I read the first three books of  George R. R. Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire” in 2002.  I was 17 and sped around in a red Mustang listening to System of a Down. Livejournal was still relevant, Usenet was for more than file sharing and fantasy was not yet cool.  It was a different time.

Coming off of a Robert Jordan kick, Martin was a refreshing shock.  SoIaF was a cynical, un-pastoral fantasy novel where politicking had consequence and characters weren’t spared grisly fates by virtue of their nobility. I clamped down on that hook. Martin created the rare fiction world where nothing was taboo, anything was permissible.  That sort of existential tone was my teenage scene.

I remember telling my friends:  “This is the good shit. This Martin guy, he keeps it real. ” I described Game of Thrones as “the most goddamned gangster fantasy on the planet.”  I grew a beard and hung out in snowstorms so I could be a cool guy like Jon Snow or Ned Stark or any one of those grim warriors.

Despite my adulterous love with the books, though, I never picked up Feast for Crows. Rather, I “picked it up” in that I held it in my hands and flipped through it in the book store but I returned it to the shelf with no regrets. I was turned off by the lack of Jon, Tyrion and Dany and more importantly, thoroughly irritated by the obscurity of their replacements. I decided to procrastinate reading AFFC until the next book came out – that way, I might not be so disappointed.

I didn’t expect it would take six years.  I completely forgot that I was a Song of Ice and Fire fan until the HBO Game of Thrones show became a goddamn zeitgeist and everyone and their mother — or at least, my mother – chattered and buzzed about it all over Facebook.  It was definitely time for a re-read, so I listened to Roy Dotrice’s excellent audiobook renditions of the first three books.

This week, I ended up at the point I was dreading.  I had to get Feast for Crows out of the way.  My distaste for the book remerged from memory fresher than most disaffections.  I finished it today and can say that my snap judgment was unequivocally correct.  Feast for Crows is by far the weakest book in the series.

AFFC features Martin giving in to the worst temptation of Robert Jordan; a trait I lovingly refer to as a “gluttony of subplots.” Too many extra plot artifacts and you obscure the flavor of the story as a whole. Once I have to start Googling character names to make sure I actually remember who they are and what they’re doing – especially when I’ve just read the previous three books straight through – something has gone horribly wrong in the composition process. The book evokes Jordan so thoroughly that the man even appears in the text of the damn book (In the prologue, a maester-in-training offhandedly references the idea of time as a wheel as a theory put forth by “Archmaester Rigney.”  Robert Jordan’s real name is James Rigney.) The ennui I felt reading about the squabbling of scullion girls in Wheel of Time is exactly the same emotion I felt when I had the politics of the Ironborn and the merry adventures of Brienne thrust on me for hundreds of pages.

What do we get from reading about the Ironborn and their Kingsmoot? We learn that they’re a fractious bunch. That’s already been established. We learn that they’re mean pirates. That, too, is known. We meet Crow’s Eye and learn pieces of his agenda. He’s, admittedly, pretty damn compelling but barely gets the screen time his role would merit because we’re too busy seeing the rest of his clan squabbling about pirate codes. The entire Kingsmoot story could have been knocked out in three chapters with one POV character – and if it focused on Crow’s Eye, it could have been interesting.

Brienne, meanwhile, sets off on a quest the viewer knows from the outset can’t be fulfilled. Her adventures provide room for a little exposition and redundant world-building, but that’s it. Yes, her travels helped set the tone for the novel, (The kingdoms are tired and bleeding from the war! People are dying and starving!) but honestly, the title did that alone. Showing more of it doesn’t make the tone any starker, it just makes for dreary reading. Her quest has no momentum until the last chapters which, while excellent, could have stood alone.

Frankly, I don’t remember much of the Dorne subplot. Which is pretty bad considering I finished the book yesterday. They might even be of grave importance to the overall plot but I couldn’t tell – they just come off as superfluous.

I wanted to like Sansa’s storyline because I’ve really been intrigued by the psychological direction her character’s taken on this re-read — seriously, the girl might now be a bigger sociopath than Arya — but honestly, I wasn’t quite riveted by the volume of page space wasted establishing that yes, her cousin is a very sickly, very special epileptic child. We get it. I’m sure it’ll be sad when he dies, too.  Can someone please give him the last few drops of sweetsleep so he we can move on?  There’s a lot of set-up but little payoff.

There are plenty of good notes for the book – Jaime’s evolution remains interesting. It’s rare we see characters beyond redemption portrayed so sympathetically without getting defanged. Cirsei’s downward spiral was simultaenously hilarious, poignant and interesting. The increased role of the Church was both unexpected and fits well with the medieval European-style setting. Arya’s training fits the direction of her character perfectly – although a man might have wished more might have been done with it. Taking Samwell to the Citadel was a brilliant stroke. I was disappointed in A Storm of Swords when he became a POV character because, frankly, he’s spent way too long as a one-note joke, but it’s nice to see he’s both growing and has been moved to a setting where he can flourish. There’s just not enough meat in this book. I’m glad I didn’t read it when it was released – I might never have pre-ordered Dance of Dragons had I done so. The last third of the book was great — when Martin moves his plots, he does so masterfully.  I just wish he didn’t spend so much time treading water.

A man sees the calender.  A man knows many — himself included — are anxiously awaiting George R. R. Martin’s Dances with Dragon.

When Amazon.de shipped a few German copy early, I was bemused to see how eager fans were.  Everybody wanted a copy, a scan or at least a spoiler. 4Chan took to the streets giving away real and fictitious plot points to outrage the fans who “prefer to remain unspoiled.”   Martin kirked out on his blog demanding heads on spikes.  I do feel sympathetic for his outrage, but who’s head goes on a spike — the guy at Amazon who put the book in a box, or the guy who threw the box in the truck? In the majority of cases, though, I don’t think spoilers hurt sales and they certainly don’t ruin a reading experience.  Plot’s a skeleton; the story is the more substantial bloody meat.

Seriously, only click through if you want  to be irrevocably spoiled: http://oeffingerfreidenker.blogspot.com/2011/07/buchbesprechung-george-r-r-martin-dance.html

 

This is an article from the Washington Post way back in 2000.  Katsucon 2000 was the first anime con I ever went to, so it’s exciting to read such a scathing review of it.

I generally love Hank Stuever’s work, but this piece totally hurt my feelings.  Nonetheless, re-reading it now makes me glow with nostalgia!

What Would Godzilla Say?
At the Japanese Animation Festival, a Brave New World Of Hot Pink and Cool Kids

By Hank Stuever
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 14, 2000; Page C01

In the modern commerce of a vinylized culture, it’s hard to know for certain whether we tell the Japanese what to do or they tell us. Lately the dialogue has collapsed giddily into a driving, sonic beat and the war whoops of mutant, cartoon samurai. It snuggles up to us with names like Pikachu.

Even if you’re “Pokemon”-literate, even if you may have rooted for Godzilla to crush Mothra or cheered that dubbed-English dreamboat Speed Racer, you realize how out of it you’ve suddenly become, standing here in the middle of something called Katsucon, the area’s sixth annual Japanese animation festival, which drew 4,000 or so young and old Japanophiles to the Crystal City Hyatt Regency on Saturday afternoon. It’s a combination of giant-eyed heroes and junk worship–a duct-taped, electronic lifestyle of thunderous noise and fantasy.

Watch as a shapely teenage girl–in a skimpy, nautical-inspired miniskirt and furry rabbit ears worn on her head of long pink hair–goes absolutely bonkers for a shyish, acne-dotted young man of perhaps 21, who draws science fiction comic books in the Japanese style.

She pushes others aside, reaching into her bright blue, plastic, teeny-weeny Princess Mononoke knapsack for a teeny-weeny digital camera and takes his picture. He gives her a picture of a half-naked superheroine who has a tiger’s tail. You realize that the “Star Trek” convention–with all its nerdy, boys-only traditions and mores–has been jettisoned like space debris. Katsucon is a plastic bullet train to yet another brave, new world.

And, oh, how we’ve been left behind.

For the uninitiated, Japanese “anime” and “manga” (translation: movie and comic book) art are apparently tops with the neo-nerds right this very minute, after years of waiting on the fringe of the sci-fi/fantasy universe.

Ranging from the “Pokemon” critters to the plainly pornographic, the Japanese animation scene feels like a new century has arrived (plunked down in the remnants of a concrete utopia; kudos on the selection of a Crystal City location for Katsucon, where, underground, we can all be karate-chopping secret agents of some pan-Asian-mafia-teenage-rock-band-mutant syndicate).

