Three Imaginary Girls

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I didn't get to see his whole set, but was fortunate enough to catch the last part of of Saul Williams' spoken word extravaganza on Sunday from 1:30 PM to 2:45 PM.

Possibly due to his outstanding, ferocious last night's full-on performance, Williams was winded at this special acapella show, and I had missed the opening act, local hip-hop duo Canary Sing (featuring Lioness and Ispire).

I was really happy it happened this way for me  though, and not the other way around, as Williams went ape-shit pissed at the end of this epilogue performance, when around 2:30 PM he was like, "That's all I have. What time is it? Am I supposed to do more?"

Then he broke into an early, jagged, widely-convicting masterpiece involving a shotgun blast from Kurt Cobain, the loss of a lover, the distance yet faithfulness of God, and, especially the lingering brutal insanity of several years in the shadow of the Iraq War.

He intensely castigated the audience and himself for continuing to party at festivals as we continue to bomb and scare the hell out of other people in a distant land, insisting that none of us clap for his rant, and begging his own  children to hold him accountable for letting unnecessary wars and other social evils happen.

"We must not keep doing what our parents want us to," he insisted, "and if we are parents, we need to listen to our children, who have a responsibility to the world to not allow us to do these things."

Pretty unsettling, but something I think we all needed someone to say, and hopefully this will at the very least direct us to voting to change (and beyond that, of course).