So why all the goggles and safety glasses??
I live in New York City as an artist and performer/improvising musician, and there came a point about a year ago where I felt this need to transcend a certain visual perception thing I saw happening — the way people are on the street, in the subway, all the ads everywhere, people constantly looking around at others insecurely, attention disorders yanked this way and that — and after having lived here for 15 years this curiosity and meditation began to take hold…
I had been seeing some paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and pictures of Japanese Zen priests (Komuso) playing shakuhachi, and had been listening to David Tudor’s electronic masterpiece, “Rainforest,” and so for kicks I just started painting over the lenses of cheap plastic safety glasses with various colors in acrylic paint to see how it would feel… When I’d come home from work in the afternoon and start practicing the trombone, I’d take a puff of herb, put a pair of these on and let play some old LPs of nature sounds and just go into this incredibly open place… Look, I’m deeply affected by the place I grew up (Santa Barbara, CA) — and light would be coming through the colors of paint, the eyes with nothing really to attach to except color, and occasional reflections of the eyes themselves, but there would be periphery…
And so it was this unique self-discovered place it put me which I NEED creatively, individually in this metropolis… And it was wonderful and exciting, FREEING, hilarious, and I was hitting the hardware stores buying the various plastic safety glasses and goggles they had to bring them home to paint over the lenses. It looked pretty ridiculous, but great… it was NEW…
And then one day it dawned on me to see what there was in the way of old, vintage goggles and safety glasses on the web, and with Ebay, and it opened up this WHOLE other realm! I couldn’t believe it! Creative paradise… I started bidding on these things, they’d come in these old mildewed and rusty boxes or just wrapped in newspaper from all over the place… When first putting them on sometimes I could almost feel a chemical affect taking place within me by experiencing these old enclosed colors, the same as they were back then! And they also looked so hip I couldn’t stand it! Wearing them around on the street then, on the commute, at gigs… What a joy! And especially sharing the realizations with other musician friends and my girlfriend at the time… I even had an optometrist make me prescription lenses for the old interchangeable Willson goggles! I love it…
And so the curiosity for all this just kept going and going… These things weren’t that expensive… The most I spent on a pair was $100, but generally they were in the neighborhood of $20 each. And I’m really quite surprised eyewear designers haven’t caught on yet with all this. I truly think some of these things would completely rock the fashion world — the metal screen, leather, and colored plastic side shields; and the split glass and colored lenses — and just the whole goggle concept, the way the things stand off from the face, I think really sparks the imagination… Some of the responses I get on the street are amazing! I mean, g r a d u a l l y it’s definitely headed this direction in trend though — seeing sunglasses on display which have the collapsible bridge and a certain shape to them; and occasionally someone with some safety glasses; or a chick with cheap “steampunk” goggles adorning her head… I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few years or sooner this will have blown up somehow and they’ll be designing super-hip glasses and goggles like this — oh and it could be really high-end classy stuff too, beautiful craftsmanship, leather, silver, glass, colored plastics, velvet — or some celebrity of sorts will start wearing these which will finally give some people the courage to be more themselves and it will all start to come out of the closet and so on and so forth… Urban Outfitters, etc, etc. ..
Mystical visions to you!
— Ben
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