Old business
Due to the fact that I have a slightly narrow world view, two blogs I regularly read both posted a link to this Stephin Merritt interview. I thought I'd keep the trend alive.
Also, I've corrected the link for my Balboa Island photos, so you can click over there to see more than one page of images now.
I only just finished watching the Smallville and Angel episodes from last week. Okay, so Clark is held against his will and tortured by a research scientist. Clark's superness and the love of Lex save him. The scientist goes into a coma. You'd have to wait to prosecute the scientist, due to the coma. Why don't they bring charges against the company the scientist works for? Clark was kidnapped and tortured and nobody even mentions calling the police or involving the justice system? They are damn lucky I'm still crushing on Michael Rosenbaum, 'cause otherwise I'd have to stop watching the most poorly written drama on TV today (and don't forget that The O.C. is currently on the air).
Another thing about this past SV that bothered me was Baby Clark. When his parents stick him in the Ugliest Bassinette Ever Clark is an infant. When he arrives on Earth he's about three or four years old. I'm down with the time it would take for Clark to travel from Krypton to Earth. How did he survive for so long, though? He wasn't in some cryo-stasis or anything and there didn't seem to be any food or fresh diapers in that fugly egg pod. The complete lack of social interaction for two or three of Clark's formative years does make sense of his character. He's such a dope. Stupid man.
Angel was pretty cool. I like Illyria getting unstuck from time. Reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut would write about.
Illyria's generally loads of fun anyway. Wesley acts kind of Renfield about her, too. He said something like, "When she speaks it's like 'Vertigo'." I can't decide whether he was making a reference to Hitchcock's film or just the medical problem. 'Cause, y'know, Illyria killed Wesley's last girlfriend and now lives in said girlfriend's body. The context didn't help at all. Usually when they make cultural references they'll be more explicit about it, but I still can't decide about that word. I could buy that Illyria's voice causes a negative physical reaction in humans, or that Wesley hearing Dead Fred's voice makes him feel wonky, but ever since the relationship between Wesley and Illyria was established I've thought of them as a potential 'Vertigo' homage. Why can't they explain these things to me? Didn't Ben Edlund write this episode? It wasn't nearly as fun as "Smile Time". When he does 'wacky' it's awesome. When he does 'standard' it's stock sci-fi garbage.
The ending made absolutely no sense, either, unless they reveal in the next episode that Angel actually killed those demons. Or the baby. Either one works for me. And the pregnant mother so reminded me of Sharon from My So-Called Life. Let me look her up a moment. Oh, she's David Boreanaz' wife. What a non-surprise. (Is there a proper word for that? Meriam-Webster online doesn't list an antonym for 'surprise'. Anti-climactic? Naw. Oh well. Based on a Google search for the term, 'non-surprise' does get used pretty often. We need a proper word for this! Negating a boring old word just isn't enough! Revolution!)
Coachella, already!
Ani and I made it through security pretty quickly (although I was forced to toss a nice new pen, sadly), and made it onto the grounds in time to hear the Section Quartet. Someone in the group said that they were the loudest string quartet. I agree. We didn't get anywhere near the Main Stage and they were still too loud for me. The KROQ tent was predictably noisome.
We loaded up on bottled water and made our way to the Mojave tent for Q and not U. We knew it was the Mojave tent cuz we asked the security guard which tent we were in. They should really think about labeling those. QanU was good, but I wanted to see Howie Day. He's got the kind of schtick that's great to watch live. Ani had to stay behind at the Mojave tent for a little while to wait for her friends (who never showed).
Howie Day is a young white guy with an acoustic guitar, and masses of pedals. He samples, loops, mixes and who know's whats live on stage while he's performing. He's like a digital one-man-band. I've even seen him do a 'dance mix' of one of his songs on the fly. Seems he has a whole backing band now, though. That made me sad. But they were experiencing technical difficulties. While others worked to resolve the problems with the band's equipment, Howie played two songs by himself. This made me happy. I wasn't close enough to see his schtick very well, but I could hear it and that's all that matters. Plus, churro and iced lemonade!
We listened to Kinky off in the distance while waiting for Ani's friends to meet us near some food stalls. They were Lexy and Drew. Good people. I highly recommend them. We got lunch (my personal mini-pizza was doughy! It was so gross! I'm lucky I didn't get sick! !!! Ani's vegi combo from the Chinese food stall smelled yummy.) and then headed over towards Beck. I don't enjoy listening to Beck (and was glad that nobody lynched me for stating that aloud near the Gobi tent), so I went off on my own. I told Ani I'd meet her at the film tent.
