A Clam before the Storm

So, I made a stealth update the other day, buried below others. It's a few posts down, or here if you like clicking things.

In it, I lay out a rough itinerary that will either guide my next few posts, or, more likely, fade into the sands of the internet like a statue of Ozymandias, taunting me all the while with the fact that I failed to live up to its promises.

I am finally recovered from what my ex-girlfriend mockingly called my "once-a-year vacation into manual labor," and have had a couple days of inactivity to make my muscles forget that they exist. In it, I have spent practically no time at all looking back on the tangle of awesome that was Folk Festival, and nearly all of it looking forward at the last few days before I am swept back to school by tides of necessity.

That said, some of you may be curious, so, without further ado:

For me, Folk Festival is an opportunity to feel good about working hard, see people who I don't get to see anywhere else, perhaps engage in some light partying, and did I mention working really hard? Did I mention that I pay the Folk Song Society for the privilege of working really hard? It's truly an amazing deal.

To continue on the bullet train summary: I work on the Lighting and Electric crew. We handle everything even slightly to do with electricity. When we arrive at the site, weeks before the festival itself, it is several fields and some woodlands covered in permanent and temporary buildings that were nailed together by even more hardcore volunteers of the Grounds crew. They have pagan rituals and totems, and you shall know them by their bells.

In any case, it is our job to turn this collection of buildings and fields into a place where people can see at night, watch concerts, prepare food and be pampered in air conditioned trailers. This requires running a lot of cables. Every year, we get a little smarter and find another couple places where we can leave things installed all year, and every year some random punk kids come along and destroy a few of our installations.

We also truck in various generators, put up street lights, dig trenches and nail things together. There is a fair amount of sweat, as it tends to be hot outside as August rolls around.

As festival draws near, we assemble mighty scaffolds and hang high the lights of the stage, trimming them with the most colorful of gels and tweaking their aim to perfection. We beseech the machine spirit of the boards not to fail, and we bribe the tiny robots that inhabit the moving lights with cubes of energon.

And then the Festival itself is upon us, and the hippies blot out the sun. More about this stage will probably make its way into another post someday, but suffice it to say that everyone suddenly wants more lightbulbs, crafters always manage to trip their circuit breakers somehow, and the campgrounds fill up incredibly quickly and start looking like something out of a postapocalyptic film on day two.

Festival lasts from (arguably) Thursday night through Sunday evening.

Sunday night, we begin working immediately after the concert to tear down the lights.

And on Monday morning, on whatever hours of sleep remain to us, we begin the teardown. In one day, we disassemble everything we have created over the past six weeks or so. It is thoughtless work at its purest. This year I rode around for approximately nine hours in the back of a pickup truck, in pouring rain and bitingly cold wind, and accomplished many tasks. I disassembled things with a hammer, vigorously. I hauled and coiled wires, and packed and unpacked the machinery necessary for such.

I was tangentially helpful in nearly dropping a heavy light assembly on the head of one of my co-workers, and narrowly missed killing the lad. As it is, he'll have bruises and a story, both impressive.

The details of the incident are... difficult to summarize, annoying, and could perhaps be, in some parallel universe, litigious. Suffice it to say that it wasn't my fault, and that apparently in no one else's universe does shouting "Woah woah woah woah!" as loud as you possibly can indicate that heavy things are falling and everyone should flee and/or dive for cover. I wish I had been capable of doing more than that, in the instant I had to act, but that was the sum of my contribution.

By the end of the day I was exhausted, soaked, shivering and guilty.

It was still my favorite day of the Festival by far.

As a self-professed lazy man, it worries me sometimes how much I enjoy really working.

Before the fury of ten thousand English majors descends upon me.

Tom (and everyone else reading this):

I haven't actually read Kerouac, so saying I hate him or for that matter, the work for which he is known is...premature. There are certainly fans of his work I have a certain amount of loathing for. Perhaps I flatter myself by saying I think I'd get along with him. At least in the abstract. It's the aesthetic of his fan base that irks me. (Did I really use irks? I never use irks, at least when writing.)


I find it hard to believe that the internet is bad for ideas. Really. If we're really mourning the loss of gatekeepers, then that's a pity party I never attended. This stab at objectivity from media outlets is horribly recent in the timeline of information dissemination. Christ, only until recently were events written down to be reviewed, consumed and hopefully understood by people not in the social elite. So now that information can come from someone other than the king and the king's opposition and now that there are more conduits for it, becoming infitessimally more specialized and growing exponentially in number, the idea of going backwards, towards a mentality that worked a couple decades ago seems silly.


Will it take more digging to find what you believe to be an accruate report and criticism of events? Yes. But I'd rather have more choices, ones which are meaningful in terms of editorial slant than fewer that are variations on a theme.

