Having instruments and recording gear set-up allowed us to catch some moments that I am glad exist.

They are not the most refined songs. Most were written and recorded within an hour or two. The idea for the “goes real fast” project was pretty clear. Write a song, record a song, start again.

Enjoy.

Through the doll house from geoffd on Vimeo.

In my mind, Steve Keller was one hell of a great person. I really love him.

I will miss him.

Chad Johnson skating

This is a small part of what of a movie that I was making about my friend Chad Johnson. The idea was to focus on the beauty of the motion of skating.

I took a lot of shots of the same moves from different angles. I also took long shots, instead of only short action-packed cuts. The whole project was shot on Super-8 film. In order to digitize the material, I projected it and recorded it on my camera. This process gave the footage a vintage look.

Hopefully one day I will finish up this project.

It brought to mind a recurring theme of one of my favorite professors, the late Nathan Knobler.

I am paraphrasing, but he would often say something like, “When you make art, you are competing for attention amongst all of the other things in the world. You are not competing for this attention between other works of art. You are more likely competing against someone’s thoughts on an upcoming meeting. You need to figure out a way to grab them and make them pay attention for a moment. And then when you have that attention, you better deliver something meaningful.”

Why does that matter, you might say? Haven’t we been told that recognition of artistic genius is not for your lifetime anyway? Why bother trying to compete? Won’t people eventually figure out what a fanastic work of art you have created? That is, after you die.

For me, the answer has always revolved around the desire to live a creative life. More specifically, to be able to support myself and family with the fruits of my creative labor. To take the creation of culture as a serious and professional endeavor.

I have never subscribed to the myth that an artist is not supposed be understood in their time and that they will only be discovered later.

My main motivation in creating is to communicate and to connect with other people and other living things. I don’t see the value in making something and then not sharing it. I am interested in the dialogue, the conversation with this thing. It is fine if it transcends my lifetime, but that is not my primary goal.

I want to impact culture. Today.

I have always had pity for the physically beautiful person that opens their mouth and nothing meaningful comes out. They instantly become unattractive to me. It is likely that they have never been challenged to think… since their looks have always carried them.

I feel the same way about a beautiful object that does not enrich life and create culture. It means almost nothing to me.

If you want to live a life where you have the privilege of creating culture and making beautiful things, it is not enough to just create them, as Joshua Bell can now attest. You ought to find a way to connect with people and to share with them.

I wish Nathan were alive to read this article. I know he would get a kick out of it.

Then one day, it stopped. I was too big to be flung around.

For a while after, I would often ask to be swung around, but eventually I accepted that it was not possible and I moved on to be an adult. It is probably at the moment when your father can’t pick you up to spin you around that you do become an adult. You accept gravity and somehow you accept a life of not floating effortlessly in the air.

To this day I miss that feeling, and I remember the sadness I would experience when watching other younger and lighter children being swung around by their father or mother or uncle or grandmother.

For a while, even that sadness disappeared. I didn’t think about it at all. It reappeared, though, when I started swinging my own daughter around in the air. The joy on her face is as immeasurable as the joy in my heart. But my joy is tinged ever so slightly with bittersweet reminiscences of my own lost childhood. It is not jealousy, it is more an awareness… an awareness of the unavoidable cycle that I am witnessing unfolding before my eyes each day as my daughter grows older and I, too, grow older.

Today my father has trouble moving even his own body around this earth. He grips tightly onto me as we go up or down stairs or when we walk from my house to the car. And I wish I could pick him up and carry him wherever he wants to go.

But it is not possible. It seems, somehow, that it should be. A son should be able to carry his father to pay him back for all of the times that he picked me up on a summer night and swung me through the air with fireflies whirling by while looking into his eyes, laughing, and asking for more.

It make sense to me. Maybe I will try.