The film tent sucked. It was tiny and crowded and the documentary I came in on was boring. I did not stay in the film tent. I wandered about, bought a strawberry snow-cone (that looked like a bright red breast), and began looking for shade. Oh, I bought a parasol just after arriving. It's made of 'natural'-colored paper and has pretty flowers painted on it in black and gold. But I needed real shade.
I found the Playstation 2 tent and sat around watching some guy try to figure out some track meet game. Kind of boring, but relaxing and cool. Eventually, I met up with Ani near the Outdoor Stage, where we'd seen Howie Day. She said Junior Senior was very good. She hadn't watched much of Beck. We dozed under some random low-lying tent thing. It was quite refreshing.
We got some more food. This time Ani went for the doughy pizza and I got a vegi combo from the Chinese food stall. The woman serving the food starting putting a meat kabob on my plate until I reminded her that I'd ordered the vegi combo. We took our food over towards the Main stage to watch The Pixies. They were a lot of fun. They have v. devoted fans, as well. Radiohead was scheduled to play the Main stage after The Pixies, so Ani wanted to get as close to the stage as possible. She's small and swift and made it through the crowd easily, but I did not and completely lost track of her after a couple of minutes. I managed to get even closer to the stage after The Pixies left the stage. I couldn't bear the idea of standing crushed between all those people for another two hours, though, and left (which was not an easy feat in itself).
I didn't really care to see any of the bands playing between The Pixies and Radiohead, so wandered around the Virgin Megastore tent for a while. As one of my fellow browsers remarked, "I don't need to pay $25 to get this CD right now. It's cheaper everywhere else."
I bought some fruit and cranberry juice and made it back just in time for Radiohead. They're so cool. They're my favorite big, world famous rock band. Thom said he played 'Creep' for The Pixies. The crowd I was in was sparse enough to allow me to shake my booty to the music. Shaking my booty kept me from having anyone standing directly behind me for very long.
Once I was certain that Radiohead was done performing for the night, I rushed over to the Sahara tent to see Kraftwerk live! I missed their first song, but the whole thing was very very cool. I was hoping for 'Pocket Calculator,' cuz that's my favorite, but they did play 'Computer World,' which is from the same album. There was a video presentation on the screen running the width of the stage. The 'band' stood in front, silhouetted against images of bicyclists and radioactivity symbols. A few minutes after they left the stage, the shadows of robot mannequins began to appear on the screen. Then the robots replaced the band for the first song of the encore: The Robots. It was so great to be there as thousands of people applauded the arrival of four robot mannequins on the stage. The actual people behind Kraftwerk eventually returned to the stage to finish their encore. I love live Kraftwerk! I had to miss Phantom Planet, but I can see them any time. And the very idea of seeing them perform live isn't nearly as fun as Kraftwerk live!
It took Ani and me a while to find each other after Kraftwerk (live!). First, we made the mistake of setting our walkie talkies to channel one, which is the same channel that about a hundred other people were trying to use. Then, someone left their mic open from Phantom Planet to Kraftwerk so that all anyone could hear on channel one was music. We did get back together in time to meet up with Drew again. Lexy was waiting in the car. They'd been trying to get out of the parking lot since the middle of Radiohead's set. Due to the complete lack of parking staff, traffic was moving at about six feet per half hour. It was the worst traffic I have ever been in. Ever. I've been in some really shitty traffic. Never before has it taken four hours to leave a parking lot with only a few hundred people trying to exit. I could probably have walked back to our hotel by then. All of the road closures by the police just made everything worse. It really doesn't help traffic throughout Indio by forcing about 40,000 people to use only one street to get to the freeway. That actually causes more traffic problems. Indio is mostly on a grid-plan. There are about a dozen different ways to leave the Empire Polo Field when all of the streets are open. The traffic control at Coachella completely sucked. I have no intention of ever attending Coachella again. Not even shutting down the port-a-potties early because the scant few available were full well before midnight was enough to make me swear-off Coachella. That traffic was.
Anyways, we got back to the hotel very late. I'll post about Sunday tomorrow. Maybe I'll have that Danger Mouse photo uploaded by then. You'll wanna see it; he's hot.
Posted by rachelcrane
at 3:51 PM PDT
