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A Letter From The Editor
Love is one helluva thing... the single greatest inspiration of art across human history and sometimes the most devastating of all emotions. It can accomplish amazing things, yet its truest form is often too small to easily observe.
By Tom Jakob | 1/31/24
Dear Reader,
In the month of February, we celebrate many holidays, some real and others marketing ploys. But this year’s February is actually an action-packed one. In addition to our regular Super Bowl and paid time off from work on President’s Day, this year we will get to celebrate Mardi Gras and Chinese New Year. February is also of course Black History Month and National Cancer Prevention Month. As the list grows, it becomes more and more apparent that there were a lot of different themes we could have applied to this issue beyond the most obvious one, which occurs every year on February 14th (that date just so happens to also be Ash Wednesday this year, so… just ignore that grim counterpoint).
The issue we have produced this month is one I am extremely proud of and excited to share. Love is something so impossible to describe, and yet we know that it is a core part of our newsletter’s mission. It is one of the most consistent inspirations of art and creativity across human history, yet to give it definitional parameters often becomes almost an exercise in futility. It is often better expressed in the small than in the grand… the small brushstrokes…the tiny etchings in a building’s facades and cornices… the little gestures that assure our loved ones in major ways.
But while this thing we call love is sometimes painstaking in its required attention to detail, at other times it is enchanting in its all-enveloping blissful nature. So it was nothing short of a wonderful, and I believe an ultimately triumphant challenge to put this month’s issue together around the topic of love. Furthermore, what makes these stories so endearing to me is their unconventional ways of analyzing how love affects and is affected by the creative process.
Betsy’s story with Austin and Liz is truly one of the most sincere and tender pieces we have published yet. After their interview, Betsy went on to tell me how seemingly in-synchronicity the pair was in their manner of speaking, with each offering the other plenty of time and opportunities to provide their thoughts on every question. What came from that is an extremely heartfelt, raw, and thought-provoking discussion of working together with one’s beloved through an extremely competitive and commercialized set of industries. Austin and Liz, through their ideas and actions, reaffirm it is possible to break free of the bondage that is the creative industry’s divisiveness through unconditional love and grace.
We continue to receive direct engagement with our community this month through our new habit of monthly reflective questions. This month, we asked our readers “What role do love and passion play in your artistic practice? How do love and passion for art interact with your professional pursuits?”
The response we have reproduced in this month’s newsletter comes from Jasmine Galante, a NYC-based composer. Her thoughts on these questions speak volumes to the variety of forms love can be found in––for others and ourselves. Jasmine’s words remind us that while it is a struggle to define love, it is a struggle worth enduring because it is the very thing that drives most of us to create art in the first place.
Our feature this month is also one of the most energizing we have produced; Caroline’s wild, fascinating, and motivating story is one you do not want to skim through. It is also one deeply enveloped in love and grace, but in a different way. It is often said that we cannot love others well until we learn to love ourselves well. Caroline’s journey from non-artist to successful photography business owner demonstrates this all through its many fascinating details, asides, and through-lines.
What also makes Caroline’s feature all the more interesting is that it has an equally interesting backstory which provides a lovely bow to wrap this entire letter and issue up with.
You see, Caroline and I were classmates back in our salad days at VCU. I had continued to see her work pop up on my feed from time to time in the years after graduation. While Betsy and I were brainstorming artists to feature in this issue, I came across some recent work from Caroline on Instagram. From the photos alone, which were bursting with warmth and passion, I immediately knew she’d be perfect for the issue.
I reached out. We talked. A date was set, January 13th, which has now been burned into my brain, but not because of the meeting with Caroline. The date is cast into my memory because of our last-minute need to change plans from a rendezvous at a coffee shop in Carytown to one closer to my apartment in downtown Richmond.
I had awoken that morning around 8 AM to the sound of my cell phone ringing for a Richmond area code. I ignored it. I always do in these dark, robo-call-filled times.
I got up and began making a cup of coffee. Then my phone rang again. Same number. Was this Caroline trying to contact me to reschedule? “No bother,” I remember thinking. “If it’s important, she’ll text me… we still have two hours.” And so I ignored the second call too. Finally, after about half-way through making my coffee, the phone rang for a third time, again from that same Richmond number. Something was up, so this time I answered it.
As it turns out, the call was not from Caroline but instead from a Richmond police officer who was standing right outside of my apartment.
“Hello,” he started. “Is this Mr. Jakob?”
“This is he,” I replied. “Who am I speaking with?”