This time, the scene is not entirely dominated by hypergeeks. Two remarkable differences between this and conventions of other genres are that there are at least as many girls here as guys, and there is more racial and ethnic diversity.

The anime kids seem cool, self-assured, uninhibited–cooler than the whole line of thirty-something Yodas queued up last summer for the latest “Star Wars” installment. What a bunch of granddads that crowd was. There may be some social marginalization going on here, like always, and these kids may yet entertain thoughts of blowing up the school. But they seem so much more together, more hip, more social than the dudes you played Dungeons & Dragons with, once. (Okay, twice.) If you were 16 again, you’d want to date the girls dressed like Sailor Moon, stomping around in knee-high boots with five-inch platform heels. You’d go mad for the samurai boy in the amputated bathrobe wearing the business end of a broom on his head and waving a sword around. Oh, you would.

(And who is Sailor Moon, anyway? She’s a Japanese cartoon character with her own popular TV show. She sings horrible pop songs. In strict anime proportion, she has boobs the size of volleyballs and eyeballs the size of compact discs.)

You’re lost, you’re hopelessly lost in a crowd of cuteness and valor and candy, where simplicity is inherent but noise is everywhere and the favorite color is hot pink–so very Japan.

On the top floor of the hotel’s convention rooms, they are playing souped-up video and computer games, violent enough to waste a thousand school board members. On the mid-level, in the exhibition hall, they are snacking on Japanese junk food, gummy candy treats and horseradish-roasted green peas (the package says: “A Happy Present From the Earth”), and they are especially chowing down on the ubiquitous Pocky, crisp biscuit sticks dipped in chocolate. (“Will draw for Pocky,” reads a sign in front of one of about 40 anime and manga artists, mostly Americans, sitting at tables in the downstairs lobby, churning out sketch after sketch of their characters.)

In various other rooms, fans watch their favorite anime cartoons (“Akazukin Cha-Cha,” “Combustible Campus Guardress,” “Sakura Wars” and, hmmm, “Those Who Hunt Elves”). In still other rooms, panelists are convened to address the state of American manga; workshops are offered on how to draw manga. After an hour of looking at the many, many thousands of Japanese comic books and TV shows, it seems as if anyone could draw them. It all looks stunningly the same to the untrained eye.

In fact, most people at the convention admit to drawing a little (or a lot) of their own characters. “I’m an unpublished artist,” explains one teenage girl in a kimono. “Fan art” takes up one side of the exhibition hall, and the ensuing auctions for peer artwork, says Katsucon organizer Keith Mayfield, “can get pretty ugly.”

One can only imagine all those kids locked up in suburban bedrooms, techno music blaring, perfecting their technique with marker pens. How exactly to draw a naked tiger girl? How to give her the perfect machine gun? How about warrior boys–their spiky, wild hair coming out of ninja head-wraps–with bunny ears? This is a long way from doodling Spider-Man, yet it seems more reductive, more simplistic, almost like fashion-school drawings. How hard can it be, after all, to draw it? Like . . . (sketch, sketch, sketch) . . . this?

There. Sort of. Now, throw in some explosions and lots of overblown drama–animes are quite sad and poetic, almost pessimistic. These cartoon characters are not afraid to die and are frequently stabbed to death; those who are left behind shed noble, subtitled tears.

Farther into the exhibition hall, the Katsucon atmosphere shows its odder proclivities: One dealer sells sharpened, ornate samurai swords for $150 to $250 each, as well as smaller daggers and weaponish whatnot.

Some tables of manga and anime are strictly marked “for adults only,” though plenty of teens manage sneak peeks. (One shrink-wrapped cartoon video’s synopsis reads like this: “Moemi, Reina and Mitsugu decide to document their first sex exploration on video.” And at the artists’ tables, two men jokingly debate the best way to render bodily fluids in motion.) It’s sex and the Orient all over again–for what is more Japanese, it seems, than the whispers and geisha giggles of that Asian prudishness? The shadows behind the paper screen: silhouettes projecting the seedy fantasies of GI Joe! There is and always will be a chemistry between the American computer dork and his fantasy Asian bride.

But let us return to that Hello, Kitty sweetness of it all. The lollipops in the shapes of cellular phones. The furry, faunaesque teenagers of Katsucon, girls and boys running around wearing kitten noses and bunny ears. This may be leading right back to some sublime naughtiness, but as the evening progresses all eyes turn to something called “cosplay,” short for “costume play.”

A couple thousand Katsucon attendees sit in line for two hours to guarantee themselves a seat for cosplay, which turns out to be a bunch of skits performed by elaborately costumed anime and manga fans, who were herded into a greenroom and assigned numbers. The Japanese animation scene seems to place the highest priority on participation: Draw it yourself, act it out, become the cartoon.

Kids dressed in papier-mache lobster claws wait next to all the Sailor Moon wannabes. Lots of karate moves are practiced. A girl in a kimono with a miniature merry-go-round bobby-pinned to her head sits in a red plastic car. A man named Tex, wearing Terminator sunglasses, barks orders to the cosplayers.

Outside, at the pay phones, a cardboard robot argues with his father on the other end of the line, begging to stay out beyond curfew. “But Dad,” he squeals, something a warrior robot should never say.

© Copyright 2000 The Washington Post Company

The motto of the weekend was: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.”

We announced it among ourselves ahead of time. We were going to an anime convention — one of those great affairs where fans dress up and wreck havoc inside a hotel for a weekend — but the truth of the matter was that we were looking for something entirely abstract: the world beyond limits.

I don’t know exactly from where that quote originates; it has been ascribed to Nietzsche, to William Blake, to Aleister Crowley, Peter Carroll, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, myself, Hassan bin Sabbah, Omar Khayaam. It is a counter-culture proverb that has been passed through visionary discontents for generations.

We spent the night before the convention doing “re-’con’-assaince.” This is to say, we bought two handles of Skyy Vodka, a bottle of blackberry brandy, a jug of Admiral Nelson’s spiced rum, around 50 multicolored ‘shooters’, bottles of Southern Comfort and Crown Royal, and a jug of Merlot Arbor Mist. Do not worry, dear reader. Between the six of us, no drop went to waste. After the convention, it would take approximately forty-eight hours to digest that much liquor.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. When the trip began, there were only five of us. We resolved to only refer to each other by our fake names; this would allow us to create new identities, lower our inhibitions and act free of the restraints that we typically placed on ourselves day-to-day. It was there I took the name Lord Andrew J. Andrews II. Alongside me were Wolfgang von Slayer, Zora and K. We were to meet up with my faithful companion from Catholic School, Ulysses, at the convention.

We left the Appalachian Mountains at 7 AM on Friday morning. However, we did not immediately go to the convention. After a three hour drive through a blizzard, we stopped off at Lakeforest Mall to see the optometrist. Wolfgang, who was already half-deaf and half-mad, had also been half-blind for two weeks, as his eye glasses were broken on one side and his contacts were loss in he mail. He went in to take an eye-exam; meanwhile K. and Zora went book shopping and I went to the bar and started pounding down Kamikazes. I was feeling pretty good at this point. Eventually, Wolfgang got his eyes and we headed off. Somewhere, the con had already begun. I was not there, but I already had my swerve on.

Ulysses called me up on his Bluetooth. “Where you all at, man?” He asked.
“We are currently leaving the optometrist.” I said with grave efficiency. “We will rendezvous in half an hour.”
“I can’t hear you –” He said. “Bad reception, no signal.”
“End transmission.” I said, and snapped the phone shut with authority.

We took the train to D.C. We followed the throng of giggling, costumed fans with weird hair, oversized props and nerdy slouches to the hotel. It was obvious that we were in the right place.

“Where are you at, man?” Ulysses called me again.
“We are approaching the hotel. Rendezvous in the lobby at this very moment!” I yelled in the voice I learned in military school long ago. With a sudden brisk Soviet accident, I barked: “End transmission.”

The fans looked at us approvingly. I flashed a smile. It’s entirely possible they were actually gawking at my bright red shirt, red pants, long black trenchcoat, the tow chain around my neck and the leash that connected it to my wrist, but I was convinced they took the outfit for granted; they were merely amused by the strange way I spoke.

