Unabashed

I was only there on Sunday, from 11AM to around 5PM, and I had a blast. I didn’t get to see any shows or presentations or author readings or contests or, well, anything at all, really. I walked around with my wife, Suzy, hopping between the four hotels and immersing myself in the event that the Con really is. There are a few photos I took at the end of this post.

In order to miss traffic (we were staying with family in Conyers), we drove to Indian Springs and hopped MARTA into Peachtree Station, which put us at ground zero for the event. We immediately began seeing people in costumes. Highlights follow:

• Met Cherie Priest, and got her autograph. Positively the high point of the Con. You may remember I interviewed her here a while back, and I can tell you now that I’ve met her that I’ve not met very many nicer people. She didn’t bring any books with her, so I couldn’t buy one, but she did sign my Dragon*Con program, and she chit-chatted with Suzy and I for a little while, and she even remembered my name :-) 
• (I was a little disappointed that Cherie wasn’t wearing her steampunk regalia, but still…I was just glad to have met her)
• Met John Scalzi, who was nice as well but you could kinda tell he was ready to hit the road for home, and I can’t say I blame him. He signed my copy of “You’re Not Fooling Anyone…”
• Bought a book of H.P. Lovecraft stories, because it’s been too long since I read any of them.
• Saw Lou Ferrigno, who was a lot taller than I thought he would be, for some reason. I mean, I knew he was BIG, but I didn’t know how big he really was, y’know? I stood right beside the Incredible Hulk.
• Among the other actors we saw: the captain from Firefly (who is also Captain Hammer now in Dr. Horrible’s Sing-a-long Blog), Spike from Buffy (my wife swooned. She SWOONED!), and the little Asian dude from Big Trouble in Little China (who, I pointed out to my wife, was more famous–to me at least–for his classic performance in Seinfeld. Remember? “Seinfeld four!” Anyway…)
• I was surprised to see so many steampunk costumes. It seemed like steampunk was the second most popular genre there (next to Star Wars, of course). …Maybe I should point out that I’m thinking of putting together a little ensemble myself…nah, I’ll just keep that under my hat for the time being…er
• Evidently it’s a lot easier to come by a chain mail or steel mesh bikini top than I’d ever dreamed. I must have seen a dozen. I must say I think it’s a good look :-)
• Yes, of course I held Princess Leia’s slave chain. She made me. I had no choice. (See pic below)

Overall, I’d rate my experience an A+, and Suzy and I are seriously considering going for the whole event next year. These were my kinds of people, I think. It was my first event of this type, and I really didn’t know what to expect, but once I was there I just walked around in a daze, trying to absorb the reality of something so amazing. All those wonderful costumes, on people that–excuse me if I’m wrong here–are basically, generally, anti-social. But, wow, how they let down their guard when in costume. I’ve seen costumed people in tourist-trap towns (New Orleans), “living statues” and the like, who are quick to come to life if you dare consider taking their picture without boning up a dollar first. So I really didn’t know what to expect. My wife saw two girls she wanted me to take a picture of, so I turned on the camera and they stopped, posed, and smiled while I grabbed a shot. Then they continued on their way. I didn’t know if I was going to have to pull out a dollar or what, but no, of course I didn’t. And on it went, through the whole afternoon: “Mind if I take a picture?” And then they’d pose, and you’d know it’s a practiced pose, but they’re all so gracious and…well. You get the picture. I love these people. They’re my kinds of people. I would make friends with people like these. I am people like these. For everyone at Dragon*Con, thanks, you were great, and I enjoyed seeing every one of you.

Me and the princess:

Here was one of the best costumes of the day, a steampunk girl with copper-tube wings:

Can anyone tell me who this is supposed to be? This hat was so large she had to be led by the fairy ladybug girl and had to stop and bend over to get through doorways. She had a big sword in her hand, and the rest of the costume was basically a towel and a brown bra. I was a very well made hat, big, but well made. It actually looked like metal. I just don’t know what she’s supposed to be.

