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Live short-distance entertainment!
Jun. 18th, 2020 01:00 pmComing to a location near you! Live and in colour before an auto-nomous audience!
At Lansdowne Park, the stadium is being converted to a "drive-on" movie venue this weekend. Bluesfest will be offering selective drive-in concerts by local performers at one of the Zibi sites. And after three long months of quarantine, people hungry for diversion are lapping it up.
I have very mixed feelings about this latest pandemic-era variety of entertertainment. It can only accommodate a limited number of people, in fact movie tickets for the drive-on were all sold out within 90 minutes. And these are not first-run movies either! So many restrictions too. First of all, you need ready access to a computer to pre-order online and it's kind of luck of the draw if you can snag a ticket or two even if you're ready and waiting when tickets first go on sale. Then you need to have a car and driver at your disposal. Maybe younger movie-goers are more used to this sort of thing but in my day, movie-going (particularly with older movies) was one of those activities you could do pretty much on the spur of the moment.
I think there was some 70s-era film where the basic storyline had people all living in their cars. I don't recall the reason for this - maybe it was rising interest and mortgage rates so they couldn't afford to buy or even rent a home? Or maybe it had to do with oil-price shocks so they could afford to buy a car (either new or second- or third-hand) but couldn't afford the fuel to put in it?
In any case, I really thought that in this day and age, we were getting away from this mentality. With climate change and other modern-day problems, there's been a move to encourage public transit, cycling, green space and the healthy walkable human-scaled city or community.
I wonder what would happen if people showed up at these events with a camper van or other variant of a house on wheels?
I don't necessarily think the return of drive-in entertainment is altogether a bad thing. But it's a very different animal from the popular entertainment of yesteryear. Not a folksy thing to appeal to the masses, where you can go to the drive-in in your PJs, schmooze with your friends and neighbours and a big container of popcorn. Not so much of celebratory occasion or a street party but more like an elite club for auto-enthusiasts and the cyber-savvy.
I wonder if anything like it will persist post-pandemic?
At Lansdowne Park, the stadium is being converted to a "drive-on" movie venue this weekend. Bluesfest will be offering selective drive-in concerts by local performers at one of the Zibi sites. And after three long months of quarantine, people hungry for diversion are lapping it up.
I have very mixed feelings about this latest pandemic-era variety of entertertainment. It can only accommodate a limited number of people, in fact movie tickets for the drive-on were all sold out within 90 minutes. And these are not first-run movies either! So many restrictions too. First of all, you need ready access to a computer to pre-order online and it's kind of luck of the draw if you can snag a ticket or two even if you're ready and waiting when tickets first go on sale. Then you need to have a car and driver at your disposal. Maybe younger movie-goers are more used to this sort of thing but in my day, movie-going (particularly with older movies) was one of those activities you could do pretty much on the spur of the moment.
I think there was some 70s-era film where the basic storyline had people all living in their cars. I don't recall the reason for this - maybe it was rising interest and mortgage rates so they couldn't afford to buy or even rent a home? Or maybe it had to do with oil-price shocks so they could afford to buy a car (either new or second- or third-hand) but couldn't afford the fuel to put in it?
In any case, I really thought that in this day and age, we were getting away from this mentality. With climate change and other modern-day problems, there's been a move to encourage public transit, cycling, green space and the healthy walkable human-scaled city or community.
I wonder what would happen if people showed up at these events with a camper van or other variant of a house on wheels?
I don't necessarily think the return of drive-in entertainment is altogether a bad thing. But it's a very different animal from the popular entertainment of yesteryear. Not a folksy thing to appeal to the masses, where you can go to the drive-in in your PJs, schmooze with your friends and neighbours and a big container of popcorn. Not so much of celebratory occasion or a street party but more like an elite club for auto-enthusiasts and the cyber-savvy.
I wonder if anything like it will persist post-pandemic?
