FilkOntario, pretty much all good
I got to FilkOntario late on Friday. I did not see many concerts, but other than that I saw all my friends, including people I didn't expect.
People I was very happy to see who I did not expect included worfiesmom, yourpeter, Claire, Catherine, Steve, Caitlin, and Alyssa. I'm going to make an effort to spend more time with people I care about at FilkOntario, because so many of them were there.
decadentdave asked me what I was using to play on. I have a laptop (Sony Vaio) with the Noteworthy Composer 2 application. The thing is that the only real instrument I know how to play (give or take a few decades) is the trumpet, which is not convenient for filking. So I know a tiny bit of music theory but have nothing I can play. The guitar is a complete mystery to me, and not one that I'm very interested in. I do want to learn to play a keyboard, though I'd really like to find something portable that works for MIDI output. (The MIDI keyboards I have found have speakers and a lot of extraneous electronic logic built in, making them not useful to me; they are kind of like building a typewriter's functionality, complete with printer, into a computer keyboard, when all I want is the actual keyboard.)
andpuff asked me about a song I didn't sing, my "Song for the Holidays" (pending a better title). I was tremendously flattered. I've been a listener for a quarter-century but I've only started writing in the past year and a bit, in my very limited free time. The UFO house-filkers very kindly encourage me to perform and to keep writing, I think in the hopes (which I share) that I will eventually come up with stuff worth actually recording or listening to. I need to fix a couple of my songs with a couple bars of introduction so that I don't lose track of new verses. I got ideas for a couple other songs which I will try to find time to write. mvt thinks some of my songs are too long, though the holiday song is based on the Irish calendar so it really has to have eight verses.
Merle told me I had to enter the song-writing contest. The only way I could figure out how to string words together was with rap. I based the song on a flying-penguin video I knew about on YouTube. The whole "contest" aspect of that drove me crazy; part of me knows I'm barely a neo-filker, but I invested energy into caring about the outcome. That of course evaporated when I heard the other entries, as though I could possibly compete with Cat Faber, one of my favorite filk artists. The contest instructions said "short", which not all the entries were.
Merle also said I had to go to the performance workshop. It was in some ways very like a filk circle. UT was trying to be very helpful, other people were shy, a few of the usual filk hogs showed up late and became filk workshop hogs, using up time without really advancing the goal of the workshop. I spoke very late, as I do in filk circles. I learned I should be more assertive and more patient, both of which were useful reminders for me.
I announced SFContario when conventions were being announced. I said I wanted to try to recreate the positive atmosphere from Filkontario at a general SF convention. We've recruited sposter and pwl1 already, and I hope to get a couple other FKO people involved. Though the main thing is if we can get the local FKO regulars to show up and attend SFContario, that would be great for helping to create the right culture and atmosphere for our new convention.
Merle and I spent $460 at the Interfilk auction. We bought the ten plagues finger puppets for Cheryl's parents seder on Wednesday. (Cheryl doesn't read my LJ, so I can post this and it will still be a surprise to her.) We got the Kathy Mar DVD and the Story into Song CD from Denvention. I helped bid up a few other items. In total the auction raised over $2700 for Interfilk, so we did our share.
There were a bunch of food choices across the road, within easy walking distance. This was a great improvement over Ad Astra.
I guess I did enjoy all the open filks. At the dead penguin filk, Heather Dale just stepped up and helped organize, asking people how many times each person had sung. But then she left and it went back to regular chaos. It strikes me that a good solution would be for someone who is one of the more well-known filkers in the circle to just step forward and do that sort of thing. What might also be helpful would be to have a clearer delineation between performer-listener filk circles and participatory circles. That way, a C-list player like me could go to a participatory circle and not impose our time on the good performers and our beginner efforts on an audience that wants to hear really good music. I strongly suspect the filk conventions already try to do this, it's just not communicated as clearly as it could be. A lot of people want to perform and a lot of people want to listen; the my-turn thing is a distraction sometimes. This is clouded by the reality that filkers are more of a spectrum than just slotting into categories. Some people want to hear the great music and the newbies, and there are a couple of shy performers who are good enough for any audience but who feel a bit safer in front of faces they know. I don't know. Certainly I'm not the discoverer of this issue. Anyway, part of me wanted to sing once or twice more, but I didn't want to do that at anyone else's expense, so that would have involved waiting another hour or two, which I couldn't really do.
I left at 1 AM, had to work on Monday.
(Edit: I will almost always mention a few points where I think things might have gone better. Most events and activities are subject to some degree of improvement. Maybe I mention these points more than the positives, because the discussion is more interesting than a litany of "it was great to see/hug/listen to so-and-so". I find glowing comments to be, well, dull. ;) So please do not interpret my few small quibbles as meaning that I or anyone else had a bad time. Filkontario was great. The same goes for my earlier comments about Ad Astra; a lot of people, including me, found a lot of positive things to see and do there, and I don't want to take anything away from the people who enjoyed it or the people who worked on it.)