We met up with Ulysses in the lobby and checked into our room. It was huge, with one single bed, a large table, a set of dresser drawers, a nice armchair and even a balcony. We were impressed. K. and Zora went to register for the convention itself; me, Wolfgang, and Ulysses continued to scope out the room. We unloaded the liquor, distributed the cups and began to knock back a few of the shooters. Then we killed the first bottle of vodka. I handed out packs of cheap cigarettes to three. We left the room, broke into the janitor’s closet and raided about ten extra ashtrays. We positioned them around the hallway. Then we began to smoke.

“Hey,” a pink-haired girl asked, poking her head out of her room. “We can smoke out here?”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “It’s a smoking floor, right?” She blinked. Then she came out to smoke. Our first act at the convention was to authorize smoking in the hallway — this rule remained in effect all weekend. It was actually very pleasant to stand outside the hotel room and smoke with all our floormates. All sorts of convention staff and hotel security would see us doing this later on in the weekend, but by then it was der norm; nobody said anything to us, nobody questioned us. We said it was okay to smoke in the hallway, and that was that. And to our credit, not one of us ever decided it was a good idea to put our cigarettes out in the carpet.

Meanwhile, on other floors, there were costumed hellions defacing the walls with magic markers. They, too, were breaking all the rules, but they lacked our refinement.

Wolfgang and I registered for the convention under our fake names. We claimed we came from the Bohemian Grove. Ulysses had already registered himself, but he kept us company in the hour long line anyway. Actually, this is not entirely true. He flitted between us and three other parties he was associated with who were all standing at different points in the reg line.

At one point, Ulysses’s eyes lit up. He looked at me and said: “Hey, let’s call J. and demand he meet us here.” J. was a good, albeit slightly estranged friend of ours from Catholic school. Like everyone who went to that school, it seemed, he took after me, in dress, posture, mannerisms. That’s not exactly true; rather, we all took after each other in that place, one unique personality with variations in temperament. The unified anime nerd theory.
“J.” Ulysses touched his Bluetooth. The phone began to ring.

He handed his headset to me. “Hello?” I boomed, feeling that authoritarian sense flooding into me again as I handled the wireless headset. I felt like a Starfleet captain. “J.?” I asked. “This is Lord Andrew J. Andrews II. I demand you come to Katsucon immediately. Call back when you arrive. We will direct you from there.” I smiled. “End transmission.”

As we went through the line, a girl approached. She was was wearing a leash, too, attached to a female friend whose face I never bothered to examine. Before I could open my mouth to use whatever clever pick-up line I had in store (‘Nice leash!’), she grabbed my own chain and tried to pull me away. I had been in that line for over an hour, however. I would not budge. A strange sadness passed through her eyes — as if she saw a missed opportunity floating away. She had cat’s eye contacts and fake fangs. Those are the only details about her I remember.

We were registered. We had badges. J. was on his way. We had lost K. and Zora. They spent most of the convention passed out or doing their own thing. They were staying in our room, but we saw them entirely infrequently. Occasionally, they drank with us, and once Zora did make-up for all the boys while K. took pictures. She did an excellent job.

What did we do next? Ulysses, true to his proud Hispanic heritage (his words, not mine!), suggested we go out to the Chipotle and dine on some fine burritos and drink Corona. J. met us there; he was carrying a Dasani water bottle filled with Smirnoff vodka. We all drank more Corona and made a toast to a world without limits and, as per my custom, the end of the ordinary world.

This is where my memory becomes a little fuzzy. I presume we went back to the room and drank more. Why were we drinking so much? To dissolve even the possibility of inhibitions. They were nothing more than restraints. The convention was a collection of extraordinary sights and people. To honor them properly, we needed enough alcohol to make us as strange as the things we were seeing. I recall downing a large quantity of vodka, thrusting my finger into the air and shouting, “Cogito ergo… crunk!”

We were not the only ones who shared this mindset. It turned out that our neighbors were the seediest sort of persons: fucked up 18 year-olds. When we first encountered them, they announced to us that they planned on drinking heavily. We cheered them on. “We’re already ahead of ya, kids.” Someone said. Was it me? Was it Ulysses, Wolfgang, J.? Which of us was the ‘bad influence’?

A significant amount of time passed. J. ordered three pizzas and a two-liter bottle of Coca-Cola from the nearby Domino’s Pizza. He paid for it with credit card. I decided J. was too drunk to drive home, so he would have to stay with us for the weekend. The pizza came an hour and a half later. They got the order wrong, so they only delivered one pizza. They promised us they would bring the rest by for free, so we shrugged and wandered around for awhile.

Eventually, the convention-hosted ‘rave’ started up. You could hear the terrible resonance from the too-loud speakers from several floors above; you could see the parade of nerds with synthetic neon dreadlocks, day-glo furry boots and every variety of glowsticks in their hands heading towards the awful sounds. We danced for around twenty minutes before an omnipresent lethargia began to kick in. Most of the fans were just hovering in the corners of the room, stationary and boring. There was barely a vibe in the room. The kids just weren’t feeling it, I wasn’t feeling it. While my friends’ danced, I slipped through the crowd and ducked out an exit.

I found K. outside the door in a slight panic. The pizza man had come to the room with the rest of our order, but he was demanding cash. I found the pizza man and yelled at him. I was definitively drunk at that point, but I was justified in my anger. How could one restaurant fuck up so many times? I called his manager and yelled at him, too. The manager explained how busy they all were, so I told him I didn’t want excuses, I wanted an apology for ‘fucking our order up.’ At this point, he apologized ten times. I took the free pizza back to the room.

On the way, the neighbors explained to me that they had been guzzling down cough syrup since I had last talked to them, and they were getting ‘pretty wrecked.’ I shook my head, went inside and set the pizzas down. I didn’t approve of those kids, not by a long shot, but who was I to judge them? If getting retarded fucked-up made them happy, then I guess I had no choice but to be cool with that, provided they left me alone. I drank quite a bit more, then I went back to the dance. The pizza that had been such a headache, such a ‘big deal’, went uneaten. By the time I would see it next, it was cold, hardened and ugly.

The rest of the night was a blur of pulsing bass, blurring chemical lights, strobes and trailing LEDS. K., Zora, J. and I all slept in the bed that night. At some point, J. got off and Wolfgang climbed on. That was the only night most of us slept. The next morning, all of the men awoke to find themselves covered in bite marks. I woke up to find myself with my hair in pigtails; I was wearing a red chamois overtop a fishnet shirt and stockings. Everyone tells me I looked quite pretty. I have no idea where the chamois came from.

Saturday morning, I wore eyeliner, lipstick, a black Utilikilt, fishnet stockings, a black dress shirt and a beautiful red silk tie decorated with playing cards. I woke early and traversed the convention. Some pink-haired woman woman in the Artist Alley was lamenting that some brutish child had stolen one of her hand-made messenger bags. I promised to find the thief and bring his head to her in a burlap sack. I never saw the bag, but the incident resonates strongly with me, even in hindsight. I always thought the community of con-kids was a close-knit one, bonded by love and trust. I’ve since learned better, but at the time it seemed a terrible disgrace to steal a craftsman’s labor of love.

I went back to the room and emptied half a bottle of wine into my gullet. Everyone was still asleep; Wolfgang had taken his hearing aids out, so there was no hope of waking him. I went to stand in line for the merchant’s hall. While standing in line, I amused myself by beginning to write this account in my pocket Moleskine journal. These conventions were important to me; the aesthetic of freaks united was heartwarming, a unique and special star of hope radiating through my otherwise ordinary world. I had met so many of the most important people in my life in these places, had so many firsts. My first drink, my first cigarette, my first kiss, my first girlfriend, my first real community, all came from the convention circuit. I desperately wanted to find a way to convey why it was that anime cons were so infused with meaning to me, but I was far too drunk.

I heard kids talking about energy drinks about thirty-feet behind me. “Did you say No Fear?!” I turned and yelled at them. I knew I was probably being too loud, boisterous, aggressive, but that was the norm here. Everything else was so loud that the only way to communicate was to shout.

“Yes!” A girl in a schoolgirl outfit said.

“I love No Fear brand energy drink.” I exclaimed. “Where do you purchase them around here?”

“Um, you can have one of mine, if you want.” The girl said. She handed me a drink; I gave her and all of her friends hugs. This is the camaraderie I spoke of.

