The first lightning bug

Work on Friday was simple. A lot of press cleaning though.

I arrived to find Brady had started printing my poster for realz. Sometimes I think he must employ those little elves who helped the shoemaker make thousands of shoes over night. I'll arrive and hundreds of things will have been printed and the press beds rearranged. When I came in, he'd already busted out some black paper and printed fifty or so posters. The black paper with white ink looked fantastic. It balanced out the poster, and in my opinion did not need to be rearranged after all.

I printed another hundered on black before cleaning the press and switching to red on chipboard. When cleaning the press, I proofed a couple of white on chipboard to see how it looked. I then printed a layer of red over the white so there was a small shadow of white showing through and Brady liked it a great deal. By great deal I mean I cleaned the press to put white back on and not even getting to red. One cool thing I learned was how to change the timpin, the largest roller on the press, which is actually pretty easy once you learn which way to screw things back together.

I left after finishing my stack of chipboard and cleaning the press, again. Joe and Halliday were meeting me at the Pistol to go to Kansas City, Kansas. The downtown is trying to revitalize itself with community gathering and part of that is the first monthly second Friday streetfair and art walk.

I'll tell you all about it later tonight, but right now there are a group of lowriders parking outside the Pistol and it's a little hard to ignore. The guy who runs the screen printing shop downstairs is holding a car show and I want to go see what happening.

I will leave you with this, there was honest to God break dancing and I fell just a little bit in love.

Later

Downtown Kansas City, Kansas, or KCK, is about five miles from where I live. The downtown is a great deal less vibrant than the Missouri side. It still has remnants of the 1940's and there is an air of abandonment similar to downtown Bremerton.

In an attempt to bring business back to KCK the downtown committee put together an art walk. This art walk was made of mostly what Modou would call "outsider art". People were sporadically set up and down the street, their tables half filled with paintings or ceramics. The classic "row of abstract giant acrylic paintings" leaning against an empty storefront was lent character by the mariachi band wandering through the streets.

Down the street from where the vendors had set up was a group of people called the "Hip Hop Academy". They'd nailed canvases of wood to the wall and were having a spray painting demonstration along side a group of kids (and 20 somethings) break dancing. It was probably one of the coolest things I've ever seen. These guys really knew what they were doing, one of them even did a head spin.

Around 8, the Hearts of Darkness, http://www.myspace.com/theheartsofdarknesskc, an afrobeat band with seventeen members, started playing and rocked the joint. Suddenly, the night turned into a raging block party with people dancing in the streets. For the entirety of their two hour set they continued to keep the groove of the party. Hearts of Darkness is the band that practices downstairs in "The Ship" on Sundays.

During the last song Halliday pointed out a lightning bug, the first ever that I've seen in person.

When the Hearts of Darkness finally finished, Halliday, Joe, and I headed out. We dropped by Sunfresh before coming home again and watching Milk. Milk was an okay movie, but I felt like it jumped around a little. After Milk, I literally passed out the minute I hit my bed and didn't wake again until eleven.