a little is enough
05.19.04 @ 10:26 p.m.
So has anyone heard this to do about Andy Kaufman returning from the dead? Or rather, having faked his death in the first place and now giddily announcing it. I suppose it's way too soon to see if it's a hoax or not. It could well be, which might be why most news outlets have ignored it.
I am not quite fascinated, but quite interested in seeing what happens.
Folklore class was an hour and a half of fucking BRILLIANCE today. Seriously. Brilliant. Neil the Grad Student gave his presentation, which he brought his mother from Denver for. Which was interesting itself. Neil looks much like the typical D&D, Trek-fan type. The kind of guy who would spend quite a bit of post-class time semi-pedantically defining "fandom" to me while we waited for the teacher to be free to talk. Today was the natural end to that. He gave his presentation on the subculture of zine fandom. People who write very serious fanfic that goes through multiple edits to eventually be self-published or submitted to a zine that is distributed via mail. Delightfully illegal, in the way all fanfic violates copyright. Neil's mom edits a Gen zine, gen fiction being for a General Audience and the opposite pole from Slash. Ohh, that was really the delight of my day. A class full of people intelligently discussion the history and origins of slash, not giggling at the sensational aspects but laughing when someone said something funny or more privately, giggles while people flipped through sample zines brought in. (Starskey and Hutch fanfic. Swear to god.) Folklore Liz passed me one that had rather a funny passage about a female character lusting for Lt. Worf and staring at her ceiling mounted mirror. Bad romance terminology to describe, ah, masculine attributes. I suppose it's geek to the nth degree to admit that this presentation on how fandom works and the intelligent and interested questions that came from the rest of the class pleased me no end (even though I'm not at all fond of Slash and am less than thrilled with it's existance and explosive popularity).
There was also a presentation on subcultural capital and female involvement in subcultures, and a Merchants of Cool presentation from a tall, redheaded grad student whose name is, I think, Matt. We had just finished the girl subculture presentation, which involved much debate on the nature of teenyboppers, and Folklore Liz leaned over to me and wrote in the corner of her notebook, "He is soooo cute!" I honestly don't know if she was being facetious or not. She and I joke about everything, almost every class day we end up whispering something or discussing some aspect of the subject of the day. I told her about Alice Cooper's awesome radio show and guessed at the frequency of the station it's on. (I was telling her about and she said "What station, what station?" As I was writing it down in my notebook, she continued. "What's the frequency, Kenneth?") This was during the teenybopper presentation, just after a definition of the difference between teenybopper versus groupie. A loud, somewhat amusing fella in the back interjected, "We're Band Aids, we're in it for the music!" He had also recently seen Trekkies (oh, how I want to see that movie) and had interjected into Neil's presentation, too.
We're that kind of class. It's natural when you have a professor that doesn't really stop talking to call on people, and even when he does, he can't really keep himself from discussing and interjecting.
This has not been an adequately Pete Townshend-y day. I wore my "This Guitar Has Seconds To Live" shirt, even though the graphic isn't great (Pete's head is almost missing because the graphic is so dark -- too much contrast) and I listened to Empty Glass and part of Psychoderelict. I woke up with "Flame" stuck in my head, which is, I guess, slightly ironic since the song is neither sung by Pete Townshend or written by him; it's a Simon Townshend song sung by the female voice actress on Psychoderelict.
The "Just like a sailor heading into the seas" verse of "A Little Is Enough" is one of my favorite parts of a song. I'm glad that it's been running through my head off and on for most of the day.
Previously
fuck it @ 08.01.05
fanciful imaginary sea voyages to come @ 07.20.05
*dies* @ 07.19.05
more ootp @ 07.17.05
harry potter: driving our children into devil worship @ 07.17.05
