Archive for October, 2010

It’s time for another one of those weekend activity reports I said I was trying to get away from, but this weekend happened to be totally amazingly awesome so you’re going to hear about it anyway.

Like I’ve been mentioning, I went out to Boston this weekend to meet up with my friends Kris and Marcy, hang out for a while and go see Roger Waters perform The Wall live at the TD Garden.

Saturday

I drove up Saturday morning and got there just after 11am. Saturday was going to be a day of mostly running around as they had to do some shopping and I needed to grab some landscape type photographs for my photography class assignment.

One of the first stops we went to was The Container Store as Marcy needed some….well…containers. And apparently they run demos of their closet organization system and at the end raffle off a $25 gift card. Well…we figured we were the only people who were interested so we had a pretty good shot of getting the gift card for standing around for 5 minutes listening to somebody talk. That is until Richard showed up. At the very last minute him and his (I presume) wife hopped on the bandwagon. And I know his name because he won the gift card in the random drawing. RICHARD!!! *shakes fist* This has developed into a running gag between the three of us now for whenever somebody gets screwed.

Other things I discovered on saturday:

• There is a furniture store chain (Jordan’s) that has an IMAX theater built inside of it.
• If you go into a men’s clothing store to look for a sports jacket to wear over a tshirt (a pokemon shirt in this instance) and jeans for a comic book convention, and tell the salesman who’s helping you such, he will give you a very funny look and ask several times if you’re sure that’s what you’re going to be wearing it with.
• Costume store employees who dress up as Master Chief from Halo enjoy dancing crazily on street corners until you manage to get your camera out to take a video.

We also visited a couple of scenic spots so I could get some landscape photos in considering there was actual sun this weekend. We hit a state park that was nice looking but only marginally useful for landscape photography as it turned out. But then Marcy and I took a walk down the road from their apartment (while Kris napped) and headed over to the Charles River which passes nearby which turned out to be great with the lighting of the sun just starting to go down. I took this picture which I like a lot (even though there’s some technical issues with the composition…namely the horizon being a bit too centered). As usual click to get a bigger view on Flickr.

We grabbed lunch from Domenic’s where I had the best tuna fish sandwich ever and hung out and chatted outside of Starbucks while enjoying some coffee beverages. Dinner was sushi at Shogun which was awesome. We sat at the sushi bar and got to see all of the prepwork that went into all the dishes they prepared. The sushi was great even though I ended up totally stuffed.

The night ended with with some Beatles: Rock Band and reading of comic books until I fell asleep on their very comfy couch.

Sunday

Sunday was more laid back. Woke up and grabbed breakfast at this awesome place called In A Pickle, where I had one of the best omelette’s that I’ve ever had (are you detecting a theme here?). Then we went back to their place and hung out for the remainder of the morning and afternoon, watching football. I took the time to adjust some of the photos I had taken for my class and get some work in on Kris’ book.

The Wall

Then we headed off for some Mexican and then headed into the city to visit the TD Garden and settle in to see Roger Waters. Our seats were on the left hand back corner, two rows from the very top of the balcony seating area. So pretty much almost as far as we could get:

Awful Phone Picture Of The Wall

Once the show got going though, we were in a pretty darn good spot to watch the production and video…so it ended up being a pretty good situation. The show started in a blaze of fireworks and pyro (which, as it turned out, were intended to make the arena smoky so the lighting effects would work). The end of In The Flesh? was amazing, with swirling spotlights from the ceiling lighting up the crowd to an airplane flying down from the top back of the arena into an explosion of pyrotechnics and then we were off.

The Wall which was being built brick by brick as the first half of the show progressed doubled as a gigantic video screen. As the workers laid bricks into the wall the video expanded to play on the bricks that were just put in. Gigantic puppets of the Teacher and Mother made their appearances. Eventually the band was totally seperated from the audience by the wall aside from a few small holes which, during The Last Few Bricks were stealthily covered up so you wouldn’t even notice they were gone. And then there was one brick left for Goodbye Cruel World…and then it was covered and the intermission started.

Marcy and I spent pretty much the entire intermission discussing the first half of the show (Kris kinda didn’t want to be there, he just came along to watch the show which was spoiled for him by a radio DJ a couple days before). The video show, the production…the music…everything was amazing. Especially Don’t Leave Me Now which is a track I tended to not like as much on the album but live, hearing Roger belt it out with all of the emotion in his voice…it really connected. My appreciation of the album and what it meant was growing by the second.

The second half of the show started with the band playing “Hey You” totally hidden by the wall which was surreal. It’s not something you DO in a live show. For the second half the traditional lighting you expect at a concert was mostly replaced by the video show on the gigantic wall. Comfortably Numb was a HUGE highlight with awesome guitar solos and the video show….wow. My favorite moment of the concert was during the second guitar solo, Roger (who was out in front of the wall at this point as the only band member visible) was acting like he was exploring the wall, eventually, with his back turned to the audience made as if to pound his fist on it and a gigantic crack appeared and the wall exploded “virtually” with him at the center, revealing a brightly colored landscape with the video bricks spiraling away.

Eventually the band reappeared on the outside of the wall as “the surrogate band”, with a completely different setup of instruments that just suddenly appeared ( I later realized they came out of the floor of the section in front of the wall) and they did the concert section of the album in character.

The Trial was amazing, with the iconic animations playing full across the entire wall, synced up with the lyrics and music. And with the chant of “Tear down the wall!” from the audience the gigantic wall crumbled and fell, and the band came back on with acoustic instruments to perform “Outside The Wall” and with that the show was over.

It was an amazing experience which I can’t fully duplicate through words. I’m still digesting what I saw and the more I think about it, the greater my appreciation for the album.

After the show we headed out to Spike’s Junkyard Dogs for a late night hot dog and drink which was also really good. Then back to their apartment for sleep.

Monday

Sadly, I had to return home on Monday, but not before breakfast from the local bakery (which was…well…you know) and some hanging out and Rock Band before I left.

The drive back was similarly uneventful to the drive out except I stopped at a couple more rest stops along the way making the drive more like 5 hours long.

So I’m left with an amazingly awesome weekend, spending time with some great people chatting about comics and music and life in general. I’ve determined to find an excuse go visiting again. I’ll be up there again for Boston Comic Con for sure and I’m considering hitting up PAX East this year (have to see if Jonathan Coulton is going to be performing this year or not. Probably he will.)

Unfortunately, it’s now time to get back to reality. Bah.