Day for Night fest springs from unconventional mind
Omar Afra is lying on a massage table, shoeless and wearing gym shorts, while contemplating the resolution to a current problem: how to reconcile the needs of a beer sponsor with a charitable donation made in connection to ticket sales.
It’s regarding Day for Night, his arts and music festival that will fill the former Barbara Jordan Post Office with hip musical acts and provocative visual artists for three days starting Friday.
The problem for Afra, the festival’s founder, isn’t whether to come out in favor of a controversial charity.
The 3-year-old fest is unabashedly political, with U.S. and Russian anti-government activists on its bill this year.
The issue is, as Afra, 39, summarizes in between deep breaths instructed by the masseur, finding an answer to the seemingly irresolvable question: “What nonprofit pairs well with alcohol?”
That query, in a sense, is an example of how Afra’s counterintuitive thinking has helped him become one of Houston’s cultural tastemakers. After all, who starts a free newspaper as a response to the Iraq War, in an era that saw digital media beginning to dull the impact of print journalism? And who uses that free paper as a platform to manifest two music festivals that have helped put Houston on the music map? And who considers pairing nonprofits with booze?
He does, and has been for the past 15 years, often while surrounded by a collective of hipsters and like-minded people who flutter about Afra like acolytes drawn to a cult leader.
A few are gathered here, in the Montrose bungalow where Afra works. It has the vibe of a record shop and college dorm rolled into one — Apple computers, wornout couches and walls painted a deep purple that are covered in the promotional posters from previous music festivals the newspaper has put on — Free Press Summer Fest and the Westheimer Block Party.
This, as they say, is where the magic happens. But come Friday, the magic will be realized as the former downtown post office fills with culture vultures craving the sounds of alt-rock heroes such as St. Vincent and Nine Inch Nails or walking through the myriad light and art installations that serve as irresistible selfie bait.
It’s Afra’s dreams come true. BBB
The old Barbara Jordan Post Office is a brutalist bunker, the kind of building that was designed during the Cold War — it was built in 1963 — as a rectangular construct striped with vertical girders. It doesn’t blend into a 21st-century skyline.
And less than two months before the launch of Day for Night, on a typical October day, Afra doesn’t blend into the beach-sandcolored building. He’s wearing a blue Aphex Twin shirt — a reclusive electronica act he persuaded to appear at last year’s festival after years of pestering — and meandering about the construction needed to prepare the spot for the December engagement.
Afra says his team is spending “a small (expletive) fortune” on upgrades for this year’s events. They needed more access points in the front of the building. And better plumbing — last year, the toilets overflowed during the festivities.
Inside, Afra exudes enthusiasm when talking about the space, his voice echoing throughout the cavernous first floor, the former mail-sorting room. Only dimly lit by the afternoon sunlight that could make it through the dusty front windows, the space has the aura of a nightclub in Berlin or Beirut, Afra says.
Some people would see this setting and consider it a dump. Afra, though, sees potential, citing the rows of rectangular white columns as an opportunity to play with how sound and light and concertgoers can move around the space.
“They’re going into these unloved environments in Houston, these industrial hellscapes, and turning them into fairylands,” John Nova Lomax, a senior editor at Texas Monthly and former music critic at Houston Press, says about the Day for Night crew.
Afra likens a traditional music festival to a movie theater — the audience sits down, watches a show and then gets up and goes to another screen. His first festival, the Free Press Summer Fest, which he sold the rights to a few years ago, fits that motif. But the idea behind Day for Night was to use a new medium — light installations — to keep entertainment flowing among the stages.
This year’s Day for Night is expected to cost $6 million. Afra anticipates it will bring in four times that much money to Houston. And though economic impact estimates can often be overblown, he may have a point. Last year’s festival sold two-thirds of its tickets to people outside Houston, according to Afra.
But the building, the festival’s home, is all about Space City. The same architect designed the Astrodome, Afra points out, before saying it reminds him of the buildings his father helped construct. “It’s so quintessentially Houston.” BBB
Afra grew up in southwest Houston, the son of a civil engineer and a homemaker. His family moved from Beirut to the Bayou City when he was a toddler to escape the Lebanese civil war. Afra’s late father had attended the University of Houston.
His parents always had music on around the house — Julio Iglesias or Fairuz, a Lebanese singer whose warbling voice is heard layered over hand drums and lutes.
And they went to hear it live, too. Afra’s father once carted then7-year-old Afra, his sister and his brother to the Westheimer Street Festival. This was back when Montrose had a little more grunge, Afra says, when funk bands and reggae bands played, and someone put on a drag show on top of what is now the Blacksmith Coffee Bar.
