Festival Life

Last weekend I went to the Fire Arts Festival in West Oakland. It's put on by the Crucible, the place where I had my glassworking class a few weeks ago, as one of their major fundraisers. I wish I had pictures, if I could take pictures that could do the display justice, but picture-taking is discouraged, I imagine since (a) a lot of the displays are from artists actually trying to make a living off this stuff and (b) flashbulbs just would not be cool.

Without pictures, it's a bit hard to describe the first five minutes of the show. The doors opened at 8pm, letting everyone file in and take a look in the remaining daylight at the inventions and contraptions filling the lot below the BART tracks.

At 9pm, on schedule, the Opening Flare fired, and I could feel the heat on my face from 100+ ft away. Within 5 minutes, I was experiencing the vertigo of all hell breaking loose around me: a keyboard-fired menorah, a 25-ft wide candelabra beating flames in time with someone's pulse, hyrogen bubbles popping and pounding my eardrums, a Tesla coil giving off clouds of ozone as the Tin Man danced around it, a Baba Yaga treehouse belching steam high in the air, as a troupe of (I kid not) black vinyl-clad, flame-wielding go-go girls aboard their vehicles, the results of crossbreeding Amish wagons with Mad Max, shot roaring flames 30 ft into the air while the blackened iron sculptures scattered about them were fired to a roaring, glowing red...

First five minutes was pretty intense, and I was actually wondering if I was feeling okay, but a little time and a little fresh air later, glowing iron sculpture and go-go girls were pretty cool.

We had great fun watching the Flame Vortex folks send a swirling tornado of fire curling and lapping at the BART cars (an unexpected bonus with your fare!). The Flamethrower Shooting Gallery was sadly not available to members of the general public. Firebots: remote controlled conflagration! The stage show had some music, lots of fire dancing, and the highlight of an acrobatic pas de deux aboard a hula hoop craned 40 ft into the air...noticeably without any safety equipment (say, a net?) that we could see. Or fire, for that matter, but still spectacular. Grand finale: a turbojet powered flame cannon generating 150 dB and continuous plumes of 100 ft flames.

Good fun, highly recommended to anyone not completely pyrophobic. If you've ever been Burning Man-curious but are put off by various aspects such as the dust, the FAF has all the spectacle, takes much less time, and involves far less inconvenience.

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This Week: the Bicycle Film Festival is coming to San Francisco, Wednesday-Saturday. Uh, there aren't any films to speak of in the program on Wednesday or Thursday, but they do show up Friday and Saturday. They're showing at the Victoria Theatre right atop the 16th St BART station making it super easy to get there. I may have to get tickets for a couple film sessions on Saturday (probably the 5pm and 9pm) with a break for dinner in between. Anybody else? C'mon, my festival-picking mojo is working pretty hard right now.