Only A Fool Knows What It Means

Title: Only a Fool Knows What It Means
Fandom: Heroes
Characters: Elle, Gabriel
Rating/wordcount: FRK/100
Notes/Warning: For the "temptation" challenge at sylelle_100. Lyrics by Tom Waits.

( Rusted brandy in a diamond glass )

This Land Is Whose Land?

This Land Is Whose Land?
Race, Place and Genre: Situating “Folk” in Folk Festivals 1

It's been over a month since this year's Winnipeg Folk Festival, and I still have a stack of other things I Should Probably Be Working On, but if I leave this any longer it's not going to get written, and I need to write it.

Bird's Hill Provincial Park, 30some km NE of Winnipeg. A beautiful summer night on the Canadian prairies; stunning crayon-box sunset giving way to night's chill and stars almost as numerous as the mosquitoes (but theorizing “nature” and materiality of place is another conversation). It's getting near the end of the Mainstage concert, Thursday night at the 36th annual Winnipeg Folk Festival.2 I'm sitting at my grandparents' tarp, next to the mid-audience sound tower. King Sunny Adé and His African Beats have just left the stage, and I'm already mentally blogging (a couple of people on my friendslist had recently posted about size positivity, and apropos of that discussion I wanted to salute the two beautiful women dancers/hand percussionists whose enthusiastic performances were definitely a highlight of his set and possibly the whole weekend). Then, while the stage crew sets up for night's headliner Xavier Rudd, Vance Gilbert comes out to do a short set (in festival patois, a “'tweener”) and comments after his first song about how kind it was of the festival organizers to put all the Negroes on the same night. There's an audible hiss as thousands of hippies and seasonal wannabes draw a shocked breath. I wince, not because I'm scandalized by the suggestion but because I'd been thinking along similar lines when I read the schedule a few days earlier. It's not technically true, this year (Oumou Sangaré was on Mainstage the following night and Burning Spear on Saturday), but it's far from a spurious accusation.
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