Merry Mastodonians,
If you’ll allow me to talk about me…the cocktail of the holidays, the new year, and a birthday makes the last days of December a natural time to reflect and prep for the year ahead, despite this year proving there is only so much one can really prep for. 2024 has unfolded more like an anthology than a cohesive narrative; shifting, seasonal, segmented. How I feel about this structure is neither here nor there for the purposes of this dispatch, but it has led me to ask both an earnestly inquisitive “…what did I do this year?” and a more self-critical “what did I do this year?” In an attempt to respond, I’m listing the art and artful attempts that help me remember and make sense of their meaning. Whether you’ve seen or supported any or all of these efforts, it really does take a village, and I’m thankful for the part you’ve played:
The Holiday Collection (January)
The majority of this project was developed over the course of November/December ’23, but publishing it in the first days of ’24 was a nice way to kick off the year. Reading them a year removed, I don’t think every piece hit its intended mark, but it was validating to have prose, poetry, and scripts together, arm in arm. Words across forms is a sticky and essential part of my flavor of evolving artistry, and this collection was a valiant effort to realize this commitment. If you have holiday reading hours or care to revisit any, I recommend POPS, The Buffers, and The Centerpiece.
NYC pilgrimage (February)
Being only 10 months removed from the move, I don’t have the knowledge to fully evaluate the choice and all it’s boded, and will continue to bode. I am confident in saying that this move stands as a BC and AD moment—a time and place that has tangibly shifted the way I see myself, others, and the changes I’m seeking to make. Though it took two and a half decades, this move was also one of the first choices I pursued out of intuition and unabashed self-interest, taking on a zag while my brain yearned for zigs. While it’s been far from touching true hardship, I’ve felt the weight of putting myself on my own hook, making peace with my actions and inactions, tangoing with demons old and new while finding ways to bash in their skulls with metaphorical frying pans (kettlebells, cottage cheese, Kodak film). I recognize this rhetoric might be the kind you hear after someone summits Everest or wins the Tour de France, but in my own little universe, the journey has been somewhat comparable. No project in this post could’ve been possible without the inspiration and access the city has offered, and despite its facade of brash, inflexible impenetrability, the small moments where I’ve seen it bend and mold to my moves and shakes, no matter how fleeting and publicly imperceptible, has made it all worthwhile. My belief is that this coalescence is only just beginning, and I’m along for the ride through thick and thin.
KaneFrame (March-Present)
Like Play-a-Day accomplished nearly (checks the date, gulps) four years and nine months ago for my writing, KaneFrame has laid out the runway for my photographic pursuits to take flight. Though it began as a reactionary measure to display images away from Instagram’s ominously omnipresent orbit, the truest value of the ‘photoletter’ lies in its role as a curatorial sandbox, challenging me to draw photographic through lines across place and time and understand where my eyeballs and lenses find themselves pointing. Whether it’s smokers, cats, cars or bananas (more on that later), noticing patterns begets more actionable photo taking, which begets series, collections, books, exhibitions and beyond, all kickstarted from a single post. Not every post can or should cross these development thresholds, but with intent, time, and a platform that enables shipping work with frequency and joy, KaneFrame will continue to be an indispensable tool regardless if its readership scales to anything meaningful. The same goes for the monthly digital zines, which I hope to begin printing and expanding in 2025.
FLRE (March)
Building worlds is fun.
Maxine (March)
Shorter can be sweeter.
Yo Mama (April)
Welcoming a tad more “write what you know,” and coming to terms with needing an editor.
Bananas of the Boroughs (April-Present)
This wasn’t supposed to happen, but almost 250 daily posts later, B of the B is alive and kicking. It’s been a key point in grasping what my project building is becoming (slowly, obliquely, then all at once), and broadening what skill building actually means. I didn’t have “being the best in NYC at finding and documenting bananas” on my bingo card, but why fight it? I’m upset at my hypocrisy for making this an Instagram native effort, but there’s some lingering belief the concept might fit what the algorithm wants while I flesh and figure out the catalog’s long term plans (as it expands). All I know is that the bananas keep calling, and I must keep finding them.
