Apparently my dream-center wasn’t feeling like generating any new content last night - so it mashed up a bunch of old stuff.
I went to CMD, to either drop something off or pick something up, and noticed a big long table sitting outside, which people were beginning to set with food. I went in through the front doors of CMD, and although the decor and the people were the same, the layout was a lot more like another web agency (I forget what it was called) - there was no lobby or elevator, just a stairway going up to an overlooking second-floor, where all the people were currently in a meeting.
I snuck in like a cat, making no sound, only briefly knocking into something with my backpack - above me, someone (I think it was Jeremy) glanced down, noticed me, but grinned and nodded, and didn’t report me - he was on my side. After I did whatever I was there for (don’t remember what) I left. Outside, the parking lot was like a weird combination of three places: the real CMD parking lot, the playground and field outside of Richmond Elementary (where I went to K-5th) and the Gorge Amphitheater - so a field, some pavement, a fence around the whole thing, except for an entire border made of a huge jagged canyon cliff.
For some reason I noticed that there were a bunch of fence peices in the dumpster - big red slats with points on top, nailed into two cross beams, with posts at either end. I was considering taking them for firewood, or maybe to give to my parents to use in their backyard, but I couldn’t seem to pull them out, and get them on my car. But I kept trying it - I suddenly realized it was dusk, and just starting to get dark.
Behind me, I heard a bunch of people shouting - I turned around, and saw fireworks going off, and a crowd of people gathered around the tables I’d seen earlier. I ran over, and found - ready for this? It was Harry Potter’s birthday party! None of his wizard friends were there - it was just him, a bunch of people more or less my age, and suddenly, I was there too. I don’t know if Harry knew who I was, or actually if he’d noticed that I was there, but I wasn’t told to leave or anything, so I just joined in, eating, talking to the random people around me, occasionally shouting “Happy Birthday” in chorus with my fellow party-goers.
Then, the party started to wrap up - the lights dimmed, people drifted away, and Harry sort of hooked up with a girl that was there - I was spying on them as he convinced her to let him give her a kiss, and I suspect they would’ve done more, except that it was a false ending to the party! The lights suddenly came back on, and dance music was pounding! Some skinny black guy in tight jeans and an open shirt bounded over, and pulled Harry into a little synchronized dance routine, which we all tried to copy. Yay! Dance Party!
… the end. (I had some other facet of this dream that involved an amusement park, which I think I’d dreamt about before, running around between the stalls, the rides, the tents and RVs where the staff lived while they were running it… but I barely remember it.)
Let’s think about what we’ve got here. CMD is where I used to work (and where I’ve been told I’m actually not allowed to b re-hired,) Richmond is my old elementary school, the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington is where I’ve gone for three years now to see the Sasquatch Music Festival. CMD is usually on my mind in some way or another, since I liked working there, and my two roommates (and lots of my friends) still work there. I’m not sure about Richmond, but last night I was looking at the list of acts I’d enjoyed at Sasquatch, so that’s where that’s from.
The big red fence slats that I wanted for my parents back yard were in fact the fence that used to be in their back yard - I remember it as a kid. It was rotting and falling apart. It got torn down, but my parents have been having trouble with the neighbors’ kids coming into their backyard and messing stuff up, so I wanted to put the fence back to stop that. Possibly the reason that I couldn’t get the fence to move is because I couldn’t when I was a kid either - it was too strong to break apart, and I know I played around with doing that back then.
I just had a birthday party, and I was just watching this thing about Harry Potter in a rap battle with Voldemort - see, there he is, and there’s the black guy, and there’s all the people who aren’t his wizard friends, but who like him nonetheless.
So it’s a bunch of random stuff that I had bouncing around in my head, and my brain was like, “I can make a cool remix out of this!” Iiiinteresting.
Spoiler alert - there will be no psychedelic notebook pages this time around - I took it easy. This year was fun, in a more sedate, sunburned way. Let’s take a look at how my weekend went:
Day One
The Gaslight Anthem
Doves
Passion Pit - I remember not liking them as much as I expected to.
M. Ward - not really the type of music I listen to, but good music.
Shearwater - I only heard a little bit of their performance, but I really liked what I heard.
Tim & Eric - terrible. not funny at all. non-stop scatological and misogynistic jokes just don’t sit well with me, I guess, along with making fun of people that are mentally challenged.
