Despite my excessive comment at the bottom of the page, this article is an interesting exploration of music fandom and the conflicts inherent to classification and group identity:

“The Language of Tribes: True Fans and Outsiders”
by Kyle Bylin

The difference of opinion, or lack thereof, that occurs between members of the same tribe, is what characterizes what type of fan they are, how passionate they are about the music, and the depth of involvement they have.  In Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, Seth Godin argues that, “Tribes are about faith – about belief in an idea and in a community.”  He believes that “they are grounded in respect and admiration for the leader of the tribe and for the other members as well.”  But, do members of the same tribe actually respect each other wholeheartedly?  Or, are there ways in which certain members become discriminated against?  In the domain of music, there are hierarchies of “true fans” and lesser, or “casual fans.”  Through speaking in the language of their tribe, members clarify who belongs and who’s an outsider.

I don’t agree with every point in the article, but I think Bylin does a good job presenting a topic that, as I said in the comments, is touched upon often in passing but rarely explored formally as a whole.

You can’t explore a fan phenomenon like the flag without meditating on fandom itself, and while I find the meta-ness of it pretty wanky at times, there’s no escaping the insider/outsider aspects of group identification and self-identification with a group. “Tribe” is the most recent buzzword, but whether you call it a tribe, a fandom, a clan, a brotherhood, a community, a congregation, a culture, the implications are the same: even despite absence of intent or action, the flip-side of inclusion of some is exclusion of others. An Us doesn’t always have a Them, but its very existence creates a Not-Us.

Over-thinking? Maybe. It’s an uncomfortable idea to explore, especially when the reason for grouping together with others is a positive one. But consider: have you ever felt like your choices or experiences had been challenged by simply hearing about someone else’s? Say, that you learned someone is or isn’t a vegetarian? That he or she voted for a different candidate? Does or doesn’t believe in aliens? Prefers John or Paul or Ringo or George? Kirk or Spock?

Have you ever ended a story with ”You had to be there”?

Many thanks to Nicole Pellegrini for the link.

Today is my eighth wedding anniversary. (Hi, honey.)

Today is also the official U.S. release of Stewart Copeland’s Strange Things Happen: A Life with The Police, Polo, and Pygmies. (Hi, Mr. Copeland.)

Which means that today is also the official U.S. in-print debut of the Green Flag. (Hi, Flag.)

I’ve known this day would come for months. I’ve had evidence in hand for weeks. But now that I actually sit down to post this post, it feels strange.

Appropriately, Copeland’s chapter involving the flag is strange. Reactions to it are mixed. My own reactions to it are mixed. Judging from the chapter, the evidence, and the liminal space between, I’d venture to guess that Copeland’s reactions are mixed. As strange phenomena go, this one’s hard to separate into green and white. I can get on-board with almost all of his take.

Almost.

But today, in a sense, the flag goes live. Unlike its inadvertent appearance in Rolling Stone, the flag is now officially, on purpose, a part of print history. It has already popped up in the book’s first Amazon review. (Haha.)

This thing that my husband and I slapped together at our kitchen table and that all these people flew around the world has now landed in this guy’s memoir.

No matter how you write it, no matter how long you get used to it, it’s still all very strange.

Photo: Laurie Pizza

My friend foobella has decided that my article on stewartcopeland.net embodies her Police reunion tour experience so well that she no longer has to write about the experience herself. Which is enormously flattering. Cheating, but flattering.

Thank you, foobella.

A 2999-word summary of the flag that ate my life.

Eventually the page will feature photos of the flag’s appearances around the world, but the site’s redesign is still a work in progress, so I’m waiting until it’s finished before I send the link to my three aunts as my mother would have wanted to do.

But there it is. And it is very strange.

Copeland’s quote is the best part of the piece, of course—but as a friend once conceded, who better to be upstaged by.

Now if only I could figure out how a typo that wasn’t in the original draft has materialized on the page . . .

