Sticky Sticky Bang Bang

Part 1

On Sunday night I headed down to the third and final night of the Pitchfork Music Festival.  Most of the acts in the festival did not interest me enough to get me over my dislike of giant crowded festivals, but my friend Jake was in town and had an extra ticket for Sunday.  So I "watched" Bon Iver, which was a good performance, except I could not really see (a tree blocked my view) or hear (Spiritualized was playing on another stage and more or less drowning out Bon Iver).  

I was excited for Cut Copy to play, but they came on about 30 minutes late, and then started playing some weird drunken blues rock that would have fit in Road House.  One would think that as a primer for a huge festival crowd, a new-ish band would play its signature engaging and catchy brand of nouveau synth pop.  But their opening suckiness led to a mass exodus of fans who walked across the street to see the headlining act, Spoon.  I was one of these flee-ers.

Spoon put on an excellent show, and the crowd, though tired from festivalling for three days, was into it.  I was very impressed with Spoon's performance, though this was hardly surprising.  I could hear Cut Copy in the background finally playing their good stuff, but I think they lost some potential fans with their opening round nonsense.

I'm glad I did not go to three days of Pitchfork, but I'm also glad I saw what I did.

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Part 2

As has happened before, I have now been sucked into a terrible, terrible, highly entertaining, terrible television show: I Survived a Japanese Game Show! 

Words cannot express how terrible and stupid this show is, or how fun it is.  I will not yet claim it is addictive, since I do not think this is DVR-worthy yet.  (Grammatical Sidenote: despite what many people from Minnesota [and elsewhere, I guess] may think, the word addicting is not interchangeable with addictive, and would be incorrect in this situation. Addicting would in fact be incorrect in just about every situation I have heard it used.  I'll borrow you my usage books if you'd like.)

If you would like some idea of how awful and awesome this show is, please check out the site at ABC. 

Good god, what has happened to us/me?