I took Friday off to go to All Points West, a 3 day music and arts festival at Liberty State park. The entire thing was a huge money sink that I was pretty "meh" about. The ferry from lower Manhattan to the park (round trip) was $20 in advance, $25 leading up to the show, and a whooping $30 if you buy if before you get on the ferry. Ray and I paid $25. That's crimal. But not as crimal as the price of bottled water and beer...
The ferry ride was nice. The drop off was not so much. It was like a fucking 10-15 minute walk from the ferry to the entrance of the festival. The worst part is that you can see the entrance the entire time and know exactly how far it was - very fucking far as far as what I was expecting. To top it off, K-Rock put up posters on the railing by the water the ENTIRE way to the entrance, like literally every feet there was another K-Rock poster. What a fucking huge waste of money and resources. By the time we got halfway to the entrance, it seemed like whoever had the awful job of putting them up had given up and threw away the rest of the signs in the garbage. Yes there were entire stacks of them in the garbage where they stopped putting them on the railing.
The big headliner was Radiohead. New Pornographers, Mates of State, Andrew Bird, and The Go Team! also played, plus some others I can't remember on Friday. I went with Ray because he had an extra ticket. It belonged to Dapo but he couldn't go because he had to work. To be honest I didn't even want to go. No, I'm not that into Radiohead.
We speculated how much beer would cost, and when I found out that bottled water was FOUR U.S. DOLLARS I pretty much figured out we were in for some ass-rapage on beer prices. It was $7 for a 16oz cup of Budweiser or Bud Light or $9 for a cup of Stella or Red Hook. They also only allowed you the
privlage to buy up to 5 cups of beer a day. They enforced this by making you wear a giant bright neon green wristband that had 5 tabs. Every time you bought a beer, they would take a tab off of it. They also marked everyone's hands with a purple marker with ink that I can still see on my hand a full 36 hours after it was first applied on me. You could also drink in the two designated beer serving areas that had an entrance, exits and "emergency exits", which had a guy standing in front of with 2 barricades bottle-necking the exit of. The entire thing was silly if you asked me, and not very prone to drunken fun.
One thing I did discover was that Neko Case doesn't do any of the singing for the New Pornographers (?) It was some brunette woman named Kathryn Calder. That is news to me. So why is Niko Case so famous for being in the New Pornographers if she only played violin? Because she's hot? I'm so confused.
[
2 minutes of google searching later] Ok, so I just found some images of Neko Case singing for the New Pornographers. This really doesn't make any sense.
[
Ok, back to APW]
I didn't take any photos because they didn't allow "professional" cameras unless you had a press pass. Go to brooklyn vegan if you want to see photos. I didn't even bring my iPhone because I didn't want the chance of it getting stolen if anything crazy happend. So I switched back to my old phone and in the process lost a number of someone I wanted to meet up with at the show.
Sometime during the New Pornogrpahers set, Ray and I ate some oatmeal cookies he had baked. It didn't really do anything for me for a while. We went to get food after the set and he was like, "you seriously don't feel anything?". I said, "no!" "I'm gone", Ray replied. Half and hour later we're sitting in the beer area because he wanted to get more beer. He said something to me so I started to turn my head towards him. Like smacking a brick wall, it hits me and I'm like "Ooooooooh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit". I don't know why I have such a high tolerance. I really shouldn't because I don't 'eat cookies' like ever. Then a few minutes later, another wave hits me. And I got really paranoid.
Earlier in the day, we went inside this smoker's cabana to avoid the rain. Oddly enough, no one inside was smoking, jus hanging out. They had a big canvas wall with crayola makers laying around that you could doodle. Ray and I were a bit drunk at that point off of 2 $7 dollar Buds (hey, we were dehydrated). So I thought it would be really funny to draw
The L Magazine logo on the thing. Well, that wasn't so funny so I decided to write "Mike Conklin hates All Points West" under it. That was hilarious at the time - until I was sitting and paranoid in the beer garden before the Radiohead set. I started to play out all these senarios in my head, like what if some organizers saw that and actually got pissed and called us and then the L would have a mini PR nightmare and I would get fired for it. Then I figured the smoking room people would probably just throw it away after (I hope).
As I said, I'm not that into Radiohead, which means I don't know a lot of their music. That didn't really stop me from enjoying the show though. They put on a pretty fucking good live show. The stage show was pretty amazing. I would have probably enjoyed it more if I knew the music. But this show hasn't really made me want to go looking for their music either. Oh well, maybe I'll download
In Rainbows.