You know, I had a whole post ready to go up on Thursday morning. This was going to be the first time that I would get a second post up in a week as scheduled. I had been compelled by an email from a friend and a fortuitous web of link-following to write that post. I even let myself miss a deadline for a lit journal in order to get that post finished on time.

It was all very exciting.

In the post I was going to talk about the difficulties of mining one’s own life as a writing/art subject. I was going to talk about how uncomfortable it is for me to put myself and my life on display, how so much of my personal life—including my own marriage—is intimately tied into this project that I’m writing about, how I struggle with the fear and anxiety of having to put my own dirty laundry out there when I have spent so long learning to hide all those thoughts and vulnerabilities and embarrassments. I was going to say how this artistic pilgrimage often feels like a campaign and a crusade in which, more often than not, I find that I’m fighting against myself, how I do want to be read but don’t always want to be seen.

It was a pretty good post. It even had a couple of metaphors. But I’m not going to post it.

Instead I’m going to make the post moot.

But I need to beg your indulgence as it’s going to require a little time and a decent amount of B-story.

In the meantime, by way of introduction, I’d like to present to you my mother, Maureen, the lady to the left.

Without that lady, I wouldn’t be writing, let alone writing a book. Without that lady, I wouldn’t have spent more than a year chasing a dead rock band on two sides of the Atlantic. And without that lady, a green flag would never have stalked a drummer around the world.

That dress that she’s wearing in the picture—my mom loved that dress. That’s the dress that she wore to my wedding. That’s also the dress that she wore to her cremation.

Because my mom was just that good, she managed to do all of those things despite having been dead.

*****

RIP, Natasha Richardson. My heart goes out to your family.

Thanks to mtj for the thread title.

*****

Continuation: Last Mother’s Day

name |nām|
noun
a word or set of words by which a person, animal, place, or thing is known, addressed, or referred to
• someone or something regarded as existing merely as a word and lacking substance or reality

A name is a powerful tool. To name a thing is to identify it, and to choose a name is to choose an identity, to define oneself as a unique personality and character. When choosing a name, one should consider the big picture: the name’s appropriateness and longevity; how well or not it represents its object; how it will attract or repel others; how it can refine or pollute the words and thoughts attached to it. When choosing one’s name, one should take care to meditate long and hard on the name’s power and implications; one should think broadly with great consideration and sobriety.

Or, like I, one can just screw oneself from the start.

Having decided to join Stewart Copeland’s forum, I had spent a few days tweaking and changing an introductory post: if this was destined to be my only message, I wanted to make it a good one. After a few rounds of revisions, I was ready. I held my breath, selected all, copied—and stumbled. I had missed a step: I still needed to register for a user account. And in order to get me one of those, I needed a name.

Crap.

Naming characters has never been my strong suit, so naming myself was destined for disaster. I briefly considered using my real name, but I really didn’t want to: I didn’t have much of an “online presence” at the time, and I liked the idea of retaining some anonymity. I didn’t foresee any especially controversial posts to be made on a drummer/composer forum, but I also didn’t need potential employers or my dad tripping across me doing something stupid on the internet.

But there isn’t much that you can do to dress up “kellie” but rhyme it in unfortunate Garbage Pail Kid fashion or attach it to “green.” My half-appellation “kel” goes nowhere in terms of punny wordplay (kelvin, keltic, Kelmer Fudd?), and “walsh” sounds like an onomatopoetic verb related to the unpleasant expulsion of fluids. Mine is just one of those names you must grow to embrace.

I stared at the monitor for a few minutes considering my options. A Stewart Copeland- or Police-related song title or lyric seemed a solid choice, but the few that I considered had already been taken, often in varying spellings. I struggled, poring over thirty years of music in my head, mumbling melodies to get to potentially useful lyrics.

