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vintagegeekculture · 7 years

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Dead Fandoms, Part 3

Read Part One of Dead Fandoms here.

Read Part Two of Dead Fandoms here.

Before we continue, I want to add the usual caveat that I actually don’t want to be right about these fandoms being dead. I like enthusiasm and energy and it’s a shame to see it vanish.

Mists of Avalon

Remember that period of time of about 15 years, where absolutely everybody read this book and was obsessed with it? It could not have been bigger, and the fandom was Anne Rice huge, overlapping for several years with USENET and the early World Wide Web…but it’s since petered out.

Mists of Avalon’s popularity may be due to the most excellent case of hitting a demographic sweet spot ever. The book was a feminist retelling of the Arthurian Mythos where Morgan Le Fay is the main character, a pagan from matriarchal goddess religions who is fighting against encroaching Christianity and patriarchal forms of society coming in with it. Also, it made Lancelot bisexual and his conflict is how torn he is about his attraction to both Arthur and Guinevere.

Remember, this novel came out in 1983 – talk about being ahead of your time! If it came out today, the reaction from a certain corner would be something like “it is with a heavy heart that I inform you that tumblr is at it again.”

Man, demographically speaking, that’s called “nailing it.” It used to be one of the favorite books of the kind of person who’s bookshelf is dominated by fantasy novels about outspoken, fiery-tongued redheaded women, who dream of someday moving to Scotland, who love Enya music and Kate Bush, who sell homemade needlepoint stuff on etsy, who consider their religious beliefs neo-pagan or wicca, and who have like 15 cats, three of which are named Isis, Hypatia, and Morrigan.

This type of person is still with us, so why did this novel fade in popularity? There’s actually a single hideous reason: after her death around 2001, facts came out that Marion Zimmer Bradley abused her daughters sexually. Even when she was alive, she was known for defending and enabling a known child abuser, her husband, Walter Breen. To say people see your work differently after something like this is an understatement – especially if your identity is built around being a progressive and feminist author.

Robotech

I try to break up my sections on dead fandoms into three parts: first, I explain the property, then explain why it found a devoted audience, and finally, I explain why that fan devotion and community went away. Well, in the case of Robotech, I can do all three with a single sentence: it was the first boy pilot/giant robot Japanimation series that shot for an older, teenage audience to be widely released in the West. Robotech found an audience when it was the only true anime to be widely available, and lost it when became just another import anime show. In the days of Crunchyroll, it’s really hard to explain what made Robotech so special, because it means describing a different world.

Try to imagine what it was like in 1986 for Japanime fans: there were barely any video imports, and if you wanted a series, you usually had to trade tapes at your local basement club (they were so precious they couldn’t even be sold, only traded). If you were lucky, you were given a script to translate what you were watching. Robotech though, was on every day, usually after school. You want an action figure? Well, you could buy a Robotech Valkyrie or a Minmei figure at your local corner FAO Schwartz.

However, the very strategy that led to it getting syndicated is the very reason it was later vilified by the purists who emerged when anime became a widespread cultural force: strictly speaking, there actually is no show called “Robotech.” Since Japanese shows tend to be short run, say, 50-60 episodes, it fell well under the 80-100 episode mark needed for syndication in the US. The producer of Harmony Gold, Carl Macek, had a solution: he’d cut three unrelated but similar looking series together into one, called “Robotech.” The shows looked very similar, had similar love triangles, used similar tropes, and even had little references to each other, so the fit was natural. It led to Robotech becoming a weekday afternoon staple with a strong fandom who called themselves “Protoculture Addicts.” There were conventions entirely devoted to Robotech. The supposed shower scene where Minmei was bare-breasted was the barely whispered stuff of pervert legend in pre-internet days. And the tie in novels, written with the entirely western/Harmony Gold conception of the series and which continued the story, were actually surprisingly readable.

The final nail in the coffin of Robotech fandom was the rise of Sailor Moon, Toonami, Dragonball, and yes, Pokemon (like MC Hammer’s role in popularizing hip hop, Pokemon is often written out of its role in creating an audience for the next wave of cartoon imports out of insecurity). Anime popularity in the West can be defined as not a continuing unbroken chain like scifi book fandom is, but as an unrelated series of waves, like multiple ancient ruins buried on top of each other (Robotech was the vanguard of the third wave, as Anime historians reckon); Robotech’s wave was subsumed by the next, which had different priorities and different “core texts.” Pikachu did what the Zentraedi and Invid couldn’t do: they destroyed the SDF-1.

Legion of Super-Heroes

Legion of Superheroes was comic set in the distant future that combined superheroes with space opera, with a visual aesthetic that can best be described as “Star Trek: the Motion Picture, if it was set in a disco.”

I’ve heard wrestling described as “a soap opera for men.” If that’s the case, then Legion of Super-Heroes was a soap opera for nerds. The book is about attractive 20-somethings who seem to hook up all the time. As a result, it had a large female fanbase, which, I cannot stress enough, is incredibly unusual for this era in comics history. And if you have female fans, you get a lot of shipping and slashfic, and lots of speculation over which of the boy characters in the series is gay. The fanon answer is Element Lad, because he wore magenta-pink and never had a girlfriend. (Can’t argue with bulletproof logic like that.) In other words, it was a 1970s-80s fandom that felt much more “modern” than the more right-brained, bloodless, often anal scifi fandoms that existed around the same time, where letters pages were just nitpicking science errors by model train and elevator enthusiasts.

Legion Headquarters seemed to be a rabbit fuck den built around a supercomputer and Danger Room. Cosmic Boy dressed like Tim Curry in Rocky Horror. There’s one member, Duo Damsel, who can turn into two people, a power that, in the words of Legion writer Jim Shooter, was “useful for weird sex...and not much else.”

LSH was popular because the fans were insanely horny. This is, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the thirstiest fandom of all time. You might think I’m overselling this, but I really think that’s an under-analyzed part of how some kinds of fiction build a devoted fanbase.

