Man About Town
Sights, sounds, and smells from the past couple weeks
I have been going to a lot of concerts. There are a few reasons for this. First, I love going to concerts. That's an easy one. Second, I moved to Los Angeles last month and there are a ridiculous amount of shows happening every night here. On a given Friday, there are a minimum of four shows that I can be talked into attending. Third, I am still looking for work so I'm taking any excuse to get out of the house so my brain doesn't collapse in on itself. This has an alternately collapsing effect though as I am not being as frugal as I should be but I'd rather be low on money than low on mental health. It's a tightrope. Fourth is that my favorite baseball team was so frustrating to watch that I gave up completely on them on August 9th when Cal Raleigh hit a home run directly over my head. Purists will call this being a fair weather fan and that's fine because I think it is important and healthy and smart to prioritize spending your leisure time on things and activities and with people that will bring you happiness and joy and excitement and love. There is no intellectual or moral righteousness in subjecting yourself to voluntary misery. That's a dramatic way to talk about not watching baseball on TV for six weeks but I think this can be applied in a lot of facets of life. I was never someone who called Twitter "le hellsite" or complained about how it made my brain want to explode because I never really felt that way. I joined Twitter in 2014 and have met a lot of incredible people on there, many of which I have met in person and cultivated beautiful relationships with. I am extremely grateful for that. But I do feel that it sucks to click around on there now so I stopped using it cold turkey a couple weeks ago. I kind of miss it but the missing it is the older version of Twitter, not its current form. It's hard to know how much of it is rose colored glasses but the feeling is real all the same. This has not had a profound impact on the way I spend my time or the relationship with my phone but I started using Duolingo to re-learn French and I'm rocking a ten day streak. I don't think I would've done that had I not stopped using Twitter and my evidence for that is that I never used Duolingo or ever even considered trying to learn a second language until I stopped using Twitter. The scientific method wins again. But anyway I was talking about going to concerts.
Three notes in, I was crying. I still don't quite know how to account for this—that night was maybe the fourth time in my life a concert had brought me to tears but none other had ever done so so quickly. It was immediate, so sudden and bewildering it was as if I'd been punched in the nose. I was sitting in the wooden bleachers high up in the Hollywood Bowl. It's the farthest from the stage I've been at a concert but I felt immensely connected—tunnel vision.
Floating Points (alongside Shabaka Hutchings, Dan Snaith, Kieren Hebden, the Los Angeles Studio Orchestra to name a few) was performing Promises, an album he made with jazz legend Pharaoh Sanders who sadly passed away last year. This was the first and supposedly only time the piece will be played live which is a tremendous shame for those who were not able to witness it. I feel incredibly lucky to have been there but will be truly sad if they really never perform Promises again because it was such a unique and special experience. I can't even really call it a concert, it felt like something entirely itself.
I've never understood the idea that seeing the first or an especially rare concert makes it inherently more special. The first show on a tour will likely be one of the worst as they haven't settled into a rhythm or had time to riff out certain things beyond rote rehearsal and there are always technical issues that arise that you simply cannot fully plan for in practice. If given the option, I will always try to catch an artist later in their tour or if they're playing multiple dates in the city I'll catch the second or third. They won't have had to travel that day and will be more comfortable in the venue and more willing to try something new to differentiate themselves from last night's performance. There's a contingent of LCD Soundsystem fans who were mad when they reunited which I find very silly. That they reunited five years after a very dramatic breakup is also silly but who cares. In my opinion in does not dampen the experience of seeing their "final" show at Madison Square Garden because they are never gonna do a show like that again anyway. So I guess I just backed myself into my own corner saying that that is particularly special because it only happened once. Whatever.
I don't really know what else to write about Promises because frankly I don't think my words can do it justice but it was just incredibly cool to see that piece performed live with something like 50 musicians on stage working in harmony to bring this majestic piece to life. It was my first time at the Hollywood Bowl and it is a beautiful venue. I didn't even mind sitting way up in the nosebleachers, it sounded incredible and was cool to see such a large crowd sat in stunned silence throughout the show, save for some scattered drunks who were pretty annoying at times but at least for me were not enough of a distraction to sully the show in the slightest.
