Bardstown Road.

 

Every once in a while, you find yourself in a place that transforms you.  Your reality shifts a little bit, if only for a moment.  You gain a heightened sense of intellect, experience, something beyond your usual world.   (The brilliant scholar Sharon Zukin would call this experience “liminality.”) 

 

One of those great liminal experiences for me was on Bardstown Road in Louisville.  It’s a bit like Delmar in the U-City Loop here. 

 

It was a true urban neighborhood.  The whole world was thrown together in a ten-block area.  Eclectic houses, eclectic people.  Churches, tattoo parlor, coffee house, bars—saints to sinners, all in a row. Awesome!

 

There was the used-book shop, where the owner—a small and quiet man who seemed to make his mind up about whether or not he liked you—pointed out the history section to me.  The aisles were maybe 30” wide, but the books seemingly ran from floor to ceiling!  It was  great!

 

There was the coin shop (my son is becoming a collector, so we look out for places like this).  Here, men smoking gigantic cigars tried to explain to me how the US issued five types of currency at the same time.  Guess it was all worth the same, but it’s kind of amazing.

 

Anyway, I did an internet search on Pete Peterson and there was nothing.  That was some time ago—maybe something’s out there now.  Just in case, I wanted to have a few words on the information superhighway about this impressive musician. (I have more to say about him on the “brilliant” page.)

 

How to begin?  His music is not written down, he sits and it just flows.  The timing of his music is sometimes set to the human heartbeat at rest.  It’s intriguing.  Entertaining.  Liminal.  He’s a musician who can actually make a living being a musician!  That alone says something good.  Of course, he’s never too far from Bardstown Road. 

 

If you’re in Louisville, find out where’s he’s playing.  If you have a few minutes to kill before his gig starts, then stroll the neighborhood awhile.  Maybe I’ll see you there!