Free Fall Interlude

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Hello Reader,
Got Free Fall?

Why an interlude? Why, when “everybody knows” that blogs are “supposed to” be on a narrow topic-niche. 

Bloggers are “supposed to” attract lots of readers by always having an ongoing familiar focus. So why? Easy: because I did college drama, and movement studies with theatre majors, and then after graduation I did rhythmic gymnastics, (with parents and coaches, not to compete) and all these activities were like figure skating: Judged not on a narrow focus, but on variety, such as space used, levels, and so forth. 

Variety is the spice of life. 

Hence an interlude. 

Free Fall writing, at the City of Calgary’s C-Space every Friday, is where we all have the same prompt, and then we write like mad, until the timer rings, without no editing, no apologizing. 

On a recent April morning I did fiction, nonfiction, and a prose-poem that people said was beautiful.

Sing it on the way to a funny forum: “Greece is for next week, Free Fall today.” 

April 27 

prompt- “I’m never late”

Darcy was a child of privilege. “I’m never late” he remarked. “It’s a corrupt world, God knows, but back in Hamburg we all knew that wars were won on the playing field and in the halls. No one was supposed to be late.”

Jung looked at him bleary eyed. His alarm watch must have rang, but he was just too tired to hear it.

Darcy continued, “Although we had servants at home, we all took turns in cleaning up, and making breakfast, and here—have some of my star pan cakes.” Darcy had a tray with not only pancakes but some prime great-juice and a carafe big and a carafe small. Tea and milk.

A shapeless bundle of cloth was in the corner. Darcy cocked an eyebrow that way “Sue? She up?”

“No. She crept in to keep an eye on me. I’m sure she’s heard of men creeping out in the dead of night. Just wanted to be sure.”

Darcy moved around. “Yes, that’s her. You can see her head from here.”

Jung moved to see and commented “Our little angel.” They sat camping style and enjoyed their food. 

“Next time,” Jung said, “we involve Sue in making breakfast.”

Said Darcy, “Elevenses”

“Eh?”

“Elevenses. What you soldiers call mid-morning tea break. She can help prepare it, and bring it around to everybody. Get to know them.”

Jung nodded.

Prompt- butterfly

I have butterflies firmly categorized as a chick thing. This ever since I took a semester of "Drama for adults dealing with children." For our final movement study, every group or person, except for me, surprised us by including butterflies. So there you are. A chick thing. Oh yeah, I forgot to say that I think I was the only male in the class. That was OK, some of my best friends were people who deal with children.

It was all so long ago. I’m still chuckling over taking a night school drama class. Some of us were lounging in the dairy bar when a lady asked if we knew that our classmate was a radio announcer. Of course. “Well I didn’t, I was casually listening to the radio when suddenly I heard that laugh!” I think of that moment, sometimes, when I listen to CKUA which is were she ended up, fittingly.  Young rock stations are best left for our younger years.

That was the class where I noted someone’s pin (badge) on the first day and said, “Oh, a Doctor Who fan” and we remained friends for years afterwards. She found the class useful for her live action role playing. I may have been the only male in that class too, but I forget. Strange. We think of space fans and nerds as being anti-girl, and keeping them out of our chess club, but I have never minded being around women. In fact, when I go to Japanese fantasy conventions half the people are women. Maybe not for video gaming, but for comics and anime, yes, gender equality.

I’m still laughing at the boy dressed as Sailor Moon, or one of her friends. A mighty cheer rang to the rafters, in female voices, when he said his mother helped him with his costume. That for a lecture on Yaoi, the male on male relationship comics. The professor told is it was nice to not have female competition in your love story.

Prompt- why them?

Why them, why?

Why go after, with hating eyes and clawing fingers, those who love those we don’t?

Folks of lame limbs, the halt and the blind and distant minds, they love in ways that we can only dimly understand, why them?

People of distant caravans once out of Egypt, why not let them go their own way? If they don’t love us, isn’t that punishment enough?

Add them all up, and in one place and time they tipped the scales at six million souls.

Why them? Do they not love football, mom’s apple pie, and ships sailing the waves? Do they not love laughter too? 

Add them up, at a dark place and time, and there’s another six million souls.