It was Afra’s first music-festival experience. He loved every minute of it.
“There was a bit of controlled chaos that was beautiful,” Afra says. “Anything could happen.”
Afra began developing his own musical tastes in fourth grade during a trip to Austin. He was on a sidewalk when three men in an open-air Jeep drove by, blaring “Paul Revere” by the Beastie Boys. “And I got like 40 seconds of that song, and I was like, ‘What the (expletive) was that?’ ” Afra recalls.
He eventually did several stints at the University of Houston — where he studied political science — and went as far as the University of Arizona before dropping out and moving back to Houston when his father got sick.
Afra settled in Montrose and cobbled together a handful of side jobs: teaching music and managing a guitar store. He had two kids. And, he says, he spent time smoking weed and listening to the prog-rock band Tool while telling his friends that he wanted to start a newspaper. BBB
The idea for forming the Free Press came from Afra’s own frustration with, and opposition to, the Iraq War.
Some of that opposition stemmed from his left-ofcenter politics. The rest came from seeing how people of the Mideast were portrayed in news coverage of the war.
One day, he spotted the name of a printing company and contacted it asking how much it would cost to print his own publication. The rates were reasonable and, when the school where he was teaching music shuttered, Afra decided to form an alternative newspaper. He bought a copy of Photoshop and took the plunge into publishing with two friends and the mother of his children.
The first issue of Free Press came out in 2003.
“It was all rants, basically,” Afra says. “It looked like Facebook today, but in lowresolution print.”
Still, it filled a void in the alt-media world left after Public News, another publication for Houston’s underground crowd, shuttered in the late ’90s. Free Press quickly found its groove as a publication that primarily covered the underground arts scene.
That’s when it started to become a threat to its primary competitor, Houston Press, says Lomax, the former editor at Houston Press. The fact became especially clear when the lineup was announced for the inaugural Free Press Summer Fest in 2009.
“They just had the kind of taste that the underground, alternative crowd wanted to hear,” Lomax says. “I would just look at the bill, and I was like, ‘They nailed it.’ ”
After some smaller iterations on Westheimer, Free Press Summer Fest sprang out of Eleanor Tinsley Park in 2009 with multiple stages showcasing a mix of up-and-coming national bands, Houston heroes and the type of headlining acts that compel people to buy tickets to these allday events.
Summer Fest was eventually sold to C3 Presents, a Live Nation company, but its time under the watch of Afra hinted at the “new” type of music festival he envisioned with Day for Night: For instance, a slide full of nontoxic paint was set up on one of the park’s hills, and hundreds of concertgoers slid down it.
“All that (stuff) we tried to plan, and that slide was more popular than anything,” says Mark Armes, 34, a Free Press staff videographer and Afra’s closest friend.
They stopped providing the slide well before Afra sold his stake in the festival in 2015, for liability concerns. BBB
“I don’t normally wear shorts to work,” Afra says, padding down the hallway of his Montrose office in sock feet.
This is after his massage, when the Free Press maestro grabs a change of clothes from his desk and sneaks away to slip into jeans before returning to his desk to eat and answer email.
Shelby Hohl, a graphic designer on staff, steps in. Hohl has been with Free Press for more than a decade. When he met Afra, he was 19, sleeping on a couch and working at Whole Foods. But Free Press needed a graphic designer, and he knew some design.
“We’ve definitely got more convictions than degrees in this office,” Hohl says before wandering out.
The employees are a mix of Afra’s close friends, including Armes and Hohl, and eager 20-somethings. One of Day for Night’s financial backers since the festival’s inception, Randall Jamail, is a member of a family of locale lore — at least in the Lebanese community. He’s the son of prominent Houston attorney Joe Jamail, who was of Lebanese descent.
“Everyone there is doing something artistic, even if it isn’t successful commercially,” says Jack Betz, 28, a former editor of Free Press. “Some of them are just pretentious hipsters, too, but that’s OK.”
Afra says a knack for getting the right people on board has propelled Free Press and Day for Night to success.
“If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s putting people together who otherwise wouldn’t work with each other,” Afra says. “And that’s what’s made Free Press and Day for Night what (they are), having these people create something that’s bigger than just their little slice of the universe.”
But things like music festivals are rarely smooth operations, and Afra and his team are used to the occasional hiccup. He and Armes are reminiscing about some misses.
“I was just thinking about the commercial where I misspelled Westheimer,” Armes says, from his desk.
“Yeah,” Afra replies with a chuckle. “It got aired on MTV.”