U2 concert: celebrating the Light

In my last post I told about the 5% of my U2 concert experience that was negative. Now it is time to celebrate the remarkable, amazing day/evening I had. I got to Pasadena relatively early, park in old town, and went out for a walk around. I was hoping to meet up with my friend Beau from my Wheaton College days. We had reconnected on facebook, and decided in the crowd of 96,000 U2 fans, to try and find each other. Beau had sent me a text that he was eating in Old Town before getting on the shuttle to the concert. I looked around Old Town a bit, but didn't find him, so I headed back over to the shuttle loading area and figured I'd see him getting on the shuttle if I just waited there. After waiting a while, I decided I was going to shuttle over, just to see what was going on at the Rose Bowl. I was literally 3 people away from getting on the shuttle when my hip started singing. It was a text from Beau that he and his friend had finished eating, and they were on their way to the shuttle. So I went back to my waiting spot, and waited for them to shuttle over together. We got to the Rose Bowl and found some more friends of Beau who had a spot on the golf course parking and were picnicing before the show. We hung out there for a while and relaxed. It was great hanging out with an old friend I had not seen in over 20 years.

After a bit, we headed in to the stadium. We tried to stick together once inside, but the general flow of the crowd and the pull of the concession stand separated us. So I found my way to my seat and settled in for the show (full story on seating in last post). Black eyed Peas opened up. They are not really my style, but I have to admit, they put on quite a show. The highlight of this part of the show for me was when Slash (not from one of my favorite bands) joined the Peas for a performance of "Sweet Child of Mine" (a very good song, which I like).

Then was an intermission, and close to nine o'clock the show was starting again. It opened to the strains of David Bowie's Space Oddity (another Song I Love) then the band came out on stage I don't have the song list in front of me now, but It was amazing. My previous experience seeing U2 in concert was spent mostly watching the heads of the 35 rows of people in front of me. This time was so much better for 2 reasons. First, I was in an arena, and part way up the side, the people closer than me were also lower than me, and not in the way. But beside that the large screen above center stage brought all the performance highlight into your lap. It was a really amazing show. Bono is so charged, so on fire. I have never before seen a perform who I feel so passionately embraces what he believes in (and that is saying a lot since I worked for several years in the Christian Music industry, where you would expect the performers to passionately embrace there beliefs). Bono spoke about the attrocities during the Irian election, the need for more money to deal with AIDS in Africa, and the plight of an imprisoned Burmese democracy leader. Each of these causes were close to his heart. The power of the music and message was undeniable. The high tech effects made for a great show, but the lyrics, and the power with which Bono delivered them ae what madethis a night I'll never forget. I'm sure there will be more on Bono and U2 in future post, I find them an amazing group, who move me every time I listen.

U2 concert: a brief exploration of the dark side.

Let me start this post by saying that the U2 concert Sunday was fantastic, and a 95% positive experience. Today's post is about the 5% that was not positive. It will be the last I speak of these things (with the possible exception of repeating them in a letter to Rose Bowl events staff). After venting here I will wipe these negatives from my mind and remember only the great music, and message that was presented. So here comes the venting...

Whoever designed the seating sections at the Rose bowl obviously expected the people acting as ushers to have an IQ. Those at Sunday's concert failed this test. When I came in to my section (section 21), I approached the Yellow Shirt dude who was the usher for that section. He looked at the ticket and pointed me up and to my right, which actually coincided with what the sign on the wall of the section said. I found the proper row, and after the girl in the row behind me showed me where to look for a seat number, I found seat 15. I sat there as the black-eyed Peas sang. As the black eyed peas finished, I was tapped by one of the other Yellow Shirt dudes. He told me I was in a another man's seat. I tried to explain that I was in the right seat, and the other Yellow shirt Dude had showed me how to find it. he insisted I was in the wrong seat and had to follow him out, and he would show me to the right seat. When we got to the aisle he started to point me to section 20. I showed him my ticket and said I was in section 21. At this point he said, "well I don't know where your seat is, but you can sit here if you want, pointing to the front row of the section. After a quick look I realized these seats were represented by the people in te row of wheel chairs at the rail, and if I were to sit there, the wheel chaired fans would be blocking my view.

