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Holy heck, an update! Yes, this concludes my longest period of not updating. My statistics have plummeted again, showing that the internet traversing folk are a capricious bunch with barely any patience at all. Aw well. Easy come, easy go. There was actually a very good reason for my absence these past days. I was busy helping to organize a music festival. Yes, unlike most of the internet traversing folk I do stuff outside of the internet. Let me share with you the tale of the biggest music festival of Gemert.
Zebra festival 2008 Act 1: The cleanup. The origin of the zebra festival are somewhat obscure. Nobody really knows why its called Zebra but most agree that when it was first organized in 1988 drugs were involved. Lots of drugs. We started out by cleaning up the bar it would be taking place in, the Bunker. Its a cultural centre for the youth and it was a complete dump when we started out. Some examples of what we found when we started preparing for the festival:
8 computer monitors. We threw most away before I took this picture.
24 wood cutouts of figures we immediately started putting in funny positions.
Indescribable amounts of unusable wood, carpets, fly swatters, a pair of skies and a santa claus suit that smelled like sweat and beer.
32 empty beer crates that were stashed on the roof and had been there for the better part of a year.
Yes, it was a mess. A mess that took 2 days to clean up. But then we were ready to start, the container we had rented for the festival already one fifth filled up. The true work was yet to begin.
Act 2: The buildup
To the right you see the place where, in a little over 2 days would be a festival that would host close to 2000 people, be the spot of unchecked alcoholic abuse and probably form the battleground for drunken idiots out to crack heads. Some said it had been a stupid idea in 1988 to host a big festival on our only parking ground and leave bands and visitors without a place to park but just like in 1988, they were ignored. And rightly so.
For a festival organized by 25 year olds, we were remarkably well organized, even if I say so myself. We even had a forklift truck and managed not to kill anyone with it for the entire festival!. The arrival of the fences that would prevent people from going to places where we didn't want them heralded a dark time of work for me. I was in charge of the fencing. Holy crap, that was a lot of fences.....
My fencing job wasn't made any easier by the jerk who was still parked on our terrain. Even if you're not paying attention you should see that its really stalling our efforts to fence of the entire parking lot. I hated this mercedes so much I actually considered getting the fork lift truck and dump it in the bushes. Note the dude standing next to it. One of my many minions for the fence carrying.
Half past 4 on the first day marked the arrival of the beer and sweet son of mozes, was there a lot of beer! 40 barrels of sweet sweet beer arrived and were duly stored for us to gawk over. Hmmmmmmm. Beer.....
Sadly, we had one casualty. Teun, our most gullible worker drone crawled under a piece of stage and got crushed to death. He was deeply missed. For 2 minutes. Then it turned out he wasn't dead. Good, now get me some coffee!
Back in 1988 some jerk figured we needed a big tent to put more bands in. This tradition has endured and we're still sacrificing parking space to place it. Again, despite the fact that we're all a bunch of incompetent 25 year olds, we placed it with incredibly efficiency. Hmm, maybe we're not as dumb as I thought.
Things were progressing well on the first day. But we weren't in the clear yet. There was another day of frenzied preparations yet to come before we could open up and let in the alcohol craving masses. To be continued...
Back to the world of sucks and rules
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