I considered Coco for a while as the opening half of that song is my favorite part of the Rhythmatist album, but two things kept coming to mind: the clown and Micky Dolenz’s sister. (The Sting connection didn’t even occur to me.) It had taken days of summoning the courage to make a simple post, and I had text hanging in limbo in the clipboard waiting to be forgotten or mistakenly saved over, but here I was struggling to resolve the familial relations of a musician that I had a crush on when I was 9. I needed a new approach.

My eyes darted around the room in search of inspiration as I tried on names of objects and stuffed animals, from a dog named Homunculus to a monkey named Ebola. Millions of pages of words on the bookshelves around me, and all I could come up with were Romantic poets, devils, aliens, and mythological women who had met tragic fates. You really can’t call yourself Ophelia or Medea and expect things to end well.

I started sifting through mental lists of random nouns: trees (Willow: too Buffy), spices (Cinnamon: too hooker), Muppets (Animal: taken; Rowlf: meh), uncommon vegetables. I must have sat at my desk for more than an hour tossing around names and identities, only to discover that a eureka idea had either already been taken or was simply too stupid for words. When exasperation suggested that Rutabaga felt like a worthy option, I thought of how I could really use a drink.

Eureka.

Typing letters into the registration form, I found myself falling back on the drink that is my fallback: when I’m out and not in the mood for anything in particular, I order myself a dirty martini. It’s simple, it’s salty, and it’s full of brine and double entendre.

I filled out a password, a confirmation code, minimal contact information. I wondered what “Board Style: euGenio” could mean. I tried to remember how many hours plus or minus GMT I am: most of my work was North America-based, so I rarely had to deal with the math of international time zones.

I hit “submit” and waited for a confirmation email that would never arrive. Instead, a day or two later, on a quiet March Sunday, I tried my luck at logging on. Even only a couple of days later, this new name of mine already felt stupid, but it was better than Rutabaga, and I didn’t want to start the process over again. I hadn’t thought in terms of longevity or appropriateness; I had never considered how my “name” might be shortened or the confusion that might occur by having an abbreviation the same as a prominent poster already on the board. I had no way of knowing that eventually my real name would be bandied about often enough that I may as well have just cut to the chase from the start.

Most of all, I never once considered the possibility that I or anyone else would ever have to say this name out loud. These people weren’t real; they were just people on the internet, electronic buddies to chat with about Stewart Copeland’s music and the exciting new Police tour approaching. I would never see them; I would never meet them; I would never have to look a person in the eye and say, “Hi, I’m DirtyMartini.” It was just a silly name on a fan forum.

Once logged in, I took a few hours of fiddling around with a couple of unremarkable warm-up posts, but I finally posted my inevitably embarrassing introduction, sounding a lot like the lame, psychotic twit that I had hoped to avoid. I even managed to quip on my new name, throwing in a comment about liking my drummers like I like my martinis—a groan-worthy line that is justifiable only if all parties involved are inebriated.

Mine wasn’t a post for the ages; my registration wasn’t an event for the history books. But for me it was the opening step of a journey that would consume part of my life for years to come and serve as the subject of this current writing project of mine. And in the process, within this small electronic world, it would give me a new identity.

But first the Police tour needed to begin.

*****

To be continued.

A couple of years ago, I joined a fan forum.

I had never joined a fan forum before. In truth, I had never done anything properly “fannish” before at all. Like most people, I have been a fan of things—bands, writers, poets, products. I live in a Mac household; I own multiple copies of Leaves of Grass and every R.E.M. album, even the iffy ones. And I admit that in my adolescent years I nursed a tight little obsessive streak for talent and/or pretty.

In the fourth or fifth grade, my best friend Angela and I hand-wrote what must have been hundreds—if not thousands—of entries for a Sam Goody “Win a trip to see the Monkees!” contest. Around the band’s 20th anniversary, MTV had started showing Monkees reruns a couple of times a day, and I would wake up early to sneak downstairs and catch the morning episode before school. Micky Dolenz sure was goofy. And kinda cute. So when this contest came along, Angela and I launched an offensive.

