fyre festival is going well

the Ron Funches line in the Netflix doc is great, (paraphrasing) a bunch of people paying thousands to go to the Bahamas to see Blink 182? Let them go, this is Darwinism at its best etc

I'm always kinda fascinated by festivals. compared to regular concerts, which usually run fairly smoothly, Festivals can be outright lawlessness! I wouldn't say I've been to a bad one, luckily. but even the best ones usually have issues, whether it be issues with the grounds, substandard contractors, security going rogue. I know the first time I went to Maryland Death Fest, the security was so bad they kept making people who already had festival wristbands wait in line with people purchasing, only to correct the 'mistake' after some of us waited in line 40 minutes. they roughed up some individuals to the point where the organizers said they wouldn't hire security from the same source the next year.

I do remember Welcome to Rockville in Jacksonville getting largely disrupted by tornado-spawning thunder storms, with attendees screaming after terrible bands like the Hollywood Undead and Devil Wears Prada had to cancel (as if there was any choice - you could see tree debris on the interstate for miles). but y'know, that's an act of God.

I think this is the reason I stick to established festivals. The only fledgling one I ever attended was the Florida Metal Fest, which only happened once, but it was a well-run machine! I have major issues with claustrophobia so reading about festivals where people get trampled or suffocate scare me.

at least with regular concerts like you can tell in advance if a venue is dicey, y'know. by the time you find out the guy putting out MegaAwesomeFest2019 is actually a grifter, you're already fucked.

Message To Love, the documentary about the 1970 Isle Of Wight festival is worth checking out for some vintage promoter-out-of-his-depth action.

I don't really get the Coachella style fests, like Maryland Death or Big Ears or Milwaukee Psych are cool in that there's definitely an aesthetic but like oh hey do you like music? stand in a field and see Liam Gallagher and Schoolboy Q and Baroness and Ariana Grande and Skrillex and a Slint reunion I don't get

i went to acl once and it was after it had rained and it was one of the most miserable experience of my life

mud and austin ppl and $4 waters and a bunch of bands that i kiiiiinda like maybe a song or two by plus parking way the fuck out somewhere yuuuuuuuuuck

Bim's whole thread here is good value.

i'm 5 mins in and i already know this guy is good value pic.twitter.com/iC8MiGyKlm

— Bim Adewunmi (@bimadew) January 20, 2019

otm, bim is the best

holy fucking shit i haven't seen these docs yet but I worked for Andy K1ng in '97 for 4 months. just a 3 person office running his event planning service from a loft on prince st.

I don't really get the Coachella style fests, like Maryland Death or Big Ears or Milwaukee Psych are cool in that there's definitely an aesthetic but like oh hey do you like music? stand in a field and see Liam Gallagher and Schoolboy Q and Baroness and Ariana Grande and Skrillex and a Slint reunion I don't get

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Saturday, January 19, 2019 10:34 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah my wife and i were talking about this tonite actually in the context of the fyre docs and the stupid generic fest that happens near us...check out this lineup...i do think there are a lot of people who value "live music" and/or "live music on a big stage" over, like, what that music actually is. we know ppl who go to this fest and they have no aesthetic to speak of in comparison to picky nerds like myself who are all "well i liked their first two records but not crazy about the new one" or my wife who is basically like "i'll leave the house for mbv 1992 or massive attack 1998."

Twenty Travis Tame

xxp — RVW, you may (or may not) want to avoid the Netflix doc.....

rip what is your take on Andy?

i can't wait to see it!

i was only in NYC for the fall of '97 and kinda got hooked up with that job, and was grateful to have it, but Andy was real bitchy and self-involved, rubbed a lot of ppl the wrong way, came from money and wanted you to know it ... but ran a pretty good business despite. we got along but were not pals.

he opened this preposterous restaurant called the E4st V1llage Y4cht Club (!!) that failed in record time. there was no ironic slant to the place, he just wanted a hamptons-y cafe in what he understood was the hip neighborhood!

he was a little ridiculous, as i'm sure is apparent in the film. but i have nothing against him. i had a fairly big party at his place when he was out of town, and when he came back everything was in place but the floors were a disaster. and he was cool about it. i just had to scrub the floors with linseed oil for about three stright days.

Hahah all sounds about right!

Andy is unbelievably awesome. Christopher Guest vibes are off the chain

Yeah Maura and others have been saying Guest REALLY needs to do the movie of this.

what i said sounds mean -- he was a good guy and good to me. when i took that job i was 21 and had never been to NYC and he and the city itself were a pretty big culture shock to me though

Huh – seems we’re the same age, and I also moved to NYC in ‘97 #fascinating

i’m curious about his ties to Billy & their backstory, because from the Netflix doc it really seems to veer into adoring relative/bad judgement territory. he seems pretty smart & together when he’s talking but some of the stuff is like, dude WHY are you helping this idiot? why would you do this for him?

