Once more, the banner is raised on the mailing list. The ever so useful community mailing list I'm on for anime convention management, that is. And the banner in question is that cheerful challenge to post the silliest thread possible.
This time around, at least my friend Erica started the nonsense, instead of me. Often these threads seem to spawn out of my oddball signature lines, which I change whenever the mood for a side comment strikes me. In those cases, they may last for just a few thoroughly off-topic responses. But when any of a certain select few repeat offenders such as Erica purposely starts a thread that's silly, the thread takes on a life of its own and can go like wildfire, the result of the good nature and rampant creativity of the list members. One thread even spawned its own web site (with the help of a friendly web developer) for our imaginings regarding development of the most epic fail convention ever. This time around, Erica decided to go for a more laid-back approach to the silliness, and suggested "MehCon," with the memorable motto "The Premiere Whatever" suggested by artist and friend Mari Kurisato. It's not designed to be an epic fail con, because we can't be bothered to put that much work into failing. We plan to have some kind of costume contest, if the person running it remembers to bring the boxes of stuff from her garage, and if someone passes out so we can dress them up, but otherwise we might just draw on them because we forgot to order any registration materials. I'm thinking Naruto headbands. Someone might do an AMV contest but we're not sure because we have all these discs, and they only brought a VCR. I'm in charge of guests if any show up. I think I have some power bars I can feed them.
We like to occasionally flesh out one of these manically devolved conventions. I envision these as an "action figure" set of self-destruction conventions. EpicfailCon, WhateverCon. The SevereDramaandPoliticsCon would definitely need its own action toy in the line. Possibly one for DeludaCon, all smiles while it's bleeding to death. Wait! You can buy badges for 80% off today only! What do you mean the hotel canceled our contract? Um... ok, we can do it in the parking lot then....
The convention mailing list in general has a lovely high tone, a dedicated community happy to help even people asking the same question that was already asked thirty times, and a lot of really useful information on everything from licensing and permissions to hotel contracts and tax concerns (and that's just this week). It's a public list and even those who do not manage cons sometimes join just to see what the heck we talk about. I do generally try to give useful input to these conversations, and have occasionally sent a baby con manager a six-page answer to a single-line question. I value the serious information on the list greatly, and value the massive combined experience, talent and savvy of the convention members, and I must note there are many, many times when I restrain the urge to post a silly aside for fear that I'll drag the whole list off the rails again.
But at least once a quarter there *ought* to be silliness, and at least once a year it ought to be a seriously dedicated level of silliness, and I am pleased as punch to contribute. I'm not sure whether it's influenced by Spring Fever, and I can't say this is even a tendency to want to draw attention to myself. It's a sheerly irrational determination to enjoy those opportunities for whimsical nonsense. Because really, when all the contracts are signed and the guests are scheduled and the banners are hung, we're running anime cons.
And that is a truly silly thing. We can get as serious as we want about vendor verbiage, but there is a person pogoing by in a banana suit even as we strike sub-paragraph three. And the fact that there is a person pogoing by in a banana suit is an excellent example of the reason anime cons ought to exist in the first place.
I believe the impulse to silliness is one of the highest impulses in human nature. Like the nurturing impulse it is a deep-seated lure to share the most harmless and pleasant method of communicating with and sharing with other beings. The urge to giggle together is a delightful and very healthy way of connecting with all of humanity (and sometimes, dogs, dolphins, horses and birds too).
This belief shows in the way I program for conventions, with panels on the internment camps in the U.S. during WWII or Japanese translation leavened by sessions like the Anime Olympics (racing wind-up hopping hedgehogs the participants are only allowed to touch with flyswatters). Seriousness is a valuable and important and, well, serious, contributor to all of our sociocultural achievements. And learning is ingrained, expanded upon, and seen more completely when looked at through the looking glass of humor. We learn what we do and we do what we love. The two should be well entangled.
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Ies with Ease
It's obvious that the Queen's English, Cockney, Canadian English, U.S. English, and Australian English are fantastically diverse languages (let's not even start on Indian English today morning).
But every now and then a new facet of the differences strikes me. Reading one small word in this article on an airport outbreak of war between two rival motorcycle gangles in Australia triggered that familiar "wait a minute..." feeling about our mutual (?) language.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090323/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_biker_brawl
Now, it seems there are already a lot of basic items in Australia that end in an "ee" sound, however spelled, whether it's a wallaby, a joey, or a budgie. In some cases though, those are shortenings of longer words (budgerigar) to a comfortable form. And comfortable forms have those ee's on the end more frequently than in U.S. English forms. Here in the U.S. an ie ending seems to have a connotation of something small, cute, childlike, harmless. Little Ann is Annie, little Rebecca is Becky, babies are ee's, and budgies are ee's, and hard core Star Trek fans struggle to be known as Trekkers instead of Trekkies in a desperate bid to be taken seriously, and so far we trend pretty well along the same lines. "ee" is a little more feminized in the U.S. as well, with women more likely than men to be willing to ee-ify any term they are currently using, whether it's sweetie for sweetheart, teenyweeny cutiewootie, or Dougie for Doug, as I heard a lady call to her friend last weekend.
