Kevin Roden – 03.11.11

Avoiding presumption, I restrain myself from attempting to capture “THE” meaning of 35 Conferette.  Various meanings have been explored and will continue to as we reflect on this event.  Last year around this time, I suggested that the a meaning of the Conferette was found in its display of a lost civic virtue: magnanimity.  It’s precisely that attempt at greatness that local thinker/writer/musician Dave Sims claimed was at the heart of the Denton music scene when he was interviewed for the now famous New York Times article about Denton.

“There’s this combination of artistic fervor and small town naïveté.  Artists here don’t know they’re not supposed to be Bob Dylan so when they start a band, they shoot for the moon.”

Denton’s own cultural economist, Michael Seman, makes the case that the Conferette has meaning in terms of its contributions to our local economy and emerging workforce.  He speaks to these things and more in recent interviews to the Dallas Observer and the Denton Record-Chronicle.

Yet, another narrative flows silently under the surface, still waiting to be recognized and understood.  Consider 35 Conferette’s founder and Creative Director Chris Flemmon’s insistence on a downtown festival.  Before crowd size and logistical concerns moved the Midlake and Flaming Lips showcase a mile away to the North Texas Fairgrounds, last year’s vision insisted on this as well.  This vision for an urban-centric Conferette has been questioned from all corners…

Why not keep everything out at the Fairgrounds, where there is more parking and more room for people to roam around?

Why not do it at Civic Center Park where we host all the other outdoor festivals in town? – that’s what that area is there for…

There are too many complexities with doing it on the square – what are we supposed to do about traffic? about parking? about the businesses?

There is meaning to be found behind 35 Conferette when one begins to see that Flemmon’s vision includes a debate with the very assumptions underlying those questions.  It is about a competing vision for the city.  In fact, one might say that these questions assume a vision for the city that is historically anti-city.  This requires a brief explanation…

Post-World War II America saw the rise in a new philosophy of city planning that resulted in a flight away from the city and into newly created cookie-cutter neighborhoods and the emergence of suburbia.  Still wanting to make use of the cities for employment and commerce, imposing highways systems were created in an attempt to make suburban life more doable.  Fragmentation resulted on two fronts.  First, the old cities became fragmented from themselves as roads were built with only the connection to the outside suburbs in mind.  Inner cities communities were literally cut off from one another by ominous freeways.  Second, a new fragmented understanding of human living came about as we began to prefer dividing the various functions of civic life and place into separate neatly-packaged areas.  Zoning laws were adopted that kept living areas separate from working areas, areas of commerce separate from areas of festivity – everything in its right place.

Denton still bears the scars of this way of civic thinking in the form of University Drive and Loop 288.  The diseased condition of the latter is not yet realized precisely because the market choices and brick selections happen to coincide with fashionable trends in commerce and building aesthetics.  Areas of town designed for one thing only – when you are there, you’re only value is as a consumer.  When the stores are closed, there is nothing left for humans and your identity is lost.  “Quick, get that store  open 24 hours!”

Those who question the urban-centric vision of 35 Conferette continue to think this way.  “There is a place for things like humans coming together in festivity – in fact, we’ve created one and this is not it.” But what must be understood is this: the hearts of the younger generations are turning back to the city.  35 Conferette’s insistence on its location is but an expression of this desire to heal what has been previously torn apart.

Lazy thinkers will chalk this all up to a generational shift in aesthetic preferences.  This is lazy precisely because if the whole issue boils down to a question of aesthetics no further understanding of either side’s claims or criticisms ought to be taken too seriously.  There are, however, serious questions of humanity at stake.  The purpose of the city is fundamentally to foster human life.  If how we have set up our surrounding has had the effect of further fragmenting both individuals and communities, then something needs to be reexamined.

And who better than the artists and musicians of our community to first raise these important questions?  Perhaps right here in Denton, the role and purpose of art and the artist in modern life is being (re)discovered – to put our city, and thus us humans, back together again.