Sean Crawford

May,

Calgary,

2018

Footnotes:

~The Who fan was Shannon, the professor was from UBC on the coast, the DJ was Allison Brock.

~The holocaust (whole burning) was in the news that Friday. Lest we forget, the victims were twelve million in all, including six million Jews. 

For comparison: A few years ago Calgary passed the one million mark, during the 1988 Olympics we were at eight hundred thousand and something. 

~After the great fire levelled the downtown, and City Hall conducted business in a tent, future buildings were constructed of locally quarried sandstone. One of the old four storey sandstone schools is recently converted into "C-Space" where all sorts of creative outfits lease space from the City of Calgary.

For example: Quest Children's Theatre is on the third floor, there is a stage going in on the ground floor, and at the other end of that floor the tiny coffee shop is now up and running. 

Next to the three former classrooms for my Alexandra Writers Centre Society is the RGO Treehouse, an end room with three plate glass walls, for lectures, meetings and parties.

On our other side is a textile club that makes clothing, across the hall is Alberta Publishers.

Often the walls and halls are used for temporary art showing. You can buy art and jewelry in two stores on the second level. 

Note: That's the building I took my clients to see when it was still half renovated with cool debris. They liked that experience.

Another Note: In case you phone for a bus route, as of last week, Calgary transit is still learning about us.

At Otafest

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

Originally Published Victoria Day 2009
as a Chitchat/introduction, pre-essay,
to Hollywood Morality

This weekend I am at the University of Calgary at a festival called Otafest. You know the word trekkie? The vague equivalent in Japan is otaku, meaning "fan" of Japanese comics, or "manga," and of Japanese animation, or "anime." So I'm around hundreds and hundreds of people in costume. Meanwhile there is also a western Canada high school aged volleyball tournament going on and the coaches and parents are clueless. And a male coach my age, who sees the costumes every year but still doesn't know what's going on, expressed contempt: I think he's a mundane fool. At least a couple of ladies asked.

As a middle aged man I can recall watching the first aired shows of Star Trek. And something else: I can recall that in the 60's female fans were writing fiction of Kirk and Spock having a loving relationship. There was quite a lot of such female "fanfic" and no one quite knew why. Now I "know:" It was to fill the void of no such comics from Japan. Now there are lots of "yaoi" (boy meets boy) manga.

I know because Doctor Antonia Levi has driven across a dozen mountain ranges from Vancouver to give lectures. Yesterday her first otafest lecture was a "nerd magnet" where suddenly I was not the only "old guy:" There were over two dozen people, almost none of us in costume (like I said, nerds) and the room included at least a half dozen men and women my age. Doctor Levi told us about universal myths being encoded into Japanese popular culture.

Her next lecture, after a short break, was a "girl magnet:" lots of costumes, lots of energetic people under 18. It seems that in Japan nearly all of the yaoi readers are under 18—just like their approving mothers before them. But here in America any yaoifest will have an age limit of 18+. The girls yelled it wasn't fair; they screamed with approval when a boy in a wig and dress said his mother helped him with his costume.

As for me, middle aged: normally at slightest hint of impropriety I go "harumph!" and rustle my newspaper. As for these kids, they aren't bad: They aren't the sort to wear black leather jackets and sneak smokes behind the arena. They are wholesome. In fact, two of them work part-time in a public library! (Where there is some yaoi they aren't telling the librarians about!) When they grow up, some of them will attend lectures on cultural encoding.

I can't fault the girls for their belief in tasteful boy with boy romance. Meanwhile I will continue to do the middle-age thing of vigilantly monitoring our popular culture for stuff that is sexist or too violent or- you know what I mean.

Hollywood Morality

Sean Crawford
Calgary
Summer 20009

Another Otafest

 Another Otafest

www.essaysbysean.blogspot.com

In my essay last weekend (Again, Webizens) I said I liked teens, and that I’d have a Macbook air at the end of summer. ... This weekend I was among swirling crowds of young costumed Otaku at the Otafest, and now I won’t afford an airbook until the end of the fall.

You see, I’ve been carrying a list for years of obscure old anime that are very hard to find. And a unique out-of-town dealer had them all! (otakuentertainmentcanada@gmail.com) Hurray! - Oh, my poor bank account – hurray!