But calling biker gangs "bikies" abruptly raises a flag that we are no longer on home turf. Either Australian English has divorced itself from the baby connotation of the "ee" sound, or in a country with poisonous radar-using furbearing egg-laying platypuses, stretches of hundreds of miles of nothing between dusty outposts, and giant toads that ooze toxins, methamphetamine-dealing biker gangs merely qualify as "cute." Oddly, the wide-spread use of "ee" forms which would be a feminine tendency in the U.S. becomes a back-to-front way of reinforcing the impression of all the testosterone inherent in Australia.
But every now and then a new facet of the differences strikes me. Reading one small word in this article on an airport outbreak of war between two rival motorcycle gangles in Australia triggered that familiar "wait a minute..." feeling about our mutual (?) language.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090323/ap_on_re_au_an/as_australia_biker_brawl
Now, it seems there are already a lot of basic items in Australia that end in an "ee" sound, however spelled, whether it's a wallaby, a joey, or a budgie. In some cases though, those are shortenings of longer words (budgerigar) to a comfortable form. And comfortable forms have those ee's on the end more frequently than in U.S. English forms. Here in the U.S. an ie ending seems to have a connotation of something small, cute, childlike, harmless. Little Ann is Annie, little Rebecca is Becky, babies are ee's, and budgies are ee's, and hard core Star Trek fans struggle to be known as Trekkers instead of Trekkies in a desperate bid to be taken seriously, and so far we trend pretty well along the same lines. "ee" is a little more feminized in the U.S. as well, with women more likely than men to be willing to ee-ify any term they are currently using, whether it's sweetie for sweetheart, teenyweeny cutiewootie, or Dougie for Doug, as I heard a lady call to her friend last weekend.
But calling biker gangs "bikies" abruptly raises a flag that we are no longer on home turf. Either Australian English has divorced itself from the baby connotation of the "ee" sound, or in a country with poisonous radar-using furbearing egg-laying platypuses, stretches of hundreds of miles of nothing between dusty outposts, and giant toads that ooze toxins, methamphetamine-dealing biker gangs merely qualify as "cute." Oddly, the wide-spread use of "ee" forms which would be a feminine tendency in the U.S. becomes a back-to-front way of reinforcing the impression of all the testosterone inherent in Australia.
It goes in cycles
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090323/wl_uk_afp/britainusliteraturesuicide
Yahoo notes the suicide of the son of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself as well. So did the next wife of Sylvia's husband Ted Hughes.
For many in American culture, suicide is unthinkable - but really, once you've thought it, it is a thought impossible to "unthink." Of course it's impacted by generation on generation of a tendency to clinical depression, but I believe the nihilism and narcissism inherent in my mother's suicide was imbued in our lives together for a decade before that event, just as the nihilism and violence of my father's suicide was. The outlook itself, valuing life little enough to be able to throw it away, was woven slowly and steadily through our entire lives. My uncle had committed suicide when I was still young, and it was not a surprise to me that my sister tried to commit suicide, even predating my parents' successful efforts (inasmuch as they may be called "successful"), because she absorbed this thread, felt it tie itself around her hands and arms and eyes. The rope grew as thick as a boa constrictor, sinuously twined itself around us and settled in, breathing with a life of its own, its scales a cool comfort to the touch because even if death was a moment away, embracing it was all its own kind of defense. I may have been less susceptible only because my sister was more sensitive to begin with.
Even before my parents' death, I used to annoy my friend Dan with a simple acceptance that some day I am going to die - I used to tell him that death is nothing to worry about, it's only dying itself that's the difficult part. After drowning at nine and living in the family I had from five until sixteen, I was honestly quite surprised to make it to sixteen in the first place. And surprised again at 21, and 30, and these days just about every day of my life. There are days when the world seems nothing more than reflection on water, and on those days I think of dying. They are misted with a melancholy so old it seems distant, faint, and soaked into everything like a water stain on a hundred-year-old photograph. I do not die, because I have life flowing like an antivenin in my veins, am so swelled full of taste and smell and sound and touch and sight that it pushes away the water. But I'm full of memories too, and many are still sore things, coming and shaking me in waves some nights so it is as if every loss was new. Dan was frustrated at the very thought that I might think that dying was going to happen some day and when it does I might not think it was wrong. Dan thought all death, any death, was wrong and he was fierce and fiery as a torch burning in the heart of life. Dan wrote a beautiful poem at one time, when a friend was stabbed to death in front of a cathedral on what was then the main strip through town and still might be. The last line, alone, was "I will never cease to fly in the face of the sound of her wings." I would walk that road and see the stain of the blood on the sidewalk; they never cleaned it away fully until the next time the Pope came through town. Dan's words flowed and continue to flow in my veins, along with a few other phrases, circling with my blood and guarding me from a despair that masks itself as careless fatigue, a tsunami masquerading as a morning mist.
