quote:

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Originally posted by cassandra is

eh eh eh... 'cos they're un-sexy, and on top of that, they don't wash...

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pas de bras pas de chocolat

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quote:

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Originally posted by Carl

She's leaving me!! Now look what you've done, Cass!

:)

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quote:

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Originally posted by Carl

[PJ Harvey is my girlfriend. We're both very angry at you're comments.

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quote:

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Originally posted by cassandra is

eh eh eh... like being in PJ Harvey's bed just for one night... oooooops! hope my girlfriend won't read this...

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quote:

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Originally posted by cassandra is

although I sometimes wish I could be everywhere at once...

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quote:

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Originally posted by Homers_pet_monkey

If anyone wants to buy any Reading tickets, I have 5 for sale at face value ('cos I'm good like that).

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WHAT WOULD MADONNA DO?

THE STYLE COUNCIL at Coachella
By CAROLINE RYDER, STEFFIE NELSON & LINDA IMMEDIATO
Wednesday, May 3, 2006 - 3:00 pm

Since I’m barely 5 feet 1 and not the easiest to
spot in a crowd of 50,000, it was inevitable that I
would lose all my friends at Coachella. I was
watching the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on Sunday and
had foolishly edged deeper into the crowd than I
should have. Suddenly, my girlfriends were
nowhere to be found. As Karen O grinned
manically down at me from a big screen, I realized
I was on my own. With no map or band schedule.
No cell-phone reception. No entourage. It was just
me, myself and my shrooms.

Feeling panicky, I did the only thing that seemed safe — I searched for Madonna.
Following the sea of gay men to the dance tent, all I could see were hairy backs. Warm
sweat hung in the air and stuck to my face. Twenty-five minutes later, the bitch still
hadn’t come on stage. The crowd was booing and someone stepped on my foot. At that
moment, I hated Madonna, the world and my friends. Most of all, I hated Coachella.

Then Madonna skipped on stage with her dancers. She wiggled her leotard-clad behind
and yelled, “This is my first festival. Does my butt look big in this?” Madonna, I realized,
would never be a crybaby if she lost her friends. She’d dance into the night and find
some beautiful strangers to play with. So that’s what I decided to do.

I went to the tiny rave tent and partied like it was 1992 with 300 friendly Marines and
glo-stick kids. I wandered into the Snow Globe Igloo Dome, where foam cascaded from
the ceiling and festivalgoers clambered over a glittery-white pirate ship. I headbanged to
Coheed and Cambria and watched Coldcut (five laptops, I counted ’em) play “Pump Up
the Volume.” I wandered around the VIP area and met the blond drummer girl from
Eagles of Death Metal, fed shrooms to a Hollywood hipster, and gave some love to
Coldcut’s MC Juicy. In three hours on my own, I met more people than in the entire
previous day at Coachella. By the time I met a long-haired, high-cheekboned 19-year-
old boy who asked, “So you wanna hang out and see some bands together?” I thought
about it for just a second. “Nah,” I told him. “I fly solo.”


—Caroline Ryder



The Like: Yes, we hate them
because they’re beautiful. (Photo
by Mark Hunter)

Dress You Up in Your Love

On the Coachella fashion frontlines, Cahuenga
met crunchy, frat boys boogied beside rent boys,
the Age of Aquarius met the Apocalypse and the
cult of the frock reached its apotheosis. But when
it’s 96 degrees in the shade, practicality is sexy.
In the immortal words of Ana Matronic from the
Scissor Sisters, “SPF 50, motherfuckers! What
were you thinking?” Sunburns are not hot and the
first-aid tent is no place to show off your new
ensemble.

The fashion rags have declared this the Year of the Dress, and clearly the ladies of
Coachella have been paying attention. Sonja, who was rocking a Day-Glo ’60s micro-
mini with Chuck Taylors, told me that I had to have a cute sundress. I didn’t know cute
came in all shapes, sizes and colors — glitter halters to tie-dye from Thailand. No
dress is too loud or too low-cut, too short or too long. A parade of evening-length gowns
amped up the hippie vibe, and de rigueur ’80s shades added a little Dynasty decadence
to the mix.

