Girl on Fyre

I only had to take P.E. for one year, when I was in 7^th grade, and I hated its guts. Hey, this will date me: we had to wear actual rompers as gym suits, that is to say, our shorts had  elastic bands around the bottom, presumably so no one could see our knickers when we ran. To make matters worse, I had it first period, i.e. at 8 AM. Even in California it can be damned cold in the morning, but after some of us tried to wear our turtlenecks under our gym clothes, our teacher, Ms. Goode, bawled us all out: “That’s like wearing your bra OVER your clothing,” she said.

This was my gym suit. Srsly. Note how we didn't have heads then.

I had just turned eleven (having skipped a year in elementary school) and I didn’t even wear a bra yet, so I didn’t even have the slightest idea what she was talking about. “Why is it like that?” I asked my friend Debra, and she patiently explained the analogy to me.  I remember, during basketball, which we were never picked to play, we would sit on the trampoline in the gym and I would relate to her all the dirty parts of “The Exorcist,” which I had read and she had not. She  explained those bits to me as well. That was her role in my life at the time - as it was many years later, when she became a lactation specialist, and was forced into even more explication about bodily functions.

After 7^th grade I got a note excusing me from PE forever and ever because I was on the local swim club and did more than 10 hours of exercise a week, but I was thinking about PE the other day, because it struck me as I was reading the newspaper that Ms. Goode looked a lot like Melania Trump. No wonder Melania gives me the creeps.

Having worked in, or at least alongside, the music business, I feel like I’ve met a million Melanias, people for whom power and access is a primary motivation. Not everyone you meet in the business is like that – many are there because they love music – but there are enough of them to poison the well pretty thoroughly. Also, they aren’t just in the music business, and they aren’t only females. Wherever you are in the world, whether it is backstage at the Forum or in a baby nursing group at Kaiser, you will immediately recognize this type of person, because, to begin, they pretty much don’t like other women. If they’re women themselves, they view other women as competition. If they’re men, they view them as inherently powerless, and therefore lacking in anything worth having.

In fact, it might not be going too far to say that there are two types of people in the world, the type who are like that, and the type who are not, and the two types seldom mix socially.

this is what I wear to festivals too

I could be extrapolating needlessly but I think that the Fyre Festival in the Bahamas last weekend was filled with people who had that fundamental mindset. You know: that Festival that costs five figures to attend and you were supposed to get luxury beach lodgings, special food, all access passes and so on, just to see Blink 182. It is very hard for me to believe that anyone thought that was worth $12,500 but apparently such was the case. For one tenth of that, you can buy RT tickets to the Bahamas, a lovely brunch and a B and B on beautiful beach somewhere, so it’s hard to see where the value in the ticket was. 

According to this article in Vanity Fair, the festival's cachet was sold via posts made on social media by today’s supposed tastemakers. Therefore, buying a ticket was supposed to be buying a backstage pass to glamour. But there’s a fundamental problem with that idea. It’s all what Baudrillard would call a simulacrum – “that which conceals the truth.” And simulacrums usually get found out.

you say you don't want to live like a refugee?

So watching the Fyre Festival implode on social media was pretty much how I spent my weekend. At first, it was fun to think about: all these rich people stuck on an island in little tents eating cheese sandwiches, having preloaded all their money onto wristbands that didn’t work in town, etc. But it got depressing real fast. If you look even cursorily at the festival’s monetization plan, it exhibits a sort of greedy stupidity that characterizes last fall’s election as well. And I should know: I did my dissertation work on the rock festivals, and it is clearly the nadir of the form to date. In my scholarly work, I speculated that festival culture would become ideological state apparatuses, solidifying faith in capitalism through the false consciousness of music-based imagined communities. Instead, it seems to have devolved in exactly the same way as our current political scene: rather than focusing on music or even on ideology, this festival, like today’s political culture, is focused on the creation of brand, wealth, and ultimately, the homogenization of  experience. Today’s festivals provide proxy-spectacles for social and cultural capital, which in themselves are proxies for power and access.

 In short, the Fyre Festival’s failure is symptomatic of the vast misunderstanding that is under-girding all civic life right now. It reminds me of what someone oncecalled “the slutty allure” of a second order simulacrum.  Trump Presidency =  Fyre Festival = Boom.

the slutty allure of Green Day's simulacrum?

I know I am oversimplifying here. Festivals aren’t terrible. I have friends who love going to Coachella, and Burning Man, both of which are very expensive. I know that they like them because they see them as these temporary autonomous zones where they live outside the social hierarchies that make our lives such hell, and that is totally understandable. Yet the fact that these T.A.Z.’s are so expensive to participate in is problematic. It reminds me of a column I wrote in the original Fools in which I pondered why it is that the cheaper a concert is, the better. All my favorite concert experiences – and it’s true of festivals as well - have been extremely affordable, and if you think about your own experiences, I bet you’ll agree: the quality of a concert is almost in inverse proportion to its cost, and only Walter Benjamin knows why.

This is why I refuse to buy Hamilton tickets, by the way. I just feel like I can’t enjoy anything that expensive. One day ages from nowI’ll see Hamilton somewhere for a reasonable price and it will be fine, I’m sure. But it’s not some unrepeatable exclusive thing that I need to go into debt for. And I wonder: these days, what is?