Photo by wumpiewoo
A lot of places do weird really well. But when D.C. does weird, it usually just ends up being pretty uncomfortable and confused. That was the case with Sunday’s Green Apple Festival on the National Mall. Rather than an informative, inspiring, musical call to action, it felt more than anything like a high school assembly.
Some of the biggest problems were mistaken assumptions about what brought people to this event in the first place. The organizers seemed to think that everyone was there to pat themselves on the back for being part of the “green generation,” (a term they stuck anywhere they possibly could) rather than, ya know, for a free Flaming Lips show. (I didn’t get the impression that the girl yelling “I LOVE ACID!” was there because of her devotion to lowering her carbon footprint.) The organizers missed an opportunity to really connect to an assembled audience about the issues it stood for. Instead of useful tips or motivational facts, they gave us long winded eco-cheerleaders, a sea of brochures, and a few text message-based trivia questions. There were signs that they wanted to connect to the younger people in the audience — an inspirational tagline, frequent mentions of Obama. But mostly it felt like your dad trying to sound hip. Congressman Edward Markey, co-author of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, offered awkward metaphors, like, “the earth is running a fever, but there is no emergency room for planets.” He then urged people to send a text to show support of the bill — which would then later be turned into physical letters sent to congress. So close, and yet so far away.
The mall was lined with booths, and anybody who was giving away something free got a line of their own. This fact was drenched in a sad sort of irony, considering that the tchotchkies these folks clamored for all afternoon will probably end up in a landfill in the not so distant future. A note to organizers: paper handouts and branded plastic giveaways are anathema to a “green” festival.
So is, for that matter, an event that stretched several hours beyond what it should have for the sake of inviting every sponsor and every head of any tangentially eco-conscious organization to get up on stage and give a speech. There were about six speakers at each between-set interval, all of whom said more or less the same thing, and none of whom gave any actually useful advice or calls to action. This was frustrating for a couple of reasons. It was pretty boring to hear different people giving the same speech over and over again (many of whom didn’t get the memo about not needing to yell when you’re using a microphone), but also in the respect that without these needless buffers, the entire show could have ended earlier and used a lot less of that stage-supporting electricity. The Green Apple Festival seemed to lack the presence of mind to edit, to stay on message or to keep its crowd engaged. And as the temperature dropped and the rain began to do the same, it made for a pretty unsatisfying afternoon.
And we haven’t even begun to talk about Chevy Chase yet.