Onstage, the looks ranged from the dressed-down, very Now skinny dark jeans and
tees (worn to perfection by the curly-haired singer of Dungen) to getting fully costumed
as the characters of The Wizard of Oz, as the members of Gnarls Barkley chose to do
(Danger Mouse was the Wicked Witch). The fierce femmes of Sleater-Kinney made me
consider cutting my hair to a boyish, sexy chin length, and hip-hop messiah Matisyahu
just might start a trend with the Hasidic Jew look: black pants, long-sleeved white shirt,
black cap and full beard. Madonna flexed her muscles, stripping down from pants to a
leotard, and Karen O from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs is simply in a style league by herself.
She’s a vamp and a clown, a bird of paradise who stayed up all night. O accessorized
her red-and-purple mini dress with jester tights that were half-black, half-torn fishnet,
and a single black-and-silver sequined fingerless glove.

The Best Dressed Band Award goes to NYC glamorpusses the Scissor Sisters, no
contest. While Tool and their oversize-black-T-shirt minions worked through their
childhood rage on the main stage, Jake Shears and his de-gorgeous partner Ana
Matronic pranced and vogued in gold lamé like some disco-era Apollo and Athena
spreading the glittery gospel of love and redemption on the dance floor. I shudder to
think what the desert dust could do to their outfits, but as the Sisters themselves
advise, “If you’re gonna be gorgeous you’ve got to have just a touch of filthy.”


—Steffie Nelson



''Animal Collective are so
overrated''

Fry Me to the Moon

What would a pool party at Frank Sinatra’s Palm Springs Estate be like? I pictured a
bunch of hipsters afraid of getting their hair wet, sitting fully clothed around a pool, lest
their pasty flesh get colored by the sun. Or would it be packed with chicks and dudes
with hot tan bodies floating around all sexy sexy like a beer commercial? Bathing suit.
Jesus, I’d have to wear a bathing suit . . . in front of strangers. I felt like I was 11 all over
again as I desperately searched my suitcase in vain for an oversize T-shirt.

By the time we arrived at Anthem magazine’s Coachella satellite party, the place was
jam-packed. Some people wore bathing suits, but most of the girls were in short-short
American Apparel-esque jumpers and wedge heels, or bathing suits with cowboy boots.
Flip-flops are apparently out. I looked down at my Havaianas, which suddenly looked
about as sexy as Tevas. There were a few partiers in the pool, but mainly larger-than-
human-size rubber duckies, an octopus and a Loch Ness monster. We bee-lined it for
the bar, then staked out the last bit of real estate on the poolside grass. Within a few
minutes our bodies were glistening with sweat. Fuck it. We released our pasty bodies
from their hiding cloaks and hopped into the pool, beers in hand. Slowly, one by one,
the girls kicked off their heels, the boys took off their T-shirts and the pool filled with
people. The DJ turned it out and suddenly there was a feverish dance party in the pool,
punctuated by heavy splashing. No one seemed to care about the bands they were
missing back at the polo fields. Girls got their hair wet. The duckies were mounted.
Someone found a way to the flat ’50s-era roof and jumped into the pool. Copycats
followed — even a gaggle of giggling girls made the leap — until some dude, possibly a
sober individual aware of insurance liability, put the kibosh on the high flyers.

The sun was about to set by the time we dripped back to the festival to catch the Yeah
Yeah Yeahs, Massive Attack and Madonna. Some wet chicks left looking Tammy Faye
Bakker after a cardio workout. Me, I hid my pool hair under a cowboy hat and was
grateful for my waterproof mascara.

—Linda Immediato

Walking in His Shoes

One critic’s day and night at the Coachella bop-’til-you-drop

~ By RON GARMON ~


Photo by Steve Appleford

Soaring on the ground: Eagles of Death Metal

anYe West pulled faces out of the crowd, Cat Power was
out-yowled, Sigur Rós called down an ice fog, but Depeche
Mode was Saturday’s mainstage heroes at the seventh
Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. More than 60,000 attended the
first of this two-day event last weekend (April 29-30), and the mainline
music press has postmortemed this year’s event in terms of the headlining
acts. But, as usual, the sideshow action at the other four stages was just
as thrilling, and the crowd itself was the real star. It was the great
American bop-’til-you-drop, with dance and Red Bull making acres of
happy casualties as the night wore on.

By 1 p.m., the damp bodies of our eminent colleagues were already lolling
in the press tent. Fellow CityBeat scribe Josh Sindell and I lugged two
newsboy-sized bundles of the Coachella issue over a mile in hallucino-
heat. Brother Sindell had a game plan to daunt Vince Lombardi, but I was
more than content to plunge into the welter of sweaty, slow-moving
bodies and swing with the alkali vibe.

