What do you mean by that, you may ask?  I mean that the Arcade Fire tickets sold out in negative one minute.   It bent time.

You see: tickets went on sale at noon.  But by 12:01 it was sold out.  All ~300 tickets couldn’t have been sold in a minute, so it actually bent time.  It went back in time, and sold tickets in the past.  (Time is a curved thing; it’s relative.)  Pretty trippy.

By the way, they’re playing here, at the Henry Miller Library, in majestic Big Sur, on October 5th (same night as GBV reunion show in San Fran.  G-B-V!!! G-B-V!!!)

Note: Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices is, by far, the greatest songwriter of all time. No one has written more amazing songs. Discuss.

But I digress. This Arcade Fire/Steven Hawking business also makes you wonder: clearly, the Arcade Fire time-bending episode was the fastest sellout in Henry Miller Memorial Library history, but how have other sold-out shows compared?

Well, our interns pulled a report, and here you go.  A couple of surprises in there!  (Note: each show is notated by the time in which it sold out; shortest to first)

1.  Arcade Fire, 2010: -1:04 minutes (see above)

2.  Animal Collective, 2009: 2:34  minutes

3.  Band of Horses, 2010: 2:45 minutes (Animal Collective breathes a sigh of relief!)

4.  Phillip Glass, 2009: 3:56 minutes

5.  Yo La Tengo, 2010: 6:23 minutes

6.  Mike’s Powerpoint presentation of the history of Friend, his van, including a tour of “The Crow’s Nest,” 2010: 8:13 minutes

7.  Patti Smith, 2008: 10:23 minutes

I’ll stop now, assuming no one is still reading.