San Francisco's Golden Gate Park hosted the First Annual Outside Lands Music & Arts Festival to much applause and yearning. With so much available open space, it's hard to imagine that there hasn't been a music festival that has rocked the park past sunset.
I wasn't able to attend Day Three (Sunday) of the festival because on Saturday I received a larger-than-expected barrage of cigarette and pot smoke, which irritated my eyes greatly. The eye drops I brought didn't alleviate the redness or soreness, and after I woke up Sunday morning I could barely open my eyes.
I have been in places where I was around a lot of cigarette and pot smoke, but the mixture and dose of both affected me more than I thought would.
It's unfortunate because I was really looking forward to seeing Nicole Atkins & The Sea, Stars, Vienna Teng, Drive-By Truckers, Broken Social Scene, Rogue Wave, Wilco, and Jack Johnson perform. I'll have to settle for reading reviews and watching online streams.
Besides the music, there were other attractions that Outside Lands featured, many had to do with technology while others had to do with the Arts portion.
Crowdfire
The highest touted event was Microsoft's Crowdfire, which was sort of a mini-social musical network where attendees could upload photos and videos of the festival. You could do that anywhere, but users could comment and mix the media and watch their creations in real time via the many monitors that were set up in the humongous tent.
By Saturday, I saw roughly 300 multi-photo pages. There were many sofas that let festival goers simply lounge around and view them. You'd think this technology would benefit more established music social networks like Last.fm, but I think Microsoft wanted to promote their Zune music player and better diversify their marketplace with a test-driven feature to eventually serve as an alternative to Apple's iTunes Store.
The tent also housed Intel's presence with a few popular Guitar Hero stations. There were also a few laptops available for Internet access, which I never saw used for anything but MySpace profiles. There were a few televisions and screens devoted to live video for a particular performance.
Artist Dome
Dell sponsored a tent (which should have been a lot bigger) for promoting some of its technology like its popular stitching machine that helped customize all kinds of clothing with any design.
The tent was also used to house interviews with a many of the festival's musicians. The times often conflicted with performances I wanted to see. Fortunately, these interviews can be viewed at the Outside Lands page at Dell's Summer Rocks. The tent was a small place to relax in the middle of the entire festival, which featured a few comfortable couches and a ping-pong table.
Outsider Art
Outsider Art was a series of tents devoted to the many artists who help design and decorate the festival's stages. I was surprised by how small the tents where and even though they were located near the middle of the festival for some reason they seemed be lost within the tent shuffle.
Signature Lounge
Visa's Signature Lounge was a godsend, and welcome VIP treatment to the many long lines at either the portable toilets or the alcohol stands. It was underused Friday, and Saturday was overused with large crowds trying to buy cocktails and long lines trying to use the very private bathrooms. The one men's trailer (the women got two) was extremely dirty by Saturday night. To be fair, there were plenty of portable toilets placed throughout the grounds so this lounge was more of a bonus or "privilege" than a "right."
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