Renaissance
The car drank half a tank, delivering my young teen and his buds to the Arizona Renaissance Festival, somewhere between Apache Junction and Guatemala. Only after dropping the kids off and returning to the rural highway, could I appreciate the festival's tallest structure, the medieval jousting stadium, magically lifting thousands of enthusiasts into the bright, sparsely clouded Sonoran sky, transporting them to an earlier time.
I made the trek back towards Phoenix along impossibly linear State Route 60, accompanied by Joni Mitchell on the radio.
***
***
Free of the kids, pointed straight along an endless sunny road, losing count and care of spindly light towers, like aluminum mantises preying in a row. East of Phoenix and far from Eden, the 60 finally and fully arcs into grim, loud Interstate 10 near a place called Diablo, where drunken Tempe chafes devout Guadalupe and brushes up against muscular Phoenix.
It is at this devil's triangle, where so called Angels play a lazy practice game, and where a voyager, navigating asphalt curves at 72 mph, is struck by how full the stands appear, compared to the half empty hangar due west on Jefferson Street, host to unsplit squads actually try to win.
It is at this devil's triangle, where so called Angels play a lazy practice game, and where a voyager, navigating asphalt curves at 72 mph, is struck by how full the stands appear, compared to the half empty hangar due west on Jefferson Street, host to unsplit squads actually try to win.
*
This is spring ball's renaissance. At Diablo, the vermillion crowd is packed 
like new cherries in a crate, and up the road in Scottsdale, the cheapest seat from which to catch Giants flounder is $13. Well, that's standing room; an actual seat costs extra. Watching Dan Ortmeier ground out, at those prices, drew ten thousand Saturday.
Far more than before television money drove our entertainments, and baseball stands were made of pine. When Scottsdale had no clubhouse, and all the players filed into the one parking lot, postgame, with the entire scarcity of sun baked cognoscenti, separated only by an equipment bag or a young autograph seeker's timidity. At today's secure and "improved" MLB proxy complexes, chances of bumping into a star are as distant as at MLB games - and astronomical compared to hanging around Congress.
Inside the bustling Renaissance Fair, the boy ate a six dollar turkey leg, then ate up the comic stockaded "prisoner" hurling salty insults at passers by. The festival was rife, he told me later, with lonely fellows in their twenties and thirties, many clad like medieval Trekkies, more eager to exit their century than unrequited conversations.
Ballyards also brim with twenty and thirtysomething lonely hearts, instructed largely by television that it's the place to be - and be seen - preferably in pricey clubwear, authentically sewn in China. Wired hounds and gadflys openly courting a bought and sold scene rather than subtle romance with a game many of them never played.
A Renaissance Fair. The teeming Cactus League. Two corporations cashing in on the present, one by unapologetically immersing itself in the past, the other alternately harkening and ignoring it at its calculated convenience. I've looked at crowds from both sides now, and appreciated them best from the highway.
(photos courtesy of danieloates.com)
like new cherries in a crate, and up the road in Scottsdale, the cheapest seat from which to catch Giants flounder is $13. Well, that's standing room; an actual seat costs extra. Watching Dan Ortmeier ground out, at those prices, drew ten thousand Saturday.Far more than before television money drove our entertainments, and baseball stands were made of pine. When Scottsdale had no clubhouse, and all the players filed into the one parking lot, postgame, with the entire scarcity of sun baked cognoscenti, separated only by an equipment bag or a young autograph seeker's timidity. At today's secure and "improved" MLB proxy complexes, chances of bumping into a star are as distant as at MLB games - and astronomical compared to hanging around Congress.
Inside the bustling Renaissance Fair, the boy ate a six dollar turkey leg, then ate up the comic stockaded "prisoner" hurling salty insults at passers by. The festival was rife, he told me later, with lonely fellows in their twenties and thirties, many clad like medieval Trekkies, more eager to exit their century than unrequited conversations.
Ballyards also brim with twenty and thirtysomething lonely hearts, instructed largely by television that it's the place to be - and be seen - preferably in pricey clubwear, authentically sewn in China. Wired hounds and gadflys openly courting a bought and sold scene rather than subtle romance with a game many of them never played.
A Renaissance Fair. The teeming Cactus League. Two corporations cashing in on the present, one by unapologetically immersing itself in the past, the other alternately harkening and ignoring it at its calculated convenience. I've looked at crowds from both sides now, and appreciated them best from the highway.
(photos courtesy of danieloates.com)
Matt, you got me again with 'cognoscenti'. I love that word and use it around my 'dumb' friends all the time, which proves quite a point.
Listened to the podcast this weekend. Good conversation there. Though I must admit, the lady who interviewed you reminded me of those NPR spoofs on SNL.
Thanks for the link too by the way. Much appreciated.
It's freezing cold here and windy so reading your story of baseball in the desert sounds like a long lost fairytale. Ah...
Cheers,
Jeff
http://redstatebluestate.mlblogs.com/
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It is my considered opinion that funny and crabby trumps cognoscenti and crabby any day of the week. Therefore, I hereby pledge both my readers to redstatebluestate at the upcoming convention.
No. I've made up my mind. It's for the good of the party AND for the good of our country.
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