I ended up watching the Hulu doc tonight. It had some interesting details which the other one didn’t, but I didn’t like its style nearly as much — a lot of stock clips used to illustrate points, heavy-handed messaging about “Millennials,” explaining to the viewer what social media is, etc.

If you watch just one of the docs, I recommend the Netflix one; it’s a better overall production.

(The Hulu doc also seems to have an odd agenda involved with pointing fingers at the Jerry Media guys in particular, trying to make them look particularly complicit in the enterprise, even dings them for being involved with the other doc... from watching both films, it’s not really clear to me what that angle’s all about.)

I thought the angle was pretty clear — the Hulu one, via the ex employee, pretty clearly asserts FJ knew things were fucked well in advance and were at least strategically silent about it, if not directly complicit. The Netflix one, unsurprisingly, assets something else.

I didn’t think anything was said about the Jerry guys in the Hulu doc that they didn’t admit themselves in the Netflix doc — they deleted negative comments as directed, etc. The Netflix doc does reveal that they eventually quit at the 11th hour, and Billy hired a different marketing company.

Those guys were at more of a remove from what was happening than many others, it’s just not clear to me why they would more culpable. Someone in the Netflix doc makes the point that if a contractor (of any kind) is hired to work on a piece of something, they can’t be expected to perform due diligence into every aspect of it; they have to trust that the folks actually running the enterprise, and who have ultimate responsibility, know what they’re doing.

One more point I’ll make about the two docs is that the Netflix one has a lot more first-person footage from folks involved, all along the line, and it’s structured chronologically — so you really feel like you’re experiencing the story happen, in a gripping and compelling way. The Hulu doc feels like something being reported after the fact by others, using much more conventional (and often corny) TV-doc techniques.

conversely I'd say if you can only watch one (and actually read this thread first/bitd) do the Hulu - if you can watch both, do Netflix first. They both have different access, and make the most out of what they have, but the Hulu one has more of a digging / grubbing / detail approach that will work as a followup to some of the glosses in the wilfully stylish (slash produced by the marketing team for the actual festival) Netflix one.

lol, one hour's xpost

So, I watched the Netflix documentary, and the WTF moment people mention upthread about this Andy King guy being ready to literally such the dick of the chief of Bahamian customs... He tells it with a straight face, but surely we're not supposed to think he's being serious? I mean, it seemed like whoever told him that was playing a rude joke, but why would he believe it? Did he really except this government official would rather get his cock sucked by a middle-aged businessman instead of, you know, getting the money they were supposed to get. Yet King tells the story like he was actually ally preparing to give the guy a blowjob. It's just weird.

Also, I wish the doc had actually interviewed some of the Bahamian locals who apparently worked on the site for a couple of months and never got paid... They're point of view was kinda presented by the local chief of operations and the caterer, but none of the workers got to tell their story. There was just too many shots of rich white people complaining how they were scammed and money, yet clearly they're so well off those kind of losses don't mean much to them. So they should've put more emphasis on the folks who were clearly the biggest victims of the whole scam.

Any hints for how to watch the Hulu doc outside the US?

someone lost the box with all the luxury villa keys in it

is this what "lacanian" means

XP - Yeah I'd quite like to watch the Hulu doc too, if anyone has a lead.

I don't really get the Coachella style fests

I've been to a bunch of these fests and have really grown to hate them. I think the thing that made it hard for me to grasp but quickly became apparent is that increasingly not many people go to these things for the music. The music is just the soundtrack. So while I was hustling to get to place to place to see the handful of acts I wanted to see, I realized that was the wrong way to do it, and that one reason the lineups were getting more and more generic and disposable is that it was all just background noise. Case in point: my two girls, 11 and 14, don't know much about these tests, but they think of Coachella as a "style," something they've gleaned from Instagram. "That's very Coachella." Once or twice they've mentioned wanting to go to Coachella or Lollapalooza, but it's literally never been about who is playing, it's been about the scene, or their conception of the scene. Which I have been quick to correct as largely glitter-coated or shirtless/barely-shirted dummies in vast dusty/muddy/hot fields that smell of a mix of urine and body spray.

xxp - Tuomas, I think people here were making an effort to avoid “spoiling” that moment (for those who haven’t seen the doc)!

Oh, ok, sorry about that.

