Tonight at 7 pm Pacific, you can do one of two things:

1. Watch Radiohead broadcast their last North American show of the In Rainbows tour, or

2. Watch Obama give his biggest speech ever.

I love you, Radiohead, but this is a little more important to me, given that I’ve seen four shows on this tour. Don’t take it personally.

Got up pretty early on Radiohead Day, around 8 a.m. I think it was. In spite of getting in fairly late the night before. More than a little liquored up, as well!

Did my usual, made coffee, fed dog and cats, and put some chicken breasts on to bake in tarragon and white wine. Internetted. Dressed to go meet a friend to exchange dollars for Radiohead tickets. Waited in vain for half an hour…stopped at bank to get cash to pay friend figuring that at worst I could sell at the venue. Emailed non-showing-up friend and said um, do you still want tickets? he called and said yes, and that he’d be back in East Van early afternoon; I said OK, well I’m at home till about 1:00, can you come by then, and he said yes. So I baked this really nice little Chocolate Bundt Cake out of my America’s Test Kitchen cookbook (really nice texture, will totally make it again, wish the recipe weren’t across two pages though), made some tarragon mayo, made us darling little chicken sandwiches, boiled up some edamame, cubed much of a gorgeous cantaloupe, and blanched some snow peas, to make up a chicken breast and snow pea plate for my dad, and packed up sandwiches, edamame, melon and sliced and wrapped cake for the lineup. Ticket guy showed up shortly after 2:00…So an hour later than planned, headed out to UBC.

After paying some heinous parking fees of late ($17.50 for less than four hours beneath Pacific Centre! THIS AIN’T NEW YORK, PEOPLE!) it was nice to score a $5 parking slot for the entire afternoon and evening.

We headed to the lineup and the misery began. There was a holding area, post-search, where people had been lined up. Just as we arrived, there was one of those spontaneous herd instinct things, and everyone rushed up to the entry. Gates weren’t open yet, but people needed to feel closer to them, I guess. Couldn’t see my peeps, talked to Mike who was at the drinks thing the night before, and tracked him down. Eventually caught sight of Sean, although didn’t speak to him.

The Main Distractor and I chatted with Mike and this other guy, ate our picnic standing up amongst the faithful, and melted in the sun. For two and a half hours, as the doors were late opening. While those peculiar people who hire on as security, screaming, berated people who actually dared to–wait for it–SIT DOWN while waiting. Whoa. I mean, the nerve! “ON YOUR FEET!! MAKE A PATH!! GET UP NOW!!” Listen, bitch, nobody’s paying ME to be here, and you can stop screaming like a little puling fascist right fucking now.

When they did finally let us through, their scanners were malfunctioning and they had to hand-rip stubs. People overwhelmed them and just went right on through.

Thanks to Mike’s excellent recommendations, we slud through to the field PDQ. The stage had this barrier thing running between it and the sound/light booth, though, so there was this empty wasted swath of prime center stage, 5 or 6 feet wide, running all the way through. Nothing useful in there but cables. Normally, cables are run under a shield of some kind or under the plywood…I don’t know why this is no longer an option for UBC, but after even half an hour or so against one side I calculated my view as basically the back of the heads of the tall boys in front of me, and my likelihood of being squished against the fence as high, so we escaped to the stands, where many Radiohead friends had already scoped out sweet spots, and were kind enough to share with us. I shared cake with them

The set list was:

01. 15 Step
02. There There
03. Morning Bell
04. All I Need
05. Where I End And You Begin
06. Talk Show Host
07. Nude
08. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
09. The National Anthem
10. Bangers And Mash
11. Faust Arp
12. Videotape
13. Karma Police
14. Jigsaw Falling Into Place
15. Just
16. Exit Music [For A Film]
17. Bodysnatchers

Encore 1
18. House of Cards
19. Optimistic
20. You And Whose Army?
21. Planet Telex
22. Everything In Its Right Place

Encore 2
23. Reckoner
24. 2+2=5
25. Paranoid Android

And I had my best view yet of the light show. the seating in the covered bleachers was an excellent idea, as it poured with rain. So we were spared a thorough soaking (our trash bag ponchos wouldn’t have stood up to all that!!).

