Con*Cept 2004 in Montreal, or "What I Did at the Con"...

[fajrdrako]

Con*Cept is a science fiction convention in Montreal - roughly a two and a half hour drive away. It was held last weekend at the Day's Inn on Guy St, where I went in Sheila's van with Sheila, Harry, and Tasia.

My friend Yolande was working registration, which made her easy to find. I was impressed by how hard she worked, and how she managed to be pleasant to everyone. And Chantal, who was one of the co-chairs of the convention - we barely had a chance to talk because she was so busy, every time I saw her she was dashing from one place to another, but it was a delight to chat in passing, too. So many old friends. Perhaps the best thing about the whole convention was that so many people I haven't seen for ages were genuinely glad to see me. Of course I was glad to see them, too - it works both ways. I was reminded again how precious my friends are to me.

We arrived just in time to go to Larry Stewart's opening panel. Larry is an Ottawa fan entertainer and artist, a sort of Renaissance man with many eclectic and apparently random interests. He hold panels about, well, nothing in particular, or perhaps whatever catches his interest at any time. I've seen him do panels on Star Trek, slide rules, Jules Verne, and Harry Potter. This time he had no particular theme, but let people in the audience ask him questions and he went with it, topics old and new, with or without voices and impressions - Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, Firefly, and Terry Pratchett. He did voices from the animated movie version of The Wyrd Sisters, which I now want to see. He shocked me by saying he didn't like Firefly, which I find close to incomprehensible. But then, he never liked Star Trek: The Next Generation either, and while I don't think it has the quality of Firefly, the show had and has my respect in many ways.

Funniest bit: Larry doing Granny Weatherwax doing Richard Burton doing dialogue from The Wyrd Sisters. Or perhaps it was Larry doing Richard Burton doing Granny Weatherwax, I'm not sure.

I noticed that all the Ottawa people who were there, and there were a number of them, mostly Apaplexy members - they were all sitting in a group (unplanned) on the right hand side of the room. I wondered why.

We stopped for some lunch in the con suite. I had picked up a donut from Dunkin Donuts on the way. I had ordered my favourite donut, an apple fritter, but discovered when I bit into it that it wasn't an apple fritter at all. It was more like a jelly donut with an apple filling. It was dry and really quite unpalatable. I have been spoiled by regular trips to Tim Horton's - Dunkin Donuts is obviously substandard. Sheila finished it for me. I'll know better next time.

Then I did a tour of the dealer's room. There were books, but none I particularly wanted. A lot of Star Trek merchandise. The only things that really appealed (until later) were some beautiful Celtic jewellry and the swords, particularly the Lord of the Rings swords, particularly Anduril, which at 30% off was only about $300. Which in itself is so far beyond my budget as to be unthinkable - heck, $30 is beyond my budget. But I could and did look longingly at it.

I then had a terrible dilemma: whether to go to the panel by Phil Jiminez, artist Guest of Honour and X-Men artist, or to go to lunch with Yolande, maaboroshi and maaseru. It is a mark of my deep love for Yolande, maaboroshi and maaseru that I decided on lunch. I hardly ever get a chance to see Yolande. We went to lunch at Le Faubourg, an international food court that had all sorts of tempting foods, mostly Asian, with a smattering of others like St Cinnamon and Subway. We got Chinese food: in my case, squid, rice and vegetables. Delicious. We talked about all sorts of things, including television - Yolande likes Lost too. I was glad to hear it.

The place we got our food was on the ground level of Le Faubourg, but we had to go up two sets of escalators to find tables to eat. That was no problem, except that it turned out that there were no escalators or elevators going down, and maaseru is in no shape for stairs. But she managed. I am amazed by the improvement in her health simply due to eliminating some things from her diet.

Back at the con, I went to readings by Jo Walton and Kelly Armstrong. Jo Walton read from a book called "Farthing" which is a cosy British mystery set in an alternate-universe 1949 in which Germany took over Europe (but not England) in World War II. Normally I don't like alternate history and I certainly don't like cosy British mysteries, but this was rather intriguing, it was so creepy - her description of sweet English towns reminding me of scenes from The Prisoner.

