The middle of May until a little bit into June were active days. My birthday rolled around again and this brought the whole family down to southern Nevada. We hit the Sphere to see Dead and Company, found a speakeasy and a fancy-pants cocktail bar in downtown Las Vegas, spent a few balmy backyard nights ending what had been an erratic Spring, weather-wise, and visited the National Nuclear Testing Museum also in Las Vegas. A good time was had by all.
The sphere has a touch of magic right now. A touch of gray as well. I had wanted to check it out since it opened. And the Dead show felt about right. Another era of psychedelia and 60’s/70’s hippy-ness writ on the large and extraordinary screen.
I had not paid enough attention to the post-Garcia Dead. The band had been prevalent on and off in my daily life before then. I was never a deadhead. This recent show was in fact my first. But my freshman year of college involved both a lot of Dead and a lot of Jack Daniels. I haven’t touched the whiskey since but all sorts of memories over a long time involved the music of the Dead vaguely present while doing projects, accomplishing homework or work assignments, or just hanging out at Upstate New York, New England, and Park City parks and bars.
I noticed this new iteration a year ago or so when clips appeared regularly on YouTube in what was thought to have been the last Dead-related tour. I noticed first that John Mayer was involved and second that he was extraordinarily good at it. There is an element of Miles Davis or John Coltrane riffing on classic melodies in the way he approaches the Dead classics. Much of the vagaries and moodiness of the transcendental stuff is made sharper and brighter by Mayer’s guitar. I thought he was just a pop-star. Who knew. Those are probably fighting-words with the hard-core grateful-faithful, but in some ways, I think that I prefer Mayer. And it is art and not a competition anyways.
Additionally there is the Sphere which is a special venue. I have been to a lot of concerts over the years and this first time touching on the Sphere was magical and one of the best. An ever-growing repertoire of graphics has long accompanied the ever-expanding repertoire of Dead songs. They are as much of the Dead personality as the music and there is no better place to feature the graphics than the Sphere. It is new technology which provides that first dopamine-flooding moment and leads to the long pause of reflection that art provides. It also tends to fade in significance with time, but I suspect a long time in this case. With Dead and Company in the Sphere the graphics are art rather than showmanship and have to be experienced live to be fully experienced. Just my opinion of course.
Over the last week or so I have been rewriting the css for my own site. CSS is cascading style sheets and it became popular when the method of web-styling formerly known as Flash was brought down by Adobe in a conflict with Apple and its desire for a closed-garden App store. In its first big-time emergence CSS was quite weak. It didn’t have a lot of the functionality that had been accomplished with Flash. Times have changed. Now with png images with show-through vacant space, grid and flexbox based positional layouts, svg-based vector graphics, and many new ways to select elements and bits and pieces of elements, true illustration and photography-based graphics, as well as video and animation can be put online, integrated and manipulated with much more advanced javascript and associated libraries.
Early in the advancement of CSS there was a site and community built around the concept of the CSS zen garden. It had something special and is now a bit out of fashion. The same HTML was provided as a base for infinite different sites which differed only because of the CSS and associated styling and graphics. This made the sites which were otherwise identical wildly different and unique. All members of the community submitted creations. At that time it was fairly basic but lovely in a lot of ways because it included really cool integration of all of the components that make up a HTML, CSS and Javascript site. New sites have lost that artsy quality and are more functional, driven by efficiency, and are more uniform. It should be noted that the CSS zen garden site has been ressurected with both new and old entries.
My goal in messing around with my CSS is to accomplish something along the lines of the CSS zen garden movement but with all of the flashy new features available in today’s CSS. I am updating pages here and there and have four left to go. But have also come up with two or three new ideas for redoing all of the pages all over again. One of these days I will be comfortable with calling it all good. Then I will redo everything. Just because….
