Devon

Sitting out in the grassy beer garden beside the Old Malt Sccop in Lapford, rural Devon. Overcast, fairly cool.  Our first morning here, 7 days into England 2019. I should have gotten my hoody, but Sharon is still sleeping, or semi sleeping, since I made some noise trying to get out of the room, 

The cattle are honking at the farm next door, the sheep are grazing peacefully 100 yards away. A light rain just now chased me onto the patio, semi-covered.

The pace has been fast, so this is the first chance I’ve had to scribble some notes. We’ve done somewhere north of 1300 miles so far, and we’ve done pretty well hitting sites. A few missed due to time or distance, or simply choice, but overall we’ve done well.

The driving has been exhausting, especially the medium sized towns where the roads get tangled and the GPS gets confused, which has happened more often than I remember from past trips.

Today is Exeter, at least at this point that’s the plan, and we’ll be taking the bus.

The hotel here is a pretty nice facility – an obvious community drinking spot, appears to be part old coaching inn and part reformed farm house. Already chatted up with some locals – where are we from, dogs, travel logistics – and everyone is friendly, and a little curious. I’m not sure many Yanks find and stay at this place. It’s pretty much in the middle of nowhere.

More notes to come.

Where there's smoke

Got Fyre ? 

Watched the Netflix doc about the Fyre Festival last night - a few thoughts come to mind.

Plenty of schadenfreude has been slung around about instagram-hypnotized scenester millennials dispensing thousands of piasters (in some cases, 10's or 100's of thousands)  to attend a completely implausible music festival in the Bahamas, goaded on by clever social media marketing images of slow-mo super models splashing around on a pristine Caribbean beach and winking suggestively over their mai-tais. 

And frankly, yeah, it's a struggle not to giggle at the dissolving whoosh of hipsters' bored money into a bottomless black hole. 

But really, c'mon, there have been scams as long as there have been people (in the interests of full disclosure, I fell for one myself, more than thirty years ago), and this one - although cinematic in its sweep and audaciously catastrophic in its finale - is really just another in the proud tradition of lying for cash.

Someone said The Dream was this way

We have little sympathy for the scammed in this case, a lot more for the locals who worked their tails off futilely, didn't get paid and probably don't have trust funds backing up their dubious life choices, but as for whether or not this is a deeper commentary on a social-media driven society where image in everything, the fact is that illusion is ALWAYS the central component of a scam. Social media is a just a firehose for the bullshit.

The other thought is that music festivals (which I personally have no beef against - they can be fun, community enriching and socially bonding events) are extremely hard work to pull off, and the prevailing notion proposed by the chief perpetrator (and current ward of the Federal Corrections facility in Otisville, NY) of this comic dumpster fyre (Billy McFarland) that a positive attitude and dedicated team work will overcome the basic logistics of payroll, crowd management and resource control was, for me, maybe the most infuriating part of this event. I know the guys who do the Arise Festival in Loveland, and they work their asses off every year to put this event on. Counting porta-potties and measuring chain-link fencing isn't as sexay-time as filming models splashing gleefully around in turquoise waters.

Lastly, I still appreciate Trevor Noah's commentary on Fyre: "Yeah. White people love camping...unless it's a surprise."

I'll see the Hulu doc when I get around to it.