When Pigs Fly: Roger Waters closes Coachella

Last I heard, blogs were supposed to deliver information immediately. The Daily News' blogs, apparently, have adapted a more lackadaisical approach: No matter that I prepared this two days ago (at the moment of my latest attempt at posting this); they'll get it online when they feel like it. Newsweek need not fear any competition.

Roger Waters closed Coachella with a trademark polished and bombastic show full of visual fury accompanying the musical artistry -- a set of Pink Floyd numbers like "In the Flesh," "Mother," "Shine on You Crazy Diamond," "Wish You Were Here" and "The Final Cut" -- then performed the legendary 1973 album "Dark Side of the Moon" all the way through. While you can't envy guitarist David Kilminster's assigned task -- replicating David Gilmore's celebrated and tricky licks -- he served the material admirably, and Waters is in amazingly good shape and of strong voice.

And, of course, for "Pigs," out came the amazing airborne swine to circle the crowd.

Fireballs erupted at the finale of the first set, and the pig (intentionally or not) was set free, wafting out into the desert night. The porcine fellow reportedly drifted to Temeculah, where it found a job as a house tent for a termite extermination company.

Earlier in the evening, My Morning Jacket played a set of its eclectic psycheldelic-indie-Southern rock on the same stage, while ...

... over on the Outdoor Stage, Love & Rockets vied for the same audience with a driving set that featured a generous amount of its early material.

Sean Penn appeared twice on Sunday, here just before My Morning Jacket. He did not have very nice words to say about our government. In fact, they basically boiled down to these two: "F@%& you." He implored festival attendees to play hooky for another week and join him on The Dirty Hands Caravan, which headed off to New Orleans this afternoon, hoping to spur political activism along the way and then take in the close of the New Orleans Jazz Festival. Just what you want after a weekend of blistering temperatures and a glut of smelly, sweaty people: more of the same.