Dialogue: Confessions of a fete-crasher

I have a terrible confession to make. It might be my last, but what the hell, we're probably not here to make friends.

The confession: I don't enjoy festivals, or parades, or any of those little public fairs/fetes/celebrations of community and/or self - those ones that are held in parks and where you go and wander around and buy food and look at clothes and it's all in the name of something.

When I hear the words "festival" or "pride parade," I go a little numb. I wonder why everyone else is so keen to get there.

"Yeah, there's a festival in our park this weekend," they yell. I wonder, perhaps, what others see that I don't.

It isn't about not wanting people to express themselves or celebrate. At least, I'm fairly sure it's not. It's about not being able to generate a response to the results.

I stand in front of a Hero Parade and maybe drink a few beers and maybe think, "Oh, yeah, fair enough, whatever..."

I wander off to various ethnic festivals and have a reasonable, if forgettable, time. I do my very best and, as I say, theoretically support everyone's right to celebrate whatever aspect of themselves or their community they find interesting, but usually end up sleeping core events away under a tree.

So there it is. The celebratory aspects of a culture do not affect me in the least. I suspect I will go to hell for this, if there's room.

But this does not, alas, stop me wondering why people rush along to these things. I wonder if they really feel the excitement they claim to feel, really see what they claim to see, are really moved to the degree that they claim to be moved.

Perhaps they are. It's a shallow, frivolous world we live in. It would hardly be surprising to find there was a generation out there that thought the fripperies counted, that a parade or a festival should evoke the depth of response of definitive art.

Unfortunately, parades and festivals, while enjoyable, can't do that. That's when you find people trying to fill the void with enthusiasm which is, I suspect, a behaviour we Pakeha are particularly inclined to.

Here's a little tale on the topic. Not long ago, someone gave me a great little book of essays about San Francisco in the years since the Great Quake. When I read the name San Francisco, my thoughts turned to a weird trip I took to that very place a few years ago.

It was weird because everyone on it (all New Zealanders, mate) kept trying to find depth where there was none or, at least, kept trying to read more into each district's external decorations than was perhaps there to read.

It was pretty tiring.

"Look at these streamers," people would shout if they found a bit of pink material fluttering from a pole outside a grocer's in Chinatown. "Isn't it great." It wasn't. A pink streamer is only vaguely amusing even on a good day. If you have no concept of the context in which it ought to appear, it is hardly amusing.

But on it went. "Look at those ducks hanging in the window. Look at those people dancing like that. Look at that guy's hat. Isn't it great? Isn't it great? Isn't it great?"

God help us. They're probably still at it. Trying to milk depth and meaning from streamers by screaming at them. Which is hard to do. And it is particularly hard to do in San Francisco.

San Francisco is not a particularly deep or meaningful place. It is pretty, and exciting, and has played host, over the years, to a lot of people who've wanted to leave the past, and usually themselves, behind.

None of that, though, is necessarily synonymous with depth. And that seemed to be the point everyone was making in my little book of essays.

Mark Twain, Lewis Lapham, Tom Wolfe, Amy Tan - they're all in there and they all write about the reasons they left San Francisco, the futility of trying to find meaning where none exists.