And that closed out my 2008 Radiohead shows. Holding hands with my Main Distractor. He had a good time, too.

My intention afterward was to hang around and chat with some friends I hadn’t caught up with, but it was cold and wet, and we were well-positioned to make a speedy exit, so we did. Due to the lucky parking, we were able to get off campus with little delay, and a fortuitous choice of route got us from our parking lot at UBC to the heart of East Van in less than 30 minutes, in spite of pretty bad weather. Much easier than some of my other concerts this year!

Much to cover! not sure if I’ll get through it all as I’m a tired girl and could use some good shuteye tonight, long day at work tomorrow.

So the rest of the birthday: good brunch at De Dutch Pannekoek House, followed by some not too exciting shopping; I did get this darling cute monkey purse though!

Monkey Purse

(Looking it up it seems it’s a lunch bag, not a purse, but whatever. It’s adorable!)

Then an incredible Parkside dinner, of course. Lovely meal, which we both enjoyed.

Monday was dedicated to even more shopping (! I know!); I had a budget to work with and worked it, baby; got him a nice dress shirt; got me a Peter Nygard silk, lace, tulle, cutwork skirt; a grownup patterned silk skirt; and three tops to go with; as well as an iPod case for mine and a laptop case for the new laptop! so I’m set for any fancy dinners anyone wants to take me to

Monday evening we met up with a diverse bunch at Chill Winston: an ateaser who was in town early for the Tuesday show, several of my favourite food geeks (many of whom were also going to see Radiohead), and Seancouver.

Tuesday was spent cooking and running around a little to hook up with a friend who was buying another friend’s spare Radiohead tickets, and preparing a supper for my dad, who stopped in en route to NJ to walk my Choobie and have a non-airport-food supper; and a picnic for the Main Distractor and me to eat in the Radiohead lineup, as well as a chocolate cake to share with the kids. The concert I’ll talk about separately, it was pretty cool in spite of pouring rain.

Yesterday I had to head back to work, and the boy and I had a quiet evening in and finished watching Withnail & I, which if you haven’t seen I strongly, strongly recommend. Thanks, Dignan, for loving this movie so much that I was spurred to get it myself.

Today, another day of work, and another trip to YVR.

Sigh.

Still no definite date. Keep up the well wishes, this apartness really sucks.

I’m bad at waiting. Or maybe I’m good at waiting. I don’t know. I know I hate it though. There are approximately 12 days till my Main Distractor arrives, to help me celebrate my birthday. Yay!

It doesn’t get any easier, I guess that’s all I’m saying. You may become inured to it, but that doesn’t make it any more fun. And you simply can’t think about the fact that he was originally supposed to have been here by now, permanently. Because it makes you, well, sad and or mad, and what’s the use of that?

We have lots of stuff planned for when he’s here; some involving shopping and cooking, and some involving restaurants and/or meeting up with friends, so many of whom haven’t met him yet. There are a couple of unprogrammed days, too, because while it’s nice to have plans, I usually find that I’m saying OH WE SHOULDA _______! the day before he leaves, and time’s run out. So with a little luck some of those things will occur to me before he actually leaves LOL. There will also be a great influx of Radiohead people to see the Vancouver show, which should be lots of fun! and some of them will have a chance to meet him, too.

This week is a bit fidgety, and then next week there is a hair appointment and a spa appointment (birthday traditions, you see). And me becoming ever more impatient.

Thank god for the webcam, is all I can say, and Skype. I think I would have lost my mind by now if we couldn’t talk/see each other the way we can.

