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Both sfgoth and our DSL has been down all day long. It's a holiday, I guess.
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Put another way, nothing is true. Everything is permitted. I went to Hubbub this afternoon, the new monthly spoken word event put on by Holy Titclamps publisher Larry-bob. It went pretty well, though no matter how much I edit and tweak the current piece I can never quite get it to flow right. That'll happen, I guess, and I need to move on to a new one anyway. Larry-bob was kind enough to plug kittypr0n (I only really feel comfortable doing so at K'vetch), and he also referred to my tendency to read first at open mics as "taking the bullet." I'm pretty sure that's a compliment. Afterwards, I went by Borderlands to give Wolf a tape, since he's never actually seen the show. (Not many have.) He told me that earlier in the week he'd been out to eat with some friends and was talking about Ripley being on kittypr0n. The waiter overheard and said, "Oh, I've heard about that show!" Bounce bounce bounce goes the meme...
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At the anti-war demonstration today, I saw my new definition of unintentional irony. More pictures can be found in the directory. Estimates of attendance range from a vague "tens of thousands" on the news to 55,000 by the police and 200,000 by the march's organizers. All groups have their biases and their reasons to distort the figures, and in fact there's probably no way to tell for sure, but having been in the middle of it, I'm inclined to believe it was in the six-digit range. Whatever the exact number of people, it was a hell of a lot.
Yet we managed to run into people we knew, including but not limited to Shrike, (e) and Pike.
There was also Lilah, who we briefly
met at SpookyCon—she was part of the Morbid Curiosity reading along with Shrike, and
wound up sitting next to me at House of
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I had a three-hour electro appointment this morning, bringing my total to 229. It's the first time I've been zapped since mid-October. It's really more maintenance and cleanup than anything else these days, as evidenced by the fact that I didn't try to get it done before SpookyCon, though did I shave every day just in case. I went ahead and made another appointment for Monday after next. He cleared my face, though my chest still needs work. Lots of it. Not that anybody else but Maddy and I see it, but still. It's fur where there should be none. We received out first three discs from GreenCine yesterday: Phantasm, Todd Haynes' brilliant Poison, and Open Your Eyes, which was remade by Cameron Crowe as Vanilla Sky. Haven't seen it, and I'm not sure I care to. We watched them and put them back in the mail this morning, and are now eagerly awaiting Brazil, Beavis and Butt-head Do America and Black Sunday (the alliteration is coincidental). This is actually quite fun. Tomorrow we're going to the anti-war demonstration downtown. I've always felt guilty for not having attended any during the (first) Gulf War. The Ex was forbidden to because her parents were afraid that if she was recognized by any of her father's customers, he'd lose business. The truly sad part is, they were probably right. But things are different now. (Though I don't have the foggiest idea if The Ex will be there.)
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Of SpookyCon. Terrifying Turnout! While twice as many people would have been a good thing for financial reasons, I liked the intimacy of SpookyCon, the fact that there wasn't a lot of people (until Saturday night, anyway). I was reminded a lot of ForWord Girls in that respect. It isn't something which happens at Convergence, which is why it won't be a great tragedy if we don't make it to the one this April. (Of course, with my luck, if we don't go there'll be a surprise Throbbing Gristle reunion.) Although I really do hope more people attend SpookyCon 2, so there'll be a SpookyCon 3. Startling Status! Our "professional attendee" status started out as something of a lark; Weaselboy told us to go ahead and pay for regular registration and he'd bump us up to professional, saving us twenty bucks. One of his stated reasons was so we could attend the Saturday night banquet, which was eventually cancelled. I suspect another one of his motivations was to beef up the professional attendee list so it would look, well, like there were more professionals attending. We were more than happy to shemp for him, of course. It made us feel a little more like part of the convention, like we had a bit of cred, and it made us more comfortable giving people flyers for the show. We also gave away some tapes, to Rachael at the registration desk, Maria Alexander, and Reggie Bannister. In the long run we did nothing more than spread the meme a bit, but that's all ever mean to do. "Professional" or not, we weren't there to make money. Besides, not having to be at work, as so many of the other attendees were, took some of the pressure off. Gruesome Guest Cats! Although getting new material is always nice. Borderlands Books has recently acquired a hairless cat named Ripley, and store owner Wolf is is enthusiastic about us taping Ripley for the show. Reggie has also offered to tape his cats for the show. He's a big cat person; indeed, before we even had a chance to give him the tape on the Sunday, he mentioned that he'd seen the flyers around the last few days and had wondered if it was us. Since he lives in Long Beach it's a bit dodgier since we prefer to do the camerawork ourselves, but it's a worth a shot. He's done public access as well, and