Dorks And Losers

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park hosted the First Annual Out­side Lands Music & Arts Fes­ti­val to much applause and yearn­ing. With so much avail­able open space, it’s hard to imag­ine that there hasn’t been a music fes­ti­val that has rocked the park past sunset.

I wasn’t able to attend Day Three (Sun­day) of the fes­ti­val because on Sat­ur­day I received a larger-than-expected bar­rage of cig­a­rette and pot smoke, which irri­tated my eyes greatly. The eye drops I brought didn’t alle­vi­ate the red­ness or sore­ness, and after I woke up Sun­day morn­ing I could barely open my eyes.

I have been in places where I was around a lot of cig­a­rette and pot smoke, but the mix­ture and dose of both affected me more than I thought would.

It’s unfor­tu­nate because I was really look­ing for­ward to see­ing Nicole Atkins & The Sea, Stars, Vienna Teng, Drive-By Truck­ers, Bro­ken Social Scene, Rogue Wave, Wilco, and Jack John­son per­form. I’ll have to set­tle for read­ing reviews and watch­ing online streams.

Besides the music, there were other attrac­tions that Out­side Lands fea­tured, many had to do with tech­nol­ogy while oth­ers had to do with the Arts portion.

Crowd­fire

The high­est touted event was Microsoft’s Crowd­fire, which was sort of a mini-social musi­cal net­work where atten­dees could upload pho­tos and videos of the fes­ti­val. You could that any­where, but users could com­ment and mix the media and watch their cre­ations in real time via the many mon­i­tors that were set up in the humon­gous tent.

By Sat­ur­day, I saw roughly 300 multi-photo pages. There were many sofas that let fes­ti­val goers sim­ply lounge around and view them. You’d think this tech­nol­ogy would ben­e­fit more estab­lished music social net­works like Last.fm, but I think Microsoft wanted to pro­mote their Zune music player and bet­ter diver­sify their mar­ket­place with a test-driven fea­ture to even­tu­ally serve as an alter­na­tive to Apple’s iTunes Store.

The tent also housed Intel’s pres­ence with a few pop­u­lar Gui­tar Hero sta­tions. There were also a few lap­tops avail­able for Inter­net access, which I never saw used for any­thing but MySpace pro­files. There were a few tele­vi­sions and screens devoted to live video for a par­tic­u­lar performance.

Artist Dome

Dell spon­sored a tent (which should have been a lot big­ger) for pro­mot­ing some of its tech­nol­ogy like its pop­u­lar stitch­ing machine that helped cus­tomize all kinds of cloth­ing with any design.

The tent was also used to house inter­views with a many of the festival’s musi­cians. The times often con­flicted with per­for­mances I wanted to see. For­tu­nately, these inter­views can be viewed at the Out­side Lands page at Dell’s Sum­mer Rocks. The tent was a small place to relax in the mid­dle of the entire fes­ti­val, which fea­tured a few com­fort­able couches and a ping-pong table.

Out­sider Art

Out­sider Art was a series of tents devoted to the many artists who help design and dec­o­rate the festival’s stages. I was sur­prised by how small the tents where and even though they were located near the mid­dle of the fes­ti­val for some rea­son they seemed be lost within the tent shuffle.

Sig­na­ture Lounge

Visa’s Sig­na­ture Lounge was a god­send and wel­come VIP treat­ment to the many long lines at either the portable toi­lets or the alco­hol stands. It was under­used Fri­day, and Sat­ur­day was overused with large crowds try­ing to buy cock­tails and long lines try­ing to use the very pri­vate bath­rooms. The one men’s trailer (the women got two) was extremely dirty by Sat­ur­day night. To be fair, there were plenty of portable toi­lets placed through­out the grounds so this lounge was more of a bonus or “priv­i­lege” than a “right.”

The lounge’s orga­niz­ers also got hip to the notion that tak­ing out your Visa card to get in was very annoy­ing and soon had wrist­bands for the patrons.

Fes­ti­val Problems

1. Of the five staff mem­bers I asked for direc­tions to the press tent, the one per­son who pointed me in the right spot was the one per­son who was the most hon­est and upfront about hav­ing no idea where it was.

   That shouldn’t have hap­pened. If you’re wear­ing a “staff” t-shirt, there should be no rea­son why you wouldn’t know where any­thing any­one asks you is. That might seem like a lot to wish for, but the tent is a sta­tion­ary place and a pop­u­lar des­ti­na­tion, and I spent thirty min­utes going in cir­cles before I found it.