At this point I proceeded to find another Yellow shirt Dude, who looked at my ticket, and pointed my to the left, I said "Why did the first guy send me right then?" He responded with , "I don't have time to help you find your seat, I need to help the other people." I was not sure what other people he meant. Probably it was the crowds of people who knew where there seats were who were going to the restroom like I should have been during the intermission. I wanted to scream, "Don't you know it's My Birthday!!" I wanted to volunteer to go stand in the (red) Zone if they couldn't find my seat. I finally gave up on the Yellow Shirt dudes, and found a blue jacket guy who had on a radio with a headset (usually a sign of leadership, if not intelligence). I should him my ticket, and he began to show me to my seat. Amazingly enough he took me straight back to where I had been and removed the other gentleman from the seat, explaining to him that seat 15 (my seat was the end of section 21 and seat 115( the seat next to me) was the beginning of section 20. It is beyond me why the two section merge in one row, and how 115 can ever follow 15. this goes back to those great minds who designed the seating...(i am going to try to post a seating chart wit this blog). So after wasting 25 minutes of the intermission (prime bathroom time) I found myself enjoying the concert in the seat I started in. Was this whole fiasco warranted? No! Could it have been avoided with a little more training/intelligence on the part of the Yellow Shirt dudes ? Probably.

Okay, enough on that. One final negative on the concert. The parking/unparking was a nightmare. I parked in remote parking and shuttled in. Nice and relaxing, no nightmare of getting near the arena. Trouble was, everyone who parked there and shuttled in throughout the day all wanted to go back at the same time. So after the concert got out around 11:20, it took till 12:35 to get on the shuttle, then till 12:55 to get to remote parking past all the pedestrian traffic. Then another 20 to 25 minutes to get out of parking garage... I have no solution for this problem, but there must be a better way.

But enough GOM (Grumpy Old Man) talk In my next post I'll tell you everything I Loved about the concert. Thanks for letting me vent!!

Two Movie Allegories

Dictionary.com defines Allegory as "The representation of abstract ideas or principles by characters, figures, or events in narrative, dramatic, or pictorial form."
Today's blog is going to talk about two movies that I saw today that seem to fit this category. One you will I'm sure quickly see as an allegory, the other may seem a stretch to you.

Before we begin...SPOILER ALERT FOR WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE & COUPLES RETREAT...

We will start with the more obvious Allegory of Where the Wild Things Are. This classic children's book was written to years before I was born. And with this new movie adaptation, it shows that it is aging Wildly and with quite a lot of style. Director Spike Jonze decided against using high tech CGI creatures, but went instead with what looks like upgraded versions of the Sid & Marty Kroftt saturday morning creations of my childhood (HR Puffinstiff, Land of The Lost). In this story Max gets in trouble for his wild behavior and runs off (in the book he's sent to his room, in the movie he runs away). He finds himself in a wild forest with The Wild Things. Here is where the Allegory kicks in. Each of the Wild things seems to represent different pieces of Max, or any child's personality. Carol is the selfishness and anger of acting out, Judith is distrust of others, paired with Ira who is low self esteem, Alexander is the feeling that grown ups never listen. You get it? each Character is part of Max, and in becoming King of the Wild things, he has to try to bring all these parts of him together, and bring them all under his control. Or maybe I'm reading to much into it, and its just the story of a rowdy kid and his wild imagination...

Anyway, moving on to Couples Retreat. I'm sure most people go into this movie just looking for rowdy laughs and a good time, and you can definitely come away with that. But I found in it an allegory, with each couple displaying a different problem one might encounter in their marriage. We see the man who's wife has left him, and he is trying to fill the void with any young thing he can find, though really still in love with his wife. We see the couple who has been together since high school, each with a wandering eye, not realizing they just need to look at each other with a fresh eye. There is the couple who are striving so he=ard to keep everything on track and on a schedule, that they don't realize they are losing the love that brought them together. And we have the couple that are each so busy with their own thing, they totally miss the fact that they are leading seperate lives together. I challenge you to go see this movie with your mate, and go into it not just looking for the cheap laugh, but looking for something to bring you closer. It's no FIREPROOF, but it might be the funny romantic kick your relationship needs...A Couples Retreat if you would.

Car in the shop

Well, my pretty little Matrix is in the body shop. No, I did not plow into the side of a semi again, I did not rear end another ambulance (medical transport vehicle actually), and I did not slam into the guard rail again. No, this was a much simpler feat. I hit a rock in the road. Don't laugh, there are some pretty good sized rocks up the mountain, and a lot of them end up on the road after three days of wet weather like we had last week.

I was driving up the hill, just minding my own business, when a car in the lane next to me (also heading up) started to drift into my lane. I did not feel like letting him drift into me, so I swerved a bit to me left, into the medium strip. This is when I heard a thunk, and felt my car lilt to the left. I pulled over and check out the damage. I saw that not only was the tire flat, but my sporty rim was also cracked.