For example, a big reason for the success of Mass Effect is that everyone has a favorite girl or boy, and you have the option to romance them. Likewise, everyone who was a fan of Legion remembers having a crush. Sardonic Ultra Boy for some reason was a favorite among gay male nerds (aka the Robert Conrad Effect). Tall, blonde, amazonian telepath Saturn Girl, maybe the first female team leader in comics history, is for the guys with backbone who prefer Veronica over Betty. Shrinking Violet was a cute Audrey Hepburn type. And don’t forget Shadow Lass, who was a blue skinned alien babe with pointed ears and is heavily implied to have an accent (she was Aayla Secura before Aayla Secura was Aayla Secura). Light Lass was commonly believed to be “coded lesbian” because of a short haircut and her relationships with men didn’t work out. The point is, it’s one thing to read about the adventures of a superteam, and it implies a totally different level of mental and emotional involvement to read the adventures of your imaginary girlfriend/boyfriend.

Now, I should point out that of all the fandoms I’ve examined here, LSH was maybe the smallest. Legion was never a top seller, but it was a favorite of the most devoted of fans who kept it alive all through the seventies and eighties with an energy and intensity disproportionate to their actual numbers. My gosh, were LSH fans devoted! Interlac and Legion Outpost were two Legion fanzines that are some of the most famous fanzines in comics history.

If nerd culture fandoms were drugs, Star Wars would be alcohol, Doctor Who would be weed, but Legion of Super-Heroes would be injecting heroin directly into your eyeballs. Maybe it is because the Legionnaires were nerdy, too: they played Dungeons and Dragons in their off time (an escape, no doubt, from their humdrum, mundane lives as galaxy-rescuing superheroes). There were sometimes call outs to Monty Python. Basically, the whole thing had a feel like the dorkily earnest skits or filk-singing at a con. Legion felt like it’s own fan series, guest starring Patton Oswalt and Felicia Day.

It helped that the boundary between fandom and professional was incredibly porous. For instance, pro-artist Dave Cockrum did covers for Legion fanzines. Former Legion APA members Todd and Mary Biernbaum got a chance to actually write Legion, where, with the gusto of former slashfic writers given the keys to canon, their major contribution was a subplot that explicitly made Element Lad gay. Mike Grell, a professional artist who got paid to work on the series, did vaguely porno-ish fan art. Again, it’s hard to tell where the pros started and the fandom ended; the inmates were running the asylum.

Mostly, Legion earned this devotion because it could reward it in a way no other comic could. Because Legion was not a wide market comic but was bought by a core audience, after a point, there were no self-contained one-and-done Legion stories. In fact, there weren’t even really arcs as we know it, which is why Legion always has problems getting reprinted in trade form. Legion was plotted like a daytime soap opera: there were always five different stories going on in every issue, and a comic involved cutting between them. Sure, like daytime soap operas, there’s never a beginning, just endless middles, so it was totally impossible for a newbie to jump on board...but soap operas know what they are doing: long term storytelling rewards a long term reader.

This brings me to today, where Legion is no longer being published by DC. There is no discussion about a movie or TV revival. This is amazing. Comics are a world where the tiniest nerd groups get pandered to: Micronauts, Weirdworld, Seeker 3000, and Rom have had revival series, for pete’s sake. It��s incredible there’s no discussion of a film or TV treatment, either; friggin Cyborg from New Teen Titans is getting a solo movie.

Why did Legion stop being such a big deal? Where did the fandom that supported it dissolve to? One word: X-Men. Legion was incredibly ahead of its time. In the 60s and 70s, there were barely any “fan” comics, since superhero comics were like animation is today: mostly aimed at kids, with a minority of discerning adult/teen fans, and it was success among kids, not fans, that led to something being a top seller (hence, “fan favorites” in the 1970s, as surprising as it is to us today, often did not get a lot of work, like Don MacGregor or Barry Smith). But as newsstands started to push comics out, the fan audience started to get bigger and more important…everyone else started to catch up to the things that made Legion unique: most comics started to have attractive people who paired up into couples and/or love triangles, and featured extremely byzantine long term storytelling. If Legion of Super-Heroes is going to be remembered for anything, it’s for being the smaller scale “John the Baptist” to the phenomenon of X-Men, the ultimate “fan” comic.

The other thing that killed Legion, apart from Marvel’s Merry Mutants, that is, was the r-word: reboots. A reboot only works for some properties, but not others. You reboot something when you want to find something for a mass audience to respond to, like with Zorro, Batman, or Godzilla.

Legion, though, was not a comic for everybody, it was a fanboy/girl comic beloved by a niche who read it for continuing stories and minutiae (and to jack off, and in some cases, jill off). Rebooting a comic like that is a bad idea. You do not reboot something where the main way you engage with the property, the greatest strength, is the accumulated lore and history. Rebooting a property like that means losing the reason people like it, and unless it’s something with a wide audience, you only lose fans and won’t get anything in return for it. So for something like Legion (small fandom obsessed with long form plots and details, but unlike Trek, no name recognition) a reboot is the ultimate Achilles heel that shatters everything, a self-destruct button they kept hitting over and over and over until there was nothing at all left.

E. E. Smith’s Lensman Novels

The Lensman series is like Gil Evans’s jazz: it’s your grandparents’ favorite thing that you’ve never heard of.

I mean, have you ever wondered exactly what scifi fandom talked about before the rise of the major core texts and cultural objects (Star Trek, Asimov, etc)? Well, it was this. Lensmen was the subject of fanfiction mailed in manilla envelopes during the 30s, 40s, and 50s (some of which are still around). If you’re from Boston, you might recognize that the two biggest and oldest scifi cons there going back to the 1940s, Boskone (Boscon, get it?) and Arisia, are references to the Lensman series. This series not only created space opera as we know it, but contributed two of the biggest visuals in scifi, the interstellar police drawn from different alien species, and space marines in power armor.

