The group discussed how festivals and promoters are wary of introducing drug testing kits to their events because doing so is considered an implicit acknowledgment of substance use to the municipalities in which they take place.
What at first appeared to be a quick joke -- the Replacements, perhaps, mocking their own status as over-the-hill rockers on the Coachella bill, or the tacit acknowledgment that summer festivals have become a game of spot-the-guest-star -- only became more twisted and cynical as the set went on.
All jokes aide, though, Arroyo Seco was a welcome acknowledgment that the music festival market not only can accommodate a diverse array of ages and interests but can also be good business.
Driving the Risor festival is an implicit acknowledgment that every performance musicians give is, in a way, a performance in progress.
That was an apparently reluctant acknowledgment of what everyone already knew: the festival had become a marketplace as well, and a frenzied one at that.
The New York Film Festival has been miserly in its acknowledgments of American independent filmmakers, but the first week of the festival includes one noteworthy domestic film in the lineup, and it's a ferocious one.
The Wayman Tisdale Story has received numerous acknowledgments such as Best Documentary from the Park City Film Festival and The International Christian Film Festival, plus Best Sports Documentary from the Los Angeles Sports and Film Festival and The People's Choice Award Runner-Up at the Pan African Film Festival and the 2010 Basketball Hall of Fame Enshrinement Award.
Its visit to Queen Elizabeth Hall this weekend as part of London's annual Dance Umbrella — long one of the world's largest and most prestigious festivals of modern dance — seemed in large part an acknowledgment of the Umbrella's influence.
The festival's mission to "showcase raw queer talent" through "a live and loud acknowledgment that our people do not fit into the simple stereotypes projected onto us by mainstream culture" is perhaps a tall order -- but the team who pulled off year one has since grown, and they are about to top themselves.
The Palestine Festival of Literature and the International Writers Festival of Israel both took place this week without mutual awareness or acknowledgment, and each closed Thursday night with readings and songs.
In that group, Mr. Gatins and Mr. Johnson could get the biggest boost in the Oscar race, and with this acknowledgment for "The Master," Mr. Anderson stands to regain some of the ground he started out with when the movie hit the festival circuit.
