Deutschsland has Gotta Die

Because of the crazy UN debauchery going on, boohoome, my morningly trip to work has been disrupted.
I work on 42nd, and the bus dropped me off at 49th. MY LIFE IS SO TERRIBLE.
As I was walking the 7 blocks, through a throng of cops and official-looking starchsuits, I heard chanting up ahead of me. It was a rhythmic call-and-response chant:

CROWD: Get China out of Tibet!
ONE IMPASSIONED GUY: GET CHIN-A OUT OF TIBET!
CROWD: Stop the torture in Tibet!
ONE IMPASSIONED GUY: STOP THE TORTCH-A IN TIBET!

My first thought was, "I should really research what's going on in Tibet".
My second thought was, "This could make a really good Atari Teenage Riot song."

The above has been my political blog.

...of Cons Past

I found this post from January '04 in my old IRC blog, about Ainsley and I trying to go to a Fangoria con.
It is a Found Post:

Last weekend Ainsley and I went to the Chiller Theatre Fangoria con. I hadn't been to a convention since I was like 12, when I went to a wrestling superexpo and met Sting. We drove there from her house in Jersey City, in her '69 butter yellow Plymouth Barracuda (with flower-bedecked roof). I tried to figure out if being in the car made me feel cool, and decided it would feel cooler writing about it. Somehow we got lost after we got to the Meadowlands exit, and then finally once we got there, I realized that it probably wasn't being held on the racetrack or in the clubhouse, and I was an id. So we looked for the Meadowlands Sheraton, and somehow getting in there is incredibly difficult. We could see the hotel, towering above the clouds, but couldn't get into the parking lot. We went down the NJ Transit employees-only road (trespassers shot on sight), and could see the parking lot right across the culvert, with nothing separating us from "Return to Sleepaway Camp: The Panel" but 10 feet and a chain-link fence. The hands on the watch in my head crept slowly towards 4PM, the time of the panel. I had already missed seeing such celebrities as Selma Blair and Ron Perlman, not to mention Kane Hodder.

"Jump the fence," I whispered, trying to muster some sort of Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest inspiration.*

"What the shit are you talking about?"

"Jump. the fence," I repeated, my resolve strengthening, now channeling some Thema and Louise action.

A shadow darkened her face. "You asked for it, you got it," she replied, bloodying her lip with determination, her black moon boot pressing pedal to metal. "Don't say I never did anything for you in this lifetime."

So we flew. Oh, we flew like a ... an amnesiac baby swan separated from its family, raised by bald eagles, whose memory is finally restored after a little help from his newfound friends. Like a wizard in a hot air balloon powered by the dreams of children in whom idealism has yet to be crushed.

Uh, for reals we drove around for like another half an hour looking for the road into the hotel parking lot, and missed everything good. Undaunted, we paid $15 to get in, only to go into the dealers' room. There was some Women of Friday the 13th thing going on too, but I didn't care about that. Realizing that I'm poor, and had just paid $15 to get in, plus way too much for a sports bar pizza, I just bought a couple of videos: "Witchcraft IV:The Virgin Heart" (in this fourth installment of the WITCHCRAFT erotic horror series, rock stars sell their souls to the devil in exchange for fame and fortune. Warlock/attorney Will Spanner's (Charles Solomon) only hope of conquering the soul-stealing madness is to use his own black magic powers and recruit the help of a supernaturally sensuous stripper (Julie Strain)) and "Monster on the Campus", starring Troy Donahue (A college professor acquires a newly discovered specimen of a prehistoric fish. While examining the find he is accidentally exposed to its blood, turning him into a murderous Neanderthal, and evoution runs backwards). Evolution runs backwards.

I also purchased some new Garbage Pail Kids. They suck ass. There's 4 pieces of some green slime gum (individually wrapped, not just rotting in the package, the way it should be), 2 sticker cards, and one foil card. And of couse they're no longer allowed to look like Cabbage Patch Kids, so they just look like stupid overgrown babies standing in toilets. Much like...my ex-boyfriend! Haha, thanks, you've been great.

We met some interesting guys, I guess. Bald on top, long on sides guy was selling his own movies, and asked us if we'd like to be in his next one. "What's the name of your production company?" He replied with something like, "American Film Company Productions USA Ltd. Incorporated". This made us feel really comfortable, so we gave him our addresses and told him to contact us, in person if need be, when he needed actors for his next film. "No nudity!" he stressed, balding.

And actually, well... no one was really that interesting. It sounds like I should have some hilarious stories about seedy David Cronenberg-obsessed weirdos, but I really don't.

Then I went home.

Yay, life!


*I'm not saying that Jack Nicholson actually said this. Nor Susan S. nor Geena D. Just that I was thinking of them. OK? Thanks.

MegaMegaMicroDork

I'm back from DragonCon in Atlanta. (OK, I've been back for days but this gives it a more contemporary feel). For those of you who don't know, DragonCon (www.dragoncon.org) is one of the biggest conventions (sci-fi, collector, comics, obsessive about any form of media) in the country. The schmancyish hotels - the Hyatt, Marriott, and basically all of downtown Atlanta-are overrun with costumed norks and dweerds to the nth degree. A place where you can play Magic:The Gathering in a ballroom at 3AM. A dorkotronic utopia where Levar Burton sits at a table all day long, smiling and waving, waving at YOU, beseeching you to come over and pose for a picture with him.

I'm not one of those people that feels the need to dwell on my own dorkiness, wear it as a badge in some sort of defiance to try to exonerate it. Because I realize that everyone is some form of dork. Whether it be about something more generally socially acceptable or the stereotypically nerdy things like D&D. And I am around the kinds of people that are into that stuff anyway.

That being said, a lot of these people were dorky in the more blatant ways. Not because of what they liked or how much they liked it, but more because of their non-endearingly painful social awkwardness and desperation. But at the same time, it was so great to see people unapologetically being themselves-even though an alarming number of times that "self" was a half-naked StormTrooper variant.

Some highlights:

- Our hotel room got COBRA-ed! Yes, LARPing was in full effect. Live Action Role Playing, GI Joe-style. A red and white sticker on our door late Saturday night... we were now living in enemy territory. Luckily, we were only forced to exist under this despotic rule for about 6 or 7 hours, when we got GI Joe-d.

- A light saber battle in the hotel lobby, complete with grunts and rolling on the floor. Re-enactment or original battle choreography? Not confirmed.

-Searching for one of the famed DragonCon parties in the Hyatt private rooms. Where were these fabled Vulcan orgies*? Finally, we pass a room enticingly jambed open, a pin-up girl taped to the front door and a sign saying something like, "I'm a big slut hehe!" (no, it wasn't that, but I swear it had the word slut in it). When we peeked inside at a crafty angle we saw that the whole room, walls and floors, was strewn with similar pin-up postcards, and Christmas lights. After a long, tiresome "Dare me to go inside?" session, one of our party charged the door and busted in. We waited with bated etc. He was there for about 15 seconds. "Well? What was in there? Writhing aliens?" Pause. "It was just... 5 guys... sitting cross-legged in a circle on the floor drinking beer. They said hi and asked if I wanted to sit down. I didn't." Oh you 5 Guys, you! You and your Hopeful Retro Soft Porn postcards! You are adorable.

*I didn't want to participate in the Vulcan thing. I don't even watch Star Trek.