If you know me, you likely know that I am in a long-term relationship with patrick wolf music. Long ago in my formative youthful days, I downloaded one song and, with mind-boggling restraint, abstained from listening to even five seconds more until I had the entire CD, at which point I put it in my superclassy Walkman cd player, turned the volume up in my uber ghetto headphones, aaaand burst into spontaneous tears in my kitchen.
With the beautiful clarity of hindsight we know these years involved actual chemical imbalances in my brain, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have never had such a visceral, instant reaction to anything before or since. Music is, of course, something so…much for me that words always will fail, and I have Intense Feelings about all sorts of songs and music, but always with this longing for an imaginary perfect genre, which would not be classical but star strings fundamentally, have intense driving bass-boost-ready primal drum action, be full of deep poetry lyrics and give you All of the Feelings. It was always imaginary. It did not exist. Except then I was listening to it, and that is why I became instantly, intensely attached.
Then of course during formative mental imbalance times I listened to these three albums basically non-stop for about two solid years (so everything else seems foreign and ‘new’ to me, even if Bachelor is itself years old)
so i almost didn't even go to this concert. was expecting nothing.
Also, the venue was...guys, it was insane. WHERE WAS THIS SERIOUSLY
OH
THE ABANDONED DECREPIT GRAFFITTIED RUINS NEXT TO A TRAINTRACK GHETTO
OKAY
yes, the little red heart. yes, you can only reach it by greeting a number of bums and drug dealers in crumbling doorways.
my rape mugging and murder senses were tingling mightily, let me tell you. as i descended the stairs a RAT THE SIZE OF MY DOG ran across my boot.
Out he comes and, not expecting anything – jaw.on.the.floor.
He’s all in classy tailored black, his arms aren’t going to impale you with anorexic elbows, and he is glowing. The man is G L O W I N G and he’s playing the viola and this super-shiny gold ring is glinting all over the place and, wow, just, I guess I won’t kill myself just yet if someone can go from Pigeon Song to looking like this.
He says people are always judging him now, like, ‘why aren’t you as depressed anymore? Why aren’t you as young?” and tbqh, I was one of those people. Wind in the Wires and Lycanthropy are two of my favorite albums of all time, ever.
I watched the video for The City with complete bewilderment, with Antos and I going bwuhuh? Happy Patrick? Sunny? I…don’t quite know how to process this
I’m standing there gaping up at the stage going This is the person who wrote The Childcatcher ?! (which, do I have a word doc about how bril that thing is? PERHAPS but it is, bluntly, messed up)
But hey yo, he sold that shit. It’s hard to resist someone who’s one step short of physically radiating happiness.
so on the left is his friend gwen christie, who is lit er a ly 6'4", and he's like "oh man she's been learning swordfighting, and horseback riding - do you guys know game of thrones? so this is going to be theseus featuring brienne of tarth" and i died slightly
WOW TWO OF MY FAVORITE HUMANS WITH WHOM I AM IN LOVE OKAY
SO MORAL of this portion of Giant Freakout Essay is this show itself was astoundingly brilliant and also, weirdly, in a good way, full circle – I thought ah remember when you were why I didn’t totally despair, mr day-to-day inspiration for living mr mirror of my grey rainy lonely soul? I’ve moved on, but I will see you for nostalgia’s sake, in memorial to this sealed chapter of my life of my life I can’t and don’t intend to revisit; I will go to this concert and it will be a little time capsule museum piece of my past, and I’ll nod at it from this detached place and then leave.
but
instead
well obviously I had crazy (no, actually crazy) adventures which were astounding and which we will get to BUT better than any of it
I felt, if just for the night, this amazing full-body hope for my own future; thinking, If you can have years and years of Paris and Childcatcher and Wind in the Wires, grey skies and bare landscapes and seeing your bones alone, and have years and years where everything is firing people and failing, heartbreak heckling, lop off your hair, electric guitar screeching, and all of them seem like forever,
and then you end up here, looking like that…
then I should embrace all my grey skies and not be so terrified of the firing and failing because it might actually be all right in the end
bear with me for one more pw cheesy hallmark moment when I confess that I seldom, seldom look forward to the future with anything not found on the spectrum between worry and outright terror. I had twelve hours where not only was I not worried, I had this physical sensation of complete, fundamental reassurance. it was worth twice what I paid to have something inside me just…shut off. Like, he’s playing leipzig (two hours away) on Friday and I was legitimately considering it just for the feeling ha THIS IS WHY I DON’T DO DRUGS GUYS anyway now of course it’s all back on, but I can kind of remember the sensation and it was amazing.
