I had a particular spiffy weekend planned that ended up with way too many foibles and screw-ups.
My Friday plans ultimately took me to Chicago to see french synth rock band M83. I left work a little early to board a bus to Milwaukee, meet up with Dave, have some dinner, and drive down to Chicago. We went to a marvelous Mexican restaurant on the south-side of Milwaukee, went to a couple stores I had wanted to go to, and then headed south down 94.
M83 were playing at The Bottom Lounge. A venue that I assumed would be like any other venue I've been to where an electronic genre band would play. Some 'trendy' place with a constant flow of eletronica music building up to M83's performance. This was not the case. The Bottom Lounge was more of an indie rock venue where bands are setup on stage without an interim DJ to streamline to setup and tear down process.
So when we arrived around 10:30pm, which would've been the perfect build time to the night's headliners and a decent amount of attendance, I was quite perturbed to realize that the 9pm time on the ticket didn't mean "Doors at 9pm", it meant 9pm. Balls.
That was a secondary concern, though, considering that M83's performance sold out. Dave insisted that I, at least, spend my ticket I paid for. I did. And 15 minutes later, M83 finished up and tore down their equipment and readied the stage for the next band. Rather than pay for expensive beer in the "waiting room," we decided to drive around Chicago a little bit and then head home.
On the plus-side, M83 are fantastic. Their songs build layer after layer. Their voices, guitars and sound play in absolute harmony building this strong, powerful, warm aura. Apparently, M83 were huge earlier in the decade and hadn't produced anything new until this year. This tour was a slight comeback for their career. I may have heard some of their music before, but I didn't really know their name until their track appeared on Sasha's Involver 2. It's one of my favorite tracks on there, so I figured this would be a worthwhile event. ^_^
Anyways, I completely screwed up that night. Oh well...
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On Saturday, I had a date with a girl I went out with a few times in the past few weeks. Everything seemed to be going great with her. We really enjoyed each others company. But she dumped me because she's busy all the time and doesn't really have time to date.
On the plus-side, I now know of a Driving Range that's pretty close to my apartment and is open all winter long!
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For Sunday, Tony and I had tickets for the Madison Opera's production of Madama Butterfly. Madama Butterfly is set around Glover Garden in Nagasaki. Pinkerton, a US Navyman, meets Butterfly, a geisha, while stationed in Nagasaki. They fall in love, and are wed. Pinkerton must return to the US, though, and he leaves Butterfly in Japan. That's the first act. The second act focuses on Butterfly and her resolve and dedication for Pinkerton. And in the third act, Pinkerton returns, but not with joyful news.
MY GOD can opera be boring. I think one of their larger mistakes was omitting the second intermission with 5 minutes of low-light visual aura and pleasant somber music describing the evening turning into night turning into midnight turning into morning. I nearly fell asleep at several points.
I screwed up this event by forgetting the tickets at home by the time we arrived at the parking garage. We finally got into the overture center 20 minutes after Madama had already begun. We were able to watch the first act on monitors they had in the waiting room, but the quality was so horrible, you couldn't even read the translation.
It was certainly interesting to see a production of Madama Butterfly, but the aesthetic of Madama Butterfly is more opera oriented rather than Japanese oriented, so it fell a little flat for me.
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Between these failures, I bought a couple new records on Saturday morning and watched a bunch of sad movies on Sunday and now I'm under the weather today for some reason. Oh well, Marmoset, there'll be days like this.