the parade went well. i got to the site at 8:00 am, and, because of the fact that i was driving an art car, i was able to drive right in and park a block and a half away from the center of the universe, and park without hassle. strangely enough, although the parade and the pageant were higher profile,
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i think a lot of this update is going to be about the art car blowout, because having the art car was the main reason why everything else went so smoothly. i didn’t even have to unpack my gear for the parade until 10:00, although i did put a whole bunch of ganesha murtis and a siva murti in the back window, and 5 sivalingams in the front window (no picture, sorry), so i hung around and saw the entire fair before all the crowds, and basically relaxed. jeremy was back from the berklee school, which was the first time in almost a year that i’ve played with him. earlier emails from him said he was going to be at OCF this year, but instead he’s going to greece and italy with two other (female) students for something related to school, but i get the very strong impression that it may be a lot more than that – nudge nudge wink wink… i saw my father, and he looked as though he were pointing his camera right at me (you’d think that i would know by this time), but he didn’t say anything to me and didn’t even acknowledge my presence – admittedly, there were thousands of people, at the same time, he pointed his camera right at me. don’t be too surprised if pictures of me don’t turn up on my father’s photo CDs some day…
after the parade i went back to my car and dropped off my tuba and gear, and picked up my trombone and headed up to gasworks park for the pageant. my call was at 3:00 pm, and we were done with the parade by 2:00, so i was able to relax and take my time. there’s apparently a new hare kṛṣṇa restaurant in the university district which had set up a booth at gasworks, so i got the chance to hang out and talk with the vaisnava devotees who said that most of them actually work at microsoft. they make a really good curry.
i haven’t written much about the pageant, and i’m probably going to make this it, because honestly, i didn’t have a clue what was going on. there was apparently something having to do with the four elements, plus a “techno tribe” that represented æthyr, or something like that, i suppose. apparently brian kooser had been busy, because there were a whole bunch of giant puppets that had his hands all over them, including a whole bunch of giant, deformed baby heads, a puppet that grew from merely giant to truly enormous (which was accomplished with the use of a man-lift, which i could see from “back stage”), and a giant floating bear puppet that transformed into something else, which i was not able to get a clear view of what it was. the trombone choir (which was actually three trombonists, joined for the last song by a fourth, on stilts, who came up from the cast) was directed by mark nichols, who i know from the moisture festival, but all he had us doing was making more or less bizarre noises on cue, and because of the fact that i only saw the performance from back stage, i never really got a good idea of what it was about.
when that was done, i wandered back to my car and packed up my trombone, but it was around 5:00, and there were still crowds of people hanging around, so it was impossible for me to drive anywhere anyway, so i perused the fair again, which was mostly home-crafted stuff, imported stuff, food, and other commercial enterprises with random music acts. i was able to drive out at 8:00, whereupon i went and dropped off orrin’s sax (for which he paid me $120).
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sunday, i got to the art car parade staging location, which was the phinney community centre, at 9:30 am, and took a few pictures of the cars as they were showing up. there was one in particular that was tremendously detailed, but totally meaningless. then we drove around greenlake and back to the fair.
i saw three broad groups of people that wandered by ganesha the car: the first were the people who said something along the lines of “i wonder what it says” and then walked on without bothering to find out. of these, there was an interesting sub-group, which said, usually with some authority to the group of people that they were travelling with, that it was some language or another, which was usually wrong. the languages generally were hebrew, and arabic (farsi and persian were the two main variants), but one i heard really boggles my mind: they said “oh, that’s french.”…
WHAT???
the second group of people were the most likely to stop and ask questions, and they ranged from the merely curious but clueless, to the people who actually knew what language it is, and could sound out words. these people were usually discernable by long pauses and thoughtful expressions as they sounded out the words.
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the third group were indians or people who are into yoga or hinduism, who knew what the car was without having to say anything. i only talked with a few of them, but they were universally positive in their reactions. they’re the people for whom ganesha the car was made originally, and although there were comparitively few of them, i’m glad to have been there if it was only for them.
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not everybody that walked by was exactly “normal”. this baby has a weird hat… cute, but weird… and what do you suppose his indian parents are looking at?
i talked to a guy who had seen my car in auburn about a month ago. he writes down all of the vanity license plates he sees, and the impressions he has about what kind of people drive the cars they’re attached to. he’s got a whole bunch of information from 3 years of research, and is planning on putting it all in a book soon.
i talked with a couple of teenage girls who were in seattle with a group from their church, to do prison ministry (hah!). i talked with them for about 45 minutes and by the time they walked away, they were thoroughly confused and sincerely questioning the version of reality presented by the prison ministry trip with which they had been brainwashed.
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i got a chance to talk with don ehlen, creator of the fish mobile and others. don was the original inspiration for ganesha the car. i met don in 1999, when he and i were in the production of “Rock Opera”, an opera about geology by my friend pliny the weird. i had thought about writing sanskrit on my car for a couple of years, but when i saw the fish mobile i asked don about how he had done it, and from there it was all downhill.
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the owner of ‘VAINVAN’ has had brain surgery as well, as has her husband.
the frog car, rev. bill’s vacation bible camp, and one or two other cars had an mp3 player hooked up to a loudspeaker under the hood. i also saw a couple of cars that had “guest books” attached to them. art cars mean that the owner is an artist, which can mean that when you see one, there’s a possibility that they will be selling their artwork, which may or may not have anything to do with the art on their car. also, there are other “art car blowouts”, those that i know of are in canada, oregon and california, that pay your gas, food and lodging if you bring an art car to their blowout.