Found and Not Quite Lost

The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon is a classic 'Otaku' - the creepy obsessive who rarely leaves his room.

If Sheldon was just socially awkward, we might diganose maniakku, that is, one with only otaku-leanings. Yet after sabotaging his roommate's budding romance, this week, his dark, disturbing, traits must be addressed even as they are swept under the rug subservient to the pursuit of cheap laughs.

William Gibson offers "understanding otaku-hood is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web - the passionate obsessive is the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur; there is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic."

While the web punctures and deflates authority (after the emissions light glowed distressingly on Ranger's dashboard last week, the mechanic said it'd cost $105 to investigate; the web advised running two tanks of fuel fully through prior to panic, whereupon the warning light disappeared), the web elevates geeks to respectability.

--and fine art.

Collaborating with Murakami, Marc Jacobs, per the New Yorker, 'helped popularize bipolar tastes for high fashion (Louis Vuitton) and low celebrity (L'il Kim), popularzing the current enthusiasm for perversity and art, and combining overt cuteness (teddy bears!) with classic cool.'

Jacob feels "everyone should have a black outline drawn around them like a cartoon."

For his part, "Murakami's practice is not only referential of pop culture, but his entire life is symbiotic with pop itself, creating a reciprocal relationship between high art and mass culture, drawing upon imagery and personalities found in his day to day life," much the same material as Lautrec referenced and extracted from the dancers-artistes of his day to day life at Moulin Rouge.

In the parish hall, on Sunday, Robert and I discussed a former youth group member, an anime-devoted misfit - cloying, devoted, intolerable - yet, today, elevated in her arena like Jerry Lewis in France.

Perhaps it's a question of utility.

Rosetta Reitz, eulogized, as "an ardent feminist who scavenged through the early history of jazz and the blues to resurrect the music of long-forgotten women to create a record label dededicated to them," may have been otaku-jazz but rose above.

Havelock Ellis contends "Einstein was immediately preceded by the Russian Ballet."

Some otaku, otherwise, are left-nostalgic dead-ends: Hugo Chavez hosts the World Meeting of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity to discuss "The United States: a possible revolution?"

Still, if nothing else, Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig confesses, "before the advent of the Internet, geeks had to cower in corners alone - now they can gather forces online and discover many thousands of like-minded souls across the land - a step forward in the march of progress."

Thus what's written here makes neither impact, or money, nor advances quantum physics, or revolution, its existence (100 posts!), as written by someone in oversized Tiger slippers, in a Sheldonian room containing a Hideki Matsui bobble-head positioned next to an icon of St. Augustine's mom, carefully arranged on shelves of books precisely arrayed in height order, left to right, signifies nothing and everything of contemporary consequence.