Bob Kanefsky interview cont'd

Chaos

I prefer Bardic Circle, where everyone has an equal chance to pick, pass, or play, filkhogs and shy people alike. I've even referred to that style in at least five of my parodies. Of course, it makes it hard to do followers, including parodies, and if I sang my own parodies more I'd probably be more frustrated with Bardic Circle. Poker Chip Bardic is a good compromise; everyone still gets one turn, but in whatever order they like.

Certain minions of Chaos like to claim that in a Chaos circle, everyone is looking out for everyone else and making sure no one is left out, whereas a Bardic Circle can take forever to go around the room once. That's unfairly comparing Chaos at its best to Bardic Circle at its worst.

In Chaos at its worst, a few people take over and forget the rest of the room is there, or consider them only an audience. I've seen that happen especially when the Chaos is held in a former concert room, all the good performers sit near the stage, or even on the stage. That happened a lot at the first several OVFF's I attended; the alternate filk room was much better.

There's a variant where a moderator or "demi-ghod" acts as a traffic cop if more than one person wants to go. That doesn't always work either. I was once temporarily prevented from doing a new song, a perfect follower and the first thing I'd tried to do all night, because the demi-ghod was only semi-omniscient and knew which well-known old song another filker wanted to do as a follower, but didn't know what I had in mind.

Bardic Circle has its bad extremes too. I've seen newcomers, despite their protests that they don't know any filksongs and are just there to listen, bullied into requesting a broad subject, or even a letter of the alphabet. Then someone with a stack of filkbooks as long as your arm thinks of a song that fits, and begins searching for it while everyone waits.

So all forms can be great or terrible, depending on whether the magic is there that night. I've also experimented with a hybrid scheme, where anyone can jump in at anytime, except that the person currently holding a token that is passed around the circle has an overriding right to go next. For a token, I used a copy of a book called "The Collapse of Chaos".

Someday I'd like to try a system, maybe mediated by handheld computers, where everyone gets to participate in arranging what order the performers go in and thinking of followers. I feel most systems give too much power to those wanting to perform, especially if they're holding instruments.

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