Thanks to people like Dan, instead of seeing my life as a sepia toned memory, most days I pick up hundred year old photographs and am painfully, beautifully aware of just how much life there is in those faces gone.
Yahoo notes the suicide of the son of Sylvia Plath, who killed herself as well. So did the next wife of Sylvia's husband Ted Hughes.
For many in American culture, suicide is unthinkable - but really, once you've thought it, it is a thought impossible to "unthink." Of course it's impacted by generation on generation of a tendency to clinical depression, but I believe the nihilism and narcissism inherent in my mother's suicide was imbued in our lives together for a decade before that event, just as the nihilism and violence of my father's suicide was. The outlook itself, valuing life little enough to be able to throw it away, was woven slowly and steadily through our entire lives. My uncle had committed suicide when I was still young, and it was not a surprise to me that my sister tried to commit suicide, even predating my parents' successful efforts (inasmuch as they may be called "successful"), because she absorbed this thread, felt it tie itself around her hands and arms and eyes. The rope grew as thick as a boa constrictor, sinuously twined itself around us and settled in, breathing with a life of its own, its scales a cool comfort to the touch because even if death was a moment away, embracing it was all its own kind of defense. I may have been less susceptible only because my sister was more sensitive to begin with.
Even before my parents' death, I used to annoy my friend Dan with a simple acceptance that some day I am going to die - I used to tell him that death is nothing to worry about, it's only dying itself that's the difficult part. After drowning at nine and living in the family I had from five until sixteen, I was honestly quite surprised to make it to sixteen in the first place. And surprised again at 21, and 30, and these days just about every day of my life. There are days when the world seems nothing more than reflection on water, and on those days I think of dying. They are misted with a melancholy so old it seems distant, faint, and soaked into everything like a water stain on a hundred-year-old photograph. I do not die, because I have life flowing like an antivenin in my veins, am so swelled full of taste and smell and sound and touch and sight that it pushes away the water. But I'm full of memories too, and many are still sore things, coming and shaking me in waves some nights so it is as if every loss was new. Dan was frustrated at the very thought that I might think that dying was going to happen some day and when it does I might not think it was wrong. Dan thought all death, any death, was wrong and he was fierce and fiery as a torch burning in the heart of life. Dan wrote a beautiful poem at one time, when a friend was stabbed to death in front of a cathedral on what was then the main strip through town and still might be. The last line, alone, was "I will never cease to fly in the face of the sound of her wings." I would walk that road and see the stain of the blood on the sidewalk; they never cleaned it away fully until the next time the Pope came through town. Dan's words flowed and continue to flow in my veins, along with a few other phrases, circling with my blood and guarding me from a despair that masks itself as careless fatigue, a tsunami masquerading as a morning mist.
Thanks to people like Dan, instead of seeing my life as a sepia toned memory, most days I pick up hundred year old photographs and am painfully, beautifully aware of just how much life there is in those faces gone.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Time and Tide
The Steampunk movement is half fashion and half imagination, a creative vision of an alternate world that spans possibility both in mechanical terms and in terms of the human response to our own machine creations. It halts for a moment at the boundary of the modern electronic era and envisions the art and adventure potential in a world of steam and gears.
Personally, I love the grace and beauty of the minute range of gears encompassed in our miniaturized watches, and the majestic power of the gears that turn massive hands on our largest clocks. But there are other feelings bound up in my response to steampunk as well. Certainly there is a sense of lost adventure in an era when the world was still a vast place with frontiers to discover. There were new wonders on every island and in the clouds, and reaching them was not the forlorn journey of a thousand lifetimes that exploring space would be. Where the scope and scale of the exploration to be done today dwarfs any individual to a microscopic size, the exploration of a world half-built with civilizations brings us down only to the size of ants on tiny air balloons, still holding the power to act independently and discover a thousand details in the span of a day where-ever the wind might blow.
