Other than the work on the "Ghosts" series, the other major project I spent 2023 (and also 2022) working on was the organization and compilation of my road trip travelogues, a huge undertaking which has required going through troves of old materials including e-mails, text messages, and old social media posts, as well as having to sift through a very large collection of photographic material. Thousands of pictures taken with various cameras and phones over the past thirteen years were sorted through and put into chronological order to document every major road trip I've taken since 2010. The original plan was to have the final materials selected and the narration written before hitting the road in October of 2022, a deadline I very easily missed due to having vastly underestimated the amount of work that would be involved. I then moved the goalpost to October 2023, which I also missed for largely the same reason. Now, as of January 2024, the end is in sight, but there's still a ways to go before I can actually get there. The heaviest lifting, at least, is done. With a potential "special" road trip tentatively on the calendar for May of this year, my current goal is to have everything road trip completed and on the site by the end of April. This applies not just to the travelogues, but to the aforementioned blog series as well, and even a second blog series which I will cover below. I think this is a reachable goal, if I can put in the time required in between the other, more important personal and life goals I'm working toward for the new year.
So what's on the drawing board for 2024? Overall, a much more satisfying, fulfilling existence, on both on the project and personal fronts. Project wise, I'm leaning into a new series of blog posts showcasing some of the items in my ever expanding collection of vintage photographs from decades past. This series will run concurrently with "Ghosts," but will involve far less effort and will completely avoid all the headaches involved with photo clearances and copyrights that have been such a big part of the "Ghosts" experience. I also intend to finally start getting the concert photography galleries back online, an ambition which has very much taken a back seat to all my other pursuits of recent years. I'm not involved with the local music scene anymore and haven't been for several years at this point, and most of my musician friends from those days have hung up their instruments by now and/or fallen out of touch with me. In a lot of cases this loss of contact came about as a direct result of the COVID-19 pandemic or due to my leaving Facebook in 2021. I have the individual bands and performers that I intend to spotlight picked out, and I spent many months between mid-2022 and early 2023 going through tens of thousands of photos dating back to 2007, weeding out the bad shots and missed opportunities and sorting everything that was left by artist, only to shelve the project in favor of the travelogues and the "Ghosts" blog series. The fact of the matter is that I have long since moved on to other things I enjoy more than live music photography, and the litany of exhausting issues that come along with it (dealing with moshing idiots, rising cover charges, venues closing down, venues nowadays being much less camera friendly, musician apathy and/or lack of appreciation, etc.) make it highly unlikely that I will engage in it again at any time in the foreseeable future. Unless I develop a very close relationship with a musician or I do a one off shoot for someone as a favor, this is the way things are going to be, and I'm totally fine with that. That being said, I do want to get the best of that material up on the site for people to see. Live music photography was a really big part of my life for a long time and what I was able to accomplish in that area needs to be represented as much as my efforts with the Lost Art Open Mic, work with local spoken word artists, interviews, and anything else I've done over the years. Hopefully this will start becoming a reality by sometime in the late spring. And then there's one final, crazy idea for 2024 that I've been nurturing since early last year: I'm planning to have a small number of vinyl LP copies of the 2010 Live at Lost Art Open Mic promotional CD cut. I intend to display one in a large glass frame on my wall next to the framed CD copy that I already have. The other copies will go to one or two select individuals who were a part of that scene, and anything left over will be filed with my existing record collection. The modified album art, new track sequence, and new edits for the vinyl version are ready to go. All that's left is to commission an "on demand" record production service to make the discs, and to place the order.
And what of the personal front? 2023 was largely spent laying the groundwork for a set of significant website updates that will unfold during this new year. For 2024, I'm looking instead to tackle a host of things in my personal life that I feel need improvement. For one, I need to get back to being more physically active and to being in reasonable shape. Years spent working either part-time or full-time from home have taken away a huge chunk of my motivation to get outdoors and do things the way I used to. My social relationships and interactions also took a huge hit from the stay at home directives and the transition to remote work. This is something I intend to address in the new year. Continuing to build up my coffee Meetup group, meeting new people and forming new and better connections are very high on my "to do" list. Disengaging from toxic relationships and influences is also high on the list, and I began this process even before 2023 drew to a close. This came with some regrets, but it was something that needed to be done to clean the slate for new and better things moving forward. I am looking ahead to a better, more satisfying work/project/life balance for this year compared to last, focusing project-wise on things that give me imore satisfaction without worrying much about whether they get widely disseminated or get lots of clicks via social media shares, and focusing life wise on things that are, admittedly, largely outside the scope of this website. The whole purpose of the site was to serve as a showcase for my varied interests, projects, and activities, and after a misguided several years' long detour into trying to promote and encourage the local arts and music scenes (an absolutely thankless and underappreciated job if I ever heard of one), that's how it remains today. Whether that ends up being vintage photo restoration, research projects, memorabilia, cooking, traveling, showing off collections, or anything else that happens to appeal to me at the time, there's going to be a lot more of it coming in 2024.
