music or pants
On a long car ride from LA to SD in summer 2007, while playing a fateful game of 20 Questions, my high school friends and I realized that most things can be categorized in one of two categories: "music" or "pants". The exact criteria we came up with has been lost to time, but it was basically this: music = things you can conceive of with your mind (generally intangible), and pants = physical things you can touch with your hands (tangible).
Of course, some things can be music AND pants at the same time. A vinyl record, obviously, is music in pants form. And furthermore, one person's pants (a fictional story turned into a novel) might be another person's music (a published book).
Anyway, while revamping this page of personal projects, I realized once again that all of these side projects and creative endeavors could be organized under those two umbrellas. So, here's a place for me to share some of the things I've made (none of which, I should clarify, are actually music or pants).
@garagedoors.sf
Inspired by a Monkees interview in which Mike Nesmith encourages people to "dig things that are ugly" ("Like what?" "Oh, I don’t know, dig something like a garage door"), I started taking pictures of garage doors in various neighborhoods around San Francisco and posting them to Instagram. Although as it turns out, garage doors in SF are actually quite beautiful.
spencer owen timeshare map
A fun little map I made of (almost) every venue and show that Spencer Owen Timeshare played in the San Francisco / East Bay area from 2012-2020. Click the map to go to the interactive version and zoom around.
recordings
I occasionally used my phone to take short audio recordings of my surroundings, a way of capturing a moment in time without relying on my usual methods (photos and words). When I remember, I'll try to add them here.
paris, outside the louvre, july 2022
san francisco, taj mahal @ stern grove, august 2022
amsterdam, protests, october 2022
austin, total solar eclipse, april 2024