Lydia’s Blog

So what do you do on Ticketmaster if you’re shite at typing?

Everybody in the world besides me has probably already used this service…but I’ll just offer up a quick breakdown of how it works.

1.) You type in the act you want to see (in my case, the Beastie Boys at the Greek Theatre in Los Feliz on Aug. 19). They make you fill out a few forms, including the one where you identify letters in a wavy field to prove you’re not a robot, before telling you that the show is already sold out. And may God have mercy on your soul.

2.) You repeat the process with another date…complete with anti-robot forms and a field where you can choose if you’d like to buy two tickets for $49.50 or two tickets for $49.50 (indeed a laborious decision).  You press send.

3.) Ticketmaster then offers you two tickets for $49.50 (surprise) in seating choice that looks something like SEATS 1288 & 1289 ROW YY-XTREME LEFT CIRCLE 7-BEHIND PORT-O-LETS, and offers you one minute to create an account with their service in order to reserve and later purchase your tix.

*After this point in the Ticketmaster process, the rest becomes a cruel test of your typing skills–leaving one to conjecture that the service is really best suited to typing freaks like, say, savants, concert pianists, and those accustomed to typing with one hand through certain amorous internet activities. Or perhaps secretarially-inclined amputees.

4.) Time trial 2 (after reservation confirmation and account creation in one minute) consists of extensive registration of personal details, credit card information, billing address, contact information and perusal and acceptance of the Terms of Service agreement in under 3 minutes. If you can’t slap it together to type at Sri-Lankan-peasant-in-a-textile-sweatshop pace…you stand to lose the right to pay for the opportunity to stand several hundred feet away from three grooving ants who may or may not be the Beastie Boys.

5.) Only after the torments of TT2 do you realize that somewhere along the line, they’ve managed to stick you with an extra $20 of some service charge or another…presumably to pay for the wriggling, still live fetuses Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenburg like to crack in lieu of soft-boiled eggs for breakfast on their yacht off of Sardinia. This created a strong sense of indignance, not untinged with disgust.

6.)Time trial 3, in comparison to 2 is relatively relaxed…allowing you one minute to determine your preferred method of ticket delivery. Even the electronic variety cost $2.50. For one of those real tickets one can slap away into one’s "My first white boy hip hop concert" scrapbook, one can expect at least $20 extra.

7.) Feeling oddly violated, you press "send" one final time, and receive a confirmation number. It is a most hollow victory.

I remember back in the day, slapping a month’s allowance down on the counter in front of the morbidly acne-ridden junior manager at Strawberries Record Store in West Hartford and saying "One ticket for Color me Badd, please."

But Ticketmaster. Seriously. What is that about?

Seven minutes ago, I experienced my first earthquake. My girl Joolz in a native Los Angelean, and had told me a bit about them. The whole hiding in doorframes bit and all.

So there I was, lying in my bed checking out NYTimes slide shows when…suddenly…it started to feel like I was on the second floor of an extremely thin-walled building…where an enourmous thumping party suddenly began on the level below.

Yet completely without sound. And without a floor beneath. Very surreal. I watched the floor fan begin to teeter, and one of the pairs of meticulously set shoes on a small shelf softly tipped over onto its side.

It’s hard to know when the aftershocks subside…as their diminishment only enhances the rapid beating of your own heart…which in the end, feels not unlike a small earthquake in rhythm and texture.

Only after you stop thinking about yourself, your body and its well-being for a second, do you notice the car alarms and barking dogs nearby.

This little guy can be found at http://quake.wr.usgs.gov/recenteqs/Quakes/ci14312160.html

So. Welcome to LA, I suppose.

Crazy.