I caught King Krule at the Palladium and it was ok. He is more of a home listen for me and the crowd was pretty ass. There was a contingent of children who kept trying to start a mosh pit and nobody else was trying to mosh to King Krule so it ended up being more like a kid at the store begging his mom to buy him a toy. I was pretty shocked at the amount of phones people had out throughout the show. This shouldn’t have been terribly surprising since his fanbase seems to be pretty Gen-Z but every single song there was a swarm of phones that would hover above the heads. This is such a sad way to “watch” live music. You are just watching something that is actually happening in front of your eyes through a five inch screen. You are already on the couch watching yesterday’s Instagram story. Taking a few pictures and maybe one or two videos is fine but the returns diminish really quick. Most of the stuff you are going to capture at a show is going to turn out like shit. Anyway, the Palladium is shockingly big, fairly unnecessarily so, but the architecture is cool and unique so points to them. I don't think I need to see King Krule again.
Two days later I saw Jai Paul, which still feels surreal to say. Those that have known me a while know that I have been obsessed with Jai Paul for nearly ten years, during most of which he was radio silent. I'm not going to repeat the whole lore here but he played his first ever concert at Coachella this year. I caught him weekend two and it was one of the most surreal moments in my life. I really never thought he would perform live so to be in that crowd hearing him rip through his brief discography was really special. This time I saw him at a theater in Los Angeles I'd never been to before called the Mayan. You can probably guess the decor’s theme. The line to get in was outrageously long but I got in a few minutes before his set was scheduled to start. To my surprise, the floor was pretty sparsely populated and I was able to walk right up front and center with maybe four rows of people in front of me. Not as much to my surprise, he and his band did not take the stage for another hour which was pretty annoying and I'm not sure how to account for this but there were still a shitload of people in line when I entered so maybe they were making sure everyone was actually in the venue. On the other hand if it took them an hour past scheduled start time to get everyone in the venue that is a colossal fuckup that I can't really envision even happening so who knows. The show was good. He plays with a four piece band who are decent but not incredible. At times the bass was mixed way too high and some songs lack that je ne sais quoi live. This is understandable as he has never performed live until this year but is still a slight bummer nonetheless.
I went to Portola Festival in San Francisco this past weekend as a credentialed journalist; not a joke. I've written my review of the festival for Merry-Go-Round Magazine which should hopefully be published tomorrow. It was an incredibly cool experience to attend a music festival for free and to my surprise I could go wherever I wanted within the festival. The "media lounge" was a couple of easy-ups with some couches and tables and some coolers with free waters which I took full advantage of. There were four of those slightly classed up porta-potties that are basically airplane bathrooms. On the first day, three of the four had out of order signs on them. During one of my trips to the lounge, a man emerged from one of the out of order ones and the in order one was occupied so I said what the hell and walked into the out of order one. It was certainly out of order. The toilet was quite full and there was a decently sized puddle of piss in the back right corner of the floor but it was localized enough where it wasn't going to touch my shoes so I went ahead and ripped a piss in there. Didn't feel great about it but that was not the worst experience I had in the media lounge bathroom.
The following day around 8pm I took one of the gnarliest number twos of my life in there. The whole thing was shaking due to the bass from the nearby stages and the light was flickering in and out. The smell was pretty apocalyptic (not all my doing). As I walked out a very professional looking journalist was waiting and entered after I left. I probably ruined their day. As I was walking back into the Warehouse stage (which I was entering through an emergency exit throughout the weekend because it was right across from the media lounge and a lot less steps than hoofing it all the way to the back of the warehouse and even though you aren't allowed to do that if you flash your wristband and say "media" to a security guard they'll usually wave you through no questions asked and if they give you any guff you can lie and say you're going in to meet with your photographer and give them a water since they've been in there all day and they'll say ok but I only had to use that line once or twice because most people just don't really give a shit) but anyway as I was approaching the security guard started yelling not to go this way and as I was doing the wrist flash move I tripped on one of the steps and stumble/sprinted up the stairs and nearly ate complete shit but I did not fall. Very professional of me.
You can also go backstage and into the artist compound which is really just a parking lot with a black fence around it full of RV trailers. The inside of the trailers are pretty nice I think, but I've only been in a couple RVs in my life so I don't know where they fall on the RV niceness scale. The drinks in the artist compound range from half price of those on the general festival grounds to free depending on where you source them from so that was a nice little hack for this intrepid reporter.
There was also a lot of good music at the festival as well but that will be in the review.