The Otafest is always held the long weekend of Queen Victoria’s birthday. The holiday Monday, then, is downtime to recover from all the excitement of the last two and a half days. On Monday evening I discovered an old essay/blog of Stevey, the guy I quoted regarding cogs in Alive and Working. In his post on Anime for the Nonplussed I learned I am not the only big spender:

(Stevey was with his wife; I guess Suncoast is a video store.)

…Then we went to the Suncoast in the mall and met this girl, an American girl, 19 years old, who liked anime but was too poor to watch most of it. Think of that!  We were initially astonished that anime can make you poor, but now some 150 DVDs later, we are starting to rethink that position…

Well this girl at Suncoast, I forget her name, Ashley or Lauren or some such trendy 19-year-old name, we were chatting with her and we asked her for a recommendation…

So she gave us her first recommendation and I can tell you this much: that girl cost us thousands of dollars over the next 18 months. If she had recommended something that was total crap (…) then we might have quickly and permanently lost interest.

What made me do a heartfelt “ awww!” was this: The top ten (nonMiyazaki) titles he liked were mostly ones I owned too! Obscure ones, but good ones.

...I think a person’s attendance during an anime convention is random: Sure, you can try to eagerly mark on your program the activities and anime shows you want to catch but a lot of them you will miss as you randomly move about, being too tired, too excited or too moved to keep to any schedule. Too moved? Yes, often when I finish a series of TV episodes I just can’t go straight into another show: that would be like not having a silent pause between good songs.

Since attendance is random, here are some random bits:

…At the campus comic bookstore, Words and Pictures, the manager’s wife told me she liked how the Otafest program had a time slot for a panel on How to Flirt. The very next slot was for Speed Dating. … The outside world may be awfully stupid, but here the nerds are safe and nice to each other.

…When I saw the husband in the dealer’s room we caught up on old times. It had been a few years. “In our last episode,” I said, “Your daughter was in little league. What’s she doing now?”

“She’s attending Mount Royal College.”

“Whoa!” I shook my head. “I really must learn not to blink.” He said softly, “I often can’t believe it either.”

…When I wrote of Otafest at this time last year, I mentioned the boy-boy yaoi genre. This year there were two yaoi seminars but I didn’t have the nerve to go: What if I put a damper on the squealing young ladies?

…The first show I attended, the earliest one on Saturday morning, was about a girl with a stuffed animal who goes around healing scarred hearts. Most of the sparse audience was male, old, (over 21) without a costume, and sitting alone. I suppose just as real men can like crying country songs, so too could these guys like a show that makes you go, “awww!” I only wish the lecture theatre had been darker.

At the first Otafest, put on by the campus anime club, I counted about six costumes. This time costumes were common. The young people eagerly posed and took each other’s photographs. As for me, being a much older male, I felt silly asking. Being a male. Even though the girl’s costumes were mostly blousy with lots of fabric – think Final Fantasy. There was only one Asuka Langley – in her red plug suit, of course. It is queer but I even feel silly back at my house for having more female subjects than males for my paintings, or for my CD collection having more female vocalists than male ones. Although, strangely enough, my girl friends have always preferred male vocalists. So I rationed myself to snapping photos, with permission, only when others were snapping pics too, also with permission. Because hey, I’m no pervert.

Then I saw a young man with a simple tasteful costume: deep blue samurai skirt, matching blue rope belt, and a white shirt that was, in true anime style, really rumpled open in the front. The thing I first noticed was a neat cluster of black “tattoos” like so many little gulls, going up the neck. Cool! Black wig. Just before I could ask my subject for a photo… she spoke. Not a choirboy, a real she. Whoa! Close call! – No doubt she was using "shirt glue" – I would have just died! … And don’t you just love how, among her fellow anime lovers, this woman felt safe being boyish chested?

…How strange to think I felt “blank” about going, and almost didn’t show up this year.

Sean Crawford

Gloating over my new anime,

May 2010

Footnotes:

Over in Japan teenage girls often wear super-baggy white socks, socks that could be stretched to two meters long, socks that don’t fall down, because… the girls buy bottles of “sock glue.”

I can sure relate to the uptight male student in Chobbits. The first time I saw him I was surrounded by girls dressed as chobbit maids, wearing lots of black, with lots of buckles, and they were all howling at our poor hero's problems with panties.