The Year of Living Copelandey, part 4

Summer of 2007 is nearing when DM and I briefly consider attending the full-on excursion to Tennessee that the Police’s appearance at the Bonnaroo festival would entail. I watch the 2006 video stream of Oysterhead’s performance there and realize (while continuing to marvel at Stewart Copeland’s legerdemain) I have missed another damn good thing. But after hearing the options for ticketing, accommodations, and transport, I recall how long it has been since I’ve chosen to don a pair of muddy sandals and venture into a situation where comfort might take a back seat to endurance. I decide I’m not entirely up for the logistics such an excursion would require. At least for this year. 

A curious story makes its way back from the festival. A gentleman called cpriddims who had signed on as festival staff takes our flag to an area where the Police entourage is due to arrive and then waits until Stewart’s car passes. 

The flag is brandished, and the drummer enthusiastically responds thumbs-up from his passing conveyance. The flag is then flown by enthusiastic hands during the Police’s performance and receives its first three signatures on its blank side as cpriddims, Dive, and the SuperCat together break virgin green territory. Very nice, I think. A flattering treatment of something that was never meant to outlast its initially intended use. 

It’s at this point that I get hazy. (Exacerbating my normally poor levels of memory retention, this season is a busy period at my day job: summer is when our production department gears up to churn out educational-services product for America’s crappy public schools and skill-challenged district-level administrators as their annual autumn dance with a new school year’s incompetence begins. At least I’m not doing liquor and cigarette ads.) 

From then on, a sweet, tiny idea seems to gain even more traction. People on and off the Copeland forum actually begin to clamor for a chance to carry the goddamned flag at concerts, especially after Stewart is seen pointing at the thing, directly acknowledging the presence of His People in front of thousands of relatively clueless bystanders (most of whom are very probably there to see Sting, of course). 

This floors me, all the more so after I see photographic evidence of the drummer’s behavior. As I said earlier, I ain’t ever been what one could call an active rock fan, so I can’t authoritatively judge how unusual this sort of attention is. But it feels like a great deal, and DM has confirmed this. Determined and well-heeled fans have always found ways to interact with rock stars under limited circumstances, but this was fairly exciting and worth pursuing as a continued effort considering the talent up on the stage. 

The Flag has become a Project. Since this project’s proper execution immediately requires some major-league home-office project management, I resolve to try to stay out of DM’s way as she creates a foundation and a workflow for its continued viability. Mind you, I do not yet live within the scope of this project’s architecture. I merely visit the building it’s housed within. 

But my first-ever Police concert in Philly on 7/19 adds my own cement to the bricks, and I begin to feel as though I have a personal interest. 

It’s still early in the tour. Their impressive appearance at the Whisky notwithstanding, the boys are—frankly—still figuring out how to do what they haven’t done together for decades. Despite some relatively lackluster arrangements and a somewhat more lackluster-sounding Philly stadium crowd, it’s great to see the boys up there, it’s great to meet a good bunch of SC.net Scoobies for the first time, and it’s great to feel the enthusiasm these particular grinning fans convey. 

(For the past few years, “fandom” had meant something other to me than the pure fun and joyful involvement with someone else’s creative work that I’d known previously. My own participation in a fan-based recreation of a certain popular 1960s genre tv show had tainted the innocence of my fannish devotion with the seeming inevitability of groupthink and personality conflict, not dissimilar to some community theater groups I remember working with. A bad taste in my mouth left behind by that recent experience was somewhat dispelled by immersion in this new group of exuberant strangers. Or maybe it was just the very good local beer available from the Philly Citizens Bank Park concessionaires.)

The flag is present that day (having acquired several more fan sigatures), up in the side seats with a slightly intense young man named Conroy. Despite the fact that DM has already begun posting specific flag-spotting directions on the forum (not yet knowing if the intended recipient knew or cared about this), Conroy is a bit far from the stage for Stewart to spot easily. Perhaps we can help. 

Flag-arrow sign

The evening before, I’d hacked out a quick arrow with the word “FLAG” on it in a manner I had hoped would provide sufficient long-distance legibility and contrast (Frutiger Black Condensed in white type on a black arrow, tiled onto two letter-size sheets and taped together). DM and the lissome Donna will each carry one of these in an attempt to quickly guide Stewart’s gaze to Conroy’s section.

