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Friday, February 22, 2002

More caught up on sleep now, though creaking under an overload of stuff at work. Just a couple of follow-up comments on Escapade:

I've been a little surprised by the force of some of the reactions to the blog panel, from people who were there and those who've only heard about it. I knew going in that some folks see on-line journaling as a Bad Idea and disapprove of it with varying degrees of vehemence; and I guess I've always assumed that mockery, sniping and snarkage, both public and private, go on all the time in fandom (as in any other large motley assortment of human beings), and that that's a known thing, part of the price of the ticket on the fannish ride.

I get the discomfort with blogging. I mean, there is something innately ridiculous--and I say this with affection--in any act of putting one's self, one's big tender ego, out in public view, whether that's in a weblog or a piece of fiction or a particularly heartfelt list-post. It's ridiculous in somewhat the same way sex often is; an act of vulnerability, a willingness to be impassioned and clumsy and open in the sight of someone else. I find such vulnerability deeply touching, but there's something in the universal reptile-brain we all carry around under our layers of civilized cerebellum, something that also sees vulnerability as a place to sink the fangs. And the sight of others' public vulnerability can be very unsettling; we all, I think, know deep down in our hearts that we are fundamentally ridiculous, foolish and fond and uncool and capable of embarrassing ourselves dreadfully if we're not careful. To see someone else actually doing that, or taking that risk, can be wildly uncomfortable, and to strike back, in a displacing, self-defensive kind of way, is understandable to me.

So I get the snarking, and it's not particularly high up on the list of things that bother me. P. and I have a little in-joke/mantra: "Everyone needs a hobby; everyone needs a Warm Feeling; and everyone needs something to rub." And everyone needs something to snark at too. I snark and snipe myself, though I never feel that such times are my highest moments or anything. It's self-defense, a self-comforting ritual, just one way of coping with my frequent shame over my own embarrassingness, and lubricating the inevitable friction of contact with my fellow beings. If I construe it this way, as something I do for myself, onanistically, then it's much easier for me to confine it to private venues, and not do it in ways that hurt other people. Because hurting other people simply to get my own rocks off is in general not a good plan; we hurt each other enough just in the course of living, inevitably.

And. Um. OK, well, then there's the vid show, which I wanted to say a great many things about, but I'm finding--as always, with vids--that I lack the critical apparatus for useful commentary. I'm a very non-visual person, I've never studied the art of film-making, and my reactions to vids tend to run a continuum from Guh!! to Uhh... to Eh. I really need to see a vid at least five or six times before I can start to attend objectively to stuff like movement, and dissolves, and use of this clip vs. that clip. The chronic and seemingly insoluble problem with fannish vidding is that of access; for obvious reasons, vidders need to keep what they do under wraps far more than those of us who merely spew words, so seeing any given vid even once usually means either going to a con or befriending the vidder, and this restriction of access really affects the nature of conversations that we can have about specific vids. I've been incredibly lucky to have as a friend and neighbor the inestimable Carol, who is both a wonderful vidder and the most generous of pimps {g}, and hence have gotten to see a number of the vid show entries multiple times; and other friends have been wildly generous in sharing their work on tape {sending smooches to Laura S.}. But still. I want to see Motorcycle Drive By at least a half dozen more times before trying to say anything about it, and I don't know that I'll ever be able to. As a writer, this drives me nuts; I'm used to being able to go over a work slowly, many times, and I also have the sense with a piece of writing that I know what I'm dealing with and that I have a grip on the tools of analysis. Which is not the case with vids.

Ah, crap. Yet another entry cut short by the bellowing of duty, and the thundering onset of another work day. There's more I want to say about this, over the weekend, perhaps.

Posted @ 08:24 AM CST [Link]6 comments

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

God. Escapade. Where to start, where to start. I'm still shimmery with fatigue, and feeling like the verbiage-reservoir is completely tapped out. But I'm so freaking happy, still. A wonderful, wonderful time, and I am big with The Fannish Lurve.

On Sunday morning, I was standing in line outside for the breakfast buffet and talking with Shoshanna (a clearing morning after a night of rain, fresh fragrant air, ragged clouds obscuring the mountaintops in the distance, palm trees lashing around in the damp Pacific wind). Shoshanna, who was really my mentor into Organized Fandom, was teasing me gently about my initial resistance (back in '97) to going to cons -- "I don't play well with others, I prefer to lurk and watch, I can't deal with the social stuff!" -- and my transformation over the past few years into Big Old Con Whore.

And it's true. This was the year when I really came to understand how much fandom, as a community of friends, matters to me, how profoundly comfortable and happy I am hanging out and nattering foolishly with this strange assortment of women, and how radical a change this is for me.