As often as we could convince our mothers to drop us off at the mall, we plopped ourselves on the thin, beige carpet of the Sam Goody, writing and shivering and smearing purple ink on the fleshy edges of our right hands. We stole whole pads of entry forms to fill out in our bedrooms. We prayed really hard. According to our 10-year-old math, we had submitted more than enough entries to guarantee victory. We had worked hard. We had beaten the system.

When Sam Goody never called, we were convinced that the contest was rigged or that those lazy, humorless clerks at the mall had never submitted our entries out of jealousy of our conviction. There was no other explanation. We had passion and the law of averages on our side. We deserved to win. We were their #1 fans.

By the eighth grade my fannish leanings had grown more timely. Less well-groomed. Louder. Guns N’ Roses had become the obsession du jour, and my circle of friends and I would spend hours watching videos, reading metal magazines, and hiding in dark corners of basements engaged in earnest sleepover colloquys over just how far one would open the door if Slash or Duff McKagan came a-knockin’. We dressed as them for Halloween. We talked to Slash on the radio and became momentary envies at school the next day. I still know the words to “Rocket Queen.”

But despite the occasional raging hormones, I had never belonged to a Fandom in any formal, capital-letter sense. I had never thought much about it, really. I had only ever belonged to one fan club, and that was in 2003 to get a shot at advanced tickets that I failed to take advantage of in time. I was a fan of a lot of things, but I had never really identified as a part of a larger whole.

But one day a couple of years ago, I decided to join an artist’s fan forum. The Police had announced that they were reuniting for one last 30th anniversary hurrah, an opportunity that no child of the 80s could possibly miss. I had never been a Police fan in the Monkees/Guns N’ Roses sense, but I had spent my whole life listening to them. They were such a casual given that I hadn’t much thought of them as a band to be researched or pursued or obsessed over. For me the Police has always just been.

But the Police hadn’t “been” for decades. The band was not just defunct; it was notoriously so. They didn’t suffer from a mere case of Dead Band Member Syndrome; the Police suffered from conflict. Drama. Three decades of rumor and distance and mythology. This reunion was the Holy Grail. Sure, the Eagles famously hated each other and had reformed a couple of times, but they lacked that essential dramatic element that propelled their story from folktale to epic poetry: Sting. The Police was a break-up for the ages.

And judging from my early track record, I seem to have a thing for dead band reunions.

So when the chance to catch this impossible reunion of an almost mythic band arose, my best friend and I jumped on it, forking over way too much to scalpers for the one show that we were going to attend. And in the process of doing ticket research, I rediscovered a website that I hadn’t looked at in a long time, the official website of the Police’s drummer, Stewart Copeland. Micky Dolenz had launched my fascination with cute, goofy drummers, and although I wasn’t up on all of Stewart Copeland’s solo efforts, I was a fan of a number of his soundtracks. His Rhythmatist album in particular had gotten me through some rough days surrounding my mother’s death a couple of years prior. And drums are just cool.

The people on his forum seemed friendly, and Stewart himself even posted once in a while, which was fascinating and not just a little exciting. So I figured that, if nothing else, I would make one undoubtedly embarrassing post to thank the man for that music that had helped me stay sane in a bad situation. I didn’t have to use my real name; I could post under a pseudonym. And while he wouldn’t respond—which was really a blessing—he might by some chance read my thanks. After that, I could post or not or forget the site entirely.

All I needed was a username.

*****

Continuation: Foresight; or, How not to choose a username

Months ago I decided to sit down and chronicle the story of a most extraordinary project that has occupied my last couple of years. I really should have launched this blog at the beginning in order to capture the whole writing process, but then I really should have launched this blog at the beginning of the project itself as this book would already be written.

Alas, hindsight’s a bitch.

