Plus ça change

So Sunday night I went to the Hollywood Bowl for the first time to see Dead Can Dance. It was an amazing performance, one of those concerts where you literally feel transported. I wouldn't have been surprised to leave the bowl and encounter Stonehenge right outside (instead of traffic).

And here's one thing about being 40, when you're cool, you're really so much cooler than, say, a 25-year-old. I'm sorry, but that's just how it is. Because when you're 40, you've got a track record of coolness. I first saw Dead Can Dance 15 years ago at Georgetown University's Gaston Hall (capacity 750). I'm just sayin'... Don't get me wrong; I'm glad when a band I like becomes popular. I do not think artists have to languish in obscurity to be authentic in some way. But I'm also glad I got to see them in a more close up and personal sort of way. And Gaston Hall is the perfect setting for a goth concert, given the stained glass and all that.

I was pretty much the only woman there who didn't look like she was part of Morticia Addams' wedding party.


So it was a strange sort of thing to be 15 years and 3000 miles from there seeing the same band. Talk about worlds apart.


Continuing in the "the more things change" theme, Nouvelle Vague opened for DCD. Let me take this moment to give my unequivocal hearty endorsement. If you haven't heard them, click the link above and give a listen. Nouvelle Vague means "new wave" in French and "bossanova" in Brazilian. And so the band takes punk and new wave classics and performs them in a bossanova style. Sublime really. How can you not love a band that rocks out on a kazoo solo during a cover of "Human Fly" at the Hollywood Bowl, I ask you?

Final observation: During the "please give an encore" applause at the end (they gave two), all of these folks held up their illuminated cell phones, lighter-style. Please tell me this is just an LA thing. People don't do this in other places, do they?