Good evening, Mr. Frederik Magle! I feel like a new member, finally completing my guitar and amp system, saying they're finished, and getting a video, to say the least. I didn't want to start a new thread somewhere to say this, but after almost three years online, after being a prize-winning creative artist, professional graphic artist and sign-painter, but mostly a full-time musician, I think your portrait on your home page is the most complex and challenging image to try and emulate. As a former full-time road musician, being that for over eleven years, I'm very good with people. No-one ever slapped me, threw a drink on me or poked a cigarette burn in my clothes. Being a non-smoker, non-drinker helped. Going door to door as a missionary and five-time mayoral candidate also helps. When I watched The Merv Griffin show as a teenager, he surprised me by going into the audience and guessing their occupations or a personal aspect, getting me to look at people that way.
Every time I see your home page picture I keep looking, and if I saw you in real life I wouldn't know where to start. When I was younger, you could look for musicians hands, and people would turn mine over to look, but there are more people out there with gentle fingers from computer work now.
I can only surmise this. You type about a duality in your work. You must have a very widely experienced but balanced lifestyle to exhibit so much character, character that exudes more than age or lifestyle, and even though it's an obvious pose for the camera, it's like you just stopped being busy for the moment, and have an inspiring environment to return to.
This makes me want to focus myself. Considering the competition out there for guitarists, it's going to take an exceptional effort to make it performing again. I'd like to think my interest in being a virtuoso is going to make it for me, even if that's what I'm hired for but have to play down for the gig.
If I had to name an affectation in your pose, I'd say it's the expression on your face, looking, what, sternly ahead, even if more is expressed. But then I think depictions of the great classical composers always looked angry, with wild hair, well, maybe not Bach or Strauss and his son. That's something I'd like to be, energetic and penetrating.
It's getting to where I've got to start supplying professional performance videos, and while my musicianship and put your head through attitude has never failed me, I don't want to see my face, or hair. It's not how I feel inside.
Mr. Frederik Magle, keep on doing whatever you're doing. Your ambition probably isn't to set this kind of precedent for me, and your domain isn't a modeling runway just to influence me, but it's certainly going to be interesting to see what kind of fashion changes you're going to go through over the years.
Just to be open with you visually, here's a pic of me in the middle when I was thirty-two in the early 80's, being asked to front a band by a nineteen and twenty-one year old drummer and bassist, doing my own hair to be new wavey. That's a left-over photocopy with too much contrast, and I think the look in my eyes is wounded, or haunted, not soulful as most say. I know soul, and that's not what I felt when these were taken.
No reply is necessary here. I hope you're interested in comments about this aspect of your domain, and probably stage presence. All this, and it's not even full colour or life-size. I'm going to have to visit a stylist and trust him, and I'm not good about trusting others about myself. I've only ever decided to let someone else make up my mind for me about important musical things when I wanted to be sure I was applying myself in a way that would allow unimpeded future growth.
as always, John Watt