I used to go to Seattle fairly often. The girls and I would go for shows, or for shopping. I’d head down with or without Vancouver Radiohead kids to meet up with Seattle Radiohead kids for shows. Lately, I haven’t been going south nearly as often. But the fact that I’ve made more acquaintance in Seattle and my friend Peter from Denmark moved there, and buying concert tickets for a few shows down there, I got my NEXUS pass so I could skip lineups and move a little more freely.

The pass got me through YVR in record time when I came home from Europe a few weeks ago, and yesterday, it enabled me to bypass a good two hours’ worth of lineup on the way to Seattle. So holy crap! I recommend it. If my Main Distractor ever gets his permanent whatnot or employment status squared away here, we are going to have to get him registered pronto. Or plan on crossing over at 4 am or something. Guess which one I prefer :p

So I headed down, made it in just under 3 hours, and met up with Pete and a friend of his from work. We picked up Pete’s gorgeous and really cool wife, whom I hadn’t met before (long overdue!) and went for a v nice supper at The Pink Door. That was delicious. Then we walked over to Key Arena, stood in a couple of lines, and missed most of Crystal Castles, who evidently had started before the ticket showtime of 8:00 pm, as their set was done at 8:15. Whoops! that was a pisser (or a pity, as Pete would say) as we both were interested in seeing them.

The Nine Inch Nails show (the floor tickets were originally intended as a birthday present for my Main Distractor but, alas, Canadian bureaucracy decided that it was not to be) was better than I expected. Not that I expected crap or anything, but while the music was about what I thought I was going to get (a little more new and less old than I would have preferred in a perfect world, but hey), the light show was phenomenal (I keep using the same adjective, so I guess it’s the right one). Radiohead put on a pretty sweet LED show on this tour, don’t get me wrong, but Trent’s light guy has better drugs than Radiohead’s guy or something, because it was on another level entirely. Here’s The Frail and Closer which doesn’t show the stuff I’m raving about, but anyway. I’ll keep looking on Youtube in the next weeks to see some of the songs later in the set, because it was really really cool. I thought the bass player, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, was stunningly good. It was a good show and if my dear sweet boy couldn’t go, I’m glad that I got to go with Pete as he really enjoyed himself too.

Made it home in three hours, including stopping for gas and stopping to read some Nexus paperwork and take out my contacts, and half of Portishead’s Third while waiting for the  border.

Berlin, Berlin, Berlin. The last time I was in Berlin, it was I think 1988, January? there was still a Wall. Rodrigo and I were an item. Rainbirds was still his band. He didn’t have a wikipedia entry yet! I was still in University. I knew about three words of German.

So a long time has passed, and I hardly saw anything I recognized this time, since I didn’t make it to KaDeWe (omg, SHOOT ME! I really should have gone. I didn’t hit the Ku-Damm at all). I speak maybe 300 words of German. HA! anyway.

First order of the day was to see my last Radiohead show. Some pics from Kindl-Bühne Wuhlheide:

Radiohead has one or two fans in Berlin...

The last time the band played there was in 2001. September 11, 2001.

The steam rising from the crowd after the pouring rain stopped.

A good show.

The next few days I met up with a friend from the WGB, and he kindly showed me around. We went to the Pergamon Museum, and several photography exhibitions. We ate Japanese and Currywürst, and had a few. It was lots of fun!

All of the museums in Europe are currently being renovated!

A Long Island Iced Tea gets an umbrella? who knew?

We went to see Rodrigo’s band, Die Ärzte, at Kindl-Bühne. Radiohead sold out one night; DA sold out three.

Die Ärzte on stage. Rodrigo is on the right.

He's still pretty cute!

And Hasa got a shot of us backstage, oh the glamour

Hasa_2006 picture.

I spent an extra day in France, and was lucky enough to have a native host, chauffeur, and tour guide. And chef! I was lucky enough to eat some home cooking, including some of the best pommes frites of my entire trip. We did some sightseeing around Lille, and had a great concert at Main Square, Arras. I don’t have a lot of pictures of the concert, though. We had a pretty decent view, though; we started out sort of close, but the pushing people got too much for us, and it seemed also as though there might be some very un-Radiohead-like discord amongst the fans, so we moved back to where there was something like room to breathe.

