Air @ the Hollywood Bowl

Went to see AIR at the Hollywood Bowl last night with Pam and Gina...an all-around amazing evening as expected. Took the Metro Red Line from Universal City (free parking) to Hollywood and Highland and walked up (my preferred route). Stopped off at Burger King for some dinner...in my quest to find the best "Spicy Chicken Sandwich" offered at a fastfood restaurant. As expected, not so good. So today's current ratings are:

1. Wendy's Spicy Crispy Chicken Sandwich
2. Jack in the Box's Jack's Spicy Chicken Sandwich
3. dirt
4. Burger King's Spicy Chicken Sandwich

Is it sad that I've moved to chicken sandwiches at fast food joints as a means to being healthier?

But I digress...

So we continued our ascent up to the bowl as I devoured my so so chicken sandwich...leaving spicy sauce droppings along the way. Got to the bowl in time to catch the last half of Stereolab.

Stereolab: Some good rhythms, some okay singing (mostly French), some very lame/uninspired dancing by the lead singer girl, but some fine-ass trombone solos. Some of their songs reminded me that are some bands that make good music...but only for part of the song. I've always thought about just cutting the best parts of songs (a bridge here, a chorus there) and splicing them into one 9 minute greatest hit(s) song. Otherwise you have to sit through the bad parts (see 'trombone solo') to get to the good. After their au revoir's came intermission.

Intermission consisted of waiting in a long line for beer/wine. It also consisted in my seeing (and continually staring at) one of the top 5 most beautiful girls I have ever RANDOMLY seen in my life. She was amazing...and quite stylish too. Beyond that, she seemed quite nice (or so I gathered from the way she interacted with the people around her). Very beautiful smile...my weakness. Of course after she made her purchases, she vanished. :( I was left to yelling out "Hot girl!" like Joey from Friends as we made our way back to our seats. My emotions were echoed by the intro music that played as we got to our seats...Minnie Riperton's "Loving You". You know, "loving you is easy cuz your beautiful"...except I would add "girl in the hat" (Yeah she had a hat on with little pony tails sticking out...see, stylish). By the way did y'all know that Minnie Riperton was SNL's Maya Rudolph's mom?

AIR: I first heard of Air a few years back when Beck did a song with them on their 10,000 Hz Legend CD. I slowly got into them more and more as I got into the Lost in Translation soundtrack and their latest CD Talkie Walkie. Their music is sort of hard to describe...a bit ambient, but quite unique. I knew they would do well at the Bowl though. Perfect setting...especially with the nearly full moon. PLUS they were accompanied by the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra which definitely made each song richer.

They played a set of perfect length (not too long like Badly Drawn Boy, not too short like the first Interpol or Franz Ferdinand shows..."we only have 9 songs...shall we play them twice?"). And we were happily surprised to see Beck join them for the encore...although he just did the spoken word part of one song so it wasn't that big of a contribution...but I take what I can get.

All in all, an amazing set and I highly recommend seeing AIR live (especially at an outdoor venue like the Bowl).