When I was fourteen, I'd stay up all night writing poetry and listening to music on my Emerson transistor radio. The next day in school I'd awake at the end of math class with my head in a puddle of drool on my desk. Nevertheless, that year I got an "A" in an experimental class where you wrote everything backwards and drew things upside down. I was fast on my way down the visual highway of the arts, Super8 movie-making, and Polaroid picture-taking.
There was an acting career along the way. In 2000, as the artistic director of a Gotham theatre company, and with an apartment full of fantastic scripts that would never get funded for live performance, I realized video could bring the playwrights' words out into the world where they belong. A Masters in Film and Video followed, along with making independent and experimental film, and careers in teaching and marketing to fund my love of art and inquiry.
Somewhere in those years, I picked up Aristotle's Poetics, Arnheim's Philosophy of Art, and Bergson's Duration and Simultaneity, and I was never the same again. The world was richer, more exciting, and charged with possibility. I haven't put on the brakes since then. I doubt I ever will.