“This is Officer Capocelli with the Richmond Police Department,” he said, then paused for a while.
I paused too. “...Okay?” I said confused as all hell. “You first.”
Officer Capocelli went on to explain why he was calling: earlier that morning, a driver had turned the corner from the avenue over, and for reasons not yet understood, lost control of his vehicle, sending it crashing into the rear of mine, which had been street parked overnight. I sprinted over to the window, hoping I’d look out there and see something not resembling the Richmond skyline at all as if I was still dreaming. Alas, it was all too real: there sat my car in the middle of the street, spun out to be perpendicular to traffic and missing most of its rear, which was scattered in pieces all across the street.
I threw on some clothes and rushed outside to meet the cold January morning air. I hadn’t even gotten to finish making my coffee. I looked around. The whole street looked like a bomb had gone off. Shards of windshield and fiberglass cosmetics were strewn all about, sticking up under the tires of other parked cars and even turning the sidewalk into a menagerie of shrapnel. A street sign once demarking the parking lane from the bike lane was now a chewed-up piece of garbage flung some ten feet from its foundation.
Officer Capocelli’s cruiser had blocked off entry to the street, not that anyone could have maneuvered their vehicle around my car anyway. Down on the other end of the street was the other vehicle, which resembled a black mass of disfigured metal and plastic that had been accordioned up to a shattered windshield, with half a Volkswagen Jetta crudely attached at the back.
When I emerged from my apartment, my neighbor, Terrell, stood outside on the curb waiting for a friend to arrive.
“Don’t tell me that’s your car, bro!” he asked me in disbelief. I nodded solemnly. Terrell hung his head and gave me a fist bump. “It’s gonna be all good, bro.” Simple words, but ones I needed to hear at that moment.
It was no earlier than 9 AM. I live in an apartment above a very popular restaurant in downtown Richmond, which on a Saturday morning has a line out the door, sometimes extending around the block. As brunch-goers and drivers in their vehicles passed us by on the street, everyone rubber-necked so fiercely it seemed their necks would snap. I felt embarrassed for a moment, though I still cannot fully explain why. Perhaps it’s the vulnerability of having to stand there sheepishly while one of your most expensive assets performs a public striptease.
Anyway, there was work to be done and I couldn’t bear thinking about that right now. I began speaking with Officer Capocelli. As I did, the other driver (we’ll call him ‘Mitch’) walked over and joined our meeting of the minds. As he sauntered his way towards us, I could see it written all over his face, which was red and swollen from an obviously profuse volume of tears and hair pulling.
“I’m so sorry, man,” Mitch began. His voice was quavering and he was shaking still a little bit.
“Hey man, it happens,” I said, not really sure of how to respond.
“I’m so sorry,” Mitch repeated.
“It happens,” I repeated. And so it went like this for the next twenty minutes: Mitch repeatedly apologizing and me repeatedly telling him “shit happens” in various ways. Aside from answering questions, they were the only words that I could stand to eject.
While chatting with Mitch and Officer Capocelli, a car pulled up to the curb on the avenue over. The driver, a young woman who lives in the building above the site of the crash, called me over to her car and pulled out her phone.
“I heard the crash and took this photo of the other driver this morning,” she said, showing me the photo. “You want me to send this to you?”
“You are so kind to do that,” I responded. “Luckily, he stuck around, but thank you.”
She smiled, waved, and drove off. Here was a person with no real reason to care undertaking an act of service to a complete stranger. Why? Well, for one thing, Richmond has a terrible infrastructure, which makes it easy for drivers to flee the scene of a crash and get away scot-free. It happens a lot and she must have known this. The other reason, I suspect, is because even though she did not know it, she had the sense that we were neighbors. As such, we owed it to each other to look out for one another as good neighbors do.
I’ve only ever been in one other car accident involving another driver. Back in 2020, I was rear-ended by an aggressive driver while on my way to work. I remember when the collision occurred, my first thought was “Oh shit, this person is gonna kill me.” But when we emerged from our vehicles, I was surprised to find that the other driver did not fit the description I had built in my head. I had pictured a buff, massive, and machoistic dude covered in tattoos ready to come pound my face into the steering wheel. Instead, it was a small, demure woman who could not have been older than me. Neither of us knew what to do, except ask the other “Are you okay?” We waited for the police to arrive for over an hour, chatting here and there and more or less doing what Mitch and I would do a few years later: apologizing and forgiving over and over again.