The Decemberists - good, as always, their set consisted of playing straight through their new album (The Hazards Of Love) in its entirety.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - loved these guys, even though it’s probably not something I would generally choose to listen to, the lead singer was spunky and everyone was talented. Also, there was a huge inflated eyeball floating above the players for their entire performance.
Crystal Castles - disappointing! They sound so good on the album, but live, the female singer’s voice was terrible, just a bunch of screams… the music was otherwise good (if a bit screechy, poorly mixed perhaps) but I expected a lot more from these people.
Day Two
The Red Wine Boys - I only caught the end, but it was a comedic duo whose performance involved a lot of wine. Also, they get points for lots of audience interaction.
Aziz Ansari - clever and funny, probably the best comedian I saw, apart from the Whitest Kids on the next day.
Zach Galifianakis - he’s funny, and he plays piano. what’s not to like?
TV On The Radio - I only saw the end of this show, and I liked what I heard.
Nine Inch Nails - Great stuff, although I started getting bored when the songs got less pounding. Trent Reznor continues to know exactly what he’s doing, and it’s always impressive, inspiring even, to watch a master at work. I’m not generally a huge NIN fan (apart from the Year Zero album, which I really liked) but I definitely enjoyed the show.
Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head - After I left NIN, I headed over to see Deadmau5, and caught the end of NPSH, which has an awesome name, and almost seemed like a jazzy jam band that had thrown in a couple of synthesizers. Good stuff.
Deadmau5 - certainly the best electronic show I saw this year. Not as good as Ghostland Observatory last year, but easily better then the Crystal Castles. I slipped through the crowd until I was right up front, jumping around and getting pushed in all directions, soaked in sweat, dancing until I was exhausted. It’s kind of a fun experience to be in, but I got tired, the music wasn’t doing it for me, so I left a bit early to go back to camp and eat.
Day Three
Santigold - I didn’t get to see these people, but I heard them on my way into the venue, and they sounded intriguing, so I’ll have to look them up later.
Whitest Kids U’Know - just as funny in person as they are in their online sketches.
Monotonix - This was the most incredible performance I saw this year, period. Basically, it involved three Israeli guys, skinny, mustachioed and hairy, beating the shit out of their instruments, and spending all their time in the audience, not on stage, while still managing to continue playing. Just to give you an idea about the extremes they went to, I arrived at the stage just as the lead singer climbed on top of the bass drum - and the bass drum was being held up by the audience, about a dozen feet away from the stage. And that was nothing. Throughout their set, they had the audience carry them and their instruments all over the grounds, continuing to play - at one point, the lead singer crowd-surfed his way all the way to the opposite end of the field, climbed up on the rigging for the sound booth (about 20 feet up in the air, maybe), and announced to the crowd that he was going to count to 4, and then jump down, and they were going to catch him - and he wasn’t lying. I was incredibly impressed with Monotonix - to be honest, the music wasn’t my favorite, but it didn’t matter.
Silversun Pickups - talented group, to be sure, but I realize that I don’t like them nearly as much as a lot of other people seem to… there wasn’t really anything unique or appealing to latch onto, they were just a good band.
Girl Talk - when I first heard Girl Talk, I didn’t know the circumstances behind the creation of his music - that it’s all one big long mashup mix. Now, knowing that, I enjoyed the hell out of the show - there was some great stuff, and the crowd loved it. Speaking of which, he dealt with the issue of watching a single DJ triggering samples on a mixer board being a little boring by populating the stage entirely with party people - people in costume, people shirtless, everyone dancing. At one point, they passed an enormous inflated while out to the crowd - it was about 2/3 the size of the stage itself, which was awesome.
Tobacco - Cool electronic stuff, although I don’t think I had taken enough drugs to appreciate it properly - other people, however, seemed to have taken exactly (or perhaps more) then enough. The music was pretty interesting, coupled with the visuals - an ongoing video remix of old horror video, apparently from inside an elaborate haunted house event.
Chromeo - I’m not usually a fan of DJ sets, since it’s kind of like listening to the radio: every once in a while you hear songs you like, but a lot of the time you end up just waiting for the current song to be over so you can get to another one that you like. Chromeo was a good DJ, but I wasn’t very into it.
So in conclusion, I would recommend checking out Girl Talk, Monotonix, Santigold, Shearwater, and The Decemberists.