There was a lot of crazy shit in the merchant’s room. I was particularly amused by a stand that sold Cthulu hats, knapsacks, plush animals and fanny packs. There was a lot of weird things and weird people. I loved it.

I came back to the room and found Wolfgang had gone mad with gorilla tape. Cups were taped to the walls and dresser. The men were wearing Gorilla Tape epaulets. Wolfgang had taped a miniature Cthulu plush animal to the shoulder of his cloak. It was pure madness. When I examined the photos of the event at a later date, it appeared that our room was being invaded by ‘flying cups.’ Ever since then, it has been a convention tradition to Gorilla tape cups to the wall; the ‘flying cup’ has followed us wherever we go.

We went out to the hall to smoke cigarette. Then we went inside the room to smoke cigarettes. Then we sat out on our balcony to pose for Myspace pictures and watch the snow fall. Then we went back out in the hall for more cigarettes. Nothing was happening; we were smoking away the time while we waited for our energy lives to rise. There would be chaos, but it was not yet time.

I broke from the group and walked around the hotel again. You will notice I do this quite frequently. The truth is, I’m a loner by nature, but more importantly, I wanted to see everything and everyone who walked through the building so that I might find the heart of that social organism, so that I could know every face and facet of the event, so that I could better understand the chaotic spirit that hung in the air.

During my travels I encountered the cat-eyed girl again. Once more, she tugged at my leash. “Didn’t I attack you yesterday?” She asked.

“Yes.” I responded. She told me her name — I forgot it immediately, as she must have mine. I invited her outside for a cigarette.

“I would love a cigarette.” She said glumly. “But my friends would kill me if I smoke.”

“Oh.” I dropped the subject.

“Will you be at the rave tonight?” She asked with a flirtatious smile in her eyes.

“Of course.” I grinned, penetrating her with eye contact. Then, the crowd around us swelled like a curtain closing, and when it was dispersed, she was gone. Cat’s eyes and vampire teeth, a freak on a leash. I cannot remember anything more about this person. This strange nostalgia pangs me inexpressibly — a chance meeting deprived of its potential by the whims of space and time. Everything was true and nothing was permitted, but the future in which I would ever know this person was flatly denied. This is typical in this world, and matters little in any grand scheme. One’s path intersects with some for a lifetime and others for an instant. The meetings of an instant rarely have more meaning than being a glimpse of the possible.

I encountered Wolfgang again at this point. We were faced with a dilemma: In order to attend the masquerade, we would have to wait in a massive line for three hours, just to get terrible seats in the back. We decided this would be completely unsatisfactory — Wolfgang would be completely out his element. He would have been completely unable to hear anything or even read the lips of the performers. J. and Ulysses were in line already, but there were seven or eight hundred people in front of them. (Or, as 4chan would have us put it, over 9000.)

After an hour or so of ruminating these circumstances, we decided to work some magick. We found someone in charge of special operations and Wolfgang explained his disability to them. We told them it would be a reasonable accommodation if we could sit somewhere close to the speakers and close enough to the stage that he could read the performer’s lips.

Bingo. We were told to meet the guy a half an hour later so we could be seated. We went out for burritos and Corona and came back forty-five minutes later, food still in hand. The volunteer opened up the cattle gates and parted the crowd for us so we could get to our seats at the front and center. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, they had to treat us like Moses.

While the plebeians were filing into the auditorium slowly and painfully, we were seated up with press. Convention photographers and journalists were to our right and left as we happily ate our burritos. We, too, were Very Important People. As we waited, we had entertainment — a cute girl wearing a short skirt, fishnets and a low-cut top who claimed her job was to “stand around and look cute for the photographers.” At one point, she apologized for interrupting our view of the stage. “We don’t mind.” Wolfgang said. She blushed.

At intermission, there was a type of raffle in which Operations drew out badge numbers and awarded prizes. After a round of drawings, Colette, the convention chairperson, announced that our man J. won a special prize. We wondered what he had won; we hoped it was something amazing. He had earned it.

After the show was over, Wolfgang and I stepped out on the terrace for cigarettes. J. and Ulysses were already outside.

“Hey, man.” I smiled. “What did you win?”
“What did you win?” Wolfgang echoed.

“I won my car’s gone.” J. mourned. “My mother flipped out, drove down to the Branch Avenue Metro station and took my car. She’s insane. Like, literally insane. My phone apparently died and she couldn’t get ahold of me, so she called the hotel until she got the con chair on the line. Apparently calling me out in the middle of the ceremony was the only way they could get me to call my mother.”

“Wow.” I blinked. “That’s pretty crazy.” He was 23 years old. When was he going to get out from his mother’s thumb? It was rare to see the real world of families, jobs and responsibilities intrude on the convention utopia, but it had happened. “What do you want to do?” I asked.

“I need a drink.” J. sighed. “Car’s gone, they’re going to give me a ride back home tomorrow. Nothing else to do, right?”

On the way back, we saw five security guards going to our neighbors’ room. We laughed — we figured those kids would get busted eventually. To mourn their fate, and the fate of J.’s car, we polished off the wine and toasted again to the end of the world. When the hallway cleared out, we suddenly found ourselves having a pretty kicking room party, with several cosplay girls, a professional photographer, a few Katsucon staff members, a random Japanese guy who barely spoke English, and two Gothic Lolita models we were acquainted with. The liquor was injured in the event, but continued to flow strongly.

We moved out to the hallway for a cigarette and struck up conversations with several of the people out there. Nobody knew what had happened to our neighbors, but the general consensus was that they had it coming. They were too young, too belligerent, and too focused on getting themselves tore up to know what kind of spectacle they were making of themselves. The legends said those kids were smoking weed, drinking Everclear, downing cough syrup, popping caffeine pills and God knows what else. Nobody quite knew what to make of them — we were all partying too, but we were keeping our wits sharp. We did as we willed, but we harmed none. They, meanwhile, were harming themselves and frustrating us, but more importantly, they were the type who would make the whole convention look bad. People like them were the reasons there exist “dry cons” in some areas — nobody wants to deal with the liability of stupid minors queued up for ambulance rides.

Interesting anecdote about that hallway. There was what appeared to be a beautiful woman sitting next to a potted plant. My crew took an immediate interest in her. I had to pull J. to the side to explain to her that, judging by the slight curvature of her upper arm, ‘she’ was actually a man. They were so engrossed in her that they didn’t notice that she was, in fact, talking about her hormone therapy. Total facepalm there. At Otakon that year, she made herself famous by flashing her enhanced breasts at the line for the 4chan panel and became forever immortalized on the con circuit and Internet as “Line Trap.”

On the elevator ride down, a random girl said we were “awesome” and gave the four of us hugs.
“I’m 14.” She said. We all blinked.
“I’m 18.” I lied.
“17.” Ulysses lied.
“19.” J. lied.
Deaf Wolfgang had barely heard or understood this exchange. “I’m 25.” He said honestly.
The girl smiled at him and asked, “So are you going to the rave tonight?”

J. ordered more pizzas. Domino’s remembered us from the day before and gave us several free two-liters of soda. This saved our lives; we were almost out of mixers. I had been exclusively mixing my Vodka with No Fear energy drink to create a powerful concoction I dubbed “The Fearless Lizard,” but energy drinks were too expensive to restock.

We encountered one of our neighbors outside on the terrace. “What happened?” I asked him. “We saw security in your room.”

“Well,” The boy smirked. He still reeked of alcohol. “My friend was fucked up and told his girlfriend he didn’t love her, that he was using her for sex and that he was going down to the convention to get a new girlfriend that very minute. Then he left. So she crawled into the bathtub, ate a bunch of tranquilizers and some Tylenol PM and sliced her wrists open. Then she called everyone she knew to announce her suicide. Before I even knew what was going on, the police were on their way.”

“Oh, my.” I blinked. Right next to us, as we had been eating, drinking and making merry, some dejected Ophelia’s life had been slipping away. How melodramatic was that? And we missed it, only feet away through the bathroom walls. “Well, everything’s okay now, right?” I asked. I almost managed to feel concerned. “She didn’t actually die?”

“Oh, no.” The guy said. “She’s actually just an overdramatic bitch.”

“Okay.” I shrugged. Since nobody died, Ophelia’s attempted suicide wasn’t real. It was just one more stage show decorating the pattern of events that layered the tapestry of the weekend’s narrative. It was either artful or disturbing. What else could I do? I returned to the room and drank to the spectacle.

