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[pmcd9]

Hobot, Burning Man isn't a music festival.

Hey Formica, I see in your pictures that you ran across a couple of my friends.  My friends Dale and Tanya drive the Margaritaville Jetski, and that's my friend David's ridable sperm. Both of those vehicles are from Houston.

tI, i've never been.  I imagine it would be awesome, but the discomfort of being in the desert would outweigh the awsomeness of it.  I would need to retreat to a shower on a daily basis.  If it were someplace green I could stand to go a few days without a shower, but not in a desert where frequent sandstorms occur.

~Paul

[Mite]

I'm with ya Paul. I don't so much mind just feeling sweaty, but feeling sweaty and covered in dust for several days would be a problem.

A whole bunch of the husband's friends/coworkers were at bonnaroo, and I know they're going to try to tell me tomorrow that they can't afford $20 to go to the non-profit organization that I work for's launch party/fundraiser. 300+ bucks for a weekend and they won't chuck a jackson at a party for the kids.

[jough]

littlesmallfeets: What the FUCK do you have against the Rocky Horror Picture Show?

Mite: TROUBLE IN PARADISE?

[theinevitable]

Jough: maybe that that movie has no purpose and is not funny or entertaining in any way.

[jough]

theinevitable: From now on I'm just going to assume that you are ignorant in all things.

[littlefallsmets]

As a movie? Oh, I mean, it's fine I guess, if you're into the whole "camp" thing.

I've never been Mr. Camp, though, fake-bad always just comes off as... sorta smarmy and arrogant and lazy to me, it's not my cup of tea... I'm a much much bigger fan of Actual Bad, of real true failure, when something is horrible and was made under the sincere belief that everyone involved was talented and had great ideas and... etc etc. That's my brand of "good-bad".

Nothing finer than stumbling over a copy of a feature film made by a bunch of community college dropouts "because it's so easy to make a movie, right? ...and we'll get it in a festival and be rich!" that just rips off everything it can and... it's just so beautifully unknowingly terrible. Love that stuff.

As a... phenomina? I guess that's where my problem is.

I have this irrational hate of... when a fanbase of anything transcends the thing they're a fan of and the fan-events events become just about the for-whatever-reason-socially-awkward going out and trolling for sex in the one tightly-constructed-artificial social environment where they feel like THEY'RE the cool ones and THEY'RE the jocks and THEY'RE the fratboys and THEY'RE the bullies or whatever.

Whenever the people who are outcast and lonely and trod-upon take a completely neutral piece of culture and use it as their... device through which they can force people to conform to THEIR thing and mete out THEIR social justice and... flirt and screw with no consequences and stuff...

Blah, it just irks me. It irks me if it's Rocky Horror, it irks me if it's guys with greasy ponytails and girls with ludicrious corsets at Ren Fests, it irks me if it's that profoundly-insecure slightly-heavy girl at the Comic Book Show in the Vamprella costume hooking up with basement dwellers because its the one place she feels beautiful... it irks me on all levels on all fronts.

It's like, okay, you ever see the documentary CRUMB?

It's like that, when Crumb decides to get girls he has to act like Skutch, the big popular greaser bully and... when he tries it, all he ends up doing it alienating the few friends he has and hating himself and coming off like a bigger jackass than even Skutch is?

It's like that.

Like... man... if you were looking down your nose at people creating arbitrary hierarchies and laying bad trips on people for not conforming and hooking up randomly and lovelessly from your faraway perch in the AV room when you were 16... don't turn around and create the same damn structures AROUND something obstensively "outsider" so that you can act like those "cool" 16 year olds at 35... except without even the excuse of being 16.

And I say that AS one of the dudes who was in the AV room at 16. Well, the school newspaper room, anyway, I went to a poor rural high school and we couldn't afford an AV room, if you were a dork, there was only the school play or the school paper. But you get my point.

[theinevitable]

"some of these guys say they're punk rock, but they really just want to smoke big cigars and eat racks of ribs"
-Mr. Ian Mackaye

probably a horrible paraphrase. But I know what you mean.

[jough]

Well, to be fair, the Rocky Horror Show was a stage musical comedy first and thus is above reproach when it comes to camp value. I mean, all 1970s musical comedies are kinda campy and weird.

I'm not really that into the RHPS, but I do like some of the songs, especially the intro song that was written for the film, and while the audience midnight showings this is silly, it looks like it would be fun.  The old theatre in Media PA (the county seat here) used to show it every weekend at midnight and the girls in costume waiting to get in were always pretty hot.  That's pretty much my association with the audience participation Rocky Horror Picture Show thing: Hot girls in giraffenets carrying bags of rice.

[theinevitable]

partial retraction: "Time Warp" is pretty fantastic.

[Ben-San]

And it couldn't possibly be about a bunch of people who like the same thing wanting to put on silly clothes and have a good time.

[AugustWest]

Hit a nerve there, Commander Riker?

[V-Adore]

Hit a nerve there, Commander Riker?

You're working some pretty rough chuckles these days, Aug.

Anyway, to speak my unbearably nerdy piece: I think "nerd stuff" is all well and good when it's people just having fun in a mildly ritualized fashion. I mean, who cares if your idea of a good time involves throwing rice at a movie screen, or wearing a corset and doing a lot of quaffing, as long as nobody's getting hurt? However, I think it can get a little cancerous when this sort of activity is used as an excuse for cliqueishness, exclusion, and other generalized assholism. I think that that sort of behavior is less a function of the actual activity and more the function of the kind of people who will use any such activity to play petty tyrant. There's no use blaming all Ren Festers for a few people's jackassery.

[AugustWest]

You're working some pretty rough chuckles these days, Aug.

Sorry.

[Formica]

I did Rocky with the Indecent Exposure crew in Berkeley for a couple of years. I don't think anything could have truly opened my eyes to the cross section of humanity better than that experience did. First as a spectator and later as a participant, I met more freaks and deviants than I can count. It's a pity that, at the time, I was too young and/or shy to truly embrace it.

All subcultures, sects, and baronies of fandom have their own quirks; if anything, the obsessive desire of some to expound on the positive qualities of their chosen tangent can be directly linked to its positive impact on the human in question.

Paul, I didn't have a chance to talk to the Black Rock Sperm Bank guys unfortunately, though I did find a couple of their "night deposit" vials lying around last year. I was a bit frightened to open them, though.

To follow up on some of your comments, you might be interested to know two things: one, many people (including myself) bring all the necessary equipment for a hot shower. It can be done for as little as a $150 investment, though you'll have to haul a lot of water to pull it off right. Two, there isn't any sand up there - it's dust or, more appropriately, prehistoric giraffe shit. It's a dry alkali lakebed, similar in composition to the Bonneville Salt Flats (in fact, land speed records have been set there at other times of the year).

Hobot, my roommate couldn't give his Radiohead ticket away for Friday's show in SF. I'm not sure if they have the following they once did around here any longer.

[Hobot]

Hobot, my roommate couldn't give his Radiohead ticket away for Friday's show in SF. I'm not sure if they have the following they once did around here any longer.

NOOOOOOOOOO!

Just another reason why it straight-up sucks to live in Virginia.