My Perfect Weekend

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Birthdays usually do guarantee for good times because most people want their birthday to be an exceptional day with lots of excitement and fanfares. Since Saturday promised to be a huge day/night, my birthday on Friday was more like a pre-game, a quiet build up for what was about to come. After a nice italian-style apero in the office, we went out for dinner at the all-organic restaurant/food market "earthmatters" where we had - probably - one of the nicest burgers in New York to date. (Thanks for the tip, Mr Winiker!!) Just around the corner from that place is the Rockwood Music Hall, a place I like to call at least my second or third home. Stage 1 being so small that when you fill it with 70 people, the place is overly crowded. It creates such an intimacy you can hardly find anywhere else. And the atmosphere is extremely laid back. It definitely adds to the uniqueness if musicians "forget" how to tune their guitar on stage or if they are are too tipsy to remember their lyrics and have to read them from a big sheet of paper.

The annual DUMBO (down under brooklyn bridge overpass) Arts & Music Festival was our main interest on Saturday. Look at it as a huge gallery and studio open doors, add some weird activities like blind folded cage wrestling, creating "immersive surfaces" on a building (the picture below better tells you what I'm talking about), cabaret shows and a human sized bubble machine (here you might also have to check out the pic to understand). And there you go, plain, cool and entertaining ART! The location couldn't have been more fitting, with the old and often run-down red brick stone buildings and the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridge covering the area. You can literally find anything in DUMBO, from toilet seats on the wall of a pub over a secret garden that must be a reference to an illegal substance by the looks of the artists in the studio all the way to great paint brush galleries and really small craft stores. Of course the people here are as arty as they are party, therefore St. Ann's Warehouse delivered full-throttle party tunes that nearly made my ears explode (it was gooooood).

And then, as the icing on the cake, elbow live at Terminal 5 on Sunday evening. With just a little bit of exaggeration, one of the best and most powerful concerts I have ever been to. British lightheartedness meets epic britpop grandeur! They pulled off one of those shows; you know on the spot that you're in for a special night. And luckily the crowd was all elbow connaisseurs, so after frontman Guy Garvey let the audience sing the harmonies for "grounds for divorce" and started the tune, the whole club went nuts. As if not enough, they brought along a two-women-orchestra to enhance the madness!

All in all, a very loud weekend, but may my ears forgive me the various sound explosions over these three days...

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