My favorite sign of how big this series was and how fans responded to it, was a great wedding held at Worldcon that duplicated Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa’s wedding on Klovia. This is adorable:

The basic story is pure good vs. evil: galactic civilization faces a crime and piracy wave of unprecedented proportions from technologically advanced pirates (the memory of Prohibition, where criminals had superior firearms and faster cars than the cops, was strong by the mid-1930s). A young officer, Kimball Kinnison (who speaks in a Stan Lee esque style of dialogue known as “mid-century American wiseass”), graduates the academy and is granted a Lens, an object from an ancient mystery civilization, who’s true purpose is unknown.

Lensman Kinnison discovers that the “crime wave” is actually a hostile invasion and assault by a totally alien culture that is based on hierarchy, intolerant of failure, and at the highest level, is ruled by horrifying nightmare things that breathe freezing poison gases. Along the way, he picks up allies, like van Buskirk, a variant human space marine from a heavy gravity planet who can do a standing jump of 20 feet in full space armor, Worsel, a telepathic dragon warrior scientist with the technical improvisation skills of MacGyver (who reads like the most sadistically minmaxed munchkinized RPG character of all time), and Nandreck, a psychologist from a Pluto-like planet of selfish cowards.

The scale of the conflict starts small, just skirmishes with pirates, but explodes to near apocalyptic dimensions. This series has space battles with millions of starships emerging from hyperspacial tubes to attack the ultragood Arisians, homeworld of the first intelligent race in the cosmos. By the end of the fourth book, there are mind battles where the reflected and parried mental beams leave hundreds of innocent bystanders dead. In the meantime we get evil Black Lensmen, the Hell Hole in Space, and superweapons like the Negasphere and the Sunbeam, where an entire solar system was turned into a vacuum tube.

It’s not hard to understand why Lensmen faded in importance. While the alien Lensmen had lively psychologies, Lensman Kimball Kinnison was not an interesting person, and that’s a problem when scifi starts to become more about characterization. The Lensman books, with their love of police and their sexism (it is an explicit plot point that the Lens is incompatible with female minds – in canon there are no female Lensmen) led to it being judged harshly by the New Wave writers of the 1960s, who viewed it all as borderline fascist military-scifi establishment hokum, and the reputation of the series never recovered from the spirit of that decade.

Prisoner of Zenda

Prisoner of Zenda is a novel about a roguish con-man who visits a postage-stamp, charmingly picturesque Central European kingdom with storybook castles, where he finds he looks just like the local king and is forced to pose as him in palace intrigues. It’s a swashbuckling story about mistaken identity, swordfighting, and intrigue, one part swashbuckler and one part dark political thriller.

The popularity of this book predates organized fandom as we know it, so I wonder if “fandom” is even the right word to use. All the same, it inspired fanatical dedication from readers. There was such a popular hunger for it that an entire library could be filled with nothing but rip-offs of Prisoner of Zenda. If you have a favorite writer who was active between 1900-1950, I guarantee he probably wrote at least one Prisoner of Zenda rip-off (which is nearly always the least-read book in his oeuvre). The only novel in the 20th Century that inspired more imitators was Sherlock Holmes. Robert Heinlein and Edmond “Planet Smasher” Hamilton wrote scifi updates of Prisoner of Zenda. Doctor Who lifted the plot wholesale for the Tom Baker era episode, “Androids of Tara,” Futurama did this exact plot too, and even Marvel Comics has its own copy of Ruritania, Doctor Doom’s Kingdom of Latveria. Even as late as the 1980s, every kids’ cartoon did a “Prisoner of Zenda” episode, one of the stock plots alongside “everyone gets hit by a shrink ray” and the Christmas Carol episode.

Prisoner of Zenda imitators were so numerous, that they even have their own Library of Congress sub-heading, of “Ruritanian Romance.”

One major reason that Prisoner of Zenda fandom died off is that, between World War I and World War II, there was a brutal lack of sympathy for anything that seemed slightly German, and it seems the incredibly Central European Prisoner of Zenda was a casualty of this. Far and away, the largest immigrant group in the United States through the entire 19th Century were Germans, who were more numerous than Irish or Italians. There were entire cities in the Midwest that were two-thirds German-born or German-descent, who met in Biergartens and German community centers that now no longer exist.

Kurt Vonnegut wrote a lot about how the German-American world he grew up in vanished because of the prejudice of the World Wars, and that disappearance was so extensive that it was retroactive, like someone did a DC comic-style continuity reboot where it all never happened: Germans, despite being the largest immigrant group in US history, are left out of the immigrant story. The “Little Bohemias” and “Little Berlins” that were once everywhere no longer exist. There is no holiday dedicated to people of German ancestry in the US, the way the Irish have St. Patrick’s Day or Italians have Columbus Day (there is Von Steuben’s Day, dedicated to a general who fought with George Washington, but it’s a strictly Midwest thing most people outside the region have never heard of, like Sweetest Day). If you’re reading this and you’re an academic, and you’re not sure what to do your dissertation on, try writing about the German-American immigrant world of the 19th and 20th Centuries, because it’s a criminally under-researched topic.

A. Merritt

Pop quiz: who was the most popular and influential fantasy author during the 1930s and 40s?

If you answered Tolkien or Robert E. Howard, you’re wrong - it was actually Abraham Merritt. He was the most popular writer of his age of the kind of fiction he did, and he’s since been mostly forgotten. Gary Gygax, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, has said that A. Merritt was his favorite fantasy and horror novelist.