So in lieu of real-time reports, dear reader, I would like to catch you up with a little background on the topic about which I write, a confused, conflagrant, and confuddled tale about a flag, a drummer, and the people who loved them.

For much of the past week, I have been stuck in the mind-numbing quagmire of routine and repetition that is jury selection.

In addition to bestowing upon me the newfound identity of Juror #5 on an upcoming case (on which I can’t elaborate obviously), the selection process provided me with some much-appreciated reading time, during which I plowed through the strangely comforting The Courage To Write: How Writers Transcend Fear by Ralph Keyes.

A few months ago, I decided to write a book. The thought had been bubbling in my brain for a while, but finally, one day, out loud, as God—or rather, my husband—as my witness, I declared, “Damn the torpedoes, I’m going to write a book.” Or some words of the like.

I won’t pretend that this was the smartest decision of my life. I’ve made some boldly-gone doozies over the years, so this particular one has some stiff competition; but evaluated on its own merits, it’s likely fairly stupid. Exhilarating, but stupid. To make this decision’s worth really stand out, it managed to schedule itself just as the US was creeping ever-so-quietly over an economic hump in order to toss its arms wildly into the air and send itself freefalling into decrapitude.

One would think that, in addition to a strong sense of determination and dementia, it would take a bit of courage to turn away from any hope of a paying career or financial solvency in order to pursue a dream—and, in a way, it does—but tossing off a casual “what the hell” or a defiant “carpe diem” at the idea of drafting a literary masterpiece is a great deal easier than sitting down at the desk and actually, you know, doing it. Just gathering the strength to say “I’m writing a book” has taken many months, gin and tonics, and a thousand deaths, yet the words still send liquid streaming down the back of my throat.

“I’m writing a book.” It sounds so pretentious. Self-important. Over-inflated. “Book” is just too big of a word for a project with no actual future. No literary agents or publishing deals wait breathlessly for a manuscript. No audience exists outside of the 150ish people who already know the plot because they were there. This “book” is just me and a computer and a story that I’m compelled to tell. But “thing” is too vague and “huge-ass mother-fucker writing project” is too huge-ass to repeat again and again, so although “book” in these circumstances falls short in the “public pages bound between two covers” sense, it comes close enough in the “writing project that is bigger than a breadbox and smaller than a wiki” sense. As a word, “book” is mostly accurate and economical, an important quality to have these days.

So, suffice it to say, I’m writing a book. Which to a romantic mind sounds very exciting, conjuring up images of hard-boiled lighting angles, smoky ice clanging against stocky glass tumblers, and multiple cigarettes lit and burning down to varying lengths; but which in reality, ain’t.

I read the forums. I surf the net. I empty the dishwasher. I load the dishwasher. I research. I write. I empty the dishwasher again. I pick up milk and try to remember to water the plants. I write some more. I check my email. I write some more. I check my email. I reach a decent clip of writing, then find myself on Wikipedia wondering how I got halfway through an article about The Troubles. I make soup. In the morning I brew moderately upscale coffee; in the evening I uncork definitively downscale cabernet. At my left hand Whitman, Wordsworth, and Wallace complain of my gab and my loitering; outside lies the ‘burbs. And in the middle is me—am I—trying to write. Sometimes trying to write something good. Mostly just trying not to suck.

I’ve spent months writing, unwriting, and rewriting posts for this blog in an effort to determine its purpose; most posts have been revoked with no warning but with plenty of self-disgust. This blog should reflect what I’m doing, but what I’m doing is not easily described, an amorphous, often pissy process with scores of flailing arms and half a dozen contentious heads. But there must be something to say; there must be some sort of value in trying to record this process, if only as a warning beacon to others on how not to go about writing a book.

I’m not especially comfortable writing about myself, let alone as a work-in-progress. I’ve never written a book before. I have no real idea what I’m doing. But I’m doing it. Or at least I’m trying.

This is me trying.