Steampunk harkens back to an era when so much of the world was known that we could begin to think ourselves marvels of science, of technology to master new horizons, even as the science we held revealed to us that the expanse of those horizons might broaden unto the infinite. Our science was new enough to be like a child's kit of chemistry, emitting wonderful lights and bubbles, weird smells and corrosive agents that made us laugh at what they could eat through and etch - a side journey away from that corrosion that touches the spirit instead. It was an era where we could feel that we might learn anything, and an era still wrapped in a sense of wonder and a veil of undispelled mystery about what that anything would turn out to be. Foreign potentates had the power to amaze with strange costumes and vast empires of jewels, elephants and unicorns, even as we were still cheerfully arrogant enough to think nations of millions with a civilization of ten thousand years quaint and backward. We were bulls in the China shop, introducing vices and thinking those who succumbed to them inferior. We were unlimited by responsibility other than what we claimed to family and country, and those with more means than to be stuck working in factories that turned lungs to soot-stained rags might use those means to travel in India or Kenya with the surety of masters. Those raised to run in blackened streets might escape to ply the seas and die an early death of scurvy or the noose after a wild run of pillage and plunder. The black soot parts and vicious naivete are scrubbed away in most steampunk, leaving only the wonder and a child's sense of adventure at playing pirates, the details as ornate and piercing as the song of a wind-up nightingale.
When I look in the looking glass of steampunk style, I picture a society teetering, balanced on point with a parasol on a tightrope line balanced between future and past, between superstition and science, between mountains and rivers, what is solid and what moves, between god and man and the power of mystery and the terrible power of knowledge. These are not things, by any means, that are gone today - we still fight to find ethics and goals between our understanding of the struggle of the proletariat and our dreams of capitalist success or universal health. For now, we try to meet a common point with democracy - and in the midst of it still debate god vs. science in incompatible terms, work to understand how to exploit natural resources without destroying natural wonder, seek the unknown in the minute and the universal - all extensions of those same questions that have been with us all along but rose in such dichotomous intensity in blossoming of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Was it then that we became so black and white in so many of our questions, or is this a tendency that has been with Western culture all along?
Many of the questions have become more desperate as we reach a point where the earth itself can no longer support many of our long held habits. Stepping into steampunk is like taking a step back, a moment for breathing room, when there was a hundred years between us and the question of the end of the world and we were all unaware of it, before there had ever been such a thing as a world war and before anyone realized that the black soot of those factories would stain the entire earth before we were done, carried in vast winds from the Chinese coast over entire oceans, pooling in clouds over Los Angeles and Mexico City. I wonder, in another hundred years, whether someone will look back at the current era as a romantic time of innocence when our understanding of the results of our past and the currents of our future was still unfolding with the inescapable grace of a fractal design, the curling tides sweeping into every nook and cranny like an eddy in the smallest pool.
The question of time itself has weighed on me since I was a child. When I drowned in a mountain river at the age of nine, what I felt included a vision of time far more flexible than we perceive on any given day, and immense beyond all knowing. Since then, I've had a feeling about time that pairs the longest ages with the shortest moments.
At twenty-six, I witnessed a dance done by a handful of Korean senior citizens. As they moved in the ancient steps, each dancer brought their own individual flair to the dance, from the gentleman who stepped as carefully as if his foot might break a shell of glass to the lady with the sere expression who marched with her back as straight and immovable as stone, the lady who seemed a little lost and the one who flung out her sleeves and made a great effort to smile flirtatiously at every turn. The dance, they estimated, was ten thousand years old; a version of it dated to the earliest records in China. The dancers were perhaps seventy years old on average, and to me they were ancient, three times my age as an adult. Yet even that ten thousand years was the smallest drop in the ages of the earth, and earth a newborn itself. I was moved to tears by how young these dancers were, and how swiftly lost in the river.
I stand in the heart of Denver sometimes, and look at the few remnants of the days when this city was new - a granary turned to a shop turned to a condominium, a storehouse half burned down to make way for a high-rise, a chunk of concrete from the remnant of a bridge that stood for years like the broken column of a giant's spine, a street called Little Raven - and know that it is barely 150 years old, and so much already has come and gone. We live as a soliton, maintaining our shape so long as we travel at constant speed, and we travel at a speed so swift that when we are interrupted we unravel at the pace of a heartbeat and the little left is dispersed like a curl of dust in the wind.
I am making jewelry of watch gears and the faces of women who were beautiful in 1910, many of whom are forgotten today but for these slips of images from French postcards at the time. I doubt the fascination of most people with those moving gears and turning hands has quite so much melancholy in the sense of time as I feel, but I do think that somewhere under the steam is a realization of time - both eternal and passing.
Is it Natsukashii - nostalgic? Or Aware - piercingly feeling a moment of perfection just before it passes - a kind of future nostalgia? That latter word, Japanese, is pronounced a-wah-reh. But I like it a lot that the romaji spelling for it matches the English word aware.