the thought of having the cats of the star of the Phantasm movies on the show pleases us no end. Deadly Dinner, or Lost Souls Wandering Through Endless Night! There's something about attending a convention which makes you feel like a tourist, even when you're sleeping in your own bed. Though the Holiday Inn was called the Chinatown/Financial District location, it was closer to Chinatown than the Financial District, which is a good thing since the food in the Financial District sucks. Though we hit Lucky Creation twice, we also set out a few times having no idea where we'd end up. On Saturday night Maddy and I went out with Shrike and found ourselves at the House of Nanking, which Maddy first read as "House of Spanking" and as such will always be known to us by that name. We joined another group of conventioneers, including a few with whom Shrike had shared the stage, reading pieces their pieces from Morbid Curiosity, a magazine to which I'm probably going to submit a story. Anyway, it was our best meal of the weekend. When the waiter/owner learned that the three of us were vegetarians, he took our menus away and said he'd take care of us. And did he ever. Gosh, I hope the next Spookycon is at the same hotel so we can eat there again. Incoherent Yet Insidious Insults! At about half past three in the morning after the Friday night party, Maddy and I were waiting for the L-Owl at Market and Kearney when a crackhead started gibbering at us about our respective heights. Turns out I'm "as tall as the buildings." Gee. Great. Thanks for the 411. After a while it was obvious she wasn't going to leave us alone, and she was almost hostile about the way I nodded my head when she spoke (I'm what the touchy-feely types call an "active listener," and evidently she was unaccustomed to it), so we walked across the street and hailed a cab. The fare was the same amount as we'd saved on our registration. Which is, like, ironic or coincidental or something. Blood-curdling Bootlegging! No genre convention is complete without the bootleg video table. (Actually, I'm not sure if that's true of the Creation Conventions anymore. They strike me as being almost too mainstream to allow that sort of thing.) For a very reasonable price I picked up Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Edit 1.2, in which the voices of Jar Jar and the vaguely Asian aliens are garbled and subtitled, and Jar Jar's the dialogue is completely rewritten to make him sound intelligent, though the battle droids still say "Roger Roger." The film's been edited and the pace is considerably tighter, but there's only so much you can do to make up for a weak script. (Maybe it needed Vin Diesel. Anything with Vin Diesel is good. He's a new breed of action star.) And the video collector in me simply had to have it. Malevolent Misspellings! For reasons I don't entirely grasp, the last name on my ID tag was actually a misspelling of Maddy's last name, which she's in the process of changing anyway. Nobody ever actually looked at my name, though, so it's okay. The front side of the tag is black with gray text (spooky!), but the back side is white, so Shrike asked Zombo to draw on hers. Inspired, I asked Ted Naifeh (original artist for Gloomcookie and currently of the Courtney Crumrin series) to sketch me on the back of mine. Although I'm not particularly shy, I would have felt way too presumptuous asking for such a thing if he didn't already know me; Embeth had brought him along the first time I read at Poetry Mission. (He says he's seen Embeth about as much since then as I have which is very seldom.) Embarrassingly, he recognized me on Thursday before I recognized him. Granted, his hair was long and black when we first met and it's is short and crayon-red now, while I look the same as ever. Anyway, he agreed. Enticing Encephalovores! The Zombie Beauty Pageant. What more can be said? Sinister Sabbath! It's fortuitous we went on Sunday, and that we drove. We'd originally planned on not going at all, since it was bound to be anticlimactic and a little sad, as the last days of conventions often are. But we'd been there from the beginning and decided to see it to the end. Besides, we'd wanted to talk to Reggie and a bit more and give him the kittypr0n tape. I'd also hoped to buy a signed picture from Bill Moseley of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Rob Zombie's long-delayed House of 1000 Corpses, but he'd already left. There was a reading and open mic scheduled for that day, but we didn't attend either. We have it on good authority that it's just as well we missed the reading, for it was a story about an m2f tranny whom the writer refers to as "he." (Writers have the freedom to use whatever pronoun they like, just as I have the freedom to neither read nor listen to the story. This writer also insisted on using the male pronoun to refer to Gwen Araujo, and reacted angrily when it was suggested that it would be more respectful to refer to Gwen by her chosen gender, so I don't think I'm jumping to conclusions.) It was prefaced with an explanation as to the pronoun use, going so far as to suggest that it's okay to refer to a tranny by their birth gender until they've had surgery. (There's a bitter temptation to say "Spoken like a typical non-tranny," but that would be unfair to all the non-trannies who do get it, like Maddy or Shrike or Weaselboy or Ted or most all of my friends and family...) The friend who was present says we would have walked out right then and there, and I suspect she's right. And we'd already planned on giving the open mic a miss anyway. I'm all for them having themes; I didn't read at ForWord Girls because I didn't have anything that fit the topics, and I respected the guidelines. But I don't believe in restricting content. In this case, it was "no vampires or Poe," with the following exception: "Humorous parodies of vampires, Poe, or bad gothic poetry is encouraged, if the reader states that it's parody prior to reading." Which is all fine and good, but I want nothing to do with it. Creativity and that sort of elitist exclusivity, in my opinion, don't mix. The real shame is that it meant I couldn't read my haiku:
