Smiling Man from the Past

It was in a dream.

We sat at a table in a restaurant, the three of us: Trudy, Ben and I. We had just finished eating and were ready to go. Ben and Trudy got up to leave, and as I was putting on my coat I noticed a man at a table staring at me. Trudy and Ben had left the room.

The man was sitting there next to where we sat with a woman whose back was to us. When I looked over at him, he smiled and said something. I think he said my name.

I was perplexed for a moment. I didn't say a thing but stopped to look more carefully at his face. He stared back at me, smiling. His hair was straight and long, pulled into a pony tail. His eyes glinted as he smiled, waiting for my reaction.

His eyes gave him away. His face was younger than it should have been, as young as years ago when we were in college. His hair was longer than it was then. And I was still not sure I knew the woman he was sitting with, but I recognized the man from his eyes.

Chris? I stuttered.

His smile broadened. It had been more than 20 years.

I'm sure the woman was LeeAnn, although she never turned around. But this was in a dream, and that is where I woke up.

9:04:02 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

David Weinberger on Messiness

A talk (mp3) by David Weinberger at the recent Conference on blogging, journalism and credibility.

Weinberger talked about (1) tagging, (2) philosophy and (3) blogging. Here are his concluding remarks:

But I'm not sure that this is a temporary mess. Because it seems to me that we're building piles of leaves. And these leaves are infused with human meaning. And we want to be able to sort and manage and take these leaves and build them into things we we haven't thought of before, these leaves of individual meaning, of points of view, of tags.

This is what we're up to. We're engaged in a global project of taking down the trees and rolling in the leaves. ... I think, maybe, we're going to go through this transition, this messy transition, and it's going to be a transition into an enormous, chaotic, creative, human mess. And the world will be so much better off for it.

(My own transcription from the mp3 clip of his talk. Emphasis in the original speech. Other transcripts and audio clips from the conference are available at The Longest Now.)

1:20:32 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

Johnny Lang Last Night

Brandi Carlile was great. Her words climbed all the way into the balcony without diminishing a bit. They washed over us as she strummed her acoustic guitar and belted out the words to her songs and tossed her kdlang-esque voice back and forth from clear highs to rich lows. To either side of her, the shaven, barefoot Hanseroth brothers sang and played guitar and bass. The crowd cheered. And they were just the warmup band.

When the lights dimmed again and Jonny Lang came out with his bass player and drummer, the stage lit up in a red glow and the crowd cheered. His hair was cut short. His years were not many -- so few he looked more like a college kid than the blues man we were about to hear.

He sat in the middle of the bright cone of light thrown onto him by the spot, while the bass player sat back in a metal folding chair and the drummer sat on a electronic percussion box that he played with his hands between his legs. After that first song, the rest of the band joined them on stage.

Jonny's fingers raced up and down his guitars. (He played a different one for each number, each being tuned and re-tuned in turn offstage.) He threw his Cocker-like voice at us, closing his eyes, tossing his head back and grimacing as his notes climbed to where no notes should have been. Song after song, he did this, singing high and whispering low, stomping his left foot in beat with the rest of the band.

He sang the blues. He strummed and picked and drove his guitar. The crowd whistled. They stood. They cheered. Afterwards, the band came back on stage for four more songs. And when those were over, they came out to the edge of the stage and held hands, Jonny in the middle, and bowed together like the cast at the end of a musical. Musical it was.

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Saturday night at the Paramount Theater. Austin, TX.

10:43:26 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []