Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Arts, Crafts, Music & Drama - The Artisans' Guilds => Exilian Bards' Club => Topic started by: dubsartur on November 05, 2020, 09:24:05 PM
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Filker Dr. Debra Doyle (https://malkingrey.dreamwidth.org/) of "Song of the Shieldwall" fame has died (her professional site (https://drdoyleeditorial.com/)). With her is dying her Society and her polis and this year.
You can find the lyrics at http://www.calonsong.org/CalontirSongs/shieldwall.htm and a lot of performances on the creepy surveilled tube site.
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By her Society you mean?
I don't know her music well, I'll look it up - thanks for the link.
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By her Society you mean?
I don't know her music well, I'll look it up - thanks for the link.
Maybe its too early to tell that story but I will put on my St. Augustine hat and my Zosimus cloak and do my best.
The Society for Creative Anachronism was founded at a May Day garden party at Berkeley CA in 1966. For about 40 years, it worked as a space which brought different kinds of geeky people together (folk singers, filkers, SF fans, neo-pagans, makers, history geeks, martial artists) to discover each other, work on common projects, and meet their future spouses. For the past 15 or so years they have been in trouble for a variety of reasons:
- branches of the society have always been prone to being taken over by people who milk it for power and sex, mitigated only by the fact that terms as king are short and the organization as a whole is decentralized; it also acquires a lot of demanding 'volunteer' positions which burn out the people trying to fill them. A friend left his local group when it was taken over by a family annihilator who had not committed those murders yet. Its a group where you can give yourself and your friends titles and offices if you are really good at beating people into submission with a piece of rattan.
- the age balance shifted and that started a chain reaction where younger members don't see enough people their age and drift away
- They are an organization dominated by aging pasty-skinned ex-hippies with the hard-right reactionary politics of their demographic. The group is strongly associated with California and the Midwest so their political culture shapes the movement (Jerry Pournelle and Poul Anderson were active early members)
- competing activities which do one thing better have appeared: dedicated LARP groups that admit they are larping (some SCA folks get short-tempered when asked to explain the difference between playing Sverri the dwarven ranger and Sir Edward of Kent), historical fencing and the alphabet soup groups (BOTN IMCF HMB) if they just want to fight and train, computer gaming if they want the fantasy without the sunburn and chopping wood, and living history if they want to learn about the past more than about Sir Walter Scott and Peter Jackson. The SCA was always a compromise between many different dreams and it can't focus in on one without breaking up its coalition and angering those reactionary older members (especially because of that decentralized organization).
If you want a sense of what Powers have taken the minds of some aging members in the USA, compare some of Leslie Fish's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Fish) early songs with her ranting blog posts.
A friend and his buddies from the early SCA have agreed that they will attend the 50th Pennsic war in Pennsylvania, plus one more, and if the drop off in attendance is as big as expected they will stop making the trip because they are selling less and learning less while the cost in time and money are fixed.
One problem is that without an accessible recruiting ground in the SCA, some of the splinter groups have trouble recruiting. And I feel a harmony of soul with many of the early SCA folks that I don't feel with some other geeky communities, even though those communities are more serious about the one thing they do.
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Ah yes - I think you've mentioned a fair bit of the SCA stuff previously in various conversations we've had, I just wasn't sure whether that was what you were referring to in this particular case :)