and the one I was instinctively able to critique the earliest. I could pick out weak metaphors, botched meter, forced rhyme, and lazy imagery long before I could recognize stereotypical plot, awkward chord changes, bad use of color, etc, and I think that's why I always felt more assertive about my poetry than other endeavors...I was always a harsher and better-educated critic than most of my audience, and I knew it.
I started a lot of short stories, but had a motherfucker of a time ever finishing them. They had a way of becoming novellas, and then of getting backed into corners I couldn't see my way out of, where the next thing that seemed like it logically had to happen wasn't interesting to me, and I didn't ever get around to writing it. Mainly what I learned from that process was that telling stories is hard, and telling them in a unique way is even harder.
I also played music. I wanted to make music with technology from the moment I realized it was an option. In this, I was going radically against type...mine was, to put it kindly, not a musical family. My younger sister played flute (quite well) in school band. My mother took cello lessons for a little while when I was very young, and also had an acoustic guitar I have still to this day never heard her play. My father briefly attempted to pick the cornet back up (he played it in school) but the family banded together to crush his dreams in pretty short order, mainly because brass instruments have no volume control and Dad couldn't see what was wrong with practicing at 8:00am. My parents never watched MTV; on the rare occasions when I saw it at a friend's house it seemed alien and terrifying to me, full of shrieking people with pink hair who weren't wearing enough clothes (this was the eighties, remember.) And Mom and Dad were pretty intensely Christian for most of my young life, which meant that I was discouraged from any interest in popular music beyond borrowing my mother's tapes. So it would simply be a lie to say that music ever came naturally to me, but I damn well made a racket with my friends, anyway, using whatever secondhand equipment, cheap software, and raw innovation I could get my hands on, and some of it turned out okay...at least, within the parameters of what we were trying to achieve, and accounting for the fact that everything was being done either in the bedroom of my two-room apartment (the bed eventually ended up in the living room, never to return to its rightful place for as long as I lived there) or the basement of the townhouse I later shared with my girlfriend and her daughters.
But shit happens. To shorten years of my life down to a blurb:
- I took on a lot of responsibility for a variety of good and bad reasons including love, loneliness, the need to prove something to my father (or at least his voice in my head) and the cultural pressures of the area I lived in...a pitfall of being the kind of person who tries to hear other people out and understand their point of view is, you can only be locked in a yard full of people who say the sky is green for so long before you start wondering if you're colorblind.
- I failed at parts of my responsibilities, and went crazy. I didn't fail in ways that were necessarily permanent or fatal, I simply exceeded my own tolerance for what I could bear up under and still keep my identity intact, especially since almost the whole of it was wrapped up in other people's approval. This can happen both more easily and more suddenly than you might think.
- I was forced to reinvent myself, a process both difficult and time-consuming, and survival became the order of the day...all day, every day. In short, my life filled right up, and when something had to squish out, it was pretty much always art that got shafted. I simply had no "me" left to put into it, no time or energy or passion.
So I quit. I traded money for time. And now I'd like to put that time to good use.