Festival Sketches, Or a Scattered Account of Time Spent in New York City                                  Gesina A. Phillips

 

 

 

The festival volunteer hands me my orientation materials and I feel like I’m enrolling in college for a second go-round, maybe for something more useful this time but probably not.  I dig though the tote bag I have been handed, a rush of promotional materials attempting to distinguish themselves from the crush with bright colors, unusual shapes, and textures that border on unsettling.  The only essential thing in this bag is the festival schedule (although the complimentary earplugs are a nice thought), and it is strategically placed underneath everything else.  Of course, when I finally find it, the schedule itself also wants to tell me about all of the great companies that are involved in the financing of the festival, so it takes me another minute to locate the venue list I’ve been searching for.

 

There’s a strange tension between the overwhelming reminder of the money that went into planning this event versus the largely anti-corporate, anti-capitalist leanings among performers and audiences.  It is dissonant that I should scoff at a (complimentary) bag full of advertisements and then run off to enjoy an event sponsored by corporate funds.  I am aware that nowadays “label” and “sponsored” have become dirty words, but it seems to me that my knee-jerk reaction is the epitome of hypocrisy as I engage in complacent consumerism.  I will be troubled by this realization, but I will attempt to quash it by picking up freebies and reveling in free drink tickets nonetheless.

 

 *** 

Having neglected to do much planning beforehand, a glance at the musical lineup for the week shuts my brain down entirely.  There is too much to do, too much to see, and I am only one person.  I circle a few events and decide to play it by ear.  I also decide to cross off everything happening in Brooklyn, a trip under the East River on the L train being just too much for my already fragile state of mind.  My life has shrunk to a series of set times and subway stops as what I had planned as a vacation feels, absurdly, more consequential than my everyday hand-wringing.  The festival transforms itself from a lighthearted trip into an absurdly hyper-focused microcosm.  You will make the most of this experience, it whispers to me as I rush to the train, as I contemplate my next move, in my moments of relative solitude.

 

***

I am glad I remember how to navigate the public transit system, or I would be even later for everything than I already am.  This is the only time in my life that I have lamented not giving into the smartphone revolution.  At points during the week, I would have swapped my terror of a 24-7 internet uplink for an interactive subway map, and would gladly have thrown in my firstborn as a bonus.  After searching for Washington Square Park for 10 minutes—it’s an open space among a field of buildings, it’s green for heaven’s sake, how in the name of all that is holy have I not found it yet—I believe for a moment that technology can truly cure all the world’s ills.  Other festival attendees are congratulatory that I have somehow managed to get anywhere without having the benefit of all the world’s digitized knowledge at my fingertips.  This disturbs me greatly, but there is an accompanying and somewhat pathetic sense of pride as well.  I unfurl my subway map.  I am a pioneer.

 

***

“D’you want another drink?”

 

I don’t, really, but I end up with a fresh gin and tonic in my hands anyway.  I begin to suspect that this entire event is an excuse for people to day-drink for a week straight, the performances increasing in volume throughout the evening in order to mask the simultaneous growth of alcohol-fueled ebullience.  This is fine when you are planning on staying in one place for a while, but alas that is not the festival way, which is why a friend and I find ourselves confused and late in search of a performance that ends up being held in an office.  I try to make myself inconspicuous under harsh corporate lighting as we catch the final chords of the band’s set and applaud more loudly than is perhaps necessary or appropriate.

 

***

It occurs to me that I have spent more time schmoozing at industry parties than I have spent actually watching live music.  I decide to rectify this by catching Killer Mike and GZA.  This is the show that is perhaps furthest from the festival’s emerging indie band ethos, so I am not sure what I am attempting to prove; hell if I’m going to miss Liquid Swords, though.  Killer Mike tells venue security that if they try to remove anyone for smoking, he’ll walk, and the entire crowd lights up as one.  GZA has Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s disembodied head staring out from the white background of his T-shirt.  The Genius seems displeased that his audience is terrible at filling in his lyrics on demand, notwithstanding their hands reverently upheld in Wu-Tang style.  These are the vignettes that I remember best, which was not the point of the exercise, but I guess that’s how memory works.

 

***

I fall asleep on the PATH train back to Newark.  This is something that everyone tells you not to do, but I’m getting off at the last stop and I’ve spent all my money anyway.  The clicking of the tracks and the rocking of the car exist in an atmosphere that is the closest I’ve come to silence in days.

 

 

 

 

 

Gesina A. Phillips is an editor at The New Yinzer. She owes her gratitude to WRCT-FM for her underutilized CMJ badge.