Sunburned again. DAMN!

I return. I return from Hipster Fest 2005. (Sunburned but alive.)
About five different people snapped pictures of me, the first of whom I'm convinced was part of the Siren staff, and the last of whom was a photographer from New York magazine. Each time I tried resisting, and each time I gave in.
There are pictures of me floating around. THAT'S UNSETTLING.

I kept a log of all the thoughts that occured to me, and all the sightings of note:
12:31pm - food-serving establishments filled to capacity with some of New York's most flamboyant and pretentious indie rockers. Discouraged, I turn away because the damn hipsters are making me nervous. Currently standing in front of the wonderwheel, down a secluded street, where I feel at ease. Planning on heading to the boardwalk.... provided I ever find it.

1:09pm - back on W. 10th street in front of the mainstage. person slaps sticker on me. (without ever explaining what kind of cause it represents) Most of the other people milling around the area have had the same sticker haphazardly slapped on them as well.


1:10pm - victory! I find the boardwalk. I am also studying my sticker. So inviting is the excess space on it that I decide to write "blogger on duty" on mine. (Maybe with the hope that it will give me some sense of entitlement to whip out a notebook at random and scribble things on it every time a thought occurs to me? Maybe as a proclamation to all those who are watching me write compulsively in a notebook at irregular intervals that the notebook is instrumental to my self-motivated documentation of the event?) Who wouldn't have succumbed to the temptation of vandalizing it? Obviously since it was already on me, I had to attempt the feat of writing it upside-down. Backwards, I can do with no difficulty. Upside-down I can't do in any timely sort of fashion. I figure this must be what writing is like for severe dyslexics.


1:15pm - ambulance ltd. has been cavorting on the beach right in front of me, but I've been too busy writing upside-down letters on myself that I've neglected to notice. No, seriously, they are right fucking in front of me, I lift my eyes up and there they are centered in my field of vision. Admittedly, I am tempted to run far far away and secretly photograph them, at a distance (possibly from an angle too), without their consent or knowledge. (Instead I just watch them.) Slowly I notice that they are being photographed, that this is an actual photo shoot and they are posing.

3:00pm - I SPY SUREFIRE! Ben and Jacob Surefire (singer and bassist, respectively) seen on the boardwalk. I fumble for my camera but they disappear into the horde of fans heading for the mainstage area before I am able to turn my shitty camera on. I curse under my breath.
(editor's note: Clara, it's too bad you don't read this, you'd probably get a kick out of all this talk of Ambulance Ltd. and Surefire.)

3:01pm - Discouraged, I sit down on a bench and check in for my first Top of the Hour Sunburn Check. Results? Not sunburned.

3:30pm - I spot one of the photographers from lastnightsparty.com. I figure a top-ranked scenester like him would welcome the occasion of being photographed by a total stranger who recognizes him, so I try to chase him around the boardwalk, to no avail. (editor's note: Let it be known I've watched this guy mack on a girl he was returning from some party with on the G train. I've watched a top-ranked NYC scenester mack on a girl once. Heh. That's funny.) I mean, come on, I'd like to have something to show for at least one of these Noteable Persons Sightings I claim to be having. But it seems like whenever he isn't engaged in some conversation with somebody he knows, he's briskly pacing the boardwalk.
That guy walks awfully fast.

4:00pm - top of the hour sunburn check: still not sunburned yet.

4:19pm - I just let people from New York magazine photograph me. FUUUUUCK.

Admittedly, as the day wore on my tolerance for the heat, the sun, the isolation, the alienation, wore threadbare. But the worst, the absolute worst was my sense of isolation, which had so magnfied itself in intensity by 4 o'clock that I began to wish I'd sought out somebody to go with. Had this been winter I probably could have dealt with it. But the heat, oh the heat, the heat makes me grumpy and severely impairs my ability to think clearly. I spent much of the late afternoon loafing around on the boardwalk (where at least the ocean breezes made it bearable) wishing somebody would talk to me. Everyone was with their friends. That pissed me off. Now, ordinarily, I wouldn't have minded, but like I said, Summeritis loves company, and I'd contracted the worst case of chronic Summeritis there ever was. My voice was probably hoarse from disuse. Save for some protestations upon being asked to be the subject of photographs, and three orders for soda at the boardwalk concession stands, I'd hardly said anything at all. Feverish (I really was feeling feverish by this point, I felt the onset of a sunburn despite all my top-of-the-hour documentation, and my skin was emitting heat), I sought refuge from the sun and ducked under the corner of an awning of one of them concession stand things (awning? I don't quite remember what it was) on the boardwalk.

and for your viewing pleasure, two stray photographs that I could not find a way to incorporate into the tale of Siren Festival as I had experienced it.

What a promotion strategy! Other bands -- take a tip from them. Your fleets of fifteen-year-old converse-wearing street team girls just don't cut it anymore. (did they ever?)

It's such a departure from everything else that was going on that day, from the tired old promo strategies everybody else had been using. It was subtle, it was clever, it was genius. He (he? it's hard to tell, the person's in costume) invokes wonder and curiosity by merely being there. He does not bombard you with a flyer, he compells you to take one. The others, they slapped big obnoxious stickers on unsuspecting people (as a result, many were walking around with stickers on their back pockets and shoulders), shoved things in your face when you weren't paying enough attention to realize you should have been avoiding them as you walked by, pressed handfuls of 1" buttons in your hands. And this, in contrast, is so discreet. So effective and so discreet. The guy doesn't even move from where he's standing, but he lures you to investigate.
A hearty "cheers" to the person in the disturbing 'guise, and to the band too.

Not that it isn't nice to have things shoved in your face. I scored two CDs and a Shout Out Louds sticker. Awesome. When you've been there long enough, you'll reach a certain point at which you are decidedly sweaty and haggard enough to take whatever you're handed, no questions asked. Flyer? Thanks. Sticker? Thanks. Flyer advertising a show I won't want to go to? Thanks. Big hairy tarantula? Thanks. Odds are, if you'd handed me a big hairy tarantula after hour 5 of the excruciatingly long day, I probably wouldn't have noticed until it crawled out of my bag an hour later or until it had bitten me and I was dying.

So aside from the highlights of the afternoon, it was pretty much a complete waste. I'm so going again next year. I so did not learn my lesson.