from RASTUS JOHNSON'S CAKEWALK 4
- February 1994
BOODLE-IT WIGGINS' DREAM
NO TIME Early
evening, and the sun is going down. At Pembrokeshire Fandom
Headquarters
Burrow Catherine is snorting with glee over some obscure
Thirties
detective story and I'm rooting through The Penguin Guide
to Jazz. How
could I possibly have got to the age of forty-two without
hearing HANK
MOBLEY's `Soul Station'? Or anything by ANTHONY
BRAXTON, or DEREK BAILEY?
Why haven't I got a copy of PETER
BROTZMANN's `Machine Gun'? Or MULLIGAN's
`Age of Steam'.
And who the hell are most of these people anyway - BOB
MOVER,
NIELS RYDE, the PAT BROTHERS, GEORGE `KID SHEIK'
COLAR? Good
grief. I set aside the mighty tome and stare with renewed
wonderment at
the ceiling; those are just the tip of the iceberg too.
There's all the
other stuff I want to hear; Tuvan throat singing,
for example. The two BACK
DOOR albums I've never even seen,
the CAROL GRIMES AND DELIVERY lp from
about 1970 that still
hasn't been reissued (though it's probably best
heard through the
golden mists of faulty recollection really), a decent LES
PAUL
AND MARY FORD compilation that doesn't cost over £100, more
Moroccan
music, PRINCE BUSTER's single `Johnny Cool'. The complete
BLIND WILLIE
MCTELL on Document, only £50 the set. The list goes ever on.
But
it's not just money that's short. Let's see, there's 1194 pages
of
commentary in this Jazz CD Guide, average 10 records per page,
that's
11,940 right there and that's only what was in print at the
time of
writing. And only Jazz too. Crikey, even if you just stuck
to that and
average say 5 hours to get to some decent understanding
of each record
(some could be dispensed with in seconds JIMMY
GIUFFRE's `Quasar', for
example, uncharacteristic utter crap whereas
others might take weeks
spread over years like ERIC DOLPHY's
`Out to Lunch') you're looking at
about sixty thousand hours for
gods sake. Even if you had the ability
to keep this up ten hours a
day five days a week it would take twenty
three years bloody hell!
When
I'm finished falling about in amazement over this Catherine tells
me of a
Japanese millionaire she heard about on the radio who has
a standing order
with record shops to sent him a copy of every cd
issued. The storage
space alone defies imagining. You'd have to have
a whole crew of people
just doing the filing and cataloguing. Does
he ever listen to them? How
does he choose? I mean, having all that
choice is one thing but wouldn't
you just get jammed by it, like
a cat won't eat sometimes no matter how
hungry it is if it's bowl
is overfilled with food. I'm sometimes
paralyzed with indecision
and we've only got about 2000 records.
It's
the Priest Equation surfacing again. Years ago our Christopher
took a
tour of his bookshelves and realised with mounting horror that
at his
current rate he would never live to read all the unread books
he already
had, never mind what was yet to be published. I worked
this out myself
and found I'd already got enough unread material for
at least fifteen
years. This is bad news when you average two or three
new books a week,
never mind periodicals.
But
then it's the having them that's the important part, knowing that
if you
ever want to read THE HOUNDSDITCH MURDERS AND THE SIEGE OF
SYDNEY STREET,
or GENERATION OF VIPERS, or INDONESIA-BIRTH
OF A NATION, they're right
there, dusty but undiminished.
I
wonder, though, whether it's as much a guide to character to assess
the
books a person owns but hasn't read, as much as those with which
they
claim familiarity.
IDIOTIC
THING I found
out a couple of weeks ago that I'd done a really stupid thing
at the last
Novacon that didn't even involve drink or women. Martin
Easterbrook
phoned to remind me about the piece on The Philosophy
of the Fan Room
I'd said I'd write for the Glasgow Worldcon internal
newsletter. It's
surprising how you can bluff your way along acting
just like you know
what people are talking about sometimes. Though
there was some vague
memory of this, and I did after all have a copy
of the November 1993
newsletter supposedly to remind me. I had sent
Steven Glover (who with
Jenny Glover is Fan Affairs supervisor this
time round) a few pages of
hints and recommendations at the turn of
the year and I suppose
subconsciously had discharged my obligations.
