September 14, 2011

One thing’s for certain: Dyslexia is a hibtc. Words are hard enough to understand without having to play a game of mental jumble every time you’re confronted with a line of text. Plus, it’s extra difficult getting the subtext when you’re struggling to get the text – forest for the trees and whatnot. Sometimes the subtext is the most important part … the icing on the cake or maybe the razor inside the apple. Without subtext you wouldn’t have nuance or tone. Those three preceding nouns are fairly vital components to emotional communication, and missing them is missing the full message – maybe the entire message. For instance, take the following sentence: You’re a fucking dick. Taken literally, it’s a fairly straightforward message: You are a penis engaged in the act of intercourse. Simple enough, right? But to most people outside a mental hospital, the real message of that statement is that the object thereof is an insensitive/obnoxious/aggressive person – likely a male in this case. By the way, there is a female version too, but it’s even more incendiary, and unless you’re from Ireland or doing a one-man show on the life and writings of Chaucer, you’d be better served by utilizing the Italian word contessa and simply overemphasizing the first syllable. Unfortunately, that’s one of the many advantages of oration that isn’t available in the two-dimensional worlds of ink on paper or pixels on screen. It’s been said that somewhere between 60% and 90% of communication is nonverbal. That seems accurate. When you start parsing sentences, you find that verbs are pretty rare, all in all. They’re mostly just a jumble of nouns, pronouns, adverbs, and adjectives – the starchy ingredients of a tasteless grammatical stew, so to speak. To get real communication, you have to have the emotional roux provided by subtext. Grammar is so BORing, isn’t it? GAWD. Sadly, the written word will forever be hamstrung by its inability communicate emotion nonverbally. If only there were a grammatical equivalent of John Belushi’s eyebrows, Marilyn Monroe’s upthrust cleavage, or Martin Luther King’s oratory quaver. Yes, you can add an emoticon, but for most people, tacking on an emoticon is like sending a cute kitten picture: It either makes you so weak-kneed with fawning adoration that you forget all communication that preceded it, or it makes you want to choke the living shit out of the sender for mucking up the message with extraneous cutesy bullshit. No. There is no middle ground. Emoticons are best suited for fleeing from ghosts in Pac-Man mazes. Putting a smiley face at the end of a sentence means you haven’t done your fucking job as a writer. J. Considering all of this should at least, in some small way, give you insight into the challenges of dyslexia, even if you continue to be insensitive to its suffers. Sometimes being cute or funny with language only obscures the message and infuriates those who struggle to comprehend it. Fortunately, the guys who put together the Austin Corn Lovers Fiesta recognize this and added a clarifying “F” to the end of their acronym to avoid confusion with the other big music festival happening this weekend. ACLF: Austin Corn Lovers Fiesta. It’s as plain as the nose on your face, and it’s happening Thursday through Sunday at Lovejoys, the Hole in the Wall, Trophy’s, and the Scoot Inn. The lineup is an A-List of bands antithetical to the shoegazer set. It also leans hard toward rockabilly/country with a punk aesthetic, but if you like your music with a heavy dose of hardcore, hell-raising humor, you won’t want to miss this party. Try Friday’s show at the Hole in the Wall. Here’s who’s on the bill: Monkeyshines, Glambilly, Hickoids, Billy Joe Winghead, Poor Dumb Bastards, and the Beaumonts. Pay attention to the name: You really are going to need to love corn and love to party.