This guy should serve as an inspiration to us all. I'll let you decide how much of his frustration was all an act and if he really meant to bring that flaming whip so close to his own head. Whatever your opinion might be, keep in mind that he did all of this in the pouring rain.

Labels: festivals, hippies

I spent the afternoon of Independence Day swimming out on the Wilson River. I mentioned to a friend of a friend that I was heading to the Oregon Country Fair the following weekend. He shook his head. "Don't you know what goes on down there," he said with a sneer. "It's a bunch of hippies running around naked."

Well, yeah, there is a bit of that.

He'd never been and admitted that he'd never get caught dead in the place. This is usually the sort of reaction I get when I tell acquaintances and coworkers where I've been spending the second weekend in July in recent years. There seems to be this impression that the fair is a Dionysian frenzy of "blissed-out" stoners dancing in drum circles. To clear up any misconceptions, during daylight hours at least, all of that is kept to one corner of the fair grounds called the Drum Tower.

More or less, the Oregon Country Fair is a mix-up of an arts festival, a rock concert, a food cart melee, a family reunion and the organizers' attempt to build an idyllic society out in the woods over the course of a three-day weekend. Or at least that's my take. Ask someone else and you'll probably get a different response.

I spent most of Saturday wandering the grounds and loafing around at the Main Stage watching acts like the March Fourth marching band. At one point, a guy in a Gumby costume was led out with his head hung low. I'm not sure what he did to get 86-ed. After the band's set, a few stilt-walkers kept the show going in the middle of the crowd while a guy in a unicorn costume danced alongside them.

Sunday was a different story. A thunderstorm hit right around noon, stuck around for a few hours and turned the fair's dusty dirt paths into a series of treacherous mud bogs. Some fair-goers left while others decided to stick it out and cheer every time the thunder rolled over head. I hung around long enough to catch the Nowhere Band cover The White Album with a group of performers from the Wanderlust Circus. The guy with the flaming, firecracker whip and the unicycle? Very entertaining.

If you click over onto KATU's brief rundown of the fair you'll find a slew of complaints in the comments section about the fair "selling out" and being overrun by suburbanite gawkers. I just started going a few years ago but I'm sure naysayers were muttering the same thing two decades ago. Rather than cover myself in mud and roam the fair alongside a traveling band of would-be Neanderthals, I stuck to the sidelines.

Maybe next year I'll get my freak-on proper. Regardless of these complaints, I'm happy to report that, even after two days at the fair, I still felt like a stranger in a strange land. And that feeling is why I'll probably be back again in 2010. During my time in Veneta, I watched a woman with a pumpkin on her head brave a storm, two musicians massage three people with the waves coming out of a pair of didgeridoos, a guy feed his pet parrot Thai noodles, a paint-covered woman allow a tourist from the south to take a photo of her provided "they won't put it on Facebook," and a band perform a cover of "Blitzkrieg Bop" on a giant stage in front of an empty field.

It's nice to know that, in the 21st century, there's still a place I can go and spend an uncomfortably long period of time explaining to a mud-covered man dancing in a puddle that the folks at the burrito stand have been trying to tell him his order is ready for ten minutes.

Many more photos of this year's fair can be found over here in a Flickr gallery.

Labels: festivals, hippies

I drank a chocolate hemp milkshake on Sunday.

It tasted like caulk. It left seed bits in my teeth.

And it did not get me high.

This is the sort of thing you find yourself doing if you attend the Oregon Country Fair. I went last summer with a colleague expecting to find a few thousand glassy-eyed stoners lounging around a tent city blowing smoke rings into the air. Instead, we found something better and more interesting: an elaborate arts and cultural fair offering some of the best people watching imaginable. A second trip to this year's fair over the weekend wasn't nearly as good as the first but what drug, literal, figurative or absorbed via a contact cloud while standing next to three pot-smoking teenagers while waiting for a tofu bowl could be?

It was also very hot in Verona this year. A weekend of near 100-degree temperatures turned the fair grounds into a drained oasis by the time we got there. The main stage, so plush and filled with lounging people on beach blankets was all but abandoned by late Sunday afternoon. Fair volunteers had to patrol the paths with watering cans to keep the place from turning into a dust bowl. Topless girls wandered through clouds of dirt through neglected corners of the fair grounds wearing goggles and bandannas over their faces, looking like extras from one of Hunter S. Thompson's acid-torched epithets for the '60s. It all looked so very weird.

While the heat put the damper on some of the musical performances, it only encouraged people to take their clothes off. Depending on your tastes, this wasn't necessarily a good thing. As for myself, I could have done without the overweight, Aboriginal, didgeridoos, mostly-naked, hippie parade. This also goes for the guy in the loin cloth who jumped in front of my sister's boyfriend to demand his ticket after sputtering "I don't bite but I will if you'd like."

