5 Things Demarked by Exclamations

Jeff Koons, Hair,1999
digital flex print, 34.5 x 25.5 in
From here

1. Wow., about David Foster Wallace. He was a guy I admired for his searing intellect and terrifying literary prowess, but truthfully, I could never get through his books; I'd get too mired up in all that thought and connections and crossed lines and tangled reality, and maybe he did too.
2. Lord!, about my daughter repeatedly listening to the first track of the latest solo album by Phish bassist Mike Gordon. "This music is so wonderful!" she exclaimed loudly, deafened by the oversize headphones at the Barnes & Noble listening station, jamming to the same 30-second snippet of "Another Door" from The Green Sparrow over and over, running the UPC code under the little scanner for another dose. I have yet to be convinced by numerous arguments in their defense that Phish is remotely worth the praise, and the solo work of its members seems a subset of that dubious worth. As a father, I feel I must guide a child in the few areas with which I have some arguable expertise, but a girl's jam is a girl's jam. I was just playing it and she burst in and flatly asked if I can burn it for her.
3. Whew! the wind is no longer howling, blowing trashcans into other trashcans in my subconscious. It still looks like a brown and green scribble with piles of brush everywhere, but thankfully the wind has subsided.
4. Hey! A television pleasure of mine that I supposed should not be admitted publicly is CBS Sunday Morning and this morning they came through with a smart profile of artist Jeff Koons and managed to not give in to the what-in-tarnation contempt CBS, or particularly Morley Saeffer did in his 60 Minutes profiles, has long had for contemporary art. It's not like they went real deep into it, and arguably, there's not a lot of depth there that you don't dig yourself when you are talking Jeff Koons, but his work looked great and he came off surprisingly enlightened.
   
5. Awww, while Maya was staying at a friend's house, perhaps learning other bad habits besides jam band fandom, Jerri and I were waxing romantic about Kansas City, a place we lived for four years and hated. KC was our planned evacuation destination, would Ike have come this way to destroy us, and we were dreamily mulling over what to eat - fried chicken at Stroud's, big sloppy sandwich from D'Bronx, some requisite BBQ from Gates but most importantly, a hamburger from Westport Flea Market, a definitive hamburger experience and a singular culinary superlative for the Kansas City metro area. We got excited about seeing the newly revamped Nelson-Atkins Museum, for whom Jerri worked as a security guard while pregnant with Maya. We listened to a rolling nostalgia soundtrack of The Bottle Rockets, Slobberbone, old Steve Earle and Uncle Tupelo. We may still go at some point just to do it, but for now, this marks one of the first times I've felt sweet about Kansas City since moving away from there.