Xpost:

Yeah here in Mexico we have Corona Capital which has been done yearly since 2010, I used to go every year but stopped since 2017 because of those reasons. It started as a music festival where people actually went to hear the bands play and it has become just a place to be a narcissistic asshole. It also doesn’t help that two years in a row I was joined by two different groups of people that were terrible companions, just to prove they didn’t give a fuck about the music they literally only knew like one or two songs by one of the bands playing and were just focused on getting fucked up and left early to go to a club and left the rest of us stranded as we had hired a van for 20 people. Oh they didn’t even made it to day 2, I suppose they already had the photos they needed to prove they went to the festival and went to a club again.

Oh and BTW

Soooo there a scene in the new Netflix documentary on Fyre Fest where Billy McFarland is out on bail planning his next scam ("NYC VIP Access") and he's hanging out in his penthouse hotel room with Chuck Schumer's press secretary pic.twitter.com/7DuiFAS7RE

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) January 19, 2019

I immediately emailed @AngeloRoefaro after seeing it last night asking what he was doing there but haven't heard back.

— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) January 19, 2019

pic.twitter.com/QCU3OG5RVG

— Italian Alex Pareene (@pareene) January 20, 2019

Hulu doc on Youtube (for now):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kih06l3EB4k

Billy getting in a videographer to document his new scam was extremely "is you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy"

the bizarro moron stringer bell

The old Simpsons line is too obvious even to quote...!

on Fyre docs, i haven't watched either, but this David Sims piece seemed helpful for comparing them, specifically on the point of who they had access to / what POVs are told: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/01/fyre-review-netflix-doomed-festival-hulu-fyre-fraud/580678/

Message To Love, the documentary about the 1970 Isle Of Wight festival is worth checking out for some vintage promoter-out-of-his-depth action.

― MaresNest, Saturday, January 19, 2019 10:26 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

It's a great documentary, but the promoter had run a relatively smooth festival the year before at the same location. After Woodstock, every festival was besieged with "THIS SHOULD BE FREE, MAN, WHY ISN'T THIS FREE?!" The promoter may have been out of his depth to some degree, but he likely didn't realize how far the audience would go to force it to be a free festival.

My wife is watching the Netflix doc now, after watching the Hulu one with me last night (she agrees the Netflix doc is “9 times more interesting”).

Just hearing it over her shoulder, I’m reminded how much more effective it is... it methodically lays out details and timelines, and I came away from it really reflecting upon the events and the degrees of culpability of those involved. The Hulu doc is somewhat glib and clumsily “prosecutorial,” which (maybe paradoxically) weakens its own case.

I dunno, I think both make a pretty clear case in terms of the central stuff; it's more of a question of the further players. The Netflix one, as I noted, makes Ja Rule much more of an active participant in it all via the choices of footage, and it's worth remembering that he and Margolin are still facing a class-action civil suit. The Hulu one makes a case that FJerry is trying to cover its tracks to a strong degree.

It's a great documentary, but the promoter had run a relatively smooth festival the year before at the same location. After Woodstock, every festival was besieged with "THIS SHOULD BE FREE, MAN, WHY ISN'T THIS FREE?!" The promoter may have been out of his depth to some degree, but he likely didn't realize how far the audience would go to force it to be a free festival.

The islanders set up the 1970 festival to fail by forcing to move to a location overlooked by a hill, providing free viewing for all that cared. Emcee Rikki Farr's rants are great in the doc (pissing off the bands by threatening that they won't play unless people pay).

The Isle of Wight was a favourite retirement destination of the British well-heeled, and a haven of the yachting set, and many of the traditional residents deplored the huge influx of "hippies" and "freaks". This led to the introduction of sections to the "Isle of Wight County Council Act 1971" designed to control any further large overnight gatherings. Renting a few acres of suitable farmland to hold a music festival had in earlier years been a simple commercial matter between the promoters and one of the local farmers, but by 1970 this had become subject to approval decisions from several local council committees who were heavily lobbied by residents' associations opposing the festival. As a result of this public scrutiny, the preferred ideal location for the third Festival was blocked, and the promoters in the end had no choice but to accept the only venue on offer by the authorities: East Afton Farm, Afton Down, a site that was in many ways deliberately selected to be unsuitable for their purpose. One unintended result of this choice of location was that, since it was overlooked by a large hill, a significant number of people were able to watch the proceedings for free.

if you don't need to hear anything about macfarlane's formative years or learn any more about magnises or hear the word 'millennial' 1000 times then you can skip the first 30 minutes of the hulu one. though you'll also miss the swimming pigs biting a supermodel on the bum.

Not to mention the detail about another pig biting McFarland himself in the balls, which is a great bit.

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/simpsons/images/6/69/The_simpsons_ralph_wiggum-1-.png

A bacon bit Billy's balls, and now Billy's ballsack's big!