The Open Door Invitational

In the mid June of 2012 I wrote an invitation to nearly 900 strangers to come to dinner at an undisclosed locale. It was titled, “The First Door To Open,” and featured the images of Arcimboldo’s Summer, and a basket of cherries. I foretold of an adventure in dinner, and dining with strangers; an allegory in that one may choose to participate, because the adventure is in living, freely, and the will to love one another inside of this livable tale.

Over the next 5 years I wrote many more of those invitations. Most all of them had contained a link to a piece of music that tracked the mood and motif of the words I had written, shaped my emotional purview, evoked a kind action, or some combination of these aforementioned considerations. Often times the link was located in small, bolded peekaboo-under-the-subject-line text, perhaps subtle, but explicitly front-and-center. The intention was to present to the viewer a clickable soundtrack by which to read the invite. Every once and again a 2nd, other clickable link would be buried inside the body of the email, towards the end, like “exit music for a film.”  Some readers found them, sought after them, anticipated their presence, even. Others did not, at all. The “clicks” were semi-regular, and not many.

I recently had the idea of collating the music of Open Door Invites Past into a mega mixtape — every track that had ever accompanied my musings on dinner. This idea quickly became a prospect as equally daunting to me as enthralling. So, I made it. It’s 3 hours long. It’s an amazing fucking ruckus: 40 tracks in chronological order of invitations sent, that implicitly demarcate time and place. Much had transpired through the Open Door time, and each track narrates a part of the story. I can describe to you what,when,where,how, and maybe why, too, with the resolution of years, often months and even days; memories driven by a given song and its order of belonging with respect to the others on the list; visceral, Proustian evocations. I bet HoneyBee and BabyBee can do the same.

I started Open Door because I was curious about the world and its inhabitants. I kept Open Door because I was curious about love. I closed Open Door because it showed me what I wanted to pursue further, in this continuing, livable tale. These 40 tracks bring me to many places, mostly on my knees. It’s public on my Spotify (@openthedooranddine). Go Fetch.