Nattering around

[hrj]

Mostly a getting-caught-up weekend. Finished chopping up all the prunings to fit into the green can and returned the chainsaw polearm. Got several months worth of junk mail cleaned off the dining room table, partly in the interests of being able to serve dinner on said table, partly because I had time on my hands waiting for my dinner guest. Finally got the digital converter box installed on the living room tv. I still have never gotten around to getting the tuner, cassette player, and turntable hooked into the entertainment complex. There's actually no strong reason to have an integrated system -- the only thing I'd use the cassette/turntable stuff for at this point is ripping albums to mp3, for which an independent setup would work as well. Having the tuner hooked in would mean I could run the tv sound through the stereo speakers, but the sound improvement would be marginal for my purposes. Anyway ... whatever.

With the rain coming back, I'm back to leaning towards daytripping March Crown this coming weekend. I don't at all mean to cast aspersions on the choice of the Woodland site for March Crowns -- it has a lot of advantages as a site. But when wet it has a tendency towards significant swampiness. Mind you, any site used for March Crown will have a tendency towards swampiness. I repeat -- this is not a specific complaint about this particular site. Another tipping point was reading the event description in the kingdom newsletter and being reminded that we're once again in the middle of a "Saturday night cocktail party on the eric" reign which significantly detracts from my ability to enjoy the event. I think I may be happier opening my own personal camping season with Mists coronet in a couple of weeks.

I've got a collective movie review owed, but that will be a different post.

Comments

[ysabella-dolfin.livejournal.com]

I've only participated in the SCA since it has been a big party... what was normal before the big list field party?

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

Not trying to speak for anyone else, but my view:

It's not a matter of 'normal' or before-and-after, just a simple dynamic: Large and loud drives out small and quiet. When the list field gets taken over by large, officially-sponsored, alcohol-fueled revelry, it makes smaller-scale activities, such as bardic circles or even conversation around a fire, difficult to impossible around the field. People desiring such find that either they've relocated to the boonies (making it harder to find them or stroll between them) or they aren't happening at all.

I haven't made any actual study of the matter, but I would be unsurprised to find that the large, loud parties on the field draw only a minority of the event attendance. I, for one, generally avoid them, both because I don't function well in such environments and because the sort of magical moments I treasure can't happen there. At events with big central parties I typically find myself taking a perfunctory stroll through camp looking for some small, comfortable gathering doing something interesting, and then sacking out early when I don't find one. If I have advance reason to believe that's all that's going to happen, I might as well day-trip.

[ysabella-dolfin.livejournal.com]

Oh that stuff still happens on the Eric in my household all the time (even if I am usually out at the boozefest while it is going on)... I am not sure who you are but maybe I need to hook up my people, with your people?

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

Mm. Happens out front, readily accessible to random passers-by, or happens somewhere farther back, possibly enclosed by fabric? Happens among household members and a small circle of friends, or has lots of different people dropping in and out? It makes a huge difference - for some of us, the more insular camps might as well not exist.

As for hooking up, please don't concern yourself. There are usually places I can go to hang out if that's what I'm in the mood for. Bardic circles are rarer (and sometimes take on a personality not to my taste), but those are also harder for me to fit into unless I know the other people quite well.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

While everyone remembers the past differently, one of my issues is that there was no "normal". That is, there was no sense that Saturday evening at camping events should involve some central unifying activity that is priviledged over other possible activities.

What am I contrasting it with? A vast array of different activities: groups of sizes ranging from a small handful to dozens; levels of inclusive/exclusiveness ranging from "shanghaing anyone who walks past" to "inside closed pavillion walls"; rowdy and quiet; participatory and passive; singing, dancing, storytelling, gossiping, feasting, just hanging out.

When the habit of the One Big Cocktail Party on the Eric started, one of the stated motivations was the idea that it was desireable for everyone at the event to participate in the same activity (in order to emphasize kingdom unity). But there have always been two significant conceptual problems with that (in addition to the various practical problems). One is that not everyone enjoys the same things. But if "kingdom unity" calls for everyone participating in the same activity, it stands to reason that certain types of enjoyment are priviledged over other types of enjoyment.

If the nature of the "unifying activity" changed with every occurrence, this might simply mean that the maximum enjoyment rotated among different segments of society and everyone was exposed to tastes of different activities. But actual practice has resulted in the "unifying activity" being an extremely narrow and uniform type of event.

As cryptocosm notes, the logistical asymmetries of some types of activities (e.g., noisy vs. requiring quiet) contribute to the priviledging of this narrow set of evening activities. If it is logistically impossible to hold a quiet bardic circle within 50 yards of the "party on the eric" then quiet bardic circles will be dispriviledged either geographically or functionally.

"Priviledging" isn't simply a passive result, too. It has happened that the royalty has made a public statement that, "If you don't like loud drunken parties, then you shouldn't come to West Kingdom events."

The other conceptual problem I see with the "everyone should share the same experience" approach is that even setting aside whether people desire the officially promoted experience or not, not everyone can experience it. The dynamics of human societies have numeric limits. One of the positions that was floated around the central-party concept was that everyone in the kingdom should have equal access to and an equivalent relationship with the royalty as everyone else.

As a reaction against a perception (warranted or not) that "royalty only hang with their buds" it's a reasonable pendulum-swing. But it overlooks the human problem that an individual cannot have the same relationship with 50 people that they have with 10 people, and cannot have the same relationship with 500 people that they have with 50 people. Having a single enormous party with 500 people does not mean that those 500 people have the same relationship to each other (or to the event) that a 10-person party would have.

For me, the biggest problem with the "one big cocktail party on the eric" concept is that word "one". Biodiversity is a good thing. Monoculture tends to lead to ecological crash.

Sure, people are free to go off and do their own thing rather than participating in the "one big party". But what are the consequences if they have to go quite a ways off to do it? What are the consequences if they are made to feel like they're "not real Westerners" for doing so? What are the consequences if only the monoculture is easily visible to those still testing the waters?