Kelly Armstrong writes about werewolves and witches, and read a few scenes from her book in progress, which was about a werewolf in an airplane fending off a talkative seatmate. Good scene. I asked who her influences were, and who she liked to read, and she answered who I would have expected - Stephen King and Anne Rice. Jo Walton, quite to my surprise, mentioned Mary Renault. What good taste she has.

I then went for a while to a discussion of SF in French. As before, I understood the panelists perfectly, but when people in the audience got up to ask questions, I couldn't always follow what they were saying. Was it a matter of accents, or acoustics, or speaking too fast? I couldn't tell.

I went to the talks by the Stargate guests, Douglas Arthur and Peter Williams. I don't watch Stargate, but I'd seen enough to know who Apophis is, vaguely, and maaseru told me that Douglas Arthur played another of the villains. In a sexy black shirt and jeans, Arthur was bright, energetic, sexy, bald, funny; reminded me of Peter Woodward, whom I saw at Toronto Trek a few years ago. This is impressive, given my high opinion of Peter Woodward - though Douglas Arthur is witty, he is not as clever as Woodward. Peter Williams is originally from Jamaica: he turns out to be just the lean, gorgeous type I most like, also witty and bright. Both men were very much actors, soaking up the limelight.

There was remarkably little content to their show, though it was extremely entertaining - jokes, double entendres, news about what they'd been in and what they were going to be in. Peter Williams had a good story about his daughter's birthday - he didn't say her age but I'd guess 12 or 13. It was her birthday, and everyone in the family was working that day - Peter Williams was working on The Chronicles of Riddick. Since she didn't want to be left alone all day on her birthday, he asked for and received permission to take her on the set with him that day - he thought she'd like it. And she did. Especially when Vin Diesel got up at the top of a huge sound stage and assembled all the cast and crew, then called Romany Williams up with him and wished her a happy birthday and presented her with a birthday cake. Peter Williams said that the birthday stakes in his family had been raised impossibly high forever.

He had another story I found amazing - not the story itself, but his perception of it. He was asked what roles he would like to play. He told about a convention he had gone to in Italy, that had a writer at it, who wanted him to play the lead role in her novel if it were ever made into a movie. He then read the novel, and couldn't understand a word of it. The writer (eventually, after a few questions, guessed by the audience and confirmed by Williams) was Ann McCaffery and the role was F'Lar from Dragonflight.

F'Lar is a magnificent hero and Williams would be wonderful in that role. But I was astounded to hear that he didn't understand Dragonflight. What's to understand? I think of it as an entry level SF novel for young people - it certainly functioned that way to me. There's nothing sophisticated or complicated or difficult about it. Since Williams seemed both articulate and intelligent, I could only conclude that the man just isn't a reader.

At one point Williams asked what was being said about their Stargate characters on the net. "Who's getting any action?" he asked. "Who is Apophis sleeping with?" The answer of course was Douglas Arthur's character. The actors laughed, enjoying the notion. I love it that slash is no longer the dark, dangerous secret it used to be.

Peter Williams wore a T-shirt given to him by Con*Cept. It said "Bow before me, I am your god." Looked good on him. My goodness, that man was gorgeous. A good trait for an actor, no doubt.

Neither man said much of anything about Stargate SG-1, though they did mention the phenomenal popularity of Amanda Tapping in Europe. This was between bouts of butt inspection and butt-whipping with the ladies of that respected organization, the KBA: Klingon Bitches with Attitude.

Following this extravaganza of laughter and questionable taste, we went from the ridiculous to the sublime with a concert by Celtic singer Heather Dale, whose songs were almost all based on the Arthurian legends, all beautiful and haunting and dark. I thought the best of them was Mordred's Lullaby. My favourite of all the songs, though, was the only one that was not Arthurian at all - a song about Medusa, from her point of view. I loved the concert and even bought one of her CDs, The Trial of Lancelot, though I know it won't be the same as a live show. That's okay. I love the medieval romanticism.

The only think about the concert that wasn't great was that Charles, one of the con organizers kept coming in and talking during the concert. He's a friend of mine, but I was irritated by the intrusion. He should have known better.

