I got back from Chicago Monday night after spending three grueling but very good, full days at the Lollapalooza music festival. I stayed with friends at an older brother’s apartment in Downer’s Grove and took the train express train to Union Station. The long weekend consisted of runs back to the train station through the streets of Chicago, sundry muffins, constant giggling, hot, sweaty sun, festival food and a rather overwhelming of music. It was certainly an experience, one to be had, I think, but probably not repeated. By the end I was a bit too exhausted and misanthropic for my tastes.

What follows is a brief dispatch on what I saw, a rundown of the festival’s musical selections:

FRIDAY

• Yeasayer - First concert of the day. Pretty damn good. Their catalog is not very deep, which came across, but when they’re good, they’re very good. See: Sunshine.
• The Kills - So uninteresting all I remember is their darkly-colored stage costumes. Left after a song or two.
• The Black Keys - Technically impressive but lacking in soul. The pair of virtuosos shredded some mean guitar and nailed some drums, but I just found myself somehow bored, despite the sweaty, powerful display.
• Grizzly Bear - Great performance. This was my second time ’round seeing Grizzly Bear, and while they weren’t quite as good as last time (probably owing to the heat), they were still damn good. Their psychadelic art-rock sounds better than studio with the added noise, spontaneity and depth of live performance.
• Bloc Party - Bland, like their studio recordings. They’ve got a good drummer, though.
• Radiohead - Astounding. Apparently not their best live performance, and the crowd was weirdly complacent, but damned if it wasn’t the best show I’d ever seen. Incredible music and an astounding light show. The incidental fireworks right in the middle were a great touch. Highlights: Fake Plastic Trees, Reckoner, Everything In Its Right Place, The Bends.

SATURDAY

• Foals - Unexpectedly good. The discovery of the festival, I’d say–I’d never listened prior. Angular, almost mathematical indie-punk. Surprisingly danceable.
• MGMT- Unexpectedly bad. The disappointment of the festival. Unfinished, uninspired, and too SOFT! Booka Shade at the next stage over drowned them out.
• Explosions in the Sky - Caught a few songs. Bombastic post-rock. Self-serious and over-the-top. Made me question my liking of Sigur Ros.
• Okkervil River - A thrilling, powerfully spirited show. Will Sheff goes wild in live performance — and still comes off seemingly like a really nice guy. Rough around the edges but makes up for it in passion.
• Broken Social Scene - Solid but uninspired. Technically very good but felt phoned-in. Somehow the strange, layered wonder of their records didn’t quite come across at this big outdoor festival.
• Wilco - Gorgeous, technically spectacular and entertaining. Appropriately Midwestern. Wilco is a good time, even if they venture into dad-rock territory at times. “Spiders” was incredible.

SUNDAY

• John Butler Trio - Another surprise — I enjoyed these guys, even though many of my friends sneered at them. Beautiful guitar playing.
• Black Kids - Shitty. Sounded disinterested. Annoying vocals. Sloppy instrumentation.
• Iron & Wine - Middling performance. Sam Beam’s whispering gets surrounded by country-rock in the most recent iteration of their live show. A very good performance but definitely not what I was expecting and not really representative of what I like about the band: the quiet intimacy, closely-observed moments, and Gothic mystery that permeate his music.
• Gnarls Barkley - Solid performance, but a bit thin. Sound was off. Cover of Radiohead’s Reckoner was amusing.
• Kanye West - A none-too-subtle celebration of Kanye’s heroic ego. Entertaining lightshow, and impressive energy. But I am not a huge fan of Kanye West. Also: the douche bag quotient in the crowd was a bit too much for me.

The summer is getting away from me. I’ve lost the thread of things, the envisioned trace of my dreams.

If only this hadn’t happened before.

The Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board shows free movies in parks on the West Bank during the summer. They throw a movie, mostly kids movies and old blockbusters, up on a big screen and play for people with blankets and bicycles. The instructions say show up at dusk, and that’s how the film rolls: with the Earth, rather than the clock.

A few afternoons ago one of my mates from the Belfry astutely and enthusiastically noted tonight’s film: Muppet Movie. Being (fairly obviously) muppet people, we obviously needed to attend. It was in Linden Hills Park, on the far side from Minneapolis (quite a hike), but we decided muppets were well worth the ride.

I went on the ride (between sixteen and eighteen miles round trip) not for the destination (though I am, admittedly, a lover of muppets) but for the ride: the best bicycle route was to take the Greenway, Minneapolis’s bike-commuter rail trail, it’s entire length, all the way to Lake Calhoun. Despite being a two-year Twin Cities resident and bicycle enthusiast (though I am, admittedly, a johnny-come-lately), I had yet to travel the Greenway.

It was a fantastic time. I love my housemates. More metaphysically, I sometimes forget the wonderful feeling of motion. Being in motion has a therapeutic quality to it. Animistic interface with the world, that is, emphatic being with a bias to the animated and tactile, is something I neglect in my day-to-day life, at least in an intentional and vigorous way. I am an individual prone to stillness–not of mind but of body. I reflect more than I act. Except excessive introspection can find me drowning in an ocean of self-referential language. Motion can counteract–a purifying, clarifying or just wonderfully exhausting force.

And as I was flying down the Greenway last night in the dark, on my way home, I remember thinking that I have never been to a city so designed with this principle of motion in mind. The Greenway, the Mississippi Boulevards (stretching down the urban banks of the river), pedestrian bridges, paths around the lakes, the bike co-ops, hitching posts and transportation-centered events, like the bike film festival going on right now all bespeak a city facilitating movement.

Notice the locus of this facilitation, something underappreciated: infrastructure. Human-powered movement, among many other things, is, though not essentially dependent upon it, very much influenced and impacted by the geography of its design. Space is not an idea I thought about much until I came to Macalester. Sure, it was always a consideration: anyone has experienced understands how rooms shape a mood, make a meeting or simply serve as a place. But the level to which physical structure guides human interactions never really had much currency in my mind–perhaps the product of being wrapped up in abstraction, of being stuck in one’s head.

Whatever the case, when I went sailing by the soccer field on the Greenway, or flew past a man sitting with his Dobermanns on the bicycle bridge, I really felt what it meant to be in a place, to move by its lines and know it through movement.

July started a few days ago and I started the month with a pledge, of sorts: to write every day. So far this plan has worked out, save the (very justified) holiday yesterday for the Fourth. There are many things I want to read and many things I want to write in service of the larger goal of being a writer, an artist. Small steps along that path, and maybe I’ll find the way. Small steps, and maybe I’ll make it somewhere.

One other paltry, unsubstantiated thought: Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee is an astounding, vivifying, purifying book.