Oh my gawd…that was fucking great!!!

So I’ve been toying with the idea of abandoning this blog completely, I’m too bus these days and so are all of you. A lot has happened since the last post, I know work two part time jobs and study and still try to have a good time here. In this spirit there have been a lot of concerts lately. We say Jose Gonzales with Zero 7 last week and it was really good. Gonzales’ best songs were covers – heartbeats (the Knife), love will tear us apart and teardrop (Massive), but that may be because as humans we tend to like familiarity. At any rate he played a great set and though we got the tickets for him initially, Zero 7 didn’t disappoint at all. A mix between Air and Stereolab they were bouncing and dancing and fun and I recommend the experience.

The day after that we say Tortoise (the notekillers opened and ‘killed it’ though there is some controversy as to what that mean see luis’ blog). Tortoise was good but too loud and fast at times and somehow the show wasn’t entirely satisfying. Both me and luis silently agreed to leave at the end but before the encore.

And now we come the inspiration of today’s post, last night’s Flaming Lips concert at Hammerstein Ballroom. Now for a little bit of history, I had come close to seeing the Flaming Lips live before, in Boston ca 2000 and then we got there too late for some reason and walked in as they were playing their last song to find Wayne covered in fake blood and a general pandemonium and it was crushing to have missed it, wasn’t it John? Now the Lips are much bigger and well known and everyone has seen footage of their concerts, I even caught them on Letterman the other day, so the initial element of surprise was, I thought, lost.

How wrong can one man be? Very wrong. Following a very good set be Deerhoof the Lips came on with Wayne in a giant bubble that went on top of the audience and we carried him on our hands and then sent him back on stage.



Before the concert Flash Gordon gave everybody a laser pointer to be used later in the show. It was! We used it to point at a mirror that Wayne has holding and he reflected the beams back to us with all the light off and it was magical.



There were unscripted moments too. Part of the opening involved about 100 balloons to be thrown on the audience and then a few songs later we were asked to pop them all.. One suvived and when Wayne noticed that everybody was pointing the lasers on it he stopped talking and asked for all lights to be turned off and we all sat there watching a giant glowing ballon as it jumped around and it was truly beautiful.



There were 2 encores and 2 people that fainted and there was dancing and lights and sooo much confetti and it was fucking ridiculous. Yes, I will say it. It was the best concert of my life.




pictures not from yesterday but it was just like this only unspeakably better