every tuesday and wednesday evening I walk out my door and start my 45 minute journey to a creepy, abandoned train station/grass roots cultural center for my classes in ensemble percussion. Sometimes I get lazy and start thinking of the commute as a “same ‘ol same ‘ol” situation…routine.
On one particular evening, though, I was walking along, listening to my Shuffle, when a song by brian’s jonestown massacre came on. I’m not a diehard fan, in fact the lead singer, who many consider to be a visionary genius-madman, seems more like a junkie-wacko-charleton to me. however this particular song has that spacy, early pink floyd-esque, languid pulse to it that just cries out “I’m somebody’s life-soundtrack!”. And as I walked along I started noticing a bunch of little details that I’d already passed a dozen times before without noticing.
The song helped me gain a slippery perspective that I find so important but so difficult to keep ahold of: that “mundanity”, boredom, and routine are just words to describe a lazy mind.
the next tuesday I brought my camera along and filmed things that caught my eye. and I listened to the BJM song the whole time, put it on repeat.
for every image i tossed into the video, a hundred escaped me because I wasn’t ready, or was too timid to shoot, or understood it only after it had happened.
They’re not “amazing” images, they’re not “startling” or “disturbing”…they’re just things that I’d passed many times without taking the time to absorb, appreciate…things I never allowed to surprise me; juxtapositions, shapes, colors, angles…the geometry of every-day, of work-life, of commute-time, of urban-routine.

here’s the vid: