Self portrait in the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, 2002. The mirror is actually Luciano Fabro’s Buco (Hole), (1963).
James’ Coffee Blog: IndieWeb Carnival March 2026: Museum memories
This month, I invite you to write a blog post about a memory that you have of a museum. It can be any museum: your local art gallery, a museum you visit often, a museum you visited on holiday, a museum dedicated to one of your interests (the sea, video games, transportation, your favourite football team), or a museum at a historic site you have visited.
For some reason my mind went directly to this: The Mirror Project - Daniel Miller - Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, first recorded here here.
At 50, seeing a photo of oneself at 27 is more than a little unsettling. The youthful face, the hair, the wedding ring that represented a marriage to a person long since gone from my life, that first digital camera.
At the time, that woman was in training to be a foreign service officer, and as I’d recently lost my job in the first dot-com crash and we’d relocated to DC for said training, I spent a lot of time wandering around the city and going into museums. I enjoyed my first winter in years. I got a little bit more into riding my bicycle and a lot more into playing my guitar and writing songs and singing those songs.
But the event of remembering the image on mirrorproject.com was a trip. Here is my other submission: County Courthouse, Arlington, VA (recorded here). In my memory that was a project of Derek Powazek, someone I would later work with in the Nth (of so many) instance of “never meet your heroes” in my life. But it wasn’t, really. It was a gift to his partner and brought to life by someone else entirely. Someone I now follow on mastodon. That it still exists on the internet is something to be applauded. I mean, Moby is on there, FFS (recorded here).
Finding the original of that photo required plugging in a backup external hard drive and sifting through old photos from an era I rarely revisit. I found this one:
That phone, the Nokia 3650. I tried to find a better resolution version of the above, but it’s possible that is the original resolution. Regardless, this selfie is the best representation of that time I can imagine.
Any search of an archive surfaces interesting nodes in a graph. Music is always the first to grab my attention.
Keith Michaud was a musician friend in south FL before we moved to DC but especially after I briefly returned, licking my wounds from a stint in Europe and the resulting divorce. The most emo singer-songwriter during the heyday of emo, his gigs in Palm Beach were always reasons for every member of the tiny music scene there to gather and get drunk and love on each other. This track was always a giant sing-along.
Of greater import to the present is Sondre Lerche’s Tragic Mirror, off his 2007 record Phantom Punch. Carissa and I went to see him at least once at our favorite music venue, Club Dada (also miraculously still in operation). Someone recorded his show there and I still have the mp3s, which are remarkably good.
Download Sondre Lerche, “Tragic Mirror”, live at Club Dada in Dallas, 2007
2007 was the year our friendship turned into what would become, as of today, 18 years of partnership, 15 years of marriage, and three children. The feeling of that moment is captured in another Sondre Lerche song:
We’ve been through so much together since then. I should watch this video more regularly.