Heading to Norwescon on Wednesday evening (arriving Thursday late morning in Seattle).
People I was very happy to see who I did not expect included worfiesmom, yourpeter, Claire, Catherine, Steve, Caitlin, and Alyssa. I'm going to make an effort to spend more time with people I care about at FilkOntario, because so many of them were there.
decadentdave asked me what I was using to play on. I have a laptop (Sony Vaio) with the Noteworthy Composer 2 application. The thing is that the only real instrument I know how to play (give or take a few decades) is the trumpet, which is not convenient for filking. So I know a tiny bit of music theory but have nothing I can play. The guitar is a complete mystery to me, and not one that I'm very interested in. I do want to learn to play a keyboard, though I'd really like to find something portable that works for MIDI output. (The MIDI keyboards I have found have speakers and a lot of extraneous electronic logic built in, making them not useful to me; they are kind of like building a typewriter's functionality, complete with printer, into a computer keyboard, when all I want is the actual keyboard.)
andpuff asked me about a song I didn't sing, my "Song for the Holidays" (pending a better title). I was tremendously flattered. I've been a listener for a quarter-century but I've only started writing in the past year and a bit, in my very limited free time. The UFO house-filkers very kindly encourage me to perform and to keep writing, I think in the hopes (which I share) that I will eventually come up with stuff worth actually recording or listening to. I need to fix a couple of my songs with a couple bars of introduction so that I don't lose track of new verses. I got ideas for a couple other songs which I will try to find time to write. mvt thinks some of my songs are too long, though the holiday song is based on the Irish calendar so it really has to have eight verses.
Merle told me I had to enter the song-writing contest. The only way I could figure out how to string words together was with rap. I based the song on a flying-penguin video I knew about on YouTube. The whole "contest" aspect of that drove me crazy; part of me knows I'm barely a neo-filker, but I invested energy into caring about the outcome. That of course evaporated when I heard the other entries, as though I could possibly compete with Cat Faber, one of my favorite filk artists. The contest instructions said "short", which not all the entries were.
Merle also said I had to go to the performance workshop. It was in some ways very like a filk circle. UT was trying to be very helpful, other people were shy, a few of the usual filk hogs showed up late and became filk workshop hogs, using up time without really advancing the goal of the workshop. I spoke very late, as I do in filk circles. I learned I should be more assertive and more patient, both of which were useful reminders for me.
I announced SFContario when conventions were being announced. I said I wanted to try to recreate the positive atmosphere from Filkontario at a general SF convention. We've recruited sposter and pwl1 already, and I hope to get a couple other FKO people involved. Though the main thing is if we can get the local FKO regulars to show up and attend SFContario, that would be great for helping to create the right culture and atmosphere for our new convention.
Merle and I spent $460 at the Interfilk auction. We bought the ten plagues finger puppets for Cheryl's parents seder on Wednesday. (Cheryl doesn't read my LJ, so I can post this and it will still be a surprise to her.) We got the Kathy Mar DVD and the Story into Song CD from Denvention. I helped bid up a few other items. In total the auction raised over $2700 for Interfilk, so we did our share.
There were a bunch of food choices across the road, within easy walking distance. This was a great improvement over Ad Astra.
I guess I did enjoy all the open filks. At the dead penguin filk, Heather Dale just stepped up and helped organize, asking people how many times each person had sung. But then she left and it went back to regular chaos. It strikes me that a good solution would be for someone who is one of the more well-known filkers in the circle to just step forward and do that sort of thing. What might also be helpful would be to have a clearer delineation between performer-listener filk circles and participatory circles. That way, a C-list player like me could go to a participatory circle and not impose our time on the good performers and our beginner efforts on an audience that wants to hear really good music. I strongly suspect the filk conventions already try to do this, it's just not communicated as clearly as it could be. A lot of people want to perform and a lot of people want to listen; the my-turn thing is a distraction sometimes. This is clouded by the reality that filkers are more of a spectrum than just slotting into categories. Some people want to hear the great music and the newbies, and there are a couple of shy performers who are good enough for any audience but who feel a bit safer in front of faces they know. I don't know. Certainly I'm not the discoverer of this issue. Anyway, part of me wanted to sing once or twice more, but I didn't want to do that at anyone else's expense, so that would have involved waiting another hour or two, which I couldn't really do.
I left at 1 AM, had to work on Monday.
(Edit: I will almost always mention a few points where I think things might have gone better. Most events and activities are subject to some degree of improvement. Maybe I mention these points more than the positives, because the discussion is more interesting than a litany of "it was great to see/hug/listen to so-and-so". I find glowing comments to be, well, dull. ;) So please do not interpret my few small quibbles as meaning that I or anyone else had a bad time. Filkontario was great. The same goes for my earlier comments about Ad Astra; a lot of people, including me, found a lot of positive things to see and do there, and I don't want to take anything away from the people who enjoyed it or the people who worked on it.)
Heading to Norwescon on Wednesday evening (arriving Thursday late morning in Seattle).