Sri Lanka.

If nothing else, the ads are going to bea source of constant amusement for me, as I have lately seen one advertising rental cars in Sri Lanka. No doubt this is Alex's fault, but I am only worsening the problem by mentioning Sri Lanka again. Sri Lanka! Sri Lanka!

Er, anyway... I forgot to mention Steven Malkmus in my Pitchfork recap, which was foolish, becuase I really enjoyed his set. Dude can play the guitar, and puts that to good use. I may have to look into getting some Pavement and such.

And as I mentioned, there was a free Decemberists concert in Millenium Park. I went with some UChicago folks and, not surprisingly, ran into more of them during and after the show, including Casey, who ventured up from FermiLab. They played with the Grant Park Orchestra, which put an interesting twist on some of the songs, though they seemed to have a little trouble staying completely in sync at times. Stuff like "The Infanta" gets a nice kick from having an orchestra behind it though. They played a decent mix, mostly stuff from Picaresque and The Crane Wife though.

During the main show, there was an unfortunately high contingent of family picnickers in the lawn area where we were sitting/standing. They were moderately distracting, as the show was a little on the quiet side, but I wasn't about to try shushing a thousand people. They left for the encore, and the more enthusiatic part of the crowd surged forward appropriately, including several breaks through the temporary fence separating the lawn from the seating area.

Colin Meloy opened the encore by singing the first verse of The Smiths' "Ask" a capella (up to "Ask me I won't say no. How could I?"); I was geeked, but not as much as if they had proceeded to cover the song fully. But it was still a solid encore, concluding with the ever entertaining prodcution of "A Mariner's Revenge Song". We were all swallowed by a whale again.

And then it rained. A lot. About five minutes after the concert. Fortunately, conglomerated set of 8 or so people we were by then managed to take shelter in a Chipotle (where most people got food) and a Subway (where I got food, and everyone else had to sit because there was no room in the Chipotle). We managed to get fairly soaked just traveling the 40 feet between the two nonetheless. Good times.

So then I got bored and signed up for Google AdSense. There's one way down at the bottom of the sidebar. So far it seems to think we talk about writing and baseball a lot... Touche, Google, touche. I'm also throwing them onto the ScavHunt website I'm working on, as that has a more legitimate fund-raising purpose. Of course, that page isn't visible from outside my apartment right now, so it's not going to garner a lot of views aside from me reloading every time I change the code.

Making my computer behave like a webserver was itself somewhat tedious, as it required three programs to be installed, working, and sufficiently aware of each other. Nonetheless, I am now WAMPed up (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP). I got an old computer free from the library a while back that I intend to use as a real server... once it has a hard drive.

You know what's more interesting than that: PITCHFORK. The fest, not the website, but they're alright too, what with the sponsoring and all. There were bands aplenty, and it was damn good to see people again, even if I couldn't go to Marty's 21st (lousy bars, with their rules and restrictions). I managed to make all three days after scoring a cheap ticket to Friday on E-Bay. Some highlights:

Friday:
-Sonic Youth: I was basically unfamiliar with all of Friday's acts except by reputation. Now I need to get Daydream Nation. Such wonderful, glorious use and misuse of guitars. On that note:

-"Hey bud, chill out, Youth is playing!" - the dude next to me misidentifying a short-haired girl sitting in a chair next to the sound booth (a volunteer, I think), while everyone else was standing. Lead up: "Hey, what's wring with that guy? Doesn't he know Youth is coming up?" ... Follow through: "Hey, that guy you called 'bud' is actually a really hot chick!" He offered to let me punch him in the face if he was being too much of a jackass.

Saturday:
-Came in during Califone, who sounded pretty good from mostly afar.

-Did the side stage thing for Fujiya & Miyagi and Professor Murder, which turned out well. Professor Murder especially. Energetic as all hell, if hell were a dance party.

-Yoko Ono turns out to be not my thing. But at least I got a ton of keychain lights. i ii iii, as they say. She has very good stage presence, so I think I was more entertained by the between-songs... and that wacky intro video about spreading love. "Don't Worry Kyoko" was kind of catchy actually, but in the end I just couldn't take the wailing and left early. This would not stop me from using the phrase "Oh, Yoko" repeatedly.

Sunday (Sunday Sunday):
-Deerhunter: Strange. Noisy. Lots of fun. Have an absurdly gangly front man who wore a glove with tiny figurines attached to it on strings. They mostly didn't do lyrics, at least, not intelligibly, but a lot of heavily processed looping of sighs and moans and things. Nonetheless compelling.

-The "sit on the grass near the poster show" strategy saved everyone a lot of sunstroke, and was surprisingly good for hearing things. We did this through the Ponys ("garage rocking their way into our hearts"), Menomena (Menomen-meh. maybe if I were paying attention), and The Sea and Cake (sounded pretty good).

-Jamie Lidell had one song I really liked and gets points for wearing a strange hat made of foil streamers.

-Of Montreal may have outdone the Flaming Lips for the strangest things I have seen at a concert. I wasn't blown away by the songs they chose, but they have a hell of a stage act. Marinara, fed to a five-headed golden blob monster. Balloons full of glitter held on a 20-foot pole, popped by another 20 foot pole. Darth Vader. I'm really not sure what it all meant.

-The New Pornographers were my headliner. Though a bit understaffed, they were loud and played a bunch of songs I like well, and that's really all I ask. Also, I find their keyboardist/Neko's backup strangely attractive. But mostly it was just everything I needed to hear at the end of a festival. They rocked. Also, the interview in this article gets really funny.

-I stuck around for De La Soul and farewells. De La Soul were good, but mostly not my genre.

All in all, though, another excellent summer fest thingy. And then there was a free Decemberists concert, just like that.