Bright Eyes at the Wiltern

Three things:



The Wiltern Theatre is an iconic music venue, and an architectural masterpiece. Along with the likes of the Pantages Theatre and Griffith Observatory, it represents Los Angeles in its 1930s art deco prime.

The bottom floor of the venue has removable seating, so some concerts can have seats on the orchestra level and some can open up the space for standing room only. When I was buying tickets for Bright Eyes, the ground floor was SRO, so I opted for the mezzanine. My rock-and-roll knees and my rock-and-roll lower back -- even with my rock-and-roll orthopedic inserts -- no longer allow me to stand in one place that long, and a Bright Eyes show isn't going to have a mosh pit.

So I get a seat and a view -- front row, baby -- because the mezzanine is, I'd assume, a balcony.

But I'd never been upstairs at the Wiltern before, and it turns out that the mezzanine is the back half of the second floor, with the loge taking up ten or twelve rows in front of it, and an aisle running the width of the theatre between them.

This means that my front-row seat was actually perfect for viewing people using the aisle during the show, which seven thousand of them did.


 
  [A video of the band Bright Eyes playing a concert, with several people passing as black silhouettes in front of the camera.]




My wife can now add "rock concert" to the list of places she's fallen asleep because it's after 8:00pm and she's sitting down.



Conner Obrst dances exactly like you'd expect.




 




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