nothing what's snow with you?

[davemerrill]

We got like two inches on Tuesday night, which is the most snow we've gotten since Dec. 13. Nobody's really complaining, but at the same time people are kind of scratching their heads and wondering what's going on, waiting for the other snow shoe to drop.

Last weekend Donald and David came over and we exchanged Xmas gifts and watched MST3K and "The Day The Sky Exploded" off the 50-movie set of public domain SF "classics" we picked up during Xmas vacation. This weekend it's a little trip out of town due to the Monday holiday and the mild weather. If it was last year, we wouldn't even be thinking of going out of town.

In between it's been workin' workin' workin'. I have an article due on print anime zines of the "early days" very soon, and I'm still doing research, marvelling at how a really great looking professionally printed national club magazine can shift gears from translated anime theme songs to total fan politics editorial in the blink of an eye. Or the turn of a page, for that matter. I'm amazed when I read a fan club editorial (a different one from years later) that decries fan backbiting and name-calling while in the course of doing EXACTLY THAT, reciting a list of OTHER problem-plagued fan clubs while making the bold claim that their new, exciting fan club will avoid all those pitfalls. And they did, by not lasting nearly as long as some of the bad-example clubs mentioned in their newsletter.

And this wasn't via email or websites or message boards on the internets, either; this was all typed out on paper, photocopied or mimeo'd or printed, collated, bound, put in an envelope, and mailed using US postage and valuable USPS employees. A massive waste of everybody's time and money, especially considering that it was the 1980s and the pages you're wasting complaining that the fan club vote was rigged or that that other fan club over there isn't responsive to their memberships's emotional needs could have been spent giving us translations or synopses or episode guides or character guides or fan art.

So anyway I have to write that article (which is almost writing itself here!!) and I want to get another Let's Anime updated before the guy at Black Sun posts something about every 60s anime thing in the world, and I have crazy stuff I want to scan in and post here, and of course there's the beast of Mister Kitty to update every week. Found Sound isn't too hard, though ten minutes surfing through music blogs reveals vastly weirder music than anything I own. I'm going to be blunt about Stupid Comics though - we are running out of Stupid Comics. It's getting tougher and tougher to wring comedy out of our comic book collection; finding ten or twelve images that we can hang gags on, comics that aren't merely inane or tedious but actually the kinds of comics you would show to your friends and ask them what the hell is going on - there are only so many comics like that in the world, and a smaller percentage of those are in our posession. We're going to have to range a little further afield to find the dumb comics, and in the meantime I'm giving myself permission to take a week off now and then to let the creative batteries recharge, to parcel out the stupid at a more economical rate. It's a present I give myself, and those are the best kinds of presents!!

In the meantime, of course, I invite you to enjoy Mister Kitty updates of Zero Fighter and Shain's strip Element Of Surprise, and this week's Found Sound is all romantic and stuff!

Comments

Find It!

[mpceccato.livejournal.com]

I rather enjoyed the music to Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. Does it really hold up after 40 years? Not exactly. But it's on par with other studio recordings of the time.

[tohoscope.livejournal.com]

Thank god the INTERNETS arrived to save the day! No more bad fan behavior now that we've got anime up to our elbows and done away with those pesky VCRs!

Heh.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Well, at least it's not killing trees and wasting postage, and nobody ever again will get cotton mouth from licking envelopes filled with bitter fan diatribes. Fan stupidity has been helped via technology into becoming an instantaneous, ephemeral, blink-and-you-miss-it phenomenon. Whereas fan feuds from 1939 are preserved, like flies in amber, for all time. As a historian I applaud that records of such things exist, but as a human being, the spectacle of monumental idiocy embarrassing future generations for years to come is daunting.

[tohoscope.livejournal.com]

True. I'm not up to looking around rec.arts.anime for fear of what I may find from those good ol' days.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

It's for Colony Drop, they're doing a print zine.

If this was for OUSA, it would be done already (they actually pay, and that has a remarkable way of sharpening my enthusiasm).

[sobieniak.livejournal.com]

Heh, perhaps I should donate some Stupid Comics to you if ever. Just managed to dig 'em out and was going to scan some covers in for several places.

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

We welcome all donations of Stupid Comics!

Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[(Anonymous)]

I'll have you know that I've licked many an envelope holding "bitter fan diatribes," and have never once suffered cotton mouth! Most of the time, the time and effort being wasted belonged soley to the one doing all the complaining, since you couldn't get no one else to do much of anything back then. Even envelope-licking.

I did feel bad, every once in a while, for the people whose dues paid for the paper those complaints were written on, though. Especially "election stuff." The only excuse I could offer was that there wasn't anything else worthwhile to print in its place, except maybe for fan art that already ran in three other newsletters. I can still recall the first year I joined the C/FO, I got a total of one slim newsletter for my $10 bucks. Hell, at that point, I would've accepted six pages of complaints, 'cause at least then I'd have known they aknowledged my existence.

RWG (hard to include content no one was creating)

Re: Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Well, when you drive away the artists and writers, you tend to not get a lot of content. Funny how that works.

Re: Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[(Anonymous)]

I think a lot of the fan complaints back then came as a result of the whole "dues" model, which dominated fandom during that time. If there was a better way of producing something and charging for it afterwards instead of the model that was in place when I was involved in fandom, a lot of the "fan wars" could've simply been safely ignored. But a good 85% of the complaints I got personally were of the "what am I getting for my money?" kind and maybe (maybe) 15% were of the "too much politics" kind. The latter just seemed more important because of the people I hung with, who just so happened to be the sources of the complaining :-)

Luckily, the "dues" model died fairly quickly after the national C/FO.

