Journal - April 19, 2006

APRIL 19, 2006

… Last night I met with the Berwick folks and by the end of our meeting they were kind of prepping me for what I had suggested: getting some people on video to talk about their own wedding seating arrangements. Yet I don’t quite feel ready for that as I’d like to figure out some stuff via writing first. We talked a lot about my interest/disinterest in people, interacting with the people I “study,” and how that played out with regard to my work.

Here are some other thoughts:
Seating as a mathematical/formulaic methodology:
B’s mother doesn’t get along with B’s father = Seating Plan A
G’s mother doesn’t get along with G’s father = Seating Plan B

Complex subtle relationships can fit into these formulas. Does this apply in many other situations with the world at large? Do we try to make it apply?

Something else:
I don’t think that the relationship between the family dynamic and the chart is actually very interesting. In fact the chart itself seems to be less and less interesting the more I think about it.
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Do individual family stories have to be kept intact and separate from other families’ stories? Can they all be spliced together? And yet, I do almost want this to be a straight-up documentary on wedding seating.
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The process of matching what you might learn about a family with what their seating chart looks like seems boring, didactic and stupid. I wonder if it should be only about ONE family and not a survey of multiple families? Perhaps the survey should be of different elements of the same wedding. The piece will then be about discovering the complex dynamics of one family through noting how the practicalities of the event are addressed. This is very much like the Family House series but using a family other than my own as the subject. I could try to do something with my own parents’ re-marriages but they weren’t traditional, formal weddings. They had casual lunches/receptions instead of sit-down, place setting-style dinners. Maybe P would let me work with his wedding. … What else is there to look at?
- church/ceremony seating & placement
- “giving away the bride”/walking down the aisle
- reception seating
- toasts

The more I look at all of this and read the websites, the more undeniably apparent it is that this project is totally about me. I guess I knew it was in a way but it’s just a lot more personal and relevant than I realized. I mean, all of my friends are getting married and picking out dresses and table centerpieces and reception locations and everything while I look down my nose a little and scoff at the excess and conformity of it all. And yet what did I do for nearly 4 hours today? Search wedding websites, learn about the “sweetheart table” and follow a lengthy chat session on veil etiquette for a woman who’s already been married. Frankly, it seems like I am either feeling left out and want in on all the girly wedding stuff that my friends are all sharing or I really want to get married. More likely, this is as much of a continuation of my Family House series as it often suggests and I am trying to understand how to deal with all the emotions around my family that arise when I even consider … (gulp) having a wedding.

The fact is that I am being forced to think about marriage with so many of my friends’ weddings to attend and in doing so I cannot help but insert myself: my own family, my own personality, my own prejudices and hang-ups. My own fears and hopes. Just like the phone call stats and floor-plan layouts from the Family House series, seating arrangements are a practical problem or difficulty, a simple matter that brings the ever-present issues of my family to the fore. This is all really about me (but of course).

Do I want to make the project about me? About my potential future wedding and where everyone will sit? I don’t think so. And frankly, that’s still not very interesting to me. So they don’t get along. Don’t sit them at the same table! Done. Who cares?! They don’t get along and I/you have to deal with it on this “happy” day. THAT is interesting. Why don’t they get along? What happened? How did you deal with it on the big day? Were they civil to each other? What did people say? This is interesting.

And, no, I don’t want to talk about me and my family. I think that’s pretty definite. Do I want to talk about just one family? I’m inclined to say no. I’m inclined to want to study these people who choose a traditional wedding with seating charts, these people who conflict-ridden families as well those with happy families. I think I’m also simply curious about other people’s families, their ideas of family, marriage, commitment, their ideas of weddings and of what their function is.

“It’s YOUR day.”

Is it? Is that what a wedding is all about? I’m inclined to think not at all. I would think that a wedding is actually for the community. That it is an announcement to their community of a couple’s commitment to one another. I think it is also – in return from the community – a show of support for that couple.
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I’m feeling muddled.
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…
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Come back again to the concept of the IDEAL vs. REALITY. A wedding is the consummate perfect day. “The best day of my life.” “The happiest day of my life.” Who has a bad wedding? Who has a difficult wedding? Probably lots of people but no one would ever say so because it’s supposed to be perfect and so everyone is supposed to feel perfect. Maybe I’m wrong though. Maybe everyone really does have one of the best days of their life, I mean they’re celebrating the person they love the most with everyone else they love and who loves them.

But (there is ALWAYS a But somewhere) a moderator of a wedding chat site I was on today wrote that her “f#cking father” didn’t go to her wedding because he couldn’t be in the same room with her mother. That has got to be hard. I mean, you can still have an incredibly wonderful day but there must be a tinge of melancholy knowing that your own father couldn’t put you first for one very significant day. And then there’s got to be millions of other examples of situation that are just gradations of that in intensity.

There is the cultural myth of perfection and then there is reality. Sure maybe this difficult reality hits more frequently with examples of tasteless distant aunts, homophobic cousins, or uncles who get too drunk. Probably that more frequently than a father who wouldn’t attend.

But the point – perhaps – is that it will never be perfect and yet we want it to be. We are told it will be, it can be, it should be. And we are given little ways to try and make it so. We can try to control the situations that might cause problems: separate the parents, seat the homophobe cousin nowhere near the gay college friends, close the open bar at 8pm.
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Think maybe about interviewing people who got married a LONG time ago about their wedding difficulties, as they might have a different perspective, a different candor.
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So, I think I do need to begin with a video: interview-style. Perhaps I will do some insane editing on it and leave just a few comments, or just a section of the image. Perhaps I will splice multiple interviews together. I can hack it to bits if I want and play with my interest in minimal presentation that way.