Night Lights Weekend Wrapup April 29-May 1
If you go out every day of the week, does the weekend ever really end?
For the sake of keeping this a weekend blog, I’ll start with Friday, although I ended up going out every night from Tuesday onward.
Friday afternoon, I started out early to swing by Kawaii Kon. I’ve covered it for the past couple years, and although this year our main gallery was done by Dallas Nagata, whose gorgeous, poetic photos I envy and aspire to, I went just to say hi to people and snap a few shots of the costumes.
Aww, anime hair.
The costume of the guy on the left is so familiar to me, but I’m blanking on what it’s called…
The “Halo” guys.
Here’s poor Gabe, being assaulted by Dallas and another photographer.
After Kawaii Kon, I dropped in on Eat the Street for dinner, and got to try OnoPops’ candied SPAM and sweet cream pop, of which I was an instant fan.
I also got to try some Pinoy Dogs from the brand-new Flip’t Out lunch truck… little, sweet mini-dogs in some kind of pandesal (sweet bread) buns, each topped with a different kind of meat. Filling and delicious, but a little too sweet.
Sweartogod, I’m turning into a foodie more every day…
Afterward, it was time to catch City City, performing live at SoHo. I’d done an interview with the bassist, local girl Valerie Ngai, and got to meet and briefly hang out with her and the rest of the band after the show. Their performance itself was fantastic… even better than I had hoped, actually, which is the same commentary I heard from several people who hadn’t been familiar with the band before, but dropped in out of curiosity to see them.
It was also the first time I got to hear Jake Aesthete, the keyboardist from GRLFRNDS, do a DJ set, and that, also, was pretty fantastic. Much of his set was cool, dancy remixes of indie songs by artists that I was familiar with, but had never heard remixed before. Good stuff.
Saturday was Spam Jam, where Nonstop had set up a shared booth with Yelp. When I arrived to take photos, the team was already jamming, a live Twitter wall, live streaming video and photo stream in full effect. Here’s the full package:
Here are the party pics, but seriously, look at all the photos, not just mine.
I got to have my second SPAM Onopop, which was every bit as yummy as the first, and some SPAM lettuce wraps from P.F. Chang’s. Also, thanks to Dallas Nagata, I got to rock these cute little pins at Spam Jam (name the meme and I’ll give you a dollar… or not).
After Spam Jam, it was home to process photos, and then a brief rendezvous with friends at Bar 35, for DJ Nocturna’s 80s Pop Muzik night.
Sunday, I discovered that Good to Grill in Kaimuki has amazing Kona beer-battered Fish & Chips, which made my afternoon. Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera, but it was so good I wished I did.
Then, Sunday evening, I was taking a nap when all hell broke loose on Twitter and Facebook. I woke up to my roommate shouting something about Osama Bin Laden, and since my cell phone just happened to be in my hand (I sleep like this more often than you’d think) I popped open Twitter and got to read the big news of Bin Laden’s death, streamed live by hundreds of the people I follow. All evening, social media carried the news faster than any of the news organizations could keep up, and I felt like I was watching history being made as the stream scrolled by.
Also, I’m calling it… the Twitter satire (Twatire?) as an all-new form of social media meme. A few short moments after I took this screenshot, @GhostOsama had jumped to over 35,000 followers:
For about two hours, it seemed like everyone in the Twitterverse and on Facebook was focused on new developments in the story (and some incredibly witty satire). A momentous end to an extraordinarily busy weekend? You bet.
What’s coming up in this next week? Cinco de Mayo and First Friday, that’s what. See you out on the street!