I was promptly rewarded with a DJ set by Perry Farrell and Welsh nu-
trance trio Hybrid. Here was easy obliteration for this old-time Jane’s
Addiction/Porno for Pyros fan, with nearly 2,000 half-dressed pretties
swaying and spritzing inside the Sahara tent to jagged, iridescent disco.
The first day was well on once this hour-that-stretched finally shimmered
away, with the festival outside spreading like a carnival amoeba, tickling
tendrils in every direction. The post-rock festival crowd is turning into
one great gladsome T.A.M.I. Show with fewer clothes and better
physiques. A haul of punk boyz, biker chix, indie doods, hippie dainties,
burner babies, vintage hipsters, and walking shoutouts to half-a-hundred
other subcultures vast enough to daunt a pop Whitman all mixed with
affection and respect. Looking as usual like the cheerful corpse of Brian
Jones, I fit well in the general mishegoss.

The Zutons at the Outdoor Theatre won my business over techno-
godfather Joey Beltane’s fizzled booty-bomb at the Sahara. These
Liverpudlians pounded impressive sparks out of the old Spirit/Joe
Walsh/Grateful Dead jazz-boogie machine, moving acres of rocker-chick
booty to sublime demonstration. I danced and tarried, missing Lady
Sovereign’s well-received set, but managed to catch hip-hop activist
Common throwing down some ultra-sophisticated bullshit at the main
Coachella stage. He was like a platform preacher verbal-riffing over tricky
jazz beats on the huge-yet-outnumbered Hip-Hop planet now gestating in
the belly of humanity. He was replaced by Kanye West, simply one of the
slickest pop artists I’ve ever seen turn the crank. He drew the marks to
him by spitting out verbs and nouns like God’s Own Snakeoil Salesman
over a staggered detonation of samples. He had a vast crowd on wires as
I ambled off to catch the last 20 minutes of Louisville quartet My
Morning Jacket. Its grassroots-tinged psychedelia jittered the rockers still
standing into a tribal groove, with young love groping among the
discarded Crystal Geyser bottles as the sun went down.

Critics’ darlings of 2001, Reykjavik’s Sigur Rós at mainstage laid down a
set like a hundred-ton sleet sculpture, settling a cocoon of chill around
everything in earshot. I lingered amid this gathering frost, and then legged
it past Damian “Junior Gong” Marley’s Rasta-of-damned-fools to disport
myself further to Ladytron’s sub-zero Euro dance-pop at the Mojave tent.
I was bored by Franz Ferdinand’s pirated art-crock two years ago, and
Cat Power’s exemplary Southern pop at the Mojave was being throttled
by the brilliant aggro techno Carl Cox was blasting out of the Sahara. The
Eagles of Death Metal roughhoused their way through trademarked
greasy classic metal for the last of the rock ’n’ roll upright at the
Outdoor.

Aged and pretty, Depeche Mode launched into the evening’s star turn at
the main with an air of uncorking the Good Old Stuff at party’s end.
Gorgeous renditions of canonical songs like “Walking in My Shoes” had a
mellowing effect as tens of thousands of harassed, woozy, happy, horny,
and nostalgic temporary Indio residents seemed to smile at once.

Coachella desert music festival attracts
massive crowds, musicians

Chris Daines

Issue date: 5/4/06 Section: Entertainment

Thousands of tents aligned in grids on a large
polo field filled quickly Friday evening. For those
camping, the Coachella Music and Art Festival
was more of a four-day escapist desert fantasy
than a simple festival.

The tents went up one by one, and soon looked
more like an upper-class refugee camp than
vacationers. All campers had to endure
thorough searches of all their bags before
entering the campground.

Anticipation for the weekend's concert grew.
People sat around their tents talking about
which bands would be better to see live, which
band was flat out lousy and who was a must-
see.

Meticulous schedules of the concert were
printed out on sheets of paper. organizing the
weekend between the almost 100 performing
artists.

Late evening saw the emergence of
psychotropic drugs and alcohol that was
magically smuggled into the campground.
Drum circles began and the tents became a
large tailgate party for the music festival to
follow. Raucous sexual encounters in
neighboring tents were not muffled by the thin
polyurethane linings. The campground found
peace around four in the morning.

The intense sun shattered the comfort climate
of the previous evening. The warm breeze and
tolerable temperatures were a deceiving desert
guise. Tents became almost instantly
uninhabitable once the sun rose over the
horizon.

"It is like the desert, with carpet," said a woman leaving her tent for the polo field. Her
frustration with the harsh 7 a.m. sun and the noise of the campground made her
laugh uncomfortably.

First timers rushed off to the venue, but veteran festival campers spent more time
socializing in the campground before they left the comfort of their own water and food.