But gee, when they ask so
nice you can hardly refuse. Though I soon
wished I had.
I
rapidly realised that I wasn't sure what I was doing, in what context
and
for who! Not only did I have no more than the vaguest idea of
who was
actually on the Worldcon committee, but I had as little understanding
of
what their overall idea of the convention was. A sort of all-encompassing
typical Scottish fandom Bigger and Betterism, or what? Or has the
apparent
wholesale takeover by a rescue commando based in the South
East of
England changed all that? And what the hell was this Fan Fair
or Fan
Concourse shit anyway? Sounds like some dumb American idea
to me.
Apart
from that doing an outline of the why and how of a fan room
for me is
like describing how to walk or chew food - you know,
you just, like, put
one foot in front of the other, or move your jaws
up and across and down,
everybody knows that (oh and try to keep the
two processes as separate as
possible). Call me pitifully old-fashioned
if you like but I've got a set
idea of what the Fan Area of a convention
(especially a Worldcon) should
be and I can't envisage anything different.
The idea and ideals of what I
think is a successful Fan Room are so
deeply embedded that I could just do one
without thinking, so as
far as explaining it to someone else goes I was
really struggling.
Even with the help of local firm CATHERINE MCAULAY-EXPERT
WRITING SOLUTIONS things barely improved. We rewrote the bloody piece
so often we lost contact with the alphabet, never mind the words and
concepts.
So
naturally since then I've been getting great big attacks of the
Fear.
God, what if I've done this wrong, what if because I'm proposing
a real
trad fannish fan-oriented layout these onward-and-upward go-getters
will
just think it's a load of old-fashioned cobblers and ditch it
all as a
matter of principle. Who knows, but already I feel a burden
of guilt
settling upon my shoulders. Not just because the piece was
so ill-written
and expressed either.
Look,
read it for yourselves;
THE
WORLDCON FAN ROOM - AN OUTLINE PHILOSOPHY
So
there's the Worldcon, a huge thing, and inside it is
something else, the
Fan Room. What is it? What's it for? Who's it
for?
The Fan
Room, including the Fan Program about which see
later, is a convention
within a convention, running parallel to and
in association with its
giant parent (or offspring, depending on how
you view the evolution of
conventions). It provides an environment
and schedule of events,
programming and services not specifically
catered for elsewhere in the
Worldcon, and although in essence it
is aimed at only a few hundred
people rather than its coexistent's
thousands, it offers up a quite
distinct experience available to all
the convention's attendees.
The Fan
Room is the secret heart of the convention. Its
core constituency
includes those most familiar with the worlds of
sf and sf fandom. Many of
them are the people who, by organising conventions,
running fangroups,
and producing fanzines over the decades have contributed
mightily to
making the whole Worldcon event a reality although
many of them might well
say that things have not quite turned out
as they planned! These people - the
fans - veterans of
many conventions, don't need to be catered for in quite
the same way
as the majority of attendees. They can to a large extent
make their
own amusements; they participate fully in the main convention
as program
participants as well as comprising the audience. But they do
need
a place to be, a place where they can congregate, talk, drink,
socialise,
get fanzines and other publications, and engage in programming
that
is much more tightly focused on their interests than could be
accommodated
on any of the main program tracks. And in simple that place
should
be the area sf fans, as well as many other convention attendees,
most
enjoya large comfortable bar.
Some
people already know their natural home is in the Fan
Room, others will
find it by accident as they wander the convention
looking for that
indefinable Something that appeals to them. Some
may come along to
see a Fan Program item, intrigued by an unusual
write-up in the Program
Book, and stay around in the Fan Room afterwards.
The idea is that because
the Fan Room is set up with the traditional
fan in mind it potentially has
appeal to a wider audience, not in
spite of its apparently
exclusive philosophy.
One
thing the Fan Room must do is to provide, via its displays
and various
tables, a clear, coherent and above all engaging picture
of the world of
sf fandom, its history, ideas, culture and aims. SF
fandom has a history
and background that goes back long before the
first episode of STAR TREK,
and it is as well to bring this to the
fore from time to time lest it be
forgot. And this should be no dry
raking over of memory either; the Way
of Life portrayed should be
echoed in what actually happens day to day in
the Fan Room and Fan
Program. This is not an archaeological recreation
after all, but a
vision for the uninitiated of a particular enthusiasm
that they might
well care to share in.
