BayCon: Let Us End Tomatoes, Part I
...whereby our hero experiences an evening at the San Francisco Bay Area Regional Science Fiction and Fantasy Convention, also known as BayCon, which their website describes as "one of the five largest regional annual science fiction and fantasy conventions in the United States...since 1982."
I hadn't really expected to ever attend BayCon, but my friend Tycho (whom I'd met at a different convention years before) was a coordinator, and he, Alex and Max, had two suites at the hotel. I told him I really didn't have a desire to come to the convention, but I'd join him he Saturday night for the post-con bacchanalia.
Alex and Robin picked me up and we arrived at the hotel well after the vendor and art rooms closed. Vendors weren't on my intinerary; I'm a laissez-faire conventioneer. Since I moved to California in 1993, I've been to six or so conventions, but my presence was largely social, a chance to visit and party with friends. I've never bid on an art auction, or attended a lecture on animal totem theory. I'm not opposed to fandom obsession, I'm just not that into it.
BayCon's focus is much broader than other local furry and anime cons. It's an open swap meet for the diverse and overlapping Sci-Fi and fantasy fandoms, a huge umbrella that stretches from Middle Earth to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and all local stops in between. There are merchants from every dimension, sector, and parallel universe imaginable.
The second floor suites were joined all together to form an ad-hoc party floor where each room was a lounge decorated in an individual theme. On one side, all the party rooms opened up to a promenade that ran the length of the hotel. Revelers went room to room and spilled out onto the promenade, which resembled a cross between Deep Space Nine and the Mos Eisley space sport. I wondered if George Lucas would have found it interesting that all those Klingons far outnumbered the few Jedi. I was kind of hoping one of the Klingons would find a Jedi and start some shit ("I find your lack of balls disturbing!", "Anakin Skywalker...now he would have made a good Klingon warrior!"), but alas.
The Klingons have mellowed in the sweet, quiet peace of the Organian Treaty. Their old contrary, dour, prickliness has given way to a hard-drinking, stein-clinking, "K'plakhing" celebratory mood that evokes a hybrid of Hells Angels, Charlie Daniels, and the Pirates of the Caribbean. Klingons don't converse so much as roar robust declarations in quasi-formal, contraction-free grammar with enunciated consonants. They laugh loudly and drink and sing and boisterously slap each other's backs in jocular abandon. Some wore false Klingon teeth, and I overheard one rumble, "It's not easy to smoke with teeth like these."
While each con has a unique character, there are similarities that run through them all and are reliable as tax day. One begins to appreciate what a bitch of a time Counselor Troi had if the Enterprise was anything like this. These conventions are social touchstones for an international diaspora of creative, imaginative people that generally live just outside the mainstream. Still others have never seen the mainstream, let alone fished in it. And every year, this extended social family of black sheep fill up a big concrete box far away from home, and they simmer there for four days. A quarter century's worth of interlaced personal histories play the role of "hot spots" in a burned building: undetectable but lying in wait, ready to flash as randomly as a Whack-A-Mole.
It was pretty easy to differentiate between those who were there for a stress-free good time and those who were there because they mean it. In a way it felt like a Robert Altman movie filled with various eccentric characters, labyrinthine layers of plot, overlapping dialog, and underlying implied dynamics. The maintenance of this elaborate, invisible doily of ego, social custom, personal grudges, traditions, gossip, virtual fiefdoms, and untested assumptions make the real paper logistics seem as complex as an ATM withdrawal.
Now, as you can imagine, I love situations like these, and good deal of my night was spent listening to those around me. I met some extremely interesting people, and even officiated my first good deed as a minister of the Universal Life Church. :-) But more on that in a bit.
Late in the evening, a stranger pointed out that my trashy-fabulous ensemble of t-shirt, jeans, Hawaiian shirt, and aviator sunglasses, made herself and a few others think I'd come dressed as Hunter S. Thompson. For me, it came out of nowhere. I hadn't intended to evoke the late Doc, I'm only a casual reader and we look nothing alike. I didn't make a conscious connection in the mirror based on a Hawaiian shirt and aviators.
The direct words she used, "Dude, you're Hunter Thompson at this convention" rattled me. I literally didn't know what to say. I'd been there all night doing my watchful thing, and I saw the resemblance immediately in widescreen context. I was one of those moments when a capital-T Truth comes into light, the cycles of humanity find a brief focus. I was both elated and a little terrified. I've always felt my lot in life is that of a slightly detached, yet emtionally connected, observer - somebody who records and contextualizes not from above, but from just over here. It's where I'm comfortable and most happy.
And there I was. I walked through a living, breathing sci-fi/fantasy hallucination at the Santa Clara Doubletree, with its garish carpet and weird lighting sconces, I felt exactly what I'd imagine Thompson felt like all those years ago in Las Vegas, covering another convention at another hotel, and Thompson finally clicked. I've decided must read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the others all the way through, for once. There must be some insight somewhere on this weird job description and toolkit that he and I used to share on this planet. And maybe some clues to avoiding the despair that eventually claimed him.
