I have decided that even if they aren't consecutive, I'm gonna post here for 77 days. Or 77 times. 77 stories. Some variation on that number. Gotta do what speaks to you, and that rings with resonance for me, so there it is. Don't like it?!?... go start your own blog...
There was for a brief time a wonderful chimera of retail space, creative space, and rich opulent beauty on the side of the street facing Calhoun Square mall in Uptown Minneapolis.
We Are The New Power Generation, this boutique was called. I remember being unable to stay away when rumor suggested that the Purple Rain motorcycle was on the premises, albeit behind a velvet rope. No pictures, no cameras or recording devices, please. Was posted just inside the door.
The first time I ever walked in there I was still 98% n00b. I remember being overcome by the atmosphere. The veils, beads, scents, the woodgrain, the artwork, the sense of it being decorated by someone with a top-shelf no-expenses-spared mentality.
In the coming years I remember going upstairs there for the Neo Manifesto poetry readings. More on that another time, once I find the fliers in my handbill collection. I still have things the NPG store mailed out to us with the address of the house I grew up in on the back side of them...
Along the stairs to the second floor were three, maybe 4-5 separate professionally framed image collages. Prince, in pictures I don't recall if I've ever seen elsewhere. Variations on flames, from candle flames to larger effects, cut and overlaid to create cover-style artwork.
The theme of them stuck with me because I was playing the Indigo Girls Strange Fire cassette over and over in my walkman while working the job I had at the time. (The other go-to tape I was slowly wearing out sat in the box for Strange Fire, and I dubbed it myself. It was a comp I've re-made several times over the years. Glam Slam Ulysses songs on one side and I'll Do Anything songs on the other. But again, another story 4 another time.)
I will not forget them. I only recently remembered the specific term.
Maybe we'll see it someday, somehow. Maybe it was speculative art or a gift from a relative of a bandmate. I don't know any more about it than what I remember. I can't even imagine I would've asked the dude behind the register.
I was still 75% stuck in my shell and/or with my head up my own claven yet in those years. I might have thought about it, but overcoming my inner critic and actually saying anything? Not bloody likely...
I realize this is gonna be at least as much about me as it is what I'm recalling. But that's either a psychologist's and/or an editor's job. And I may have utterly run out of fecks to give when Cheri succumbed to her alcoholism.
If I'm lucky, I'm still getting the first draft down. Sometimes it ain't even that well put together. Art ain't pretty, plenty of people who make it say if it isn't making you even mildly uncomfortable it isn't serving its purpose.
If you want polished journalism, this may not be the place to get it. Just sayin'... the brain-scrapings shall continue. More occurs to me a little everyday.
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