Happy Friday!
Let’s talk about the Fyre Festival. To be honest, I didn’t have much use for it at first. I was vaguely aware and amused back in 2017, when a music festival publicized by Instagram influencers riding Jet-Skis in aquamarine seas publicly dissolved into a dumpster fire of a debacle, most vividly illustrated by a sad cheese sandwich that went viral.
But I wasn’t waiting with bated breath for the January’s dueling documentaries about the ill-fated, Ja Rule-fronted “luxury music festival,” or, like the New Yorker’s Naomi Fry, attending a sale of leftover merchandise in a Manhattan loft, searching for meaning among the $200 hoodies. (Though her piece on doing that is worth a read.)
But now, I’ve come to understand that Fyre Festival has given us a gift we didn’t know we needed: new language.
In the age of the influencer economy, when social media stars are paid to suggest we could all be riding jet skis with the Hadid sisters off the coast of a private island, Fyre Fest gave us a perfect metaphor. We need new language to describe not only the epic failure of the reality to live up to that expectation, but the glee the rest of us feel in witnessing it.
Got a spectacular, social media-hyped failure that comes with a side of schadenfreude? It’s a Fyre Fest!
We can now look forward to using this handy term to refer to the Fyre Fest of dates (witty and charming in DMs but a handsy, drunken mess IRL); the Fyre Fest of politics (Brexit, with Theresa May as Ja Rule); and the Fyre Fest of fashion trends (when it’s a thing on social media, but you’ve never seen it on the street).
Headline writers and social media users have adopted the term, referring to the Fyre Fests of startups, TV musicals, sparkling waters, creativity workshops, US presidencies, pizza festivals, and more.
“Giving something a name can give us a shorthand to reference a complex concept, and that’s really powerful,” Jane Solomon, a Dictionary.com lexicographer, recently told Quartz’s Annaliese Griffin. “Without that word, people might not be talking about that concept; they might not have the language to frame that concept.”
Like for example, clusterfuck. Before we had Fyre Fests, we had clusterfucks. The term dates back to at least the Vietnam War, reported Quartz’s Corinne Purtill, in her nuanced and profane exposition of the term for Quartz at Work.
Not to be confused with a SNAFU (“Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”), a scenario that’s FUBAR (“Fucked Up Beyond All Repair”), or a good old-fashioned shitshow, Corinne found that a clusterfuck—which like SNAFU and FUBAR is a military term—is distinguished by three main criteria: illusion, impatience, and incompetence.
“All three of these failings share a common root: people in power who don’t (or won’t) acknowledge the realities of their environment, and who don’t push themselves to confront what they don’t know,” writes Corinne. “The problem is, if potentially bad outcomes aren’t addressed pre-launch, they are more likely to surface afterward, when the reckoning is public and expensive.”
And in 2019, when social media magnifies the possibilities for illusion (and delusion), that might just turn into a Fyre Festival.
If you still haven’t watched the docs. Quartzy has a scorecard to help you decide whether to indulge in the Hulu or Netflix documentary about the Fyre Festival. Hulu got the interview with Billy McFarland (at a steep price, reportedly), while Netflix featured a disgruntled yoga dude, an event producer willing to go far above and beyond, and a restaurant owner who had to drain her savings account to pay her employees after the festival imploded. (TL;DR: Watch both!)
Or if you just want a good old-fashioned fiasco. Cue up the delightful and hilarious “Fiasco!” episode of This American Life. Segments about the doomed 1973 high school production of Peter Pan, a young cop determined to rescue a beautiful woman from a squirrel, and a cub reporter sent to interview Moon Unit Zappa in the 1980s all made me laugh out loud.
And what the heroes of these fiascos share, as Glass points out, is that “everyone is just about to reach just beyond their grasp.” That of course, is when greatness can occur. But in these cases, fiascos ensue—which, if nothing else, make for great stories.
Have a fiasco-free weekend!
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The new movie Velvet Buzzsaw, starring Jake Gyllenhaal wearing an abbreviated mop of bangs, comes out today on Netflix and it looks wild. Gyllenhaal plays Los Angeles art critic Morf Vandewalt, in a role that brings him back together with his Nightcrawler cohorts Rene Russo and writer-director Dan Gilroy. Also: John Malkovich, Toni Collette, Daveed Diggs, and Wanderlust‘s Zawe Ashton, who comes upon a trove of haunting paintings by a recently deceased neighbor. As Quartz’s Sangeeta Singh-Kurtz wrote, “the tension between capital and art has deadly consequences when the subjects of the paintings—demonic-looking people and animals—start attacking the self-important, overdressed, over-coiffed art dealers appraising them.” For a really wonderful documentary on the same subject (minus the murderous paintings), I highly recommend The Price of Everything.