Then I went out to dinner with friends: Donna, Jim, Sheila, Harry, Tasia, Pat, Sandi, and Glenn. We went to a place called Cage aux Sports, nicely convenient, a place to get steak and ribs. Not being hungry, feeling poor, and being eager to go back to the con, I just had French onion soup - the first bowl of French onion soup I have had in more than a decade. It was as delicious as I remembered.

Then I left everyone and went back to the con, to go to a late panel called GLBT: a different point of view of SF/F, about both the participation of gays in fandom and the depiction of gays in material for fans. Arriving a little late, I only knew one of the panelists, Lance Sibley, whom I recalled from Toronto Trek. But also in the audience was Phil Jiminez, the X-Men artist I'd missed in the afternoon. I was all the more sorry I'd missed him. He was intelligent, articulate, friendly, and had some very interesting things to say about being gay and in fandom, and we discussed how gay fans are not just happily accepted within fandom, but they hold the best parties. We talked about the sensationalism given to sexual orientation in the press and the odd attitudes you find on television and in comics, compared to the more reasoned attitude in books.

I then went to Pat and Sandi's room and played a cut-throat game of Scrabble with Tasia and Donna. Tasia, wonderful woman, had brought her Scrabble game. Throughout the whole game I had mostly consonants and they had mostly vowels, which turned out to be much more of a handicap for them than for me, as I was easily 50 points ahead through most of the game. But Donna started catching up and in the end she won 210 to 200 because she could go out and I was left with a Q.

I need a grudge rematch sometime in the near future.

I went back to our room then, where Harry, who had spent the later part of the evening talking to Larry, was reading Kelly Armstrong's book Bitten. We chatted for a bit about Smallvile and Angel, and I fell asleep, and slept soundly till morning.

I was up on Sunday before anyone else, and got in a half hour of yoga practise. Yoga is nicely quiet: I didn't wake a soul.

Soon after, Yolande phoned and invited me to brunch with her. I was delighted. We had more of a chance to talk with each other and the other people at our table - a woman named Maureen, an American named Pete, a con organizer and dealer named Dom (who is also a friend of Sheila, small world) and Larry Stewart. Larry was particularly funny. I ended in with a rather intense (and depressing) conversation with Pete about the state of affairs in the U.S. today. He's a retired military man and had interesting comments about a career in the military and the different reactions soldiers can have to the more brutal aspects of war.

Next: the Strong Female Protagonist panel. Elizabeth Vonarburg introduced herself: "I have been nominated as moderator for this panel. I am not moderate." I have a longstanding secret passion for that woman: it was nice to see she was as attractive and intelligent as she has always been. The panelists all had interesting insights on the subject: three men, three women, all writers. There was much talk of "the Xenification of history". I was a little startled to hear one of the panelists talking about his heroine - referring to the soft, feminine side of a warrior elf with eighty kills. Something about this struck me as paradoxical and maybe a little bizarre. Everyone had different notions of strong female protagonists: Xena, Mrs. Peel, Sailor Moon, Kaylee and Zoe in Firefly. I was surprised no one mentioned Scully, but that's maybe a sign of the times - no one talks about X-Files any more. I liked Terri Osborne's comment that what makes a female character 'strong' is to be competent and capable - and that's true of male characters, too. I noted that every single person on the panel thought they wrote strong women who were not sterotypes. I was just a little skeptical.

I was fascinated to hear that Keith DeCandido is writing a Firefly novel - the novelization of the coming movie Serenity. All he could say about it was that all nine characters will be in the movie. Curious about the quality of writing of a man who will be writing my adored Firefly heroes - now, there are strong women like no others! - I went to DeCandido's reading of his own book in the Pont Neuf room. That was another con detail I disliked: Readings were in the Pont-Neuf room, which also contained the art show in the back, so that people going to see the art show had to cut through the reading area, and there were often people talking in the art show or in the hall outside, making it difficult to hear the readers, even when they had strong
voices.

