Springtime in Luck-land

Yesterday: Someone had his *ss handed to him at air hockey last night. Okay, then he beat me the next three games, but for one glorious moment I was a superstar. I was also schooled in the ways of mini-golf at the delightfully retro Spring Lake Park Amusement Mini Golf. Super fun on a lovely Wednesday eve.

This weekend: Chris Monroe, whom I adore, is doing a reading at Red Balloon Bookshop on Saturday. I have this file labeled 'Important Papers'. It has some very important things, like passports and birth certificates, but mainly it's things like pictures of my dream haircut ripped out of a magazine, my temporary tattoos from being a member of Pee Wee's Playhouse Fan Club and cartoons torn from the New Yorker and other places -- cartoons that I thought I really couldn't live without. The single most saved comic is 'Violet Days' by Chris Monroe. I truly love it. Some of them in the file are so yellow and faded, you feel like you're sifting through grandma's scrapbook. If you haven't seen Chris Monroe's work, get yourself to a bookstore, Strib or some other place and share the funny, man.

There's also an opening at The Soap Factory on Saturday night. What intrigues me most about the opening is the exhibition of Roger Roger, a work by media artist Traci Tullius that reflects on her Oklahoma upbringing. From the web:

Connected by musical interludes performed by the artist’s father in a deserted, Ford dealership showroom, the 6 projections that compose Roger, Roger form a semi-narrative, quasi-factual, spatial poem. Part folk tale, part fantasy and part down-home jamboree, this multi-channel video phantasmagoria is an Oklahoma-centric epic reflecting the inherent weirdness of the middle of nowhere. The main action (and often inaction) revolves around the landscape; the vast midwestern sky, like an inverted sea, dominates both the frame and the characters’ movements. Featuring guitar distortion, a spectral farmhouse, Elvis-impersonating toddlers and the strangely disquieting nullity of the plains, this 6-act fable continuously mingles the banal and homespun with the ethereal and peculiar.

Pretty heady stuff, no?

Also, I think I'm going to plant stuff. Is this the year that I actually plant things, tend them and reap the benefits? Who knows. I just know that every May I feel the urge to drop serious coin at some garden center, only to watch the plants wither and die a month later. What can I say? It is my way.

Happy seriously Spring weather, Lone Reader!