The Moon Garden Lounge

sugaree ~
Hang in there! You were lucky to have hubby's company take care of yall this way, and super great that you shared your luck with your neighbors.
Thanks for sharing your nightmare with us.
It will get better.........

mahailia, I just found that photo on the net. I don't know if anyone shopped it but it sure is GORGEOUS!

alison, your dogs are adorbs. Our neighbors have two dachshunds, and one of them likes to get out under the fence, run around, and bark. It's funny when we come out to walk our ancient beagle. The dachshund runs away, squeezes back under their fence, and then barks at our dog from the other side.

I was thinking some more about Adam at the Vineyard. The Vineyard renditions of Chokehold and Broken English are incredible! Each syllable has a flowing, unbroken quality. Each phrase melts beautifully into the next. I was put in mind of something that was said by the legendary music producer Mitch Miller about the greats that he worked with:

Emotion is not something you feel. It’s something you make the listener feel. You have to be very cool, and know what you’re doing. So it’s craftsmanship … it’s bullshit to say he’s drawing the emotion from his personal life, because what he’s drawing is the emotion from your personal life, and he’s saying it for you.

I’m so in awe of all the emotions that play through Adam’s voice on all the Vineyard songs: defiance, vulnerability, lust, wisdom. That version of Trespassing, wow! Adam's warmth and beauty and honesty are uncanny. cassie and others have educated us about the technique and how Adam produces these sounds. But underlying it all is such extraordinary mental control.

Another quote, this one from Giorgio Tozzi, the great American opera bass:

It is extremely important that when you walk out onstage you want to communicate with the audience, give them something. To do that as an artist you need to leave your ego back in the cloakroom on a hook. Because when you are out on the stage there is no room for ego, there is only room for one thing and that is honesty. You’ve got to honestly want to communicate with your audience.

As amazing as he was when he started out on Idol, Adam has grown tremendously as a performer right in front of our eyes. When I first saw Adam on the AMAs, Gridlock, and early performances from 2010, he was still asking us to watch him “feel” something.



By the end of GNT there had been tremendous evolution, and now he is singing almost all the time within a framework of truth and passion. He is spending nearly all his time simply communicating with the audience, not thinking about hitting his next mark.



I wonder what Adam does to prepare before a concert. Does anyone know? It seems clear that he draws from a deep well of positive emotion. Adam has said many times that he feels no stage fright except before major TV appearances. Quite simply, there is no room for fear or tension because he is filled with happiness to enter a room full of people who are special to him. This was obvious to me when my sister and I got to attend Adam’s promo appearance in Houston in March. Seeing him sing before just a few dozen people, Adam seemed to hold us in his eyes, to regard us with joyful surprise.


Adam looked at me at 5:17. ;D

Whatever he does, it works on the songs about emotional suffering as well. It seems like Adam's whole emotional personality is awake and available to him when he performs. And that is just so cool.

ETA: Mahalia, lol, what was that you said about volumes? Sorry for the weight of the tomes that follow! Does one scroll in the Moon Garden? Is that done? As far as I'm concerned, scroll away!

Kay--

your post brought me tumbling out of lurkdom because it struck so many chords in me. I share many, perhaps all, of your feelings. Hi, my name isn't midwifespal, but I'm an Adamaholic. I, too am an open fan but a closeted stan, and I can't imagine confessing the full extent of my obsession to my loved ones mostly because I can barely manage to confess it to myself, and I am pretty embarrassed (or maybe embarrassed isn't quite the right word--guilty is closer) about it. This puts me in a strange and uncomfortable position, because I am not somebody, in general, who has secrets, or to put it in a less negative way, I'm not the kind of person who leads a totally independent life from, say, her husband, or her siblings--who has her own social world and they have theirs and we come together on limited shared ground. I'm pretty tightly intertwined with my peeps. So it's weird, yes.

Why the guilt? Well, I'm certainly not trying to condemn anyone else's standom--but in my own case there are clearly many times where Adam absorbs time I'd spend better on other things. I'm on the younger side of fans on this board, and unlike many Atoppers I have not spent a life working hard and sacrificing my own interest for a husband or children or a boss. I feel so strongly the joy Adam provides for some of my friends on this board because in a life full of selflessness and busy good will, they've finally been offered a little corner of indulgence for themselves. But I can't in all honesty borrow that joy for myself, because to tell the truth, in some ways my life is all selfish indulgence--that is, with some notable exceptions, I've rarely had to worry about anybody else. (I mean, I'm not a bad kid, but youth is spoiled, right?) I really don't need to be further encouraged down that road, lol.

I understand that "what the heck am I doing?!" question that you've bumped up against, Kay. I try to excuse it (as I believe Mahalia has suggested in the past) in terms of sports-fandom; I'm an avid sports fan, and that certainly has absorbed many hours in the past, and also involved investment in individual personalities. But, still, I mean, could it get any more frivolous and weird? Google-stalking a celebrity? I've examined this odd obsession from every angle. And while I recognize strong streaks of rationalization in the results of that analysis, I think there's more in it, too. I don't think our fascination with celebrities is quite as creepy as the covers at the supermarket checkout mags make it seem. Really, it comes down to an interest in people, a genuine interest in real people, and what celebrities offer is a shared topic of interest, like a friend we all know, though we don't know each other. That's a pretty rich human subject, and I don't fault us for pursuing it.

In our case, of course, that subject is a particular person, and, as we all know, again and again Adam validates our fascination and affection with his warmth, talent, and complexity. We cling to his story like we do to a terrific novel, only of course Adam's real, and therefore infinitely more complex and interesting, and infinitely more evoking of empathy. We like him, and even if it's not (it can't be) personally reciprocated, that's a real, not an imaginary, relation to him. I can't quite chastise myself for my connection to Adam, because it would be like chastising myself for liking and feeling excited about a friend--if he's likeable, we like him; if he's struggling, we root for him; if he's triumphant, we celebrate with him. And the more we know about him, the more intimately we seem to know him, the more rational, in a way, our deep-felt reactions are. That's what decent, empathetic humans with affection for each other do.

