Yesterday, by all accounts, was a really good day. I feel bad waking up feeling bad. Exhausting day, it’s true, but good gig, good festival. But there were some negatives that maybe wormed their way into my psyche a bit more than I thought they had. I woke up at 6am with what I think is probably one of my first legit mask / crowd anxiety dreams… I was at some sort of party where people were crowding me, a little push here and then people were coming up and congratulating me or something and I think I said “heh, thanks – but don’t touch me” and people got a little joking with it and I think specifically Ron Goad [who’s generally an awesome guy] jokingly poked me and I yelled “don’t fucking touch me!” and I bit him in the eye.
To be clear. I would never bite Ron Goad in the eye.
Also to be clear, I’m not sure why, in my dreams, I always bite people in the eye.
I remember watching some episode of Law and Order and getting unhealthily obsessed with the bags under one particular actor’s eyes and then becoming unhealthily obsessed with my own, imagining that they were something I could tear off in some way – and it’s this soft, vulnerable patch that I often imagine gripping in my teeth and ripping away.
Like I would NEVER do to Ron Goad.
The dream devolved from there, bloody and visceral and with that fruit rollup feel of stringy, thin flesh between my teeth.
But really, yesterday was kind of awesome. Except for the parts that weren’t.
I got up early, drove down to Rockville and met Rowan in the parking lot of Strathmore Mansion to run over a couple of songs that we weren’t 100% on before we performed for SAW’s Takoma Park Folk Festival fundraiser. Rowan was hosting the festival later in the day and I was, of course, RUNNING the festival later in the day so maybe it was a lot to pack in but it was well-spaced and it just meant that I had to, you know, leave the videos, graphics and script till the DAY OF THE EVENT so it seemed like a good thing to be a part of. There’s a lot of other stuff going on in that whole experience, but all-in-all I was flattered to be asked to be a part of it, and when I found out Rowan had been asked it seemed a no-brainer to perform together (no doubt that was the thinking on the part of the organizers from the get-go).
Setup was chaotic. 12pm load-in not just for the musicians but the whole (huge) crew. 12pm load-in for a band performing at 1pm is one thing. 12pm load-in for a band, sound crew and film crew and webcast crew who are unfamiliar with the space and unsure of how they’re going to work together for a 1pm start is… not enough time. So things were a bit chaotic and I think the Live stream kicked off at around 1.15pm or something. Enough time to get plenty of angry texts and messages wondering where things were, but not so late as to make me nervous about the rest of the day…
But it WAS my first experience with a venue that insisted on contact tracing forms (presumably a good thing – though I think it’s in poor taste to include a check box for “please! Include me on all Strathmore mailings!” – I mean, I GUESS it’s a fine use of a necessary information harvest but…
And though it wasn’t my first experience with a COVID-era venue saying “we’re gonna be strict about x and careful about y” and failing to deliver – it WAS my first experience with it in-doors.
Strathmore passing around notes to everyone asking them not to make noise or applaud because the webcast was allowed under the agreement that there was no Live audience – and beyond that it shouldn’t SOUND like a Live audience (I guess) which I thought was an interesting point… like… there was a LOT of crew there and the applause was kind of nice. Whether they clapped or not didn’t effect the number of people in the room, so I’m not sure how I feel about that “rule”.
And then there was the soundguy who refused to wear a mask.
Scolded multiple times by the organizers he just ignored this and I guess we could’ve walked out… but I didn’t. And I wish he didn’t absolutely conform to a stereotype. But he did. He does. I’m not sure how specific I want to get in a public Journal entry but I’ve seen this guy flip from friendly to angry from moment to moment, watched him be absolutely obnoxiously condescending to his (wife?) assistant handing her something, then wondering where that something is and then snatching it back from her scolding her for taking things… he wrote a really obnoxious response to #blackouttuesday referring to thugs and criminals looting and it was (still matched to stereotype) filled with misspellings and stretches of all caps with the principle argument that we (members of the folk scene) don’t know him, can’t control him, and can’t tell him what to do (regarding not webstreaming his open mic on that night)… he wrote this letter to multiple folk organizations, their boards and a local press outlet… none of which, I believe, had asked him to not run his open mic.
But you know, stereotypically he felt judged.
But also stereotypically we just did our best to get along.
And so I plan to not work with him in the future. And rather stereotypically I’m not quite sure how to execute that other than absolutely making sure I know who the soundperson is in the future. And that will eventually cause friction. But SAW had made an agreement, made it very clear how things were going to be cleaned and how people were to space and wear masks etc – and their soundperson didn’t abide by the rules.
BUT the show was really, really good. Rowan and I were on form and watching the playback later we LOOKED like we were on form. Any sour tastes in our mouth was hopefully unaccompanied by contagion as we proceeded to scarper with a rapidity appropriate to people who were hosting and running a folk festival later in the same day.
Which we proceeded to do.
Takoma Park (Alternative) Folk Festival did NOT proceed without a hitch – but proceed it did and though there were a couple of missed clicks from me, a complete existence failure of my partner’s machine requiring me to webcast the whole night (rather than alternating back and forth over the course of the evening) and a muting issue that required me to rewire my audio at one point to poke back in and say ROWAN UNMUTE!!! – well – other than that it seemed like everyone was really, really happy with what we’d created. For myself, I was pretty satisfied. Maybe even impressed. It wasn’t what I’d envisioned, but it wasn’t too far off the mark either and most of our realizations over the course of the night were generally things that we’d made a little too complex for ourselves, things which we can correct for in part 2 in ways that will actually make our Lives a bit easier. Definitely a bit shorter (this will probably involve some hard choices for me, but I’ll figure it out) and that means shorter video renders, fewer txt blurbs to preload and slightly less things to research.
I dare say I’m even looking forward to it!
It was a good day. Shame it was marred by nightmares less than 12 hours later.