But that's why I go to something like this: for the cultural shock. Fairly tame, PG-13-level culture shock but culture shock nonetheless. People tell me that things really get wild after hours every year after the staff close things down and run amuck. Oh, well. I'll probably never get a chance to see all that but after five hours in Verona I've once again filled my annual quota for vegan food, body odor and exposed flesh covered in florescent-paint depictions of benevolent celestial bodies. Thank you for that, gentle hippies.

Also: I put together a Flickr gallery of photos from this year's fair. It can be found over here.

Labels: hippies

Three days later, there's still dust in my hair.

We'd come expecting hastily constructed stages and a few rows of booths surrounded by campgrounds. Instead what we found at the Oregon Country Fair was a Shangri-La/Brigadune for the unwashed masses, a temporary, utopic Disneyland for anyone who wishes the early days of the Summer of Love had infected ever facet of this country, replacing our still lingering Puritan hang-ups with endless drum circles, Thai tea and clouds of pot smoke reaching up to the skim the heavens.

But, when you boil it all down in blue-collar, layman's terms, the Fair consists of little more than 10,000+ people walking around a sprawling, 280-acre Ewok village jammed full of people selling bird houses made out of cowboy boots and license plates. Like most things, it's a matter of perspective. One person's festival of all that is Good and Right in this world is another person's overpriced arts and crafts festival.

My opinion falls squarely in the middle. So much love and communal spirit drenches the fairgrounds outside of Vernonia that it's impossible for even a lifelong curmudgeon to sneer at it outright. I was too unborn to watch the '60s go by. I only managed to witness the strung-out, Trustafarain echoes still lingering around Eugene during my days at the University of Oregon. Despite the high admission price, the Fair at least feels like something pure and innocent, at least as pure and innocent as a 40-year old woman covered from head-to-toe in gray body paint cavorting past candle shops and an endless, three-day long drum circle can be.

In an afternoon I saw what may as well have been an Ent, a man rubbing sticks together to make fire, a college kid on a bed of nails getting hit in the stomach with a sledgehammer, a marching band fronted by the counter-culture equivalent of Papa Smurf and Tigger, an Elvis singing songs about global warming, people making Icees on a contraption made out of a bicycle parts, a woman reading a bizarre rant in front of a crowd of agitated children, a device that allowed me to "hear what the trees hear," art made out of rusty silverware, several oversized puppets, gongs, bongs, schlongs and enough bare breasts and naive optimism to fuel Vegas for a month. Take Burning Man, toss it in a forest with looser rules when it comes to capitalism, add more families and less Silicon Valley geeks and you've got yourself the Oregon State Fair.

At the Fair I also ate the best potato I've ever had. It was at an Afghani booth. I have no idea what the staff did to the thing. We're talking about manna from heaven here.

After a spell on a beach blanket next to two giggling, tripping teenagers in an ocean of people and smoke camped in front of the main stage, we went on an hour-long search for an elusive deep-fried ice cream stand. No contact highs for us, honest, no sir, uh-uh. Afterwards, metaphorical batteries recharged, we headed back to Portland, KLCC broadcasting, live, the final musical act of the night. After a spot-on cover of "Penny Lane" and "I Am the Walrus," the Beatles cover band onstage rolled into "All You Need is Love" as the late summer night sun poured over the Willamette Valley.

Sure, just love but don't forget about the high-paying job, the 401K, the stocks, the bonds, the Lexus SUV, the discarded ethos, the condo, the pressures, etc. The '60s crowd didn't and their kids and their grandkids won't either, if they bother with the hippie game at all. Can you find me a more apt metaphor for Baby Boomers than that little Buddha up there? I'm wiling to bet the Papa Smurf equivalent, that benevolent, slightly-crazed icon of the Oregon State Fair, works as a stockbroker the other 362 days of the year. How did Hunter S. Thompson describe this sort of thing? "We're all on a survival trip now"...or something like that.

Still, it's fun to believe and break out the old magic for 72 hours once a year. Myself, I've always preferred the sentiments behind "A Day in the Life."

More photos from the '07 Oregon Country Fair can be found over in the ol' Flickr gallery.

Labels: fests, hippies

I've lived in this state for most of my life but I've never made a trip to the Oregon Country Fair. My plans for the weekend fell through and now I'm thinking about making my way south. For those who have gone and aren't of the, er, "hippie persuasion," is it worth the trip, if only for people watching?

I could use some advice. For example, will I find myself surrounded by people yelling "Narc!" if I dare mix a non-branded Gap t-shirt with Birkenstocks?

Labels: hippies, Oregon