Chris Martin and I will not be friends

Coldplay are extortionist bastards. one hundred sixty eight dollars for free standing tickets!? uh uh. no thank you, you can sing to gwyneth alone, I want nothing to do with your sugar-coated faux angst. what do millionaires have to cry about anyways?

(Flashback: A winter's night in NY in the not-so-distant past. Outside, the streets are a noir-ish grey: you could almost hear Orson Welles lurking behind the corner in a trenchcoat. Elliot and I are in St Mark's Bookshop on East 8th [hope I'm getting this right.. my memory is a murky mess] browsing through pretentiously intellectual reading material, like too-cool translated Japanese fantasy lit disguised as 'postmodern discourse', but it's forgiveable. We were at that age when it was our prerogative to pretend to be someone else. The riffs of 'Yellow' hum themselves into the air, punctuated by the occasional intrusion of the rain whenever the door swings open momentarily to let another wannabe in or out. Of course, we didn't know it was called 'Yellow' then, but the freshness of unabashed Brit rock in a country where radio served a stale staple of bling beats and whiny pop rockers reeled us in instantly. The rest, as they say, was not history, but rather the shared experience of all who went to college at the turn of the millenium. Wasteful Internet decadence at its height: We Napster-ed Coldplay.)

So much for nostalgia. I'll have to KIV my Coldplay concert plans, especially since I had been unusually extravagant last month.

The sad thing is, our sunny island rarely gets any remotely good bands doing shows that I always feel compelled to go even if it was something I only marginally like. Coldplay's good because it stirs up warm fuzzy feelings for old times' sake, but it's not really the footstomping, fistpumping kind of 'good' nor is it clever or witty enough to excite my inner geek. Every now and then, we get a Franz Ferdinand, and every inch of your soul, every particle of your being is charged with such frenetic excitment and you feel like frankiestein waking up to the smell of morning. But then it ends and you hang around, hover, stick your hands in the pockets and kick the dust off the ends of your sneakers while humdrum Oasis and Coldplay come and go and you wonder if you should just go because there's nothing else.

My next frontier is the local indie scene. I went to an Observatory gig last year but noise rock, symphonic or not, wasn't quite my thing. Cafe Cosmos or Timbre, anyone?