December 8th, 1980

First blog post.

Welcome, and thanks for being here.

I wish I was able to tell you what this blog was going to be about, but it’s going to be a little adventure for me to find out with you. I know it will somehow involve art and architecture, a little music, some Kansas sports, maybe some recipes and short stories thrown in. It probably won’t be anything groundbreaking, but hopefully a good song you haven’t heard in a while, a good building you haven't seen, or a good article to read or exhibit to see. It should at least be something topical or temporal. There is a story that I want to tell, I’m just not exactly sure what it is yet.

Plus now that I don’t have school to occupy all my time, I need something to do, and I decided the moment was right to jump with two feet into 2002, and start a blog. 

So for this first post, I chose a to pay a little tribute to John Lennon. I always think about him on this week. December seventh and eighth are important days in American history. The anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and the anniversary of John Lennon’s murder in New York City.

OK, I just figured out one thing I don’t want this blog to be: morbid. So I promise it wont be.

But John Lennon’s death made an impression on me as a kid - and I wasn’t even alive yet when it happened. I remember one day, I’m not really sure how old I was, but I was looking up at my mom, she was still taller than me. So that probably puts me under 11, I’d say around 9. I don’t know when I started to like Beatles music as a kid, but I remember that this was the day I became fascinated by them, mostly John Lennon.

I was riding shotgun in my mom’s old blue Jeep Cherokee, shooting off question after question about the Beatles and their history. I asked if they were all still alive (see as a kid, I was still of the mindset that anyone older than my parents could very well be already dead of natural causes. Plus all the pictures of them I had ever seen were in black and white), and she answered that all of them are still alive except for John. At first I reasoned that he must have been the oldest in the group, and had died before the other, younger Beatles. So you can imagine how confused I was when told that he was shot. On purpose. I mean only bad people get shot, I was crushed to find out that one of the members of this great new band I had found was a bad man.

Mom: “No, no, he was a very good man”

Me: “Then why did somebody shoot him?”

(Long pause. We were heading uphill on 9th Street at this point, towards Emery, and as we crested the hill, she explained that...)

“Sometimes people just do things that don’t make any sense at all”

I still remember it like it was yesterday.

Why would somebody kill a person that made such good music, and was not a bad man? And was in black and white pictures? I was growing up in the age of Vanilla Ice, and I figured somebody would shoot him way before they shot John freaking Lennon. I mean, he was a Beatle. Please don't take this the wrong way, I don't think that Vanilla Ice should be shot.

But if you had to choose one or the other…

So I became fascinated, and wanted to know everything there was to know about John Lennon and the Beatles, and maybe find out why this happened. I went to the library to read books, listen to music, and ask other people that were taller than me about it. I made Beatles tapes, drew Beatles pictures, trying to figure out why.

I still haven’t gotten an answer any better than the one my mom gave me that day.

So for my first post, I made this little video for a few reasons; today’s date, the fact that Christmas season is upon us, and that American soldiers will be headed home from Iraq to their families very soon. 

This is also a bit of an exploration. I want to do some experimentation with the blending of art, music, photography and video. A few hurdles on that track are that I am a marginal artist, a mediocre photographer, and a downright monstrous musician. So maybe if I mash them all together, something palatable will emerge. Sort of like goulash. My number one goal with this video was to create something that I could put my name on and say that this would earn no less than 'B' grade in a junior high Film Media class. Because we have to have goals.

So here is my first attempt, I really hope you enjoy it, if nothing else it’s a great song.

Happy Christmas, everyone.

Lennon from C T on Vimeo.

And the finished product...