Crash | Walker | Maple Seed | Malkmus
The embroidered rock pants were pulled from the closet last night in preparation for Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks freeform jazz odyssey that rocked First Avenue. Sunday night’s always a tuff night to rally for a show, especially when the show doesn’t even start till 11:45pm. You basically have to write off a large portion of your Monday morning. But I feel good this morning, here, back at the controls. Thus is the power of the Rock; it re-energizes while keeping you up way past your bed time on a school night. Sonic Gatorade.
Reflecting on the show, I had the feeling that Malkmus was holding back a bit. I felt that he really wanted to bust forth with a blazing metal-tinged 20-minute rock jam opus but something was keeping him from this destiny.
About a month ago, the giant maple tree that takes up room in the back yard bombed the neighborhood with it’s whirlybird helicopter seeds. ‘Operation Seed Drop’ was impressive enough to make Donald Rumsfeld blush. Now, after heavy rains those seeds have begun to germinate at unprecedented numbers. This weekend I was an ecological destroyer as I deforested my entire yard of hundreds of new Maple Trees. They are resilient little guys. They even took up residence in the rain gutters. In fact the gutters didn’t look so much like gutters as they did planters boxes. If I didn’t have to worry about rain not draining off the roof properly it would have been cool to just let them grow.
Saturday, the misses and I finally got over to the re-vamped Walker Art Center. I wish I could say that I was blown away but I wasn’t. I wish I could pin-point exactly what I was expecting and didn’t find in the new Walker but I can’t. It just kind of left me with an ‘ehn’ feeling. Personally, I feel the whole idea of a physical museum is almost antiquated. Even if it’s got bleeding edge architecture and ‘mutli-media’ displays it just seems old. The best part of the Walker will continue to be the performances, music, and lecture series, but the museum part of it seems like an after thought. Part of my problem is tactile. I want to touch everything! I’m like a five year old. You hang a heavy oil painting with thick globs in relief, and dammit, I don’t just want to look at it – I want to touch it. That metallic statue over there? I want to run my hands all over it! How can anyone have an opinion about a piece of art until they’ve been intimate with it? This is probably why, if given the option of going to a museum or an antique shop, I’ll choose the antique shop every time. At least at the antique shops when I pick something up alarms don’t go off and security doesn’t tackle me to the ground.
Also, I saw the movie Crash this weekend. Paul Haggis is 2-0. Great film. Don Cheadle was brilliant as always, Ludacris was hilarious. Amazing narrative. More movies like this please.