We were pretty loaded. We staggered down to the rave and tore the dance floor up. Or rather, we tore ourselves up. Wolfgang blew his elbow and Ulysses blew his knee. My feet were blistered and bleeding. Security saw the two trying to construct a sling for Wolfgang’s arm out of Gorilla tape in the corner. They brought us to Medical, where they tied his arm up in a real sling and did some paperwork. Security offered me a tasty and refreshing Pepsi-Cola while I waited for Wolfgang to be released. Meanwhile, I overheard convention staff discussing an incident in which two boys who matched the description of our neighbors were huffing amyl nitrate in the rave.

At about 4 AM, I went back to the rave. On my way in, the cat-girl passed by with some dull-looking emo boy in kitten-ears and a tail trailing behind her. She looked at me sadly, whispered, “I didn’t see you.” The she disappeared.

There was more dancing.

I went outside the rave to see our neighbors “walking the line” while being observed by two gruff looking police officers. Their story ended with that field sobriety test; whatever trouble they got themselves into from that point on was none of my interest. I staggered away from the convention as it wound down. I was tired but not sleepy. I came back to the room and ran a warm bath. I shed my sweaty fishnets and kilt. It felt good to be alive. I took a bottle of alcohol in with me and took a three hour bath, drinking, smoking, and relaxing in epicurean delight. Somewhere downstairs, the insomniacs were still wandering, in search of one last blip of fun to end their night with. Once upon a time, I had been one of those creatures. I had ridden an escalator with total strangers for two hours; we called ourselves “The Cult of the Escalade.” We were surely going to move up in the world.

The next day’s hangover was a mutual apocalypse.

The crew needed to be scraped off the floor before we began the process of picking every crumb from the carpet, peeling every decoration from the wall, removing each and every scrap of the weekend from the room. Before we closed the room door for the last time, I announced: “This room is dead to me.” And it was. It was immaculate; it was as if we were never there. The space was returned to conventional reality. We checked out of the hotel and separated from J. and Ulysses, then I returned to the mountains.

When I arrived back in Appalachia, I looked into a mirror and realized I looked younger than I had in years. My face had shaped itself to resemble a cartoon character. The pure weirdness had revitalized me. There was something special about that time and place; the world of the convention was some strange other reality, some consensual illusion of total weirdness and freedom. Reflection on those matters is useless; only each pure experience can bring that strange state over me again.

Because there is a God in this world, the next Monday was President’s Day, so I had no class. This was a beautiful thing, because I spent the next 48 hours in bed battling fatigue, flu and a strange delirium. My dorm room would morph into the hotel room I had spent so much time in; when I would slip in and out of consciousness, I would have strange, babbling conversations with people from the convention who were no longer there. As the rappers might say, we had done it big that year.

In retrospective, I would prefer others did not act the way I had that con. In recent years, there have been too many disasters as the result of the strange drinking and partying culture that has always been a part of the convention circuit. One year I had an interesting time talking to a guy at a room party; the next year I find he lifted one of my friend’s wallet and went on to stab someone at another convention. There have been incidents of people vandalizing, well, everything, lighting signs on fire, running screaming through hallways of people sleeping, God knows how many hospitalizations, suicide attempts, overdoses, all sorts of terrible things in the seedy underbelly of the subculture. I am not a part of those things, but as I compose this account, they strike very close to home. The difference between my people and those people is as slim as the difference between my room and the room next door. We behaved with excess but respect, but the example we set may be merely one of excess. The party’s been great so far, but I worry that one day, it, too, might end.

- laja2

Once upon a time, there was a restaurant called the “College Perk.” It was a small little house off of MD Route 1. It was an easy turn to miss; if you didn’t know what you were looking for you might never have known there was a coffee shop there. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful establishment with free Wi-Fi, bottomless coffee and late hours. I have a vivid memory of certain November evenings, watching the sun set on the cafe’s porch while I smoked cigarettes with the other regulars.

It was a “third place,” a home away from home. It was a place where I reunited with old friends and made powerful new ones. The bar operated without drunks, sleaze, violence or other ugliness. The atmosphere had a certain bohemia that Starbucks can only aspire to; reading, writing, political and creative conversation was the norm there There was magnetic poetry in the bathrooms. How cool is that?

An older friend of mine once sat in the cafe for days, painting an image of the back porch with a grand crowd. In those indistinct silhouettes, I could pick out very clearly the shapes and faces of the friends I had come to cherish. Another time I fell asleep in the restaraunt. I was awoken in the morning by the day-shift manager asking me if I wanted any coffee or bagels. Shortly thereafter, my crew and I decided on the spur of the moment to attend an anti-war protest scheduled that day. There’s a Youtube video of Mike Gravel giving a presentation there, and the area’s Obama campaigners used the store as a place to organize and make their preparations.

This is not the sort of community that operates on the plush chairs and concrete porches of Starbucks.

As time went on, the store began to face challenges from the city council and other aspects of local government. Specifically, there were issues with the liquor license, and whether or not the owner of the restaraunt believed the city of College Park had the authority to make him purchase a second liquor license. There was a hearing, and City Hall was flooded with store regulars in silly and colorful costumes, bearing signs reading “Perk Wars,” “If I Wasn’t Drinking at Perk, I’d Be Drinking Alone,” and other slogans. Patrons and employees gave heartfelt, good-humored, angry and even tearful testimony to an increasingly bewildered city council. After the hearing ended, some of us were outside smoking cigarettes with a sympathetic councilman when a congo line of twenty or thirty boisterous drunks paraded stumbling down frat row. We were not those guys.

Legal troubles mounted on the property, however. That July, everything reached a boiling point when a small electrical fire took the store offline. Inspection, licensing, foreclosure, a veritable perfect storm had gathered around the store. Several attempts were made for grand re-openings, but they never happened.

The store is still gone; I have heard the phrase “long, dark night in the wilderness” used in reference to this probably a few more times than is appropriate. On slow weekends, I miss the place in a painful, almost spiritual way. Without having that comfortable, nuetral space to read, write, and rest away from home, I’ve sort of been stuck gravitating from cafe to cafe, bar to bar, club to club, looking for some similar atmosphere or community, but no other place rings true. It boggles me a bit, how a zebra-striped old house with a bar can mean so much to me, but I’m not the only one.

I was thrilled last night to discover that the owners are trying to acquire a new property and trying again. The new plans are audacious, but seem within the realm of possibility. I’ll let them speak for themselves. Please look at http://www.the-perk.com and sign their petition.

EDIT –

I feel compelled to put up a little bit more information about the Perk.

Taken from the Perk in Exile Facebook group, here is a brief history of the College Perk’s downfall:

” A landmark cafe, bar, music venue and social scene, the Perk has been an important part of College Park and the surrounding community since 2004.

* In June 2008 the Perk suffered a small electrical fire which (temporarily) closed the restaurant. As a separate issue, however, and more or less at the same time, the Perk also became the target of an improper foreclosure. Most of the important repairs have since been made, but the restaurant will remain closed until the legal issues surrounding the improper foreclosure are resolved.

* In May 2009, after herculean legal efforts (and five previous eviction attempts), the Perk and its residents temporarily lost the battle for possession of the property. Legal remedies are still being aggressively pursued, but for now the Perk is under the control of a different owner.

* Please do *NOT* visit the Perk at 9078 Baltimore Avenue at this time. It is no longer under our control. For now it is best to avoid the Perk until things are resolved. All gatherings and observances previously scheduled are now being moved to different locations.

* On Monday, October 5 the Perk website was updated with additional news about a possible NEW location for the Perk as well as some additional ways that you can assist. Please visit http://www.the-perk.com to find out how you can help!”

Last November — was it really almost a year ago? — former Perk regular Dean Omanposted a letter about us “Perksters in Exile”

Here is a Youtube video featuring the eviction situation.

If you like Mike Gravel, here is a video of him speaking at the Perk.

Youtube has many videos independent bands playing there as well. This was a wonderful place; it would mean the world to so many people to see it reborn.

Yes, one little cafe can have this much meaning for people. At the moment of writing, the online petition to the M-NCPPC for “New Perk” has 577 signatures. I implore you, dear reader, to give them more. Please. The Perk’s website has a link to the petition. Please sign.

My friend Kristine just finished creating two music videos documenting my crew’s trip down to San Jose for the Fanime convention and then San Francisco for a week:

I apparently can’t embed the San Jose video, so you can get it here.

