Angst at Arco

This weekend, we hosted the annual Spoken Word Festival here on the site. Some of it was pretty good. We listened to a couple spoken word acts that were impressive, although one was so depressing everyone wanted to throw themselves off the mesa. There was also a bluegrass band called The Family, and a pyrotechnic performance group called Flam Chen. But the rest of the weekend was a poetry slam (team poetry competition with audience judging). We can hear every word that is said in the amphitheater from our room, so even though we weren't really interested, we got to listen to it anyway. Maybe we missed the more intelligent parts, but it seemed to consist mostly of edgy, hip post-adolescents (and you just knew they were edgy and hip because they dressed in weird and, in the case of the female participants, barely legal clothing and screamed "fuck" into the microphone every three seconds or so) venting spleen and boo-ing any judge that dared to score them based on their actual ability. (As Kip notes, "The reason there are so many starving artists is because most artists suck.")

Anyway, it is mostly over at this point and we seem to have survived. The rest of the holiday weekend will be tours and, most likely, site cleanup.