Theresa Who

carnivaloftherandom:

gailsimone:

constellation-funk:

gailsimone:

… I spoke with someone recently who said they wondered what their life would have been like without geek culture, and they seemed to totter a bit on whether or not it would have been a good thing.

I certainly have had some unpleasant experiences because I was a nerd, or a fan of nerd things. I…

I do think there is a specific difference between geek culture and geek artifacts; I don’t think the two are necessarily inextricably linked. I can (and do) read comics without going to cons, for instance.

It is interesting that glam rock acts are listed in your examples of geek culture, specifically Ziggy Stardust. It does raise the question of what geekery actually means, since the general cultural consensus is that David Bowie is the coolest person who ever lived and The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars sort of cemented that image of him as such. What is geeky, exactly, if that album and that persona can be labeled as such? (and I’m absolutely not saying they can’t because I think there’s definitely a case to be made that they are) Is Tarkovsky’s Solaris geeky? Is Fantastic Planet? Krautrock? The work of Henry Darger? How does one describe geekery as an ethos as opposed to a demographic?

(this turned into more of a free-form musing than an actual response to anything)

I understand the separation between culture and artifact, but I might suggest that if you have the latter, you are holding a piece of the former.

And there was definitely a time when Bowie was outsider music. His reputation as a universal genius came much later.

I think ‘geek culture’ may not be the best wording, but I certainly imagine some musicians as fantasists, certainly Wagnerian opera appealed to King Ludwig II in that manner. Is a musician different from an artist or a novelist in that sense? If so, why? 

Alice Cooper and Ziggy Stardust were characters, Diamond Dogs is a futurist concept album, certainly. I think they fit right in there.

And, sure, it is possible to hate fantasy and enjoy, say, Lord Of The Rings for the swordfights, but I would maintain that even those with the smallest imagination like Star Wars and Tolkien for the the fantasy on some level, assuming they like them at all.  I think there’s still a big chunk of the mainstream that dismisses virtually any SF or fantasy culture as silly or juvenile. It’s a fairly recent development that the AVENGERS or AVATAR can actually BE the mainstream. Even the Wizard of Oz wasn’t a big hit when the film debuted.

It may be that we all define what is beloved geek culture by purely subjective standards. That may, in fact, be the only definition that means anything.

Semantics are fun: Culture, artifact… community. Everybody geeks out over SOMETHING, but not everybody calls it that. The evolution of the term, “Geek,” has been an interesting one. (Go use your google-fu, kiddies, if you want the full story of the etymology.) 

The difference between culture and artifact has been covered in the comments above, but I think that what’s missing is that somewhere between the things we love and the tapestry that can be viewed as a culture woven of those artifacts and events, is the community. 

We’re a little like ferrofluids, (again: google-fu) in that with the application of the right magnetic field, we find each other and form something bigger than ourselves. When all is said and done, we have the things we love and the identifiable culture those things are part of, but the most important thing is that out of those things come a community. It shifts like the tide, we’ve got bleeding-edge and late adopters, but whether someone’s been reading comics for forty years or just started watching Doctor Who six months ago, there’s room in the community. Some wankers will tell you otherwise, but that’s their problem. We have bobbles and the occasional tectonic shift and the obvious internecine squabbles, but the community is the driving force. We share things with each other, we dissect and disseminate the things we love, we become field researchers and academics of a very narrow field, in the pursuit of fascinations we can’t always explain.

In a hundred years, no one will think twice about someone getting a Ph.D in Comics Studies. It will be just as valid as getting a degree in Elizabethan literature. 

Everybody geeks out over something, we always have. We seize on those things that make our brains light up like the fourth of july, make our hearts leap in the joy of resonance, and urge us to find others who feel likewise. 

Culture: the synthesis between the artifacts and the community. We’re there, we’re constantly evolving, and there’s always room for more of us.