I think these two were really pirates. And not in a good, happy, or fun way. The bad way.

This Guy (I know you know who he is) came complete with sound effects:

That’s enough for now. I took a few others, but this is a good sampling. If I’d been there the whole weekend I think I could have taken a million pictures.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: Atlanta, con, convention, dragon, dragoncon, pirate, Pirates, steampunk

Matt Staggs warms my soul:

Thanks to the internet connecting all of the great social tribes together we’re re-entering a “storytelling age,” where authenticity, experience and the ability to communicate ideas in a compelling manner matter more than the authoritarian mono-culture sponsored by corporate America. Those of us who can adapt to this new world - the creatives, the visionaries, we who would have been Skalds, Bards and Troubadours a few centuries ago - will thrive, assuming our place by the fire and our rightful position of importance in the new global tribe.

And blogs will be the campfires around which we huddle for stories, warmth and grog. Or ale. Depending.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: octopi

In the continuing saga of my life, I had an interesting experience I’d like to share, and one that again has awakened something inside me, something creeping and profound. Last summer I was with my mother and two nieces (aged 14 and 15) in my mother’s garden. She plucked a ripe tomato from the vine and smelled it, and then took a big bite out of it. My mouth watered. I’m used to the stock of vegetables we get at the market nowadays and I know how much difference there is between that and vine-fresh. It’s staggering. But my nieces had an entirely different take. One of them said, “Ew, gross!” And at that point there was exclaiming and proclamations on the wrongness of it all. What became clear to me in that moment was this: If something truly awful happened, and society collapsed, the human animal as it has evolved would be in a lot of trouble. Because a vegetable plucked off the vine is considered dirty, gross. That tomato was probably the cleanest, most pristinely perfect tomato those girls had ever seen, but since it wasn’t displayed in a bin at the grocer, because it was so close to soil and sky and life and segregated from any form of disinfectant by a good hundred yards, it was gross. Kids, it’s time to refresh your relationship with the Earth. Stop primping for a moment and watch the sunrise, let the rain fall on your face, stop fretting and just be.

Photo by bucklava.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: gardening, tomato

This might also be known as the first glimpse at the Halloween ‘08 costume craze. 

The website that first hosted these photos, Survival-International, has succumbed to bandwidth problems and is now only hosting this one page. They simply wanted to show the world that there are still isolated, uncontacted tribes of Indians whose way of life may be threatened with extinction due to illegal logging nearby.

It’s hard to imagine a people who’ve never had the notion to just get away, to walk and see where the path leads, no matter how far it might lead you. It’s even harder to imagine a life still lived as if the height of technological advancement was fire. Here’s a good page on what it means to be uncontacted, and this is what it means to me:

• You’ve never had ice in your drink; you drink only water, or whatever you’ve figured out how to ferment
• The most important things in your life are the sun and rain
• You’ve never experienced clean socks on your feet
• You’ve never felt the cool side of the pillow
• Comfort is something elemental to you
• You’ve never escaped the heat by cranking up a fan or cranking down the air conditioner
• You’re unconcerned with the imminent extinction of all the animals on the endangered species list 
• You are an endangered species 
• Your history is passed on, generation to generation, by verbal rote
• If you want anything, you must build it or make it
• If you want to eat, you must kill to do it
• If you want warmth, you must create fire
• You’ve never heard a song that wasn’t sung by someone you know
• In many ways, you are more intelligent that any of us contacted folks (If my family lived in the same conditions as you, it is very probable that we would all be dead within six months)
• You’ve never seen a photograph, television, radio or automobile (you have, however, seen a helicopter, from a distance, and you tried to kill it)
• You’ve never seen a book, magazine or newspaper (But then you have no alphabet, so it wouldn’t do you any good anyway)
• You’ve never seen a photograph of your mother, uncle or grandfather
• You’ve never seen a photograph
• You have no idea how big the world is; the world to you exists only within the confines of your jungle home
• You’ve never seen an ocean
• You’ve never seen a polar bear, a whale or a penguin
• All of your belongings fit in a neat leather pouch that you wear on a sling
• You’ve never experienced greed
• You have no idea that people have visited some of the stars you see in the sky
• You’ve never worried about getting a raise, or retirement
• You’ve never owned something because you thought it was pretty or convenient
• You don’t know what electricity is
• When the sun goes down, you go to sleep
• You’ve never worried about making your mortgage payment
• You’ve never been late for work; or for anything else for that matter
• You don’t know what Wikipedia is, but that is where most of us will learn what we can about you (what’s with the body paint? Is that a regular thing or did the photographers interrupt a wedding or something?)
• I don’t really know if you want to be contacted or not; my feeling is that you don’t, else you might have wandered away from your home by now. But if you ever do get the itch to find out what the rest of the world is like, I hope you’ll stay where you are and forget about all the rest of the globe, because there are teeny, tiny little bugs, smaller than you can see, that can kill you if you get too near any of us. It sounds crazy, I know, but it’s true.

