mvv
on a mission, vision, and values for Something New.
It’s a tough week (this week).
I’ve been drafting and editing a refresh for Something New, centered around mission, vision, and value statements that can be a guiding force for the ebb and flow of trying to write every week. My output has slowed, and my clarity has clouded, this past summer with life happening all around. So it goes.
I have been left, after Tuesday night, with a new clarity, strange as it may feel. I feel more comfortable in my mission here than ever before. Everything seems simpler, somehow.
The kindling of the fire was an idea, an old quote attributed to some person, or persons, that I read a week or four ago, about our lives being not for answering the largest and hardest questions, but instead for living with them, feeling them, moving through them. Experiencing them. Understanding them as best we can without shutting ourselves out to alternatives or alterations.
You may be wondering what the answers are right now. I’m certainly asking the questions for and of myself. I am also holding onto the information and tools that my community has given me over the past eight years, when answers have been similarly out of focus, and I am remembering how our community has taught itself how to resist, persist, and survive. I take solace in the varied abilities of various people, and of the many different coalitions of people. I take solace in having learned and grown over the last eight years, and in the steady, if slow, progress that is taking place along the seams of things. There is good in this world, and we can help make it, by and for ourselves, and with and for others.
All of those ideas are why art, and community, are my questions and my answers. We are facing unprecedented times, but so was everyone else, for all of time. And in unprecedented times, people create wonderful things. A 1956 jazz record might be the scratch for this particular itch; a 1937 novel might have the perfect description of someone in the news today; a 2025 blockbuster movie might encapsulate the decades-long failings of an entire industry, or it might just be an ineffective, mundane time at the theater.
I decided, about ten years ago, to try my hardest to avoid cultural arrested development. I don’t know what I expected(1), but I have found countless branches reaching out to infinite depths, and endless exploration of ideas and craft. There are answers, and questions, for everything. There will be more tomorrow. They are alive in other people, and in the things that they make, and they are alive in you, and in the things that you make.
And so I will continue, much the same as before, to search, to feel through, and to share the beautiful, smart, challenging, worthwhile things. I will have fun creating different ways to do this, and will keep it freely available to anyone who wants to have it. I will do my best to leave out that which is created in bad faith, and those who create more harm than good. I will err, and I hope to be corrected, and I will learn, and I will grow, and I will echo what those who know better know. I love the things I find — and the act of finding them — so much; it makes me feel so alive, and so full. I just want other people to find and feel good things, too.
A recommendation before you go:
Johnny Smith - Moonlight in Vermont (1956)
When the days darken, and temperatures fall, my music tastes bend toward nostalgia, toward warmth and fuzziness, toward melodic creativity rather than flashy craftsmanship. Johnny Smith, an American jazz guitarist, pairs with the saxophonist Stan Getz on this compilation album that is all killer, no filler.
The recording has the exact fidelity that I crave during this season: a softness around the edges, a slight whisper over any silences, plenty of depth in the bass, and plenty of pluckiness in the guitars and brass. If you enjoy Vince Guaraldi’s work for the music of Charlie Brown, or if you like mid-century Christmas music (this isn’t a Christmas album), or if you like the idea of jazz but find some of the “classics” a bit too heady, I think you will be comfortably in the pocket of Moonlight in Vermont.
Perfect for: solo evening work in the kitchen, music to listen to while reading in an Eames chair, or getting yourself closer to holiday music without upsetting your neighbors or loved ones.
on Spotify | on Apple Music
