For some reason, last week seemed to stretch on forever. The city was covered in a thin layer of ice on Tuesday, resulting in lengthy transit delays due to chains. Bobby's bus wasn't running by the time his class ended, so he asked me to pick him up from the Woodstock Laughing Planet. It took forever to scrape the arctic blast off my windshield, but I crept along slowly but surely to fetch him.
We spent more than six hours at Bunk Bar on Wednesday night to see Wild Flag play. Bunk Bar is incredibly difficult to find, as Google Maps lists it at Bunk Sandwiches on Morrison. That's not where it is, though. It's down along the waterfont across from the hoity-toity clarklewis restaurant. Fortunately our friend Vince had been eating dinner at Bunk, and was kind enough to stay put until we arrived to take over his table. My review of the show should be up on Melophobe tomorrowish. Spoiler alert: the show was atrocious. The best part of the evening was when a pair of neuroscientists asked to share our table. They were interesting, and kind enough to share their french fries with us in exchange for the seat. Less awesome: Bunk Bar charging 8 bucks for an under-poured glass of wine. I know the neighborhood is getting gentrified and all, but there are still homeless people sleeping under the adjacent bridge. 8 bucks is not a justifiable price. I switched to beer.
I met Conor and Jonathan after work on Friday for drinks and snacks at Bridgeport. We were joined later by Lorien, who watched Blue Valentine with us. She was nice enough to let me hug on her arm during a particularly difficult scene or two. The night was still young, so the boys and I went to the Hutch for some karaoke. I sang my new standard, "Mother," and tried a Pink song. Jonathan sang "Modern Love," and he and I did a somewhat sloppy duet of Pulp's "Common People." Bobby, who had been playing poker at boys' night, came to collect me at the end of the evening.
It's been a lazy weekend in general. We had dinner at Laughing Planet last night, and spent today bumming around the house. I got an email full of recipes from my mom, including one for frittatas. Drawing inspiration from that, I chopped up some vegetables, threw them in some small baking dishes, poured eggs over that, and sprinkled cheese on top. 30 minutes later, they looked like this:
Ingredients: grape tomatoes, spinach, crimini mushrooms, broccoli, red bell pepper, four eggs, cheddar cheese (for Bobby), swiss cheese (for me). Bake at 425 for 30 minutes, and enjoy delicious dinner. Bobby also made some potato pancake-type things that were super tasty, but I ate mine too fast for photos.
Agenda for this week: The Head and the Heart and Kelli Schaeffer at Doug Fir, possibly Pub Quiz. The topic is words. I would annihilate everybody.
Pictured below is the single greatest moment of my musical life. As Lorien can attest, I held it together pretty well, and we had a nice, brief conversation before I stepped aside to let her autograph other fans' objects. I waited until I was safely in the Doug Fir parking lot before I started shaking and crying and being completely incoherent. Most awesomely awesome concert experience of all time!
Oh yeah, she signed my record too, which was nice because I had been carrying it all night.
I'll post a link to my official review when it's ready. I doubt I'll be getting much sleep tonight.
We woke up at the hotel Monday morning and met Conor for breakfast at a cafe around the corner. Checked out of our room and drove back down to the Seattle Center for our second day of festival enjoyment. With headliners Drake and Mary J. Blige, the Mainstage lineup wasn't our speed, so we bought the cheaper tickets for the day. Conor nabbed a ticket and we immediately went to the comedy booth to obtain our Chris Hardwick/Nerdist Podcast passes. That was scheduled for 2:45, so we had about 90 minutes to dawdle around before that started. We consulted the schedule,
and decided to go see a Bluegrass act called Trampled by Turtles. The grass was wet, but we found a handy solution in the free bandanas being distributed by Bumbershoot volunteers. They were good for sittin' on.
Trampled by Turtles were a lot of fun, though it started to get a bit rainy.
After they played several songs, it was time to head over to the theater for a live recording of the Nerdist podcast. We ended up with second row center seats, and I was in nerdy fangirl heaven. The gentlemen of the Nerdist had numerous hilarious guests, and Mr. Hardwick will be posting the episode in a week or two. I tried to be discreet about taking photos, and this is the best one I got. The two ladies on the left are Garfunkel & Oates. To the right of them is David O'Doherty, then Chris Hardwick, Jonah Ray, Matt Mira, and Doug Benson.
