WHAT?
Dancing About Architecture is a musical autobiography,– the non-linear story of a chunk of my life (roughly 15-35 years old) told through the music I listened to.
HOW?
There’s a number of paths to follow through this site. The home page, reachable by clicking the “dancing about architecture” banner at the top of most pages:
includes the alphabetical index and a threads link. The index block,– which is also on most other pages,– has links to each of the 150 pages.
Just click on a letter (the above is an example and does not work) and a pop up window will show you which artists are covered that begin with that letter (I’ve been having some trouble with this feature in Internet Explorer, you may have to click a letter twice in order for its list to appear).
The threads page follows people and places that appear in multiple entries, and offer another way of navigating the story space. Each entry page also includes a speaker icon, which, when clicked, will play the song in question,
and a dollar sign icon, which will lead you to the appropriate Amazon page for ordering a copy of the disc the song comes from.
Also, clicking on the album cover will lead you to that artist’s official web site, if there is one (or, rather, if I can find what looks like one - no guarantees).
You can also roll the dice and take a (semi-)random journey through the entries.
WHO?
Who I am is unimportant, although the careful reader will find a single mention of my first and last name somewhere on these pages. I debated changing the names of the people mentioned here, but decided against it. The stories are specific enough that those people involved would know it was about them no matter what I changed their name to and, because it is so specific and because I only use first names, those people that weren’t directly involved won’t know who anybody is anyway. There may be the odd revelation that might surprise somebody out there (he had a crush on me? yuck!), but the chances are slim enough that I’m willing to let it all hang out, warts and all. But, for bare bones, I was born in 1964 in Seattle, have lived in Michigan, Chicago, Amherst, NYC and currently reside in Los Angeles, where I live with my wife and two kids and work as a television editor. Nuf said.
WHY?
This project began innocuously enough with the birth of my son, in 1998. Wanting to share the wonderful world of music with him, I decided to play him everything in my collection so it would all be incorporated into his rapidly growing brain and personality. So, on his first day home from the hospital, a nestled him in my lap, held his floppy head upright, and put in an Abba disc. Three years later, I took ZZ Top’s greatest hits out of the CD player, our alphabetical journey complete. Along the way, as a memento and possible future gift for him, I made compilations of my favorite artists from each letter. Around the same time, my stepfather, a classical virtuoso, asked me to turn him on to some interesting contemporary music, so I started writing notes to accompany the tracks on each letter’s compilation disc. Quickly realizing that this collection of songs illustrated my own journey through adolescence and into adulthood, I expanded the writings to turn it into this sprawling musical autobiographical thing. Although originally written as a book, I rejected that form because I thought it was important to hear the music I was writing about and because I was also intrigued by the idea of telling my story out of chronological order. By being (roughly) alphabetical, the book form was already out of chronological order, but it was still linear, starting where I wanted it to (Boston) and ending where I felt it should (George Winston). Wanting the reader to find his or her own path through the story, I decided the only way to really construct it would be as a series of interconnected hypertext documents. These are they.