Personally, I love the grace and beauty of the minute range of gears encompassed in our miniaturized watches, and the majestic power of the gears that turn massive hands on our largest clocks. But there are other feelings bound up in my response to steampunk as well. Certainly there is a sense of lost adventure in an era when the world was still a vast place with frontiers to discover. There were new wonders on every island and in the clouds, and reaching them was not the forlorn journey of a thousand lifetimes that exploring space would be. Where the scope and scale of the exploration to be done today dwarfs any individual to a microscopic size, the exploration of a world half-built with civilizations brings us down only to the size of ants on tiny air balloons, still holding the power to act independently and discover a thousand details in the span of a day where-ever the wind might blow.
Steampunk harkens back to an era when so much of the world was known that we could begin to think ourselves marvels of science, of technology to master new horizons, even as the science we held revealed to us that the expanse of those horizons might broaden unto the infinite. Our science was new enough to be like a child's kit of chemistry, emitting wonderful lights and bubbles, weird smells and corrosive agents that made us laugh at what they could eat through and etch - a side journey away from that corrosion that touches the spirit instead. It was an era where we could feel that we might learn anything, and an era still wrapped in a sense of wonder and a veil of undispelled mystery about what that anything would turn out to be. Foreign potentates had the power to amaze with strange costumes and vast empires of jewels, elephants and unicorns, even as we were still cheerfully arrogant enough to think nations of millions with a civilization of ten thousand years quaint and backward. We were bulls in the China shop, introducing vices and thinking those who succumbed to them inferior. We were unlimited by responsibility other than what we claimed to family and country, and those with more means than to be stuck working in factories that turned lungs to soot-stained rags might use those means to travel in India or Kenya with the surety of masters. Those raised to run in blackened streets might escape to ply the seas and die an early death of scurvy or the noose after a wild run of pillage and plunder. The black soot parts and vicious naivete are scrubbed away in most steampunk, leaving only the wonder and a child's sense of adventure at playing pirates, the details as ornate and piercing as the song of a wind-up nightingale.
When I look in the looking glass of steampunk style, I picture a society teetering, balanced on point with a parasol on a tightrope line balanced between future and past, between superstition and science, between mountains and rivers, what is solid and what moves, between god and man and the power of mystery and the terrible power of knowledge. These are not things, by any means, that are gone today - we still fight to find ethics and goals between our understanding of the struggle of the proletariat and our dreams of capitalist success or universal health. For now, we try to meet a common point with democracy - and in the midst of it still debate god vs. science in incompatible terms, work to understand how to exploit natural resources without destroying natural wonder, seek the unknown in the minute and the universal - all extensions of those same questions that have been with us all along but rose in such dichotomous intensity in blossoming of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Was it then that we became so black and white in so many of our questions, or is this a tendency that has been with Western culture all along?
Many of the questions have become more desperate as we reach a point where the earth itself can no longer support many of our long held habits. Stepping into steampunk is like taking a step back, a moment for breathing room, when there was a hundred years between us and the question of the end of the world and we were all unaware of it, before there had ever been such a thing as a world war and before anyone realized that the black soot of those factories would stain the entire earth before we were done, carried in vast winds from the Chinese coast over entire oceans, pooling in clouds over Los Angeles and Mexico City. I wonder, in another hundred years, whether someone will look back at the current era as a romantic time of innocence when our understanding of the results of our past and the currents of our future was still unfolding with the inescapable grace of a fractal design, the curling tides sweeping into every nook and cranny like an eddy in the smallest pool.
The question of time itself has weighed on me since I was a child. When I drowned in a mountain river at the age of nine, what I felt included a vision of time far more flexible than we perceive on any given day, and immense beyond all knowing. Since then, I've had a feeling about time that pairs the longest ages with the shortest moments.
At twenty-six, I witnessed a dance done by a handful of Korean senior citizens. As they moved in the ancient steps, each dancer brought their own individual flair to the dance, from the gentleman who stepped as carefully as if his foot might break a shell of glass to the lady with the sere expression who marched with her back as straight and immovable as stone, the lady who seemed a little lost and the one who flung out her sleeves and made a great effort to smile flirtatiously at every turn. The dance, they estimated, was ten thousand years old; a version of it dated to the earliest records in China. The dancers were perhaps seventy years old on average, and to me they were ancient, three times my age as an adult. Yet even that ten thousand years was the smallest drop in the ages of the earth, and earth a newborn itself. I was moved to tears by how young these dancers were, and how swiftly lost in the river.
I stand in the heart of Denver sometimes, and look at the few remnants of the days when this city was new - a granary turned to a shop turned to a condominium, a storehouse half burned down to make way for a high-rise, a chunk of concrete from the remnant of a bridge that stood for years like the broken column of a giant's spine, a street called Little Raven - and know that it is barely 150 years old, and so much already has come and gone. We live as a soliton, maintaining our shape so long as we travel at constant speed, and we travel at a speed so swift that when we are interrupted we unravel at the pace of a heartbeat and the little left is dispersed like a curl of dust in the wind.