This is the San Francisco video:  [Drew's note:  Embed link later!]

At the very beginning of the trip, there was a bit of madness. J. and I could only get a ride to the airport around midnight the night before the flight. The flight left around 6 AM. We found ourselves condemned to walk around BWI in those dead, empty hours talking. The regular announcements: “Be vigilant! Be afraid! Fear, fear, fear all foreign people, foreign objects! Look for suspicious things!” had us discussing 1984 and Big Brother, and by the time sleep deprivation set in, we had composed a little ditty set to the tune of the Human League’s “Don’t You Want Me Baby”:

“You were working as an editor at the Ministry of Truth when He met you.
He picked you out, He shook you up and turned you around,
turned you into someone new

Now five years later on, you’ve gotten back on your feet.
Freedom has been so easy for you, but don’t forget
it’s He who put you where you are now and He will put you back down, too.

Don’t, don’t you love Him?
You know He can’t believe it when He hears that you won’t see Him.
Don’t, don’t you love Him?
You know He won’t believe you when you say that you don’t need Him.

Don’t you love Him baby –” and so forth, and so forth.

The point is, being beneath the eyes of so many cameras and guards while simultaneously hearing loudspeaker message after loudspeaker message warning of code oranges, terror, fear, danger, suspicion, etc., brought on the imagery of police states and dystopia. But that’s only natural and entirely tangential to the trip as a whole.

Eventually we met up with the crew and boarded our plane (after being rigorously searched, of course.) I had never flown on an airplane before, so I was a little terrified from what I’d heard on the Internet about the TSA. Somehow, I had it in my head that it was a natural and common occurrence for people to be pulled out of line, questioned by federal agents and receive anal probes. This did not happen, thankfully.

Until this trip, I had never really ventured far from the East Coast before, so I experienced a more significant culture shock than I had expected.

Upon first arriving in San Jose and exiting the airport, the first words I heard from a Left Coaster were, and I quote, “You can’t smoke here.” I had to find a little isolated corner out by the taxi stand before I could light up a cigarette after a very stressful and turbulent airplane ride. I began to grumble about blue states, nanny states, Democrats, arbitrary, authoritarian nonsense, “If only Ron Paul were president,” and everything else libertarians typically grumble about when they dislike a rule. This was a recurring theme throughout the trip. Everything seemed so much more expensive than I’m used to. I heard a rumor that California imposed extra taxes on soda cans and bottles, and my wallet wouldn’t be too surprised to find out that was true.

Honestly, I didn’t find much to be notable about the Fanime convention. The most fun I had was on Friday and Saturday morning when a group of hardcore religious folk came out with signs, telling the fanboys that they would be going to hell. I’m not sure if this was the exact sign or not, but this was remarkably similar to the list of persons they were condemning:

And I have to say, California’s crazy Christians are by miles better than the protesters I’ve seen in D.C. At the Obama inauguration, it was to get from the Metro over to the National Mall, you had to pass a set of nasty, shrill, mean-spirited religious protesters who seemed intent on ruining everyone’s day with vicious hellfire and brimstone crap. And don’t get me started on the sheer nastiness of some of the people who go to the annual March for Life. I’ve nearly gotten into fistfights with some of those guys after they’ve nearly trampled me at Metro stations when I’ve been trying to get to work.

These guys in San Jose, though, I honestly thought they were having a good time. There were only six or seven of these guys, but they probably had fifty or sixty fans screaming at them for being bigots, all the while making incredibly inflammatory, anti-Christian remarks. One young man completely missed the irony of calling the preachers intolerant and psychotic and then making the statement that “Jesus molested little boys.”

Anonymous got in on the action, as did Jesus costumers, which made for a great juxtaposition of ideology and imagery: Jesus standing next to a Pedobear standing next to ranting men with religious signs. Nonetheless, though, the protesters did some epic trolling themselves. I wish there had been a Raptor Jesus there, though. That would have generated “big lulz” from me.

My favorite moment of that scene was when the man with the megaphone picked out a Wiccan goth girl who had been screaming at them for quite some time. “You’ve been out here for over an hour now,” he said. “You wouldn’t be arguing with us if you didn’t feel guilty. Look at you, you’re miserable!” She ran off crying. Eventually, the cops asked them to leave and they did so with minimal complaining.

Seriously, I hate zealots as much as anyone else. But somehow, these guys struck me as a fun and friendly presence at the convention. A lot of other attendees feel like their time was ruined because of them, but really, people like this show up everywhere in D.C., and they seem a -lot- meaner on the East Coast.

Otherwise, I was a little nonplussed by the con. A four day anime convention is a pretty cool idea, and everyone there was chill, full of energy, etc., etc., but that’s about the norm for me. I’ve spent so much of my life at anime conventions that I’m not easily impressed these days. It wasn’t a bad convention, but there was very little about it that stood out to me as special.

There wasn’t really much to do in downtown San Jose. There was a nice curry restaurant and plenty of places to buy liquor, but otherwise, the town seemed enormously dull. Hell, nobody even seemed to jaywalk down that way. Everyone we met on the street was quick to inform us that “San Jose was hell on Earth” and that really, we needed to go to San Francisco. So when the con ended, we took our bags, walked a mile, took a train to another train, took a bus and then walked down to our hotel on Union Square.

There was a rather unfortunate mix-up at our hotel. While the woman from hotline.com informed us that we would be able to bring a maximum of four guests into the hotel (we had six), the woman at the front desk of the hotel said the room had a maximum occupancy of two guests and the reservation was only for two guests. The hotel was laid out in such a way that anyone going in and out of the room had to pass immediately through a three-four foot passage way immediately next to the front desk, too, so for the duration of the San Francisco trip, four of our roommates were essentially sneaking in and out of the room. We had a system organized where we entered and left the hotel in pairs in seven minute intervals and rendezvoused at a Walgreens.

Speaking of Walgreens, is there seriously a need for, quite literally, a Walgreens on every corner in San Francisco? They aren’t even that popular on the East Coast, but in SF, they were literally everywhere. Also, why is it that half the pharmacies in SF don’t sell cigarettes?

Every bus station in San Francisco I visited had an electronic billboard stating that routes would be cut due to California being, well, bankrupt. This is the sad reality of tax-and-spend, but that’s neither here nor there, really. I loved the public transit system there. I find the D.C. Metro wonderful, but the sheer ease of getting around SF by bus, cable car, trolley and subway was absolutely amazing. Our travels went smoothly and cheaply around that city. I have to toss some props out to the taxi drivers, too. I tried to walk or take public transit whenever I could, but the taxi rides I did take when I was out late at night were far, far cheaper than I’m used to, and the drivers were wonderfully friendly to boot.

I’ve heard all the mythology of California and how the vibe of the ’60s had never ended in some places. I probably shouldn’t have been surprised by the prevalence of long-haired, bearded, hard-partying hippies in the area, but I was. I’m generally more comfortable around the flagged freak set. Mohawks, piercings, strange hair colors, bondage pants, beards, boots — these create a visually appealing aesthetic for me, even now, with my hair shorn and beard shaven. It was strange but beautiful to see a place where the counter-culture appeared so normal and integrated into the landscape.

I was really interested in visiting the Haight Ashberry district. Despite having never been alive during the ’60s, I feel a lot of nostalgia for that cross-section in time. The Haight was the cornerstone for a lot of that area, and in a lot of senses, the district is clinging to that history to keep itself alive. It’s weird to see the book Rebel Sell, which I absolutely despised, in action the way it was there. That one street probably had 9 or 10 head shops — is there really that much demand for that many glass pipes? Nostalgia sells, though — the area presents the image and memories of that era of psychadelia and revolution and turns them into a commodity. The dreadlock, homeless kids smoking bongs in the middle of the street, the open-air drug market at “Hippie Hill” — I have the strong impression that those people were all in fact tourist attractions, a necessary nuisance to give the area the aura of subversion it needed to keep the old spirit alive and sell it to visitors. I found that beautiful.

I appreciated the area homeless as well. The clever signs, the dogs, the sense of community and culture they seemed to have resonated strongly with my sympathies. I hate the idea that so many young people would willingly refuse to work in order to panhandle (and after several of them accidentally disclosed that they had homes, I couldn’t help but feel a little defrauded in my expectations), but it seems like they have a better life for themself in that town. There was one homeless man who approached my crew several times in town with jokes, another who did math tricks, another who explained exactly how the bus routes worked and sold city maps, a group who sat outside the American Apparel downstairs so they could “stare at the ass on the sign all day,” and another who allowed people to verbally abuse him for a dollar. I don’t think I’ll ever forget them. D.C. has nice homeless, too, but there are plenty more mean and crazy ones. In general, I’m not use to the homeless being that much fun.

