After spending a good deal of Saturday running around the SGV running errands (and fitting a few rounds of Mario Kart in), I grabbed some cupcakes, we got some Chinese takeout and headed for the Hollywood Bowl where we saw MGMT (YAY!) Spoon (Awesome!) and BECK (OH YEAH!), with Beck playing a good deal of his set with the LA Philharmonic strings, conducted by David Campbell.
I had almost forgotten about this concert completely, and when I did, I wasn't sure if I was still going to go. I had bought the pair of tickets back in May at some cafe during the show's presale for my roommate's birthday, which was 5 days prior to the show. Even cooler was the fact that I really had no grand scheme to get the best seats (I'm not rolling in that kind of cheese), but wound up in the "Super Seats," which are actual plastic seats with armrests and drink holders instead of benches. Since they were my roommate's tickets, she could have taken anyone she wanted, I'll say that I'm very happy that she took me (about which I'm sure she gave no second thought).
The show was pretty awesome. The lineup was amazing, and I was very excited to see MGMT and Spoon, and I realized last night this was my third time seeing Beck live (#1 was Coachella 2004, #2 was the first Detour Festival 2006). It was an awesome set, kicking things off with "Loser," then launched into the newer stuff from his latest album.
Even cooler was that for this show (including during the Spoon set), I noticed they were using this swirl effect around the layers of the Bowl, which I've never seen before. Beck's set took full advantage of this effect as such:
I'm a big enough nerd that I was very happy to find a free program that can batch resize images, and then at the show I remembered my camera has a continuous shooting mode that shoots 2.5 frames per second. All this paired with my recent discovery that you can make animated images on Photoshop made for a nice little geekfest of making animated GIFs.
As cool as that may look, it doesn't do the night justice, as these sights were accompanied by some awesome sounds, and I'm sure there's some way to capture sound on my camera, but I like to use my camera to take pictures...sorry.
You can see more images from the evening, including more swirly stage animations and cupcakes in my Flickr set
After waking up too early today because I failed to turn off my alarm, I lazed about, did some laundry, and headed for Chavez Ravine to see the Dodgers play the Giants as part of Fan Appreciation Week. Roomie got the tickets for free thanks to BoA, but we didn't partake in the special tickets that offered free drinks to fans. Oh well. Our seats weren't too bad, (Reserved first base side within foul ball territory) and we later learned it was also Deaf Appreciation Day, which was sponsored by some company that had reps as ASL interpreters at various stations where they would accompany the hearing impaired fans when they were ordering at the refreshment stands. I thought that was really cool.
It was a fun game, and a great one, too, with both teams staying even on hits, but remained scoreless up until the 11th inning when the day's theme of bad calls and a few missed balls by the Dodgers gave the Giants a run for them to win the game. What sucked was that the Giants deliberately walked Manny twice. BOO.
You can see more pics from the game here.
...and of course, there's always more room for kitty love:
I haven't been spending much time here for the past week or so (I was sidelined last weekend and happened to be in M-town), and I have to say there is some sense of comfort in being here. Still, I went to bed last night with a blanket over my window to act as some sort of privacy screen, for though It's been some time since the more recent incident inside the house and even further from the first incident, I still felt uncomfortable, since the last time I went to the Hollywood Bowl with my roommate, I was left home alone and in my room to have a peeping Tom make his way atop our basement doors to peek into my room. Not to say that I expect such a thing to happen every time we go, but something felt unsettling to me, and I felt like I needed to do that.
Either way, this weekend has been really fun and I'm so glad I had this time here and with my roommate and with the cats. It's truly been a very long time since we've done anything like this, and it's something that I miss that I wasn't fully aware of until now.
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