Make me wanna holler...
For various reasons, I’m trying to give up bickering about matters Columbia during our 40 days of lent celebration. We’ve had enough discord over the last couple years and since the one thing we all agree on is that Columbia’s Awesome, let’s just focus on that.
…But then that nagging voice in the back of my head starts acting up and I can’t help but say something…
Namely, vibrancy:
The vibrancy of the lakefront during Lakefest was great – everyone seemed to have a ball. The stark contrast between Lakefest and the rest of the year, I think, speaks to the need to create an environment where such vibrancy can thrive without constant efforts to introduce it.
Let’s not take our status as a planned city too far. We should be able to have fun without always creating committees to coordinate it.
2 comments:
I agree. There is not a lot happening at the Lakefront. It is such a cool place. It needs some life.
"The stark contrast between Lakefest and the rest of the year, I think, speaks to the need to create an environment where such vibrancy can thrive without constant efforts to introduce it."
If every day were a festival, what would be so special about any given day? There would then be calls for greater and greater spectacle to overcome the familiarity, expectation, and boredom with daily festival. What freakish thing would be demanded next - exhibitions worthy of the Roman Coliseum?
I still wonder why there are calls for "vibrancy at lakefront", ironic assertions that there's a need to "create an environment" or ironically saying "there's a need to create more life" when there's already existing environment, vibrancy, and life there.
There's music at lakefront continuously: wind using the trees, buildings and water as instruments, the lake tapping out an improvisational beat at the shore, birds dancing, parading, congregating, and living all about. And the ever-present art exhibition of controlled civil structures gracefully transitioning to meet nature along the western edge of the lake with a strip of isolated properly preserved nature posing an appropriate juxtaposition on the opposite shore, and an equally stunning nighttime canvas under a twinkling sky.
It would be a shame to diminish it with a constant cacophony of artificiality, the glare of outdoor lighting for ornamentation's sake, dead industrial surface, stream- and lake-killing run-off, and air-polluting traffic congestion.
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