Still, a reading with some acoustical difficulties is better than no reading at all. DeCandido read from his latest novel, which features Star Trek: the Next Generation characters. In honour of the Klingon Bitch with Attitude in our group, he read a scene with Worf, an action scene set at the Embassy. I enjoyed it very much, as well as the Data scene he read afterwards, but though his reading was excellent I couldn't seen anything special in his writing that made me think he could do justice to Mal Reynolds and those wonderful Firefly characters. Of course, the plot and dialogue will be from Joss Whedon: I don't really need to worry about DeCandido's talents.

The next panel was on American and European comics - the difference in style and the industries. Since this panel was being held in Montreal, it inevitably dealt with the unique situation of Canadian comics - since everyone on the panel (Thierry LaBrosse, Marc Shainblum, Glenn Grant and M. Giguere) were Canadians who write or draw comics and only Phil Jiminez was American. They discussed the impact of the Spider-Man movie on sales, the differences and similarities between superheroes and other heroes and the way they are received in different countries, the strange career of Dave Sim, and the impact of the medium on the message.

Afterwards, Phil Jiminez went downstairs to the room where he was signing autographs. There was no busy trade in autographs, but there was a good chance for the fans to talk with him, and I was impressed by the quality of attention he was giving each fan.

I wanted to talk more, but my driver was pulling on my shirtsleeve and it was time to head off.

We listened to Heather Dale tapes in the van on the way back, and ate at Tim Horton's where an apple fritter is as it ought to be, and one of the most delicious things in the world.

Comments

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Canada will probably get it early next year along with the US.

I hope so. Or, failing that, that it will appear on a U.S. channel I can watch - not Sci-Fi, which we can't get, and which seems the likely place for it. But you never know.


Luckily I have all my files backed up on cd - or I'd really be tearing my hair out!

Thank goodness!

Can you watch Region 1 (i.e. PAL) format dvds?

Yes. I carefully and deliberately got one that plays both Region 1 and Region 2. I love British shows and wanted to be able to play them.

Century City, if you're still willing to get it copied for me..?

Of course I am. I'm working on it.

As for getting Jamie Bamber in Montreal - I think he'd come if they invited him and paid his way, but I don't think they can afford it. I can hope - ? I was going to write them a letter, I may write and suggest that they invite him. It can't do any harm to ask.

[rosiespark.livejournal.com]

Fingers crossed that it is, but if the BSG series isn't accessible, then I could easily put it on cd (assuming I manage to download the episodes) for you. That's also assuming my poor pc gets sorted out soon - one of my main reasons for upgrading from Win 98 to XP was that the shareware programme I was using didn't work properly with 98...

I carefully and deliberately got one that plays both Region 1 and Region 2.

Oh, the cleverness of you! I did the same. ;) There are some films that are only available in NTSC. And one of the local rental places illegally stocks Region 1 dvds. Yes, my mistake above - PAL is Region 2, NTSC is Region 1.

As for getting Jamie Bamber in Montreal - I think he'd come if they invited him and paid his way, but I don't think they can afford it.

I don't think I could afford it either! Pity. I'm terribly smitten. There's a rather crappy special feature on the BSG dvd, and the best thing about it is obviously Jamie. He's sweet and funny and articulate. ::drools::

[benbenberi.livejournal.com]

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but... BSG is going to be on the SciFi Channel in the US. (In fact, they've been promoting it very heavily.)

The R1 DVD of the miniseries is scheduled for the end of Dec, I think.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. Well, I can only hope that some Canadian channel picks it up then. Or maybe just save up for the DVD.

I believe Farscape was another show shown on the Sci-Fi channel? That put it right out of my area of accessibility - and by the time it turned up on Space it was old news.

[rosiespark.livejournal.com]

Sounds like I should copy the miniseries dvd for you, then...

More by email. Soon. Keep your fingers crossed for success with a last-ditch attempt at formatting (again!) etc. due to start in about an hour and a half. *nervous grin*

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

May the formatting go well, and be hassle-free!

[rosiespark.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Considering this will be the third attempt, I can't help feeling resigned rather than hopeful. We'll see. 1 hour and ten minutes...

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

And counting. I wait in curiosity to see.