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Monday, July 14, 2025

Bit Depth

A Carnival coda

by

20140324

There's a re­al pos­si­bil­i­ty, in the rush to post mortem the ma­jor mis­steps of Car­ni­val 2014, that we will make more, far-reach­ing mis­takes in the plan­ning of fu­ture edi­tions of the fes­ti­val.

We are on the verge of deputis­ing a cav­al­cade of cul­tur­al Cap­tain Bak­ers, the now large­ly-myth­i­cal vil­lain of the an­nu­al Can­boulay per­for­mance, to po­lice the bound­aries of what is al­lowed and de­sir­able in a fes­ti­val that is found­ed on the idea of the bac­cha­na­lian re­lease of in­tel­lec­tu­al in­hi­bi­tions.

So many of the is­sues that sur­faced dur­ing the cel­e­bra­tions of 2014 arose from ex­act­ly that fun­da­men­tal con­flict. Bands be­ing pe­nalised for hav­ing un­der­age cel­e­brants and for start­ing at the wrong point in the pa­rade route.

Every­thing about the de­fi­ant­ly pri­va­tised So­cadrome event.

It's as if we now be­lieve that Car­ni­val must be con­tin­u­ous­ly sub­sidised and ruth­less­ly reg­u­lat­ed if we are ever to whip it in­to shape.

But con­sid­er some­thing else. Con­sid­er the very heart of Car­ni­val it­self, the pri­vate urge to present some­thing en­gag­ing and cre­ative as a con­tri­bu­tion to the fes­ti­val it­self. The es­sen­tial mo­ti­va­tion that has dri­ven every­one from Min­shall to a young Paramin jab jab to do some­thing so out­ra­geous, so star­tling, so ut­ter­ly un­usu­al that we are moved to do noth­ing more that stand stunned and mut­ter, "well, that is mas."

To ex­plain this a bit less ab­stract­ly, let me tell you a sto­ry about how I came to im­merse my­self in what's called pret­ty mas for two years.


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