Outside Lands, Part 2

My second day at the Outside Lands festival (a couple weeks ago now), was a better experience than the first. I was hanging out with Scott (who kindly gave me his extra ticket) and his friends, without a big agenda about what to see, and we smoked some weed and wandered around a lot. The day ended with Wilco, my Favorite Band, and it was a decent, if uninspiring, set.

But that day I also saw what must have been the best act of the festival, the Mexican duo, Rodrigo y Gabriela. I think it was the sickest guitar-playing I have ever seen. They had two giant screens so we could watch them play. Scott told me later every time he looked over my mouth was just hanging wide open. Slack-jawed, they call it. Here's one of their videos:



It was a beautiful day, the throngs were tolerable and the music was great. Also, the sound did not go out much, from what I recall.

Outside Lands

This weekend is the giant Outside Lands music festival in Golden Gate Park. Kim and I went to the first night last night, primarily to see Radiohead. I have not gone to too many festival shows and I doubt I will go to too many in the future. It's a total clusterfuck and just not worth it.

I didn't mind how difficult it was to actually get there - we took the BART, tried to get a cab from downtown, gave up, went to the Muni, gave up, took the Muni back to Powell and looked for a cab again. We eventually found one.

Inside the park, it was cool until we tried to go see Beck. Kim and I got in separate lines for beer and food and an hour later had beer and food. It was just stupid. I'm actually going back on Sunday to see Wilco; I'm going to try to smuggle in some beer because fuck the organizers and their fucking bullshit. I basically paid $160 bucks so Kim and I could stand in line for food and beer and then hear Radiohead from half a mile away. Plus my sciatica was about as bad as it's been in six months.

There was bike parking:
Some delicious oysters:
Looking this way from the beer line, I thought I heard some music that might have been being played by Beck:Looking the other way, you just get the sense that humans are really stupid creatures. Why would any intelligent creature want to be doing this?
Emanating from that reddish and greenish area, below, were the sounds of the Greatest Band on Earth. Well, it wasn't all bad.