{"id":476,"date":"2008-07-24T14:58:00","date_gmt":"2008-07-24T20:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.laughingmonkey.org\/?p=476"},"modified":"2008-07-24T14:58:00","modified_gmt":"2008-07-24T20:58:00","slug":"crucible-fire-arts-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/?p=476","title":{"rendered":"Crucible Fire Arts Festival"},"content":{"rendered":"

A couple of weekends ago, I attended the Fire Arts Festival<\/a> in Oakland CA.<\/p>\n

I attended a forerunner of the show about 6 years ago. The show is hosted by The Crucible<\/a>, an educational artists’ space for crafts like blacksmithy, ceramics, enameling, glass blowing, welding… all seemingly fire related.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The long-ago show that I attended was a low-key affair. During the day Crucible hosted an open house where the family-friendly crowd could watch artisans practice their craft and examine some samples of the finished goods. As night descended, the kids cleared out and a more adult crowd watched performances that included swinging fire torches, poi, and staffs, fire breathing, fire eating and much more. Off the loading dock was a collection of iron work sculpture that was mostly crafted from recycled materials. Occasionally, a crotchety old dude would get up from his lawn chair, make a couple of adjustments to a sculpture and it would come alive with fire, explosions, glowing white heat and electrical arcs. The entire experience had a real home-brew feel to it, but it was amazing and wonderful despite that (or maybe because of it.)<\/p>\n

This most recent show was altogether different, and still wonderful. The venue was moved to a very large parking lot, and the scale of the artwork was considerably larger. There was a wrought iron tree that was nearly three stories tall…<\/p>\n

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… sculptures of a a kneeling woman and sitting man that were even taller, bracketing a circus trapeze setup.
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There was a firetruck that had been converted into a blacksmith forge…
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… another firetruck that had a large mounted flamethrower…
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… and another antique firetruck with a working steam engine.<\/p>\n

There were more exhibits than I have the time or energy to describe…
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<\/a><\/p>\n

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… but I’ll highlight two of my favorites.<\/p>\n

First is a piece called Exxothermia. It is a large block of ice, about five feet tall, three feet across and two feet thick. There is a vertical hole bored through the center of it, with gas coming in from the bottom. At the top, the gas is lit!<\/p>\n

A brass block is set into the hole, and as it heats in the flame, it melts the hole larger and slowly descends. Occasionally a worker would kill the flame, fish out the sizzling hot brass block and replace it with a slightly larger blow at the top, and repeat the entire process over again.
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Notice the hand print in the ice, where someone held their hand against it to melt an impression.<\/p>\n

The second piece was the Fire Vortex. There was a flat space about 20 feet in radius, ringed with large industrial fans pointed just off center, to create a swirling vortex of air. Flammable gas is piped into the space, and lit by two brave crazy guys in fire-proof gear and long torches. They were able to build up flaming twisters that reached thirty feet in the air or more.<\/p>\n

Notice what’s in the sky in the left of the picture? That’s the BART tracks, with a car of passengers zooming past the site. I can only imagine whet their reactions much have been to the flames swirling into the sky beside them!
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It was a hell of a night, the rare sort of thing that manages to make me miss the bay area.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of weekends ago, I attended the Fire Arts Festival in Oakland CA. I attended a forerunner of the show about 6 years ago. The show is hosted by… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,23,35],"class_list":["post-476","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bay-area","tag-fire","tag-memories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/laughingmonkey.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}