Tavie
dave foley
mark mckinney
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blogs i like:

amy
andrew
carl
barb cooking blog
boing boing
caroline
cartoon brew
chris
cityroom
consumerist
erin
gena/ deadly stealth frogs
gothamist
jim hill
kids in the hall lj
kithblog
matt k
mike t
nathan
post secret
rynn
sarah
sarah c
sean
tea rose
toby
tom


webcomics i read:
american elf
american stickman
elfquest
lolcats!
masque of the red death
the perry bible fellowship
toothpaste for dinner
ultrajoebot
xkcd

Other places to find me:
me on the tumblr
me on the flickr
me on the formspring
me on the twitter
me on the ravelry
me on the myspace

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Friday, March 14, 2003
This may be my favourite blog entry of mine, ever. Or not. But I was looking for old posts about Lynne Thigpen, and found this on one of the pages. The background is, my darling friend Matt wrote an incredible monograph about Hedwig and the Angry Inch as the ultimate postmodern fairytale, and it reached the eyes of John Cameron Mitchell, Hedwig's creator, who was so impressed with it that he invited Matt to have dinner with him. This is the post I wrote in response to it:

Wednesday, October 03, 2001
The thing about the whole JCM thing that makes me just thrum with happiness-- well, the MAIN thing, I think there are many very obvious reasons to be happy-- is that it isn't that it's a regular fan-idol meeting. It's not that Matt won a contest. It's not that JCM is meeting him as a favour, or as a kind act from a celebrity to his fan, because JCM wants to give a kid a thrill. It's not because Matt showed up on his doorstep and JCM feels sorry for him. It's not because Matt is the president of his fan club or writes him a million fan letters a day.

It's because Matt produced a brilliant piece of writing, and it was on the strength of this creation, of this product of Matt's intellect, on the manifestation of Matt's genius, that this godlike idol-figure felt compelled to contact him. It's a beautiful thing, almost beyond expression. It's an inversion of the normal processes of fan-relations; who is a fan of whom here? Who appreciates whose work?


I think about fandom a lot. There's lots of angst, lots of thumbings through Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers. There's lots of self-deprecation and justification, of intellectualizing of fannish activities and theorizing about fan creativity and formation of communities. There's lots of mooning and sighing. Fandom is so much larger a part of my life than I ever would have wished that I can't help but continually analyze it and its place in the culture and subcultures in which I find myself, and wonder about its place in my own self-identification process. Therefore it has a large emotional significance for me, and so when something like this happens, it makes my heart so light.


So light.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:46 PM

This is why cyberanthropology is my field. It's all tied up in fandom and empowerment and charisma and everything that has made me a distintinctive personality. You can see the connections, can't you? They're shimmering in front of my eyes like spiderwebs, now. Something's happening.

 Why are you in Tavie's head? 2:20 PM | shower me with attention