Why did A. Merritt and his fandom go away, when at one point, he was THE fantasy author? Well, obviously one big answer was the 1960s counterculture, which brought different writers like Tolkien and Lovecraft to the forefront (by modern standards Lovecraft isn’t a fantasy author, but he was produced by the same early century genre-fluid effluvium that produced Merritt and the rest). The other answer is that A. Merritt was so totally a product of the weird occult speculation of his age that it’s hard to even imagine him clicking with audiences in other eras. His work is based on fringe weirdness that appealed to early 20th Century spiritualism and made sense at the time: reincarnation, racial memory, an obsession with lost race stories and the stone age, and weirdness like the 1920s belief that the Polar Arctic is the ancestral home of the Caucasian race. In other words, it’s impossible to explain Merritt without a ton of sentences that start with “well, people in the 1920s thought that...” That’s not a good sign when it comes to his universality.

That’s it for now. Do you have any suggestions on a dead fandom, or do you keep one of these “dead” fandoms alive in your heart?

#fandom history #lensman #robotech #prisoner of zenda #mists of avalon

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multsicorn · 7 years

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Top five filk songs!

…. I love how I asked for asks cause I’m like, I miss tumblr, I wanna talk with you guys more! And then I didn’t have time to answer for a whole day >_>. OH, WELL.

You would probably get a different list if you asked again tomorrow, but five OF my most favorite filk songs under the cut. (Oh, and only some have links, because the others don’t seem to exist on the internet. Though I could record myself singing them, if anyone would want to hear and if it wouldn’t be a breach of etiquette…).

1. My Brother, My Enemy by Sassafrass. [and/or: lyrics and explanation here.] It’s hard for me even to pick a favorite Sassafrass song! They’re my favorite filk artist, and one of my favorite musical artists in general. This one doesn’t have quite as many harmonies/parts as some, but, it’s still excellent at doing that Thing where each voice sings different words as well as different notes, and, especially here, I love the way the voices diverging and coming back together repeatedly illustrates the flow of the story. I love the evocation of a foreign (to me) emotional background (and they cry not for justice forgiveness or peace but for vengeance vengeance vengeance vengeance, an insistent crescendo that ends in a crash), and… so why is this number one. It’s the story as well as the artistry of the telling that gets me.

In the span of seven? Minutes, Odin and Loki find something unique and valuable in each other, make this connection, this bond, swearing blood brotherhood, and then are brought by circumstance to break it (these worlds are my duty to guard and protect, I can’t make exceptions before such a threat, your children were my enemies), and the emotionally painful and complex fallout. Could you get any more my personal aesthetic? I kinda think not.

2. Glass Half Full (Of the Sea) by Benjamin Newman. This is one of those songs that’s So Important to me. (And when I saw Ben at Contata last month, I got to incoherently try to tell him so! :D.) This makes sense, I’m sure, to no one but me, but it is to my life what I liked to imagine “Rock Star” was about Kurt in New New York.

The story is… I found this song (for #reasons), some few years before I properly got into filk. (I somehow managed to not realize it was about a selkie until the first time that I heared it in a filk circle!). There’s been a lot said - outside of filk circles, too, I’m sure, though I’m mostly thinking of “Still Catch the Tide” - about the selkie myth as representing how women are confined in the traditional picture of marriage. And at the time that this song was the song I needed - my now-husband and I had just recently moved in together - we’d known each other for three months at that time? but there were practical reasons for this. And I was SO IN LOVE, y'know, but also struggling so much. What is space! What is independence! My husband then (he hasn’t been for years and years now, we have LEARNED~) was very much like Blaine in New New York. Basically. Always wanting to do everything with me, and taking me not wanting to as a personal hurt.

So I used to sing - “a free creature or a wife, either way she’d lose a life, that she never wants to lose.” Because the song wasn’t just a description of my dilemma. (Though even the fact that it shows these as both things you might want, I appreciate!). The chorus - especially the last chorus:

i’m not the girl who sees the glass half empty, i’ve got both my loves, that’s what makes me free, and since i can decide, i’m staying by your side, with a glass half full of the sea

provided an image of resolution for me. And here let me explain one more thing: back in my late teens/early twenties, I actively identified myself as a deliberate optimist. So the ending of the story being a. well, I can pick, so I’ve always got that, and, b., maybe some things suck, but here’s this THE GLASS IS STILL HALF FULL image… it just fit the particular things I was looking for so WELL. It was a rocky adjustment, living together, deciding whether to commit to this particular relationship rather than all the unknown possibilities out there. I’m happy with my choices! (If you read my blog, ever, that should be obvious.) But, yeah, this song #helped.

3. Solar Flare by Sam Baardman. I do not have an essay to write for this one! I just find it really beautiful, both the music and the images created by the words. I think it was the first song I heard in a circle (where it was perfomed by Decadent Dave Clement) where I was like… I NEED TO FIND THAT AGAIN, AND HEAR IT AGAIN… and that was early on (in my filking ~career), so back when I knew less how to do that. And for most of a decade it’s just been for me one of those songs that - you know, when you don’t feel like singing almost anything, you’re sick of all the songs you know, or they’re just not right for the mood you’re in, or whatever? (Maybe you don’t know. Maybe this feeling isn’t in fact ubiquitous. I don’t know! *shrugs.*) It is one of those very rare songs that I never don’t feel like singing. *hums* there’s a comet just outside my window, hanging in the afterglow of a solar flare, and the stars like a diamond spilling off of the moon…

4. As I Am by Heather Dale. One of my favorite love songs Of All Time? I love Heather Dale a lot, too, and I’ve been singing this song just so much recently. It’s supposed to be about Arthur and Guinevere. But there’s a lot of specific notes - ’i’m not looking for perfection, i’m not offering a saint’ - ’i offer you this look inside, i offer you this trust’ - and, most especially of all, ’i need your strength to help me fight the battles that i must, i need you to remind me of the light we bear within’ - that are beautifully worded and sung, yeah. But that also feel to me like beautiful expressions not just of infatuation, but of the sort of partnership that is… my life, really ;). And, it’s pretty.

