More on Arcade Fire

Apparently after Win encouraged the audience to crowd down towards the stage, security at Radio City took exception. This was just one aisle over from where I was, but I didn't notice (though I did see a couple of security guys booking it across from one side to the other at one point).

Neon Bible

I went to the Arcade Fire concert at Radio City tonight. Great show, great venue (I'd never been there before). They're one of those groups who seem like they're having so much fun up there performing, and that kind of energy and enthusiasm helps to get the crowd into the show too. It's also impressive that there are ten people (by my count) up there performing and they're all DOING something at any given time. Nobody's just kinda standing there and waiting for their turn to play. It makes for some really rich, deep music.


The lead singer of the band, a few times during the show, encouraged the people whose seats were further back to kinda move on down towards the front and just kinda stand in the aisles. (At one point he hoked that the security staff must hate him for that.) I happened to have an aisle seat, so at some point during the show this other dude who was filing down towards the front on the singer's instructions wound up standing next to me, and kinda intruded on my personal space. And then I realized, "wow, when did I start worrying about having personal space when I'm at a concert?" (I dunno, maybe that was just because it was a dude, though.) Anyway, I guess maybe that's another sign I'm getting old.

"Some Days Are Better Than Others"

Zooropa was, by most accounts, not U2's finest effort. (As an aside, while my observation has been that most critics and fans rank it ahead of Pop in the band's catalog, I give Pop a slight edge and consider Zooropa their worst studio album. Odd, in view of the fact that Zooropa came out right when I started listening to U2, but there you have it.) Towards the end, though, it's got a song that I think sort of hits pretty well on how I feel lately.

"Some Days Are Better Than Others," I suppose, could be read to be about manic depression or just about the variety of emotions and experiences presented by life. That's the way I am lately (though, I don't know, maybe I've always been like this but am only noticing it recently). Some days, I just don't care about what the future holds, or the fact that I'm always single or why that is, I'm just content to sort of enjoy whatever is going on. Every now and then, though, there'll be a day where I feel... almost crushingly isolated. Before I moved to NYC a few years ago, I read something to the effect that sometimes you can feel really lonely in a big city, even when there are lots of people around, or, I suppose, because there are lots of people around and yet you're not connected to any of them, really. Days like that are bad. I'm not going to dwell on this any more, at the moment, because it's a bit depressing thinking about it. Perhaps next time I have one of those days I'll write about it.


Incidentally, the following song on Zooropa, "The First Time," is just beautiful. I have no idea what it's about, but it's beautiful nonetheless.