"Bringing light in dark times: Music and Art connect people and offer Hope." By Steven Gelsi

Steven Gelsi, iD Magazine's first Editor (1991)

Before I talk about iD Magazine and Jacksonville, let’s start with Paris, France, and Scottsdale, AZ.

Paris may often be known as the City of Lights, but any city could be a city of light. It depends on your perspective and your experience. Recently to me, Scottsdale, AZ was a city of light because I had a strongly positive experience that brought me to tears more than once at the Musical Instrument Museum, a modern showplace of instruments from all over the world.

Sure, we’ve all probably seen pictures or even displays of musical instruments, but here they were on display, along with audio and video footage of the instruments being played. As a musician, it was moving to see the instruments and hear what each one could do, while listening to recordings and watching videos of people from another culture, another time, another continent, another language. As the sounds came through my ears, I felt the music. I felt a connection. I hummed along. I nodded. I felt the rhythm. I connected again. I felt moved to tears. Sure, I loved seeing guitars played by The Beatles and other rock gods, but it was my experience listening to instruments I’d never seen before that deeply resonated.

This extraordinary experience filled me with hope and feelings of true light and delight. Here was human interaction between continents, between ages, between cultures. They called out, and I heard them. My heart stirred with some kind of ancient recognition passed down through our collective DNA to the time before time and back again. It gave me hope that art and music may often transcend time and politics and help us express ourselves peacefully and celebrate the light in all of us.

Darkness and fear and ignorance and hatred and war and racism remain around us always either in the background or the foreground, and that is sad. It seems like it’s all coming to the foreground even more nowadays.

And we may always return to hope. Let’s stay with that for a minute. Light. Art. Expression. Let’s turn any city into a city of light.

So that’s where Jacksonville comes in. I moved there in 1990 to take a reporting job at The Florida Times-Union as part of a grand plan to eventually learn Spanish and work my way down to Miami as a writer. So, I moved into a speed bump village apartment complex somewhere in the Arlington area. I figured these residential Disney Worlds were all that Florida had to offer. Lo and behold, within a few months I had discovered Riverside-Avondale and moved in with a fellow reporter into a super cool and cheap apartment building on Donald Street.

It turns out The Great Fire of 1901 in Jacksonville was a great thing for that neighborhood, re-built during the 1920s and 30s with plenty of sidewalks, parks, walkable shopping areas and parks and some Art Deco splendor like the statue “Life” in Memorial Park, all set in the lush oaks and Spanish moss growing around the area, not to mention beautiful St. Johns River views. Iconic! Instead of being built for parking lots, here was an area that encouraged human interaction. My apartment building had front stoops and back porches that wove in with your neighbor. You couldn’t help getting to know everyone in the building and partying with them. Before I knew it, my social life took a quantum leap up. I soaked in the barbeque and the alternative music scene at a club called the Milk Bar, which took its name from the Stanley Kubrick movie, Clockwork Orange. Before I knew it, I had met local artists Robert McMullen and Aku Tardiff and we formed a trio original rock band called The Ripe. I also became friends with Jacksonville singer Debbie Rider, who was working for Lynyrd Skynyrd at the time.

Somewhere at some point, someone mentioned a meeting of artistic-oriented folks and we were talking about a magazine. I always loved magazines and even started up a short-lived literary magazine in college called The Edge. I had grown up reading Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, and other publications that glorified the life of writers and artists and film makers and I bought into that vibe for my career aspirations.

So we printed iD Magazine with adman Mark Gebhardt; Clair Mead [Hartmann] on art direction; Evan Chanacki, and then later Jim Minion as managing editors; among other local luminaries. It was grand. It helped stoke the local arts scene in the historic Riverside-Avondale neighborhood by tapping into an audience of younger, art-oriented folks who were rising in the city at the time. The magazine wasn’t around long, but it ignited some positive energy that remained in the area for years after, I like to think.

The idea never dies – bring light to where you are. As the saying goes, you can find a world in a grain of sand. You can travel much by staying in one place, too.

I ended up leaving Jacksonville in 1992 not for Miami but for the New York City area. I wanted to reconnect with my dad and the rest of my family after living in New England, Florida, and the Philadelphia area for roughly 11 years as a college student and newspaper reporter, because my dad had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. Before I left, my community reporting work for The Florida Times-Union had gained a couple of fans on the City Council – Tilly Fowler and some others – and they ended up giving me a Proclamation before I left. They didn’t even know about iD Magazine!

The pursuits and goals of iD Magazine remained with me over the years, and I never forgot the lesson that you can bring light and hope through art anywhere.