An Apologia for Concept Picnics

Just before I left Boise, Lindsey and I had the idea for "concept picnics", that is, picnics in unusual locations or having other strange features. For example, everyone could wear suits and having a picnic in a cemetary, or we could bring only pies and eat in a traffic median, which were the first two concept picnics we did in Boise. I'm trying to re-start this tradition in Chicago, and last Sunday we all had a picnic in a children's playground. (We wanted to have it on this abandoned railroad trestle, but it was decided when we got there that half the party was unwilling to do the necessary climbing.)

I just love bulshitting about the concept behind concept picnics. For example: Milan Kundera says that there's an aesthetics of kitsch, which I understand like this: say you see a child running with a baloon, and think to yourself not, "How lovely, a child running with a baloon", but rather, "How lovely, to be sitting here watching a child running with a baloon". You are not perceiving beauty, but rather participating in a widely held notion of what is beautiful, and congratulating yourself on that.

Picnics /are/ nice, and carry with them certain picnic-symbols: a basket, a frisbee, a nice lawn, pleasant surroundings, casual dress, maybe fellow-picnicers, and lovely weather. The church picnic is one of our culture's great icons of wholesomeness. I enjoy picnics like this, but they're so thoroughly iconified that one can't be sure if one is actually enjoing them or enjoing enjoying them. One way to find out is to break the stereotypes, one or two variables at a time - have your picnic in a stairwell, but hold everything else constant, or have it in a park, and cross-dress. In this way, we are not deviating from picnics, but plunging through the kitsch into the PICNIC ITSELF, that is the genuine experience of the picnic.

I could go on. But another reason I like our concept picnics is that it exposes you to the fact that there are other slightly kooky people out there. For example, as we were climbing the fence onto the railroad trestle (the willing did this just to see what was up there before the playground-picnic began), an unmarked white van drove up, stopped, and a man got out and walked towards us. When he got close enough, he stopped, put his hands on his hips, and we looked at each other, I on the ground, and my friend halfway up the fence. I started to run through possible excuses in my mind, and didn't find anything very plausible. Finally, the man spoke. "Isn't there supposed to be a way to get up there without climbing the fence?" he said. "Um, really?" my friend asked. "I think it's east of here. Do you know where it is?" "Uh, no, but that would be nice," my friend answered said. "Hmm. Well, I guess I'll keep looking," he said, and drove off.