I called my friends at Toyota of Redlands to check on getting it repaired there, without turning it in to insurance. I found out the rim itself was $445, and probably another $100 for the tire. So I turned it in to the insurance where I have a $300 deductible. Took it to the body shop, and since I was driving on a donut spare, they arranged through the insurance to get me a rental. Hope they can get it fixed before U2 this weekend, I'd like to go to the concert in my own car.

Oh, almost forgot the funniest thing. I called the insurance, and told them the whole story of swerving, and hitting the rock. One of the questions was, "Was the rock okay?" I told them that in my concern of getting my car safely off the road, I had failed to check on the condition of the rock.

Whole lot of nothing

Been a week since I posted anything here. Not a lot going on. Or not a lot coming into my mind. Sometimes words just flow and flow, and sometimes I can't come up with an idea to save my life. Hit a rock on the road the other day. Blew out the tore and cracked the rim. Been abusing the donut spare. Wish I could tell you how much I've been working on my writing...but I haven't been. Wish I could tell you how well the Bears played today, but they didn't. Wish I could tell you how I was planning on spending all the money I won on the MegaMillions Friday, but I didn't match one number. So its been one of those "whole lot of nothing weeks".

Ah, but next week the aging rocker in me will be able to tell you all about the U2 show. That'll be worth the wait.

The Aging Movie Fanatic

WARNING PLOT SPOILERS FOR THE INVENTION OF LYING AND WHIP IT! AHEAD:

When I was very young, my requirement for a movie was simple: Did it have the word Disney stamped at the beginning. As I grew I broadened my film watching window. When I was eleven a little movie came out that turned my world around. Summer of 1977, and everyone was going to see this movie. My sister Gloria went and saw it, and told me I should go. It took a while, but I finally convinced Mom and Dad to take to me to see Star Wars, it was amazing, and introduced me to the wonders of Science fiction and fantasy. I have never looked back.

Through out Jr. high and I High School I filled my time trying to see as many SciFi and Fantasy films as I could. When I hit college I discovered more thoughtful films. Independent films, art films, comedies, and cult classics like YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, BUCKAROO BANZAI, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. My film watching was expanding and growing and maturing. During thid time I simply wanted to fill my film watching days with any and everything I could find.

I've tamed down a bit in recent years, and since getting married I stick largely to romantic comedies, or just plain goofball comedies (Will Ferral type things). We tend to stay away from movies where people die of some long drawn out illness. And I couldn't get my wife to watch a Sci-Fi movie if my life depended on it (although she likes Harry Potter and Twilight). I do occasionally go out on my own to see something that my wife wouldn't enjoy.

That brings me to the movies I saw on Thursday. The first was Jennifer Garner and Ricky Gervase (sp) in The Invention of Lying although it did have the nice under lying message that you should not judge people simply on the outer appearances but on who they really are, i found the film rather disturbing in that the whole premise was that God, Heaven and religion are all lies. I was disturbed by this, and by the fact that none of the previews for the movie had clued me in that this is what was going to be the main thrust of the film. In my younger movie watching days I might have just laughed this off and said so what. Instead I went away very disturbed. Although this was not a horrible movie, and it had its funny moments, and Jennifer Garner was cute as usual; still I can not recommend it.

But the second movie I saw Thursday, Whip It! is another story altogether. Drew Barrymore makes her directorial debut in this film of a teenager (played by Ellen Page) who finds herself drawn to roller derby. Her mother wants her to be in all these beauty pageants, and she does these to please her mother, but her real love is for the roller derby. It is a rough and tumble heart felt coming of age film. The scene I love is when her dad brings all the roller derby girls up to where she is in a pageant, and her dad tells her mother , "800 hundred dollars {cost of the dress} I can stand to lose, but what I can't stand is losing the chance to see our daughter happy." That is a very cool dad I would say. Anyway, I loved this film. Go see it.

Always Backup!!

Jesus and Satan have an argument as to who is the better programmer. This goes on for a few hours until they agree to hold a contest with God as the judge.

They set themselves before their computers and begin. They type furiously for several hours, lines of code streaming up the screen.

Seconds before the end, a bolt of lightning struck taking out the electricity. Moments later, the power is restored, and God announces that the contest is over. He asks Satan to show what he has come up with.

Satan is visibly upset, and cries, “I have nothing! I lost it all when the power went out.”

“Very well, then,” says God, “let us see if Jesus fared any better.”

