Storyteller

I've been telling stories for a while now. What started as a love for personal conversations and recounting events morphed into music journalism, telling stories of concerts and albums to those who experienced them or not. (You can find recent ones here for DownBeat and here for The Lawrentian.) I've been at that point for several years and while I have enjoyed my time as strictly a journalist with occasional creative writing in other styles, I want to be a puddle, spreading out across a plain, reaching many destinations at once. My desire to be a puddle has helped me realize a storyteller can traverse mediums and creative outlets, fabricating and describing through the likes of music, film, personal connections, et cetera and no one thing should limit it. I brand myself as a storyteller because there's no use for me being boxed into just a musician, or just a writer, or so on. Our human experience is bigger than that and we can tell stories how we want, and it is the story that reigns supreme, not the means that
share it.

My whole life I have been moved by a wide variety of storytelling—The Grateful Dead, The Point, Charlie Kaufman, The Coen Brothers, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Hydrogen Jukebox, Kurt Vonnegut, David Foster Wallace, Serengeti—these are just several works and artists that have shaken me to the core, leaving me inspired but also feeling like I have known them forever. Recently, it's been David Lynch and Yo La Tengo that have been guiding me, building up ideas in my head that are just waiting to echo as stories and leave at least a small fraction of an impact that my influences have done to me. In Marshall McLuhan's The Medium Is The Massage, he claims that "All media are extensions of some human faculty—psychic or physical..." and if that is true, my art will be an extension of the mind, the soul, the heart, the ghost in the machine.

A poster (with original artwork) for a happening I fronted that brought together several of my artistic voices with other artists near and dear to my heart.