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Trapped In VIP: Coachella 2008 by Susannah Mills
(I'm feeling invisible sunburn)
Oh the perils of typing directly into the internet. What may have definitely been wittier than this rewrite was lost to Firefox, who blazed off with the unexpected quit. Killer. Take two.
The desert in California (make that everywhere) is very hot. So hot that no matter how many waters you drink or Excedrines you bum from strangers you will find a headache lurking at some point in the day. I got back earlier tonight after driving with the sun setting in my left eyeball, I think, because that’s where the pain lived tonight. It’s gone with the desert heat and the respite is like a new lease on life.
Other than sun induced headaches Coachella is this ginormous music festival in Indio, California that lasts a few days if you want it to, for me it went for a coupla days. Started out of my place Friday night with my bff Eric, didn’t quite hit the desert so much as Venice Beach. We woke up and left early Saturday instead (very much a yay, I’m serious the desert if very hot).
First stop was the house of a friend of mine who works in production/advertising. If you don’t camp you rent sick houses or stay at one of two rock and roll hotels (more on that later). We jumped into the pool immediately, ate some grapes, talked to my friends and left for the venue.
Because some parts of the weekend were perfect our connection for VIP passes happened to be four cars down from us in the parking lot. We were nervously banking on a “Call me when you get there!”, this is scary because usually your phone laughs back and you better hope you didn’t lose your friends. Passes in hand we got to skip the 1 and ½ mile walk from parking (which was VIP parking?) to the entrance across the street. The biggest difference between VIP and the big field was that it was smaller. Maybe the people were more rude? More famous? I don’t know. But it was odd because once you were in VIP with the red wrist band you couldn’t leave for the main field and come back in again to VIP. I know, it made total sense to me too. So Eric and I spent a lovely Saturday trapped in VIP listening to a set of music that resulted in lots of sensory overload and joy and crazy people. Bad crazy.
Music.
First band we saw was Death Cab. “Yes, that’s what they sound like. Cool.” and then we walked down this little lane to get one of these.
I heard the song from when I worked the door at Tokio (weird how music triggers) and ran back like a 15 year old. Got more excited when I saw that there were guys in a crane taking better pictures than me, look:
After they played my entire life changed for a few reasons due to the Kraftwerk show. If you’re not familiar, they are the first electronic band that broke ground, 4 kind of genius guys from from Germany who laid down beats that people still steal and created visuals that alone make you wonder if you got dosed somehow. That’s such a terrible amount of weak information. Feel free to add please.
The appreciation I gained for this genre of music was an enormous surprise, coupled with the sensory overload of the audio and visuals and then tripled with the thoughts I had regarding Kraftwerk’s thematic genius I had to go away for a second to make sure I wasn’t dying. Oh, you had coffee you tard so I went back to the show and took these.
The guys looked like this with my intsy camera and I’m pretty sure they did not move at all:
On the screen you saw stuff like this:
Because this is epically long and epically is not a word I'm pretty sure I'll talk later about Prince, seeing David Hasselhoff, where I stayed and why it was slamming and cool, and where you can go to see the worst picture ever taken of me for print in any publication. It's awesome.
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