After the hectic pace on Saturday, the con wound down somewhat before concluding on Sunday. I attended a panel on Galileo, another one on world building, and one on World Domination. Then I attended the dead dog filk and went home. Along the way I finally met up with someone I’d been on the lookout for all con.

After the history panel, I attended another panel on World Building. Although I feared it would retread the ground from Saturday, it was in fact much better and far more useful for me. The panel included two editors and two writers (Barbara Campbell, Wendy Delmater, Jude-Marie Green, and Kate Paulk). Despite speaking from their own experience, the panelists never made the talk all about them, and were quick to praise other authors about their successful work. Their advice was related to craft, not marketing: Find something worthwhile to say, and make your world help you say it. Though light on the specifics (necessarily so), their comments offered some path through the murk that surrounds any effort at serious world-building. They made me think more seriously, which is a recipe for a successful panel.

Perhaps appropriately, after a panel on how to build a world, I attended one on how to take it over. This wasn’t terribly useful but that’s OK because it wasn’t terribly serious. In fact, it largely was an opportunity for the moderators to riff off one another, which they did with speed and wit. Really, at this stage, what more can be said about world domination and cartoonish supervillainy? Although apparently the key is to have a plan…

The “dead dog filk” is “An event held after the formal end of programming at a convention” (definition courtesy of the Filk Glossary) It’s the last chance for the filkers to assuage the pangs of their addiction before the con breaks up. This was billed as “Dead Dog Filk / Gripe Session”, and it was actually far more the latter than the former (though I get the impression this is not the usual case). There weren’t too many specific gripes, except that some of the panels were scheduled too early.

This was explained as being due to the need to reserve the room; otherwise the ConCom (Convention Committee) would have slated something else in that space. Having non-filkers invade the filk room apparently messes with its feng shui. One of the interesting observations I had is the filkers still struggles with being a small, somewhat misunderstood community lurking within and looked askance at by the con at large — which is funny, as con goers are themselves a small, somewhat misunderstood community lurking within and looked askance at by society at large.

At the dead dog filk circle I finally ran into Merav Hoffman, who befriended me when I looked lost at last year’s Lunacon. Merav convinced me to attended Contata, which I ended up enjoying immensely, so I was glad to cross paths with her and catch up. One of my motivations in going to Lunacon every year is to attain a sense of community, and Merav has been very kind in helping me fit in.

After the dead dog filk, it was time to head home. Although NJ Transit once again let me down (two hours to go from NY Penn Station to Princeton Junction — and this was after they abruptly canceled the express I had been literally about to board), it was far from the ordeal from Monday and I got in before too late. Looking back, I’m really glad I went again. Lunacon has really turned into an event I look forward to, and it has yet to disappoint.

One of the fun things about cons is that they go on and on into the late night (at least by my standards). I went to a couple of late-evening sessions last night: “Strangers Have the Best Candy” and “Adult Filking”.

“Adult Filk Singing” was filk singing for adults (duh). In particular, these were songs and poems with a certain salacious aspect… although very little was worse than PG-13. I was again astounded about how open the filking community is. People have lifelong acquaintances and a deep oral history but were never above welcoming in new people. Indeed there was an unofficial moderator who would explain, sotto vocce, what some of the peculiar filk terms mean. As before, the performances were uneven and the writing a little spotty, but it was really fun and a very comfortable session.

So, on to Contata proper. (See this earlier article for context.) A filk con is different from a regular con (assuming that my limited experience at Lunacon allows me to generalize about a “regular” con) in that the filk con is explicitly organized around the music. In a lot of ways, it was really just a rolling three-day concert. Unlike Lunacon, there were few panels or discussions per se (though I must admit I simply missed a few, on things such as tone-shaping or guitar-making). Instead, there were scheduled performances and “open filking” — which is basically an otherwise-unoccupied room wherein anyone could drop by and begin singing. And of course, the traditional midnight chocolate tasting.

This put me in an odd position. As anyone who’s suffered through the Hun Talent Shows can tell you, I am every bit not a singer as I am not a songwriter. The only thing musical that I can play is an iPod. Thus I didn’t really have much to offer. (Only later did I come across Ian, who tells stories rather than sings. I thought, maybe I can do that, with enough prep work.) Indeed, the primary talent I brought to these sessions is my ability to clap loudly, honed at many a high school play. I could also join on the chorus — filk songs tend to have very crowd-friendly choruses — if there were enough other people to render my mangling anonymous.

More below the fold.

And it has to be admitted — there was a huge disparity in talent among the singers. Many people were carried more by enthusiasm than by ability. I don’t want to be cruel but the fact remains. On the other hand, there were as many people who demonstrated real, honest talent — somewhat unpolished, often, which reflects the fact that for almost everyone, this is a hobby not a life. And finally, the guest of honor was Heather Dale, for whom performance is her life. More on Heather in a different post. And don’t get me wrong — enthusiasm carries the filkers pretty far. Almost no moment was truly cringe-worthy and none were nails-on-chalkboard bad. People did get wrapped up in their songs and they brought the rest of us along. In many ways it was more poignant hearing someone unskilled sing from the heart. It worked especially on the bittersweet songs of remembrance that seem common to the genre.

