Well, here I am at the Hilton Rye Town for my third Lunacon. Apparently during the past year the Lunacon people changed their versioning system from counting from the first Lunacon (making this the 52nd) to simply attaching the year. I sort of miss the old way.

I’m actually quite a bit early, as registration doesn’t even start until 5 PM tomorrow afternoon. In principle this means I could have probably skipped being here tonight and just come up tomorrow, and from a fiscal perspective I probably should have. But I hate travel and like having the time to recoup. Also I keep telling myself I will use this time to read and to write and generally attend to the personal activities I’ve been neglecting so far this year. We’ll see.

Friday is a somewhat light day, as is Sunday, but Saturday is chock full of things and in fact (as usual) I have far too many things to attend that all occur at the same time. I’ll probably end up just going to whatever is closest to where I am at the time-changes.

Senator Hilary Clinton has finished her address to the Democratic National Convention. My personal response: She didn’t hit it out of the park but she definitely got some extra bases and maybe batted some runs in.

I think she delivered a full-throated, crystal clear indictment of the past eight years and of John McCain’s alignment with it. It was a bit corny but I liked the line about McCain and Bush meeting in the Twin Cities because you can hardly tell them apart. Senator Clinton did a good job enunciating what the Democratic Party is for — things like universal healthcare and improved public education — as well as what the Party is against — such as military adventurism, crony capitalism, and the abandonment of civilized society to a race of all against all. I still believe that had she delivered this message consistently throughout the primaries, rather than focusing on her opponents, she would have made the hurdle and would be speaking tomorrow instead of last night.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the speech was nonetheless still mostly about her — her experiences on the trail, her motivations for running, etc. That’s to be understood and it was a historic campaign, so it can be forgiven. She spent a little too much time on that, and she did detour into the end into a polishing of the legacy of President Clinton. If you tuned in to the middle and you cut out before the last few moments, you would be forgiven for thinking this was a Clinton acceptance speech.

Unfortunately, that’s where the speech fell short, too — because there are two meanings of “flatly”. Yes, she was clear and unequivocal. But she was also surprisingly indirect. She did not mention Senator Obama’s qualifications for president; for her, the clincher is apparently merely the fact that he has the (D) after his name. While that’s not a bad reason, what the party needed was for her to embrace Obama qua Obama, not just as “the guy who barely beat me”. Most emphatically, she needed to use this vast public platform to renounce the criticisms she made in the debates … the criticisms that right now form the backbone of McCain’s attack ads. She needed to take the wind out of those sails, and she did not.

In fact, what she needed to do is something that, it would seem, a Clinton cannot do: She had to say that she was wrong. Actually, even more weakly, she had to say merely that she was mistaken — we can leave the morality of “wrong” out of it. She could have said that, since the two campaigns have begun working together, she has seen a side of him she hadn’t appreciated before. It wasn’t necessary for her to swallow her pride and say he is more qualified than she; but she had to say that he is qualified. Having explicitly made the opposite claim on videotape, she needed to dispel it. At this, she failed; and so this speech was not what it should have been.

Ironically, this makes Senator Clinton’s future even more inexorably intertwined with Senator Obama’s. If Obama goes on to become the 44th President, people will remember this speech as a pivotal test for the campaign which lifted him up and started the Democrats, at long last, into their national strategy. Clinton will be set up to become the heir apparent to Ted Kennedy as Liberal Lion of the Senate, or if she chooses, to move into a Cabinet position or, perhaps, even a Supreme Court seat — in all cases, praised for her integrity and self-denial that cemented the support of her people for the candidate. But if Obama goes down to defeat, he takes Clinton with him… because, in memory, her speech will seem tepid and hedged, at least to his fervent supporters — and there are 18 million of them, too, remember. Come 2012, the Democratic Party will be long tired of the squabbling and a third candidate will likely take the nomination, neither Obama nor Clinton.

Of course, if you only watch the mainstream media, you won’t have gotten that speech. Instead, you’ve probably be treated to more important questions, like: Why did Michelle Obama look “angry”? Who choose the pantsuit worn by Senator Clinton? Because after all, those are the questions on which the election to be leader of the free world should turn…

Lunacon 51 (2)
Some thoughts on my second con (should that be “sec-con”?), jotted down at midnight, though they’ll be posted much later.