David O'Doherty and Garfunkel & Oates were completely hilarious, as were the gentlemen from the Nerdist. Doug Benson mostly makes stoner humor, so I wasn't that into him, but he had a few decent one-liners. I'll post a link to the podcast episode once it goes live. After the Nerdist recording, we caught a few minutes of the Meat Puppets. I wasn't that into their set, but they were one of Kurt Cobain's major influences.
We hung around for a few minutes, but the rain got the better of us and we decided to look for food. Our choices weren't great, but we found a nice quiet upstairs area to eat. Nearby, there was a life-size chess board, so Bobby and Conor stopped for a round of Wizard's Chess.
Chess is boring, so Tara and I went to find some elephant ears, which are the opposite of boring.
Following our meal, we went back to the Broad Street Stage to catch Japandroids. I think I would have enjoyed them more if I'd been familiar with their music, but they had a good show going.
After a few minutes of Japandroids, we split up for a while. Bobby, Tara, and I went to see Loch Lomond, who are from Portland. Bobby and I hung out with several of the members during PDX Pop Now! a couple of years ago. They were awesome, and we had great seats. It was a pity they were hidden away at the Northwest Stage in the back of the Seattle Center with only about 30 audience members.
I would have liked to stay longer, but we were due to meet back up with Conor to see Jenny & Johnny. On the way to their stage, we discovered Flatstock, which was a huge expo featuring original concert posters from various artists. We had been doing pretty well, cash-wise, until that happened. We went over to Jenny & Johnny, who were our last show of the weekend.
Jenny & Johnny were good, but we left early to go back to Flatstock to make some purchases, while Conor went to stand in line for Patton Oswalt seats. All-told, Bobby and I ended up with five posters. I got a Tara McPherson print, a Liz Phair poster, and an awesome print of a heart in a jar. I am a sucker for things featuring anatomical hearts. Bobby got posters from The Faint and Stereolab. We will have us some stylish walls. Posters in hand, we headed back to the car to begin our long drive back to Portland. Despite a brief detour to the Southcenter H&M store, we made it back home in record time, with no traffic at all. Got home around 11:30 p.m. and crashed out.
Ever since I learned about Bumbershoot, I begged and begged my parents to take me. Most years, though, school had already begun and a vacation was out of the question. I finally went in 2005, the year I moved here, and saw Elvis Costello for a mere 15 bucks. Five years passed before I felt compelled by the lineup again. My experience went a little something like this:
We skipped Saturday because the headliner was Bob Dylan, and I'm not a fan. To steal Bobby's line, dude sounds like he's singing into a shoe. Bobby, Tara, and I arrived in Seattle about an hour behind schedule on Sunday, and checked into our hotel. While we were at the front desk, we spotted a young skinny guy carrying a guitar out to the parking lot. The concierge told us he was indeed in a band, and one that would be performing later in the day. We dropped off our stuff, grabbed some lunch at a nearby Salvadorean restaurant, and caught the bus to the Seattle Center. On the agenda for Sunday: Chris Hardwick (standup), the Bouncing Souls, Hole, and Weezer.
We went to the theater where Chris Hardwick was performing, and they would not let us in. The festival organizers did not bother to clarify that we would need special passes to attend comedy events. These passes were free, but they had to be obtained an hour before the performance. Needless to say, I was pretty hacked off about this, and stomped around mumbling, "well what the hell did I pay 40 dollars for, then?" Surrounded by obnoxious teenagers and feeling crabby, I updated my FB status to read "nothing reinforces misanthropy like an all-ages music festival." This was before we discovered the beer garden, though. Once I arrived at the bottom of a glass of wine, everything was hunky-dory again.
We had a good view of the Bouncing Souls from the beer garden, so we hung around for quite a while. Alas, they did not play Kate is Great, which is the only song of theirs I know.
Clearly, though, we had a good time in the beer garden anyway:
After watching the Bouncing Souls for a while, we decided to track down some food. Bobby and I grabbed Mediterranean samplers, Tara got food from a stand nearby, and the three of us sat at the fountain to enjoy our dinner and watch people dodge the water jets.
Finally, it was time to be herded into the stadium for the mainstage events. Hole was up first,
and I was REALLY excited!
