Send An Awl Reader To A Kraftwerk Concert With A Scalper

by Jeff Johnson

Thus far into Kraftwerk’s week-long residency at MoMA, not many individuals have popped up on Craigslist offering up their +1 for sale. Maybe it’s because people who were lucky enough to purchase two tickets for one of the eight shows during the online sale/debacle must present an ID bearing the same name as the purchaser’s to gain entry into the concert. It’s a really big deal! So presumably they’re taking someone who is equally passionate about the music, or dragging a loved one who they’re trying to convert. (Which is never quite as magical as we hope.)

Whatever the case, it seems that most ticket holders don’t want to go to such a monumental event and sit next to a stranger the whole time.

That said, the people who are selling their extras are kind souls simply looking for help paying their taxes, want to purchase a motorcycle, who like pancakes (?), would appreciate anyone who has a vagina to join them, are interested in hearing your offers — just don’t expect a dude to do, like dude-on-dude stuff, okay? — and/or just want straight up cash. A lot of it. Like this guy, with an extra Man Machine ticket for tonight:

400 dollars is the minimum I am willing to sell it for. Feel free to offer higher than this amount.

Or this deluded person who with his/her boyfriend has managed to land two extra tickets for the Tour de France night, and wants to sell to the highest bidder starting at $500 per ticket.

I always thought eBay was the auction site, and Craigslist was the site where you had the guts to just name a price and take it. There’s no transparency on Craigslist, obviously, so your potential purchaser doesn’t really know what the highest bid is, and so, when you’re asking them to bid, that’s douchey.

I don’t doubt that there are people out there willing to spend a lot of money on scalped tickets, but it’s off-putting to see these big Kraftwerk fans (they’re all claiming how awesome it’s going to be) be such opportunists about it. It’s an extra ticket, not the polio vaccine. No one is going to restore a vintage Airstream for you, asswipe.

So my proposal is this: we should pool some cash together to send someone to this concert. With a scalper. A seller who would like to get $1000 for their extra $25 ticket, should, but the person they sell it to should then get the right to stare Marina Abramovic-style at the person that sold them the ticket for the entire concert.

Basically, I want the person who gets $1000 for their extra Kraftwerk ticket to get stared at by a stranger for the entire concert. This is extremely stupid. But entirely appropriate.

Jeff Johnson is ready to hear from people who “obviously would let someone stare at me for $1000, silly.”