Sooooo the part everyone wants to hear about commenced afterwards; I had been watching Gwendolyn as she partied down in the wings like the most enthusiastic and delightful intense pw fangirl and, if there’s anything that will make you instantly great in my books, it’s doing all the hand motions and knowing all the words to patrick wolf singles
So I had originally intended to just leave afterwards, since I was totally Over Him, only then HA HA I wasn’t, and unsure how creepy stalker weirdo it would be to be like I AM SO HAPPY YOU ARE SO HAPPY IT’S AMAZING CONGRATULAAAAAATIONS, I still resolved to do it if I could, except then actually I wanted to find this amazing Gwen person and be like WOW YOU WILL BE IN GAME OF THRONES AND YOU SING LOUDLY TO PW I LOVE YOU POSSIBLY
So like a total freaking creeper I…hung out by the merch table
because I know his merch guy is actually his fiancé
because I am a creep like that
and i was betting he wouldn't leave without him
and somehow i ended up buying a tea towel (?!?) and i'm pretty sure William thinks i'm an illiterate jerk creeper because HIS HANDWRITING IS SO TERRIBLE OKAY but whatever I have a nice tea towel now. . .
and then suddenly Gwen was there! and talking to some guy in ENGLISH and I just got up and ...sidled over... and she was like Are you a Thrones fan too? Then you'll die when you hear who I've got with me! and rattles off all these names and I basically blacked out after Jon Snow and Theon Greyjoy and then when I actually got introduced to some other dudes I had no idea who they were (Hil says Gendry, but otherwise mysterious?) ANYWAY she goes
"We're going to this bar after, you should come with! We're on holiday !!"
W H A T
are you new to being famous gurl because you just met us ten minutes ago and we are civilians potentially serial killer stalker fans what are you doing
OKAY I WOULD EFFING LOVE TO
but then we got kicked out without gettting the address, just a name, and no one (NO ONE) knew where it was, so I went with the guy and his fellow amazing gay irish buddies to this bombed-out wreck of a creepy graffittied ruin and had glog (ja!) and then
he remembered he'd bought a pw cd but forgotten it back at the concert
so we went back, but it was all closed, so we had to use the back stage door, which was behind a MASSIVE metal gate, and the security guards actually would let NO ONE in and got Will to come out like 'Is this guy legit and not a stalker?' and luckily Will remembered and went back to get the CD and so we got let in
CREEPY LAND WHERE I SPENT LIKE THREE HOURS
so later once we left and then I came back again (it was a weird night yo), allllll the other twenty girls waiting outside the gate were staring enviously at me as I just got to bust back in through the gate since they had recognized me as someone who'd been let in before aaaaah i'm a stalker
but anyway
met the drummer Ben who is UNFATHOMABLY GORGEOUS and super, super nice, and Welsh, and also gorgeous? and so nice?
