The "other" festival

There was almost seven hours in between the two film festival movies that I watched on Friday, so I took it upon myself to get a few things done during that period. Most notably, I finally finished off Neuromancer, William Gibson's revolutionary science fiction novel, watched 3:10 to Yuma (which was great), and checked in at a hostel.

The hostel room was for a place to crash for Karen, Janna, and myself, as we had planned to meet up and go drinking in the city. After much confusion on her part, I met up with Karen soon after The Man from London finished. We had a couple of beers in the room before meeting up with Janna then going out. We started off at a bar with a large outdoor patio, and then went on to look for more exciting places. Unfortunately, every place that looked even remotely interesting had a large line, or a cover charge, or some stupid dress code (although most places with dress codes do not appeal to me anyway). It turned out that we walked around in circles for a while before finally settling on going back to the first bar that we went to. We had breakfast at this little hole in the wall (often the best kind of place to go to for breakfast), then sold my ticket to Juno before Janna and I headed to the Virgin Festival with Janna's brother.

The festival was awesome. I admit that the main reason that I went was to see Björk perform live again, but I did enjoy myself for the entire day. The first act we saw was k-os, who was alright. At this point, we felt like getting some food and drinks, so we proceeded to get ripped off. Festival food is usually overpriced, but to add insult to injury, the way in which food and drinks were purchased was a silly ticket-based system. One place would sell tickets, while several other places exchange tickets for food. What was annoying about this was that you'd end up with people essentially lining up twice for the same thing. The thing that seems to ruin festivals these days are the stupid decisions and regulations made by other people who probably have no interest in the music being played.

We saw Kid Koala (who was called up at the last moment to do a filler set) spin some pretty good tunes for a few minutes, but he didn't spend a lot of time on stage due to some apparent technical difficulties. After another drink, we went to see the Arctic Monkeys, which I only went to for the benefit of staying in a group. I really don't like the band, and wasn't really too impressed with the set, though everybody else went nuts. We split up for the first time after the Arctic Monkeys set when I decided to watch Hayley Sales instead of Interpol.

I'm glad I saw Hayley Sales for the second time (the first being at Whistler), as it's always a pleasure to listen to her nice and relaxing acoustic surf rock. In fact, the whole set was really relaxed - the whole crowd was sitting on the grass in front of the stage and just chilling out. Sadly, not a lot of people seemed to sing along when Keep Drivin' came along as the last song. Almost immediately after Hayley Sales finished, Mute Math started playing on a neighbouring stage. I hadn't heard of them before, but from the one song I heard, they seemed like a decent hard rock band. I went back to catch the end of Interpol (who kind of sucked - they screwed up a few times) and meet back up with the others.

Björk was the headlining act of the night, and deservingly so, as she just blew everybody else - as well as the crowd - away. In fact, after she finished, a common sentiment I heard from the crowd was something along the lines of "I wasn't really expecting her to be that good, but she was really awesome!" Of course, I already knew she was going to be awesome, and just enjoyed the incredible set that she played. It varied slightly from her set from Coachella, which was more than enough to keep me satisfied. The laser light show was also cool, as was the weird visual electronics interface that the "DJ" was playing around with.

Because the Virgin Festival was being held at the Toronto Islands Park, and there were only one or two ferries running, it took a really long time to get everybody out of the grounds. About an hour and twenty minutes after the gig ended, the three of us finally landed back at the harbour.