activities of daily living

For the second time in less than a week, I've been blown away by Sigur Rós. If I had to pick a favorite, I'd go with the Saturday show at Coachella. It was shorter, but watching outside at sunset in the desert, surrounded by mountains and palm trees, standing¹ in a crowd of (mostly) appreciative fans, with live video of the band members on gigantic video screens was near perfect.

Not that there was anything wrong with tonight's show at Benaroya. The longer set, amazingly effective yet primitive video and light installations, the dreamy spinning spotlights, and brilliant acoustics combined for an all kinds of beautiful performance. And the part where the band comes out to clap for the audience? swoon.

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1. A much more engaging way to enjoy live music, I think.

It's been a few months since I last visited Pioneer Square on art walk night. Tonight, I started off by thinking that catching a bus would expedite my journey from work. Instead, it took me across the West Seattle Bridge before I had a chance to escape. I was lucky that my wait below the bridge for a downtown-bound bus was only a few minutes, but it turned out to be twenty minutes of bus riding for a net of six blocks travel.

I started at the Tashiro Kaplan building and soon met up with Caroline and Samantha. There we saw folk art made of corrugated cardboard, drawings of seventeenth century notables juxtaposed with wild dogs, interesting pin-based concepts for wall decorations, photo montages, and odd statues made of things like spines + bird parts + knitting + water from a puddle near the Tate Modern. We also went to the Bugs, Beer, & Art benefit. They were short of beer when we got there, but there were invertebrates aplenty. All were dead, most in cases, reminding me of Nick and his entomology days. Also present were "dancers" making horrible sounds and movements, followed by a "performance artist" [?], which might have been bug-inspired.

We finished the evening at the Western Building [this is where the first sentence of the post becomes relevant]. After visiting an exhibit/party at Snowboard Connection, we headed into the lofts. Almost every room had been reconfigured, from subtle to dramatic changes in layout. Like a dream where a setting is vaguely familiar but fundamentally incorrect, the reconstruction was very unsettling. The oddness of the physical changes were accentuated by characters like a guy in a full length mandress/mumu outfit.

With all of that cognitive dissonance and disorientation, none of us were up for the Capitol Hill side of the art walk with its testicle-based exhibits; so we called it a night.

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p.s. the winners of the "best snacks" contest were Punch for large chunks of nice cheese with insect-themed crackers and one a different T-K gallery with peppermint-patty style chocolates and weird new Butterfinger crisps. Non-winner was the Western Building space with Four Cheese [product] pasta sauce as an accompaniment to bread and pretzels.