Sigur Rós stage setup

the threatened rain just gave us a taste--not much at all

Le Kev. Sorry you're blurry!

Not blurry this time!

clouds

former Gare du Nord

Oysters, anyone?

It all started in Amsterdam, more than two weeks ago. I landed, went to the tourism office to pick up my transit and museum pass, and went to my hotel. It was easy to find, in spite of what a bunch of whiners on TripAdviser had said. Mind you if I’d arrived after business hours I might have found it a little trickier. In any case, I dropped my bags, went to a market to get some water and snacks (MUST have snacks in one’s hotel room!) and then passed out for a couple of hours, jet-lagging pretty hardcore. I woke up and had a snack, had a shower, double-checked my transit instructions, and went off to see Radiohead.

I got there for the second song, it was immensely crowded, and the Dutch are very very tall people. I have no idea what the stage looked like, or what the venue looked like, really. I found myself surrounded by tall people, who were smoking tons of cigarettes, drinking beer, and (and this is the only one that really gets to me) talking. Talking a lot. About anything and everything, at full volume, and I said to myself, that’s what you get for arriving so late, you’re in the back with the people who don’t really give a damn about the concert. So I didn’t stay for the encored, since I couldn’t see anything anyway, and I could feel the jetlag wall approaching at high speed. I was also very afraid to miss my last tram back to my hotel, and be dopy and jetlagging and trying to find a cab. Didn’t seem like a good plan. But I could hear the 1st encore as I walked back to the bus stop, and it was sweet.

The following days, I went to a couple of museums, walked around, etc., and some of it’s documented in previous posts. Here are some of the pictures I took: I love the architecture there!

gargoyle

Rijksmuseum

pardon?

houses

So there’s good news, there’s bad news, there are pictures, and whatever.

Good news is I seem to have fixed my broken blog. I’m home in one piece, and I think I managed to stave off bankruptcy :p

Bad news is kinda myriad (will that word always make me think of the movie Heathers? probably). There was staff upheaval in my absence, and we’re stuck with an astonishing, condescending temp who is so sweet to the Men in Charge that they don’t understand why our jaws are constantly on the floor and our eyebrows at our hairlines. She is either unclear on who her immediate supervisor is (that would be me), or uncomfortable taking instruction (not orders, instruction) from a younger female. Apparently the even younger female who was here while I was away had even more serious issues. It’s always really great when someone new comes in and totally reorganizes someone else’s desk, decides what is the right way to do something, and who she ought to listen to. Never mind actual permanent staff and established procedures.

One more week! please, no more! Unfortunately I don’t seem to have the kind of backup that will allow me to say THANK YOU AND GOODBYE for a morale-boost for the actual admin staff. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

The worse news is that my Main Distractor had some kind of bureaucratic snafu and will not be arriving permanently as of next week, after all. I heard that in Berlin the night my laptop finally, definitively exploded, and it was quite a blow It’s not forever, of course; Plan B has him arriving in August instead, and he’s committed to coming for my birthday and the Radiohead concert here, that’s set, so I guess we’ll take the next steps as they come. It’s funny, because when I was emailing with Rodrigo before the trip, he exclaimed about the difficulties in getting a work permit: when Rainbirds came, way back when, they had work permits and social insurance numbers as easy as pie. How times change.

I’m happy to be home with my cats and dog, and they seem fairly content to have me back, although Choobie obviously wishes he could have me AND go swimming every day. Sorry, Choobs.

OK I will try to get photos to post properly and do the Travelogue now.

At Brussels airport, all is well, ISO food and then off to Berlin and my last Radiohead show–for July.

Photos and such perhaps later or tomorrow.

Must find a hat as I think it’s raining in Berlin…