It could be summarized by saying: You don’t know what you’re missing, but you don’t know how good you’ve got it.

Meanwhile, those of us who are contacted are waiting patiently for a robot 100 million miles away to unfold its arm.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: aboriginal, amazon, amerindian, brazil, peru, rainforest, tribe, uncontacted

Southern culture on the skids…

I don’t really like the term “The New South” because it suggests progress, and as I drive around the South I don’t see a lot of progress. Economically, yes; the industrialization of the post-Civil War South has given us jobs and money that during antebellum times only a tiny percentage of Southerners enjoyed. But culturally, the New South has digressed. Now it’s just carbon copy sprawl. Sure there are some cities that are doing good things–Huntsville, Mobile, Atlanta, Miami. But for every good example it seems there are five bad ones–Birmingham, Montgomery, Jackson, even Savannah, where you could say the only true southern culture exists to this day outside of maybe Charleston, but even there it is meticulously cultivated. Some would offer New Orleans, and I would agree to a certain extent, adding that New Orleans has a culture all its own and, proud as I am that it is a southern city and a city that I dearly love, it is unlike most any other place you can visit.

What I see when I travel around the South, and I do travel extensively throughout the “Deep South”–Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and Florida–is a loss of identity. I see culture flying out the window. There’s no architecture to be proud of, and the restaurants are at least 90% chains. Churches are going up in metal buildings now, springing up daily it seems, and trailer parks–despite good interest rates for mortgages over the past ten years (or so)–have surged to heretofore unrealized numbers. What does it all mean, though, when you get right down to it? It means that being southern doesn’t have any romance any more. Where once there was a culture, now there’s just sprawl and loss of identity. Sure, I’m the first to admit the culture we had was founded on the backs of slaves, and I’ll tell you that even though I am deeply ashamed of that, in one way I am grateful for it–because those people who were brought forcibly here from Africa brought their culture with them. They made our food worth eating, our music worth listening to, and our entertainment entertaining. There are parts of my heritage I am deeply ashamed of, but there are other parts that I, like most southerners white and black, cling to, and how I wish that part of it could remain. But it seems to be floating away on a magnolia-scented breeze.

I’m not saying it’s all bad. Things couldn’t have been much worse if you were a black person living in the slavery states, or even in the segregated South. And for that progress I am glad, and the term New South does ring true there, but racism still exists (and not only in the South). Maybe it always will, but there are those of us who believe MLK was right in many ways. Still, though, there are those who don’t, and there still exists a separation of class, despite desegregation’s best intentions.

Granted, southern culture wasn’t all peachy even at its height (can any culture ever be?). But it was distinct to the region. It was our own, and we were proud to live here, and to talk the way we do. It wasn’t all Tara, no. There was a lot of poverty, but there was a lot of family, too, and in the South there weren’t very many things more important than family. From our great familial bonds came southern hospitality, probably what we’re most famous for, but even that trait seems to have gone by the wayside. How can I tell? Because twenty years ago you couldn’t pass another vehicle on the road and not get a friendly wave. Seriously. But not any more; maybe it’s because there are so many more vehicles out on the road today–you’d be waving the whole time you were driving, today. Or maybe it is indicative of the situation, that Southern hospitality is just another fading relic of a bygone era.

