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September 5, 2006

C@L repruhzents at Bumberschnitz

It's sort of like a citywide Meetings, only with lots of high school kids and hippies

Much like learning to fawn over Death Cab For Cutie or savor a tasty bag of Dick's, attending my first Bumbershoot brings me ever closer to legitimacy/ mad street cred as a C@L resident. As I learned in the charming entry on Wikipedia, Bumbershoot is "an annual international music and arts festival held in Seattle, Washington. One of America's largest local arts festivals, it takes place every Labor Day weekend at the 74-acre (299,000 m²) Seattle Center, which was built for the 1962 World's Fair." You betcha! And the funny name? It's an old-timey word for umbrella (Wikipedia mentioned something about it being a "portmanteau"), which, wink-wink, makes a lot of sense here in Rain City.

Or at least it would make sense if Bumbershoot took place in the fall, winter, or spring. in the winter. But Labor Day is still summer in C@L, and summer in C@L means that it's pretty much one of the nicest places on Earth. We're talking 75 degrees and sunny pretty much every day. You know, like living in San Diego. So you don't really need a bumbershoot at Bumbershoot, unless you're capable of getting burned at this latitude (which is pretty tough).

I had heard good things about this Bumbershoot thing, and was pretty excited to give it a whirl (I was out of town for it last year). It didn't hurt that I had visitors in town and that the whole thing takes place roughly in my neighborhood. My big takeaways from a weekend at C@L Center:

As if a whole city held its own Meetings: so let me get this straight. We wander around a controlled environment from music pavilion to beer garden to music pavilion to beer garden. We randomly run into friends. We get little passes and buttons that give us access to all sorts of fun stuff. And it takes over an entire summer holiday weekend? Hmmm. This sounds familiar. Very familiar. It sounds like something that I enjoy and tend to be pretty good at. Hmmm. (So you can imagine that I was pretty down with the general vibe.)

He really could have used more violas: I was pretty fired up to check out Kanye West (the Sunday night headliner). I had seen him once before back at school in New York and thought he was just the cat's meow. I guess things have changed a bit. I should have known the performance would be a little different when the seven-piece string ensemble took the stage. What, only three cellos? Do you think you'll be able to get by? For a guy who really should know better (or at least have figured out that he doesn't need to care about these things), Kanye West sure spends a lot of time talking about how awesome he is and how he may or may not have gotten jobbed at some music industry awards show. Errr, yeah. Eddie Vedder doesn't really talk about that sort of thing. It's C@L. So you know.

Tough to argue with sports where the participants might have been drinking as much as the spectators: caught my first live roller derby action on Saturday. Ummmm. I mean, it wasn't terrible. It was definitely low-end, mind you, but it had competitive violence, and I caught myself jumping up to cheer for the more spectacular collisions and spills. And I imagine that's the whole point of the affair? Like really clumsy hockey without a ball or any clear way of keeping score? Oh wait, I forgot the horrible costumes and trashy commentary. Like I said, it wasn't bad.

Cut your hair: given that I work at the gihugic software company with all the other type-A engineers and MBA dweebs, I sometimes forget that, at its core, C@L is still a pretty hippie-dippie kind of place. Bumbershoot certainly helped me to remember that. Whoa! There were old hippies everywhere! In the beer garden, selling crappy craft art, standing shirtless at the urinal next to me! I mean, that's cool and all, and I don't like to feel like The Big Lebowski, but, well, YOUR REVOLUTION IS OVER! CONDOLENCES! THE BUMS LOST! MY ADVICE IS THAT YOU DO WHAT YOUR PARENTS (and kids) DID; GET A JOB, SIR!

Oh right, the music: I enjoyed the couple songs of Jeremy Enigk that I heard, was happy to catch The Blue Scholars on the big stage, and thought it was nifty to see a bloated Badly Drawn Boy out there. I liked seeing the Thermals in the basement (felt like a grade school dance!), especially since they set up a little beergarden inside. I skipped the main stage stuff on Saturday (bands for the kids that I didn't know too too much about) and thought Atmosphere was okay but not great on Monday.

All in all, good times at the Bumbershoot. Well done by all parties involved -- I look forward to spreading the good news.

Posted by thatkid at September 5, 2006 10:36 PM under C@L

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