Hello again. I’m back from vacation and ready to begin my yacking ways once again. Incidentally, vacation was a road trip to the Pacific Northwest and California, and I snapped a few pictures along the way and picked up some ideas that might be interesting to apply here in Elgin. We’ll get to that later.

Who went to FoxFireFest? I tried to go twice but was foiled each time. I just couldn’t figure out what the schedule was–I don’t know if the papers even published it, and the event didn’t have a website, so I didn’t really see anything and there weren’t a lot of people when I was there. I did another search just now, and noticed that DNA did add the Friday concert to Upcoming.org. But I went to one of these summer concert things once where they don’t tell you what they’re going to play, and it turned out to be a medley, bits and pieces of this and that. I find such programs to be annoying. Classical music was not written to be played or listened to in such a way. At the very least, please play the whole movement! In any case, I don’t know what they actually did at the Friday concert. Hope it was good.

Turnout for this festival was in the mid-range of what they expected, 14,000 people or just under 5,000 a day, which is roughly the same as Brewfest’s attendance. I don’t know what attendance was for the Elgin Fine Arts Festival, but it was probably similar.

I’m not enthusiastic about the name FoxFireFest, which I think is confusing, but I recognize the need to change the name from Elgin Fine Arts Festival. Clearly this is an arts festival, so I don’t know what this fire stuff is all about. If they want to do an actual fire festival that would be cool too, but let’s do that in the fall when fire would be more fun. Then you can do bonfires, fire walking, fire juggling, throwing, Laotian fire boats and whatever other kind of fire stuff you want to do. But if it’s art we’re dealing with, I don’t know why “fire” is in the name.

We had to drop the name Fine Arts Festival because every other community, large and small in America–perhaps the world–has a fine arts festival. And the word “art” itself has been debased to the point that it’s meaningless. So if it were up to me I would drop the word “art” in favor of “craft” and “artisan.” I would jettison the name FoxFireFest–since this is the first year, there’s not much invested in it and it can be tossed. And instead use Artisan Fair as the festival name–or some version thereof–and go after the craft market. Craft is where it’s at. Turn it into a huge crafts extravaganza, with pottery demonstrations, glass blowing–doesn’t Howard still do this at ECC every summer?, weaving, sculpting, etc. And by sculpting demonstrations and the like, I don’t mean a guy with a chainsaw carving a bear out of a log. There are plenty of skilled ARTISANS in the area–including nationally recognized stone carvers and potters, and it would be a pleasure to watch them do their stuff. “Fine Arts” is used up, meaningless, but the words “Artisan” and “Craft” still have power.

Of course still include music, the food, etc., but get rid of the stuff that was thrown into the mix for no obvious reason (cycling). I think such an event would attract a lot of vendors selling their jewerly, pottery, people who are already selling at Renegade Craft Fair.

Okay, enough about FoxFireFest. The other interesting, but easily predicted news, was that Water Street Place will not get built anytime soon, if ever. As we’ve said all along, we destroyed an important landmark in exchange or an empty promise of more condos at the end of a real estate cycle. It hasn’t been announced yet, but we also expect that the condos that were supposed to replace the Crocker will not get built. In the similar words of one famous Kazakhstani reporter, Thank you, city council…NOT! Fortunately we still have the facade of the Crocker, so eventually we can rebuild it. I would imagine that phase two of the Fountain Square project is also at this point, more or less fantasy. Given the state of the market, the city has to be prepared for a far west that doesn’t materialize, and a half-built, half-demolished downtown, not to mention tax revenues that will likely be short of what has been projected. It’ll be even worse if lawmakers allow a Chicago casino, something supported by Elgin’s own state senator, Mike Noland. It’ll be interesting to see if his position has changed.

Filed under: arts, downtown, events.
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