mid April, 09

D Faces,

Recently we checked out the psychedelic poster exhibit at D.A.M., which we recommend to you. In front of a set of posters by Lee Conklin was this descriptor of his work, "What begins as the letter D might, upon inspection, morph into a bird...then two birds...and end up as a face."

This weekend starts with Geeks Who Drink Trivia on Thursday, May 16th, followed by a the neo-jazz of Vision Jazz at 8:30pm for all of you jazz lovers. $5.

Friday night the Jagtones are back at 7pm-10pm with their take on dance music from 50's-80's. This is a benefit for Judi's House (providing hope and healing to grieving children). $10. After Jagtones, at 10:30pm we have the sweet Italian pop/Tropical/Jungle music of Calvin Locklear. $5.

Saturday at 4pm we have Wendy Woo in for the Music Train Family concert series. $7/$3 kids. Then at 8pm we have the acapella of FACE. $12/$8 students. And at at 10:30pm we have Tempa and The Tantrums. $5. Have you felt the love of Tempa in the form of music? Can't wait. Also check out the sweet poster on Tempa's myspace page.

Baby got back,

D tail

Extra Credit: Walter Pater wrote a book of art and poetry criticism in the mid 19th century called "The Renaissance" which went on to become very influential. The book is poetically written, almost a poem in its own right. Here's the book's inspiring conclusion:

"Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, --for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end. A counted number of pulses only is given to us of a variegated, dramatic life. How may we see in them all that is to seen in them by the finest senses? How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy?

To burn always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. In a sense it might even be said that our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes two persons, things, situations, seem alike. While all melts under our feet, we may well grasp at any exquisite passion, or any contribution to knowledge that seems by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment, or any stirring of the sense, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or work of the artist's hands, or the face of one's friend. Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing on their ways, is, on this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. What we have to do is to be for ever curiously testing new opinions and courting new impressions, never acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy.

Some spend their interval in listlessness, some in high passion, the wisest, at least among "the children of the world", in art and song. For our one chance lies in expanding that interval, in getting as many pulsations as possible into the given time. Great passions may give us a quickened sense of life, ecstasy and sorrow of love, the various forms of enthusiastic activity, disinterested or otherwise, which comes naturally to many of us. Only be sure it is passion --that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments' sake."

1868