Five Things Too Early on a Saturday

[scarlettina]

Woke at 6:07 AM. Bleh.

1) I had a night full of hideous anxiety dreams. I'm still upset about missing the bus to the airport for my trip (and watching it pull away from the curb) because I forgot to pack something.

2) rosefox has made a really thoughtful GenreVille blog post about harassment at conventions. Well worth the read.

3) suricattus talks about the evolution of taste through changing one's diet and habits. Specifically she gets into her evolving distaste for poor-quality chocolate and for salty snack foods. I've experienced this. But I've also experienced the reversal of this effect, which is interesting. I don't put up with crappy chocolate nearly as much as I used to, but I still enjoy a Milky Way mini-bite candy every now and then. Doing a whole bar? God no! I guess my tolerance has changed: I can enjoy a bite but more than that is an offense to my senses. Ultimately, this is a good thing.

4) I haven't commented on the Democratic National Convention, partly because I've been too busy and partly because I didn't have much argument with anything I heard. I did come away with the following thoughts, though: Michelle Obama really knows how to write and deliver a speech. She's so smart; I'm so proud to have her as First Lady. Bill Clinton should be named Explainer-in-Chief and I'd vote for him again in a heartbeat. Barack Obama is the only candidate I'd even consider voting for in this election, and if we don't reelect him, this country is going to be in deep, deep trouble.

5) I have a mountain of freelance work to do this weekend. I ought to get down to that. ::sigh::

BONUS! 6) kateyule's post about the books she's been reading put me in mind of a story I heard on NPR recently. They did a piece on a study about the relative happiness expressed in popular music over the last sixty years and found that it has been decreasing steadily since . . . the mid-late 1960s. And all I could think about was how "Eleanor Rigby" (1966) would have struck a listener in 1955 as a really peculiar, possibly slightly repellent piece of music. But then everything seemed to change with Revolver, which included more complex orchestration than most pop music at the time, more complex subject matter, and less reliance on love songs. Fascinating stuff.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I believe that the most immediately effective way of overcoming this programming is to focus on conventions as businesses providing services, and on convention attendees as customers.

I REALLY struggle with this concept, in fact, it trips me up really badly because Conventions, at least the fannish kind, just aren't like that. They are not-for-profit events run by volunteers for what is, on the whole, their friends.

The petty, frankly, ridiculous invective I'm seeing hurled around at the Chicon team for stuff like the Hugos, the food and water in the Consuite and other stuff, feels like the flipside of this attitude.

Likewise I'm in a discussion involving Rosefox elsewhere where I can agree 100% with her position, the logical conclusion of what he is saying is a world where I don't really want to be involved in Fandom anymore.

Women have the absolute right not to be harassed, have their choice of clothing or otherwise have unwanted advances. But if the way we achieve this is through basically clamping down on flirting and all male/female interactions? Then we're doing it wrong.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

I haven't seen much of the grousing about WorldCon myself, but I'm not surprised it's happening. It seems to happen every year. I'm wondering if the amount of grousing about WorldCon has increased proportionally to the amount of money it costs to buy a membership. While it's not as pricey as a trade show, it's still quite a pretty penny. I also wonder if it has something to do with the graying of fandom, and what people are and aren't willing to accept.

I've always thought that taking a little bit more of a business-like approach to conventions would do everyone a good turn. Not a lot, just enough to polish up the rough edges. While it's true that we all want to think of conventions as parties we throw for 5,000 of our friends, we also want our friends to feel safe, comfortable, and respected in our living rooms.

I don't want conventions to clamp down on flirting; it's one of my primary pleasures at cons. But if someone can't tell the difference between flirting and crossing someone's personal barriers in an unwelcome way? They need to be schooled. How conventions deal with that isn't going to be determined in the space of a couple of weeks or, necessarily, by becoming more businesslike. It's a cultural shift that needs to take place, and I think it's going to take more time than our attention-deficit-plagued culture might be patient for. We're humans. Things take time. And experience.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I think there's a few things I need to unpack here in a reply :)

1) While conventions aren't cheap, if I compare them to multi-day 'pro' events I attend they're at least half the price, the cheapest 2 day event I've attended recently had a 'rack rate' of over $400, and 4 day ones can easily cost over $1000. Hotels charge vast amounts for convention space... not sure what we can do about that.

