Some Random Foolishness..."The Electronic Music Festival"

The summer of 2006 was one of my most eventful summers. I did alot of traveling and checked out a few events around Toronto that I had never been to before, one of which was the "Electronic Music Festival".

I always walked around with a point-and-shoot camera as well as a video camera to record and document anything interesting that happened. Now here in March 2007, I'm at home actually going through all this raw footage I decided, what the heck, I'll upload some of this stuff.

These are video-clips taken from the festival that day. The show was wicked!...Don't mind all the foolish nonsense that we were saying after the show.

MUSIC: Lily Allen - Littlest Things

I had never heard of this artist until a friend of mine told me about her. Very nice, and inspirational music! I guess I'm still on my "UK" tip (see ColdCut - Island Earth), I dont know, I think UK artists are just on a whole different level than alot of "western hemisphere" groups, generally speaking....thats my impression at least (maybe they just do more drugs over there). I find the creativity level is exponentially higher....or maybe I just like the accent.

Here's some of her video's I found on YouTube. Dont worry, these songs aren't completely off in left field, they're just some funky, groovy, sweet tunes. Listen and enjoy!

MUSIC: Coldcut - Island Earth

A new song just found, "Island Earth", this song is HYPNOTIC! I LOVE IT!!! Anyone that knows me knows I have a VERY broad range of musical tastes. I know I've been posting rap videos, but rap is by no means the only kind of music I listen too...in fact I dont listen to too much of it nowadays...

MUSIC: Common - I Have A Dream

Common's newest song that I just discovered. This song is WICKED!, BEAUTIFUL!, the kind of song you just listen to over and over again! With all the bull$hit in Rap Music nowadays, this is probably one of the only artists who still inspires me.

MUSIC: Mos Def

Here's a freestyle I just found from another one of my favorite artists the Mighty Mos Def!....This is just sick!

MUSIC: Common

Well since I'm still in a "Chicago" mood and I'm also a lover of "real" rap music, I figured I would post one of favorite rap video's and songs by Chicago native Common -The Corners!

TRAVEL: "Chi-Town - Part 3"

Ok...so that last three months have been busy as hell. But now its nearly christmas and I have some time on my hands to actually update this damn blog. SO..I'll finish off my Chicago trip, where did I leave off....

Trip to Chicago: the lengths that we would go through for the love of music
Part 3 – The Mission

We were all true soldiers this day! After staying up the night before till' about 1am, I got about 2 1/2 hours sleep then jetted off to the Airport to catch our 7am flight...and in these post 9/11 days...that means arriving at the airport at 5am. Anyways, we caught our flight to Chi-Town and arrived at 7am Chicago time. The concert wasn't until 9pm that night and our flight back to Toronto was leaving at 7am the following morning. So our stay in the Chi' was exactly 24 hours...no need for a hotel. So in a nutshell, our day went like this....




Breakfast at Toronto Intl' before departing to Chi-Town


Arrived at O'Hare

7:00am - 8:30am ....Took the "L" from O'Hare airport downtown...oh yeah, Chicago's "L" SUCKS ASS (See Rants' and Raves' - Chicago Transit Authority (CTA),


Waiting for CTA....and waiting...and waiting


Infamous Chicago "L" Train

8:30a.m. - 11:00am ...Got downtown, roamed around, got confused by some of that "mid-western American slang" while ordering Starbucks..."Whu Cana' Star' Yuh' Off Wit'","Whe' Yuh Goin'"...inside joke :P


Random City Shots

11am to 1:30pm ...Got to listen to my brother and some crack head camera guy talk forever about a "Holga" camera that my brother decided to buy at some camera store downtown...holy crap man, how long can two people talk about cameras...


How long can you go on about a freakin' camera!

1:30pm to 3:00pm...Pissed of a waiter while eating lunch because we wanted to change seats and he didn't want us to move because he couldn't keep track of the tables...like thats my problem...we moved anyways...so as a result he took forever to bring out our orders...




