Conventions, Science Fiction, and Me…

One of the two remaining science fiction conventions in the Detroit area was this past weekend.  ConFusion, the younger of the two, had its thirty-ninth iteration; the new con committee, volunteers all (as true fannish conventions are), decided to forego one-day memberships – good from midnight to midnight on one of the three days of the convention (Friday, Saturday, or Sunday).  This seemed to be a big mistake to the old-timers in the area, but they weren’t consulted.

They also moved from the hotel in Troy they had been using for the past eight or ten years (the exact number escapes me) to another down in Dearborn.  Again, this seemed to be a mistake to the experienced conrunners, but again, they weren’t consulted.

This is, unfortunately, the way things go with fannish conventions… every new con committee insists on reinventing the square wheel.

I have been a fan long enough to both shrug at these occurrences, and to wish that they didn’t make the same mistakes the last six committees have.

I have “pubbed my ish”, as they say… several editions of my fanzines scopus:3007 and Lightning Round are available on efanzines.com.  I have been active in con committees off and on since 1987, including working on Worldcons (the World Science Fiction Convention, the annual gathering of fans from around the world).  I have been involved in costuming,  bickering about whether a Worldcon bid should be made for Detroit (our last successful bid was for 1959), and many other fannish discussion gatherings.  My wife Megan and I have become slightly involved with steampunk (I have pictures from the 2012 World Steam Expo, where we were vendors), and have listened intently to “filkers” (science fiction folk singers, whose name came from a typo in a program book back in the day).

I look with pride at my autographed copy of Warhoon 28 (the omnibus collection of Walt Willis’s fannish writings, published in bound mimeograph form by Richard Bergeron), value my friendships with such luminaries as Mike Glicksohn (Fan Guest of Honor at the first Aussiecon), Fred Pohl (who should need little introduction), and George R. R. Martin (whose acquaintance I owe to both Mike Glicksohn and my wife Megan).

But the “traditional” fannish values of yore seem to matter little to the generation currently running things… General cons, where everything is on the agenda, is falling victim to specialized cons, such as “steampunk”, costuming, gaming, media, and even a couple of cons honoring the “old school” fanzines of yore.

This Balkanization of fandom may just lead to its eventual demise, but I hope not.

A Shot In The Dark…

Let’s begin at the (putative) beginning…

Since getting out of university this past May, I have been trying to motivate myself to write something I think is worth shooting, and shoot something I think is worth showing.

As you may infer from the previous statement, those attempts have proven to be less than fruitful.  It’s been four months, and I’m not happy about this.

I have images of wonderful scenes flitting through my consciousness, but they aren’t really amenable to being knit together into a coherent whole.  I have characters developing in the “stewpot” on my mental “back burner”, but no situations they’re suitable for.  And I have situations that would fuel a gripping, suspenseful movie, but no characters other than one-and-a-half-dimensional placeholders to work with.

‘Tis a puzzlement, to be sure.

Did my time at university sap my creative “juice”?  Did being forced to write their way render me unable to write my way?  Or is there another explanation I’m just not seeing?

Stay tuned… the adventure continues.

Is It Just Me?

This being Sunday, our normal routine is to read the paper, watch our favorite Sunday morning program (CBS Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood), eat a leisurely breakfast, get the trash out of the house for Monday collection, and generally ruminate about the week gone by, and the plan for the week to come.

(Such plans, as you may have guessed, rarely survive first contact with reality.  Such is the way things go…)

Yesterday, we were one of a group of vendors at a comic, toy, and collectibles show not that far from us.  The sales were lackluster, but we made good contacts and had interesting conversations with people, and that makes up for quite a bit.  We all agreed that the events in Aurora on Friday cast us (as people “out of the mainstream”) in a bad light.

We wear costumes.  For the most part, we’re not interested in “real” things, like sports, cars, and girls/boys.  We aim for Man to reach the Moon once more, to move on to Mars, and perhaps then, to the stars themselves.

And they laugh at us, call us “geeks”, “nerds”, “losers”, and the like.  The mainstreamers, the “norms”, as My Beautiful Wife called them, hold someone who can throw or catch or hit a ball in higher esteem than most politicians.