More on BayCon tomorrow.
I hadn't really expected to ever attend BayCon, but my friend Tycho (whom I'd met at a different convention years before) was a coordinator, and he, Alex and Max, had two suites at the hotel. I told him I really didn't have a desire to come to the convention, but I'd join him he Saturday night for the post-con bacchanalia.
Alex and Robin picked me up and we arrived at the hotel well after the vendor and art rooms closed. Vendors weren't on my intinerary; I'm a laissez-faire conventioneer. Since I moved to California in 1993, I've been to six or so conventions, but my presence was largely social, a chance to visit and party with friends. I've never bid on an art auction, or attended a lecture on animal totem theory. I'm not opposed to fandom obsession, I'm just not that into it.
BayCon's focus is much broader than other local furry and anime cons. It's an open swap meet for the diverse and overlapping Sci-Fi and fantasy fandoms, a huge umbrella that stretches from Middle Earth to The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and all local stops in between. There are merchants from every dimension, sector, and parallel universe imaginable.
The second floor suites were joined all together to form an ad-hoc party floor where each room was a lounge decorated in an individual theme. On one side, all the party rooms opened up to a promenade that ran the length of the hotel. Revelers went room to room and spilled out onto the promenade, which resembled a cross between Deep Space Nine and the Mos Eisley space sport. I wondered if George Lucas would have found it interesting that all those Klingons far outnumbered the few Jedi. I was kind of hoping one of the Klingons would find a Jedi and start some shit ("I find your lack of balls disturbing!", "Anakin Skywalker...now he would have made a good Klingon warrior!"), but alas.
The Klingons have mellowed in the sweet, quiet peace of the Organian Treaty. Their old contrary, dour, prickliness has given way to a hard-drinking, stein-clinking, "K'plakhing" celebratory mood that evokes a hybrid of Hells Angels, Charlie Daniels, and the Pirates of the Caribbean. Klingons don't converse so much as roar robust declarations in quasi-formal, contraction-free grammar with enunciated consonants. They laugh loudly and drink and sing and boisterously slap each other's backs in jocular abandon. Some wore false Klingon teeth, and I overheard one rumble, "It's not easy to smoke with teeth like these."
While each con has a unique character, there are similarities that run through them all and are reliable as tax day. One begins to appreciate what a bitch of a time Counselor Troi had if the Enterprise was anything like this. These conventions are social touchstones for an international diaspora of creative, imaginative people that generally live just outside the mainstream. Still others have never seen the mainstream, let alone fished in it. And every year, this extended social family of black sheep fill up a big concrete box far away from home, and they simmer there for four days. A quarter century's worth of interlaced personal histories play the role of "hot spots" in a burned building: undetectable but lying in wait, ready to flash as randomly as a Whack-A-Mole.
It was pretty easy to differentiate between those who were there for a stress-free good time and those who were there because they mean it. In a way it felt like a Robert Altman movie filled with various eccentric characters, labyrinthine layers of plot, overlapping dialog, and underlying implied dynamics. The maintenance of this elaborate, invisible doily of ego, social custom, personal grudges, traditions, gossip, virtual fiefdoms, and untested assumptions make the real paper logistics seem as complex as an ATM withdrawal.
Now, as you can imagine, I love situations like these, and good deal of my night was spent listening to those around me. I met some extremely interesting people, and even officiated my first good deed as a minister of the Universal Life Church. :-) But more on that in a bit.
Late in the evening, a stranger pointed out that my trashy-fabulous ensemble of t-shirt, jeans, Hawaiian shirt, and aviator sunglasses, made herself and a few others think I'd come dressed as Hunter S. Thompson. For me, it came out of nowhere. I hadn't intended to evoke the late Doc, I'm only a casual reader and we look nothing alike. I didn't make a conscious connection in the mirror based on a Hawaiian shirt and aviators.
The direct words she used, "Dude, you're Hunter Thompson at this convention" rattled me. I literally didn't know what to say. I'd been there all night doing my watchful thing, and I saw the resemblance immediately in widescreen context. I was one of those moments when a capital-T Truth comes into light, the cycles of humanity find a brief focus. I was both elated and a little terrified. I've always felt my lot in life is that of a slightly detached, yet emtionally connected, observer - somebody who records and contextualizes not from above, but from just over here. It's where I'm comfortable and most happy.
And there I was. I walked through a living, breathing sci-fi/fantasy hallucination at the Santa Clara Doubletree, with its garish carpet and weird lighting sconces, I felt exactly what I'd imagine Thompson felt like all those years ago in Las Vegas, covering another convention at another hotel, and Thompson finally clicked. I've decided must read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the others all the way through, for once. There must be some insight somewhere on this weird job description and toolkit that he and I used to share on this planet. And maybe some clues to avoiding the despair that eventually claimed him.
More on BayCon tomorrow.
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