I am making jewelry of watch gears and the faces of women who were beautiful in 1910, many of whom are forgotten today but for these slips of images from French postcards at the time. I doubt the fascination of most people with those moving gears and turning hands has quite so much melancholy in the sense of time as I feel, but I do think that somewhere under the steam is a realization of time - both eternal and passing.
Is it Natsukashii - nostalgic? Or Aware - piercingly feeling a moment of perfection just before it passes - a kind of future nostalgia? That latter word, Japanese, is pronounced a-wah-reh. But I like it a lot that the romaji spelling for it matches the English word aware.
Steampunk
Last weekend was my first "Steampunk" meet. We'll see if this is something I get into deeply since I don't tend to be fanatic about any of my hobbies. Good signs -
-Everyone was pleasantly kind about my sheer lack of clothing qualifications. While I might barely pass for acceptable in dress, the majority of the crew were quite well attired, and indeed I would note that a number were in outfits simply coruscating with brilliance. Fantastic outfits, splendid tailoring, excellent accessories and sheer pleasure in presentation.
- Everyone was also a sheer pleasure in terms of company. I had the honor of conversation with people who were intelligent, gregarious, and full of good humor, and that in itself is a great reason to appreciate this subculture. Members tend to be both creative and whimsical.
- I have not laughed that much in a long time. This subculture is also a very entertaining one for observation. Social norms include openness to new people, curiosity about craftsmanship and appreciation for skills and talents, and a tendency to easily express individualistic opinions.
Points of interesting cultural interchange:
1) People in shorts, tshirts and baseball hats staring at the people in corsets and skirts. Person in corset and skirt spots an older, overweight gentleman in a navy sweatshirt with a tai chi group, practicing rather limply and awkwardly with a tasseled sword. Person in corset being stared at dashes over to other girls to whisper "Did you SEE that GUY?" Yes, and he saw you too. ^_^
2) Extremely good cheer for silly things. Delight in taking photos of group running in "terror" from kraken (kite). It would have have been nice to get a shot of them all running after the ice cream van if the van hadn't gone past at high speed.
3) Appreciation of the skills of others highlighted by people who were very willing to share any information of how they accomplished their art or where they purchased their accoutrements.
4) Reaction of others - while the normal staring response of a person in common American culture to anything unusual was evident, it takes its own direction in Steampunk. Common American reaction to people in science fiction costumes that run along the lines of Star Trek, aliens, or similar items clearly discernible as part of that subculture is largely negative. In the case of the steampunk outfits, people were constantly coming up with interest in what the group was doing - we pointed one gentleman to the web sites he can search, and I got an email address from the clerk at the cupcake store to let him know of the next event. One young lady in an elegant off-the-shoulder blue dress was stopped in the street by a mother whose child wanted to be introduced to "Cinderella." General conclusion from this limited experiment: Apparently old-fashioned clothing and details appertaining to it is a delight to the average American, and a point of interest and inquiry, vs. futuristic or alien presentations which induce a mild phobic reaction.
5) I like any subculture which allows me to explore an entire range of the English language which has fallen into general disuse, much less make up more lovely twenty-syllable technical terminology both sonorous and somewhat delusional.
-Everyone was pleasantly kind about my sheer lack of clothing qualifications. While I might barely pass for acceptable in dress, the majority of the crew were quite well attired, and indeed I would note that a number were in outfits simply coruscating with brilliance. Fantastic outfits, splendid tailoring, excellent accessories and sheer pleasure in presentation.
- Everyone was also a sheer pleasure in terms of company. I had the honor of conversation with people who were intelligent, gregarious, and full of good humor, and that in itself is a great reason to appreciate this subculture. Members tend to be both creative and whimsical.
- I have not laughed that much in a long time. This subculture is also a very entertaining one for observation. Social norms include openness to new people, curiosity about craftsmanship and appreciation for skills and talents, and a tendency to easily express individualistic opinions.
Points of interesting cultural interchange:
1) People in shorts, tshirts and baseball hats staring at the people in corsets and skirts. Person in corset and skirt spots an older, overweight gentleman in a navy sweatshirt with a tai chi group, practicing rather limply and awkwardly with a tasseled sword. Person in corset being stared at dashes over to other girls to whisper "Did you SEE that GUY?" Yes, and he saw you too. ^_^
2) Extremely good cheer for silly things. Delight in taking photos of group running in "terror" from kraken (kite). It would have have been nice to get a shot of them all running after the ice cream van if the van hadn't gone past at high speed.
3) Appreciation of the skills of others highlighted by people who were very willing to share any information of how they accomplished their art or where they purchased their accoutrements.
