1. Today, I gave my big toe another day of rest for most of the day. The first episode of The Eighties, which I watched on Thursday, focused for a little while on how Miami Vice broke new ground as a television show with its music video approach to story telling and its focus on inventive camera work, giving viewers frame after frame of intriguing shots and filling the frame with beautiful men and women. I realized I'd never watched Miami Vice. So today I watched the show's pilot, a two hour story that established how Tubbs and Crockett came to be partners as detectives on the vice squad, Crockett's unstable personal life (and his pet alligator), Tubbs' fraudulent means of getting to Miami and his desire for avenging his brother's death, and the pilot introduces members of the Miami Police Department. I'm not sure how much more of Miami Vice I'll watch, but I enjoyed the visual features the show was famous for (Executive Producer Michael Mann banned all earth tones) and I especially enjoyed the way pop music was integrated into the story line.
2. I gave my toe its first moderate workout late this afternoon. Debbie and I had decided to have burgers from the Elks delivered to the Lounge. I walked uptown. It was just about the right amount of exercise to give my injury. Occasionally, I felt twinges of mild pain, but, overall, my toe felt pretty good. It's definitely still inflamed. It bled a very tiny bit today for the first time since Tuesday. But, all in all, I was encouraged and I continue to ponder when to take my toe hiking on a trail.
3. Back home, I watched the last fifteen minutes or so of the J. J. Cale/Leon Russell studio session I enjoy so much on Amazon Prime and then I watched a 1980 performance of Leon Russell sitting in with the New Grass Revival. When Leon Russell sang gospel songs, including "Amazing Grace", I had to pinch myself as a way of coming back to reality. At times, Leon Russell seemed like Jesus himself wailing the vocals and playing the piano. If you have Amazon Prime and want to check out this concert, it's called Leon Russell and the New Grass Revival: Live and Pickling.
Before I went to bed, I watched nearly half of a documentary: Tom Rush: No Regrets. When I worked as a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Univ. of Oregon library back in 1987-88, my supervisor and good friend, Paul Frantz, introduced me to Tom Rush. I played his music over and over and over again on an a Walkman cassette tape player and couldn't listen to "Urge for Going", "No Regrets", and "Joshua Gone Barbados" enough and tonight I recalled flying to Minneapolis in late January of 1988 for a (failed) job interview at Augsburg College. I'd never flown to Minneapolis before and I listened to that Tom Rush tape as the great expanse of Montana and the Dakotas opened up beneath the jet plane and, later, as the lights of the Twin Cities filled me with awe. I loved that trip, despite my lousy interview performance, and Tom Rush was with me not only as I flew into Minneapolis, but as I walked the streets near Augsburg and the Univ. of Minnesota and gazed at the Mississippi River and imagined myself living there one day -- which, of course, never happened.
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