This past President’s Day weekend has been quite excellent, even though I feel like I stayed completely busy the entire time. I came up on 60 bucks I wasn’t expecting, I got to have some serious catch-up time with an old friend, I had a car to do grocery shopping with because my parents were out of town, I was introduced to many new and friendly people (one of whom was especially awesome), The incredible weather afforded some fantastic motorcycle rides and perhaps best of all there was a literal abundance of local house shows to go to every night.
It was at these house shows that I had the chance to conduct a social experiment that I devised while talking to a good friend last Tuesday. One of the topics of our conversation involved the process in which someone would go about reaching the pinnacle of notoriety within their social circle, to be the King (or Queen) of their scene. Now we both agreed that we could identify these people but neither of us could really explain exactly how they came to hold this title. Honestly these questions will always remain completely unimportant because it really doesn’t matter at all; however I had a lot of fun this weekend observing friends and strangers interactions at the plethora of shows I attended with these thoughts in mind. The following I believe is the most important step.
Name Recognition. You don’t even have to be particularly nice to be a Scene King, it helps, but the most important thing is that everyone knows who you are. My observations support this conclusion based on people’s greeting and goodbyes.
Note: I’m sure (and hope) that this is purely either accidental or unconscious.
The Greeting: The greeting is almost always grandiose and it usually involves a big hug and a loud exchange. “It’s SO good to see you.” Or, “Hey! What’s up Man!” This inadvertently shows everyone around the greeting that the greeter knows someone; and the more people he greets the more people see how many people he knows. Attention is drawn to him and this attention can be used to foster new people to greet, “Oh yeah, I remember you, I saw you at the show last week!”
The Goodbye: The mentality behind “The Greeting” isn’t so bad, it’s the goodbye that bugs me because- there isn’t one. That’s right, the future Scene King says goodbye to no one, one minute they’re at the party and next thing you know they’re gone. This may prompt some to say “Have you seen so-and-so?” or “Do you know when/where/why so-and-so went?” Hence more name recognition.
I hope that if anyone is reading this they know that I’m making these conclusions just for funsies. It’s funny because it’s just may be probable enough to be true and I saw it go down all weekend. The morale of the story is to always say goodbye to people because it’s just plain uncool to do anything else. Also can everyone stop using the descriptors “weird”, “interesting”, and “cool”; because those words don’t tell me anything unless they’re immediately followed by an explanation as to WHY the interaction was weird, WHY that movie/book was interesting, or WHY that person I haven’t met yet is cool. I’m not mad at the people who do this, I more than anything just think its funny, but hasn’t someone ever told you something like “That band was cool, they had a weird sound but it was really interesting” and you still have absolutely no idea what they’re really trying to say.
Just nod your head and agree.
No comments:
Post a Comment