8:30: He's doing the "UAF (Ugly As Fuck)" song. Cool. The sound here isn't excellent -it's too often too hard to hear him over the music--but the bass being canonized here is a good thing. The crowd is all over. Neat moment. He's walking off stage. Good not great.
8:41-8:48: So, here's what's happening: Three girls are in line getting some snacks; pizzas and drinks and whatnot. It's almost $29, which in itself is ridiculous, but that's not the point. One girl is paying for everything. She hands the cashier her card, the cashier swipes it, then she looks at her and says, "It's been declined." Whoops.
Decision time. It's a gift card, apparently, so she pulls out her phone to try and check the balance. This is not a fast process. It was funny at first, but now it's frustrating. The people behind them are beginning to rumble. One of the girls in the group that had wandered off for a second comes back and asks what's up. They tell her the card has been declined. She asks how much it is. They tell her $29. Her response: "Oh, I ain't got that." Then she just walks the fuck away. Hahahaha.
The girl who was supposed to pay, originally, just stands there, holding pizzas and already opened sodas. It's not clear if she's trying the "I'm Just Gonna Wait Here And See If I Can Pressure This Lady Into Giving Me This For Free" move that you can usually get away at fast-food places if you order an extra drink after you've paid and then stand there and fumble around looking for $2, but if she is, it isn't working.
The cashier is a pitbull. She won't flinch. She just stares, dead into her eyes. This is excellent. It's like a standoff in an old western movie, except instead of guns, one woman has a job to do properly and the other one has no common decency. Awesome.
8:54: CUDI! The crowd explodes, explodes, explodes.
9:25: Cudi is an excellent live performer. He's very enthusiastic. He's already done that song about marijuana, that one about possibly being a ghost, that spooky one from the first CD and that one about being up, up and away. If you're not bothered by the whole artsy, I'm-important ethos he carries around with him, it's pretty impossible not to immediately fall in love with the guy.
9:26: By the way, he's been wearing a zip-up sweater this entire time. All of sudden he looks like Linus from Peanuts.
9:28: It's getting good and revved up in here. People are crowd-surfing now. That's a thing they only do at predominantly white shows, FYI. Black people don't crowd surf. They also don't regular surf.
9:28:05: That last timestamp, by the way, was brought to you by the good people at Generalized Stereotypes, helping you be a subtle bigot since 1848.
9:28:15: Cudi has this symbol that they've been playing on the big screen behind him. It's basically a picture of a planets revolving around a sun, but instead of their being a central sun, there's this great big outline of himself. It's like the Cudicentric model of the solar system or something. Copernicus is the one that came up with that version, right?
9:32: So here's another question: The floor section of the show, they're jumping around and going all crazy and mashing into each other and shit (Chip referred to it as "the jungle" earlier). The seated section, though, we're mostly stuck to our chairs, tiny and contained. Do seats homogenize the concert experience at a show like this? Because it kind of feels that way right now.
