dalla$ + currently listening

Time to clear the stable of bloggable nonsense so I can write some stuff that's actually substantive here in a few weeks. I've got two new pieces to write about (one of which is a really interesting collaboration with the Blanton Art Museum) and I need to get this off my chest: I saw Ke$ha in Dallas on Super Bowl weekend. Holy shit, it was awesome. Her shirt, as you can see, appears to say: "I ate the worm."

A friend secured us some free VIP tickets for a huge private-ish party that Bud Light put on the day before the Super Bowl. I usually hate hanging out with douchey, rich people (someone told me that tickets were going for $400) but since we got ours for free and the acts were going to be crazy good, we drove the three hours up to Dallas-Fort Worth.

The concert featured Pitbull (who I had never seen but really enjoyed), Ke$ha (res ipsa loquitur) and Nelly (who I had also never seen) and being surrounded by drunken people gyrating to the insane concert that they put on was probably the second funnest part next to the ridiculous spectacle on stage (she played a theremin at one point...a theremin!). Here's a picture from the concert I pulled off the interwebs that shows her playing a guitar shaped like an assault rifle. See that cannon-looking thing on top of it? I'll bet that's a flamethrower for arena shows.

The show was held in downtown Dallas inside a massive tent in the parking lot for the Aloft Hotel which had been bought out by Anhesuer-Busch and re-christened The Bud Light Hotel. You can guess what they served there but, aside from swilling shitty beer, I had what amounts to the most expensive ($14), smallest (tiny plastic cup) and best Long Island Iced Tea of my life (only top shelf booze for a Ke$ha concert, my friends).

So, I went to a Ke$ha concert and had a blast. I sang my voice ragged and danced like it was the end of the world (as is my wont) before heading back to graduate studies and Baroque counterpoint. It was a great distraction. There was even this old dude in a hilarious (but, sadly, not ironic) red sequined shirt walking around that totally made the paper the next day. That's the closest I'll probably ever get to going to the actual Super Bowl and probably the most exclusive party I'll ever attend. It was pretty damn epic.

In other news, I just got Jónsi's new DVD, go live. It's a recording of his go tour's stop in London and it's the same show I saw in Minneapolis last May and Austin last November. There are some interpolations of rehearsal footage that lend to a really interesting--if occasional--documentary feel but the live album that comes with it is totally worth it for no other reason than that you get a few tracks that weren't on the studio version of go. "New Piano Song" is way more interesting than it's title would suggest and "Stars In Still Water" is an absolutely perfect song; it could be performed at a campfire or in an amphitheater. Hearing go rendered live in its entirety is interesting enough...but those two songs alone are worth the price of admission.