Everything I’ve Created In Quarantine

END OF THE WORLD PARTY

It started off innocently enough: a creative gig with a local bar in town (aptly dubbed, “The Bar” which is wholly confusing when trying to tell your buddies which one you’re at). The owner of the joint had an idea for a weekend party (and, at least in small town Iowa, there wasn’t the same looming threat of COVID-19 that existed on the coasts of America). The goal was simple: Throw an END OF THE WORLD party where the bartenders wore medical-grade gear complete with face masks and donning those clear plastic gloves that always seem to leave a weird residue on your hands after you dispose of them.

Corona beer was even going to be on a reverse-special and they were going to raise the price of them by an additional buck. THE BAR hired me for a short shoot to promote the event and I didn’t even finish the edits before I got the news:

The State of Iowa Was Proactively Shutting Down.

Damn. Guess the party wasn’t going to happen after all. At least we got some fun photos out of it, though.

I live in Keokuk, Iowa. It’s a quaint, roughneck river town on the crest of the Mississippi. Last I checked, the population was somewhere between nobody and ten-thousand inhabitants.

To put it as succinctly as I possibly can: there isn’t much to do around these parts if you aren’t going to the bars. There’s a row of four or five hot-spots that most people my age seem to congregate at and I have spent my fair share of time alternating between them over the last few years. When they all closed simultaneously, I was greeted by a fairly bleak epiphany: I didn’t have a god thing to distract me from what I needed to be working on.

Seemed like there were two distinct options I could take. I could either do what I’m at least locally famous for and commit to my patented Gloom-and-Doom™ ideology and wallow around until the ban was lifted, way before the second wave inevitably hit (still to be seen, but I’m placing my bets on: that’s coming).

…or I could choose to use the time accordingly and hone in on my crafts. That seemed more productive to me and so that’s what I committed myself to.

Or, at least, that’s what I decided. Making it real would take some time.

Day 01 was especially rough.

I’m not going to paint some rosy picture of inspiration here: I was horribly fucking depressed. So much so that my young niece (as intuitive as she is), would not leave me alone for entire strings of days. I was newly single, alone in a completely barren house, and half of my belongings were destroyed after a night of drunken debauchery some two weeks prior (I couldn’t be bothered to clean up after myself).

I didn’t make much that day. Or for the next few days after that. I couldn’t be bothered, I guess. I knew what I needed to do, but I didn’t know how to inspire myself to do it.

That’s why it helps to have friends in low places (and one of them being some 4,500 miles away over in Germany). My bandmate and best buddy Eike Swoboda didn’t accept my pity party and inspired me to get to work on a new song for our TWO MINUTE TUNES project (you should go follow us, by the way).

Over the next couple days, we conceived, wrote, produced, and finished a song called, “Mots Doux”.

And to see the creative process of that video, we also made this episode:

To preface that, too, we also finished a video for a song we created BEFORE quarantine started called, “Sayonara”. As a little side note here: this is also my favorite JOY? song to date.

And of course, the TWO MINUTE TUNES EPISODE:

GLITTER

I think bringing this song and video into existence almost in spite of my lack of will really seemed to kick me into the right spirits. I was still feeling sorry for myself, but not enough to just sit in my own filth anymore. I woke up the next day, cleaned my house, and plotted with my friends Morgan and Dakoah about a photo shoot in Burlington, Iowa (which ended in Keokuk with glitter that I’m still recovering from from weeks later).

The three of us had such a good time that it made me realize why I started doing this photo thing to begin with.

People constantly poke fun at me, they suggest that I do this stuff to see hot girls without their clothes on (and while I do readily admit that it is a nice cherry on top of the cake), the true meat of the thing is that it’s in those moments that I genuinely feel connected to people.

As a general reality for me, I usually feel pretty lonely. I don’t think many people relate to me and I don’t think I relate to many people. When I used to go out (before the world ended), I would run into this fact almost constantly.

While my peers were talking about mortgages, cars, women, men, and thinly-veiled attempts at confidence, I was in the corner of the room not saying much at all (and likely feeling even less).

Truth be told, the American Dream has never been of much interest to me. I’d rather live in a dump that I can throw glitter around in and create memories with people equally as weird and fun as I find myself to be.

If I lived in a nice home (and I’ve lived in several now), this kind of thing just wouldn’t be possible. I think back on all those lonely nights at all four of my town’s major bar scenes and it became apparent to me:

This is what really matters. The rest of it is just peripheral. It’s always been this way for me and I am finally okay with that fact. I don’t have to want what other people want.

I can want what I want. That’s okay, too.

KAITLIN AND JIM BEAM

I reconnected with an old flame and we spent an evening taking photos and drinking absurd amounts of alcohol. It reminded me of when we were just kids at my dad’s house, drinking small quantities of Jack Daniel’s and assuming we were really on the cutting edge of life.

