Garage Band & Public Storage

YOUR GARAGE, 2 April — paradoxically, this unassuming place is both the place where creativity is born… and the place where creativity goes to die.

Early in your life, the garage is the no-cost studio where musicians, artists, inventors, and innovators can develop their work. Later in life it’s home occasionally to cars, but more often to boxes of meaningless paper and a lifetime of unnecessary household products, and art & technology materials that are artifacts from the dreams you no longer pursue but don’t have the courage to divest yourself from the baggage of, or for which you have not yet even admitted to yourself that you no longer pursue.

From Hewlett & Packard, to Wozniak & Jobs, to a million garage bands that barely played a gig, or maybe changed the world, the garages of this earth must surely rival Cambridge, Harvard, and Stanford (combined) for number of innovations and cultural sea changes. These garages seem rivaled only by The Internet itself for the sheer number of individuals who have been empowered to pursue dreams, explore ideas, hone craft, and develop innovation there. The Garage is the uber-research lab where free of publish-or-perish pressures and investor bottom lines, the most personal, speculative, and innovative work has taken place for ages.

The Garage is also the place where failed dreams and forgotten hopes, too painful to reopen, too treasured to discard, fill a bloated Raiders-of-the-Lost-Ark warehouse where you can neither park your expensive new car nor fold your laundry for the cockroachitorially exploding mass of former-life baggage.

Your Garage is the birthplace of creativity.

Your Garage is where creativity goes to die.

Once upon a time I taught myself to screen print in my parents garage; today I have a box of toe shoes in my garage: it is as unlikely that I will ever wear them again, as it is unthinkable that I could ever part with them. I was a ballerina once. Not professionally. But I put in enough blood, and sweat, and tears, enough blisters and bruises and bunions and broken nails.

What are these ratty old toe shoes now? Trophies? Coffin nails? Proof that my body once did things that it doesn’t do today? The idle fantasy that I’d ever even want to put them on again? That dance form has so little to do with my perception of art and life today. Yet it was hard. I survived. So now it can take up space as a mausoleum for relentless creativity now made tame.

Your Garage is the birthplace of creativity.

Your Garage is where creativity goes to die.

Featured image:
La Sera 3.13.11-34, by Nicole Kibert