pecunium

I saw this on

off_coloratura's journal

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.

So I said, sure:

Journalism
Faire
Fandom
Cloak
Boiled In Lead

(For amusement's sake I feel strangely compelled to say the last was something else first, and she changed it)

Journalism

I studied journalism in college. I was lucky enough to enroll in one of the better schools for it in the country (not what one would expect in a community college, but there you go. I went to that school because it was closer to my the family bookstore. It was a little further than the other college, but not so much as to make it impractible. Fifty/fifty as to which I'd have attended, absent the bookstore). I'd studied in high school too. In HS I wrote opinion pieces. That was harder work than one thinks.

It colored my way of thinking. It probably removed most of my restraints about speaking to powerful people, and speaking my mind in print. Getting phone calls at home from people who decided, after the story saw print they didn't mean what they'd told their spokeman to say was fun... yeah that's it, fun.

Having friends come in and chew me out because I'd made two mistakes... one writing as true an account as I could of something which looked worse than it was, and two, structuring the piece so that the last two inches getting cut changed the look a lot, well that was intructional too. I think Lynn Wechsler would be willing to speak to me now, but there you go.

It was work. The paper had to get out. Every week there was something new to do (at least one thing). We had the sense of being a sought after outgroup. Everyone wanted coverage, lots of them weren't happy with what they got. Some was our fault. Some is endemic to the idea of reportage. The reporter can't get it all, and usually has no idea what the story is about. Worse, sometimes we do. It was tight-knit.

It's where I learned to manage people, and prioritise, and do reasearch and (insofar as I am able) laid the groundwork for being able to analyse.

Faire

By this she means the Calif. Renassaince Pleasure Faire of the erstwhile Living History Center. I was an cast member for most of the past 20 years, and through several changes of locale (north and south). I like acting, and history, and wearing pretty clothes, and food, and drink, and being part of something big, and silly. It is a place with it's own community; several of them. Two of the loves of my life I met because of the faire. Two of the great hearbreaks had the faire involved (not the same people). Many of my closest friends have worked the faire. It's a microcosm of the world at large, with all the petty politics and gossip of a small town, and all the virtues of an ingroup. Sitting out at night drinking beer, sharing stories, singing songs and jokes and watching the stars move round the sky; past the tree-tops, and behind the hills... it's magical.

Fandom Science Fiction Fandom. My folks got involved in the mid-seventies. I wasn't interested (Roy Chapman Andrews was more exciting than John W. Campbell). But the books were about the house, and the movies, and the shows and the people were around. It was pretty much inevitable I'd be pulled in. The Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society was local, and boom... social circle. Older than I, and a cohort in my age group. The "famous" (one of my classmates in high school was agog when I mentioned someone I knew being at a party, "you know Larry Niven?") and the not yet famous, and the run of the mill wonderful people; as well as the social misfits whom we accpted because, well just because.

It's where I learned to blog; writing for APA-L, and then APA-Fnord, and Myriad, and the occaisional lettter of comment to someone else's zine, or apa. Between that, and newspapering, I was socialised. I'm sort of gaffiated; and fandom isn't what it was (in the mid-'80s I could go to a convention a month; see people, meet people (the first time I met Harlan he was doing a stunt at a con... writing a story on Saturday, in a tent. The clacking of the typewriter was audible anytime one left the building.

What of my friends aren't from the faire, are probably from fandom.

Cloak She's talking about this cloak

I still have it. It used to my garment. It was a gift from my girlfriend (my 21nd birthday). These days the nap is a little thin, but the weave is stout. It's a little warm in the summer sun, but the evenings in LA are 20-30 degrees cooler than the days, and the swing is more in the hills. Rainproof (I've worn it in pouring storms, in the wash of the weather for hours, it's been as much as 8 lbs heavier, and rank with the smell of wool, but I was warm, and dry, beneath it), large enough to keep two. It's been, at various times, pillow, bed and blanket. It made me easy to spot when I was in college. I thought it had been lost when I joined the army. I didn't take it with me to basic, and couldn't find it in my things when I came home.

It was, oddly, enough in the closet of a different girlfriend's parents house. I got in touch with her about three years after I finished basic and she asked if I wanted it back. Most definitely. I don't wear it as much now as I did, because the camera bag doesn't sit well under it, but with a bit of care it ought to last another score of years, and be proof against a lot of nights of slowly spinning stars.

Boiled in Lead What can one say about a band which plays, speed-thrash central-european-middle eastern-celtic rock folk? First time I saw them was at McCabes, on a stage not much bigger than a couple of tables. We danced until the walls rattled, and clapped until the rafters shook. We once did a day at the fair, and drove 80 miles to see them play, danced until the place closed, and drove back to the fair to nap for a couple of hours and perform the next day. They've changed people, some come, some gone, some returned. The music is incredible. The fans great, and the band welcoming in the extreme. Small places, big places, sitting in the living room after the show with the people putting them up, talking music, passing ice-cream, just unwinding.

How can one not like a music with flying llamas, and other catchy little ditties about plague? Some bitter stuff about war (My Son John is vicious) and traditional tunes with modern treatments, as well as modern tunes with traditional ones (Stop!Stop!Stop! by The Hollies is very different when combined with the Turkish melody, Ma Ali, and Adnan in the crowd with a dumbek while we danced with/around him... it was a party).

Really, how can one not like a group named "Boiled in Lead" which called an album, "From the Ladle to the Grave".

Most of those things interrelate. All of them (even the cloak) are about people, and sharing things with them.

Thanks for asking about those things. I'd not have thought about them altogether, and that's been a pleasure.