When my friends and I decided to go away for a week, we had no idea that we’d miss one of the biggest events to hit Philly in years.
Luckily, my compadres at Philly Future were there to catch all of the action. PF’s Live 8 coverage was a thing of a beauty. As one of only fifty bloggers worldwide given a press pass for the event, Albert was in the front row and took some amazing shots. You can check them out on Philly Future, Albert’s photoblog, and his Flickr site. Dan Rubin of Blinq also did a great write-up describing Albert’s experience, including the fact that Albert is going to donate all of the proceeds from his photos to the Live 8 cause.
The Philly Future team was all over the national and international airwaves, with Karl appearing in an Inquirer article, and Albert doing an interview with The Independent of England. And many Philly bloggers, like Will Bunch of Attytood and Dan Rubin of Blinq, wrote live blogs of the event.
My own experience of Live 8 was limited: I listened to the radio broadcast on my way home from the beach, and then caught a three hour rebroadcast of concert highlights on Saturday night.
I do hope that Live 8 makes a difference, and there is reason to hope that it will. Still, I think that it would have been great to have all of those rock stars show up in a “free speech zone” close to the G8 meetings to give a real message of public dissent, and to really put themselves behind the cause.
The biggest irony of the day came during the concert rebroadcast that I watched on the local ABC affiliate. While there were no MTV-style breaks in the music, more than once, commercials for the show took a weird turn: just after displaying images of starving African children on the Live 8 screens, the ABC affiliate played commercials for TrimSpa, in which various Americans talked about how many pounds they had lost using the TrimSpa system. It was a perfect encapsulation of the American dilemma: the rest of the world is struggling to feed itself, while we’re trying to figure out how to stop eating so much.
3 Comments on "Live 8"
Matt:
Hey–I got some pohots on my blog as well. Not nearly as good as Albert’s, but I’m happy with them.
http://www.thebmrant.com/
Matt:
uhhh…that’s photos….not sure what pohots are.
jess:
did anyone else feel that madonna carted birhan weldu around the stage just until she grew tired with not being the primary focus? and that her vocals were off and kinda contrived? i am thinking that she may need to tour more often, to keep in practice. i know she likes to tour only once every thirty years so that ticket prices can be outrageous enough to fund trips to the spa for her eight-year-old, but when the key suffers… usually, ‘like a prayer’ gives me goosebumps and kinda makes me cry a little. but it didn’t sound good and it irked me to see someone come and lead weldu from the stage mid-song. in the same way the trimspa/famine juxtaposition was irritating. might just be me, though.
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