A certain kind of failure leaves Los Angeles for San Diego. You can spot them close up, the Hollywood Dream’s dispossessed. I saw it in the face of my 11am bartender– his mean eyes squinted when I ordered a Diet Coke and then came a long, digressive monologue about who had produced what movie, who had directed what, and the best film of the year. He was a failed actor, someone who’d waited tables for too long with too little talent. Four years ago, the deepening grooves on his face had forced a reassessment. If he was to die in this state, he might as well get away from the Hell of Los Angeles and grab hisself a piece of the good life. An ocean mist clouds out San Diego mornings, but when it burns off, you can almost taste the sweetness.

But these, of course, are the inspirations of California– a sunblasted uniformity of the dumb and the deranged, where no youth fashion ever dies and where you can sit in a bar watching Soul Coughing, Kid Rock and 311 videos before the noon hour and never once does anyone blink at the sheer horror playing out on the plasma display. So no surprise that the most SoCal of SoCal locations hosts the Comic Con, a mass hysteria in which media properties are hand crafted and enacted in the human drama, writ large on willing bodies. I hope that future scientists and magicians will create the ultimate Cosplay/Masquarade costume– a psychic cloth that projects into the minds of the spectator the image of their favorite media character. You’ll be manga with the manga kids, Spidey with the nerds and children, Slave Princess with the sexless and every possible permutation thereof; you’ll be Gay Mario with the homosexual crowd and Latino Mario with the Guatemalans. All will smile in joy, except perhaps the wearer, who will lose the personal connection betwixt theirself and their favorite property. After all, ain’t that really what it’s about? Demonstrating your deep relationship with the Form of Green Lantern, and letting, for a day or two, the Idea overtake you? I suppose blankness can’t reflect in blankness– so perhaps my idea has flaws.

In any event, today I did the poster panel on Romance Comics. The CAC people paired me up with Jacque Nodell, who does the blog Sequential Crush. Recommended reading. The panel turned out interesting– romance comics people found us and listened and then posed questions and all was hunky dorky. I’d read Jacque’s blog even before I saw the list of presenters, so it was fascinating and bizarre to meet someone else interested in the same period. Even better, she’s given the matter an enormous amount of thought. A lady with a future, and anyone with decency would seriously consider giving her a forum to collect and document this material.

Our pal elly, now grown increasingly ambiguous, slummed down at the convention center for another day running. I realized, welling with sympathy, that no one has my infinite tolerance for repetitive tortures. I don’t like Comic Con but I damn well will go for four solid days; poor elly was knocked about by the middle of her second but soldiered on like a Christian.

Somewhere after the panel, she got a text message recommending that she scum around with some Hollywood dude. I amscrayed at the merest mention. Los Angeles filth is my demesne, so I know the score– one coked out C-list superego is indistinguishable from the next. A person should always have the good taste to stick with the talented or the beautiful. Mere competence is a common coin.

I wandered for a while, thinking about comics on my mercurial want list but getting none. The day before I scored a dirt cheap copy of Rory Hayes’s Bogeyman #1 and John Thompson’s The Book of Raziel. I got tired and sent elly an sms insisting that we leave. By then she’d had her fill of ever-so interesting Hollywood hilarity and quicksilvered out the door. We hit up a cab and wandered around the city for a delightful few hours, getting some food and walking the second malicious dog of my visit.

More tomorrow.

Comments:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_VARIABLE or '$' in /home/d3a13a/content/theme/comments.php on line 22

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_VARIABLE or '$' in /home/d3a13a/content/theme/comments.php on line 22