Sitting in our "un-assigned" seats pissing off our waiter...we were kind of pissed too cuz the waiter was a jack @ss!

3:00pm to 6:00pm...OK, lack of sleep is definitely catching up to us and the concert is still hours away...so we decided to get a hotel up buy the airport. Took the "L" again in the middle of rush hour back up to O'Hare...why dont they put any damn A/C on these trains...(again see Rants and Raves, CTA) ...headed back to the hotel to get some rest before the concert...




More Random City Shots


Wha'...you aint' never seen Canadians before!?

6:00pm to 7:00pm...so that wasn't much rest, I snoozed for all of 20 minutes, then we headed back to the "L" to head to the Congress Theatre


Congress Theatre ... the morning before the show

7:00pm to 8:00pm...CTA sucks! Spent all this time on the f#$kin' train!

8:00pm to 11:30pm...TRIBE IS DOPE!! Wicked way to start of a show with "Buggin'Out!", Wicked way to end it off with "Check the Rhime, Award Tour and Scenario!" they performed ALL their hits from "El Segundo to Find My Way!" wicked show...they even brought Jarobi on stage!


Not my picture...but I was there! (Photo courtesy of www.okayplayer.com)

11:30pm to 1:00am...decided to have a night on the town, which didn't amout to much because we were so damn tired. We went to a bar downtown to eat..ahem...dinner, which for me comprised of "Bread with Butter", a "Samuel Jackson's...i mean...Samuel Adams", which is NASTY AS SHAT! BTW, (YES THEY DESERVED TO DIE!! AND I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL!!!!) and I almost forgot the delicious "Fried Cheese!"...thats gotta' be great for the arteries!...it hardens them up real good! :P

1:00am to 3:30am....Yes, thats how long it took to take good old CTA from downtown back to our hotel near the airport.

3:30am to 4:15am....After a good nights sleep, all 45 minutes of it, it was time to get ready and head back to O'Hare to catch our flight to Toronto.

4:15am to 10:30am....got to O'Hare, lucky us, my brother and I (the two black guys) got randomly selected for additional screening at security! Just an observation, about 80% of the people in the "additional screening" line were people of color, and about 80% of the people in the standard line were not. I'm not saying anything...just an observation.

Lucky us again (for real), since we were flying stand-by and thus got seats as they became available, the coach section was full so we got bumped up to FIRST CLASS BABY!!...Ahh' the leg room, nice hot egg omelette for breakfast made from REAL eggs, not that powdered crap, potatoes sprinkled with a delicious blend of foreign spices, buttered toast slightly warmed to slowly dissolve in your mouth, served promptly by monsieur (i forget his name, all I know is he had his shirt tucked into his boxers :S)...so yeah the food was "delightful", or so I was told...I was too tired to care and I slept for the whole flight back to Toronto without eating a thing.

Finally got home safe & sound at about 10:30am...and went straight to my bed.

Was it all worth it? Hell yes, Tribe Called Quest is WICKED! ... but next time, I think I'll order my tickets sooner and just see them in Toronto




Later Chi-Town

TRAVEL: "Chi-Town - Part 2"

Trip to Chicago: the lengths that we would go through for the love of music
Part 2 – How the Hell are we Getting There?

Now that the concert tickets were purchased for the show, the next and most important question arose....even more important than actually getting the concert tickets....how the hell were we getting there!!??

Chicago is an 8 hour drive from Toronto, which isn’t too bad, but it is a very boring drive, and considering this would most likely be a weekend-only trip, nobody really wanted to drive for 8 hours just to stay in a City for a day and then drive 8 hours back, and have to go to work on Monday! Luckily, it is good to have friends who have relatives in the airline industry! We were able to find some really cheap round-trip flights between Toronto & Chicago around that weekend, and flying there was only about an hour, much better than a boring 8-hour drive.




