First Night
Jan. 1st, 2009 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rbandrewsLast night was New Year's Eve.
Austin apparently does this street festival every year, and we went.
It was a lot like Maker Faire, but outside, and with a higher ratio of Faire to Maker. It had that combination of "awesome" and "fucking obnoxious" that I am beginning to associate with things Austin.
Awesome was that most of the food vendors from the hot sauce festival were there, so I got another great bratwurst. Arc Attack was there, playing non-video-game music on their giant Tesla coils. There were mimes, and a projector displaying cool visualizations on the river while new-age music played, and a construction of long bamboo poles and bungee cords that shouldn't have stood up but it did. There was a gazebo filled with giant windchimes (beautiful and maybe my favorite thing of all) and a flock (swarm?) of butterfly bikes.
Obnoxious was the stages filled with irritating amateur rappers, and the stages that weren't had crowds so we couldn't get close enough to see. There was the fact that we had to park almost at I-35 and then walk six or seven blocks, and the Public Address system.
This deserves its own paragraph. There were two microphones set up, with giant speakers such that the whole festival could hear them (one setup each side of the river). Anyone could walk up and say a few words, sing something, whatever they wanted. In theory this is neat, right? In practice, it's a demonstration of why the Internet has moderation. Most of the people saying stuff were either under 14 years old, complete morons, or both. And this would drown out much cooler things, like the music from the good stages.
The main thing I wanted to see was a perfect example of Austin's cool/obnoxious blend. Candle told me about it a couple weeks ago: these artists built a clock, completely wooden, huge, operational. Totally cool, right? Then they set it on fire at about 8:15 that night.
Come on, what the hell? I would really like to have seen that. I would like, in fact, for that to have been displayed for several months in a museum or something. Unfortunately, we'd have had to get there super early to even see it operating, and we actually got there at about 8:20, just in time to see it go up from across the river.
Austin apparently does this street festival every year, and we went.
It was a lot like Maker Faire, but outside, and with a higher ratio of Faire to Maker. It had that combination of "awesome" and "fucking obnoxious" that I am beginning to associate with things Austin.
Awesome was that most of the food vendors from the hot sauce festival were there, so I got another great bratwurst. Arc Attack was there, playing non-video-game music on their giant Tesla coils. There were mimes, and a projector displaying cool visualizations on the river while new-age music played, and a construction of long bamboo poles and bungee cords that shouldn't have stood up but it did. There was a gazebo filled with giant windchimes (beautiful and maybe my favorite thing of all) and a flock (swarm?) of butterfly bikes.
Obnoxious was the stages filled with irritating amateur rappers, and the stages that weren't had crowds so we couldn't get close enough to see. There was the fact that we had to park almost at I-35 and then walk six or seven blocks, and the Public Address system.
This deserves its own paragraph. There were two microphones set up, with giant speakers such that the whole festival could hear them (one setup each side of the river). Anyone could walk up and say a few words, sing something, whatever they wanted. In theory this is neat, right? In practice, it's a demonstration of why the Internet has moderation. Most of the people saying stuff were either under 14 years old, complete morons, or both. And this would drown out much cooler things, like the music from the good stages.
The main thing I wanted to see was a perfect example of Austin's cool/obnoxious blend. Candle told me about it a couple weeks ago: these artists built a clock, completely wooden, huge, operational. Totally cool, right? Then they set it on fire at about 8:15 that night.
Come on, what the hell? I would really like to have seen that. I would like, in fact, for that to have been displayed for several months in a museum or something. Unfortunately, we'd have had to get there super early to even see it operating, and we actually got there at about 8:20, just in time to see it go up from across the river.
