Sonnet VIII

This weekend I attended the V Festival at Hylands Park, a two day long concert with IMO a really cool line-up. The acts I saw: Orson, The Cardigans, Keane, Beck, Radiohead, Fatboy Slim, the Dandy Warhols, Gomez, Matisyahu, Starsailor, Morrissey, Groove Armada, and a little bit of the Divine Comedy, Paolo Nutini, The Charlatans, The Feeling, The Delays. And we danced some to DJ's as well. Yes, so, I was really tired at the end of said weekend. Pictures will be posted shortly - just have to get them from Joe, the only one of us who brought his camera. Some things I learned:

1. Beck and Morrissey are just inherently, innately cool in their beings. Beck's act involved marionettes dressed like him and his band on a little stage that did the exact act they did and had a very funny video montage of said puppets "behind the scenes" at the V Festival. What is funnier than puppets propositioning women and visiting port-a-potties? Morrissey was dressed all in black and his band in all white suits without shirts. That is hot. And his backdrop was a huge picture of Oscar Wilde.
   
2. Wellies are the bomb and give you a bizarre sense of well-being when playing in mud. They also make you a really good dancer.
3. Virgin is made up of evil marketing geniuses that can bleed you dry of all your money and you will smile and ask for more. Examples: a "parking pass" that comes with your very expensive festival tickets but then - surprise - turns out to require a 10 quid payment when you arrive; a festival lineup and venue that are very lengthy and confusing but, again, no publication of said lineup or map of venue is made available to you without another 10 quid investment from you. However, these Virgin people are not operational geniuses by any means, and this festival, if experienced by Kumar Rajaram, would inspire a flurry of overhead projections with process maps and various qeueing possibilities.
4. People are filthy animals when isolated for a couple days with only port-a-potties and various mind altering substances on which to subsist. And I would like to give a quick shoutout to the guy who urinated next to me while we were standing around waiting for Radiohead to start, our chav-ish football hooligan neighbors who blasted radio 1 at ungodly hours of the morning, and the overly amorous couple in the tent next to us. Thanks for making the festival even more memorable.

Endymion (For Music)1

We pitched our tents on high lands. Clouds pour'd down
So we did shower pounds upon the shop
And Cosy Camper's funky wellies found;
Gazebo, chairs, and ponchos were our crop.

We whet palates with Red Bull, vodka, beer;
Thus fortified we sailed o'er waves of grain
And entered harbors beat by deep waves clear;
The diverse sounds, rhythmic, entrancing, rained.

Ears Beckoned by puppets with humor dry
And pipes blew keen notes deep from iron lungs.
Tents sheltered sparks that when stoked did flame high;
hymns fanned, and Dirty Harry, touch of sun.2

We hung it up, the DJ, hats, V Fest;
To bathe post days long revelry is bless't.

1. Wilde's poem alludes to that of Keats.
2. These two lines refer to the Puma stage, which was housed in a big circus tent and was where we saw Matisyahu, Fatboy Slim (who ended with a cool mash-up of the Gorrillaz song Dirty Harry and his Praise You), and Groove Armada.