(photoset [flickr])

whew! did everyone make it out alive? my highlights from the last day of the bumbershoot:

- Nouvelle Vague playing for a live KEXP broadcast in the basement of the Charlotte Martin theater. Cute girls with French accents singing new wave songs, virtuoso tambourining from the drummer. A false start to about a “sweet and tender hooligan” when the guys in the band aren’t quite ready. One of them is wearing a ruffled shirt and playing a glossy stand-up bass [?] which makes it all the easier to forgive. And at the end of the show, both the band and the exiting audience yell to correct the on-air host’s pronunciation of “vague”.

- Ben Gibbard showing up for another Bumbershoot guest spot at Tinkle. This time he plays songs about monkeys written by Nillson and Diamond. With the exception of the few people in the audience (un-)lucky enough to be harassed as part of the show, pretty much everyone in attendance is delighted when the David Cross, Todd Barry, and Jon Benjamin’s comedy variety show runs forty minutes later than scheduled. Sure, the guys recycled the video made for last spring’s Vera benefit shows, but the obviousness is part of the humor. In between a pair of their videos (one so full of profanity and full-frontal dude nudity that even the population of Deadwood might have blushed), Slovin & Alen changed costumes often enough to put David and Diana to shame. By the end, we’d all learned valuable lessons — about passing off random objects as human hearts, a doctor wanting to be goth, Bumbershoot guidelines and hints. To commemorate it, pretty much every comedian at the festival joined the Tinkle gang onstage for a We Are the World style performance of the Rent theme song. And I think I can call my life complete now that I’ve experienced David Cross perching over me and belting out “Seasons of Love”.

- All of the ways that people interacted with the SuttonBeresCuller installation. Lounging in front of the television on the half trailer’s couch, avoiding the sun in the shade of the unfinished project’s box, visiting the mobile park’s bench, and sitting on the roof of the submerged house. It was a really great transformation of north lawn of the fountain.

- Obviously Feist being Feist was a predestined highlight. She opened with a song written in Seattle with her friends from Kings of Convenience. At the midway point, she asks the band to leave so that she can do the amazing thing where she plays a couple songs with just herself and the sampling pedals. It’s neat when Radiohead does this sort of trick, but when they do it it’s awfully showy. Here, the way it just blends into the act and sneaks up on everyone is all the more astonishing. In the spirit of our weird democracy, the audience to vote for the next song by choosing a number without knowing what song corresponds to their choices. And in this section there is a very important lesson. When a beautiful Canadian asks if anyone has a lighter, she means for you to hold it up while she sings the heartbreaking song. She does not mean for you to throw a lighter at her chest. While the person in the audience with a major-league pitching arm may have had the best intentions, it is pretty much always rude to peg a lighter at a lady. And apparently, there aren’t enough smokers at Bumbershoot to attain a critical mass of flickering flames. The show takes a turn toward the upbeat when she brings the boys from the band back onstage to close out the set. They sing like the Pointer Sisters, play “Mushaboom”, and as red and yellow lights flashed on one dedicated fan’s freshly-purchased poster hanging over the photo pit’s fence they ended the set with a Nina Simone cover (”See-line woman”).

- Rushing over to the Broad Street Lawn to get our Arts &; Crafts collective trading cards stamped at the Metric show just as the band was playing “Police and the Private”. Later, Emily Haines dedicated “Rock Me Now” to everyone in the attendance who had never purchased an album, a likely majority of this Tribe Called Quest skipping crowd. Repeatedly hovering over the audience, she reached out to meet outstretched hands and at one point indulged a fans by letting them play with her hair. By the “fake encore” portion of the the show, she’d toppled one of her keyboards, donned a hooded sweater that had made its way onto the stage (which looked like a “fucking thrift store”), and dispensed some fall fashion advice (big eyebrows). After a decent amount of headbanging, jumping around, letting the guys take guitar solos, and writhing around on the floor, they closed out the festival with “Soft Rock Star”.

What were your favorite festival moments?