About halfway through the first session on Friday night, I suddenly understood why it felt so familiar. My insight is going to sound snide but I don’t mean it that way: It sounded like hymns at a church meeting. It really had that vibe. The faith that draws these people together is certainly not conventional and it’s more than a little nebulous. But it was clear this was a community united by faith in something. I think it’s a quixotic wonderful mix of the tacitly progressive belief in “the future” as promised in sci fi and a yearning for a past known never to have occurred. It’s a faith that the world is bigger than the everyday, that there’s meaning somewhere in the Universe. Maybe it’s really just a faith in themselves, in their own community. I could see where people take strength from that.

As an example: One of the guests-of-honor was to be Tom Smith, who is apparently a long-living legend in the filk community. A couple of weeks back he had a mishap coming off a stage and did real damage to his leg — so bad that he had to miss Contata because he was in for a second round of surgery. Now, Tom does filking professionally and so he is not covered under anyone’s health plan. (And the absurdity of that is a rant for a different day….) Anyway, at the last moment, Contata was restructured as a sort of impromptu Tom-Aid, a benefit for him to help offset the medical bills. People dug deep to buy merchandise or even just to donate, even though the demographic at a filk con doesn’t slew any more toward the well-off than any other random sample of people. Artists donated tracks to a commemorative CD offered in return for a donation; people donating money seemed honestly surprised to receive anything in return. It was a lot like how people tell us it worked in the good old days of small town America. It was uplifting to see.

Stuff like that happened all weekend. It was like a giant extended-family reunion. And to be brutally honest, science fiction attracts a disproportionate share of people who are socially awkward, for whom the social graces are more theoretical than observed, who have gone through life labeled “Does not play well with others”. But here, everyone jelled. People more than put with each other’s quirks; they celebrated them. Everyone had a spot in which to excel, and everyone gave of their excellence without stint.

What’s more, I doubt anyone else even noticed it. It was just How Things Are Done. As an outsider I could see the entirety in a way probably not available to those steeped in the community. I’ve seen plenty of functional but sterile events, and more than many simply dysfunctional ones. Without taking away anything from the con organizers and their whirlwind of effort to keep things moving, I was struck by how smoothly things seemed to flow. People put aside their egos because they all wanted the con to succeed — everyone felt a greater investment in the larger event than in their own small concerns. Again, from a group the larger culture derides and harries, this was nothing short of transcendent.

I spent this weekend at the hotel Hilton Parsippany, attending a sci fi con called “Contata 5“. In a somewhat strange co-branding fashion this was also NEFilk 18 — apparently, NEFilk is sort of an umbrella designation. Filk is an odd branch of music deriving from (originally, literally via type) folk music — it’s folk with a science fiction / fantasy bend. Filking is one of those sundry ways in which being a science fiction fan is not the same as being, say, a New York Mets fan or an opera aficionado. It’s the shared culture and oral history that keeps the community close-knit and vibrant despite being spread over every known continent.

Although I’d heard of the phenomenon, my first exposure to filk was at Lunacon this past March. Filking was a distinct thread woven through Lunacon — a chain of panels and sessions scattered among the calendar of events, at which more or less the same people showed up. I attended one late-night filking session to see what the buzz was about. To be honest, it was a little intimidating. This truly is an organized oral culture with multiple decades of backstory. Everyone knew the words and the anecdotes and the in-jokes — everyone but me, that is. My temptation was to high-tail it out of the room and write it off as a failed exercise.

The story doesn’t end there though — more below the fold.

Happily, though, I lingered just long enough to discover the contradiction of filking. Due to the steep curve and the shared history, filkers are naturally a little separated from other con goers. The richness of the culture can be overwhelming. But the filkers aren’t a closed or exclusive community. To the contrary, the filkers at Lunacon reached out to me as a newbie, Even though most of them have known each other for a decade or more, they went out of their way to include me and make me welcome. They shared songbooks; they shared jokes; they shared stories.

By the time the “open filk” was winding down, it seemed entirely natural to join them at the traditional midnight chocolate tasting. I’m still not clear on whether the chocolate tasting is a general filk tradition, or a Contata one, or a NEFilk one — or just the particular habit of that particular band of filkers. It was a good excuse to get together and socialize and basically not let the night end with the official closing time. Merav Hoffman was the con chair for Contata and she found the chocolate tasting an opportune time to strike and make a pitch for new members. In particular, she told me about the upcoming con in June and invited me to it. Largely because it would be in New Jersey and I could easily get to it, I decided to take her up on it.

So a few days after Lunacon, I booked a hotel room and registered myself for Contata, wondering what would be unique to a filking con. More to come.