5. Causes And Effects by Seanan McGuire. [link is to lyrics] A song that answers many questions for me - not with answers that I didn’t know, mind you. But it provides a crystallized form of something that otherwise isn’t. And I’ve used it, in-circle, as an answer to songs that I’m sure were meant well but Rubbed Me Wrong! … the song feels like it’s About Me, though I’m sure it’s about Seanan, but it fits many of us geek girls, and what I most take from it is this: ’she tries to tell herself that beauty isn’t worth its weight in gold, she sometimes thinks she’d sell her soul just to come out of the cold.’ (Cause YES isn’t an explanation, but also, yes.) I don’t know. It’s one thing to know that societal standards of beauty and of it being paramount for women to be ~beautiful~ are both bullshit, to know that if you’re lonely it’s not necessarily because of you. It’s another thing to be able to believe that all that’s true. And I’ve gotten there now, yeah, but it’s been a long fucking journey. So this is a song about the road I’ve walked.

AND because, I couldn’t resist, various honorable mentions.

6. Eternal Flame, words by Bob Kanefsky, music by Julia Ecklar. [or, to slightly misquote Batya’s Words of Bob, Julia wrote the music, Bob wrote the filk ;)]. This song is particularly special to me out of all the other filk Songs I Have Loved because it was both the first song that I sang in a filk circle - a decade ago, now, in October! - and the first song I sang at a filk non-circle (concert!!), just recently. Also it’s probably good to have a little humor in my list somewhere, because there’s really quite a lot of it in filk. And also also, I do sincerely love this song not just as humor, but e.g. ’when he filled the leaves with green, fractal flowers and recursive roots, the most lovely hack i’ve seen‘… really does get at something real about the beauty that’s in Nature’s patterns, and of process-based even though not intentional design.

7. Mary Ellen Carter by Stan Rogers. Is the song I’ve sung most frequently in filk circles that isn’t a filk song. Well. We sing it a lot. It’s ~found filk??~ Or it’s just a song. But a story song about resurrecting a ship that’s served you well, even if the ship’s on sea rather than in space, well, it fits in. And it’s something that I sing against sadness, when I’m sad. ’though your heart it be broken or life about to end, no matter what you’ve lost, be it a home, a love, a friend, like the mary ellen carter rise again.’ (… also, it reminds me of Jack Zimmermann, nowadays.)

8. Goin’ Back To Hogwarts by Starkid. I could meta more, on that spoken bridge of Days of Summer, or on To Have A Home, but… as a kind of complement to 'frequently sung in filk circles, not really filk,’ as above, I’m ending with another 'not really filk.’ (Though I’ve sung starkid songs in filk circles several times, and it’s always gone over just fine.) Cause, like,.. it’s a fan song about a fictional property. (And fun and funny and a great crowd-pleaser slash singalong.) And certainly has a place in fandom, somewhere!, - but not specifically filk fandom. Even if this performance in 2009 looks SO MUCH LIKE so many circles I’ve been in at other cons since slightly before that time. I don’t think any other celebrity clip has ever made me feel so much #oneofus.

#hotel carpet fandom #*sings*#januarium

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caddyxjellyby · 6 years

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Alcott Readathon 2018: Hospital Sketches (1863)

"It is by no means faultless, but it fastens itself upon the mind and heart of the reader." -Springfield Daily Republican "The wit, the humor, the power of brief and vivid description which the volume evinces, will give it a wide popularity." -The Wide World "There are some passages in this little volume which will move the heart to tears as irresistibly as the humor of others will move the voice to laughter." -The New England Farmer Hospital Sketches (1863) was published first in newspapers and then as a book, to mostly glowing reviews. It is based on Alcott's brief time as a nurse with the names changed. The protagonist is called Tribulation Periwinkle but I couldn't help but refer to her as Louisa. I'm leaving a lot out of this recap so that if you read it there will still be surprises. Chapter 1: Obtaining Supplies The book opens with something I had forgotten - Nurse Periwinkle has two sisters and a brother Tom. Tom suggests she try nursing after she rejects other family suggestions of writing a book, teaching, marrying, and acting. A neighbor introduces her to a nurse and she receives her commission. "A certain dear old lady" cries while saying good-bye to "topsy-turvy Trib." She's entitled to a free railroad pass and spends 5 pages searching for the right place to get it. Haven't we all been there? After acquiring it she compares herself to Christian in Pilgrim's Progress "when the Evangelist gave him the scroll." Before the train leaves she visits her sister "Mrs. Joan Coobiddy" at the Dove-cote. Chapter 2: A Forward Movement Train ride.

"Very comfortable; munch gingerbread, and Mrs. C.'s fine pear, which deserves honorable mention, because my first loneliness was comforted by it, and pleasant recollections of both kindly sender and bearer. Look much at Dr. H.'s paper of directions—put my tickets in every conceivable place, that they may be get-at-able, and finish by losing them entirely. Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbor pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife. Put them in the inmost corner of my purse, that in the deepest recesses of my pocket, pile a collection of miscellaneous articles 22 atop, and pin up the whole. Just get composed, feeling that I've done my best to keep them safely, when the Conductor appears, and I'm forced to rout them all out again, exposing my precautions, and getting into a flutter at keeping the man waiting. Finally, fasten them on the seat before me, and keep one eye steadily upon the yellow torments, till I forget all about them, in chat with the gentleman who shares my seat. Having heard complaints of the absurd way in which American women become images of petrified propriety, if addressed by strangers, when traveling alone, the inborn perversity of my nature causes me to assume an entirely opposite style of deportment; and, finding my companion hails from Little Athens, is acquainted with several of my three hundred and sixty-five cousins, and in every way a respectable and respectful member of society, I put my bashfulness in my pocket, and plunge into a long conversation on the war, the weather, music, Carlyle, skating, genius, hoops, and the immortality of the soul."

Knowing LMA I imagine she doesn't approve of hoops.

