Organizer versus Promoter

I skipped most of the workshop blocks i was not facilitating at Loud Love. Not because the content was disengaging, but because there was so much organizing to do.  We joked that the new staff to the organizing collection were called “disorganizers” because theoretically open space can be run by a loosely affiliated collection of participants – but we have not quite figured out how to do that yet.  Sky grabbed me and said he wanted to talk about funology before i gave the workshop.  So we talked outside during the “Negotiating Good BDSM Scenes” workshop.

Sky at Loud Love Phoenix Circa June 2013

He had three main points:

Funological grading/Grade Inflation:  Sky was critical of the funological grading system which i developed and promoted, feeling both that it leads to grade inflation (saying events were better than they really were) and that undercuts our inspiration to do better.  He proposed a multiple index system, where novelty, an event’s life changing capacity, its inspiration for future events and other factors might be averaged for an aggregate grade.  

sometimes the best is just too good

Insidious mainstream creep:  Sky also warned that event organizers must be ever vigilant of mainstream values creeping into our work.  We need to make sure we are not drifting towards events with are consumption oriented, or move us towards observer/performer dichotomies instead of everyone as participant,  or that create access stratification based on access to money.  To name just a few.

Beware of actions looking radical, but that still replicate mainstream values.  Just because something has the image associated with something radical doesn’t mean that it is radical.

it is not enuf to just appear radical, one has to be it.

Promoter versus organizer:  But his most important point was a critique which was of me quite specifically, that the two rolls i play in event organizing are frequently in problematic conflict.  I both promote events and i organize them.  In the process of promoting, especially around the recent Loud Love event, i start to believe my own hype about how big or how wonderful the event is and do not do the organizing necessary to insure the quality of the event.