Mortality Blog

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.

I’m not even sure where to start. How about by explaining that the ‘sasquatch music festival‘ is an annual event that takes place in at the gorge ampitheatre up in Washington.

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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:

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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:

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… 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.

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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.

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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.