A Roomful Of Elephant Calls

[koganbot]

A call to skyecaptain, freakytigger, petronia, and anyone else who inhabits the worlds where Rockwrite and anime-and-videogame and Fanfic worlds overlap. I claimed, while conversing with arbitrary_greay on the wallpaper-music-as-the-elephant-in-the-center-of-the-living-room thread, that:

Geekdom and video games and anime have enough cachet that the music that attaches to them is not going to end up in the category "We So Don't Pay Attention To This Stuff That We're Actually Hearing Quite A Lot Of That We Don't Even Notice That We Don't Write About It" in the way that AC does, but rather'll get written about by critics more and more as time goes on.

I can't say I'm the one to make the argument, though, so I hope you all might care to comment, on this or on what AG says.

And I'm linking Bob Dylan — not as an example of BGM but 'cause I assume "Ballad Of A Thin Man" is what first shot the words "freak" and "geek" into the culture as positives. 1965:

http://vimeo.com/52383325

Comments

Inferences pt 2

[koganbot]

In any event, by changing a few words, we can ask ourselves similar questions about people in the anime and video-game worlds: how will they interact? how would they like to interact? how should they interact? And we can throw in all sorts of variables: race, class, gender, whether people are positioning themselves as fans or critics or intellectuals or geeks or are they there for fun or are they serious participants, and so on.

But I'm utterly at a loss as to how, unless some people in those worlds explicitly ask them, such questions could be there in some stronger way than they are in my Sam and Chris example. I'm inferring from* your phrases "write about itself plenty" and "an implicitly posed question" that you're thinking something stronger than just, "the questions are there if someone wants to ask them." But I'll put that feeling of being lost in brackets to jump to this one: I don't see how such questions can be less there in the rockwrite world than in the anime/VG world. That the rockwrite people may be more often pushing such questions to the surface, and then mostly dealing with them poorly, doesn't eliminate the questions from the subsurface. They don't go away. So if anime/VG is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions, then the rockwrite world is implicitly asking and implicitly "addressing" such questions too, no matter how bad a botch the latter world's explicit questions and answers are. Fwiw, Nitsuh's post is absolutely fraught with the issue — if not the question — of what his relationship to Jessica Hopper and ilk will be. I don't see how such issues can possibly disappear, whether or not Nitsuh and Jessica ever make them explicit, whether or not Nitsuh and Jessica actually spend much thought or emotion on the issues.

To put all this more abstractly, and returning to my reply back in '88 to my friend John, there's a bunch of stuff that I generally put into the category "hairstyle"/"acting out" — I'm using these words as positives in this particular paragraph — that I consider to be at least a rudimentary form of thought, or at least as having the potential for containing thought. The way I put it is that, by choosing my cut of hair, or what shirt to put on, or what tone of voice to use on a comment thread, I'm to some extent answering some questions (what will my relationship be to others given their hairstyles and shirts and tones of voice?) even if I'm not asking them explicitly or implicitly, and even if I think the questions are a waste of time (which I don't, but that's a different issue). As I said, I don't see how rockwrite, no matter what it does, can make such answers and their attendant questions go away.

Btw, speaking of tone of voice — mine — I found Nitsuh's post shallow and Jessica's, if Nitsuh described it fairly (I didn't click through), juvenile. And I'm going to be all masculine and binary and tell you, Dave, that either you want to communicate your ideas or you don't, and assuming the former, you've simply got to give examples, describe events, as a matter of course. I don't fully understand why you tend not to. If it's fear of calling people out, I would guess that, e.g., Nitsuh would welcome the fact that you wanted more from him than he gave. At least, you gain more by assuming so than you lose if the assumption is wrong.

*Though this might not be what you're implying.