Like Zach, I am watching summer plummet to the earth, and am waiting the inevitably rising of her more colder, but no less colorful relative, fall. Fuck. What am I saying? School starts soon, and brings with it a practicular set of worries and tribulations as opposed to others. (See: No really, are we letting him into the house? and will I ever get my work done, oh God, oh God, vs. oh God oh God, I need to get a job and No really, can't I stay out till 3 am with people you guys don't know?)

See you soon, space cowboy.

Deleriously long post, AHOY!

I've had a lot of time to naval gaze lately, if only because finding out that the cool kids are all hanging out roughly a block from where I'm living has driven me into a misanthropic spiral from which there may be no return. Omg Jay Mccarroll! Do you think he saw me? Omg!

Anyway, I realize that my last post (about bums, and not the kind that you sit on... I mean, not the kind that you throw money at so they go away... I mean, not the kind that are made of you ass) was a little grim, but it was a pretty grim time. I've had a decent sum of time to naval gaze since then, and I've wasted most of it thinking about Blogging as a cultural phenomenon. I posted a lengthy rough draft of my ideas on my dusty old Livejournal some days ago, and I've realized that 95% of what I think is entirely different from worthwhile deduction, so whatevs. Anyway. One of the reasons why I like Elevennames is because it is, at least nominally, of more professional quality than livejournal. We have a title! Dammit! And neat backgrounds! In the end, I suppose I'm really just trying to justify some kind of imagined gentrification of the effing internets. Like the myspace vs. Facebook conflict that's older than the internet (roughly two months ago), the distinction is entirely arbitrary, yet I cannot deny the sheer potency of it's subconscious tidal pull. I am driven to think that one is better than the other, because my brain is, on a very fundamental level, broken.

Or, if you'd like, it's because I'm an all-or-nothing 'Merican.

Anyway. I basically approve of blogs, provided they are the children of effort and desire, and not just something that information is thrown at every so often. Note that these two things can look remarkably similar sometimes. But blogging is nothing more than publishing a Zine for the lazy - there's nothing more inherintly shameful or Harmful To Culture about the activity than there is in, say, posting that you want to sell your couch on myspace. Or that you are looking for someone to do nasty things to your orifices. Whatever floats your particularly sticky boat. The thing that old people don't like about it is the sheer rapidity that it takes culture to. Instant accessibility to any and everyone means that things accelerate at a truly ludicrous pace, and that, like all truly doomed temporal paradox experiments*, the slower paced participants are going to be passed by the faster ones.

*Wherein a number of creatures, initially the same species, eventually evolve into entirely different species based upon their personal predilections, including one that wants nothing more than TO HUNT MAN.

This is not really an apt metaphor. My own mandibles have woefully underdeveloped venomous pouches, so it is all entirely theoretical. Actually, this was a dream I had last night, and it had vampires in it, too! So wait, what?

In the end, it's not a matter of evolution at all - like all things* it's just an illusion, a matter of perception. To say that culture has a speed is to imply that it's something that can be measured, or that one can consciously see culture falling apart, when the entire proposition is basically madness. The only reason pissy Victorians didn't spend all their time posting images of themselves at Jenny's 21st birthday bash is because of a lack of resources.

*So sayeth Buddha.

It's not a matter, in other words, of us being the maintainers of society at large - rather, it's about our participation in it. To say that it's simply materialistic and shallow and that you don't want to participate in it is basically admitting that this thing of ours, our cosha nostra of the Halo set, has become something that you don't identify yourself with. Hence, it's something that, while you are intrinsically a part of it, you refuse to do anything to help it out, other than, say, level a bundle of pointlessly litiginous lawsuits or protest some chubby, overly pale fellows who make games about guns and aliens.

The natural (and sometimes good! Though often not!) narratives that accompany these games of alien ge-no-ciide are handily ignored, as are the blogs which encompass the full range of human emotion and experience, dealing with all of our pettiness and nobility, our wit and our grief. Of course no one wants to read On The Road anymore - it's superfluous (didn't I already use that word?) to our understanding. There are a hundred different author who interpret events in different ways. Certainly, Kerouac is to be praised for being at least a decent writer, but the parts about only liking the mad ones, the people burn through the sky like brilliant white spiders etc. etc.? Poignant poetry, but who's he kidding? There's no one around anymore who spends equal amounts of time in the library and in jail - it's a dead breed, like the Tazmanian devil, hunted to death by our parent's generation. Just like gentleman explorers or vikings, society changes.

And wearing suits and swing dancing every night does not make you evocative of a more refined age, it makes you look like a jerk.

Blogging is, in one form or another, incorporated into society, in the same way we've adapted ourselves to mass transit and television cameras - it's a young art, as is everything that we do as part of society, and they need work and study before their objective value can be determined, and what's successful is discernable from what's pointless and trite. But until then, it's a great rush, yes?