The lines at the entrance to the festival were littered with water bottles. No receptacles
were in place and thousands of unsuspecting people were told to drink up fast as no
outside food or beverages were allowed inside the festival. Concertgoers drenched
themselves in their drinking water. The extreme sun and heat dried them very quickly.

The sun was almost inescapable. Shade tents were placed strategically next to food
vendors. Merchandising tents lined the areas around the two-dollar bottled water
stands every 500 feet around the festival field. Entrées went for an average eight
dollars.

"It's the new festival diet. Lots of sun, a little bit of water and almost no food," said one
man about the cost of food and water at the concert.

The afternoons were sparsely crowded. Unofficial estimates put ticket sales for the
two-day event at about 120,000, but the majority of attendees opted to show up later in
the evening for the better-known acts.

Saturday had a unique mixture of indie and mainstream acts throughout the day. The
smaller tents offered alternatives to big name acts. Each concertgoer had their own
agenda for the day, of who'd they see and what they would do. The audience's
reactions and comments provided for nearly as much entertainment as the
performers themselves.

"Perry Farrell is the sex," said a woman supporting herself on the guardrail, which
divided the dance tent. Farrell thrilled the crowd as he joined dance house fusion of
Hybrid for three songs.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah packed one of the smaller tents so full of people the heat
was almost suffocating. "His voice sounds better in person," said one woman who
had stripped down to her bra and short shorts in the heat.

Kanye West made everyone laugh when the riff began his famous "Gold Digger"
single and he said, "White people! This is your only chance to say (the n-word)," and
later he danced to A-Ha's "Take On Me."

A Hollywood woman spoke on her cell phone as Sigur Ros took the stage. "Some
band named señor rose is playing… they're fabulous," she said.

Fans became crushed in the crowd that pressed each other to be as close to
Depeche Mode as possible. "I hope they play 'Master and Servant'," said one girl. "I
took an online test and it said if I were going to be a stripper that would be my song."

Daft Punk's first performance in more than seven years captured the excitement and
celebration of the night. Their irreproducible bass thumped thousands of sober, and
not-so-sober dancing fans.

"This one girl wanted some of my e ... I'm not going to give my last e to some random
girl while Daft Punk is playing," said a man in the audience. the girl walked away with
her friend in disappointed anger.

Sunday was an all-star festival of greatness.

"They're weird, but they rock," said a woman about The Octopus Project's noon
performance on the outdoor stage.

Thousands danced to Los Amigos Invisibles' salsa and Venezuelan rhythms. "Ese
grupo me encanta," said a woman in her best white Spanish accent possible.

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists ended their set in the harsh afternoon sun with a plea
for the crowd to find some shade. Their upbeat set drew the crowds in as close as
they comfortably could in the heat. Sunday's heat seemed much more intense. A
woman expressed her love for Leo, and he laughed. "You don't even know me," he
said.

"I should have been here rather than with the jumping Jew on the main stage," said a
girl mesmerized with the sounds of Jamie Lidell. His soulful crooning backed by
mixed electro beats, and even some improvised beat boxing kept the audience
swooning over his sound.

Seu Jorge performed some of his samba hits for the first time for many in the
audience. An eight-month pregnant woman swayed her hips slowly to the beat and
twirled her skirt in the air with both her arms. "I was so happy to have some music that
I could do my pregnant dance to," she said.

Madonna played, but her tent only allowed the thousands who waited there all
afternoon to see her. The rest could not get within listening distance.

Massive Attack's powerful stage presence and supporting singers took the audience
back in time to when they first were exposed to the avant-garde, moody British soft
rock.

"The new album comes out tomorrow at midnight, but I bet all you f****ers
downloaded it already," said Maynard, lead singer from Tool. The statement met
applause from Tool's first live audience in years. The quieter dynamics of their songs
were often interrupted from the thunderous dancing celebration from the Scissor
Sisters on the outdoor stage.

Coachella finished its seventh year with the most automobile traffic yet. The congenial
crowds provided an air of camaraderie which permeated the long days and nights of
the festival. Despite intense heat and insane crowds, the celebration and music
outweighed all of the drawbacks of the festival.


Media Credit: Chris Daines
Daft Punk's electric performance
enthralled crowds Saturday.


Media Credit: Chris Daines
Unofficial estimates say ticket sales
reached almost 120,000 for the two-
day festival.


Media Credit: Chris Daines
Dancing to Seu Jorge outside of the
Gobi tent on Sunday.