GaFilk Con Report

[catsittingstill]

Note--I wrote this con report many days ago now. It's not that it took me this long to write it; it took me this long to edit it. I just hope I've done the markup right.

These recollections of GaFilk 2007 were aided greatly by having 1) the program, 2) the pictures and 3) the recordings. The recordings especially have been prodding my memory as I go over them to clean them up.

The short version is that I had a great time at GaFilk, as always.

I had had the good fortune to have Judy Miller (yes, the recent Pegasus Award-winning performer) and braider agree to spend Thursday night at my house and let me ride to the con and roomshare with them. They were lots of fun and added immeasurably to my enjoyment of the con.

We spent the drive down to Atlanta talking and singing, teaching each other new rounds. I think I've finally got the hang of "Be like a bird," which I heard many years ago, but never fully learned ("Be like a bird who, halting in her flight, on a limb too slight, feels it give way beneath her, but sings, sings knowing she has wings: sings, sings, knowing she has wings") and I learned a new round from Judy that apparently her father wrote. It's one of a very few rounds I know of with verses.

If I remember right, pretty much the first person I saw at the con that evening was Dave Alway. I hadn't been able to find my "catsittingstill" button when I packed, but he had an extra one for me, saved from last OVFF, when I had remembered my button. I hung it off my badgeholder and wore it the rest of the weekend; it's still on my dresser.

Opening ceremonies (toasts to the new year and absent friends, one of whom, Donald Clarke, people were kind enough to toast with me, followed by singing all the verses to Auld Lang Sine) was followed by the MyFilk game, which had a couple of rounds of "name that song from watching the first line in sign language" that I found very entertaining. There were actually two signers there, Judy and Linda Melnick. It was interesting watching their different styles—Judy tends to flow the signs into each other much more; Linda tends to keep them crisp and distinct from each other. I found Judy more beautiful to watch, and Linda more understandable. They're both enjoyable in their different ways, and I feel good about my growing understanding of sign language. A couple of the lines I couldn't understand at all, but most of them I could catch a word here or there, and sometimes I got the whole line. I no longer feel like the signs are blurring in my eyes quite so much. I still need more practice, though.

It occurs to me that ASL is gaining quite a bit of prestige in filking circles. I don't know whether this is an ongoing development or just this years fad, but I think it's very cool and intend to pursue it.

MyFilk was followed by Becca and Graham Leathers' concert (chirosinger and musicmutt). Those two are very cute together. They both sing and play very well, while having very different styles of writing. I recorded their concert, but a lot of times when I'm recording I forget to push the stop and record buttons for every song, so I get three and four songs together as one. GarageBand, which came free on my Mac, has been working very well to edit out the chatter and turn down the volume on the applause and so on. It even has a compressor (a function that reduces the loudness of the loudest parts while not affecting the loudness of the rest—useful to keep from breaking people's ears.) Aside from the fact that it converts the mp3 into, and saves it as, AIFF rather than mp3, (a slightly better format that takes ten times the space) it's perfect. And iTunes will convert the AIFF back into mp3, but I'm not sure all that converting won't degrade the sound quality somewhat. On the other hand, GarageBand is effectively free, which is something to keep in mind.

After the concert, I talked to several people, chatting about life and upcoming cons, and then peteralway and I went off to a quiet room next to the Con Suite to practice Dulcimandyas together. We made several runs at it, and while I didn't do as well as I'd hoped, we didn't fall apart or make any egregious errors. Peter decided on a couple of rearrangements for the mando accompaniment (when the dulcimer takes the lead) that I think make it a stronger presentation. In the breaks I enjoyed some of the Con Suite's bounty. The Con Suite was very nice—not unusually elaborate except for the crockpots full of melted chocolate (which I appreciated as a pleasantly decadent touch), but very practical. I particularly liked the inclusion of bread and peanut butter and jelly (though every time I made myself a sandwich I found myself succumbing to the temptation to make it peanut butter and chocolate instead), and of fruit and vegetables. I probably consumed a third of my calories in the consuite, though I did bring food of my own too, and attended the banquet. All honor to the ConSuite volunteers!

I also hung out with mdlbear that night, and we talked a little; he let me look at the songbook and preliminary CD he was putting in the interfilk auction, and he played me some of his songs. I particularly liked his song about the toolmakers. I sang him my Hymn to Athena that I wrote just after I finished Patience, and andpuff came along and I sang both of them my Mimmoth song.

Then I was going to go to bed, but I must have decided to go down the hall again for some reason (get another bite from the Con Suite maybe?) and found that quadrivium and cflute were setting up in the same room peteralway and I had used to play a couple of hours earlier. So I sang a few songs with them, but I was pretty tired and my voice was definitely going, so I stumbled off to bed.

I've been having a lot of trouble with my voice getting tired and hurting lately. I don't know if I'm just out of condition or if something is actually wrong, but it may be time to put in a little time singing every day and try to get back into shape.

The following morning we went to the morning yoga session run by quadrivium and weirdsister. Yoga looks so languid; I would never have thought it so intense! But it was interesting; I'm thinking about getting a book or a CD or something—maybe I should try it on a regular basis.

