I have heard of some weird and wonderful things that they have done over the years to try and better the scene. This car pooling initiative is kind of inevitable, as space and venues are a lot more limited than they were years ago when the psy scene in Cape Town was still intimate and somewhat controllable 😉 BUT reading a small line which many people may have overlooked caught my eye on the event page yesterday… I was looking for the lineup times to determine which the best times to jol are, and, in turn when the more common ouens play so that I can rest! Although, this is what I found…
Now hold on a second. I used to rely on that wonderful silver pillow as my only way to get slewed. How can they ban our wine in a packet from the dance floor? By the time most Capetonians pay for petrol, tickets, food, refreshments and necessities, there is hardly any funding left for booze. Hense the importance of the papsak at ALL outdoor festivals. I also feel this bag of love epitomizes what the jols are about, spreading the love. How many of you have been to an outdoor and not taken one knee to hammer some ice cold dry white at 7.30am? Yeah, I thought so. I understand some of the kids get too slewed because they don’t know their limits and just gun it through the entire 5 Litres. But that’s exactly how most of us learnt, the hard way… How else are they going to find out that wine and shrooms isn’t a good mix? HAHA
What will I do now to practice my aiming skills at 11am on a Sunday morning?
If anyone has any further information with regard to how, and, more importantly why this happened please enlighten me? I will do some digging at the party, but in all honesty I am going there to lose my shit and not work so it may take until Tuesday to get your answer 😉
It’s not such a big deal. They have not banned papsak altogether, just on the dancefloor. Put it in a plastic bottle. Problem solved
A sak isn’t the same without its silver outer skin 😉 Going to be a long time till they get this one right though, everyone still had their sakkies o the floor!
Lame, peeps must drink whatever potion they see fit & plus the sack is a great place to lay ones head if needed…
Glad you brought this up… I tried to do some investigation around this, but found it very hard to get a clear and direct answer from Alien Safari about this – maybe you will have more luck.
What did come up though, was that the organizers of Alien Safari are dissatisfied with the way the contemporary scene has turned out, and have framed the papsak as a symbol and a cause of these recent developments (including drunk kids, people getting hopelessly wasted and causing trouble etc). Thus, it seems by banning the papsak, the organizers were trying to have their say about how they feel the scene should be progressing.
I disagree with this policy for several reasons, but first I would like to point out that I agree with Alien to some extent. These parties should NOT be all about the booze (or the drugs for that matter) – psy trance culture goes way deeper than that, and there is a large social/spiritual/cultural aspect to it that is largely overlooked today. I also agree that we are seeing a lot of people who get hopelessly drunk and cause shit these days, perhaps more than there have been in the past.
But, on the other hand, to blame and ban the papsak is completely illogical. This is suggesting that the problems they have specified are caused not by the wine itself, but by the packaging that the wine comes in. I don’t need to point out how ridiculous this idea is.
The recently founded ‘papsak tradition’ is an awesome cultural marker that should be embraced. It involves taking an object and symbol from dominant society, and completely subverting the way in which it was intended to be used. We have made the papsak ours – it is a symbol of the culture that we are creating. Furthermore, it ties in with the wider values of trance culture, in that it leads to a focus on communalism and sharing.
There will always be the people that complain about cultures changing, and about scenes becoming commercialized. Change is inevitable, and we all know that with commercialization come overcrowding, drunken douche-bags, fights etc etc. I fully understand where Alien Safari are coming from, when they express their desire to have things as they were in the older days, or have the contemporary scene transformed in one way or another. However, if they really want to transform the scene in this way, they should be hosting smaller, friendly and intimate parties, such as the recent Organik event (and guess what – there was papsak all over the dance-floor at that one). Instead they choose to host events such as Sprung, which had an attendance in the thousands. Of course, this is their prerogative, but then they shouldn’t try to blame the unruliness at big parties on the papsak. You can’t have your cake and eat it.
Thanks for the massive reply! I am off to a dinner party and will reply first thing in the morning. Agree parties should not be about booze or drugs, but then why ban papsak, when 16 year old kids are doing MDMA and Acid in plain sight of people like me?