Hole is actually just Courtney Love and some session musicians at this point. Not even Eric Erlandson is in the band anymore. They took the stage (with the guitarist from the hotel!), and I started recording. Forgive the terrible video quality. My camera is about five years old. Fortunately the sound quality is great! After greeting us, Courtney Love started to play a song. She sang, "Slut kiss girl, won't you promise her smack, is she pretty on the inside? Is she pretty from the back!" Right after she finishes this verse, you can hear me going BERSERK and see the camera jumping up and down with me before I have to shut it off and sing along. "Pretty on the Inside" is one of my favorite Hole songs, and they definitely didn't play it when I saw them in 1999.
They played a good mix of old songs from each of their albums, including singles like "Violet," "Miss World," and "Doll Parts" from Live Through This; "Celebrity Skin" and "Malibu" from Celebrity Skin; and "Skinny Little Bitch," "Honey," and "Pacific Coast Highway" from their new album, Nobody's Daughter. The newer stuff is actually pretty decent. I especially enjoyed "Pacific Coast Highway." Then again, I love any thinly-veiled reference to Kurt Cobain.
They also played "Asking for It," as well as a cover of Pearl Jam's "Jeremy." A completely horrible cover of Jeremy, I might add. You can see for yourself in this video. They launched into it after PCH, and did warn us that it was going to be bad.
I grabbed a few more videos, which I'll link to at the end. Please ignore the fact that you can hear me singing along. They played astonishingly well, and Courtney was not her usual trainwreck self. During the breaks between songs, some girl behind me kept yelling, "Kurt killer!" which was wholly unnecessary. Yes, that's the general consensus among Nirvana fans, but $40 is a pretty big chunk of change just to heckle somebody. Hecklers and bad Pearl Jam covers aside, their set ended much too quickly for me.
Once Hole left the stage, people began to pack the stadium, and things got crowded. Tara and I must be magnets for really tall dudes, because some really tall dudes decided to come stand in front of us and act like jerks, severely limiting our view. Finally, Mr. Cuomo and company took the stage.
A couple of songs in, the people around us became pushy, rude, and generally unbearable. Thanks to years of roller derby training, I decided I'd be the hero and get us out of there as fast as humanly possible. I grabbed onto Bobby and Tara's hands, and hip-checked our way to the more spacious area at the back of the floor. Many people were annoyed by this, and expressed their annoyance quite colorfully, but we didn't exactly care. Things were much more pleasant at the back of the crowd. Over the course of their set, they played the three main singles from the Blue Album, plus "My Name is Jonas" (yay).
The band certainly has a ton of energy after performing for all these years. Mr. Cuomo was climbing on the scaffolding, and then somehow got on top of some nearby port-a-potties to sing a few songs. The crowd went wild for this. Rivers Cuomo is even adorable when he's standing on the roof of a toilet, apparently.
They left the stage for a few minutes as some sort of fake encore thing, and returned to play "El Scorcho." Bobby swears he heard me say, "Ugh, finally!" when that happened. I believe him.
The rest of their set was full of their new post-Pinkerton top-40 crap that is universally panned by fans and adored by frat boys. The aforementioned frat boys also seem to enjoy making the =w= symbol with their hands, which is stupid and view-obstructing but makes for some fun pictures.
Near the end of the night, Mr. Cuomo appeared from behind the drum kit wearing a blond wig, and sang a mash-up of MGMT's "Kids" and Lady Gaga's "Poker Face," or, as Bobby called them, the two most overplayed songs of the year. It was still fun though.
They ended their performance with all of the members playing on the drum kit, and we fought our way out of the stadium to go back to our hotel. We caught the tail-end of the Dandy Warhols playing "Bohemian Like You" as we made our way to the bus stop.
After waiting for the bus with 50 other people, we decided to hail a cab back to the hotel instead. The driver was the talkative and slightly crazy type who obviously dropped acid one too many times back in his heyday, but he got us to the hotel quickly. Once there, we met up with Bobby's and my new friend Conor, who is temporarily living at the hotel while on a work assignment. We had some much-needed drinks and quiet time in the hotel bar, and told Conor all about the day's adventures. He decided to join us for day two, so you'll see him turn up in that post and the corresponding photos tomorrow. Additional Hole videos available here and here.