Jesus enters a command, and the screen comes to life in vivid display, the voices of an angelic choir pour forth from the speakers.

Satan is astonished. He stutters, “But how?! I lost everything, yet
Jesus’ program is intact! How did he do it?!”

God chuckles, “Jesus saves.”

This joke came to my mind after lunch today as a vivid reminder of the panic I could have avoided before lunch....Okay, here's the story. I am an aspiring writer. I have several children's books written, along with 19 chapters of my first novel, and about 7 chapters of a young reader novel, a few short stories, and several poems. All of these are saved on a compact little zip drive. I keep this zip drive in a small holder, which clips into a mesh net on the inside of the case I carry my portable DVD player in. The case is with me always, at home and at work. Today at break I went to get my headphones out of my DVD case. I find that it is not zipped up. I also find my zip drive is not clipped to the mesh. Panic insues...I don't even worry about the fact that my DVD player could have fallen out and broken. All I can think of is that I have no back up for most of the stuff on this zip drive. I have paper copies of some of the items, but all that typing...argh!! So I paniced... I sent a text message to my mother-in-law to pleases check around my desk for the zip drive. She was helping out in my daughter's class room, but said she would look when she got home.

So as I waited to hear from her, I was trying to calculate how long it would take to retype all the lost material, and how much this would cut into my actual new writing. I remembered the scene in Little Women where Amy (a young Kristen Dunst) throws Jo's manuscript into the fire. I remembered the anger/agony in Jo (Winona Ryder) as she realized her work was gone. And i realized I was both Amy and Jo in this case...If my work was lost it was only me to blame. As I was eating my lunch, two and a half hours after the initial discovery, I received the message that my zip drive was safe on my desk. My two and a half hours of panic and fear and stress was over.

Oh, yeah, when I got home I made a back up!!

Maturing Musically, part 3: Doing it Beatles Style.

In case you live under a rock, or have been off the planet recently, I thought I'd let you in on one of the hottest selling music groups this past month. They're a little 4 member band known as the Beatles. Not sure if you know the name. But here are just a few of the records they broke last month: (statistic from hypebot.com)

1). In the United States:

• On Billboard's Comprehensive Albums chart, which lists the most popular album releases in the US, including current and catalogue titles, The Beatles set a new record for the most simultaneous titles by a single artist (18), including five of the top 10 and nine of the top 20.
• On the Pop Catalog chart, The Beatles achieved another new Billboard chart first for the most simultaneous titles in the top 50 (16), a record they previously set themselves with 12 titles in December 1995. The Beatles have nine of the chart's top 10 titles, and all 14 re-mastered CDs are in the top 20, led by 'Abbey Road' at number one and 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' at number two.
• On the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart, 'The Beatles' stereo boxed set debuted at number 15, and 'The Beatles in Mono' limited edition boxed set debuted at number 40

In the UK:
The Beatles had four titles in the top 10, seven in the top 40 and 16 in the top 75, including both the stereo and mono boxes, as well as 2000's 'Beatles 1' compilation. This set a new record for the most simultaneous albums in the UK charts according to the UK Official Charts Company. In this week's UK chart, The Beatles have 13 albums in the top 75. A further 84,000 CDs were sold last week, bringing their total sales of the re-masters to more than 354,000 in 11 days and their total UK sales this decade to 6,755,000.

In Japan:
14 re-mastered titles and boxed sets debuted in the top 25 of the international chart, including seven of the top 10, led by the stereo boxed set at number two, the mono boxed set at number three, 'Abbey Road' at four and 'Let It Be' at six. Across all titles and box sets, more than 840,000 albums were purchased by consumers in Japan in the first three days of sales.

Now if all this doesn't mean much to you let me point out that the most recently recorded Beatles CD (Abbey Road) was recorded 40 years ago. Also, this band that has all these albums on the charts, has lost two members: John Lennon and George Harrison. Yet there music is still selling millions of copies world wide. Why is this? What about this music makes it so salable even today? Who can say really. The talent of the band? yes. the heart they put into the music? yes. But it is undeniable, even today people long to here the strains of Yesterday. Who knows, maybe the answer to why the Beatles are still selling today is because it is a taste of the past, and like the song says, "Yesterday all my problems seemed so far away, now it looks as though they're here to stay. Oh I believe in Yesterday."

Regardless of the reasons, The Beatles remain a pop music icon, and a top seller, which I think reiterates my point from my second Maturing Musically post that most of the best songs have already been written...and several of those were written by the boys from Liverpool.