So I pretty much live in the hippest neighborhood in all of New York City–and certainly in Brooklyn–yet I never actually do anything there, because I’m too busy hanging out with Kamran the Boyfriend in his richie-rich when-you-look-out-my-bedroom-window-you-see-the-Chrysler-Building neighborhood. But on Sunday, that all changed on July 27th when I finally went to see the band MGMT at

I was pretty pumped, because my friend Sonya had been forcing MGMT on me for weeks before that to get me ready for the show, and to see them for free seemed like such a I-am-poor-and-I-live-in-Brooklyn-and-I’m-seeing-a-Brooklyn-band rad thing to do on a Sunday afternoon when I’d usually be watching Kamran do laundry. Plus, what beats watching a concert from inside a drained pool?

The gate was set to open at 2, but knowing that a line would form before noon, we decided to show up late with the hope that we’d be able to walk right in. We leisurely ate some faux-chicken buffalo wings and strawberry/peanut butter/cookie “milk”shakes at my favourite vegan restaurant, Foodswings, near Bedford Avenue while some mean stormclouds formed overhead, and then at 3:30, we approached the park.

The line was still huuuuuuuuge. Like, down three blocks and wrapped around the park with eight people across on the sidewalk. Sonya and her boyfriend, Adam, had been waiting since 12:30 and had barely moved. So naturally we cut in front of them, and then two seconds later, Jesus punished us for it by making it pour. Seriously POUR. For, like, an hour. The line looked like this:

and at the end of it, we looked like this:

Almost too horrific to share, right? But I can’t help myself. Plus, we didn’t look nearly as bad as the huge group of girls (+ 1 pimply boy) behind us who had brought the bags from inside boxes of wine and were drinking the stuff out of the spigot. And screaming. Incessantly. This kid near them said, “You girls are drinking wine from bags, and that is fuckin’ badass.” And then they all had a big screamy orgy. They were approximately 16 years old but already had the haggard faces of their mothers, and that pleases me.

The Ting-Tings had played while we were still in line, which was a real shame, because they sounded great. Instead we had to endure Black Moth Super Rainbow, who I will not link, oh no I won’t, because they were that uninteresting. To endure their set, we bought some fruity beer and checked out the intense dodgeball game that was taking place off to one side of the pool:

This picture is cool because a guy is getting hit in the face with a ball in it, but you can’t really tell that at this size.

And then MGMT came on.

They opened with a really slow song, and I was like, “This is a weird way to start a dance party,” but I expected that they were just working up to the awesome stuff. And then they played another slow song. And another. But, like, people were cheering and clapping, and Sonya was smiling her head off, and everyone seemed to be having such a good time. It didn’t make any sense to me. Sonya asked me how I was liking it, and I couldn’t help myself; I blurted out, “This is BORING!” And then I felt bad.

It’s just that I was expecting this and this, and I wasn’t getting it. I had specifically not brought a purse just to be able to dance like a wild woman, and this was not wild woman music. Not liking it made me feel like one of those shallow teenybopper who comes to a show and only knows the words to the single.

With the lame music and the crappy weather, the day felt like this:

But then! They played this, and it was great! And then they played “Kids”, and then they played “Time to Pretend”, and it was glorious! Look at how happy we are, with our wrinkly foreheads:

So in the end, I totally loved the show, and I’m glad we stuck it out. Especially because we got to have Korean BBQ at Dokebi afterward:

And just because I can’t help thinking this is the awesomest thing ever, check out this amateur music video of MGMT’s “Kids”. Soooo good, right?

My roommate, Wen, invited me to go see Cold War Kids play for $3 as part of Celebrate Brooklyn! on Friday night. The only song I’d ever bothered to listen to was “Hospital Beds“, and I didn’t loooooove it like everyone else I know seems to, but I figured a concert in the park would be nice. I listened to the songs on their MySpace that day in an attempt to form some sort of opinion of them, and I felt okay about their songs, but they didn’t move me or anything. I did come away thinking that their vocalist reminded me a bit of Jack White of The White Stripes, though, and that’s exciting.

My friend Beth accompanied me to the park, and we meandered along the tree-lined sidewalks of Park Slope and looked in the windows of brownstones filled with baby strollers and bookshelves that don’t have to move from apartment to apartment as the rent goes up and can therefore actually be filled with books instead of the Avenging Unicorn Playset and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines that mine are.

We got seats toward the center, swigged from our $2 cans of Snapple, and set to judging everyone in sight. Our main target of ridicule was this girl right in of us with these really great maybe-vintage light brown sunglasses that took up her entire face. We mocked her mostly because we felt like she didn’t deserve them. Well, that and her half-hearted greasy female pompadour. And handgun earrings. Then we switched to deciding who I should sleep with while Boyfriend Kamran’s visiting home in Laguna Beach and no doubt ogling tons of blondes in bikinis: the guy with the excellent Bonnie Prince Billy beard or the really classicly-romantic-looking girl two rows ahead of us who might have very well been 15 years old. Wen’s arrival cut the conversation short, and I instead went about taking pictures of myself showcasing emotions ranging from shifty

to manic.

The first band up was Sam Champion, who were billed as “not local for long”, but we found them pretty much nondescript aside from the fact that their lead singer was hot, but even that was questioned once he took off his face-obscuring sunglasses. I think they thought they were kind of . . . The Doors-ish? . . . but we spent most of their hour caring more about the biracial lesbian couple next to us chasing their blonde-haired, blue-eyed toddler up and down the aisle.

The middle band was Elvis Perkins in Dearland, who we took to pretty kindly despite the singer’s all-white outfit and the inclusion of an organ in their instrumentation. I’ll admit that a lot of their music was drowned in our discussion about whether the P on the vocalist’s hat was for Princeton or the Pirates (I voted for the former, since I have a boyfriend who has a Ph.D. from Princeton and all and think I know what the Princeton P looks like), but we also genuinely liked the folksy guitar stuff they had going. If you’re checking out their MySpace, I think “While You Were Sleeping” is a really good representation of what we heard.

In between sets, we amused ourselves with the screen hanging from the back of the stage that showed messages and pictures people in the audience could text in to a special number. There were a lot of “hipsters go home” and “hi lux from axel and cooper :)”, but there were also some marriage proposals and one admittance to giving someone else in the crowd genital herpes.

When Cold War Kids came on, everyone stood up, the aisles filled with people, and the row behind us went crazy singing along (on key, thankfully) to every word of every song. And I found out that I actually liked the band quite a bit. Well, the singer, at least. In fact, I liked him so much that I wished he’d ditch his instrumentalists, get some better songs, and become the new Jeff Buckley. I got so mad that he kept wasting his voice on screaming, but now that I think about it, it provided a nice juxtaposition to his sweet crooning. I felt totally inspired by his singing and his stage presence and his completely soaked shirt. Listen to this, and you can imagine the effort that goes into it.

So yeah, it’s safe to say that I love him.

And the park at night.

And getting sauced at a Mexican restaurant that looked like an Aztec temple afterward with Beth.