The stress of Escapade for me is that there are too many people I want to spend time with, hang with, chatter with, drink and eat and watch excellent vids and silly tapes with. I go into manic overdrive and fly around from group to group to group, hugging and babbling and soaking up The Lurve. And this is so not like me. At times, during the weekend, I had this odd sense of standing outside/beside myself, thinking "Who the hell is this crazed extrovert?"

But enough about me; let's cut to the random burble about various parts of the con.

--The panels: not as many good ones as in past years, as Anna notes, but still several that made me very happy. The one I actually remember best is the dS panel, Swinging Both Rays, co-moderated by Laura Shapiro and Merry Lynne. I know Laura was quite nervous heading into that one, fearing an outbreak of harsh words, chair-flinging, etc., but it was (in my memory) a remarkably warm event, with many intelligent and gracious things being said by partisans of both Rays. What seemed to form a rallying point for many was a primary, bone-deep fondness for Fraser, and a wish for him to be happy with whomever a writer can contrive for him to attain happiness. And there seemed to be pretty universal acknowledgement that, if you honor the show's canon in its entirity, you have to come to terms with the ways that both these guys were deeply important in Fraser's life. Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, but I felt a lot of positive energy in the room, a sense of reaching-out hands, and I left with a huge upsurge of hope for this fandom. In the "Fannish Year in Review" panel, Maygra asked people for their wish-list of What I'd Most Like to See in the Coming Year, and I offered up a wish for dS fiction that will well and truly reconcile the Ray Wars, and this panel gave me real hope that we'll see this.

The blog panel, which I co-moderated with Rachael Sabotini, has been very well summarized in her LiveJournal, and I can only say thank god Rache was there to help handle that one. I wish we'd had two hours for it; and I wish it'd been earlier in the weekend, so that I might have had at least some vestige of functional brain. As it was, though, I was bleary and wambly and suffering from the Armor-Piercing Headache of Insufficient Sleep and Excessive Single-Malt Consumption the Previous Night. I tried to jot down major points on the whiteboard, while Rache, who was as always awesomely clear-headed and astute, rode herd on the large vociferous crowd and kept track of who was to speak in what order. (At one point I think we had fifteen or more people backed up, like airplanes circling O'Hare.) People were just simmering with things they wanted to say, and the main outcome of the panel, I think, was to give them a chance to voice a variety of opinions and perspectives, and to mark out some of the main areas of continuing controversy. Rache did a great job of contextualizing blogs/LJs in terms of similar past controversies within the fan community, which I found immensely valuable, and much intelligent stuff was said, and everyone left in small energetic groups vigorously continuing the conversation. [Edited this entry to say that Destina has some very fine commentary on this panel--go read!]

The Sockpuppets panel was fun at first, and then turned difficult for me, as it got into some past hassles I thought I'd gotten over but which apparently can still bring me close to tears, and I said more than I likely should have. The Year-in-Review was great fun, as Maygra attempted to create some sort of classification system to sort fandoms that are flickering out, that are on the ascendant, that have been sucked into a black hole, that have attained a steady-state cruise and keep chugging along. Hot topics: Smallville and LotR (of course), RPS/boybands, and attendant legal issues. The Aging of Fandom panel I found very interesting; for a while it threatened to turn into a reprise of Those Damn Kids Nowadays and How The Internet Wrecked Fandom, but Sandy is a moderator who always manages to affectionately mock all sides of an issue, and even more importantly, there were several chronologically younger people in attendance--Ins, Sheila, and Cassandra stand out in my mind--who spoke out with great confidence and intelligence. I was particularly struck by the fact that Ins, who is way less than half my age, has been in fandom considerably longer than I have, and can speak about it with much more authority. Again, as with the dS panel, I left with a sense of connection and respect being forged across divides (and yes, I really am a Pollyanna at times, I know). And there were several other good panels that have gotten too muddled in my memory for me to give a reasonable account of.

I want to say things about the amazing vid shows, but I'm appalled by how long-winded this has gotten already, and Anna's given a wonderful account, so--go read her, I'll post some addenda and reactions later.

And then the people--my god, the profusion of people, those I've known and loved for years, those who were new to me, the vidders, the writers, the HL and XF and dS fans, the long and the short and the tall. Bless 'em all. I felt swathed in wonderful people the entire time, and everywhere I went, any time of day or night, there was conversation and laughter. If I single out any I'll forget someone, but--oh hell, I'll just quickly say what a delight it was to meet Denise, who is hilarious and smart as hell, and to spend time with Zen&nancy and Mairead and AuK and Shoshanna and Anna (Anna!!) and Lum and Maygra and MacG and LaT and Taz and Viridian and Merry and Laura S. and Killa and Robin and Bonnie and Destina and Jane M. and Kady and Rache and Naomi and Karen and ... oh, crap, and a dozen more, this is getting insane.

I am rapidly descending into utter mush and incoherence, so I'll tie this off for now, and add to it later. Must go get sleep.

Posted @ 09:25 PM CST [Link]1 Comment