This is another case where I felt like human beings were becoming tourist attractions. San Francisco is famous for their homeless people — the “Why Lie? I need beer” guy is all over the Internet — I’ve seen him on the front page of Digg and Reddit over 9000 times.

Some of the homeless were less than kind, of course, but that’s typical of human beings. I had to call the police on one bum who was harassing a group of two or three homeless women, because things were getting loud, voices were getting violent and the talk was getting to be of beatdowns. On Haight Street, burnt-out, dirty-looking dreadlocked one kid asked to bum a lighter from me for a smoke. I handed one to him, and he immediately hopped on a skateboard and rode off. I caught another set of guys when they were about to try and lift my boy J.’s wallet, but they aborted that mission at the last second and ran off. Another guy I had asked for directions opened his mouth in a nasty, toothless smile and began to offer a bottle of stolen fortified wine and tried to see if we wanted to buy a cell phone from him before the service got cut off.

On our way to a goth night at the DNA Lounge, we met a dude on the bus who asked us where we were from. When I said Washington D.C., he sat back and mused. “I used to be in P.G. County Maryland. Awful place, worst place in the world, corrupt to the brim.” When another group of people heard I was from D.C., the response was, “Oh, so you’re from the Angry Coast.” Way to make me not want to go home, Left Coasters.

I liked the DNA Lounge a lot. Whenever I go out to the goth clubs, I always want a burrito to go with my drink. So imagine my surprise to find a multi-level club with both an absinthe bar and cheap but delicious burritos for sale? Absolutely amazing. The second night I went to at that club was called “Meat.” They played goth rock, grilled up a bunch of meat and let patrons skewer it themselves and eat as much as they wanted for free. That was the best club event ever.

DNA Lounge reminded a lot of D.C’s old club Nation — a huge, counter-culture oriented venue under constant threat of shutdown. Apparently the city of San Francisco’s alcoholic beverage board ruled the club “A disorderly house injurious to the public welfare and morales.” Now, the club uses that as an advertising slogan. It was a wonderful club full of wonderful people — one night, I even got a few of the bouncers to walk me back through the Tenderloin District to get to my hotel late at night.

Another night, coming back from a hip-hop club filled with “bros” and “bras,” my crew and I heard gunshots and screaming. There was a shout of “I think they saw,” but we were gun. We ran until we got to the closest 7-11, where I bought a pack of cigarettes, a No Fear energy drink and a little chunk of Cracker Barrel cheese. We’ve all heard gunshots in D.C. and Baltimore. We know how dangerous cities could be, but in the fog of San Francisco’s glitter and wonder, we had forgotten for a time. That gunshot broke that spell.

Soon, we would take the train back to San Jose and take a plane back to Baltimore. I carried with me a handful of golden dollars I got as change at the train station. I still have them now, gold pieces from our adventure. No reflection for now, but I’d like to return someday.

Yahoo! Geocities is closing down today. I’ve been catching both genuine and ironic, misty-eyed nostalgia for that free hosting provider

I remember my first ever websites were in the /Tokyo/Palace sector of that virtual community. Back in the day, all my favorite websites were hosted on Geocities, and all my friends were there, too. Domains and commercial hosting were frighteningly expensive propositions at the time. I had a fairly nice website set up for me to write my *coughcough* Bishoujo Senshi Sailormoon fanfiction on. Of course, that site’s long since been scrubbed from the Internet. The Wayback Machine doesn’t even hold any records of it — it was the completely non-notable work of a barely-adolescent aspiring to Internet greatness, you know, like all of those other super popular awesome fanfiction writers I was reading at the time.

The transition to Windows 95 destroyed my computer that summer, so I ended up having to update the website from libraries and cybercafes in Rosslyn, VA. Are there even any cybercafes around D.C. anymore? I don’t think there are. A shame, because I had a really great time hanging out, drinking coffee and typing up my obviously super-awesome villain-centric fanfics from public terminals. I remember lovingly coding the HTML into the text at the moment of composition. I remember joining Webrings, promoting my website on Guestbooks, doing everything I could to drive traffic to my sad little website.

One poor bastard wrote on my guestbook that I totally had the best Sailor Moon website on the Internet. I didn’t doubt her sincerity, but even then I felt a sort of condescending pity towards whatever sort of misguided person would think the 11 or 12 year old me was on top of the food chain.

(Of course, it never failed to grind my gears that one of my sixth-grade classmates actually -had- won a slot as one of PC Magazine’s “Best 100 Sites on the Web” awards for his Warcraft site earlier that year.)

I killed my Geocities account around the time of the Yahoo! acquisition and the big boycott that emerged following that. People were terrified of Yahoo! jacking their intellectual property and using their images to promote the site, as the TOS gave them the rights to do. Very quickly, the backlash incentivized Yahoo! to change their TOS, but I always felt uncomfortable using their service after that. I ended up switching over to Tripod and a few other sites over the next few years until one of my friends bought his own domain and hosting, at which point I eagerly joined the unfettered world of the big-boy Web.

I wonder if the web will ever have another outlet for creativity like Geocities. We see some of the tropes of bad Geocities sites on Myspace (MP3s auto-playing instead of midis, gaudy backgrounds, animated gifts, animated text, etc.), but vanity pages lack that content that a lot of the Geocities pages had. The image galleries, the story archives — there was a remarkable amount of content on those amateur websites. I wonder if this new media, blog-centric “Web 2.0″ will ever evolve to such a form that people will be creating personal websites again outside of the blog / Myspace aesthetics that are so popular now.

Ye mighty, we can no longer look upon your works. Geocities is gone now. I truly believe the disappearance of this site has the equivalence in Internet history as the fall of Atlantis, Pompeii or Thebes might in real history.

“Come leave your tears: a brief farewell. The beast
With many heads butts me away. ”

- William Shakespeare

Now that both Borders and Barnes and Nobles are offering free Wi-Fi, I no longer find myself quite as alone loitering in these stores. The smells of coffee, cigarette smoke, stale magazines, bored adults and rain-soaked leather are lingering in the air today while I type. I’ve spent so much time in bookstores since my unemployment began. These places are a comfort zone for me.

I’m watching three or four people sunken deep into the leather chairs, books open on their laps while they nap. I’ve napped in here too. Others are texting and Twittering from their phones. I’ve been that guy, too. I’m often the guy who picks up three or four old comics from their rack and a few graphic novels to peruse through. I doubt the store’s management is entirely amused by the sheer amount of freeloading that takes place in the store — once, I was asked very politely by a Borders in D.C. to not break out a pizza I brought in in the middle of the cafe while I read their books and drink my own energy drinks. A reasonable request — I went outside to finish my food and smoke a cigarette before I came back in to read their books.

I will say that I buy a lot of books from Borders over time, but in the short-term, it’s around one in ten Borders visits that the store gets a single dime from me. I’m not sure whether Borders Corporate would be thrilled or irritate to find out that I, like so many others, find their store to be like a home away from home. Obviously, these amenities are there to draw people in to buy books and coffee, but at what point does the store start losing money from their customers making themselves at home?

I can only assume from the design of these stores that yes, I am absolutely welcome here. They wouldn’t place big, comfortable leather chairs right next to the comic book rack if they didn’t want me to read the comics. They wouldn’t make the Wi-Fi free and provide power outlets unless they wanted me to use the Wi-Fi for over two hours (estimated battery life of most laptops). All of this is a good-faith effort to ensure that sometime, I consider grabbing a book or two from them.

Still, I have to wonder if this is just an older, more pretentious version of the way I used to hang out at shopping malls as a teenager to smoke cigarettes and sneer at mainstream culture. Yes, now I’m sitting quietly in a corner, typing or reading, but don’t people have their own houses, their own Internet for this type of thing?

I’ve alluded to the sociological concept of a “third space” in this blog before, a place between work and home that can be treated as a casual social environment for one to associate with the community, or at least “do their thing” in public. Bookstores have been filling this gap for me, ever since The College Perk boarded its doors. There’s something reassuring and meditative about being surrounded by books and coffee. Being in an environment surrounded by data, without the pressure and distractions I get at home from all of the clutter and memories surrounding my own desk gives me a greater sense of ease and concentration.

