muddle_fish

It being festival season I went to a festival event this evening. This particular event was to celebrate light, creativity, innovation and other such wishy-washy abstract concepts to people down to The Rocks and spending money in tourist town.

I started off with a double espresso and brownie from the Guylian café to wake me up as I was flagging a bit for no obvious reason. After this the party moved to the promenade at Campbells Cove where spicy chorizo was wisely invested in. The crowd had gathered and there a good few thousand people sitting around looking cold and bored. I was there to see a show called Fire Water which being in Sydney harbour I assumed would be a spectacular event where some pyro-maturgists would set fire to some reasonable area of the water and there would be fire works and all the rest. It was a mistake to assume this.

A slight buzzing slowly became evident and I notice that the lamppost a few metres to my right was, in reality, a rather tall stand supporting some rather large speakers. The buzzing became a hum and the hum became deafening. In the water there were a few crafts that were essentially pontoons and about one hundred candles floating in paper vessels. As the hum became uncomfortable for even the most unflappable of the audience two persons dressed like monks holding tall torches ablaze ushered a boy along the edge of the cove. The boy got into a boat and did something that may or may not have been meaningful. While this was happening a group of colonists in red coats rowed past a pontoon platform upon which a series of cardboard cut-outs of poor people began to rise. The colonists disembarked their vessel and took up instruments and broke into some self-indulgent, progressive rock. After that din had ended the speakers began pumping out monotonous racket heard earlier but now with a bit more urgency. It was at this point that I notice other members of the audience as confused at I was.

I had hoped that the event was concluded as I was not enjoying myself and keeping good company about it too. For no apparent reason a ghost ship then emerged from the water on which the boy from earlier sang a stupid song. After his warbling ended to no ovation whatever, a red coat, no doubt sensing the mood of the crowd, put a torch to the ghost ship. Jets of flaming gas poured from rigs in the boat and the odd fiery geyser reached out but other than that it was pathetic. The ghost ship then sank back into the water and that was it.

So to summarise, a colonial progressive rock band scuttled a ghost ship on their way to conquer a new land.

In be fair, it was not nearly as entertaining as I made it out to be.  

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