The Scraps of Summer (May-August)
When cobbling this list together, I went back and forth on what to include about this time of the year, if anything. My initial impulse to gloss over what I was doing is indicative of how I’ve tended to view my relationship with productivity - if something isn’t showing some shade of completion, it’s difficult for me to validate its value and the work I put into said work. When I hit the inevitable dips required for difficult projects, this mentality can often lead me to “hype cycle” through ideas, chasing the dopamine of a work’s promise over the uncertainty (and eventual triumph) of powering through. This summer was indicative of this cycling - typing away until I hit a wall, then jumping to the next concept, rinse, repeat. There’s some logic to favoring the hot hand approach with as many disciplines as I’ve shown promise, but it’s a habit I’ve engaged in consistently enough over time to know it doesn’t lead to desired returns. I forgive myself, and am still quite happy with all the dust I kicked up — the sketches of a baseball novel, 5-ish short stories, and the blueprint of a website/journal dedicated to the sociological effects of sports and games. I still have my heart in these kernels and hope to share them in their best forms, yet a defined strategy is needed to grease the wheels of each. Scrapping is fun, but it’s not a surefire path towards shipping. If nothing else comes from this period than this revelation, it’s still time well spent.
Look Down (August/September)
Coming off a stir crazy few months, pivoting to crafting something I could see, touch, and share was an important milestone to reach. I had the right stuff to put something together, but not the nuts and bolts know-how to make it happen. The self doubt was palpable until the first dummy print from FedEx, a reminder that moving any and all work off a screen into the physical world has a special way of breathing life and legitimacy into any process. Getting to place this booklet into the hands of those I appreciate has meant a lot to me, and even selling a couple to those who don’t know me on a platform I support in Metalabel was fruitful. I am proud of the content — as much as one can be of city garbage — but prouder that I figured out a pipeline to craft bigger and better things looking ahead.
Block by Block (September - Present)
I’d spent many early months in New York embracing the strengths and freedoms of ultrapedestrianism (this is a word now), but it wasn’t until June’s 14 mile, 350 photo walk down the entirely of Broadway that got the gears going. Knowing a path has been walked in its entirety tickles my inner desire for completionism, and the feeling of moving through the entirety of the city — street by street, block by block, image by image — is a hefty, worthy, repeatable task. I begin each walk quite aware every inch of the sidewalks have been tread on and captured by amazing individuals and artists, but not that way, not on that day, and not by me. Have legs, have shutter button trigger fingers, will travel.
Reasoning with rhymes (September/October)
The title of poet still gives me a squirm of unworthiness in a way that’s different from writer, photographer, etc, but I tend to keep going back to work that’s poetic. I got about six pieces deep into a theme before slowing my roll, hoping to edit and refocus when I have a better sense of what I want to do with them. At base, I know the plan is for photo pairings to come into the picture. For now, and for once, it was fun not to ignore the urge to craft rhyme-centric work. Progress!
What now? (November/December)
The last 7 weeks have been packed with entrances and exits to a degree I could not have anticipated, and I’ve tried affording myself the time to make sense of all these various realities. Given the work I’ve detailed here (and all the rest), I recognize I want a lot of things. My relative youth, passion and past work makes it fun to want a lot of things, and believe it’ll help me reach many of these things in due time. What I’m grasping with more clarity now is that wanting a lot of things can become crutch-like cloud cover for not really being sure what I want. I’m pretty certain by now that stepping onto on an inflexible professional and creative escalator is never going to be in my DNA, but that doesn’t free me from making commitments, decisions, plans, and follow-throughs. Unorthodoxy of any kind, especially as someone engaged in many worlds, begs for more frameworks, decisions, omissions. It’s transitioning from thriving in the “what if” to learning from the “what happens;” towards bolder assertions, more effective experimentation, and eating what I’ve put on my life’s plate before piling on seconds. It means knowing what projects are in motion continuously and contiguously with an informed sense of direction and the fuels they require - time, collaboration, serialization, public sharing, informed feedback, higher/lower expectations, better platforms, stronger networks, smarter deadlines. Learning the work of doing the work doesn’t feel as fun, but it’s the investment in myself I need to make to truly do the things.
Resolutions
I know I just ranted about a lack of specificity, but I’m keeping my New Year’s resolutions general and packed with the letter H:
Hunger - the mental urge to keep going
Health - the physical ability to keep going
Hindsight - the wherewithal to keep laughing and gleefully realize how ignorant/dull/misinformed/unaware I was yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.
If you’ve gotten this far, again, thank you. Wishing you and yours a wonderful final holiday week, and look forward to all there is to come. Talk soon, and see you in 2025!
-MK