Week 7: Walt Disney Hall

So my new thing this wait is being late in posting about my new. Wait, being late is the opposite of a new thing for me... Being consistently on time would be a new thing for me, but it would also probably be unsettling for anyone who knows me. Moving on. My new thing for last week was attending a concert at the Walt Disney Hall. This was also on my list of things to do in L.A., so - multi-tasking win!

The Walt Disney Concert Hall is renowned for its acoustics; according to Wikipedia, "The Hall's reverberation time is approximately 2.2 seconds unoccupied and 2.0 seconds occupied." I guess that's good...? It is also renowned for being super weird looking.

{Obviously, I did not take this. Wikipedia did.}

 Anyway, last Friday I made my first venture to the Walt Disney Hall when Tom took me to see Ryan Adams.

{Tom does not share my challenges with the space-time continuum, so we were, in fact, early for the show.}

The show was amazing. The music was great and Adams' banter was truly funny,  but one of the best parts of the evening was the opening act. In my experience, the opening act is usually someone you've never heard of playing music that you politely sit through in anticipation of the night's main event. [This is, of course, not true when the Riders open for America as they will be doing this Sunday at the Belly Up.] Anyway, the Ryan Adams' opening act was not some obscure band from Seattle; it was Mark Twain. Technically, it was Val Kilmer doing Mark Twain, but it was awesome. 

Apparently Kilmer has been working on a movie about Twain for close to a decade. You can see the trailer for the movie here; it includes a lot of the bits that he did last Friday. That Twain sure was full of one-liners, and as we were listening to Kilmer some of them off ("I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it," "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts."), I decided that he (Mark, not Val) would be at the top of my list of people to invite to my hypothetical dinner party.

{Val Kilmer as Mark Twain}

After about thirty minutes of Twain/Kilmer, the show started. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Ryan Adams can be a little hit or miss for me, but I really like every song he played. It was just Adams alone on stage, and maybe it was the effect of the grand concert hall, but everyone was really quiet and respectful while he played.  The clip below is from the show that we saw, and that was about as rowdy as it got (the actual song starts at 1:25).

           

I left with a new appreciation for Mark Twain and Ryan Adams. Great night.