And Adam, I'm happy to insist through my stan-colored glasses, lol, is as worthy of this affection as anyone out there. Kay, what you call his magic I always think of in terms of happiness. Adam just expands my happiness in a peculiarly powerful way, and that doesn't seem to be something deserving of guilt. I have my own narrative about how I found Adam, and about what he offered me right when I needed it most, which I won't go into here. But one of the main things he taught me about was a particular knack for carefree happiness in himself and in his own innocent indulgences, and I think that's a lesson that we all learned well, and put to good use again and again on this board. Add to that the expansive powers of witnessing excellence of any sort (and Adam offers plenty), and this stanning can be a pretty rewarding experience.

But of course there's more to it than just Adam and our feelings about/for him, and that "more" is another big player in my rationalizing arguments, lol. I couldn't begin to catalogue everything I've learned over the last four years following this man. About pop music. About alt. music. About social media. About the role of the internet. About gay culture. About singing. About the entertainment business. About L.A. About fashion. About twitter. About kale. About Finland. About halloween. About Kiev and Amsterdam and Kansas City and Toronto and Cape Town and Wroclaw (and how to pronounce it) and Queen and David Bowie and glam rock and electronic dance music and dub-step and and and and and. I've just been like a sponge. It reminds me of junior high, when I was a quiet, shy, sheltered little girl still very much of my parents' home, and my desk in social studies was next to this gorgeous goth girl's desk who had a life full of adult challenges and dramas and who talked incessantly the whole hour to another goth friend on the other side of her and I just eavesdropped, absorbing every exciting detail, loving every minute of this glimpse into a world different from my own. It (and school in general) expanded my horizons immeasurably, and so has this experience. I love that I know a bit about WeHo culture now even though I've never been to West Hollywood. I'm a bit of a geek, and the classroom is probably my most natural habitat--it's nice to have been able to go back school.

And perhaps the most valuable lesson of stanning Adam was taught in a global classroom. What I mean is, there are people on this board from literally every corner of the globe (well, okay, it would be literal if the globe had corners, leave me alone ). And we all love the same shit about him. We're all moved by the same shit (or most of us, sorry, I still can't get into Underneath ;D perhaps because I have a bonsai soul). We all find the same shit funny. A laughing twitter meme begun in Ohio is perfected in Indonesia. A certain Serbian with a sarcastic streak cracks my shit up on a daily basis. It's really a pretty beautiful thing to see.

All of which, of course, is nearly impossible to explain to my nearest and dearest without sounding like an absolute nutter. I mean, superficially its all pretty out of character for me. And I retain some justifiable shame at the thought that I know the name of a pop-star's boyfriend's Finnish family's dog. I'm not sure I could ever look Adam squarely in the eyes if I were lucky enough to meet him, and we know how he hates that, lol. But if I can explain it, at least partly, to myself, it makes this whole odd obsession sit a little easier on my conscience. I know it still fills some spaces it really should not fill, and I am wary of that, and trying to make certain choices in my personal/professional life to minimize that, and perhaps lurking a little more as a result. I've set certain rules for myself that to my relief I find it quite easy to follow: never let Adam-stanning prevent me from doing something else enjoyable with friends and family. If there's some radio interview or concert or TV appearance happening at a time that conflicts with other plans, take a deep breath and relax in the knowledge that the ninjas have my back (this is how I was able to survive missing the EMAs). Don't take Adam with me on vacations unless a quick check-in is costless. Get work-related tasks done before slipping into the rabbit-hole. Minimize the amount of time I spend with Adam when the hubby is at home and offering real-life company. Etc. And when a quick look into Adam's world offers easy happiness, human warmth, and a little magic, then go for it--there's no harm in it at all.

Oh, wow, this is why I do the radio silence thing. Once I start gabbing it's impossible to shut me up. Sorry, folks. #ItsKay'sFault
:redface:

kay, what an interesting topic you raised. I also agree with mahailia that Adam is very much a modern-day prophet or shaman ... easy to want to follow, hard to explain to others as mwp wrote eloquently. (waves to mwp!)

I had a few thoughts about it, first of all about time. It seems to me that time is probably the thing that sets apart a stan from a fan. You have to invest enough to time to fall down the rabbit hole, so to speak. And with sites like Atop, you can stan in a supportive environment, surrounded by others with similar feelings.

I think what we are really talking about it is what happens when private interests come under public scrutiny. Being a stan is a disparaged cultural practice. We're all aware of the negative stereotypes -- being a super fan is crazy, embarrassing, takes time away from, well:

America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I'd better get right down to the job.
It's true I don't want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I'm nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
-- Allen Ginsberg, America

We all want to be socially acceptable. I think it's hard not to internalize the devalued status of fandom as something less than full blooded.

Now to revisit to the wide world of sports as an analogy ...



So why is it not stigmatized? Hmmmm .... well, it is masculine ... definitely not gay ... women are sex objects (cheerleaders) or killjoys (beer commercials) ... I bet if I went over to a Texas Longhorns message board right now, I wouldn't find folks trying to justify the countless hours spent obsessing about how well or poorly a bunch of 19-year-old guys play football.

I think it is no accident that this site was called Planet Fierce, and then Adamtopia, and within Adamtopia there is a Moon Garden. It represents an alternate reality, a statement of utopian hope about the world that could be, rather than the one that is.

In other words my question is why do we feel the need to justify it at all?