“We are so punk rock.” We’d say.
We weren’t.

To think back on it, it’d have taken that whole damn bottle just to get us feeling the booze at all some eleven years later.

We’d long since downgraded to Jim Beam (ten dollars cheaper than Jack) and alcohols that most upstanding citizens would point their noses up at: the kind that is so cheap and so gross that the hangover almost feels necessary.

But none of that really mattered in the moment.

Even if things get bad eventually, the happening is still oftentimes worth the consequence. And when nine-tenths of the people I know are unemployed at the moment, sometimes the only thing you can do is drink that rot-gut stuff. It all does the same thing in the end.

Cirrhosis or Covid.

Which is getting me first? I’d place my bets on the former.

So, anyway, we all hung out and talked about old times, about new times, and the general malaise of life as it existed in this place in time. But it seemed to make sense to me, too. We weren’t exactly following the rules of quarantine (okay, to be completely transparent here, we were still mocking the idea of social distancing entirely. The reality of it hadn’t yet hit small-town America and we didn’t think it would). I mean, I can’t speak for the rest of them, but I sure as shit couldn’t.

We hadn’t even had a single confirmed case yet.

“Come on, open the bars back up!” I foolishly said. But nights like these would have been completely spoiled around strangers anyway, even if a looming pandemic wasn’t hanging over our heads like some perpetually bad news or storm clouds that get blacker and blacker as you peer into them.

We were creating our own party. Fuck the system. Let’s be punk rock. For real this time.

VIDEO JOURNALS

I also made a series of video journals during this time. And I don’t really have much to say about them beyond what they are, so I thought I’d just post them here:

MORE JOY?

After this experience, I took a few days and started to focus on my band, JOY? again. We needed to get back to work on a music video for a track we’d been crafting over the previous several days and we finally came up with a concept that the two of us agreed upon.

This was the finished product:

And, of course, the title is an overt wink to the idea of self-isolating and a sardonic response to my general lack of applying the idea to my own existence. The official TWO MINUTE TUNES VIDEO can be viewed here:

LOST LOVE, FOUND

That Joy? song was supposed to be my farewell to the relationship I’d spent the last couple years cultivating. The two of us imploded in on ourselves like a dying star (and in one instance, I even tried to pick a fight with some random guy she knew for no reason at all), and I’d finally put my hands in the air and waved that old white flag. It was clear to me:

she was done and I should adjust myself accordingly.

No sooner did we finish that song did Celina reappear into my life, almost like an apparition or something like that. It took several days for it to become real.

I would routinely wake up surprised at who was laying next to me. I’d really conceded that that part of my life was over.

The two of us wasted no time on rekindling our romance and the two of us were doing weird photos and dying our hair even weirder colors within the first couple days.

It took me a number of them to tell my nieces about the two of us reconnecting (they had already grown quite close to Celina before our split and were very obviously affected by it, so I didn’t want to fill them with false hopes).

When I finally did show them who I was hanging out with, they both cried. Profusely. That was enough for me to know that I was making the right decision.

A house I’d spent a lot of time in over the years had burned down in a fiery blaze one windy morning in the infant stages of Celina and I. The very first thing we did together artistically (that was more about art and less about just looking pretty) was this odd shoot with my niece in front of said building.

Part of me felt like maybe it was insensitive to shoot in front of that house, but it’s also my own way of paying respect to something, so I had to fight the urge to live up to the standards of some ghost that I wasn’t even sure existed to begin with.

I eventually decided that those unfortunate people would either understand my reasoning or they wouldn’t. And I’m glad I did it now, anyway, in retrospect, because the whole structure came down in just a matter of days.

THE BALLAD OF CELINA AND CODY

It was around this time that Celina and I decided to dissect our entire relationship publicly for the whole world to sit witness to. To date, it’s probably my favorite confessional piece I’ve ever made. You can watch it above.

We were, of course, inebriated.

TELLY

The two of us also got a puppy a few days after this video was shot; a young Great Pyrenees we dubbed, “Telly”. He’s been a handful, but I love the little guy dearly (and I’m going to enjoy calling him a little guy for what little time left I have to do so).

ESSENTIAL

My brother Dakota came up to me with an idea to shoot some photos of him beaten up and wearing a suit. I liked the idea due to my own hesitancy about the idea of “essential workers” and how the term itself sounded like a fluffed up version of, “sacrificial workers”.

By this time, some twenty days into quarantine, the reality had finally set in for me. COVID-19 had reached small-town Iowa and it seemed like nobody else was getting the memo.

It was nothing for me to see people congregated at gas stations in groups of fifteen or more, outside of the dead mall or at the grocery store bitching about not having anything to do. I realized how foolish I’d been up to that point and part of me wanted to kick my own ass.

That said, I took my frustration out in the form of art. Here are some of the results of that endeavor.

