Blogatron

The L to the U to the something else.

I thought it might be easier for us to discuss this using the comments function; I don't have a way to make this entry private, but I've pre-dated it so it is pretty under the radar. So, basically, the standard internet rule applies: don't say anything you wouldn't want your grandma to read.

Courtney's notes from the 8/11/05 meeting about The Name Issue:

So, a good and productive conversation this evening. Steph, we really missed you! Thank you to Hilary, Brandy and Emily for such active and engaged discussion - y'all are brilliant.

After we explained the situation with LUPEC and our concerns about the ongoing use of the name, it was unanimous pretty much immediately that we should be thinking not about how to wheedle use of the name out of the Pittsburgh ladies but thinking about a brand and name retooling.

We had a long discussion about the values that we've been trying to embody with our parties. We started by taking another look at the mission statement we generated last year. It seemed like we might be just as happy starting from scratch in terms of a mission statement - partially because we thought a new mission statement would be a good idea and partially because we thought that the discussion of a new mission statement might give us some good ideas for a new name.

It would be probably too lengthy to try to capture the entirety of the conversation here; we got talking about who the parties are for - i.e. are they for us, or for the people who come to the parties, or something else? We seemed to agree that what we're doing (while it is great for both us and the people who come) is really more to fill what we perceive as a vacuum in American culture: a cultural and/or social void that we feel on some empirical level should not be empty. Hilary made the good point about progress and the things that might be lost on the way; as society's improved in terms of equality for women there have been some things that were always considered "womanly arts" that were discarded. Our approach is that as we discard things that society doesn't need we should be careful we're not throwing away things that might have value as well, creating the "cultural void" we talk about above. In other words, can we take back the baby, but leave the bathwater?

We discussed the nature of this cultural void in some detail and the conversation tended to center around three major concepts of what seems to us to be missing and what we feel our parties and organization can contribute:

-"Rewards of Effort."
We agreed that we didn't feel good about the way that things today have to be easy in order for them to be considered fun. We talked about the value of things that are more challenging: both in terms of creating parties (there's fun to be had in the effort that we engage to make the parties happen) and in terms of forcing people to engage with the parties (coming to one of our parties isn't just arriving with a six-pack; you need to think about what you wear, try new drinks that are unaccustomed to you, even interact with people in a way that you might not every day).

-"The Decadence of Celebration - for its own Sake."
We talked a lot about celebration and indulgence being a valuable thing without any kind of justification or reason for them. So many parties happen with other reasons for them; school, work or family needs. Celebration that meets no need but the need for celebration itself is a good thing. We also talked about the value of creating a kind of theatrical event and the sense of freedom and anonymity that this creates; there's a kind of egalitarianism to the decadence of our events.

-"Valorization of the Feminine."
We also talked about the importance of things that haven't always been valued by the culture as a whole. Parties, and the creation of parties, matter because they make life beautiful or entertaining or fun; parties have, however been trivialized. There's a bit of a feminist message here too; throwing parties is "woman's work" and has traditionally therefore been less important. You can draw a parallel to other debates about woman's creative arts being treated as less
important than men's creative arts (painting/art vs. knitting/craft, women "cooks" vs. male "chefs", etc). One thing we believe wholeheartedly is that parties matter; the "trivial" matters.

From this discussion we moved on to talking about names, and mostly did a lot of brainstorming but didn't really hammer anything out.

Is that accurate, ladies? Am I missing anything? Fill in anything I've forgotten here.

Posted by hilatron at August 11, 2000 10:58 PM | TrackBack