Whipped Cream Difficulties

Lawrence was kind enough to throw me a backlink for my SF Bay Guardian entry. So I thought I’d note here, just for the record, that the Providence Phoenix is also closing down. From what I can tell, the PP is part of the same media group that owned the Boston Phoenix, which shut down last year. (Also, this gives me an excuse to exercise the “Rhode Island” tag.)

I remember picking up a few issues of the PP back when I was going up to Rhode Island on a semi-regular basis, but I don’t recall much about it beyond it being a fairly generic alt weekly. Again, I’m sorry for the folks who are losing their jobs; no snark here. But it is hard to see what the PP had to offer that isn’t duplicated elsewhere.

Also, this gives me a chance to link to yesterday’s TechDirt article about SXSW: Populous, a consulting firm that’s been working with SXSW organizers, is proposing “clean zones” for SXSW:

According to the report, the “Clean Zone” would be a perimeter around some part of the city that:
“protects the brand equity of SXSW and its sponsors but would be made to work with existing businesses and their interests so as to uphold sponsor values and private property rights—in return this may involve a financial exchange linked to the permit process that provides the City with additional funding for security and safety personnel.”

Part of the “clean zone” proposal talks about doing “soft searches” for “forbidden items”. It isn’t clear what that means, though there’s speculation that “forbidden” = “doesn’t have an approved sponsor logo”.

The current policy of the City with respect to the permitting process as ‘first come, first served’ and/or ‘must treat everyone equally’ appears to have become detrimental to event planning process and management of the key stakeholder interests. The SXSW event is one of the largest events in the world, and bespoke treatment is needed to facilitate a continuing safe event in Austin.

A fair number of people seem to be reading this as part of SXSW’s ongoing struggle to get rid of “unofficial” SXSW events, and I kind of think it is hard to read in any other way.

I’ve felt for a while now that SXSW is too big, and I’ve expected a major disaster of some sort. But the funny thing is: we had our major disaster this year, and none of these proposals (or any other proposal I’ve heard) would have prevented it. As a matter of fact, the only thing I can think of that would have prevented it, is more substantial barriers on the closed-off streets.

Kind of seems like SXSW is becoming all the things the AusChron purports to dislike, doesn’t it?