So where is our culture now, and what happened to the cool, halcyon southern solitude? We once had uniqueness–in our architecture, our food, our style. We once felt noble and proud. Shouldn’t desegregation only have freed up that pride for all Southerners, white and black? The fact is that the Old South was built on farmland and steel mills, tobacco and king cotton controlled the economy. If you weren’t in one of those two vocations you were probably a very hungry person. And today there are no farming communities left. The steel mills have all, for the most part, shut down and moved away. Today’s economy is driven by the same paper as every other corner of the nation, all rolled up into the petrodollar. And all those things that made the South unique and grand are withering away, fading into obscurity. 

Is the South a better place? Sure it is. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad I have my job. I’m glad the Southern economy is what it is–even with the country in recession, the gripping poverty that once ruled in the South has become, comparatively, a miniscule thing. I’m glad I can be friends with a man who is black without white elitists whispering insults at me. I’m glad for all those things, yes, but I sorely miss the things that were embedded in our culture and made the South unique.

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: antebellum, Culture, deep south, desegregation, economy, halcyon, petrodollar, recession, segregation, south, southern

Reflections by Comrade Fidel. Oh yeah, he should get a blog, or at least set up RSS for these articles.

El Jefe is jefe no more, handing the reigns to brother Raul, ending the tenure of the Last Great Revolutionary. What does this bode for Cuba, pearl of the Caribbean Sea? Not much in the immediate future, as Raul is fundamentally and ideologically as hard-line as Fidel. But Raul will likely want to leave his own mark in the history books of Cuba, rather than being a simple note at the end of Fidel’s paragraph: “At this point Raul assumed power and everything was the same as before.” I believe Raul will do something, but what that something will be I have no idea.

For Fidel, it looks like blogging will occupy a bit of his time for a while. And what a great blog that would be, too. No, he won’t call it a blog, but essentially that’s what it’ll be, and for the time being he’s calling it “Reflections by Comrade Fidel.” His first entry is interesting enough to make me want to read more. The enigmatic Marxist is imminently quotable, as well:

The end of a historical period is not the same as the beginning of the end of an unsustainable system.

Cryptic, yes, but he’s talking about America there, in a way that says “this is what I have known for many years.” He believes, as he always has, that America’s system won’t support itself, that it is bound to eventually fail, and he may have been right all along, even though he may not live long enough to see the resulting cataclysm.

And he says:

At this point I am dedicating myself to the adversaries. I enjoyed watching the embarrassing position of all the candidates for the United States presidency. One by one they were obliged to announce their immediate demands of Cuba in order not to risk losing a single voter. Not that I am a Pulitzer Prize winner interrogating them on CNN on the most delicate political and even personal matters from Las Vegas, where the logic of chance of the roulette rules and where one has to make ones humble presence if aspiring to be president.

Fifty years of blockade seemed too little to the favorites. Change! Change! Change! They all cried in unison.

I agree. Change! But, inside the United States. Cuba changed long ago and will now follow a dialectical path.

Yes, dialectical and mired in poverty. Dear Jefe, your life’s work is nearing its end, and left so much unaccomplished. You fought long and hard, but in the end your island gem of the Caribbean is in little better shape than it was when you firmly announced your presence.

Fidel Castro is one of those great men, the kind who walk into a room and own it without saying a word. He always had that way about him, too, it didn’t come by way of his presidency. One thing is for certain: Fidel became the revolutionary he is because he loved Cuba and he (correctly) believed the system in place at the time was corrupt. He removed the corruption, but then he replaced it with dictatorial communism, firmly believing in its core theory, failing to realize that human nature would never allow it to function as designed. 

written by Matt Mitchell \\ tags: America, Caribbean, Castro, Embargo, Fidel, Marxism, Raul, Revolution, Revolutionary, Trade, United States