The Fan
Room might well be criticised for setting out to
appeal to just a few
hundred people, but you might just as well say
that about anything other
than maybe the Hugo Ceremony. The whole
point is that it is a running
event through the whole duration of
the Worldcon, a social setup
scattered with fan-artifacts that can
as much engage the interest of the
newcomer as the old hand. Anyone
looking for a place to sit, drink,
listen to music, chat or browse
through the displays or fanzine tables
should be quite at home. Indeed
the whole point of having a Fan Room
rather than just another bar
is that it has a specific purpose, it is the
known place to be for
its core constituency.
The Fan
Area is exclusive to an extent; its often easier
to characterise
it by what is not there. Indeed anything that doesn't
actually clash with
the basic mission statement can be included, but
there are some
things that might be inappropriate. It's not really
for the novice sf
reader interested only in news of the latest trilogy,
or those whose
interests are primarily television shows, films or
computer gaming.
Filksingers, the JLAS, or Darkover fans will find
little to concern them.
These are all `fandoms' of course, as nowadays
almost everything is, but
they are separate from the traditional roots
of sf books and magazines,
conventions and fanzines that the sf fans
for whom the Fan Room is
constituted spring from. These other interests
certainly should be
catered for at a Worldcon, no doubt, but elsewhere
in the convention by
dedicated teams with the right specialised background.
That
being said, the Fan Room is open to anyone. There's
no secret
password to get in, it welcomes all Worldcon attendees who
may get from
it what they will as long as they understand that what's
on offer might
perhaps not be for them any more than a Phil Dick fan
who produces a
fanzine and likes small book-oriented conventions would
appreciate, say,
a Gerry Anderson event. It should be remembered that
the simple act of
providing a sociable environment offers something
for everyone,
especially in the Fan Room where the services are optional
extras to be
reacted to. This is in contrast to most other areas of
the Worldcon where
the services on offer are the whole point of the
facility.
When
the Fan Room is well organised it is inevitable that
even those whose
ideas of sf fandom are sketchy or nonexistent will
find a pleasant area
to socialise with friends old and new.
In the
best possible world the Fan Room would be a large
room seating over 200,
with plenty of table and circulating
space given an air of intimacy by
layout of furnishings and
arrangement of fan-oriented displays and
sales/giveaway tables. A
full bar open for most of the Fan Room opening
time is essential;
without it the area will not be colonised in the first
place and will
scarcely draw in its prime constituency of fans, never
mind anyone
else, and the whole thing will rapidly decline into a
forgotten backwater
of the convention - this has happened.
There
must be a staff of fan room organisers and helpers
available round the
clock, alert and reactive, keeping things neat
tidy and going according
to plan, cheerleading whenever necessary.
There's
no advantage in having too much going on in the
Fan Room, this isn't
Butlins after all. Most people just want a venue
where they can be sure
everyone else they know will show up sooner
or later. People will, in
fact, be driven out if they are subjected
to organised events. There will
be more than enough endless movement
and activity elsewhere in the
convention, and this should be a place
where everyone has a chance to sit
and talk unhurriedly.
It's
important that there are unobtrusive distractions,
like the displays,
sales tables et cetera, all perfect in this place
because the onus of
involvement is on the individual, and as long
as they're there and
worthwhile they'll be used as
and when required. There must be no skimping
or making do here - these
things should be good enough to make people
want to see/use/search
through them even if that was not their first
idea.
The Fan
Program organised on exactly the same lines
as that of a small convention must
be in a separate room adjacent
to or as near adjacent as possible to the
Fan Room. The program should
pursue ideas and entertainments aimed
primarily at the sf fan community
rather than the general Worldcon
audience. Whatever goes on there panels,
interviews, playlets,
competitions, games should not intrude
into the Fan Room itself.
Naturally, Fan Program items should be written
up in the most attractive
terms in the Program Book, so that those
unaware of the fan culture might
be drawn in by following up a interesting
program idea.
None of
this happens by accident you've got to
have a clear idea of what you want
and stick to it. Encourage people
who want to engage with the philosophy
of the room and redirect to
other areas the rest; don't allow the space
to be misused or disrupted,
the ambience destroyed, and the people you
wanted to attract driven
away by unwanted activities.