Then a boat. She doesn't want to sleep as she has "twice escaped a watery grave" and won't press her luck a third time. Because I'm a nerd I can identify both times. When she was a little girl she fell into a pond and a black man rescued her. In 1858 she was looking for work in Boston and finding it difficult, she considered drowning herself into the Back Bay. And it turns out I spoke too soon - Nurse P is in fact wearing a hoop.

Another train. Passes through Philly where "few men appear, and the women seem to do the business, which, perhaps, accounts for its being so well done." Misandry! In Baltimore a coupling iron, whatever that is, breaks, and the train stops for a repair. Her first sight of Washington D. C. takes LMA's breath away.

Chapter 3: A Day

LMA's fourth day at "Hurlyburly House." It always strikes me, reading history, how little formal education was required for getting a job.

Forty ambulances arrive from Fredericksburg. Our heroine is momentarily taken aback at being told to strip and wash soldiers but follows orders. A lad with one leg and one arm provides some gallows humor.

"I've been in six scrimmages, and never got a scratch till this last one; but it's done the business pretty thoroughly for me, I should say. Lord! what a scramble there'll be for arms and legs, when we old boys come out of our graves, on the Judgment Day: wonder if we shall get our own again? If we do, my leg will have to tramp from Fredericksburg, my arm from here, I suppose, and meet my body, wherever it may be."

We learn that nuts as slang was used in 1862.

A Confederate says he'll wash himself, provoking "angry passions" in LMA. She has no sympathy for him.

She filks The Charge of the Light Brigade:

"Beds to the front of them,

Beds to the right of them,

Beds to the left of them,

Nobody blundered.

Beamed at by hungry souls,

Screamed at with brimming bowls,

Steamed at by army rolls,

Buttered and sundered.

With coffee not cannon plied,

Each must be satisfied,

Whether they lived or died;

All the men wondered."

The doctors and nurses work non-stop from dawn til 11, with supper at 5. "The amount that some of them sequestered was amazing."

Chapter 4: A Night

An example of the tragic/comic mixture that is Alcott's trademark. She enjoys the night shift and learns to recognize each man's snore. A twelve year old drummer boy, Teddy, wakes up crying. It isn't pain - he dreamed about his friend Kit who died. Teddy was injured and Kit carried him wrapped up in blankets, so Teddy blames himself for weakening Kit. LMA assures him Kit would have died either way.

John, a blacksmith from Virginia, dictates a letter home. He has a ring so she asks if he's married. He says, no, his mother is a widow and so he must support her and act as surrogate father to his sister Lizzy and brother Laurie. LMA admires his manly courage and maternal devotion. He dies two days after, just before the reply arrives.

A man who lost his leg attempts to escape home, hopping all around and rambling, and a Prussian gentleman puts him back to bed.

Chapter 5: Off Duty

A surgeon urges her to rest lest he "have to add a Periwinkle to my bouquet of patients." Her room has broken windows, sheets for curtains, and rats that take the food.

For exercise she visits Armoury Hospital and describes how it's much more clean and organized than Hurlyburly House.

Another time she visits the Senate Chamber, but it isn't in session so she sits in Charles Sumner's chair, imagines herself cudgeling Preston Brooks, the guy who beat up Sumner for making an anti-slavery speech, and steals "a castaway autograph or two." Then she goes to an art museum and writes that "several robust ladies attracted me . . . but which was America and which Pocahontas was a mystery, for all affected much looseness of costume, dishevelment of hair, swords, arrows, lances, scales, and other ornaments quite passé with damsels of our day, whose effigies should go down to posterity armed 76 with fans, crochet needles, riding whips, and parasols, with here and there one holding pen or pencil, rolling-pin or broom."

Then it rains for a week and she's shut up in her room. The other nurses and her friends visit her, including Dorothea Dix.

As any of you who have read a biography of LMA know, she comes down typhoid and returns home.

"I never shall regret the going, though a sharp tussle with typhoid, ten dollars, and a wig, are all the visible results of the experiment; for one may live and learn much in a month." Only ten dollars? TEN? $2.50 a week? Frank Leslie paid her $50 a story.

Chapter 6: A Postscript

Answers to readers' letters. Are there churches services at the hospital? Yes, there is a chaplain but she finds his sermons dry and uninteresting.

"Regarding the admission of friends to nurse their sick, I can only say, it was not allowed at Hurly-burly House; though one indomitable parent took my ward by storm, and held her position, in spite of doctors, matron, and Nurse Periwinkle. Though it was against the rules, though the culprit was an acid, frost-bitten female, though the young man would have done quite as well without her anxious fussiness, and the whole room-full been much more comfortable, there was something so irresistible in this persistent devotion, that no one had the heart to oust her from her post. She slept on the floor, without uttering a complaint; bore jokes somewhat of the rudest; fared scantily, though her basket was daily filled with luxuries for her boy; and tended that petulant personage with a never-failing patience beautiful to see.

I feel a glow of moral rectitude in saying this of her; for, though a perfect pelican to her young, she pecked and cackled (I don't know that pelicans usually express their emotions in that manner,) most obstreperously, when others invaded her premises; and led me a weary life, with "George's tea-rusks," "George's foot-bath," "George's measles," and "George's mother;" till after a sharp passage of arms and tongues with the matron, she wrathfully packed up her rusks, her son, and herself, and departed, in an ambulance, scolding to the very last."

Nurses aren't required to witness amputations. LMA watched operations because she wanted to nurse at the front. The offer from Dr. Z to witness a dissection she turned down.

She was warned "to expect much humiliation of spirit from the surgeons" but those she worked with didn't do that at all. They were very kind and when she was ill Dr. Z made sure she had firewood.

She refuses to give the hospital's real name - it has closed down and its patients moved to, she hopes, a place with better food.

