Just how clueless are the kids behind Nonfiction (q.v., q.q.v.)?
The current scuttlebutt, which I take to be accurate, is that these social climbers are trying for a V2.0 in September. This would be after their complete failure to understand the entire concept of off-the-record status, and the structural impossibility of doing the same thing all over again now that such failure of understanding has been exposed.
One more time, kids: A conversation is off the record if and only if agreed upon by all parties beforehand. It cannot come about as the result of a diktat. But what can come about is a real-time witchhunt – as actually happened at Nonfiction V1.0, when the otherwise affable host shut the entire show down until the secret recording agent in our midst was exposed. I had to school these fuckers on their own topic.
Moreover, there seems to be some misunderstanding about what it really means to get up onstage in a crowded room to tell stories. Everyone in the room then knows your story, your name, and what you look like. Just how off-the-record can that be?
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Not only do these greenhorns not know the first thing about what they’re actually trying to do, deep inside the organizers lurks the dream of arts-council grants and legitimacy in the media demimonde they actively court. Could an office and salaries be far behind? In other words, couldn’t Nonfiction be just like Spacing?