   That brings me to another prob­lem I had which was that the tent was very far away from the main fes­ti­val grounds. Sure, inter­views need quiet and artists want their pri­vacy but there was plenty of staff check­ing press bracelets and tick­ets so secu­rity shouldn’t have been that tight as to make such a trek so time consuming.

   Also, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who got lost try­ing to find the tent and ended up miss­ing the media ori­en­ta­tion. And there weren’t any post­ings that I could find that gave the day’s media events nor were there any staff mem­bers eager to help a seem­ingly igno­rant and bewil­dered attendee.

   I could have asked a few other mem­bers of the media or staff, but that would really delayed my oth­er­wise some­what care­fully planned itin­er­ary. And since no staff seemed to know any­thing oth­er­wise I thought it best not to risk it and try to expe­ri­ence as much of the fes­ti­val as possible.



2. The festival’s map design was ter­ri­ble. I know the orga­niz­ers were con­strained with the size and shape of Golden Gate Park, but the expe­ri­ence could have been much bet­ter. I was lis­ten­ing to Andy Hawk, a Sacra­mento DJ (KWOD), and he said the mea­sure­ment from each main stage (Land’s End and Twin Peaks) was a mile.

   If you look at a map, you could see all of the wasted and con­strained walk­ing space. The biggest grip I had was the path to get to the more inti­mate and greatly used Lind­ley Meadow (hous­ing the Pre­sidio and Sutro stages). On the map it looks small and in real life it was really small.

   By Sat­ur­day, many of the metal fences were either pushed back or strewn on the ground because so many peo­ple had a hard time get­ting to where they wanted to go with­out feel­ing bumper-to-bumper.

   It’s ironic how con­strained the fes­ti­val seemed when so many of the tents and stages felt so scat­tered (with the excep­tion of the Lind­ley Meadow section.

   That’s a plan­ning issue that really shouldn’t have existed. There is that alter­nate north­ern path, but that brings me to my third issue, which was the lack of read­ily avail­able information.

3. There were hardly any signs any­where around the fes­ti­val grounds. Head­ing there, I met five sep­a­rate groups who had no idea where they were going. There were no signs, and the only map was the fes­ti­val map but Golden Gate Park is incred­i­bly large. I saw a few signs, which blended too well with the exist­ing park signs for any­one to notice.

   Even paper signs sta­pled to trees or taped to poles would have helped tremen­dously but nowhere around the neigh­bor­hoods could I find one. Did they expect non-residents to be able to find it that eas­ily? There could have been a some staff mem­bers sta­tioned at a few of the park’s key entry points to help direct and assist peo­ple, but I guess they were really needed on the main grounds.



4. The size of the exits was also a huge prob­lem. If you expect 60,000 peo­ple to attend, you should also expect 60,000 peo­ple to leave as well. Espe­cially with the main shows like Radio­head, Tom Petty & The Heart­break­ers, and Jack John­son — I don’t think the orga­niz­ers real­ized how dif­fi­cult mov­ing so many peo­ple out of one area quickly, effi­ciently, and safely would be. Just ask Caltrans.
5. While the other prob­lems I had were more digs on the orga­niz­ers and their lack of plan­ning, I think this is more of a dig on peo­ple in gen­eral. Out­side Lands was sup­posed to be a green event, yet by the end of Sat­ur­day there was so much trash on the ground that I think it sur­prised many about how ambiva­lent a lot of peo­ple were toward the environment.

   Sure, many of the trash and recy­cle bins were far away from the stages but they had to be. No one wants to stand near trash, but that doesn’t give you the right to sim­ply leave your trash on the ground.

   In addi­tion, there were count­less cig­a­rette butts all over that the orga­niz­ers prob­a­bly second-guessed try­ing to ban smok­ing from the event. That prob­a­bly wouldn’t have gone over well, with pub­lic out­cry being the great­est and enforce­ment being the hard­est. But that def­i­nitely needs to be addressed for next time.

Part­ing Thoughts

While it might not have seemed like it, I did very much enjoy Out­side Lands. There is a ton of poten­tial for OL to be a pre­mier sum­mer fes­ti­val that it makes you won­der why it hadn’t hap­pened sooner. Design­ing such a big event isn’t easy and since this is the inau­gural one, I’m going to give the Out­side Lands orga­niz­ers huge credit for both putting the effort and pulling it off.

I expect there will be an Out­side Lands next year, and I hope that changes will be made. I antic­i­pate orga­niz­ers will work even harder since this year’s event was so successful.

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