The morning my car was struck by Mitch while waiting for Officer Capocelli to finish his report, my mind went back to that day. How long had Mitch been waiting for me to emerge from my apartment? What had run through his head in that time? What agonizing dread he must have felt, waiting for the owner of a car he just totaled to emerge from their home, possibly furious? At that moment, I realized the human brain is a lot more capable than we often make it out to be.
I don’t say these things to make myself sound so perfect or even-keeled. Of course I was furious! I proceeded to go back inside after everything was settled and punched some pillows. But screaming at Mitch and making him feel bad, or doing anything worse, would have resolved a total of absolutely fucking nothing. Love and compassion, despite their expense towards my internal satisfaction, were the only things that were going to get me back inside quickly and on time to meet Caroline for our interview.
It helped, of course, that there was so much love and patience in the air for me that morning that I barely needed the puffer jacket I was wearing to keep me warm. Shit had hit the fan, yes, but the impact was mitigated by the warmth of other people and their actions. It was like the whole of Richmond came together to figure out what happened, how to solve it quickly, and how to make sure everyone was okay.
Love is quite possibly one of the greatest concepts of human imagination that we are simply powerless to define. Sometimes, it’s asking a question as big as “Will you marry me?” Other times, it’s something as simple as pausing on your way to work to help out a stranger in need. Some take the romantic route when defining love and see it as an emotion that compels us to be our best selves towards those who evoke overwhelming feelings from us. Others take an analytical approach and see it as nothing more than a cocktail of hormones that form the biological response to breed. And then some see it both ways—a fact of science that subverts our ability to understand it because of its many, many magical manifestations.
As it’s been said, love is patient, kind, non-envious, nor boastful, and rejoices at truth. Yet so much of our time spent alive is spent on petty human melodramas that embezzle our capacity for love. We so often get angry at each other for misunderstandings, misphrasings, and missteps before we even understand why they happened. Yet rarely, if ever does a reaction void of love solve anything. It usually just creates a new problem that does nothing more for the original problem than obfuscate something that is already unresolved.
I still do not understand why Mitch took that turn so hard. I probably will never learn why. But he stuck around, possibly for a long, agonizing time, and owned up to his mistake. That’s still worth a helluva lot these days… it doesn’t cover the damages to our vehicles, but it says a lot about the power that unconditional love can have on a person and situation.
That morning really was a perfect storm of love, so much so that I struggle now to put a half-satisfying end cap on the story. Truly, how does one put definitional parameters on something so indistinct and multi-faceted as love? I tend to believe that love is usually displayed far more powerfully through actions than through words. And the actions I observed that morning were truly something to behold and learn from.
Caroline was so understanding of my situation by offering every solution and not batting an eye to a last-minute location change. Terrell was so understanding of what must have been going on inside my head that he offered some small, if not very much needed moral support. The woman who took the photo was so understanding of a stranger’s disposition that she went out of her way to make it known. This is what community looks like. This is what love looks like, to me. And had it not been for that perfect storm, it’s quite possible this issue would never have seen the lights of day or at the very least would have turned out rather milquetoast.
So, Mitch, if you’re reading this: no hard feelings. We all make mistakes, some small, some catastrophic. Sometimes those mistakes can’t be solved right away with direct actions––I’m not sure either of us could have taken duct tape and ratchet in hand to stitch our cars back together that morning. But we both saw in each other a person stuck in a tough disposition, and for a moment were able to shed away the influences of finances, self-fulfillment, and time to see past the veil and be filled with and influenced by an odd emotion: love. Small and seemingly unimportant that may seem on an insurance claim, for that, I believe we are both lucky.
An impactful lesson about the importance and utility of compassion is a luxury in this expensive modern life. We could have squabbled over who was at fault for months. We could have hurled insults at each other until the cows came home. We could have gotten into a fistfight on the street and been arrested by Officer Capocelli. Instead, we saw an opportunity for compassion and took it. Now, my car is in the shop, the street I live on has been swept for the first time in months, and I know my neighbors a little bit better. Plus, it made for an interesting story for my letter from the editor and only further justifies the need for an issue of Art Grove about love.
I’m glad you’re here on this earth, Mitch, and I’m glad that our paths could cross, odd and uncomfortable though that intersection was. I would have been the greater jackass had I made you feel worse for something you were already clearly remorseful for. And besides, insurance paid for everything, so what do I even have to be mad about at this point? If anything, my sympathy rests now far more with you and that bill than with my Kia.
Bygones. I’m just glad nobody got seriously hurt.
Tootle-oo, for now,
Tom Jakob, Managing Editor
