A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Rain or shine, NABC’s 7th annual Fringe Fest provides an oasis of beer-driven sanity amid the bedlam. This column originally was published on October 17, 2013. This year, I'll take the chance or "rewinding" it prior to the weekend, safe in the knowledge that reconfirmation is pending. But indulge me as I repeat a rant posted on various Facebook threads, and allow me to explain something.
I'm not just throwing punches blindly. The object is to raise enough hell that this issue of Harvest Homecoming's future composition doesn't languish in back rooms for another whole year, and if it requires me to make a complete ass of myself to make progress toward adjusting Booth Days to prevailing downtown realities, then it's a trade-off I can make with a clear conscience.
I've never said HH volunteers don't work hard. I've never said that they don't do good things. I've never said I want HH to disappear. Rather, what I've said is that HH needs to change with the times as it specifically pertains to the Parade and Booth Days -- and especially the latter. Many people disagree ... but quite a few agree, too, and so city government needs to get off its cowering butt and be pro-active about brokering reforms.
It sickens and offends me that those downtown entities putting the most skin in the "doing" game remain marginalized by HH's half-century-old business model. This is why I'm yapping, and to be perfectly honest, I'm not sorry at all if it bugs you.
Now, on with the rewinding.
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As practiced in the art of sedition, as opposed to seduction, it is now time for me to report on the current atmospheric condition in New Albany, where we’re all here because we’re not all there.
Most importantly, Harvest Homecoming’s shelf life has reached its blessed annual end, and all we need do now is spend our remaining autumn weekends picking up the discarded garbage and assorted detritus of (fill in the blank with persistently inflated numbers) weekend visitors, few of whom were able (or cared) to see what defines downtown 361 days out of the year, because the fest’s hoary and increasingly suspect business model does not support recognition, much less engagement, with alien concepts like downtown revitalization.
On Monday morning, I put it this way:
Downtown business owners commiserated on Twitter, welcoming a resumption of the daily working world. It's a reminder that New Albany's version of Groundhog Day occurs in early October. When Harvest Homecoming is here, the blinders are donned with a speed hitherto unwitnessed. City Hall (any one of them, actually, dating back to the Ford Administration) emerges with trepidation into Hauss Square, is abruptly terrified that it might see its own shadow -- and then we get six more years of status quo.
Seeing as America’s version of Labor Day was removed from its worldwide play date of May 1 so as to better expunge the taint of deadly socialism, the latter generally referred to nowadays as “Obamacare,” perhaps it makes perfect sense for New Albany’s Groundhog Day to take four full days, not one, and to happen when the leaves are falling.
In our municipality’s case, it isn’t workers’ rights but uncomfortable irony that bedevils the citizenry, second only to bed bugs, and so the dire threat posed by ironic detachment must be recast into simpler truths, like the prevailing fiction that Harvest Homecoming has anything whatever to do with economic development apart from the money necessary to perpetuate the fest itself.
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Happily, there was lots of music around town last weekend, some of it engaged by Harvest Homecoming’s internal trendsetters (remember how Starship had that one big hit, since judged one of the worst pop songs in history, and resting atop the charts before many readers were even born?), and the remainder hired and promoted by downtown’s existing, redefining, paradigm-changing 365-days-a-year businesses.
Consequently the sweetest tune to my ears was being played this week, after the festival concluded, coming in the dulcet tones of Harvest Homecoming’s reigning apparatus murmuring morose dismay at smaller evening crowds on the waterfront – you know, the place where there’s a tent with no good beer, which of course reflects the prehistoric ethos of the 1980s … hence the sheer, enduring embarrassment of touting the theme “We Built This City” when the ideas purporting to serve as framework for the construction site are as stale as the rancid frying oil currently coating downtown’s one-way streets.
It’s okay by me. They’ll just blame it on Wick’s, not Fringe Fest. Maybe that’s why the most popular game in town during Harvest Homecoming wasn’t the free throw shoot on Market, but the target shooting on State, as fire and police arms of the same city previously granting Wick’s permission to operate in defiance of orange-clad hegemony spent the weekend harassing it.
Meanwhile, the Harvest Homecoming takeaway never changes, does it?
Harvest Homecoming relies on a business model that once made slight sense, but doesn’t any longer. For Harvest Homecoming’s current business model to succeed, it must be imposed on a geographical area with which it openly conflicts, in which a new generation of businesses are leading downtown’s revival all year long, not just a few groundhogged-up days in fall.
This lamentable conflict gets worse every year, and it can be mediated by only one entity: City government. After all, Harvest Homecoming takes place as it does, where it does, because the city allows it – not only that, but also subsidizes it. But downtown no longer provides a conveniently empty slate upon which Harvest Homecoming can deploy its own extractive business model to the detriment and marginalization of pre-existing, heavily invested, daily models.
City government simply must be active in brokering solutions, and yet no communication is facilitated. This year the rancor was at an all-time high.
Is anyone listening?
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You can bet at least one councilman isn’t.
In yet another weekly outbreak of hilarity, it was revealed that Bob Caesar is so tone deaf that he knows only two tunes. One of them is "The 'In' Crowd" -- and the other one isn't.
As a well-scrubbed member of the dominant “leadership” caste, one who doesn’t know what it means to live paycheck to paycheck, CM CeeSaw first regarded bridge tolls as no problem, and now believes yard waste pick-up fees are a breeze, too. His cluelessness was amply rewarded with multiple, scathing comments at the newspaper’s web site, where it got so bad for the self-appointed Emperor of the Street Grid that even Emma took him down:
“I have stood up for you in the past against people who agree with that Baylor guy all the time, but no more. This time, I'm with Baylor. You are OUT OF TOUCH, buddy."
See? I’m really not the only one.
Happy News and Tribune metered paywalling, dear readers. Alabama pensioners deeply appreciate your solicitude and oblivious New Albanism. After all, they're there -- not here.
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