RWG (as for "driving away" the talent, I've never seen a poll...)

Re: Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

It was a lot easier getting content for fanzines that did not have the word C/FO involved, let me just say. Mention the name C/FO anytime after 1986 and the first thing people thought of was rules and fan politics and a lot of finicky time wasting nonsense that people simply didn't want a part of, even for zines with Vaunda Perry J-9 artwork. Which they weren't getting any more anyway, thanks to fan politics.

I don't want to get into a big thing about it, but one of the zines I picked up to look at was an issue of Anime Hasshin where Lorraine Savage was understandably miffed at having her club lumped in with a lot of other clubs in a F.A.S.T. editorial as being representative of a whole raft of problems. Anime Hasshin went on to publish its fanzine for years and years and years, always full of art and articles and translations and news and reports and reviews and you name it, and it served to connect a lot of people and clubs. And it never had an election or a bylaw or a rule book other than "don't be a dick." Some other clubs, like the one writing the editorial name-dropping Anime Hasshin, didn't last nearly as long. I'm just sayin', I got a big ass stack of Anime Hasshin zines, and a big ass stack of zines speaks louder than fan politics or rules or drama any day of the week.

I did the print Let's Anime for 10 years, it came out whenever I felt like it, and I never had trouble getting submissions. I still have stuff that never ran.

Re: Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[(Anonymous)]

Lorraine was, without a doubt, one of the good guys (err, gals). Spent a few nights talking to her on the phone back in the day and ran some of her art in our early newsletters, as well as contributing to some of hers. But not everyone can be Lorraine Savage.

When you get into FAST, well, I can pretty much tell where that's going, and it ain't pretty. That's about when I ducked out of the national scene myself. As an elected rep of C/FO, I felt 'sponsible for a couple hundred dues-paying members, so politics just came with the territory. Once it disbanded, there just wasn't any real point.

RWG (do you still have that '86 Baycon Anime Program Book?)

Re: Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

Yes, I still have my Baycon book, and I think Shaindle does too. (both C/FO national members)

Not everyone can be Lorraine, and not everybody should try, and not everybody should be expected to. I'm not pleased with the way it happened, but the dissolution of the national C/FO was a great thing for anime fandom; it kept anime from being another Star Trek fandom, and it opened the field up to everybody who wanted to write and draw and publish zines. Fandom was allowed to grow and cities across the country developed their own scenes and in a couple of years they started their own conventions, free from interference from "the home office".

Once we moved away from the "this is the newsletter of the local club" model and towards the "this is a zine and I write about what I damn well please" model, things got a lot more interesting.

When C/FO Atlanta went away and we replaced it with Anime-X, the very first thing we did was ditch the "monthly newsletter" model and instead had a phone number people could call to get information on the next meeting. The dues for joining Anime-X were five dollars. Not per year, but a one-time fee of five dollars. Everything else was on a pay-as-you-go basis. We were freed of the nonsense of writing, drawing, editing, printing, collating, stapling, addressing, and mailing, and could concentrate on the fun stuff. Anime-X lasted for ten years.

I would like to sit down with you at some point and get some data on the final, Watergate-ish days of the C/FO and the various shenanigans (legal and otherwise) that went on surrounding some of the key players - after 20 years when all you have to go on is half-remembered rumors it's kinda tough to keep things straight. You should email me.

Re: Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I'm glad a bunch of someones still have that Baycon book. I once had all the extras lying around from the print run and now don't even have a single one. Shows how THAT goes :-) Oh, well. The perfect storm that came together to get that done was an interesting one - how some people could actually cut through the crap and work together back then to actually accomplish something - and maybe I'll put it down on the blog one day...

My main problem is my memory is slowly going and I gave away my zines and newsletters years back (I think Elin Winkler might have some of them, but I'm not even sure of that), so I don't have anything to help spur it on. That's why I've been hesitant to do a lot of posting on the fandom part of my past... I really don't want to accidently slam someone or a bunch of someones based on crap I can't remember and/or doesn't really need dredging up anyway...ever since I got that first letter reply from Kurt Black, I've been pretty conscious of that.

The whole "dues" concept really still bothers me, because it tends to get you talking for other people instead of getting them to talk for themselves and that particular soap box is a slippery one. The dynamic between fans changes considerably when money is exchanged and responsibilty is assumed for a group. When someone like the sole leader of a club promises something, it's easy to place the blame (and credit) - when a "national club" assumes that responsibility OTOH...but too many influential people in C/FO LIKED that model and even after is was shown to be obsolete STILL insisted upon it, so it was kind of like the old "deck chairs on the Titanic" thing after 1986 or so...the efforts were in good faith and had all the right motives, but it just proved to be unworkable for the kind of fandom we had.

But, as things progressed, most of the reasons people joined such clubs were made null by advances in technology and such, and it's a much happier world in most respects now.

Uh, and I would email you, but every link I can find with your name attached leads to a webpage or profile :-)

RWG (and not an actual email addy)

Re: Hey, I resemble those remarks!!!

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

My email is davidrmerrill @ yahoo.com and you can also email me at terebifunhouse @ gmail.com .