Glenn Kubish

This is one of my favourite pics. Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison, January 13, 1968. I'm sitting in the second row behind the dude with the hat. :) I searched it out the other day as part of an exercise in the book ThinkerToys that I am reading (and it me) that challenged me to just look at a favourite photo for 10 minutes—straight. That is a very different use of 10 minutes. I don't know what the average time spent viewing any Instagram pic is, but it's not 10 minutes. The goal is to see the photo differently, see more in it, extract from it visual themes that can be transferred to other areas of life. So, what did I see? I see that: Johnny Cash is the authority, listened to my lawman and lawbreaker alike; those microphones are like prison cell bars; he's got one foot on the prison wall; he's singing, but he's also placed a mic at the front of the crowd, to capture the voices of the voiceless, perhaps; the painting of the California coastal cypress (t...

Word that I had managed, through a friend, to purchase two Paul McCartney tickets (for the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment) was received with a barely disguised yawn from Michael, our music-loving, 18-year-old son. His argument went like this:  McCartney tickets cost more than tickets for Japandroids,  so, immediately, what's up with that? Then, there is the fact that McCartney is well past his best-before date. "Dad, he's old," said Mikey. "Quite old." The argument continued like this: Yesterday, he was the real Paul McCartney. Today, he's part of an overpriced, overproduced appeal to nostalgia aimed at those who haven't listened to new music, don't support new music, are trapped in the past. And are willing to pay for that insulation. He's got a bit of a point. (And his mom has a point, too, when she said wistfully, "Who I'd really like to see is John Lennon. What would he sound like today?") But, here...