It's
worth remembering that although the Fan Room is open
to everyone it's not
the organisers' responsibility to provide something
for everyone; that would
be as impossible as it is undesirable. Certain
American fans might
complain for example about the lack of free food
and drink they expect at
their equivalent, the `Con Suite'; point
out this is a British fanroom
run in Britain and that hotels here
don't like that sort of thing unless
they're paid enormous sums to
do it themselves.
That's
a trivial example, but it is worth remembering that
this is a British
fandom show and there should be no imperative to
provide the visitors
with a version of what they have back home, Instead
it should be
something that springs organically from British fandom
culture, ideals
and ways. An imitation of someone else's fanroom will
be just that, an
imitation.
The
best way to run a Fan Room is by following the route
we know and are
familiar with and by building on and expanding the
ideas that have worked
well at British conventions since the first
truly successful Fan Room in
1977.
The
Philosophy of the Fan Room. Hardly De Sade is it, though there
were hours
of suffering there you know, and for wot eh. This here
following is what
I said in my covering letter to Martin Easterbrook:
"I
really hope this is some use; I'm actually getting
the feeling that the
prevalent thinking about this whole Glasgow Fan
Area thing is so far
removed from my own ideas that virtually nothing
I have to say would be
either welcome, interesting, or relevant. I
really don't like at all the
idea that we in the UK are going to end
up with a copy of something the
Americans have generated to please
a culturally quite different set of
fans; there's a real danger in
my view that not only will we not imitate
it successfully because
British fan thinking is just not that way, but
that it will not capture
people's imagination anyway. I'm worried that a
lot of the individuals
who are most obvious proponents of this are not in
fact the people
who will be in and around the Fan Area when it's actually
runningeither
as Fan Area Team or users."
"I
think that you ought to beware of setting up an
agenda to please a set of
Americans (who I do not think will actually
be at the event anyway) and
alienating the American fans who do
come and want a `traditional' British Fan Room set up as well as our
own people. The American experience is one that we can take relevant
ideas from but not attempt to reproduce. There certainly should be
no
real interference or imposition of ideas from the Main Worldcon
Committee
onto the Fan Area people who should be given a open brief
and budget to
run what is in effect a satellite convention in itself
in whatever way
they so choose, and not have to bow to the wishes
of people who might not
in fact be seen dead in the Fan Area anyway."
Well I
dunno. I know they've got themselves stuck with this thing
like two
Wembley stadiums and it's the only place they've got for
Fan stuff but I
think what they're going to do wrong is try to make
the Fan stuff fill
the space rather than change the space to enclose
the Fan programming.
All this Concourse business sounds like a particularly
horrid sort of
funfair to me - a holiday camp atmosphere recreated
by the organisers of a
village fete.
According
to the November 1993 newsletter part of a meeting was a
brainstorming
session on ideas for the Fan Fair - "some
of these were not intended seriously", but here's an honestly
random
selection (about 20%)
KITE
MAKING TURKEY READINGS
KIDCON DRY ROWING
COSTUME WORKSHOP BOUNCY CASTLE
WARGAMES EGG RACE
JUGGLING FLAGS
PROGRAMME INFO CUSTARD PIE FIGHT
SUPERMARKET REVIEWS BLOOD DRIVE
BONDAGE DISPLAY READING AREA
CALVINBALL PATIO FURNITURE
PROGRAMME SPACE REAL ALE BAR
AUTOGRAPH SESSIONS PILLORY
SF PUNCH AND JUDY SPRODZOOM
CEILIDH SPORRAN-MAKING
CLIMBING WALL FAN REPRO
FOREIGN GUESTS SMOF HUNTING
That's
thirty out of about 150 items, and gives a fair flavour from
the sublime
to the ridiculous. Some of these might please: Peter Weston
I know has a
soft spot for bouncy castles and the idea of designing
flags for fans
certainly appeals to me, and I wonder why I never thought
of it myself.
`Sprodzoom', however, leaves me wondering, and I'm not
sure even what. We
had the idea for a Punch and Judy for Conspiracy,
but like so much
nothing came of it and in the end I was glad as it
would have been just
one more damn thing to supervise and cater for.
`Smof Hunting' was
actually tried at the (I think) 1977 Eastercon
and was a dismal failure.