Stewart diligently and indicatively attempts to follow where we’re pointing (point, turn, point, turn, blink) but is unable to scope out our hapless man in the rafters. I feel bad for Conroy, but I’m engaged at this point. Because I now remember how much fun it is to be a fan of something again. 

Feels like it’s been a while, and it’s very nice.

The Year of Living Copelandey, part 3

It is Spring, 2007. And considering that it has been a while since the Wife has indulged herself in anything resembling fun activity, it seems like a good idea to enthusiastically support what might become a handful of concert dates. 

By this point, Wife has more or less begun hanging out on the aforementioned Stewart Copeland fan forum, which aligns our evenings very well as I’m still posting on one or two far more fanwanky Star Trek fan film sites (occasionally trying to remind younger Trekkies of the finer points of critical thinking regarding modern science, decent writing, political history, and nostalgia’s debilitating effects upon adult judgment. All in an obnoxious day’s work for someone of my advanced age and limited humility). Evenings are spent furiously typing on keyboards in our home office, punctuated by the occasional belly laugh or outraged growl. 

(Nota bene: My Star Trek fandom is always herewith presented as an object worthy of your most erudite ridicule and disdain. Sufficiently avid fans of other entertainment genres should realize, however, that they too live in glass houses of perilous fragility.)

The reunion tour’s Vancouver debut approaches. Wife needs a means to be recognized in a foreign city’s airport by acquaintances she’s never met. Asks me to help make something she can carry easily that’ll stand out from the car-service guys who wait at airports holding up signs with last names on them. Sure thing. 

“How do you want to carry the thing? How durable does it need to be? Okay, let’s accommodate whatever carrying needs might be physically possible, and put grommets on it.” I still have a hokey little hobbyist grommet clamp, meant for thin fabric on historical costume shirts from an entirely different era in my fanwank history. This banner-thing is needed relatively soon, and Wife grabs whatever kelly-green fabric and semi-compatible paint she can find at a relatively local crafts supply. 

She measures out a shape that allows a double-length of it to fold and have side seams to hopefully keep it from unraveling in transit. Since extended durability isn’t an issue, and there’s not much time to lovingly hand-sew the fucker together anyway, we use iron-on fabric tape and fabric adhesive to attach the folded seams to each other. So what if it falls apart in a few days, right?

Available high-resolution Copeland logos are in short supply at this point, so I must interpret from a printout of a low-resolution image taken from online. I enlarge the image, clean it up, turn it to a solid shape, print it out for cutout, and roughly trace it onto the green cloth with old art-supply charcoal. 

But I have no tracing paper. So I have to improvise a light-box. 

While it’s still day outside, I tape the art onto a bedroom window, brace the fabric over it, and try to discern outlines through the murky green. I miss most of them, and thicken the art in the process. Very sophisticated. You’d never know what I do for a living, watching me stumble through this. 

(Keep in mind I haven’t yet seen the source of this logo art, an embarrassing 1985 movie called “The Rhythmatist,” which yielded a substantive soundtrack if nothing else. I’ve only been told that this is a modified image from a movie the guy once made. I have little idea what the silhouette of Maestro Copeland is carrying. So I fake it.) 

No fabric paint is available, so I use standard acrylic. Wife has brought back several varieties of white, and (concerned with making a good impression) worries a bit about the aesthetics of using more than one “shade” of white (“Snow/Titanium”, “White Wash”) in the same area on the field of green. I try not to roll my eyes too audibly, given this thing’s probable life span. 

Crude, but sufficient for the task. Or is it?

The meet-up goes well, and Wife’s report on her newfound acquaintances includes a wide variety of interesting individuals, some of whom I continue to hear about in the following weeks. Longtime Police fans and creative professionals populate the stories. The makeshift flag has served its purpose. 

It isn’t long after this that my vague memory tells me about inquiries coming in from other SC.net people about this flag. The boys are scheduled to perform at Bonnaroo, and something like it could come in handy there. 

And this is where the first domino falls.