4) Reaction of others - while the normal staring response of a person in common American culture to anything unusual was evident, it takes its own direction in Steampunk. Common American reaction to people in science fiction costumes that run along the lines of Star Trek, aliens, or similar items clearly discernible as part of that subculture is largely negative. In the case of the steampunk outfits, people were constantly coming up with interest in what the group was doing - we pointed one gentleman to the web sites he can search, and I got an email address from the clerk at the cupcake store to let him know of the next event. One young lady in an elegant off-the-shoulder blue dress was stopped in the street by a mother whose child wanted to be introduced to "Cinderella." General conclusion from this limited experiment: Apparently old-fashioned clothing and details appertaining to it is a delight to the average American, and a point of interest and inquiry, vs. futuristic or alien presentations which induce a mild phobic reaction.
5) I like any subculture which allows me to explore an entire range of the English language which has fallen into general disuse, much less make up more lovely twenty-syllable technical terminology both sonorous and somewhat delusional.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Language and Relationships in the U.S.A. Circa 2009
This post - http://www.good.is/?p=15549 - on GOOD got me thinking about language and our wide range of informal to formal relationship categories. This was already on my mind last week due to a friend who landed in the "Um-Friend" box in her current relationship and was quite irked, but reading this article brought it to the forefront since I think the article is missing a great number of relevant terms. To discuss just a few -
Partner is mentioned as one option for someone in a relationship, but this term has a context of longer-term connectivity that the article breezily omits.
It misses an entire category of verb constructs for relationships as well:
- My "date" is a one-time thing, but "we're dating" is a good way to say "we hang out and are thinking about getting more serious."
- "We're hooking up" is a good way to say "we hang out and have sex and so what about the rest."
- "We're seeing each other" means we're dating pretty often and will probably keep doing so for a while, but there aren't any plans specified at all about future developments.
We may not be secure enough to be nouns yet, but with any verbing we're pretty sure we're happy about what we're doing.
The article also misses some terms that are used to avoid the entire point of the question:
For instance, "my friend" is nice and noncommittal about pretty much everything, oh look at the pretty daisies. However, this kind of noncommittal response can have a real impact on the future direction of the relationship.
One of the worst examples of the noncommittal response, or at least most dangerous to a fledgling relationship, is "Um-friend." As in "She's my um... friend." When said to a third party about the relationship, it's clear where you're at and where you aren't, at least not yet. When said to a third party about the relationship in front of the Um-friend, however, it becomes clear that you're not even secure enough about things yet to verb the business and say "we're dating." Thereby the Um-friend becomes aware that they should not be secure even in the idea that you might show up for the next Um-date, and come to think of it, why are they even making another Um-date with you anyway?
Heaven help you if you ever utter something like "Um-wife" or "Um-husband."
"Honey, what was that hesitation?"
For those situations where someone might be significant and is probably something other than the "Showing up in a Tag-Team for any Major Event Other" you'd normally assume from the phrase, I like to cheerfully use the term "significant something-or-other." Yes, they matter, and can be much more secure than the Um-friend, but we're not sure yet where the relationship is going from here and we might as well ride the ferris wheel while we're here.
I must admit to an absolute lack of fondness for "my mate" as a description for anyone up to and including my husband, since there seems to be a connotation there that this is the monkey I'm having baby monkeys with, and while that's all nice and good, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the mental, emotional and physical support we give one another day in and day out. Independent is good. I'm independent. I'm also selectively dependent on someone I can trust to sleep in the same bed for the rest of my life without smothering me when I snore. "My spouse" I think is a better term for a generic husband-or-wife, as it allows for a wider range of implied bonding, but it is definitely a tepid term. I don't think that's a negative for me, as I've never felt a need to rub off my lurid magenta range of infatuation on a third party when describing my spouse in the first place, but it definitely has some undertones - it's the sterilized clinical term.
It is unclear to me why I would use the terms "my snookums," "my sweetie," "my boo" or anything remotely similar to a third party to describe my spouse in any case since presumably the purpose of any conversation where I would describe said spouse would be to clarify things, not to leave them in a state of muddled melted cotton candy goo with no measuring point for the relationship itself. "My lady" is romantic, but syrup-doused, and having anyone refer to me in this manner while wearing anything other than Victorian garb sets off brazen alarums indicating a person who spends enough time in alternate-timeline re-enactments (either physically or merely mentally) to be slightly divorced from the real world.
I don't believe there needs to be much more comment on the use of the term "Soulmate" from the article, except to point out that anyone who uses the term soulmate within one week of meeting another person is best subjected to a preemptive restraining order.
Partner is mentioned as one option for someone in a relationship, but this term has a context of longer-term connectivity that the article breezily omits.