Is it entirely appropriate for people to spend as much time as I — and others — do inside of a commercial establishment like this? I honestly don’t do. I feel like the establishment is designed for this exact niche, but so are libraries.

This is going to sound painfully callous, but after reading through the new Wheel of Time book, “The Gathering Storm”, I have to say that Brandon Sanderson has done a wonderful job at saving Robert Jordan’s book series from, well, the excesses of Robert Jordan.

This is not to say that I’m glad for Jordan’s death. Like many of his readers, I followed his blog and took the news of his death rather harshly. I started reading the Wheel of Time series when I was in military school. I continued reading the series, even through the points where it became a mess of fourth-tier characters, filler, politicking and, well, scenery porn. I won’t lie; sometime after the fourth book, reading the series was more of a chore than a pleasure. I found myself tempted to skip ahead to get to the chapters featuring the characters and subplots I actually liked. I kept reading because I enjoyed the world, the magic system and the main characters. That and, well, with the amount of foreshadowing and dramatic tension set up early on, I really wanted to see how a lot of those plot threads paid off. Jordan rewarded me for my patience with fifty page long bath sequences, long and eloquent descriptions of dresses and local fashions, and politics between rival factions that read more like a catty knitting circle.

Come to think of it, I think one of the all-woman factions in the books is actually called the Knitting Circle.

Anyway, my point is that somewhere along the lines, Jordan lost his way and got trapped writing verbose baggage and filler. Big things happened in each book, but in general, you could probably cut a thousand pages out of the series and not miss it.

Unashamed, unabashed spoilers will begin here. I’m sorry, but it’s been so long since there’s been more than a chapter or two in one of these books for me to geek out over that I’ve earned the right to toss my spoilers the way Rand and company toss balefire. This is to say: I’m going to drop those spoiler bombs wherever the hell I feel like, and if that makes your whole little world unravel, that’s not my problem. You’ve been warned.

This is how bad it got: While I was waiting for UPS to deliver my copy of The Gathering Storm, I checked up on the Dragonmount website to refresh my memory of what had happened in the previous book. Somehow, I had completely forgotten that Rand Al’Thor’s hand was blown off in his battle with Sermirhage. In fact, I had forgotten that Semirhage had even rolled up at the end of the last book. This was a pretty big event, but in the blur of Jordan’s filler, it had completely slipped my memory.

One of the first things I noticed about TGS was the fact that the prologue didn’t take up a quarter of the total book. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but in recent years, WOT’s prologues have gotten significantly longer and duller over time. Sanderson gives an interesting take on a local farmer, then jumps right into the main plot. Things -happen-. When a military strike is ordered halfway through the book, it actually occurs before the book’s end. It’s amazing that my expectations for this series have gotten to the point where I’m actually impressed by the plot moving forward, but I am.

Instead of debating politics and the weather, casual conversation between characters is now being used to bring each other up to speed or resolve plot points. Yes, it’s a little jarring for Min to, out of nowhere, tell Rand that she thinks that in order to trap the Dark One back in His prison that they have to break the original seals used to trap him in there, but conversations like that put to rest, finally, years and years of speculation on the Internet and ad nauseum hints in the text. The characters are at least somewhat caught up with the reader now, and in the points where they’re not, Sanderson at least makes sure that the reader is aware of just what pieces of information characters know or don’t know. It’s amazing to look at the series and realize that, for example, Rand never knew that Galad had become a Whitecloak, even though he had been one since book five.

This book runs along with a sense of urgency that’s been disparately lacking from the series for over a decade now. The Last Battle is on the horizon, so subplots are getting wrapped up or plain discarded as fast as possible.

There’s a few bits that smack of outside influence, but with interesting results. The revelation of Traveling in previous book, a magical technique that allows characters to teleport themselves anywhere instantaneously, makes for an interesting arms race. The different factions of characters try to disguise or hide the ability from their many different groups of enemies. Each time a new faction learns the ability, the other groups lose the tactical advantage of having it. Meanwhile, it’s used to great effect as a miraculous boon to allow great amounts of plot to be covered in a single leap.

One of the main themes in the Wheel of Time series has been the messianic Rand’s steady decline into madness. As he witnesses the death and tragedy that surround him, he becomes increasingly grimmer, crueler and stoic. He not only “hardens his heart.” He chooses different permutations of increasingly harder substances as the series goes on to symbolize his heart: stone, iron, steel, cuendillar, etc. Meanwhile, every other point-of-view character other than him is constantly commenting about how detached, inhuman, frightening he is, how he’s on the verge of self-destruction, and so forth.

After 11 books, we finally get this conversation:

” ‘Oh, Rand,’ [Nynaeve] said, turning away. ‘This thing you have become, the heart without any emotion but anger. It will destroy you.’

‘Yes,’ He said softly. She looked back at him, shocked. ‘I continue to wonder,’ he said… ‘Why you all assume that I am too dense to see what you find so obvious. Yes, Nynaeve. Yes, this hardness will destroy me. I know.’”

An actual conversation, instead of an endless series of whispers, speculation, melodramatic exaggeration. This book doesn’t just tell you that Rand’s losing it. It shows it in a big way, stringing crowning moment of awesome after crowning moment of awesome. He channels the Dark One’s own power to save his skin on one occasion, and drops the balefire equivalent of a nuke on a city to take out a single target. By the end of the book, he’s teleporting around like the madman he’s supposed to be, raving about destroying an entire empire by himself. It’s probably the first time in the series I’ve really gotten the sense that Rand was actually losing it — until now, the “madness” he suffered was characterized by an expository voice in his head and the occasional dizzy spell.

The book puts a pretty heavy focus on Egwene’s attempt to reunify the White Tower. And after Christ knows how many pages of bickering and politicking in the previous books, she manages success in this book by pretty much walking around and talking sense into people. Which is not to say there’s no action in her story – there’s a particularly epic moment where she tries to talk sense into Elaida and gets a pretty vicious psionic bitchslap in front of a room full of people. During a Seanchan attack on the tower, Egwene gets her own crowning moment of awesome: she steals a sa’angreal, enhances her power and unleashes holy hell on the invading army, practically by herself. As an encore, he then goes on to completely purge the Black Ajah before the end of the book, utilizing a plot twist that very few fans predicted exactly correct. I didn’t take much interest in the Aes Sedai subplot up until this volume, but damn. I was impressed.

It’s strange to admit this, but Sanderson’s riff on Jordan’s book series really reinforced to me how much I actually love Jordan’s world and Jordan’s characters, even if the last few books have left me bored and irritated. I have a genuine desire to see how it all wraps up. I still get an adrenaline rush when the characters do something epic. I even jump on Google Talk and hit up my other WOT-loving buddies when there’s a scene I find particularly awesome. I picked up The Gathering Storm as if it were an obligation, but I’m left excitedly waiting for the next book in the series.

I don’t think I’ve felt that way about Wheel of Time since I was, very literally, in middle school.

I’ve been doing the editing for my good friend Savante’s webcomic, Pararoll. I thought I’d toss my boy a shout-out and drop a link for him. Your mileage may vary, of course, but it’s a pretty wild ride so far.

Savante is an interesting guy. He’s the kind of paranoid who believes Alex Jones is a tool of the man. He also pretends to be an alien on Omegle and sends people from all corners of the world to strange landmarks at strange hours of the morning to meet him. The worst part is, I’ve seen the chat logs and am inclined to believe in the sincerity of those he’s trolling.

The progress he’s made with this comic is nothing short of amazing. I’ve seen people trash his artwork on reddit, but I’ve also seen this guy’s drawing style evolve from literally nothing in the last six months. This is to say: six months ago, he didn’t draw anything, couldn’t draw anything and had never drawn anything. Since then, he’s not only taught himself how to draw this comic but also created several hand-drawn animated music videos. I’m envious of the enthusiasm it takes to teach yourself an entire new skill set.

Interesting note: The origins of this comic lay in a defunct tabletop role-playing game my old crew had going based on the “All Brains Must Be Eaten” D20 system. His lead character, the paranoid gonzo journalist Robert Fran, was among a cast of dimensionally disposessed characters wrapped up in some conspiracy or another. It warms the section of my heart devoted to role-playing games to see concepts from those late, drunk Saturday nights in the basement come back to life years later.