Steampunk Belly Dance Exchange of Ideas

I am re-posting a fascinating exchange of ideas about whether there can or cannot be true "Steampunk Belly Dance" or any other dance style or music for that matter.  
Each comment below was written in response to the article titled:

Not So Steampunk Belly Dance

by Jasmine June Cabanaw

posted February 26, 2011

published in an online Belly Dance Journal called Gilded Serpent

  Each comment is labeled at the end with the name of the contributor of the comment along with the link to my own response followed by a link to the original article.  The article itself comes last in what I am presenting to you as I think the dialogue about the topic is more important than the inflammatory (and probably unintentional) choice of wording in the original article that was published in an online Belly Dance Journal called Gilded Serpent.  Take a look and try to keep an open mind to all sides of this discussion.  I selected the comments that I thought were most worth reading, but there are many more under the original article.

 thanks,
Ramon
 *********************************************************
All comments previously copied to this site were removed per insistence of the editor of the Gilded Serpent online magazine Lynette Harris as she pointed out, quite correctly, that neither the authors of the comments nor the magazine/e-zine where they were posted gave permission to re-post them.  I advised that my oversight was due to an urgent desire to soothe and put out the firestorm of resentment toward the author Ms. Cabinaw and the magazine Gilded Serpent that a link-share on facebook  had set off.  As pressing the share button marked facebook, (done by a number of people in my own community-though I was not one of them) which is all that was required to start this firestorm, is not considered "Stealing" information, and that no content from the article, other than a brief quote of a few lines (it was impossible not to take it totally out of context with less and would thus do more harm than good) ever occurred regarding the article, I believe the editor may be over reacting a bit in sending me an e-mail suggessting I am "stealing content", but I agree that the comments about the article (the calmest and most well spoken ones) that I copied to clarify and resolve the conflict, should be deleted from re-posting to my personal blog site.

What actually caused the original problem was the posting of the original article by Ms. Cabinaw on the Gilded Serpent site which used phrasing, apparently unintentionally, that was very insulting to another allied community, namely the Steampunk sub-culture.  Reviewing content of articles for such possible problems prior to posting them is the venue of the magazine editor.  I was simply trying to suppress a problem that others created which appeared to be causing a very destructive rift between the belly dance community and sub-culture, which I dearly love (and the magazine which appears to be a good one) and my own community of "Steampunks".  My influence was needed to put a stop to it before it got out of hand, so I acted, albeit a little rashly in copying some of the better written comments (from the comment portion only) without consent.  They are now deleted from my personal blog site and remain so.  Any interested in reading them should go to the original article site on Gilded Serpent.

Thanks,

Ramon Fagan

For my own response to this article and discussion and for a link to the original article that started the controversy (at the end of my response-sorry, but the unexplained version of the original makes some of our community so angry that they might stop thinking with an open mind and simply see red after reading it, so I put it at the end of my own carefully considered response-): see below

http://artofsteampunk.blogspot.com/2011/03/response-to-article-stating-that-belly.html