Virtually Home

You, reader, are lucky. You're lucky because you get to view my low-light, scratched-first-gen-iPhone-camera-lens photos of The National. What a boon. The show was epic. It started out with a set by Other Lives, who looked puzzlingly familiar to me all night long until they walked off stage and someone near me said the word "Kunek". And then it hit me. I'd seen Kunek perform during Welcome Week, my freshman year of college, at the union. I was trying to figure out when at Austin City Limits 2010 I'd caught their act. But they didn't look that familiar. Other Lives sounded great. The preponderance of musical instruments they brought with them looked like a parody of a stage set. A veritable obstacle course. Every member of the band played at least two instruments in every song, though the average per band member (if you exclude the drummer from the data set) was probably closer to four. They had everything, from guitars and keyboards to bells tied to deer a...

Since I got sick I've been watching a lot of tv on my computer. Most of my time has been spent watching most of the first season of West Wing since yesterday, but I also watched a couple of documentaries online. I have to say that between Jesus Camp and Supersize Me, I haven't had the best impressions of Americans to contemplate today. In fact, they've been pretty repugnant. Looking at footage from Missouri didn't make a very good impression of small-town middle-America, either. Just fast food restaurants, huge signage, ugly highways and parking lots as far as the camera would show. Maybe it's because I live in an 18th-century stone building. Maybe it's because I live in a city made of 18th-century stone buildings with independently-owned shops on the ground floor and apartments up above, but that kind of life just is not attractive anymore. Physically, that is. What I wouldn't do for a Salina Dairy Deal hamburger and a Dr. Pepper right now. Or to drive ...