1) People with lawnchairs will inevitably come late and squeeze into the space right in front of you on the lawn. They will be very tall and wearing even taller hats. These people are douchey and you should not feel bad about loudly disparaging their character and/or lineage. Feel free to call them “Gigantors” and throw Mike and Ikes at the backs of their heads.
2) The men’s room never has a line. The women’s room always has a serpentine queue of poor ladies hopping on their toes. This will eventually result in a revolt where one woman decides she can’t wait, and goes into the men’s room. This act of urinary liberation will spread through the line, and soon the men’s room will become unisex, like Ally McBeal’s, or whatever.
3) I hope the ladies enjoyed the contact high from the voluminous amounts of marijuana being smoked in the stalls. I suppose I should have realized that there is probably some crossover between the Dave Matthews/Jack Johnson crowd and R.E.M. fans, despite the fact that DM and JJ make me want to smash windows with my head, like some crazy lady in The Happening.
4) Don’t go see The Happening. I know this is not related, but I’m serious. If you do go see The Happening, take your sarcastic robot buddies and enjoy the worst performances of Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel’s careers.
5) The Mann Music Center expects you to pay $8 for a Miller Lite, rather than paying you that much to take that swill off their hands. Oh, and you might expect a nine dollar “cheesesteak basket” to come with fries, or perhaps a basket. You would be mistaken.
6) The National was great. Pitchfork loves them, which makes me a little wary, and the singer dances pretty spastically (like the guy from Midnight Oil), but they have a really appealing variety of songs, and I would have liked them to play a bit more.
7) Modest Mouse has two drummers (awesome!) and they use a glockenspiel on one song (double awesome!!). They have a lot of energy, and I like most of their older albums, but their live sound is awfully consistent from one song to the next, and 45 minutes is sort of a long time to hear a bunch of songs with the same tempo and rhythms.
8 ) People loooove The One I Love. I don’t really get it myself. It’s a nasty little, repetitious song, with a classic f.u. ending. I don’t dislike it or anything, but it’s certainly not the R.E.M. song that’s going to make me scream at the top of my lungs and demand to have Michael Stipe’s babies. (That would be Electrolite, which they played too…)
9) Eddie Vedder sang Begin the Begin during R.E.M.’s encore. I don’t dig Eddie that much, but it was still pretty cool, and no one threw batteries at him or anything. Nice job, Philly!
10) Johnny Marr from The Smiths played along with the band on Fall on Me, which is one of Michael Stipe’s and my favorite songs.
11) The night ended with Man on the Moon, a song I used to love, but have burnt out on over the years. But hearing it tonight, with the (maybe?) full moon rising overhead and a nice chill in the air for a June night, all seemed right in the world. Hey baby. Are you having fun?
1. If you do this, you must sing the theme song to Gigantor.
2. When it’s only port-a-potties/port-o-lets/port-a-johns/honey buckets, everybody suffers.
3. Are you sure it wasn’t the MM fans doing the smoking? Also, I have this vague feeling that all REM fans are either late-stage cancer victims or have glaucoma. It’s just a feeling.
4. I read that review that gives all the spoilers. Wow. It’s like he feels he has to have some kind of weird setup and a “twisty” ending or nobody will go see the movie. Why doesn’t he just do family dramas for Lifetime like we all know he wants to?
5. Perhaps the basket refers to the part of the cow the cheesesteak was made from.
6. Does this mean I have to go listen to The National now? I mean, really, ’cause I will. But I’d like not to if I can avoid it.
7. If you look carefully when Modest Mouse plays, you can see Bob Weir standing at the back of the stage looking smug.
8. Yeah, I don’t get that one either. But then, that applies to almost every REM song. Yeah, I spelled it without the periods; whatchoo gonna do?
9. Eddie Vedder is still alive?
10. I actually do kind of like Fall On Me.
11. I remember you liking that dumb stupid song from that dumb stupid Jim Carrey movie. God. BUT, even I may agree that songs we are tired of still sometimes go down beautifully like an ice cold Miller Lite on a stifling hot day.
Comment by JB — June 19, 2008 @ 11:02 am |
2) The term “honey buckets” makes me want to hurl.
3) There were a lot of families there for R.E.M. I guess they’ve officially become classic rock. I look forward to when Stipe leaves the band and Buck and Mills play the Allentown Fairgrounds with a singer half their age that they found on MySpace.
6) You should at least give them a listen. This could be a case of a band I like that you aren’t too keen on (like Grandaddy).
9) Yes he is. But does he deserve to be? Is that the question? And if so, who answers? Who answers?
11) It was a good song (actually I’d argue one of the highlights of the 90s) before being co-opted for the Jim Carrey movie. That association only tarnished it a little. Mostly it just got overplayed by me and then by the radio. It’s still a good song.
Comment by razzzedbywolves — June 19, 2008 @ 12:42 pm |
I think that Man on the Moon was a good closing song, although I think they should’ve closed with Shiny Happy People! Give people what they want!
Comment by Sam — June 27, 2008 @ 1:33 pm |