From: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org (alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest) To: ammf-digest@smoe.org Subject: alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V6 #20 Reply-To: ammf@fruvous.com Sender: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-ammf-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest Wednesday, January 23 2002 Volume 06 : Number 020 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Frucon and Gong Show concerns [Kath Maheux ] Re: Frucon and Gong Show concerns ["John Ryan" ] Open Letter-type thing (was: Frucon and Gong Show concerns) [epbuckley@ya] peoples concerns with the convention [norgio@attbi.com (George E. Nowik)] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 07:13:55 GMT From: Kath Maheux Subject: Frucon and Gong Show concerns Greetings! We've seen a few of you are concerned about the Gong Show We discussed several ideas for talent show events this year and settled on the gong show for a number of reasons. 1) It is a more dynamic format and will fit more people in the time alotted. Some of us felt that the event last year was a bit too long and lost its momentum. 2) Fruheads have never been hostile to each other at the con, therefore we have no reason to think that anyone would be gonged out of spite. 3) The TV show was fun. We think this will be too. I personally see it as a way to keep things fun, ie not to take things too seriously, especially ourselves. 4)This is not meant to be the be all and end all of singing at the con! Hopefully more people to be active in the singalong, which kind of died last year. The gong show is more for the real hams out there! ;) I'm a bit saddened that although we've seen many discussions about this in the fruhead community, only one person actually emailed his concerns to us. We really appreciate that, and want to hear from as many people as possible, so please reply to this post! Kath Fruhead First Committee Member Second ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 13:28:28 -0500 From: "John Ryan" Subject: Re: Frucon and Gong Show concerns Singalong dying last year? That's a BIG bummer! We'll I'll try my best not to let that happen this year. Singalongs and jamming are one of my favorite things to do. I participate in the Beatlefest (Which go on until 6 in the morning) and at Strawberry Fields for the anniversarys of John Lennon's birth and death (And this year, in tribute to George). Sing-alongs just need to be done the right way. People call out songs, the instrumentalists will agree on what song to do next based on the songs called out, and then everyone proceeds to sing (or try to sing) said song. It's a simple formula that is well done when EVERYONE has a say as to what song is performed next, and when it is NOT dominated by the instrumentalists. Fruvous has about some 80-90 songs to choose from, so you won't run out of songs. If we think we've run out of songs, think again, or do something that was done a while ago. It's okay to do songs twice too. I shall be there for that, so I'll see you all there. Kath Maheux wrote in message news:3C4D0DA5.4070509@rogers.com... > Greetings! > > We've seen a few of you are concerned about the Gong Show > We discussed several ideas for talent show events this year and settled > on the gong show for a number of reasons. > > 1) It is a more dynamic format and will fit more people in the time > alotted. Some of us felt that the event last year was a bit too long and > lost its momentum. > > 2) Fruheads have never been hostile to each other at the con, therefore > we have no reason to think that anyone would be gonged out of spite. > > 3) The TV show was fun. We think this will be too. I personally see it > as a way to keep things fun, ie not to take things too seriously, > especially ourselves. > > 4)This is not meant to be the be all and end all of singing at the con! > Hopefully more people to be active in the singalong, which kind of died > last year. The gong show is more for the real hams out there! ;) > > I'm a bit saddened that although we've seen many discussions about this > in the fruhead community, only one person actually emailed his concerns > to us. We really appreciate that, and want to hear from as many people > as possible, so please reply to this post! > > Kath > Fruhead First > Committee Member Second ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jan 2002 11:23:28 -0800 From: epbuckley@yahoo.com (ellen p. buckley) Subject: Open Letter-type thing (was: Frucon and Gong Show concerns) fruheads all, i'm making this an open letter which i expect that some other committee members will probably jump in and add their thoughts to. this is intentional; we want an open discussion. every year the con committee takes flak for some of the decisions it makes. for some reason this year, there's a lot of negative talk going on in other forums-- mostly the FHDC "wall"-- that is reaching us secondhand. i'm not sure why this is, except that perhaps we're all a little testy from a lack of shows. whatever the reason... this is only my second year on the committee, but after last year, i have a new appreciation for what goes into the planning of this event. we try to do the best we can with limited resources. it's a lot of time and effort for which none of us gets paid a cent. it would be very easy to turn around and point the finger back at those who are critical of our planning process-- you don't offer your time to help, and you don't contribute anything until you see something you want to criticize. Then you're right there with helping friendly words like "BAD IDEA." some of you have expressed concern (not *to* us, but in other public forums) that this is "our" con and not yours. let me assure that that is most definitely NOT the case. each of us has an idea of what the con should be that differs wildly from what everyone else thinks. the aim is to incorporate some of many different views in order to offer something for everyone. we're mostly going by what we know does or does not work. it's many combined years of event planning experience working here when we say that the talent show needed to be trimmed a lot. i'll personally attest to the glazed eyes i saw when the show had gone well into its second hour last year. this is not an insult to anyone in particular. it's just a sign that things need to be kept moving along to insure that you keep people's attention. It'd be nice if every single fruhead could have exactly the con s/he wanted, but i can tell you that getting a quorum of 11 committee members to agree on something is enough like herding cats that you don't want to try getting every single fruhead to agree on something. a few things for the