So, the Boredoms show, June 30th, in Philadelphia, with Lightning Bolt and Hrvatski.

I think people played a lot of new shit. It's sometimes hard to tell with stuff like that though.

Keith Fullerton Whitman is like balding. He just had a laptop, and had probably done a great deal of programming in advance. I don't know. I know he was able to stand up, with his fingers not glued to the keyboard at all times, and drum along with his samples and stuff. He was pretty into what he was doing. I don't think the crowd knew who he was, but I think he won them over. Oh yeah: Not as loud as I expected, he wasn't doing the Irrevocably Overdriven thing of trying to max things into the red. He played songs that had length. One had a lot of video game samples. When I came in, he'd started his set but he was mostly just playing beeps. He got into rock out mode shortly thereafter. He was good. I had earplugs.

At one point one earplug fell out onto the ground but I put it back because Lightning Bolt are fucking loud. I didn't see them, as they played on the floor and a crowd emerged quickly. During the last couple songs, I rushed forward into the fray and got closer to the scene but all I saw were amps and the head of Brian Gibson's bass. It seemed like a lot of what was being played was new stuff, and some of it was pretty awesome. I got more covered in other dude's sweat during their set than I think has ever happened.

The Boredoms had three drummers and Eye playing- I guess a synth? I don't know. Show started with him holding what I thought were candles and waving them about. This created a sound and I don't think they were candles. Anyway- They were great. There was one song that was just like a dance gem that Yoshimi sung, it was like OOIOO or Black Dice remixing Deerhoof (music critic bullshit talk). Everything was good but that stood out. They played two encores. During the end of the first set, this Japanese dude started standing near me, with a little baby on his shoulder, baby wearing big red noise-cancelling type headphones. During the encore I saw this guy sitting on a speaker upfront. The kid clapped. It was great. Lot of dancing. Everything could be on an album. I recognized, like, a chord from Super Ae. Most stuff seemed new.

And then as I'm leaving this person's all "can I see your shirt" "yeah" "is that tux dog" "yeah" "this is ben jone's sister" "oh hi" "hey" "wait does that mean your poetry from when you were like twelve is in the paper rad book" "yeah, words to live by. well, that's embarassing." "for you or for me?" "i guess both of us, so it cancels out and we're cool" "high five for coolness" (we high five) "where'd you get that" "I made it, there's a website" "yeah i know, that's cool, i should tell my baby brother that someone's following his dogma" "yeah some nerdy kid in Philadelphia" Then I walked off to wash the sweat from my arms and face even though I could've pursued the conversation more or at least in some way tried to make myself seem awesome.