It took me all day Tuesday to sort of get back up to speed with not camping and not listening to music constantly, but now I’m feeling pretty good. I picked up some aloe vera cream stuff which will probably not have any actual effect on my sunburns, but the psychological reassurance is worth it.
It’s a three-day thing, during which dozens of bands play concurrently on three stages. There’s super expensive food and drinks you can buy while you’re there. I camped out during the event in a huge grassy field along with thousands of other people:
which was pretty cool. I love camping. I should do it more often.
Anyway, let’s see a quick overview of the bands that I saw (in rough chronological order):
Newton Faulkner
Throw Me The Statue
The Shaky Hands
Ozomatli
Kathleen Edwards
Destroyer
The New Pornographers
MIA
Modest Mouse
REM
Truckasaurus
Blue Scholars
White Rabbits
The Presidents
Michael Franti & Spearhead
Death Cab For Cutie
The Hives
Rodrigo Y Gabriela
Flight Of The Conchords
The Mars Volta
Ghostland Observatory
The Flaming Lips
In a typical day, I would wake up around 10AM, cook up some breakfast, hang out with my campground neighbors (two guys from washington and one from portland), then make the mile-or-so trek out to the festival grounds. From there I would drift from one stage to another until I found an act I wanted to see - then I’d hang out until they were done, check my schedule to see who was playing next, rinse, and repeat. After the last show of the night, I’d hike back to the campsite, light the lamp, pump up the stereo in my car, and cook up some dinner. Finally, I’d spend the rest of the night hanging out with other people around the camp ground - I met a great group of people from Montana that I ended up spending quite a bit of time with, as well as my neighbors, and a couple of crazy canadian girls. It was fun figuring out what all the differences between canadian and US english were.
I met up with Tyler and Malolry while I was there:
… although due to spotty phone service and huge crowds, I only ran in to them once.
The finale of the festival for me was two shows - Ghostland Observatory and The Flaming Lips. I honestly like the former more then the latter, due to my taste for electronic music, and I think I made the right decision in skipping most of the Lips’ show to see Ghostland. I first saw them last year as Sasquatch, and they’d made some significant upgrades to their show since then - in particular, huge LED panels and a complex array of lasers. Now - if this next part seems a little crazy, keep in mind that there were certain chemicals circulating in my system during most of it, possibly a few more then I actually needed.
The experience of being in the crowd and watching them perform was something I don’t know if I can fully describe here. The show was pure SEX - the entire thing seemed focused on establishing the frontman as a sex god incarnate. The visuals and music looked and sounded like sex. I don’t know how else to say it. Here’s the interesting part: this wasn’t sex in the human sense - there was no human connection, no physical component to it. It was deified sex, in an objectified sense. The guy was like an idol on a pedestal, completely untouchable, but seething with power. I swear it was like having orgasm after orgasm in terms of the emotional rush I got from being there - but again, without the actual normal physical sexual component of orgasm, just the feelings. The whole thing was contained in virtual walls created out of lasers drawing lines through the fog - it was like being in some sort of prehistoric temple hallway, participating in an ancient ceremony. Incredibly intense.
After the Ghostland show ended, I made my way over to the final moments of the Flaming Lips show, where they were playing ‘Taps’ on a bugle - a tribute and requiem to all of our people over in the middle east. I watched from far away from a while, but then they started playing ‘Do You Realize’, and I pushed my way down to the front. The Lips’ show went in a different direction from Ghostland’s - instead of sex, it was all about hope, and affection. Wayne’s regard for all of us was tangible. The confetti, fog, and the flashing lights all served to create this all-encompassing atmosphere, much like Ghostland’s lasers, except it wasn’t so much containing the show, as expanding outwards from it. And there was the UFO at the end - a huge stage prop full of lights and mirrors that descended, picked up Wayne, and carried him away, leaving us alone (but together of course) in darkness.
Things got weird after that. Everyone had to leave, to go back to camp, everyone was completely worn out from what we’d seen and done. I kept getting deja vu like crazy - I was about halfway out of the festival grounds when a bunch of people lead the crowd in singing happy birthday to Wayne. It was dark, and the picket fences and sagebrush beyond on all looked the same - so there were at least four or five times where I had to break out of the crowd and stop, trying to figure out if we were all walking in a huge circle. I thought I remember reading that after the UFO took off, the event staff reconfiguring all of the fences and buildings so that they formed an inescapable circuit, leading the zombie-like crowd out and then back again, to the stage where they thought they just left.