dancing with bared fangs Unless I called it a parody, of course. And who's to say it isn't? It works for the Eminem apologists, after all. A little later in the day, Maddy heard Lucifer Fulci read, and liked it a lot. I was elsewhere at the time. Drive of Doom! "I live in San Francisco, I have a car and I don't drink." By which I explained to David J. Schow's girlfriend Kerry that, while I wasn't expecting to be recruited to drive them to the Oakland Airport on Sunday, I wasn't actively not expecting it, either. There's always the possibility that I'll be asked to give someone a lift, and I generally don't mind. In this case, I was more than happy to help. As I told them on the drive over, I was hoping that maybe for the next SpookyCon, rather than "Professional" my tag would say "Stuff." Of course, that's only funny if you know that the staff badges said "Stuff," which nobody else in the car did, so the joke hung in the air like a dead fish. Oh well. The truly nervewracking part was remembering exactly how to get to the airport. There were signs, of course, but usually when driving to The Beast I write out the directions ahead of time. But I didn't have that luxury, so I winged (wung?) it, operating from the often vague freeway signs and memory. Except for possibly parking a farther from the terminal than necessary, and a near collision in the parking lot which could have been my fault, I got them there safe and relatively sound. We left the hotel at half past three and I was told they needed to get to the airport by five. Thankfully, the _____ game at the Coliseum Formerly Known As Oakland was still in progress, so the traffic was light and we zipped right past. If it had been before or after the game we would have been screwed, especially since when we got to the airport I was told that their flight as at five. Yikes. So much for the neo-traditional two hour time buffer. I helped them take their stuff (not staff) from the car to the terminal, and stood in line with them for a few minutes before realizing I'd reached the end of my usefulness. David had stepped away for a moment and Kerry suggested I could probably get a little money from him, but I declined. As a guest of the convention they shouldn't have to pay for airport service, and Weaselboy had enough hands to pay without sticking mine in his face as well. (Money is exchanged for goods and services, right? I'm such a lousy capitalist.) Frightening Finale! The sporting event at the Coliseum was still going on when I left the airport, so it didn't take too long to get back to San Francisco. Shrike and Maddy were waiting for me at the hotel, and from there we went to Borderlands for a final gathering. Eventually it was all over and we went home.
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As if we needed further proof of Le Video's decline since Stanley left, it doesn't have any of the Phantasm movies on DVD. (In fairness, they really don't have the room to stock every single movie in existence. But what's fairness got to do with it?) They do have Suspiria and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, at least, and I already own the first Massacre, which made for a nice little marathon. We'd been inspired by the convention, naturally. As for the Phantasm movies, I guess it's time to look into renting DVDs through the mail. I've been putting off joining Netflix for several months now, partially because we simply don't watch all that many movies these days and partially because of their advertising—their pop-up ads are almost as ubiquitous as X-10, and they even advertise on coffee cup holders. That's a bit much for me, really. I also hate the "no late fees" angle. As a once (and probably future) video store employee, that pisses me off. Late fees are not a given; although we don't rent movies all that often, I honestly can't remember the last time I had to pay a late fee. Why? Because I return them on time, and we don't rent movies if I don't know for a fact that I'll be able to do so. It's called accepting a little responsibility for your actions. Grrr. Oh, and they're owned by, or at least share owners with, Suncoast. Icky. So we'll be getting them through GreenCine instead. Our kinda place. Their emphasis is indie and non-mainstream movies, which is all we would have gotten through Netflix anyway. If we simply must see a Harry Potter movie, we can go down to the local video store on Judah and rent it there. And if they had Svankmajer's Alice, we'd get that there, too—I'll always prefer to give my income to small businesses in the real world. But Netflix certainly doesn't need my money, so they're not getting it.
6:53pm So I just signed up for GreenCine. Now I need to work up the courage to cancel the cable. The fact that the rates just went up—as a result of AT&T Broadband's implementation of a clarification recently issued by the FCC regarding franchise fees, so it's for a good cause, I guess—should help. kittypr0n premieres in February on Portland Cable Access. The description of the program on their schedule is the show's (un)official slogan, which we've never been quite brave enough to use ourselves.
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