Overall
though the feeling I get from this list is that it's proposed
by people
who will not be actually doing the work and have no idea
how time
consuming and irritating to organise these jolly little diversions
actually
are. If I felt that the Tim Illingworths of the world (to
mention one
recently resigned committee member) were actually likely
to be habituees
of the Fan Room at all I'd be a bit more sympathetic
but I don't believe
that's the case. (NB I except Martin Easterbrook
very much indeed from
any implied criticism here - I have considerable
trust in his abilities.)
Running a Fan Room at a Worldcon is heavy
work no matter who's doing it;
at Conspiracy I was doing fifteen hours
a day every day, and that's with
Martin Tudor taking all responsibility
for the Program. What I'm getting
at is that it's ok having all sorts
of terribly terribly amusing ideas
but for a start who's going to
make them actually Go (even if they are in
any sense workable) and
more important are they in fact appropriate for
the purpose. It seems
to me that little thought has been given to the
former and an almost
Thatcherite revolution has taken over the latter.
`Fan Area' doesn't
mean Fan as in you and me any more, but Fan as in
convention attendee,
punter to be entertained. I could go on here
detailing the various
sorts of subfandom (in every sense of the word)
that that applies
to but that would be invidious and of no real help. But
I am wondering,
in the absence of any other information, whether those of
us at Conspiracy
have already seen the only working Worldcon Fan Room and
Fan Program
we're ever likely to in Britain.
Well
anyway after reading through my newsletter piece you've probably
got some
idea why I've developed certain anxieties. I feel a real
responsibility
about this and it's one I don't think I've discharged
adequately. HELP!
If anyone has any pertinent commentary to make
I'll be delighted to
publish it here and ensure that it gets through
to the Worldcon people.
Or you can send your views direct to Steve
and Jenny Glover (address in
the back of this issue) if you prefer,
although I would like to know what
you have to say for my own self-improvement.
I am apprehensive that my ideas about a good Fan Room might be out
of date,
but I still think they're right, it's just the rest of these
bastards
that are out of step.
A
TWENTY DOLLAR WALK IN FIVE DOLLAR SHOES Quite
contrary to the arms-length attitude to fandom as expressed
by such as
Ian Williams, Rob Holdstock, Harry Bell, John Jarrold et
al (arms-length
verging on twenty-foot pole for some of them) I'm
actually more
interested in and enthusiastic about fandom than I have
been for years.
Maybe that's because I've had a couple of years off,
moping and
complaining about the various injustices of the multiverse
we call life.
I have no sense of `going back' to previously covered
ground which is
something I intuit is felt as a wholly negative movement
by, say Williams
and Bell (who I am picking as simply the most obvious
examples of
once-enthusiastic fans still on the RJC mailing list for
now who might
respond). To me it's more like picking up where
I left off, in the fabled
manner of fans carrying on conversations
at conventions a year apart as
if nothing had intervened. (Can the
same frisson of familiarity really be
there when you last saw the
person at a convention just a couple of
weekends back, and will again
twice before christmas?). I guess I've been
a fan more on than off
for so long that doing this actually seems normal
to me in a way that
stopping doing it would be a denial.
One
aspect of this renewed enthusiasm is a real neoish penchant for
schemes
for which the word `Grandiose' would be an absurd understatement.
Like
the Compleat Illustrated D West, a handy compendium of of the
Austral
Master's cartoons and artwork, nice A4 flat-opening item with
preface and
biography etc. Or the HYPHEN reprint, three volumes in
hardcover with
index, biographical sketches, and historical overview.
How about a Best
of STOP BREAKING DOWN, even. I read through my copies
the other day and
was quite taken with how good much of it including
the letters was, and
immediately in the worst throes of vanity-publishing
sketched out a plan
for an anthology done as SBD number 8 including
reprints of articles,
columns, and selected letters. Eeeee, great
it would be.
Then of
course there's the ongoing BRITISH - FANDOM ALL THERE
IS TO KNOW, our
little world's equivalent of such household indispensables
like ENQUIRE
WITHIN; a one-volume guide to the personalities, events,
and general
wonderments of the last fifty years. And we're not even
beginning yet the
selection of GREAT BRITISH FANWRITING - THE
FIFTIES (SIXTIES, SEVENTIES etc)
which will have to wait until I get
back from the local printer with the
colorised reprint of Rob Hansen's
brilliantly evocative example of
blatant hero-worship STARFAN, which
I opine has been out of circulation
for far far too long.
