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| - I truly have not words to describe hoe awesome the Life is Beautiful festival was. Epic. Extraordinary. Mind-blowing . Tremendous. These words do not do it justice. This was seriously the highlight of the month for me (if not the year). I am still processing everything I saw, listened to and tasted.
When I first heard about the festival, many, many months ago, I thought cool, but I don't really know many of the bands. But I thought the culinary portion was incredible and for that alone I wanted to go. Fast-forward to the present and the awesome magazine that I free-lance for, InVegas magazine (shameless plug) gave me a free pass for the weekend. Score! Admittedly, I might not have had the same experience as someone who paid for their ticket BUT I thought it was well worth it and would gladly pay next year. Plus, it was super cool to access the media lounge at Atomic Liquors!
On to the event. When I first arrived on Saturday I was kind of overwhelmed by everything, and didn't know where to start. I had gone alone and was wondering how I was going to keep myself occupied all day. Well I just walked around, taking in the sights. It is actually not bad to go alone, I was able to squeeze between people to get near the stages. The second day I went with a friend and had so much. I also spent a while looking at all the murals; without a doubt my favorite component of the festival was the art. The Rise Above Art program was phenomenal, it expertly curated and all the artists did a great job. There are too many to note, but in particular Zio Ziegler's mural by the Secret Garden was incredible (he has another mural by the Learning Village as well), the Chuck Close tapestry, Eric Tillinghast's ode to the Bellagio Fountains, local artist Aware's 3D mural, etc. I did miss out of the Andy Warhol film portrait, but there was just so much to do!
As I said I didn't really know a lot of the groups (I'm more of a 80's-90's rock kind of girl), nonetheless I was pleasantly surprised by some of the groups and I would definitely buy their music. I discovered a group called Youngblood Hawke that played very cool. I also enjoyed Janelle Monae's performance, as well as Vampire Weekend and of course The Killers. Ironically, I like Empire of the Sun a lot, but figured I had to watch The Killers, you know just because. They did a very good job and I was surprised how into it the crowd got.
The food portion was really good, if a tad bit expensive. I tried Blue Ribbon Sushi's fried chicken wings and a sushi roll, each for$10 dollars. The chicken wings were awesome! We also shared chocolate chip cookie from Wichcraft. Later on my (cheap) friend was hungry and we headed over to Uncle Joe's for pizza. I normally would've gotten a cocktail, but ended up getting a beer. Some IPA from who knows where. It was very good. We also got to watch two cooking demos, one with Eric Bromberg and the Living Colour guy and another with Scott Conant and ZZ Ward, who had great chemistry. We didn't get to listed to any of the talks, which I will for sure plan better for in the future.
The only issue I had was that they could've revealed all of the details at the same time; the culinary packages, the parking, etc. But other than that, I had the time of my life! Life is beautiful indeed!
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