The following pictures are from "the first night celebration" (New Years Eve festival) held in downtown Eugene. As usual for public festivals in Eugene (and not anywhere else) this one had a $7 fee. Did this make it exclusionary to a large portion of the population and keep lots of other people from attending? Of course! Was it under attended? Of course! Does this relationship occur to anyone here? No, but nor does the fact that leaving the downtown mall as a homeless campsite/anarchist haven, will hurt business...
Anyway, during the festival downtown Eugene in the evening was about as alive as the average night in Portland or Seattle. But we've got some pictures as Demaris has a digital camera and we thought y'all might like to see them. Sorry about the picture quality, only the first was at medium quality (which I think will be the quality we keep) the others are at low quality.
This is a picture of the Labrynth that they were setting up as one of the first night activities. They were running way behing and Demaris spent some time helping them set it up.
More Labrynth.
You can see that Demaris spent a lot of her time here setting up...
The New Years Snow Sculpture. No it didn't snow, but as usual was around 40'. They brought in a snow machine.
Festival crowd shot. As you can see by the lighting it's around 4:30pm (just kidding.)
The above band was at the primary entertainment pavilion. The band was called "Accordian Hell". Its an all accoridan band with little talent. At the current time they're playing some medly focused around Prince's "party like it's 1999" song. I wish I could be more specific but they were really bad, really really bad.
Note all the nice hooded jackets. It's of course raining. You might wonder why they'd have a really bad band playing at a paid music festival? It's the protectionist issue. They only want to support local bands. Of course their aren't any good ones and they're almost all folk/dead style. So the music at these things is pretty bad (unless you like hearing old style folk comparable to a cat with it's tail being stepped on.) I will say an amateur all accordian band (5 accordians) was novel.
Start to the parade. No they don't have floats. People just walk in it, sometimes dressed up some with decorated umbrellas.
Parade continues
More parade. Note the costume. A cape. A couple of activist signs but not the real ones. Most of the activists shied away because of the $7 admission.
Hope you've enjoyed the card.
Demaris & Jay