We were going to go to lunch together, but I backed out at the last minute because it would have meant missing Steve Stirling's reading. As a consequence I had only a few minutes between the reading and the next concert when I could have run upstairs to get my mp3 recorder to record Linda Melnick and friends (basically Linda Melnick, T.J. Burnside-Clapp and T.J.'s daughter Jesse: Technical Difficulties with one person substituted, and boy Jesse has a nice voice). Unfortunately I didn't think of it in time. I promised to record GaFilk for my friend Donald, who is serving in Iraq right now, so I'm hoping I can beg mp3s from someone else with more presence of mind than me. (Later note—yay! I am saved by the generousity of Dave Weingart (filkerdave) and Rob Wynne (autographedcat). Thank you thankyou thankyou!) I particularly enjoyed watching Linda Melnick sign for "Lies" and "Cranes Over Hiroshima."

I did run up and get the recorder between that concert and Urban Tapestry's concert. Urban Tapestry did several new (at least new to me) songs—"Friendship's Song;" "Another Story," a song about books wanting to be read; "Why Don't You Come Down To GaFilk;" and a song called "Paper Boats" written by Summer and Fall (or maybe just Summer or just Fall; I don’t remember). "Paper Boats" and "The Lady" stick in my mind as being particularly beautiful. I love watching them on stage; ohiblather in particular is so animated and graceful. I hear it_aint_easy wrote a song about Debbie (to get her back for her unsubstantiated accusations of gnawing halfway through his front door and having baby bunnies on his underwear), but I didn't get to hear it (pout). Which just means I need to download it from the Filk Archive.

Also at some point in that series of concerts I tried recording a movie of a song with my camera. I vaguely recall that I was interested because someone was signing, but alas, when I tried to download the camera's chip this morning I carelessly allowed the movie to be deleted without first checking that it had been successfully downloaded. A mistake I will not make again, but now I have no record of what it was, drat it.

After Urban Tapestry's concert came the 2 X 10s. I checked the list carefully because peteralway had said he would sign up and would like to do Dulcimandyas with me if he got a slot, but the slots were given out by lottery, and when I checked, he didn't have one. I was so wiped I headed back to the room to lie down for a while before the banquet so I would have the endurance to keep going later in the night. Fortunately for me, filkerdave also made available to me mp3s of the 2X10s. Almost as good as being there, and a lot more restful!

The banquet began with primping in the room, not for me so much; I'm just ill-suited to be a glamour cat—I don't do makeup and my long dresses are all dated pre-1650—but for my roommates. I watched in bemusment as dresses were ironed and nylons donned, makeup was delicately stroked onto eyelids and cheekbones and lips, jewelry was evaluated according to arcane rules of dress design and time of day. I too had jewelry to wear—Kathleen Sloan gave me a pin with three little hand-shaped beads dangling from it, shaped to spell out C A T in fingerspelling. It's a nametag. The dratted Mimmoth decided it wanted to go to the banquet for some reason, probably the food, and crawled into my hood, not to be discovered until it was too late to take it back to the room and confine it. Under strict orders to behave itself, it frisked all the way around the banquet table, plainly trying to ingratiate itself with Raphael and Summer and Fall, the little celebrity-chaser.
I spent most of the banquet watching and listening to Linda Melnick and Judy talking about various things, including sign language, and often signing, because the banquet was very noisy. We were having so much fun at our table we missed it when we were called to get food and ended up going late, in front of another table that kindly made room for us.

I was fortunate in my choice of dinner companions, but unfortunate in my choice of location—we were all the way back in a corner and I couldn't make out any of the lyrics the house band was singing. After I finished eating and people started dancing, I went around to the front where I could hear a little better. I was impressed with the young lady named Carly, who was playing the electric bass in the band with great self-possession and aplomb.

After the dinner and dance, I went back to the room to recover my mp3 recorder, which I had left on the desk to charge. It is a mark of their relative priorities that I brought the charger for the mp3 recorder but not for the camera, and that this worked out fine.

Summer and Fall's concert followed the banquet. Summer and Fall are a duo from Germany. They had songs in German, English, Russian and French in their concert and I understand they speak a couple other languages as well. Europeans always make me feel so ignorant. They had kindly done up booklets with the lyrics, including translations of the non-English ones, no doubt with ignorance like mine in mind. They had a really spooky song about stone dolls and a song in german about the voices in the wind, and the villagers disappearing to join them.

I skipped out on the Interfilk Auction, owing to a general lack of money and interest in auctions, and crept away to start the open filking early in the same room next to the consuite that Peter and I had used for rehearsal Friday night. We started with a small circle, but it grew to about 15 or 20 people at some points. I remember Callie and Steve Savitsky sitting across from me, Peter Alway to my right (we did Dulcymandias together at one point, and it was a good thing we'd had the practice the night before) and Dave Alway in the back of the room, next to where Juanita ended up. Dave seemed to be using a computer to keep his lyrics and poetry in, at that point, which I don't remember him doing before. I stumbled off, meaning to go to bed, about 1:30am, but stopped by the con suite to get a bite to eat and ran into ladyat who complained that she hadn't gotten to hear me sing. So I sang "Captain James' Song" and "the Mimmoth's Song" and "Patience Isn't Tame" for her appreciative ears, and then, having availed myself of con suite calories, wandered off to bed.

Sunday morning I did yoga again, a trifle less enthusiastically this time. Somehow it seems harder the second day. Then we had to race to get showered and out of the room in time, and wandered about saying goodbye. I missed the Ecumenifilk—I think it was only halfway through by the time we got on the road anyway.

We spent the trip back talking and going over the rounds we'd worked on on the trip up. I would have loved to keep braider and Judy at my place for dinner, since we arrived at just about the right time, but it would have been an excuse to linger and chat and they really needed to get on the road, having much farther to go.


GaFilk was, as always, a wonderful time, and I thank the GaFilk concom and volunteers for setting up a Wonderful Party!