anyway, then everyone else came out
and Patrick was like ‘hey will are we going to roses let me just get my big puffy jacket and my wallet and we’ll go” and kissed him and I had to be like I’ll be over here in the dark corner pretending not to be here because like, shit is real THEY ARE SO PERFECT TOGETHER LET ME DIE ahem so they got a taxi and harhar let me in your taxi like i was going to roll that that LOL NO
so I ask these biker dudes uh where actually is roses and they’re like yeah walk 5 minutes that way
so I start walking
and who is in front of me just leaving the bar but my four irish fairy godfathers so I go Oi! In case your stalker/fanboy desires are still activated, they said they’re going to someplace called Roses that’s this way? And Vincent, who looks like a Botticelli who’s just bitten a particularly potent lemon, goes OH ROSES HA it’s a gay bar. And it’s not that way, and it’s not 5 minutes walk
you need a taxi
should we do it
oh look here’s a taxi
and my bro the fanboy said in his irish way ACH FOOK IT, IT’S FATE, IT MUST BE FATE, LET’S GO
and so I got in a strange vehicle at 2am with four strange men, headed for a completely unknown destination in a foreign city ! and I did not wear a seatbelt. Safety first, guys.
we race (far) across the city as part of me is thinking hmmm I only have 5 euro to my name…the metro’s stopped running…my hostel is 15 minutes by taxi somewhere in that direction…I may potentially meet with challenges here welp whatever here we are
it was…a wall in a street, that said ‘bar’ in small letters over one door. ? ? ? wooow I would never, NEVER have found it without people who’d been before.
and we went in
and Lo, Behold
who was there
end tally: 2 mixed hot wines
3 jack and diet cokes
half a vodka and coke
and a bailey’s with whiskey
also, they made ‘em STRONG, people. I haven’t been that drunk in probably a year; it’s a miracle I was functioning. Two of the fairy godfathers hadn’t eaten since 3pm, and they went down fast, obviously, and Patrick was only there like 15 minutes before us but was thoroughly hammered, and Will disappeared? And I talked to the saxophonist whose name was emma ! and also played flute, and I was glad because I had wanted to say how great it was to have two ladies in the band now, you could tell Victoria had fun with it, and she was all yeah, girl powaaah and short? haha but lovely
and Patrick was wearing another of his impressive collection of knit sweaters (with skiiers, this time) and told us about his twelve (ten? man I thought I would have the whole night burnt into my conscious but oh hello vodka okay then) cousins (I can still hear the inflection on it) and his uncle who teaches physics at…trinity college? And then the most drunk of the fairy godfathers sort of yelled at Patrick and somehow kissing was involved, and then kissing of various persons, I don’t really know, we were complaining about the heteronormativity on display at what was ostensibly a gay bar, or something, and six degrees of kevin bacon of kissing (or something) and at any rate it was basically
external: yeah hey casual times we’re all super drunk this is no big deal just some spit-swapping whatever
while internally OH MY GOD WHAT IS REALITY HOLY HELL WHY ARE YOU GRIPPING MY ARM SO TIGHTLY YOU HAVE HUGE HANDS AND ALSO LOVELY ACTUALLY KEEP THEM THERE JESUS HOW DID I EVER THINK I WAS ACTUALLY NO LONGER EGREGIOUSLY, INAPPROPRIATELY IN LOVE WITH YOU ALSO WHAT IS HAPPENING WHERE IS YOUR BOYFRIEND DOES HE KNOW YOU DO THIS WOW WE ARE ALL QUITE DRUNK WOW YOU ARE PERFECT
but that was kind of the theme of the night, externally oh jon snow, kit, cool, yeah, and theon greyjoy, whatever while internally screaming HOLY HELL IT’S JON FREAKING SNOW
and jon snow has shiny hair and I somehow had good, meaningful conversations for like four hours about all sorts of things (even politics, lawd) and I never told anyone ‘I REFER TO YOUR CHARACTER AS ‘UGLY HOSTAGE !’ or anything so, yeah, success there
and I met other really lovely and brilliant people, like these two guys from London who were so great (and bought me flipping tons of alcohol, crikey) while we debated the best cellists of all time
I talked to guys and girls about guys and girls and everyone was blissed out and friendly and didn’t have to apologize for anything and
basically
heaven is a gay bar where you can talk about embroidery and elgar and swap spit with genius and fall in love with girls fourteen inches taller than you
and they paid for my cab fare home
and i made it to a bed (astounding)
and then i worked off a mild hangover in a room full of botticellis the next morning
basically berlin is flawless and my life is disgusting
the end
42 °F
40 °F
