Sharing the joy

That's what this blog is going to be all about. I plan on sharing the joy I derive from moments of artistic of sublimity in the hope that I can help enrich a few other people's lives. Presumptuous, I know. I'm talking about music, film, art, literature. Wherever I find one of those moments where I burst out laughing because it's too damn good to have been created by human beings. It can only be understood as a direct pipeline to the divine, whatever that is.

As an example I point to the 26 minutes of perfection that occurred on May 8, 1977 at Cornell University's Barton Hall. That night's performance of Scarlet Begonias-->Fire on the Mountain by The Grateful Dead is too good to be true. Having listened to that show for close to 20 years now, I still find myself laughing out loud and shaking my head.

I wonder what was going on that night. Did the band members have any clue what they were doing? I doubt it, but clearly they grappled with the phenomenon. The Dead's own lyric (By John Perry Barlow) from The Music Never Stopped (not played that night) goes:

"They're a band beyond description,
Like Jehovah's favorite choir
People joining hand in hand
While the music played the band,
Lord they're setting us on fire."

Now we all know this is completely subjective and that what I find sublime someone else may well find uninspired, derivative, or cloying. That's the nature of relative experience, and I'm not going to fight it. But I know that many people have turned me on to things I never knew about and I'm grateful they have. So hopefully this can be a two-way street, with my vast readership using the comments area to fill me in on what I'm missing.