#louisa may alcott #alcott readathon 2018 #american civil war #books #women in history

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celtfather · 6 years

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About Close Your Eyes & Reaver's Lullaby #235

The Demon Lullaby gets people laughing so much, I had to filk it for my second CD of Browncoats drinking songs. Listen to both versions of this hilarious song, originally written by Daniel Glasser. Listen and subscribe at celtfather.com.

0:08 CELTFATHER NEWS

First, you can catch my Facebook Live shows, Coffee with The Celtfather on Tuesdays at 9am on Facebook.com/marcgunnmusic

Second, I have some new products in my Bandcamp store.

You can now get the Firefly Drinking Songs songbook, which features all of the lyrics from Firefly Drinking Songs, my new album, As Long As I'm Flyin, and the Bedlam Bards' Firefly album On the Drift, plus a few lyrics that have not been recorded yet by Cedric and Rie Sheridan Rose, who co-wrote my Firefly album. This will make it easy for you to sing-along with us.

On Saturday, I released the Celtic Music 6-Pack. This is a compilation of six Celtic CDs, including: Kilted For Her Pleasure, Scottish Songs of Drinking & Rebellion, Not Every Day Is St Patrick's Day, Happy Songs of Death, The Bridge, and How America Saved Irish Music. If you're looking for a great intro to Celtic songs or my music, this is it. And it's at one low price!

I had a great interview on the Sending a Wave UK Firefly Podcast that just came out. In it, I had some exciting realizations about how I write songs, especially in regards to Firefly and Lord of the Rings.

Finally, I created a fun Firefly Drinking Songs Playlist on Spotify. It's packed full of songs inspired by Firefly. I hope you will follow, listen, and share it.

2:07 ABOUT CLOSE YOUR EYES

One of my most-popular songs since 2009 is a song called "Close Your Eyes". It's commonly known as "The Demon Lulllaby".

The song was written in 2003 by filker, Daniel Glasser. It won Best Comedy Song in the 2008 Pegasus Awards. That's also the year, I first heard the song.

It was a I-Con Science Fiction Convention in Stony Brook, New York. I remember those filk circles fairly well.

Now if you're not familiar with the word filk, that is the music of fandom. It's the music you hear at science fiction conventions. The word was first used as a misprint of folk music that was happening at conventions back in the '50s. I guess con goers liked the term, because next thing you know, filk circles exploded.

The filk circles at I-Con were my first. My old band, Brobdingnagian Bards, were invited to be guests at I-Con back in 2002, I believe. I saw Emerald Rose was performing there and thought, "why on earth is a Celtic band like us playing at science fiction convention". So I booked us and realize con goers love Celtic music, and that we were also playing filk, with songs like "Do Virgins Taste Better" and "If I Had A Million Ducats".

Any case, we were invited to the I-Con Filk Circle. We sang our songs and began building an audience. 2008 was our last year at the convention before we broke up. I don't remember who sang "Close Your Eyes". But I loved it.

After we parted ways, I did an internet search to find the song. Lo and behold, I found it on the Pegasus Awards website. I contacted Daniel Glasser and asked if I could record the song. He was extremely generous to say yes.

I had never played the song live when I recorded it in January 2009 for my CD Kilted For Her Pleasure on the North Shore in Louisiana at my friend Jamie Haeuser's house. Jamie recorded percussion on a couple of tracks for that album.

As a lullaby, I kept the song pretty barebones, just me and the autoharp. And it worked.

As I played it at shows, it was an immediate favorite. "The demons in your bed, are gonna eat you up".

One of my most-memorable moments was performing it a giant ballroom at Dragon Con in 2009. The stage was simple with me dressed in my black kilt, long hair flowing, the enormous sideburns, and an autoharp as I sang the song, pausing for comedic effect. (YouTube video)The audience was in tears by the end. It was a brilliant start to my solo career. The song was an obvious hit.

I'm gonna play the song for you right now. And then I'll share the filk of the song in a moment.

5:13 SONG: "Close Your Eyes" by Marc Gunn from Kilted For Her Pleasure

8:53 ABOUT REAVER'S LULLABY

In 2010, my first daughter was born--Kenzie. Having a daughter made this song even better. Not only do I like singing it to her. But there's no better way of finishing the song and stating, "If you enjoy this song, then your CD purchases help to pay for my daughter's therapy when she grows up."

And it's true. Your purchases do help to pay for her therapy. So please....

Well, if she wasn't disturbed, then she has been when I filked the filk.

I think it was 2014 when I first filked "Close Your Eyes". The song was already popular at my many shows. I started performing it at my Firefly Drinking Songs show at Gen Con the year before. It was well-loved.

Now when I'm up on stage, I'm always looking to use things from the moment to include in the show. Some people complain about hecklers. I don't think I've ever met a heckler I didn't like. They just give me ammo to improve my show.

The year before "Close Your Eyes" was a hit. But could I make it funnier?

Close your eyes and sleep There are... reavers in your dreams.

Reavers! Hey that works! I remember thinking.

The reavers in your bed...

I can't tell you why I decided to change the next line. But the response was mind-blowing.

The reavers in your bed... Are gonna eat your face!

The room erupted. Those who knew the original song already thought it was funny. But the visual of the horrifying reavers eating someone's face... well, it worked!

Over the next few years, I tried changing the lyrics more to suit Firefly, but they never really came.

Meanwhile, several Browncoats kept asking, "when are going to record that song?!"

I set a Milestone on Patreon in 2017. If I raised enough money, I would record the song for a short EP. The goal was met. I sat down to record the song and ended up recording a whole bunch of Firefly songs. Lo and behold I had a new album.

The album is called As Long As I'm Flyin'. It will be officially released on March 6, 2018. March is the only month that you will be able to buy a physical copy of the album online for the foreseeable future. So mark your calendar.

If you want a download of the album, along with a bunch of notes about it, become a Patron of music.

JOIN THE GUNN RUNNERS CLUB ON PATREON!

Or mark your calendar for March 6th.

You'll be able to buy it everywhere online. And you can stream it through Spotify.

