Unreal last night. Simply unreal.*

*quoted from wall-to-wall Facebook comment --Mister, re: Sparklefest
~
A strange and beguiling and slow surge of ebullience settled throughout him, coaxing an inspired kind of agreeance to the dank, spilled-out circumstance and thus calming and coiling the barroom rabble into a lovely, lulling whir of deluded, if just fleeting, enlightenment...
...
Lady Gaga is on the television in the next room. She looks like a toxic snow flake, numb if also nimble and her eyes are distant as she struts slowly across the stage in an arena thousands of miles away from us, captured on camera from a night a dozen weeks ago... All of the people in that audience are somewhere else now, trying to relax.

And I'm wondering what's real...

And I'm wondering, having written the first^ of the above paragraphs at midnight, on my cell phone, after imbibing in a crowd of head-bobbing sardined souls tacitly radiating their own respective appreciation, if not mere enamoration, with the creative energies clinging to the worn rubber boot of Detroit - whether I'll look back at myself, in 20 years, and just see a blur of exertive nights with ear piercing amps and eye straining luminance, a blur of drifting if not dancing through the disintegrating hours of the morning and having trouble then remembering exactly what you shouted to the band when they got off stage or exactly which of their songs you dug the most...

Will it seem like a heaven? Or a weird kind of hell?
What, or how, will you remember...

But you do remember how endearing SelfSays was, to the crowd. You remember how invigorating, if even frightening, it was to watch Sheefy writhe on the linoleum or do mid-air pivots off of pilars as he sings "fuck you,"... or how fast and how head-spinning-ly articulate Mister is, with his delivery and cadence... or Jelly Roll Joel's uncanny finger-picked psychedelic guitar shreads... you'll remember how incredibly fast (and passionately) the Kodak's drummer was... how primally valiant Woodman were, working their way through a blownout sound system...

You'll remember some, if not all...but...

The energy, to be vague... stays constant, through each night, each year. And you'll remember that more than anything else.

To go into the oven of Northend and look at said-energy right in its yellow-eyed, fang-bared face, ...would make a lot of things, a televised Gaga concert -included, feel less real, or hollow.

Some will have others "let loose" for them...and they'll watch the splendor, the theatre, the escapism...of Gaga or whatever else.

Others seek other outlets for letting loose... And that's where we get something like Sparklefest...

Or Scrummage, for that matter.

Or whatever else is happening next weekend, or next Monday night, in the next available crevice of Detroit.