Englewood Forest Festival was a delightful Salem experience

Today Laurel, my wife, and I headed off to the Englewood Forest Festival at Englewood Park in NE Salem. Amazingly, I don't think we'd ever been to the festival in all the years we've lived here. 

Our loss. Because the festival was a delight. The towering trees really do make it seem like the festival is in a forest, albeit an urban one.

Once we'd parked, which was kind of an adventure given the narrow streets and number of people attending the one-day event, we browsed the many booths that line the park paths.

Pleasingly, it appeared that organizers keep booths away from the oak trees in the park, as oaks are sensitive to soil compaction — which is the reason the Salem Art Fair no longer has booths under the large oaks at Bush Park, but mostly in an open field.

We enjoyed a Parks Department display of improvements being made to city parks. A pleasant City of Salem employee answered our questions.

Laurel, a major dog lover, was curious about a new dog park at Geer Park. It will be fenced, unlike the Minto-Brown dog park. We were told that Minto-Brown never will be fenced because it is in a flood plain and a fence could impede debris being carried along by flowing water.

There were many artist booths to browse. I had a good time talking with an artist whose work, I told her, seemed to capture the spirit of nature without being explicit images of nature. Being utterly unartistic myself, I felt good when she agreed that this was her aim.

I then used her as a confessor of sorts, as she was the first person other than my wife who I'd told about downloading the Grok AI app for my iPhone after noticing Elon Musk's many posts on X (the former Twitter) about Grok's image and video creation capability. 

After telling the artist that I'm not a fan of Musk's political side, but do admire his technical prowess, I said that Grok can create amazing artistic creations from some simple prompts. This is an example that I fashioned by telling Grok "Show Donald Trump as a ballerina en pointe."

I told the artist that I'm worried about AI generated art making it more difficult for human artists. Maybe at some point art will need a guarantee that it emanated from a person to make the art worth viewing, and buying, by those of us who want the source of art to come from the mind of a human being, not the programming of a machine.

There were food trucks at the festival. I got a grilled cheese sandwich from the So Cheesy truck. On our way out, Laurel and I also got two takeout dal, rice, and naan dishes from the Little India food truck. I ate mine for dinner. Very tasty.

Entertainment was also on display. We saw Celtic dancing on the small stage and heard a folk group on the main stage. All in all, a pleasant afternoon. Thanks much to the organizers of the Englewood Forest Festival and all the volunteers who make it happen.