It misses an entire category of verb constructs for relationships as well:
- My "date" is a one-time thing, but "we're dating" is a good way to say "we hang out and are thinking about getting more serious."
- "We're hooking up" is a good way to say "we hang out and have sex and so what about the rest."
- "We're seeing each other" means we're dating pretty often and will probably keep doing so for a while, but there aren't any plans specified at all about future developments.
We may not be secure enough to be nouns yet, but with any verbing we're pretty sure we're happy about what we're doing.
The article also misses some terms that are used to avoid the entire point of the question:
For instance, "my friend" is nice and noncommittal about pretty much everything, oh look at the pretty daisies. However, this kind of noncommittal response can have a real impact on the future direction of the relationship.
One of the worst examples of the noncommittal response, or at least most dangerous to a fledgling relationship, is "Um-friend." As in "She's my um... friend." When said to a third party about the relationship, it's clear where you're at and where you aren't, at least not yet. When said to a third party about the relationship in front of the Um-friend, however, it becomes clear that you're not even secure enough about things yet to verb the business and say "we're dating." Thereby the Um-friend becomes aware that they should not be secure even in the idea that you might show up for the next Um-date, and come to think of it, why are they even making another Um-date with you anyway?
Heaven help you if you ever utter something like "Um-wife" or "Um-husband."
"Honey, what was that hesitation?"
For those situations where someone might be significant and is probably something other than the "Showing up in a Tag-Team for any Major Event Other" you'd normally assume from the phrase, I like to cheerfully use the term "significant something-or-other." Yes, they matter, and can be much more secure than the Um-friend, but we're not sure yet where the relationship is going from here and we might as well ride the ferris wheel while we're here.
I must admit to an absolute lack of fondness for "my mate" as a description for anyone up to and including my husband, since there seems to be a connotation there that this is the monkey I'm having baby monkeys with, and while that's all nice and good, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the mental, emotional and physical support we give one another day in and day out. Independent is good. I'm independent. I'm also selectively dependent on someone I can trust to sleep in the same bed for the rest of my life without smothering me when I snore. "My spouse" I think is a better term for a generic husband-or-wife, as it allows for a wider range of implied bonding, but it is definitely a tepid term. I don't think that's a negative for me, as I've never felt a need to rub off my lurid magenta range of infatuation on a third party when describing my spouse in the first place, but it definitely has some undertones - it's the sterilized clinical term.
It is unclear to me why I would use the terms "my snookums," "my sweetie," "my boo" or anything remotely similar to a third party to describe my spouse in any case since presumably the purpose of any conversation where I would describe said spouse would be to clarify things, not to leave them in a state of muddled melted cotton candy goo with no measuring point for the relationship itself. "My lady" is romantic, but syrup-doused, and having anyone refer to me in this manner while wearing anything other than Victorian garb sets off brazen alarums indicating a person who spends enough time in alternate-timeline re-enactments (either physically or merely mentally) to be slightly divorced from the real world.
I don't believe there needs to be much more comment on the use of the term "Soulmate" from the article, except to point out that anyone who uses the term soulmate within one week of meeting another person is best subjected to a preemptive restraining order.
Getting Going
This blog is begun! Very exciting, I'm sure, but what's it all about?
There will be a number of forays into different topics on this blog, but in general it's likely to stay focused on human interactions; communication both verbal and non-verbal in various environments and cultures.
Having been raised in Japan to start with and then the U.S.A. I'm sensitive to different behavioral patterns and ingrained expectations in our social environment. We frequently assume a given behavioral pattern is "normal" and take that one step further to "right" without realizing it may simply be culturally determined.
Linguistic use in various cultures fascinates me, as do the expressions of various subcultures. I'm certain that my views will not match those of all who read this blog, simply because our variety of opinion and expression is vast. I look forward to your ideas, experience and input as well.
Scathingly belligerent or flamingly rude comments will be merrily deleted because it's my great joy to have the ability to do so. Let's keep our conversations civil, because civil conversation is a great pleasure.
There will be a number of forays into different topics on this blog, but in general it's likely to stay focused on human interactions; communication both verbal and non-verbal in various environments and cultures.
Having been raised in Japan to start with and then the U.S.A. I'm sensitive to different behavioral patterns and ingrained expectations in our social environment. We frequently assume a given behavioral pattern is "normal" and take that one step further to "right" without realizing it may simply be culturally determined.
Linguistic use in various cultures fascinates me, as do the expressions of various subcultures. I'm certain that my views will not match those of all who read this blog, simply because our variety of opinion and expression is vast. I look forward to your ideas, experience and input as well.
Scathingly belligerent or flamingly rude comments will be merrily deleted because it's my great joy to have the ability to do so. Let's keep our conversations civil, because civil conversation is a great pleasure.
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