The Fandom Menace

Fandom takes time.

This weekend we bought a poor and rather faded poster of M. Seurat's seminal Les 'olly'ocks Formee Avec Blobs, in a nice frame for ten bucks. It was exactly the right size for a poster I have.



It wasn't the first time the frame had been repurposed. The ghostly blue hollyhocks were stuck in with electrical tape, which required careful handling. I needed the mat to be clean of glue, obviously, for an archival poster. Stamps and writing on the back of the paper suggested that it had originally held a picture of a model house plan for a nearby housing development. Well, a frame's a frame. Bye bye hollyhocks, hello picture of man burying a corpse in a copse, courtesy of my brother's recent shipment of The Dead Weather posters. This one is from Newcastle, U.K. and comes with the entry ticket.



I still haven't located anywhere near enough space for the rock posters I already have, but a few are up.



The Yorkshire sheep and the Yorkshire landmark of Penyghent are still up next to them. (These don't count as poor art, by the way. I love the sheep photo and the watercolor is by Jeff Money, a friend of my parents'.) They may end up crammed into some sort of Yorkshire room, though, when I build the new wing for the rest of the collection.

While we were out buying the frame, we found a wonderful addition to our art collection, Power Station at Night from the illegible artist's Lots Of Paint Period. Half price art day, fifteen bucks. A tremendous bargain.



Although taking a frame and mat apart and redoing it takes time, that's about ten percent of the time I used for fandom activities this weekend, which included finding and supplying a rare file for a collector and helping organize a sync watch of some music videos. You'd think getting four women on two continents all to watch a video at the same time would be easy (once you'd worked out the time difference) but in real time it was quite a handful. Have you ever tried to get four people to play an MKV file at the same time? First VLC won't handle it for one person, and then KMP freezes for another and necessitates a reboot and then someone's husband needs something and then everyone needs coffee...

Actually we never did get to watch the MKV file. I'm leaving it as a project for later. We didn't fare much better with what should have been a standard DVD (vob) file, either, since we could all play it but only on machines we weren't actually in front of at the time. We fared much better with the WMV of The Dead Weather live at ACL and after that sought to amuse ourselves with YouTube videos which pretty much anyone can always play.

I also spent some time making covers for downloads of live music, which don't always come with covers. The standard is for them to include a text file of the set list, and that's that. With a flac file, since the chances are you're going to burn a CD, it's better to have a jewel case cover or at the very least a slip, and that means a 9.7 by 4.76 inch, or 4.7 by 4.7 inch picture that sums up the music inside, with the setlist incorporated into the picture.

I love this stuff.

I started this decade not listening to music to any significant degree. I'd burned out on Techno, which was the only music that really moved me, rap and hip hip having imploded earlierand rock music having hit the bottom by the turn of the century. I was watching movies and TV and joining societies and message boards like crazy. Now those accounts are abandoned and it's music all the time. I think I'll make this into a full post sometime, but briefly: I joined a Led Zeppelin group about a couple of months before Led Zeppelin announced their reunion concert in 2007. I didn't know it was going to happen at the time, it was serendipity. I met so many wonderful people on line and learned so many new things, that music switched to my primary focus. And I used to be a science fiction fan of the moderately active sort, even before the internet, but that's faded too.

I do fannish things because I'm just a born fan.

Thank you, all the people I'm a fan of, and thank you other fans.