The
only problem with all this is I don't have a penny to scratch
me bum
with. While others wallow in newfound riches life remains marginal
here
and even the fairly small outlay on RJC is endangered. Well,
I suppose I
could cut back to a quarterly or somesuch but it's the
very frequency of
it that helps keep my interest up even though
it's not doing much for some
of the more comatose of the readership.
Harry Bond was telling me
recently that one reason he's continuing
on with his games-fanzine rather
than coming back to fandom-proper
is that he gets actual subscriptions
forthalovagod and the thing
virtually pays for itself. The Hermit of
Keighley his own self also
suggested I put in a subscription option;
hardly a good example talking
there, the Johnson of Yorkshire, where has
the money for Collected
Writings Volume 2 gone Don?
But
there's something in it. Back in the old days it was quite the
done thing
to have a proper subscription rate or exchange for books
or prozines (now
there's an evocative word from a different world
altogether now isn't it)
but I imagine that gradually fell out of
use with the comparative wealth
of the late Sixties and Seventies.
In the early Seventies I listed FOULER
as available for 10p each or
six issues for 50p ( it just seems so little
as to be hardly worth
bothering about, but it was probably a pint of beer
back then, altho'
perhaps not the meat pie and taxi home with it), and
some years later
SBD at 20p a unit. Good lord, probably made a per-copy
profit at that
price!
But
bloody hell will people actually pay for fanzines these days or
have we
been acculturated to expecting them for nothing? And do we
value them as
nothing as a result? Rog Peyton has always propounded
the idea that the
more something costs the more desirable and hence
valued it is; he claims
that if he increases the price of moribund
second-hand stock it sells
like hotcakes. It sounds insane on first
thought but I believe he's
right. Moreover I'm sure that part of the
failure of my various
bookdealing ventures has been that I've priced
things too low in order to
encourage buyers but in
fact put them off because they felt what I had was
too cheap to be
worth having. What a cretin.
It
seems incredible now but almost the first thing I did at my first
convention
was buy a fanzine. It was Howard Rosenblum's SON OF NEW
FUTURIAN, the
first issue, and it cost me 1/- which translates
as 5p but was equivalent in
purchasing power to about 90 pence now.
I still feel ripped-off
twenty-five years later but I still
have that fanzine too.
A copy
of RJC costs on average 80p a copy to produce and mail, the
actual unit
price increased by the airmail postage particularly. Page
count changes
have obvious effects, but postage is over half the average
£55 cost per
issue. This isn't apparently a lot over say eighteen
weeks but the way
things usually go it means a stationary order of
about £100 periodically
which is a lot in one go. That sort of
dissipates after the initial shock
but then there's the £30
postage.
Maybe
it is time to try for a few pounds here and there. Perhaps Don
and Harry
are right, but it's a hard idea to implement. I can't see
actually
dropping people from the mailing list because they don't
pay - that's
ludicrous. And equally why should others shell
out to get something I'd
joyfully give them anyway. I suppose the
point is that to a very real
extent publishing a fanzine is a cooperative
venture in the sense that
without the feedback of the readers there's
no earthly point at all in
doing it; should that feedback be extended
to the idea of cash as well as
correspondence and articles? But then
where are you if your readers feel
that having sent the money there's
no imperative to send their ideas and
commentary? Up shit creek that's
where, with a boring bloody fanzine you
wouldn't give tuppence for
yourself, so you have to fold it and either
abscond with the sub-money
or pay it all back and go on a bean diet for a
month.
It
would be both wildly optimistic and somehow dangerous to think
of getting
enough money to cover the costs of this bloody fanzine,
but if I want to
keep doing it roughly bi-monthly some tin-cup rattling
might have to be
ventured. I'll feel guilty as hell about this, especially
as I know my
near-future finances are going to affected by an expensive
something I
don't want to mention yet but is fannish as anything.
What do you think?
But don't feel any obligation, honestly. There's
no-one at all on the
current mailing list I wouldn't be glad to send
RJC to free indefinitely.
Well, not many anyway. And before you ask,
no there aren't any fanzines I
currently subscribe to; trades should
cover that for the lifetime of RJC
I hope. That's called the Ashworth
Defence. Is this a tangled web of
reasoning or what?
|