Once More, With Feeling

Went to the Denver Art Museum this morning to see a special exhibit on Psychadelic Rock Concert Posters from San Francisco from 1965-1971 or thereabouts.  This was quite an interesting exhibit that showed how the poster art developed over the years from artwork based on old-style boxing posters to a radical style incorporating drug imagery based on LSD trips featuring lettering that can't be read without a great deal of work, back to a readable style before the movement died with the closure of the two main performance arenas.

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, of course, but was just a little too young to be very aware of the whole hippie-drug movement except in very general terms.  I was pretty amazed to see the names on the posters--Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Led Zeppelin, and on and on. Often two or three of these groups on the same concert ticket--for $2.

...37 runs, 46 hits, 18 pitchers, and 575 pitches

I didn't realize, until I read the exhibit signs, that LSD was actually still legal until late 1966, and that for awhile there were big parties--publicly advertised--for LSD users.  A lot of the posters were original artwork; most of the rest were signed by the artists.  There must be quite a world of collectors out there!  Kenny and I were wondering how an exhibit like this gets put together--who gets the idea?  How do they find the owners to lend the work?  Part of the reason for the exhibit being in Denver, I'm guessing, is that at some point one of the managers tried to export the whoel production to Denver.  It was met with pretty much nothing but hostility, and lasted, I think, about three months before the whole enterprise got shud down.

We spent about two hours in the exhibit; very worth seeing.

After the museum, we went off to meet up with an old friend of Tim's and mine whom we have not seen for a good many years.  John and his wife Daphne moved to Denver about three years ago, when John took a position as a professor of Chemistry at Regis University.  We had a brief tour of their house, which is quite lovely--and for sale, if anyone has a hankering to move to Denver.  We met the dogs; let's just say that they will NOT be protecting the house from burglars, if our reception was any indication.  Mary the Scottie gave us a display of her virtuoso squirrel-locating skills; I swear the dog knew where the squirrel in the yard was before she actually got out the door.  We think maybe advance squirre-location notification via Scotty-dog texting or something.

We had dinner at a nice microbrewery, at which John reminded me that their old Scottie, MacGregor used to roll over and play totally groveling minion whenever I appeared (must be that Nazi-English teacher demeanor; even Scotties recognize it as Alpha Dog!), and at which we talked about pretty much everything from the practical applications of computer science and mathematics for the Department of Defense (Kenny's purview) to 20th Century Non-Realistic Philosophy and its applications for Quantum Mechanics (John's) to the catastrophic ramifications of No Child Left Behind for public education (mine).  EVERYONE wanted to come to our table!

After dinner, we went to the Colorado Rockies game.  Daphne met up with us at the game about the end of the first inning; she was busy winning a tennis tournament match during our dinner!

The game was a riot--we almost could have skipped it altogether, as we already saw it last night.  The final score wasn't QUITE as outrageous; 8-7, but the game was nearly as wild.  Three homeruns, four errors, three triples, three or four doubles.  Nine pitchers, and 22 hits.  It was another case of "we ain't got no pitching" and "no one wants to win this game."  The score see-sawed around from 3-0 to 3-3 to 4-3 to 4-4 to 6-4 to 6-6 t0 7-6, which is what the score was, going into the bottom of the ninth.  Denver won, by scoring two runs in the bottom of the ninth--on a miraculous bloop double that saved us all from lord only knows how many extra innings--and it was the first time the Rockies had an actual lead all day.  The crowd went wild.

That gives Kenny and me a two-day total of 37 runs, 46 hits, 18 pitchers, and 575 pitches. Crazy!

Coors field is quite a nice park, with a good view of some of those 14,000-foot mountains.  We had great seats behind home plate (with the mountain view), and the weather was gorgeous (so FAR, either the reports of scattered thunderstorms have been mistaken, or the storms have been scattered to somewhere we aren't.  No complaints there.)

Tomorrow, Kenny and I are headed up to Rocky Mountain National Park to see a few of the sights there.  It will be colder there, though!