Having friends who have relatives in the airline industry is a good thing!
Photo from http://www.airlinerphotos.de/

Of course, there was a catch.

The Air Canada flight from Toronto departed at 7:00 a.m!...and in this terrorism-age of “heightened-security, and red, orange and amber alerts” (a bunch of nonsense if you ask me), that meant we had to be at the airport at around 5:00 a.m. (BTW, the drive from where I live to the Airport is about 45 minutes), AND, we were flying on “stand-by”, which meant that there was no guarantee that we would get on the flights, we would only get on if there were seats available.

That flight was also on the same day as the concert. The concert was scheduled to begin around 9 p.m. that evening.

The return flight back to Toronto also departed Chicago at 7:00 a.m. the next morning, again meaning we had to be at O’Hare International Airport by 5:00 a.m. So that pretty much meant, we weren’t sleeping for the entire trip!

So the arrangement was decided, everyone would get home from work on Thursday, catch about 4 hours sleep, head to Toronto’s Airport the next morning…fly to Chicago…roam around the City all day…go to the concert…roam around the City after the concert…find a place to crash (probably on a subway train or on a street somewhere, it wouldn’t make sense to pay for a hotel that we would only be sleeping in for about 3 hours max!) and head to Chicago’s Airport Saturday morning and fly back to Toronto.



Would these be our nightime accomodations in the Windy City???

I should also mention that when flying “stand-by” you have to dress in business attire. Since we weren’t planning to check into a hotel, we would have to wear this business attire for the entire trip…not the most comfortable clothes to walk around all day and go to a concert in. But hey, we’d do it all for A Tribe Called Quest! (They better friggin’ show up!)

Part 3 coming soon …

TRAVEL: "Chi-Town"

Well, since I just tore up Chicago's transit system, I might as well stick stay on topic and dicuss my recent trip earlier this September (2006) to "Chi-Town", a.k.a. Chicago (for all the dummies out there who couldn't figure that out).

This was a very short trip, about 23 hours in total from the time we got there to the time we left, yet there is still a lot that I want to discuss about the trip, so I decided to provide details of the trip in separate installments that I'll be uploading every so often in the next couple of days so stay tuned...

Trip to Chicago – (the lengths that we would go through for the love of music)
Part 1 – The purpose of the trip

In order to understand the whole reason why we decided to go to Chicago for all of 23 hours, you first have to go back to about July 2006. It was announced in the summer that A Tribe Called Quest would be doing a reunion tour and would be coming to Toronto in September 2006. My entire teenage years were spent listening to ATCQ, from a little Grade 7 kid doing “the running-man” to “Left My Wallet in El Segundo” to entering my first year in University singing (off-key) “Now you caught my heart for the evening… kiss my cheek move in you confuse things...”. After ATCQ broke up in 1998, I was really kicking myself for never getting the oppourtunity to see one of my all-time favorite Rap groups live in concert. So once this reunion tour was announced, I vowed to myself that, unless I died, I would not miss it!


One of My Favorite Groups of All Time!!

My very first contradiction to that statement was waiting all of 36 hours after tickets where being sold to actually go and buy some. The tickets for the Toronto show went on sale on July 29th and the concert was scheduled for Sunday September 17th (nearly 2 months later!). I went onto ticketmaster.ca on July 31st (only 2 days later), only to find out that the show had already been sold out!

So the first thing I didn’t, without even thinking, was to find out what other Cities they were playing in. The closest City was Chicago, they were actually playing there on Friday September 15th before they came to Toronto. I checked for tickets, they were available, and it was decided at that instant…we’re going to Chicago to see A Tribe Called Quest


Chicago...the Windy City (Photo from hongkong.neuerordner.de/2005/08/)


!...Hey maybe I'll get a chance to run into Kanye West and tell him how much of a jack-@ss he is...(still cant front on his music though, he's not lying when he says he's the number 1 person you love to hate)

More to follow…