So with that possibility in mind, I kept a close eye on my surroundings, and made sure to walk on the outside of the crowd so I could be sure of where I was going. Once I was almost back to the camp I got a little freaked out about the whole thing - it was pitch black, although I had my flashlight, and there were people running, and acting like zombies, and mooing like cattle. I really didn’t want to be there anymore. I found a place where some people had kicked down the wire and wood fence that was holding us in, and I walked out with them, glad to be out of that ‘irrigation ditch’, as one of the people called it. Once out, I was scared I’d get caught by the monsters (event staff or police tasked with keeping everyone flowing in the circuit), so I quickly made my way deeper in to the campsite. I was surrounded by unfamiliar cars, but I decided I was safer here, since they couldn’t move the cars, they were like anchor points. I saw a few familiar landmarks, and eventually arrived back and my car - I decided that other people were probably pretty freaked out too, and the safest place for me to be was in my car.
I managed to get in, and locked the doors - but then i realize that I was super thirsty, so I quickly ran back out, opened my trunk, grabbed some provisions, and jumped back in. I turned on the car, then took the keys out of the ignition and set them aside, since I was in no condition to be driving. I turned on my stereo, flipped through the music until I came to my own songs, and lay back. As I listened to my music I tried to write down all the stuff I was thinking about - here’s what that ended up looking like:
While all this was going on, I was nervously watching the silhouettes of people walking past outside, and it was raining, and the rain droplets were forming scary faces on the windshield, or sometimes fractal patterns. I had the windshield wipers, of course, so I used those to clear things up if it got too intense. Eventually, as you can see from the last entry at the bottom of the picture, I decided that even though I was safe in my car, I needed to go see what everyone else was doing outside.
I’m glad I did - I got out of the car, and made it over to my neighbor’s tent, where the girls and guys were all packed in out of the rain, drinking wine out of a bag and playing with glowsticks. I was okay there for a while, but it got too claustrophobic - we were all huddled like bums in this wimpy little tent, and it was cold, and there were people walking by on the road behind us that I could see but I could hear - I eventually had to leave there too. I wandered up the road and watching the people as they stumbled past. I saw a party going on that looked like Hell itself had opened up in to the world - there were flames, and people lurching around, yelling, singing, calling out to people going past, saying, “Join us!” But their voices were all deep and menacing. My lack of belief in religion notwithstanding, a lot of what I saw that felt threatening was demonic. Eventually I made it over to a tent that I had visited the night before, where the people were playing bongos and guitars - I hung out with them for a while, but eventually had to leave there too, and go back to my neighbor’s tent.
I was disappointed to find them in the same situation I had left them - all huddled inside, with their own little glowsticks. They were stuck in there. I couldn’t get them to come out. So I went back to the good tent again, and hung out with them for several hours - they were hilarious, and we had some other really messed up visitors, and overall, I think that was the best possible place for me to be that night.
I couldn’t stay there all night though, since I had to drive home the next day (or rather later that day, since it was like 3:30 in the morning) - so I went back to my own tent, and after being a little bit freaked out by this weird white residue all over my car (which I later realized was rain mixed with dust kicked up by all the people trekking back to the campsite after the show) I went in to my tent and tried to get to sleep.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t get to sleep - I might’ve drifted off for a bit here and there, but I couldn’t ever really sleep soundly. Eventually I decided to just get up - it was about 9 or so in the morning, and I wanted to leave. I packed everything up, hoping that my neighbors would make an appearance before I left, but unfortunately they were still in their tents, so after eating a light breakfast and making sure my car was okay, I left.
The drive was 250 miles, and took about 4 or 5 hours, with one stop along the way to rest and make sure I’d be able to make it back to Portland without falling asleep or something. I made it okay - and I found that my car does great on the highway. It doesn’t accelerate very quickly, and has trouble going much faster then 60 mph uphill - also it tends to vibrate a lot at higher speeds. However, I did 90 mph at several points without exploding, so that’s good. I had a few rather anxious moments passing huge trucks full of iron pipes or bales of hay, but other then that, no close calls.
I’m also really glad I got the new car stereo before I left - the trip there and back might’ve been a lot tougher without music to listen to.
So I arrived back home, took a shower, then slept for 15 hours. Yeah. What a weekend.
edit: oh shit, myspace fucked up all my pictures and stuff. Well, just click on the stupid little ‘…’ things to see the pictures. laaaaaame.
