Virtually Home

This New Year's Eve I attended the fifth annual Flaming Lips New Year's Eve Freakout in Oklahoma City. I've been wanting to attend since the first year, but have spent none of my last four New Year's Eves in Oklahoma. While southern California, Paris, Paris and Belize was a fantastic NYE run, I was kind of psyched about getting to participate. The venue was done up in true Flaming Lips fashion, and I admired the lights and balloons and enormous mirror ball as vast improvements to the vacuous, concrete space that is the Coca-Cola Events Center in Bricktown. The opener was Phantogram, a three-piece band with a drummer, a guitar and a synthesizer, whose dance music was so bass-y that my esophagus must have thought it was experiencing an extended earthquake. No one really danced, which might have been because it was early or because the music was so out of line with what we expected to see next. They seemed genuinely psyched to be there, and having come from New York Ci...