WorldCon – Part Three

Sunday
I know there’s a ton of stuff I ought to mention about my time at Worldcon that will go by the wayside here. The truth is that I’m not a very good documetarian. I’m usually so involved in what I’m doing that I forget to record it. I forget to take pictures (so that later on I can view them and say, Oh, so that’s what my trip was like).  I don’t take notes or tweet about what I’m doing while I’m in the middle of doing it (nothing like watering down your personal experience as it happens). So I rely on my memory, and while I have a pretty good memory, I have also noticed that I go into an odd present-tense kind of mentality in experience-rich environments. Things go into short-term memory. Conversations, names, sequence:  poof, gone.

So with that in mind:

Sunday I have only one panel but I’m also supposed to DJ the con dance, and John Scalzi has asked if I will crash a panel he is on about Michael Jackson. Since I find myself with surprisingly much to say about Michael Jackson, I happily agree. The panel centered on “Thriller” as a genre work, and the panelists (Nora K. Jemisin, John Scalzi, Stephen H. Segal) all had great anecdotes and information about Michael Jackson’s importance and relevance. I live in Los Angeles and was astonished at the city’s reaction not only when Jackson died but when the ad hoc memorial service was performed. I was on the road and saw the motorcade assembling at Forest Lawn. The city had put “Closed for Construction” signs on the Forest Lawn exits off the 5 Freeway, and when the motorcade set out for Staples Center about 10 miles away, CHP shut down the freeway for it. It made a lot of sense: everyone stops for 10 minutes and then goes about their day vs. a three-hour traffic jam as a line of cars full of celebrities makes its way to downtown LA.

But here’s the thing that really got me: in a city where drivers happily attempt vehicular homicide by passing you on the right in a breakdown lane so they can get two cars ahead of you to get to their double decaf no foam latté at Starbucks, I heard not one word of complaint about the freeway closure (unless you count bombastic Republican radio commentators, but who does?). Everyone just respectfully acknowledged it and went on. I was astounded. And I think the memorial itself, along with the endless broadcast of Jackson videos, served to remind people that they had allowed a man’s eccentricity to occlude his genius and innovation. You don’t don’t have to like Michael Jackson, but there’s no denying he was a game-changer in music, video, distribution, live concerts, choreography, and many other respects.

So it was really great to be on that panel and say some of these things and hear other people’s anecdotes and thoughts.

Immediately after this I was on a panel with John Scalzi and Jason Bourget called “Is Privacy a Thing of the Past?” I sat down and learned that in fact I was the moderator. Ah. Well, who knew. I’m expecting your typical 15-20 people in the audience kinda panel. Nope. Big room.  Packed. Privacy a big deal to early adopter science fiction-type peepz. All righty, then. Grab the mic and say, “In my high school debate days they taught us to define our terms before we start arguing about them. So let’s talk about what we mean by the word privacy, and whether that very idea has undergone cultural change.”  And we’re off. Whew.

I was told it was a very interesting and informative panel. My memory of it is somewhat jumbled, because it was a 90-minute panel, I’d just finished an hourlong panel, I’d had two ginormous cups of coffee, and I had to pee so bad I was seeing yellow. (Except I clearly remember being chock full o’ malaproposims early on. Faulty wiring, I guess.) I fled the thing the second it was done. There’s business, there’s PR, and there’s having a bladder the size of a walnut.

After that I went to to the Convention Ops and asked if I could get a look at the room where I was supposed to be DJing that night. Someone else leads me to where they’ve sectioned-off the back part of the ballroom to form a long narrow rectangle.  Against one wall is a platform with some tables pushed together. On this is a Mackie mixer and an amp. These are connected to four two-way speakers on tripod stands at each corner of a 25 x 25 portable wood parquet dance floor.  The speakers are set about chest-high. There are no subwoofers.

All righty then. I believe that if you find yourself in a fully stocked gourmet kitchen, you don’t have to be much of a cook to put together a decent meal. But a great chef can do things with Hamburger Helper and make you think, damn, this is a great meal.

So I go back to the Palais four hours before my gig. They’re setting up for the Hugo Awards in the main room, separated from me by a folding partition. I spend an hour hanging banners with paracord. Then I set up my rig. Turn on amp & mixer and play something really low. Tour the speakers and be sure we’re getting sound. Do some fiddling until I do get sound. Check.

Then I take apart their entire setup. I take the cables off the speakers and take the speakers off the stands and set the stands a yard higher and reposition them and put the speakers back on. Now the bodies on the dance floor won’t act as baffles for the sound waves. I hook the cables back up and line them along the wall as much as possible (it’s hard to trip over cables against a wall) and duct tape what’s exposed in traffic areas. I replace the PA’s three-dollar power strip with my cable squid.

The illustrious con dance DJ booth
The illustrious con dance DJ booth

There’s no way I’m going to wait until after the Hugo Awards to sound check & EQ this room, so I go over to the sound guys setting up for the Hugo and let them know that it’s gonna get loud in the other room for a minute. Then I go and make it loud in the other room for a minute.

There’s no booth monitor. The sound that reaches me will be lagging behind the audio in my headphones. If I beatmatch to it, I’ll be matching to something that actually happened a quarter-second ago. If I do that the result will sound like a bag of clocks.  Or sneakers in a dryer.  No, I will beatmatch by putting on my headphones and sticking my head under the table to isolate the deck cue.

The Hugo ceremony starts.  I crawl under the table and take a nap.  The Hugos end and I start up immediately. My goal here is not to pack the room — that ain’t gonna happen; you know that the second you see a setup like this.  My goal instead is to make people sorry that they didn’t show up. And to make the people who did show up think, Damn, I’m really glad I showed up. Damn, this is a great meal.

I only played for a couple of hours. I recorded the gig and you can hear the results on my post of August 19. Though the gig went great, clearly everyone was tired (they all danced pretty much nonstop, too, which is what a DJ wants to see). Then a group of them helped me break down and carry my stuff back to my hotel. Bless their hearts!

Da Crew
Da Crew

There are parties. I skip them. The con is effectively over for me and I’m tired. I go to my room and set up my laptop and try to check my email. But my laptop, which just helped kick some serious ass for hours at the gig, is now pretty much a boat anchor.  DOA. Okay. I know better than to argue with the weather. Beddy bye time.

Monday
The planets aligned and I got to say goodbye to my new friends John Scalzi & Cory Doctorow on the way out, got to see most of da crew who helped me break down the night before, say goodbyes to people I met throughout the weekend, etc.

I headed out of the con and into the stepped-on anthill of the Montreal airport. Weather out of New Jersey was diverting, delaying, and canceling flights everywhere. Mine was an hour late and my connector in Cleveland wasn’t held. Me and three other stranded travelers stayed at a Ramada Inn. We went to the hotel bar, which looked remarkably like a woodpaneled mobile home with a pool table, got a pizza parlor to deliver us a pizza (apparently no one in Cleveland eats after 9:00 PM), drank margaritas, and traded stories for hours. Erica, Matthew, Rachel — hope the rest of your lives are as lively. What a great time that ended up being.