wow. wow wow wow. fucking WOW. what an incredible weekend. i managed to see tons of music, including many acts i had never seen before, and remain relatively sunburn free during out trip to FL. we went for two reasons, mainly: the flaming lips and wilco. neither disappointed. wayne coyne is just so earnest, so enthusiastic and just genuinely concerned with making sure that everyone participates and has a good time. he was out there before the show started himself, making sure everything was just so. they have this incerdible stage show that's part willy wonka's chocolate factory, part circus, part tent revival. he started by walking across the crowd in the
space bubble, and he actually went right over our heads. i was thisclose to wayne coyne and we were only separated by the thinnest layer of plastic. he had this rainbow gun that shot clouds of colored streamers that just floated in the air, and he threw handful after handful of
shiny confetti into the air. he had this
weird nun hand puppet and then these
giant hulk-like fists. and the
animal dancers were cool too--that zebra kept it real, man! never took the head off once. no fake blood, but that was okay. i heard all the songs i was looking for and then some: race for the prize, yoshimi, do you realize, bohemian rhapsody, and a sick cover of war pigs to close it out. listen to me, i sound like a goddam hippie bro and i don't even care.
the
brazilian girls was a new act for me. they are not brazilian and only one is a girl, but they rocked my socks. the lead singer chick sings in several languages and wore what appeared from the audience to be some kind of squirrel costume. i can't confirm that though as something was wrong with my eyes that day, if you know what i mean. she sang this song called "pussy" whose refrain is "pussypussypussy marijuana" and when she did, she took a joint and lighter from the crowd and smoked it, passing it to all the other band members as well.
we saw wilco, which was every bit as lovely and amazing as you could imagine. we caught a couple of keller williams songs, a meters tune, a couple clap your hands say yeah songs (notably a great cover of neil young's "helpless," funny cause the lead singer of CYHSY has a similarly owen meany sounding voice), some lyrics born (but not the song i wanted to hear where he says bragadocious), and we closed out with the secret machines who i really dug but again, that might have been the medicine talking. we missed the two headliners, and i'm not sorry. i have seen both ben harper and the black crowes before and my body was telling me it was time to get back to the campsite. our headliners were wilco and the lips anyway.
we had incredible luck, more then we deserved really, the whole vacay. some examples: we got to FL and were totally exhausted. we arrived at about 1am after having been travelling since 3:30 that afternoon. there was a huge line at the car rental place and i was getting my stuff out when i realized that i couldn't find my license. i panicked, thinking for sure that i had left it in the ticket envelope in the pocket of the seat in front of me on the plane. yeah, and it would have been thrown away and that plane would have been long gone if that were the case. not only would there have been no rental car, but there would have been no hotel later in the trip and no plane ride home without some kind of ridiculous intervention involving overnighting my passport or something! i sprinted back toward the terminal, but stopped first to dump the contents of my purse on the ground. the last thing to fall out? my goddam ID. so then i sweated it out in line at the rental car place...we needed exactly $100 for the deposit and that was, to the penny, what we had available on the credit card. it went through. THEN, we got to the park and stopped at a ghetto ass convenience store on the way to buy beer. i left my purse (also known as EVERYTHING--tickets, $400 cash, that goddam ID, all the credit cards, my inhalers, fucking everything) on the counter and went on my merry way. we went to the park and started setting up. they told us to move when we got halfway done, and we begrudgingly did. after we finished, walter asked me about something that was in my purse, and we freaked when we realized that it was gone. we are hysterical and fly back to the convenience store. there are police cars in the parking lot with lights on, and i'n thinking jesus christ this guy just got robbed and they got my purse. we run to the doors, which are locked. we bang on the doors and no one comes. finally, the million year old cuban man reappears behind the counter and we pantomime "purse" at him. he looks at us quizzically, then the light bulb goes off. he has my purse, and is careful to show us that all the money is still there. walter breaks him off a $10 spot, which is all we can afford but well worth it.
in the morning, we discover that by happenstance (by the time we set up, almost everyone was sleeping so we weren't sure about our neighbors) that we set up between two camps of really cool old hippies who feed us and keep us in good vibes all weekend. they took some amazing pix (i literally took only one photo and it was of the inside of the tent--like i said, something was wrong with my eyes), including some of us that i will post soon.
we stayed an extra night and went to a hotel on the beach. the ocean was literally right outside our door. we had a yummy thai noodle lunch (there were all these sushi/thai places), followed by an amazing dinner of mussels fra diavolo, oysters rocekfeller, fresh blackened wahoo, shrimp and scallops, and a lovely chardonnay. there were so many opportunities for the shit to go down, when we could have just been totally fucked, but we managed to prevail.
i have spent the time since we've been back mostly laying about recovering. that eye problem of mine really took a toll and it was hard to get off the couch for a few days. but now i've done laundry and had a few meals and it's time to get down to business. i just wanted to record as much of this as i could recall while it was still fresh. now, my transitional justice paper is not going to write itself, so it's time to get going.