2) The fandom as a safe place is tricky. I'm not sure it's true and I've written about some of M's experiences at conventions... Having clear rules that are enforced that protect the accuser and the accused is essential. But I worry that tensions are getting to the point that we could end up with drumheads cropping up. Reading a thread on this elsewhere and I'm watching a friend get piled on by Rosefox and Nick Manatis for what is, in my opinion, a clear misunderstanding and he's feeling miserable about it. The online world is currently feeling very uncomfortable and non-safe.

3) And here I don't have any great answers. But if someone can't tell the difference between flirting and crossing someone's personal barriers in an unwelcome way? They need to be schooled. This is correct. As I said to Rosefox elsewhere, women have the right to dress, speak and, generally, behave as they like without fear, but when that crosses the line into blanket rules because fandom needs to educate some people then I get nervous.

This is bubbling around like racefail did and I'm getting increasingly nervous about the impact it's going to have on fans. I'm already seeing questions about generational stuff and I'm seeing a huge difference in attitude emerging on both sides of the Atlantic and that's not a good thing.

Incoherent? Sorry, need more caffeine :)

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

I'm already seeing questions about generational stuff...

I'm genuinely curious about this. Is it a question of older fans feeling like too much is being made of all this? It wouldn't surprise me. I'd be curious to read some of those threads.

As for blanket rules, I agree they're a problem. Humans require a certain amount of nuance. At the same time, it's really hard to provide and apply nuance to a large population.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I came to this opinion via fjm and lauriemann, so YMMV?

K Tempest Bradley tweeted that she felt that women fans over 40 didn't seem to be taking things seriously either.

I'm not sure it's entirely that older fans think too much is being made of this, that is probably an element of that. I feel I have to be careful parsing this too much as I'm a SWM which does, I accept filter my perceptions. That said, I think there is a concern in some quarters that by equating harassment by stupid people to rape you're devaluing the actual issue of rape.

I think there's also a regional issue too. I suspect that Brits have more experience of being in public places where people drink too much and behave badly than their US counterparts. I suspect that by age 25, the average British fan has spent a LOT more time in pubs and bars than the average American one, and has been exposed to a wider cross section of behaviors and people, fan and non-fan.

Based on some of the non-public chatter I've been part of there are people who are sick of the whole thing and are close to 'circling' the wagons to focus more on their friend circles to the exclusion of others.

[ghilledhu.livejournal.com]

I love Eleanor Rigby. As a lonely high school student with very few friends, I felt like it spoke to me; and I loved the soaring instrumentation, which seemed to both accent the sadness of the lyrics and make it bearable. One of my recent silly ideas is that Eleanor Rigby was actually a super-spy master of disguise (that's what the "face that she keeps in a jar by the door" really meant!) and the lonely spinster act was her cover.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

Heh. I like that idea quite a bit. But the song was an outlier in its time, completely different from the formulaic pop that filled the airwaves. It was the cutting edge of change (just as "Good Vibrations" was). Music's never been the same.

[amheriksha.livejournal.com]

1. I hate travel anxiety dreams. I'm always missing an international flight somewhere, or the plane has to emergency land for a non-emergency reason.

4. The amount of deep trouble we'll be in terrifies me sometimes. I can only cling to the hope we as a nation are smarter than that. (My main problem isn't even party alignment at this point. It's sheer stupidity and lack of diplomatic grace. I called Romney gauche the other day, and it was so apt I could have wept.)

6. Really interesting! I've always thought Eleanor Rigby was such a beautifully bittersweet song. Then again, I can't stand stereotypically upbeat and happy songs. (They put me in a bad mood. I'm odd like that, I suppose.)

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the NPR music story link -- I had missed that story when it ran. I hadn't considered the mid-60s as a time the music styles particularly changed (it's the beginning of my "sweet spot" of music knowledge and memories). I'm too much of a radio geek; "Eleanor Rigby" first brings to mind a cold open (rare, during that period) and cold ending (fun, for programmatic purposes) -- sorry, that's where my mind goes with that song.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

That's kinda my point. Everything about that song was different from what had come before. (geek mode on) Interestingly, this was the same year that The Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds came out, which was a musical turning point for them, too--all that lush overlayering and those magnificent harmonies. (We sang some of that stuff in chorus and I developed a new appreciation for the Beach Boys then; it was harder music to sing than I expected.) It's like 1966 was steam engine time for popular music. {geek mode off)

[bedii.livejournal.com]

There's a wonderful few lines about art in an early Travis McGee novel that you'd like which by extension shows that those who pass over something like the Beach Boys since it's popular without looking at how hard it is in actuality to do what they did are severely fooling themselves. ladyjestocost has heard me quote it too often, I fear, so I won't wave it about again.