2008年8月11日 星期一

Radiohead @ APW Festival



Thom Yorke, after inheriting the Blue Comet stage from Kings of Leon: "the next song is for Kings of Leon. We'd be friends with them if we were that good looking."

Clau remarked that Yorke was "surprisingly douchey," as befitting Scott Tenorman's favorite band. No Surprises there -- this is the original '90s British sick cats, masters of aestheticized ressentiment who said bitterly that "no one likes a smartass but we all like stars" (incidentally this was also my high school yearbook quote because I was -- I'm not proud to admit -- one of those abhorrently, pathologically sarky kids). He also fronts a band that every magazine has conspired to make canonical beyond reproach. Though I think Yorke himself realizes the absurdity of there being a Rock Music Canon agreed upon by smarmy pedantic white music nerds.

(To be honest I think a certain English prof at my alma mater looks like a pudgy suburban version of Thomas Yorke; same accent, same facial expressions, same acidic sense of humor.)

The concert was all In Rainbows alright. The stage setup was a citadel of acid-electric phantasmagoria, a vertible crystal castle of refracting glass spikes. They played most of the songs I was looking to hear (15 Step, Reckoner, There There, No Surprises, Bodysnatchers). Everyone juggled instruments, Jonny on guitar, Thom Yorke on drums, etc. and every once in a while Yorke broke out into his best writhing dance interpretation of a headless chicken. Truly bizarre.

By all means this is the most high-profile act I've seen. The festival itself was poorly organized and manned by the most anal retentive staff ever, but all the same. I think this will be one of those bands that when our children romanticize about the super retro-cool era of the 2000's, they'd wonder what Radiohead was like live and I could say oh they were pretty mindblowing alright.



Close up video of The Bends.



Next was Bodysnatchers I think. They basically played the entire songlist of In Rainbows. The red bar above the stage worried me a little. It looked like the eye of the disco ray monster machines from War of the Worlds come to vaporize us all. I was not in a mood to be harvested.



As to expected at a major festival, the whole crowd was pretty much bubbling with geysers of smoke. From afar, it looks geothermic.



Also, Animal Collective was MINDBLOWINGLY WEIRD. I think I would need Martian logic to process what I heard from them yesterday. I'm just gonna go ahead and pretend I didn't hear anything.

2008年8月3日 星期日

Kingda Ka

Beware when tigers try to sell you anything.
Sometimes they sell you cereal.

Other times they sell oil.

And on rare occasions they even sell you overpriced colleges.


We were at the NJ Six Flags for Du's birthday and a tiger sold me a ride on the Kingda Ka, the world's tallest and fastest rollercoaster. It stands at 456 feet (45 stories -- tall enough to be an aviation safety concern) and accelerates from 0-128 miles per hour in less than four seconds. Du and I were at the front row seat. Here's what it looks like:





Amusement parks and rollercoasters are pretty bizarre ideas when you think about them. They package our fear of injury/death and sell it back to us as happyfunptime joy rides. You know we as a species have evolved to be a pretty fucked up breed of monkeys when we build huge town-sized settlements in New Jersey devoted to making the fear of dying a fun experience.

No exaggeration. It was like simulated death. I opened my mouth during the coaster and swallowed gallons of air, couldn't even hear myself scream. My heart considered abandoning my ribcage and eloping with my lungs. At one point over the ride's peak, the view was just me, the curved horizon and the dirt below. Then the whole giant angry apparatus slammed us towards the ground.

There were stages of recovery from the ride. We played it cool immediately after the ride (1st Stage: Denial), but I think at some point later in the afternoon we all gradually acknowledged that it was what we'd categorize as a traumatic experience (2nd Stage: Recognition). We were violated and I will have nightmares about rollercoasters forever. And then of course the whole experience gets recuperated as a funny story the next day (3rd Stage: Denial again). But serious, I'd actually recommend an hour-long repeated ride session as a sort of lite alternative to Guantanamo.

Afterward I was pretty much depleted of a week's worth of adrenaline, so we moved on to gentler slopes. Namely Du's favorite rollercoaster -- Nitro, which (when viewed in profile) resembles the hospitable curves of the A/C/E subway map. I think I was too drained to enjoy it properly.