This week Mush tackles the big issues of autographs and idols.  To sign or not to sign.  If you have any questions for our mastermind contact her via our REQUEST page.

“The excitement experienced when you get your first autograph is likely to spur you on to collect more and become a hobby that last a lifetime.”
- Lydia Cooper, EZine Journalist

If I’m honest, the following has come about because I was a massive fangirl on the weekend, and I’m trying to reposition myself in the fangirl landscape as being at least a couple of rungs above autograph hunters. I made a zine specifically for Darren Hanlon and gave it to him after an instore gig he did. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Darren Hanlon, but he is this completely charming, intelligent, verbose, quaint musician, with amazing lyrics like “we broke up about a year ago / we split amicably of course / then I heard about your accident / where you fell off that horse. / har, har, har.” My crush on him has been lingering for a good long while, and so I did the Etsy equivalent of drawing a shitty portrait of him (though perhaps drawing a portrait of him is the Etsy equivalent of drawing a shitty portrait him) and made him a zine, personalised for him. He was either touched or slightly unnerved, hard to tell, but as I don’t think it’s going to become “a hobby that lasts a lifetime” I think I deserve a free pass on this one.

So, the quote from (sigh) esteemed EZine author Lydia Cooper. I have never understood why you would need someone’s signature for anything other than identity theft. Where did that even start, the need for someone to sign their name for you? I can maybe understand it with artefacts you might have gathered that relate directly to them – a drum stick being signed or a baseball – but a scrap of paper? An autograph book? What are you going to do with those? Sell them? What is the buyer going to do with them? Sell them again? Is this whole phenomenon just a bizarre economy of scribbles? Does it perhaps throw back to an artist signing their work, declaring it an original, enhancing its worth – because if so…dude, signing the back of a receipt from McDonalds is not enhancing shit. But, Lydia Cooper, considering your other articles includes “Top Ten Tips for Getting Football Autographs” and “Looking After Your Great Lengths Hair Extensions”, I’m going to take your statement with a grain of salt.

I suppose the Hipster version of an autograph is actually sleeping with them. Groupies have been around probably since since the first public performances in Ancient Greece – hanging around the back of the amphitheatre waiting to “peel a grape” for Adonis or Andromeda when they came off the *ahem* proscenium thrust stage (thank you Year 11 Drama). I don’t personally dig on sleeping with people just for the status – even if they did sell out the Hellenic theatre at Epidaurus – but I can’t say I wouldn’t be impressed if you came to me saying you’d done a Kevin McLeod or a Rachel Maddow (Google! Google!). And while you can’t record that in a book there is certainly the probability of a lingering souvenir in your…well…in the lower shelf of your bookcase ifyouknowwhaddimean? So in that way, you’ll always have a little piece of them with you. However in another way, you’ll be a diseased ho-bag, so just get with the zine making all ready!

I think the thing about asking for autographs that sits so poorly with me is the fact that asking someone for it seems too imbued with inequality to feel comfortable.

I had an autograph book myself when I was little, a small red pleather affair with multi-coloured pages. I think there were maybe two autographs in there: Joh Bailey (the hairdresser – my parents made me go up to him while we were on holidays in Queensland, I had no idea who the orange man was that they were pushing me toward. It was quite a frightening hue, I thought he was ill) and one of the titular Girls from Girlfriend (Check out the vid! – incidentally the first concert I ever went to) (also incidentally, ‘titular’ meaning ‘referenced in the title of’, not…well. you know). Perhaps it was that my subjects were totally underwhelming, perhaps it was that the book itself seemed to be from 1963 and felt kinda grimy, perhaps it was my abject shyness, but I became quite averse to the concept of approaching someone who has been on the telly and asking them to sign their name.

It changed for a time when I met Quentin Tarantino at 15, at the height of my wanting to be a Director (though I can barely organise myself to shower and get to work most days, how the hell I imagined I would manage to co-ordinate the artistic and logistic cohesion of hundreds of people remains a mystery) it was – to say the least – very exciting. I got his autograph in a notebook, and I kept that for years. Each time I came across it, however, its merit had diminished significantly. As a memento of That Time I Met Tarantino, it was eventually totally worthless (as opposed to stumbling across Joh Bailey’s autograph – boy howdy! Now that’s a heart racer). The experience itself is a great memory, we discussed films and he told me about when he was my age wanting to be a Director. The scrappy bit of paper with his name on it however meant fuck all. The interaction, the exchange of ideas was the relevant part, not him signing a bit of paper.