MORGAN’S 30TH BIRTHDAY

My birthday present to my friend Morgan was a short photo-shoot while she was in town one day. We only had about twenty minutes to knock it out, but the wind really played to our favor and we got some good stuff out of it.

The two of us walked around an empty, barren back-alley in Keokuk and I shot a couple hundred frames before they had to take me back home.

Morgan is always one of those people that I can just capture. We very rarely, if ever, have concrete ideas — we just work well together in that capacity and I never have to worry if I’m going to have a dud shoot with her. They’re going to be good 100% of the time.

This day was no different. She knocked it out of the park and I’d like to believe that I was on top of my game, too.

ACCELERATED ALCOHOLISM

Because what else is there to do right now? I can make stuff and I can drink copious amounts of alcohol. As I type this, I’m combining both. I’m sure that I will wake up in the morning totally aghast at my poor grammar and syntax. That aforementioned cheap whiskey that hangovers seem inevitable with, by the way?

That stuff is posted and glamorized above. Blessed be.

THE REALITY OF COVID-19

I spent a morning driving around to all the locations affected by this forced shutdown because I really think the world is living through global history that we will someday tell our kids and grandkids and great-grandkids about.

It only seemed appropriate for me to document it and freeze this unsure moment in time forever. It reminded me of my FORGOTTEN IOWA project and the memories of that project whispered into my ear that I really need to get back on that shit as soon as I can (which at this point, who really knows when that’s going to be?)

It was around this time that face masks seemed less like a novelty and more of a necessity and it wasn’t anything to see people donning them almost as a fashion accessory.

I took photos of Manny at Site’s gas station on that morning and remembered back to all the times my peers poked fun at the people over in Asia that have been doing this for years. Seems like they were being proactive when all of us here in America were laughing at them for their collective neurosis. That seemed especially paramount considering how inept and unprepared this nation was for a pandemic, but that’s a different story for another day.

While the Iowa governor spoke of reopening the state, the lot of us here were finally taking COVID-19 seriously. It seemed like the roles had reversed.

Such is life. C’est la vie.

GORE

In the meantime, I’d been trying to inspire Celina to work on things that she was interested in. One of those things was special effects makeup. She spent an hour applying putty to her face and we scared our neighborhood doing a shoot together as the sun gently set in the distance.

I was proud of her for the effort applied and hoped that it would catch fire for her the way that it had for me. Celina was becoming stir-crazy at this point and was so down on herself for the lack of work and her general lack of income.

“Girl,” I told her.
“there’s never been a better time to explore what you’re actually passionate about. Fuck money. Focus on you and what gives you motivation to wake up in the morning.”

And the makeup was so on point, too.
It was actually kind of gross to look at.

RIVERS OF BOOZE FILL THE STREETS LIKE POTHOLES

The two of us continued to drink and drink and drink. One night, Celina dolled herself up and we spent an hour or so messing around with mirrors and flashes and blurring the lines between artistry and pornography.

It was another one of those moments that made me think, “This is what matters.” And we didn’t even need the booze, but it certainly helps to coax those insecurities.

This night was a special one because a stimulus check helped us reinvigorate the economy with a middle-shelf bottle of whiskey instead of the bottom shelf stuff we’d been consuming to that point.

It was the first day I woke up without a hangover in weeks.

BARTERING IS BETTER THAN $$$$

I have also been spending a lot of time during this quarantine trading my skills for music equipment that I desperately need. To date, I’ve acquired a full drum set, cymbals, a Kustom 200 bass amp with cab, and boxes of random cords to help in the creation of music. It’s been really cool to operate like that and it’s a new way of thinking for me. So far, it really seems to be working.

A special thanks to Logan Schrapf, Joe Seaver, and Brian Peterschmidt for working with me on making these dreams a reality.

JAKE DEVERICKS

I also spent an evening with my little brother filling his ego as he transforms from a young pre-teen to a heartthrob.

While we were shooting these photos, I distinctly remember thinking how unfair it was that I remained the ugly duckling of our family.

I have a family full of beautiful people (honestly from top to bottom) and I’m still over here saying, “Hey! I make stuff and that’s pretty cool, right?”

We had a fun time driving around this ghost town and seeing what we could get in almost pitch blackness.

In the meantime, our little boy Telly had probably doubled in size.

I also made another video journal in the following days.

And then I shot some photos of Celina’s little cousin (that looks EXACTLY LIKE HER).

AND ONE LAST THING!

Finally, one last JOY? song and a TWO MINUTE TUNES episode for a song we wrote called, “You Have To Walk Through The Bushes To Reach The Picnic”.

Have I mentioned that you should follow us? Because you should: Here.

Okay, I think that’s it for now! I’m really happy that I committed myself to a concept and have actually followed through with it. I’ve removed the static of the outside world and have been trying earnestly to hone in on my skills.

Here are some random things that I couldn’t figure out how to include in the article. Love you,

• Cody Weber