Even for Barcelona, what a night! Having been at home sick for three days and knowing that I had midterms the following week, I knew I had to seize the opportunity to have as much fun as humanly possible (without dying) at the Of Montreal concert last weekend, and it didn't disappoint. Having officially decided that we are "novios" (boyfriend/girlfriend) it would have been more fun to have Cristina as well, but she was still holed up in a Girona hospital trying to recover from pneumonia (thankfully she only passed her cold on to me). As is life on a Barcelona Friday night, there were also a fine assortment of piso parties to choose from, and since the show started at midnight (it was at Razzmatazz, the same venue as that Cut/Copy show) I managed to make it to two of them before heading out. "Que punctual!" said Roxana - my friend Devin's tan, beaming Peruvian roommate that every guy seems to be in love with - when I was the first to arrive at the going-away party she threw for her old friend from Portugal. Since the party (captured in the photo above) didn't get going until late, I also had to be the first to leave, which is a shame, because I apparently missed out on seeing all of my friends embarrassingly drunk (no surprise there) as well as seeing my good buddy (and 20-year-old) Evan necking with a 31-year-old Columbian woman. Such are the sacrifices of leaving a party at 11:30 in Barcelona.
I stumbled into the warm night of the Pakistani-dominated Raval neighborhood and grabbed a falafel to eat on the way to Ross's place, where he and some of UCLA friends were pre-partying before the show. Despite being frat-dudes all, they were all seemed pretty well-adjusted, and after a few cheap Spanish beers there, we all headed out together and packed into the already-crowded metro to get ourselves to Razzmatazz. We got ourselves inside and almost immediately got separated, which is usually impossible to rectify in Razzmatazz's labyrinth-ian maze of terraces and stairwells that connect four massive dancing-rooms. But by some miracle we found each other as well as Sophia and her righteously-soused Parisian friend (that's the three of us pictured above). I didn't catch his name the few times he accidentally stumbled into me, and generally I just tried to keep him from doing the same to other people holding expensive-looking cocktails, of which there were many. Sophia was rather tipsy herself and consequently flirted with me a great deal, which made me rather grateful that Cristina wasn't there to get jealous and protective, which is sometimes her way. We all danced (or something resembling that) until Of Montreal took the stage in all of their bizarre, eccentric glory.
As for the concert itself, well, I suppose in this case the pictures might just describe it better than I can. As you can see, mere words like "bizarre" and "eccentric" don't quite give proper justice to the acid-trip theater that is an Of Montreal show, which uses a revolving cast of musicians and performance artists, to flesh out singer-songwriter Kevin Barnes fractured, funky, electro-psychedelic pop songs. In all the hysteria, I didn't quite make out what some of the costumed characters were supposed to be, exactly, but seeing them jump and tumble around was half the fun (In case you're wondering, the ones in the picture above are a man in a tiger mask trying to pile drive a man in a chicken mask). Barnes is probably the only guy in pop music peacockish enough to stand out in such a crazy circus, prancing around androgynously like a slightly more geeky, sensitive David Bowie. He rarely said much to the crowd, but his crazed-genius charisma never faltered and his wardrobe changes produced increasingly shocking results. Near the finally of the show, he stripped down to a golden speedo and had his ninja friends spread fake blood all over his body (as you can see below). After tearing throw an hour and a half set, the crowd didn't seem like it good go any more nuts. Then the band went into a cover of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" like was 1993 and the crowd went even more nuts. When it was all over, I couldn't think of anything left to do but sleep as if I had just had enough fun for an entire week, which is basically what happened.
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