#79: Bay of Pigs
Like everyone else, I watched at least one of the Fyre Festival documentaries (the Netflix one). The most important line in the documentary, which sums it up at the end, comes from the team's software engineer, who says that "the real Fyre Festival happened twice." The first, and perhaps more real, version was the party on the beach that furnished all of the festival's promotional imagery. "It just happened for sixty people versus 6,000." Now, we can say the festival happened three times: those two, plus the mass cultural celebration of its failure, streamed to millions and discussed to death—the Fyre Festival that we all finally got to attend. All three were equally real and inseparable from one another. Kyle Chayka, writing about architect Bjarke Ingels, observed that Ingels and his firm "are emblematic of an age in which every building must be a signature unto itself, acting as a branded digital image to spread online...and, last of all, a physical space to inhabit." Fyre Festival was not much different: The physical festival that people flew to and couldn't inhabit was arguably its least important part, aside from the memetic content that it yielded.
Sticking with the architecture analogy, the festival was equivalent to a terribly constructed building that looks great in photos. For me, the documentary evoked a favorite touchstone of this newsletter, Robert Venturi, who coined the idea of the "decorated shed" to describe the architecture of the Vegas Strip: the complete separation of surface imagery from underlying structure in building design. The Stardust Hotel's bombastic neon signage allowed the building itself to be a nondescript concrete box; no one could perceive the latter. Advances in building technology, as well as the internet's amplification of imagery, have made decorated sheds increasingly prevalent: Structure and appearance grow farther and farther apart, optimized for completely distinct functions. While Fyre was a metaphorical decorated shed, it was also a more literal one: The FEMA tents that constituted the festival's actual built environment are an essential, underappreciated ingredient of contemporary architecture: "For peripatetic elites who prefer experiences to objects, pop-ups to permanence, temporary marquees are the framework of a growing number of modern rituals, the shape of otherwise formless and ephemeral congregations."
If the Fyre Festival's execution hadn't failed so perfectly, or in such a culturally resonant way, it's possible to imagine it being a kind of success, or at least a less memorable debacle like Woodstock '99 (where, prophetically, a cover of Jimi Hendrix's "Fire" unleashed peak mayhem. No One Died When McFarland Lied). I came away from the Netflix documentary with the sense that it subconsciously encourages everything it ostensibly cautions against. You could pull it off if you just ran it slightly better. Fyre Festival's entertainment value remains infinitely scalable, and we all get to partake, even if at the expense of its organizers. The festival's specific logistical shortcomings are merely a vivid chapter in the documentary more than the story itself, and in this, Fyre represents a sinister mutation of Venturi's decorated shed, a starchitectural supernova: Something that physically implodes in a way that brings disproportionate happiness to countless millions in its aftermath.
Reads:
Why new apartment buildings in American cities all look the same.
Ingrid Burrington on geographic metaphors for the internet, the evolution of Google Maps, and individual freedom. "Users have agency to reshape the territory of their digital bubble, but they remain mapped subjects."
The growing popularity of mallwave music among teenagers and anemoia, or "nostalgia for a past you've never known."