In my high school's audiovisual department, consisting of a studio and control room, was an eight string mandolin with a cracked back someone had glued so that it played well enough.  During a cleaning house session at the end of a semester, the mandolin was taken home by my friend Brian.  A year or two later he gave it to me.  A decade later it was played by my friend Tony during a recording session of our two man band.  I gave him the mandolin.  A few years later, in my friend Chris's apartment, I noticed a mandolin leaning against the end of his couch, strings out.  I picked it up, turned it around, saw the glued crack, and told Chris the story of the mandolin he'd been playing occasionally in his band.
     That instrument traveled.
     I like a mandolin's sound.  The mellow high-toned strings sound like the Renaissance to me.  I never developed any facility with it.  My first year in college was consumed with studying and playing music: bass trombone and piano, music theory, analyzing scores of classical music.  I immersed myself in Beethoven, his piano sonatas especially.  This education operated as a foundation from which grew sound collages of weirdness and experimentation as I played bass with Tony and later spun records and compact discs, mixing audio together, inserting old movie dialogue with a VCR plugged into the system.
     For me, all music flows within one stream.  I feel the same way about cinema, literature, painting, and whichever other medium you can name.  My father, an English professor, once criticized renowned novelist Cormac McCarthy's disdain for Henry James's fiction.  I paraphrase, but my father said, "I don't understand how McCarthy can dismiss a writer as important as James.  Just because Henry James lived in an earlier time, dealt with different subject matter than McCarthy does, should not make him irrelevant.  Henry James developed psychological realism in fiction, something twentieth century writers, including McCarthy, rely on.  Previous writers influence later writers, just as the previous writers were influenced by their predecessors.  It's a continuum with no unimportant figures."
     This stream-thinking of mine leads me often to obscure artistic figures.  For a reason I've never been able to understand, I'm attracted to lesser known filmmakers, actors, actresses, writers, movies, painters.  I'll watch a film directed by S. Sylvan Simon, a filmmaker of the 1930s and 1940s working in Hollywood, and then I'll find another he directed, and another, just as some will watch Spielberg films.  Not the person directly in focus, the star, but the one off to the side--that's my peculiar interest.
     This could have something to do with being obscure, myself.
     Somehow the mandolin is in a high school AV studio in 1982 and sixteen years later it's in my friend's apartment, its reverse side crack an identification card.
     I haven't seen Chris in years; location of mandolin unknown to me.

                                                                              Vic Neptune