MUSIC
The Pitchfork Music Festival
At Pitchfork weekend/Lots of bands played some music/It was pretty great. by Erin Watson
POETRY
Johannes Kepler contemplates murder
An astronomy lesson. by Daniel Wright
STORY
Ex-lovers on the lawn
A trial of one's peers. by Kenton deAngeli
POETRY
The life of a salesman
This modern life. by Neal Schuster
STORY
José, Rosalita, and the Land of Mystery
Quite literally a sophomoric composition. by Kevin Clair
EDITOR'S CORNER
I am particularly unsuited to be talking about this year's Pitchfork Music Festival. The demands of my day job, coupled with the stratospheric price of a plane ticket from central Pennsylvania to Chicago when one waits until two weeks before the festival to purchase it, as I did, meant that I had to fly in and out of Pittsburgh, and thus leave early on Sunday, missing many of the highlights of that night.
I didn't miss everything, though. On Saturday, while positioning myself to land a spot in the second row for Battles, I discovered Voxtrot for the first time; 45 minutes later, they went from "that band I see on t-shirts all the time" to one of my favorite live bands, ever ever ever ever ever. If this festival hadn't also featured Dan Deacon and Girl Talk, I probably wouldn't have danced to anyone more. And after that, I did indeed end up in the second row for Battles. Those two sets alone justified the entire crazy weekend. Videos:
Voxtrot - "The Start of Something."
Battles - "Atlas." One of the wisest things I heard at the festival was that, if we were to some day discover tiny people living on the moon, they would probably communicate through Battles songs. They would open their mouth, and this would come out:
But it wasn't all about the music. More than the preceding two Pitchfork and Pitchfork-associated summer festivals, there was a lot of excellent extra-curricular activity going on this year. The guy on Sunday walking around with a DS trading Pokemon was probably my favorite thing to happen since the 2005 Intonation Festival helped to launch Four-Square Friday at UNC. When Dan Deacon's set got shut down early by the fire department because it was too crowded, it turned into something of a hipster revival. There were spontaneous sing-a-longs (I think we very nearly made it through all of "Bohemian Rhapsody"), and when someone lost their friend in the crowd, everyone joined in to yell their name as loud as they could until they were reunited.
So it was a very good weekend, and a very good festival, which Untrenchant will be summarizing in haiku form this week. -kmc