My current reading has taken a few wild turns. The first is, based on a planned trip to India, a desire to get closer to Indian culture and a recent rewatching of the 1980’s movie “The Razor’s Edge” based on the Somerset Maugham novel of the same name (my favorite movie), I have taken up reading the Upanishads in a volume with discussions of the verses and accompanied by the Bhagavad gita. This has moved a tad slowly as it is hard reading. I now recognize how almost all of my reading over the decades has been exclusive to the western canon.
I had read the Noble Quran over a couple of different periods of interest related to both studying geology with a community of geologists from Islamic cultures as well as the United States in college and grad school and a much later fascination with France and North Africa. The later led to a fair amount of additional reading in the Islamic canon particularly of North Africa. But beyond that I’ve read a only a few books: Roy, Achebe and a few others. By far most of my reading is from the American, British and various European and Latin American traditions. All rooted in the Bible in some way or another. This is a little sad, that I left over half-of-the-world out of my developing consciousness, but the way it is.
Still in the early stages with the Hindu texts, a wonderful gift arrived which drug me right back into the western canon. This was ironically a gift from a fellow from India. It is Joie by Ajiri Aki. It is one of the best titles I have found on the simple pleasures of France and Paris in particular. It is a book I would like to share and share. One by one it covers all of the best things, the foundational things, that I have found wandering around Paris and often in Spain and even Mexico as well.
Since my first reading Hemingway’s “Moveable Feast” and Michael Reynold’s “Paris Years” on Hemingway in Paris have been guiding lights, as to how to live one’s life. Without realizing it I have read a lot of French stuff: Montaigne from the fifteen-hundreds, all of Balzac, all of Zola, Gide’s novels and Journals, Camus’ as well. Maupassant. It goes on and on. The weird thing is that I didn’t understand how into French culture I was until I started spending time in France. From now on I suspect I will turn to this book “Joie” when asked why I am so fond of France.
Our last Nevada trip ended with a few wonderful though toasty nights. The hundreds came on a little early and a little suddenly. But the evenings remained enjoyable until we left. Later in the Summer even the evenings become unpleasant, often in the high 90’s. So it was a rather perfect trip. Lots of photos of the concert, the Atomic museum, other spots around downtown Las Vegas and a bit of the strip, our backyard in southern Nevada, as well as new images from the Conservation Garden Park in West Jordan Utah are included in the Las Vegas, Southern Nevada, and Northern Utah galleries of my photo-gallery pages.
A few unfortunate things occurred at the beginning. I was rejected by the TSA. They kept telling me that my flight number was incorrect and to go to the Frontier desk and get another ticket. I did this three times always with the same flight number and on the third occasion the TSA agent said, “Lets do it the old way.” He then did something different and I was allowed in. Weird. On boarding the full plane the police were removing passengers from the plane who didn’t want to be removed. It is the first major issue I have had with Frontier over several decades of flying.
Also at the Sphere there was some sort of problem with some of our tickets involving their normal vendor and the second-hand vendor from whom we had purchased the tickets. I didn’t understand what was going on. We were eventually allowed in but missed the first three songs. The tickets in question were fully refunded. I was tempted to call these Las Vegas-related things, but realize they probably are fairly common and happening all over the country. I think I will return to flying at odd times and days and will try purchasing same day tickets at discounted prices for concerts. If they aren’t available I can wait for another day.
Shortly after finding our seats, I did catch one of my favorite songs:
Flight of the seabirds
Scattered like lost words
Wield to the storm and fly
Fare thee well now
Let your life proceed by it’s own design
Nothing to tell now
Let the words be yours, I’m done with mine
Coming up in a little bit we will be headed to Lincoln City on the Oregon coast, a place we have traveled to several times over the years. It is a good Summer spot, sort of a combination of the fruits, berries, cheese and wine of upstate New York with the comfy summer weather, delightful scenery and sea-food of the Pacific coast. Like France. The Upanishads on the beach with a glass of Adelsheim in hand. Perfect. Maybe berries and cheese. Even better.