I promised you three months ago, dear reader, that I would check in with you after Coachella and let you know whether the experience merited another go-round in 2009. I am pleased to report that yes, in fact, it definitely does; the lame hipster greaseball who crashed at our partyhouse and the lack of artist parking at the festival notwithstanding.I arrived at the house I’d rented for our group at about 3:00 PM on Thursday afternoon, and the party didn’t end until I locked up and headed out 96 hours later. Even scouring the house on Monday to clean out the residue of four days of revelry held its own bit of charm.
I did NOT see Prince. Call me a pop-culture philistine (wouldn’t that be an anti-philistine?) but I have NEVER understood his appeal. He’s an effeminate weirdo with a song called “Pussy Control”. Big fucking deal.
No, like a good Mary, I spent Saturday evening from 9:00 AM to close in the Sahara tent, dancing to Sasha & Digweed and Above & Beyond. Front and center.
I saw Datarock from backstage, which was a great, great show.
Fatboy Slim met expectations.
Tegan and Sara, is abrasive lesbian music; if I’d had the energy to stand up, I would have walked away.
Somebody should shoot M.I.A.
Kraftwerk was a great random find, as were Love & Rockets and Adam Freeland. And I finally understand the appeal of Death Cab for Cutie.
I wish I’d had the energy to stay for Justice, but after a slightly disappointing performance from Chromeo, the only energy I had left on Sunday night was to pause on my walk out of the festival grounds with Leah and listen to Roger Waters perform “Comfortably Numb”. Perfect way to end an awesome weekend.
The “art” on display was stupid, as always; re-hashes from last year’s Burning Man. But one side attraction out of which I got a lot of mileage was the beer garden next to the main stage. Heineken sponsored an air-conditioned, double-dome tent right in the center of it. In the larger dome was a house DJ and people dancing around a projector in the center that shamelessly flashed Heineken-logo’d eye candy across the ceiling. And in the smaller dome were bartenders serving Heineken at 33 degrees. It was an amazing reprieve from the midday heat. I don’t even like Heineken, and I bought two.
Part of what made Coachella so much fun this year (moreso than the first couple of years I went) was that the fun I had was completely on my terms. I woke up every morning to a cigarette and a beer, and then I went to the gym. I came back, took a long shower, ate breakfast, and hung out by the pool with a few more drinks. We rolled in to the festival around 3:00 or 4:00 PM. I saw all the bands I wanted to see (except Justice, the Verve, and Portishead; grrrrrr), and I went to bed when I wanted to; pretty much no later than 3:00 AM.
There was no obnoxious party-until-dawn, BAC-never-below-0.12 current in the house this year. Everybody was calm, relaxed, and happy.
Perhaps we’re all getting more comfortable admitting to ourselves that partying like a rockstar has ill effects that aren’t featured in Aerosmith videos. Or maybe we’re just all feeling our age.
Maybe that’s the same thing.
_________________________________________
Enough navel-gazing.
If you studied the Sunday lineup closely, you saw that Sean Penn was scheduled for fifteen minutes on the main stage. Rumors were flying over what he was doing there. My favorite was that he was going to be introducing Eddie Vedder.
Who comes up with this crap? The same guy who says every year that Röyksopp is going to be added last-minute?
As a Republican, I knew better. “It’s an election year, and we’re in the middle of a throng of big hearts with small heads; he’s going to lecture us for 15 minutes to vote for Barack Obama.”
Well, that wasn’t quite correct, though toward the middle of his inebriated rambling, he cursed all three candidates for supporting “this war” but deftly slipped in a comment that only one of them could give us “hope” for the future.
Slick one, Sean. How will the masses ever break your cryptic cipher?
No, Sean Penn’s repertoire was even more amusing than lame political overtures for empty-headed liberals. It was a “call to volunteerism” for today’s youth.
Sounds innocuous, right? Keep reading.
“There’s a bus,” he slurred (after hurling a Timothy Leary-esque F-bomb at older generations, for “not caring enough” or “not doing enough” or some stock hippy complaint), “powered by clean bio-diesel leaving Monday afternoon at 1:00 PM. We need people who can volunteer for a week to go and get their hands dirty. It’s called the Dirty Hands Campaign, and we know that some of you have jobs or families, but if you can come with us, we need your help.”
Oh God, this is rich. This is just too good.
I’m having flashbacks to the scene from Forrest Gump where Jenny flashes Forrest the peace sign from the back of the bus as it pulls away from Washington D.C.
“Come on, everybody; let’s follow messiah Penn on his bio-bus! We’re gonna make a difference!!”
Leah and I laughed for over an hour back at the house that night before distracting ourselves with some Mickey Avalon and finally falling asleep.
I have a word of advice to the aimless drifters who volunteered for the Dirty Hands Campaign because they “wanted to be a part of something bigger than themselves”: Get a job. With an actual corporation. I hear they get pretty big these days.
And I have a word of advice to the organizers of the Dirty Hands Campaign: Dream though you may, simple human nature dictates the caliber of people you get when you ask them to drop their lives for a week on the spur of the moment and get on a bus. You get the people whose time is immediately available because they have nothing better planned.
God, I can just imagine the long-haired, dope-smoking, maggot-infested peace pansies that will be on that bus. The men in hemp pants and sweaters, with blond dreadlocks piled on their heads in which they hide their doobies. The portly, pungent, hippy-chic pie wagon females. You know the ones I’m talking about. The awkward women’s studies major from your college who had a totally normal middle-class upbringing but proclaimed herself a Wiccan and shunned trimming her armpits.
There are guaranteed to be at least 6 bottom-shelf, pawn-shop-grade guitars on this bus; none of them in tune and half of them missing at least one string, and all of them strumming out sad, botched versions of The Youngbloods’ “Get Together”.
No matter; the guitars will barely be audible over the choking stench of marijuana, patchouli, and body odor.
I picture the driver overdosing on shrooms after the bus breaks down somewhere in New Mexico. I see Sean Penn calling in a helicopter to fly himself out, and the hippies abandoned along a lonely stretch of old Route 66, unraveling their scratchy hemp attire to reclaim enough yarn to weave a new radiator hose.
Where are they even going? Their messiah didn’t say.
If they really wanted to save fuel, they could just get on the bus and not drive anywhere. And stay there in the desert forever.
“Hey hippy, wanna really make a difference? Go live on a parked bus and stop hassling the productive masses.”
God, I need to stop thinking about this. I think of something new every few minutes, and it just gets funnier and funnier.
As it happens, I actually know one of the aimless drifters: my buddy Levi.
I don’t know what got into him. My best guess is that it’s his new girlfriend, Valerie. After moving in with her, he’s started working at a “green” film production company, quit eating meat after seeing the PETA videos on YouTube, and now he and Val are off on a meandering non-mission to save the world with Sean Penn.
I’ve seen straight men emasculate and humiliate themselves to get laid before, but this is ridiculous. This is so far beyond lying to a stupid blonde at a college bar that you spent a year in the Peace Corps, marched in the last NARAL event, and that you love cats.
Every so often I’ll watch the mating rituals of heterosexuals, and I’m always reminded that there are indeed more difficult paths than being a gay Republican.
Levi: you have dedication, sir.
Good luck, buddy. If the creepy cult thing doesn’t work out for you, you have my phone number. I’ll pick you up in 14 months with a bag of In-N-Out and a box of Quick-Flush at the Scientology center.
0 comments:
Post a Comment