Is it just me, or is the priority system of society bass-ackwards from how it should be? The intelligent, the imaginative, the ones who will, more often than not, formulate, or develop, or write the code for, or design what our future will look like, more than likely be the ones who were ostracized or laughed at as a “geek”, a “nerd”, a “loser”, or a “misfit”.  The jocks, or their toadies, the “jock-sniffers”, will quite often be the frustrated, helpless-feeling middle managers, mired in the muck of corporate life, hating where they are, but unable or unwilling to  strike out on their own to try something they want to do.

I feel sad, and angry, and helpless, and wanting to do something… anything… to bring this madness to an end.  I want to make someone see as I see… feel as I feel… so they can know at least a small part of what I know.

Words can be so inadequate… and moving pictures, the same.  But, absent telepathy, we have no better ways to do it.

So we just keep on muddling through…

What We Have Here…

…is failure to connect the brain-dots.

I have not been doing much creative work of late, because of school.  I have about two weeks left, and things are moving toward (concept alert) The Great Mongolian Clusterf**k Of All Time.  (Or at least that’s how it feels at times.)

I decline to say bad things about the instructors I have, or have had, until I have safely gotten that piece of paper in my hands, but there will be much to say later.

I have difficulty following the comics I want to on the Web, purely from a time standpoint.  I have, between routine and necessary home maintenance chores, errands, and trying to pass miracles on an almost-daily basis, precious little time to do things for my wife, or for me, or for the two of us.  (I still haven’t gotten to see The Artist on the big screen yet.)  My wife’s car is turning into a junior-grade hangar queen, and mine is acting like a thoroughly discombobulated beater car.

I have friends who have apparently suffered with medical issues dealing with cognition, the concerns of trying to find space for my wife to do her art in advance of a “steampunk” convention we’re selling at on Memorial Day weekend while not overcrowding other storage areas or rooms in the house, trying to monitor my blood sugar so I don’t crash or freak (the joys of low-level Type II Diabetes), and editing footage from our team’s days of shooting while trying to juggle live chainsaws to get the last two scenes in the can… Well, I’m sure you get the picture.

This is not a life for the faint of heart, or the sensitive of stomach.

This is not the life I signed up for, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s what I’ve got, so it’s basically “soldier, shut up and soldier”.

Cheers!

Weekend R & R

For the two of us, in most years, January means ConFusion.  This science fiction convention, a joint venture between the Ann Arbor Science Fiction Association (AASFA) and the Stilyagi Air Corps, has been held for over thirty years now, most recently in the Troy Marriott hotel, on Big Beaver Road (also known as 16 Mile Road) just east of Interstate 75.

We hadn’t been for a couple of years, because of the issues we’d been going through with Megan’s mom dying, the brothers and stepbrothers causing different problems, and others in our lives becoming leading contenders for the Richard Cranium Awards.

With these issues (somewhat) resolved, we went to this year’s convention, named “Epic Confusion”, hoping just to have a reasonably good time.

We did.

We saw people we hadn’t seen in a couple of years, saw the widow of our dear friend Mike Glicksohn (if you know Mike, you’re the poorer for his death; if you didn’t know him, you’re the poorer for not having met him), and discussed the way things are going, have gone, and may go in future.

We also saw new and different stuff that we thought was cool, and would be good for costuming uses.  (Trust me, this is never far away from the top of our consciousness.)

It’s good to hang with people who understand you, and whom you understand, every so often.  Unfortunately, the other large convention here in the Detroit area, ConClave, is having hotel problems, and will be taking a one-year hiatus, according to the convention committee.  The thing is, science fiction fandom has a notoriously short memory, and a con that skips a year may not be able to regain their past momentum.

The absence of ConClave would leave only Penguicon (a science-fiction convention/Linux user group gathering), Youmacon (a dedicated anime and manga convention – Japanese comics and animated cartoon movies), the World Steam Expo (a convention for those who try to make Victorian and Edwardian science fiction), and Motor City Comic Con (dedicated to the entire spectrum of comic art, from mainstream comic books, to “graphic novels”, to webcomics) as companions to ConFusion as a gathering point for people whose interests run outside the everyday.

Personally, I think this would be a shame, but things do change, and it would be foolish not to recognize that.