record with regard to the Gong Show idea: perhaps many of those with concerns have never seen the real Gong Show, but when i watched it as a kid, it was fun. it was campy. it moved right along and kept people laughing. it was neither cruel nor competitive. we decided on that format because we desperately needed the "moving right along" part, and we wanted to add the "fun and campy" part. we're frankly all a little puzzled about this reaction. in one breath you're telling us that frucon is supposed to be a bunch of friends coming together in a safe and inviting atmosphere, and in the next, you're certain that those friends you just mentioned are going to boo you off the stage after 45 seconds. the rules are thus: 45 seconds is the minimum, not the maximum. everyone gets 45 seconds uninterrupted. if it makes you happy, we can make this 60 seconds or a minute and a half. no one will get gonged just for what you perceive to be our sick pleasure. we honestly hoped that some people would take the GS idea and have fun with it-- i.e. prepare something awful along the lines of what you used to see on the real GS-- in an effort to get gonged. that would have been great, but perhaps the message here is that no one wants the talent show to be funny or irreverent. *shrug* different strokes. in any case, in order to keep the talent show under control, we need to restrict the number and length of acts a LOT over what we had last year. if we don't do it this way, we'll have to do it some other way. We could just stand off to the side of the stage and cut you off when your time is up; we thought the GS would be more fun for everyone involved. we know for a fact that not everyone enjoys hours of talent show, so another alternative we considered was to stick the talent show stage in some back corner and let it go on the entire length of the con, with people wandering in and out whenever they feel like it. it'd have to be off-mic, though, as we wouldn't have enough sound equipment to run both that and the other activities we have planned. but we didn't think that way would be fair to the performers. the bottom line is, we really have no desire to ridicule anyone. We just want to keep the con as enjoyable as possible for as many people as possible. peace, ellen ------------------------------ Date: 22 Jan 2002 11:12:46 -0800 From: norgio@attbi.com (George E. Nowik) Subject: peoples concerns with the convention been a long time since i've had anything to say here. i'll try to keep this brief, but i'm the king of long-windedness. most of what i have been reading has been the single most useless sack of nonsense since santa claus left lumps of coal for the bad little children. i honestly can't believe the garbage i'm reading. let's trash the committee in public forums in spite of the fact that they have a web site set up for the receipt of any and all input and suggestions and ideas. there's only one of you thus far who has actually taken the time to -email- them rather than talk smack about them in front of others and starting rabble rousing. fine. play your games and get people needlessly upset. draw your crowds and raise your pitchforks and spades and tanks and what have you. but please, whatever you do, don't actually send feedback to the group that is trying to actually put something together for your conventionesque pleasure. [/snark] ok. now that i've gotten most of that out of my system, let's discuss a couple of things. this is real simple. if you have concerns, ideas, or otherwise-known-as regarding the convention, go to frucon.org, look up the email address, and send them a note. right now. stop reading this stupid post and get to it. this means you. are you emailng them? good. now that you've gotten that out of the way, wait. they may respond to you, they may not. considering they've only gotten one email thus far, your chances are pretty good. so few people volunteered suggestions and even fewer volunteered their services. what else were they supposed to do other than run things as best as they could without much input? bearing that in mind, please try not to come down too hard on them. against their favor (yes, i'm out to piss everyone off today! hahaeheheaheahahe!!%!@#), this was put together late. my suspicion, and i have no confirmation on this, is that they may not have realized that there could possibly be a demand for something along the lines of a fruhead convention in spite of the fact that the group that the fruheads rally to are on a collective vacation of sorts. this brings me to another point. this is a FRU HEAD CON VENT. ... ION. (i knew i left something out.) as such, this is a convention for those people who consider themselves fruheads. the convention never was designed to be band centered. for those of you who feel that the only draw to the convention was the show, i send out my deepest apologies and condolences for the death of your collective souls. it sucks to be you . (: for those of you who actually made -friends- as the result of the fruhead phenomena (doot dooooo doo doo doo) (sorry, shameless muppet moment), this is the convention for you. a chance for you to see people you likely haven't seen in a long time, in some cases an entire year, hang out, trade stories, catch up on life, sing a few songs here and there, and generally have a good time in toronto (a challenge in and of itself, especially in february, but i digress). to bring this email to a conclusion, since i'm not sure many people actually read the newsgroup nowadays (and i'm sure most of you haven't even gotten this far in the note without being ready to flame my ample booty off the board), i've a few more things to say. to those of you who feel the need to raise a flag regarding the gong show issue or rally behind it and start trashing committee members in public rather than actually providing them with the input that they have been asking for, three words: GET OVER IT. then four more words: BOOT TO THE HEAD. having said that, i'll likely take another three years away from the newsgroup. cheers to the committee for actually putting something together, regardless of when the plan was started. perhaps the renewed interest in all things fruhead will give insight as to whether it would be worth doing next year. if i may make a suggestion, open the polls a little earlier with a little more public exposure. which you may have done, but a number of people may just not have been aware of it ... i'll see you there. if you want to take this up with me, email me at norgio@attbi.com. bring it on, i prefer a straight fight to all this sneaking around. (: -= george =- ------------------------------ End of alt.music.moxy-fruvous digest V6 #20 *******************************************