weapons of massdistraction

Saturday night I skipped out on the Retribution Gospel Choir show (with just a twinge of regret) in order to stay within St. Paul city limits (as I’d left my son with some of my old friends and their kids), opting to see some of my favorite people and their new band instead. Voytek was playing the Turf Club before shoving off for their first tour, with Red Pens. And while on the road the guys are keeping a tour diary. They made their inaugural post last night after playing The Hideout in Chicago (and this is what half the band looks like this morning, yowza).

Five good things for this Monday:

• The California Academy of Sciences opens up each Thursday night for “NightLife” an adults-only evening of music, drinking, and science. One of my favorite artists, Isabel Samaras took the Steinhart Aquarium up on the offer to host her 2010 birthday party (entrance is free within 7 days of your birthday). Fun!
• The Museum of Making Music in San Diego’s next special exhibition looks neat: The Art of the Stompbox. Opens in May, 2010.
• Apparently the Polyphonic Spree’s interactive adventure, The Quest for Rest, has been around for years but I’m just seeing it now (via Lost Chocolate Lab). The third level contains an octopus! Speaking of…this is quite a hat.
• Someone pointed out a Berlin artist’s stickers that look strangely like the drawing my son did when he was 5, that I have tattooed on my arm. What do you think, eerie coincidence or “archetypal monster image that’s part of the collective unconscious?”
• I didn’t catch their Olympic performance but heard about Davis and White ice dancing, Bollywood style - and found video of another recent performance of that number.

Yesterday I knew we needed to get out of the house. The kid had some energy to burn off, but the sidewalks in our neighborhood are all icy and lame and injury-inducing and there really isn’t much to walk to with the library closed on Sundays. So I gave him some other options to choose from. He selected my least favorite among them, but the best-suited to his energy-burning needs. A suburban indoor playground called Adventure Peak with its three-story slide/climbing structure combo. Naturally it was packed to the gills with shrieking rugrats. And I forgot my headphones at home. But somehow over that three-hour period I attained a Zen-like focus and cranked out two new chapters of my novel, along with re-working some other chapters and updating the outline. I will have this sucker finished in no time if I can maintain this momentum. Hopefully I won’t have to subject myself to this sort of sensory onslaught in order to do it.