Supporting The Local Scene
1 September, 2008Support Your Local Scene, that’s what Camille over at Wheelville says and does and it was her title that sent me digging into the past and checking the present, with mixed results.
During what I call retrospectively The Boring Age (aka Childhood in a former Socialist Country), the Local Scene was all there was. Now, I am not going to bore you with stories of the first television we had – it was black-and-white and had something like two channels. It all happened long time ago and I am not a television person anyway, but there is no denying the fact that life could be quite boring if you lived in a flat province near the Hungarian border. This doesn’t mean I wasn’t able to escape the boredom, I was, very much so (books), but it also means that for lack of alternatives the Local Scene played an important role. We actively took part in many events that make me cringe when thinking about them today, I spent quite a few nights at local discos as a teenager and would never admit they were boring and so on and on.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the connection local = provincial; boring is the strongest association I get. The corresponding wiring in my brain receives even more boost in the presence of people who aggressively praise all things local, as if those were a kind of compliment to their personality, a component that made their lives larger and more important. In my opinion, they do not.
Still, I am not a person known for my rock-solid principles: I am actually quite happy if events or any kind of new experience or knowledge challenge the way I have thought so far. Meaning, I have recently seen and attended a few local events and actually quite liked them. They were nothing special, an sich, but since I am quite foreign to this part of the world, they are interesting enough to sacrifice a certain amount of my precious time for. Now, some accuracy is in order here: they may be local events, but since I am not from here I actually attend them as a tourist, meaning they will probably contribute to my knowledge of the world on a more global level and not so much local.
Which is probably what I needed, anyway.