I would deeply appreciate it if you would help me spread the word. You can share this podcast.

Of course, my previous Firefly album with Bedlam Bards, Firefly Drinking Songs, is on sale. If you ever wanted to experience what it's like going to a pub in Canton on Higgin's Moon, you want to own this album.

13:25 SONG: "Reaver's Lullaby" by Marc Gunn from As Long As I'm Flyin'

Finally, if you're not yet subscribed to Celtfather Music & Travel, I plan to have more shows just like this coming out in the future. Go to Celtfather.com for details.

Check out this episode!

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multsicorn · 7 years

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it's the circle of

I spent most of last weekend filking, as I do on Memorial Day weekends, and… I keep thinking about fic and filk.

These are the two creative communities in which I participate. (<3.) And in many ways they're completely different from each other. Fic is created, shared, and consumed almost entirely online - though I have had tons of fun discussing and even brainstorming fic with friends in person - and filk is primarily sung live, at cons, concerts, filk circles, and so on. One can listen to a recording anywhere, but much filk doesn't even exist in recorded form.

And that's not even getting into the content! Most fic (in all the communities I've ever been in) is romance, and a large fraction of it is porn; filk has a much lower concentration of love songs than any other music genre I can answer for, and while it's certainly not innocent of dirty songs, they're not all that common, either. (And something like, say, "The Mermaid" still isn't porn.)

Then there's the question of derivative (or transformative!) works. Very much filk falls under that umbrella in some sense: if it's not about a particular in-copyright canon (which most of it isn't), then it's still likely to be using a tune from somewhere else - frequently another filk song! - or maybe it's about myths or fairytales. Then again, at least as much filk isn't using anything in particular as its source material at all. And, overall, this is mostly an accidental similarity. Fanfic is inherently derivative/transformative in some way; filk only frequently happens to be.

(Although, hm, 'to fic x' and 'to filk x' are fairly parallel usages. Whether you're ficcing/filking an idea or a canon or someone else's fic/filk. ;).)

The true point of commonality between filk and fanfic is that…

(I'm so tempted to be a troll right here and say 'they're just not very good.')

(But you guys know I don't think that, right.)

(It's relevant to where I'm going, though.)

I was specifically conscious of this in the larger context of the con. Fic was mentioned at multiple panels I went to (that weren't about it), most often as a kind of shorthand for 'at least we're better than that.' I'm not sure that I like this higher profile, guys! (Though Steven Brust mentioned Stucky at a Taco Bell as an example of 'go smaller' c.f. 'go bigger,' so… that was weird, but cool.) (Also he sat next to me at filk the first night and I did not recognize him AT ALL, so I'm still screaming a bit about that in retrospect.) (but… *pulls train of thought forcibly back onto the rails!!*)

… Ah, yes. My point was that, even among fellow fans of #the thing, (which phrase reminds me of #trash of the thing, which reminds me that I also encountered the argument that Hamilton was not a fandom, the refuting of which I decisively did not choose to get into)… many of them loudly scorn fic of #the thing. And - likewise! - the filk circle seemed to carry a bit of a chip on its shoulder about a history of being told to shut up and/or go away, by fellow fans of the thing (sf fandom) that it is singing about. (… although looking up 'Dandelion Filkers' to link [https://robertarogow.bandcamp.com/track/the-dandelion-filkers], I'm tempted to edit this paragraph, but … no.) (although redacted thoughts flow right into…) I've certainly encountered both scoffing remarks re: fic in filk circles, and 'why is filk it's so bad' threads in fic-centric circles, too.

And, in fact, this sentiment persists in both cases because the average fic/filk IS BAD. Click a random link on ao3, or walk into open filk at a random time… you can't deny it. If you know the place, you know I am right.

(And, hopefully, if you go there, you know it in either case or both like I do - the shortcomings of one's home, with affection.)

Because I won't say we're bad on purpose. But we are, kind of, bad by design. We don't have minimum standards (even of SPAG or 'can carry a tune') to post or sing, respectively, and if anything in fact we have the opposite of them. You can't hang around with ficcers or filkers long without being gently encouraged to write anything you may ever express an idea for ;).

And the participatory ethos is something that I love about both sets of circles. Of course it manifests differently in these two different artforms! But the feeling of being part of a whole room singing together something that we all mean, well or poorly, is absolutely one of my favorite things ever. And, not exactly similarly, because filk has closer analogs to this, but also one of my favorite things, in fic, is the use of tropes, and - sure! - of fanon, the way that fics frequently tend to comment and build up on each other. (Well, I guess, to an extent, published fiction does that too…)

But the point isn't only that I enjoy the sort of creative working together that the community nature of these artforms enables - although I very much do enjoy it. But what I value just as much is simply the welcome whose flipside is the total absence of quality control.

Come play with us. Don't know how? Think you can't? But you're not good enough? Doesn't matter! If it sounds like fun, come play!

(<3 <3 <3.)

… So. I have a lot more to say, still. How of course no one's going to come or stick around just for that, and how of course I don't and didn't either; the specific reasons, in content and in form, I do stick around each.

Something about how the average may be bad, but the best is really very good; some of my favorite stories, ever, are fanfic, and some of my most favorite songs are filk.

… And something else about how even those 'best' are likely not much appreciable by outsiders, anyway, (and 'best' may not select for 'most portable'!) - but what exactly is quality? A vexing and quite complicated question. And an aside somewhere in here, maybe, about the noncommercial nature of both fic and filk, and how (#sorrynotsorry!) that's something I prize, and/because I see it as part of the whole community culture thing.

Some of us are way better than others, but we're all here in the storytelling circle, okay!? … anyway. I may write all these other parts later, but most likely not.

[ @januarium tagging you cause i think you'll want to read this even if you'd have missed it otherwise. here, one more <3.]

#fandom how does it work #hotel carpet fandom #stories of my life #I DONT CARE I LOVE IT

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