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.