Best News Ever

To my pleasant surprise, the City Pages have informed me that Jamie Lidell will be performing at Varsity Theater on October 7th. This show falls only three days before the Cold War Kids performance at the Fine Line, promising to make Minneapolis the greatest place to be in the beginning of October.

In honor of this good news, I have attached the three part preview/video montage of Lidell's latest album "JIM." If my hero is Jamie Lidell and Jamie Lidell is JIM, then my hero is JIM.

Part 1



Part 2



Part 3

Nancy Reagan in the Ghetto

Perhaps the best thing about the 80's is that it is over:

http://derrickbostrom.com/bostrom/2008/07/01/things-i-should-throw-out-clippings-from-the-eighties/

Playing at the Lagoon:

Horizontal Symmetry . . . And so on.

About a year ago, I visited my friend's Cabin on the East Coast. I can't remember if it was in Maine, Vermont or New Hampshire. However, I can remember an inspiring thought that occurred to me in the middle of a glassy, still lake. It was night and the detail of tall pines diffused in the dark. All you could make out was the gradient between dense woods and open moonlit sky and space. The wind was slight and the water, iron flat, reflected the shoreline like a spitting image. And it occurred to me, there in that boat, how rare it is to see purely horizontal symmetry. Studies elicit the pleasure humans feel observing symmetrical aesthetics, but more often than not the kind of symmetry we encounter day-to-day is vertical. There in that boat I felt gracious for my world turned sideways and symmetrical.

I remember reading a Robert Frost poem called Neither Out Far Nor In Deep:

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be---
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?


And . . . suddenly the poem doesn't seem so cynical. Granted, "aesthetics" are by-nature superficial, but they are just as based-in-reality as are you and I. To see an image reflected like that is a grounding experience because it begs the question, "What's real?" And so on.

Meanwhile, I stumbled on an peace-loving and aesthetically pleasing interview with John Lennon advocating non-violence. Sharing is caring:



Reading ~ Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

Hearing ~ "Goin up the Country" by Kitty, Daisy and Lewis