The first panel I intended to attend was “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”, a documentary on the failed vision of futurists from the 1930s through 1960s. Due to the weird layout and unpredictable spacetime anomalies that have caused the Lunarians to christen this hotel the “Escher Hilton”, I arrived at the room far in advance of the panel. Indeed, I arrived at the start of “Not 2B Toyed With”, a 12-minute movie that the moderator assured us was absolutely hilarious. She had to assure us, because she couldn’t show us, because in the rush to pack for the con, she’d left the DVD at home. But she was appropriately contrite and, at the suggest of a snarky audience member (me), proceeded to illustrate by sock puppets, stopping only when, well, she ran out of socks and hands to put them on.

As it turned out, “Not 2B Toyed With” – even though it never actually showed – was a better presentation than “Yesterday’s Tomorrows”. The latter, it developed, was a 1999 documentary financed by Disney and shown on Showtime exactly once. The moderators liked to call it “the documentary Disney won’t let you see” (since the studio hasn’t released it at all) but there isn’t anything spectacular about it. Instead it was a bunch of self-involved baby boomers narcissisizing about their impressions of the vision of futurists. It had a lot of cuts to semi-celebrities pontificating, like you find in those “I Love the 80s” shows on VH-1. It was a true waste of my 90 minutes.

I spent some time in the game room, watching some people play “Ninja Burger”, a Munchin-esque game from Steve Jackson Games. It looked pretty fun, actually, and funny and clever as you’d expect from SJG. I also played a round of BANG!, a spaghetti Western shoot-em-up card game. It’s one of those games with hidden objectives – no one knows who the outlaws or deputies are – that had a complicated but manageable cardplay system. I was “The Apache Kid” and the renegade, and I did well for two rounds, until I was accidentally blown up by the very same dynamite I’d put into play. *Sigh* It’s from Mayfair Games, and I think I’ll try to find it online when I get home.

I dropped back to my room to get some dinner (the restaurant was closed by now – a costly mistake on my part) and then went to “Sex Done Right”, a panel on writing about, well, sex. And though it’s easy enough to dive for the gutter, it was actually a semi-serious writers’ craft panel. It had a certain self-involvement among the panel members, though, that quickly killed my interest in their thoughts on writing. I check out as soon as one said, in all seriousness, “But then the werecat morphed and I had to think, will he rip through her? She couldn’t morph, of course, since she was a vampire….” That told me I’d wandered into a particular corner of fanspace, one that holds no attraction for me (and, to be snobbish, one that seems to draw poor talent).

I was also reintroduced to that universal con character, Annoying Guy One Seat Over. There was a nebbish first-time con goer sitting next to me who was too enthusiastic, too eager, and too clueless to be tolerated. Many panels seem to develop such a guy – who has to comment on everything, who is clueless about his cluelessness, and who overrates his own intelligence/humor/relevance. The major ecological function of Annoying Guy One Seat Over is to spread humility – to remind us that we too can be annoying, overbearing, etc. Many a time in a panel I sit back and ask myself, “Is that really a valid point? Or am I devolving into Annoying Guy One Seat Over?” It’s a useful check.

Well, here I sit in the Hilton Rye Town waiting for Lunacon to get started. If you are paying more attention to this blog than you should be, you’ll recall that I attended Lunacon 50 last year as well. This year I managed to reserve early, so I am staying at the correct hotel and don’t need to shuttle back and forth. I also arranged to come up on Thursday (the night before the con opened) so that I wouldn’t feel rushed. Originally, this was intended to be my entire Spring Break trip (before committing to go to Ocala to see my mom).

It took longer to get here from NJ than I had expected — nearly four hours door-to-door. Some of that was just waiting for trains, of course; and some of it was being whisked around Rye, NY by a cab driver who, it turns out, didn’t actually know where the Hilton Rye Town is. At least this time there wasn’t a sudden blizzard.

It leaves me with the question of what to do until the con starts. Since I dragged this laptop all the way up here, some of the time will hopefully be spent writing (and more than just blog posts).