Loscon

[calimac]

Buried in the basement of the LAX Marriott over Thanksgiving weekend was a science-fiction convention. A few of my friends in the area showed up; just as many people whom I know from up here were also there. We've come far from the days when LA and Bay Area fans tended to ignore each other's conventions.

Loscon likes discussions of SF classics. I like them too, because they're often books I've actually read. I was asked to lead the discussion of Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, a book that seems to have fallen behind the shadow of Amber, but is still a robust favorite of the attendees of the discussion. We talked about Zelazny's particular mix of elevated and low language, and of the way he makes the backstory in this novel more intriguing by leaking it out to the reader slowly, in bits and pieces.

I also led, as in moderated, a panel on "Horror and Religion." I'm not much of a horror reader, but managed to get by. The panelists were a secularist (I guess) fantasy writer, a Baptist minister, and a Buddhist (western convert subclass). With the moderator that made quite a spread. And yes, I told the story of the vampire who is faced down with a cross and replies, "Oy, have you got the wrong vampire."

A panel on the Inklings and their influence covered the ground from various points of view: their mutual influence, the influence of earlier authors (Chesterton and William Morris came in for special attention), and their influence on later writers, including the ones on the panel. Beforehand, panelist Tim Powers thrilled moderator Diana Glyer by telling her, "I'm reading your book, and it's fascinating."

Most provocative was a panel on establishing the SF canon. This turned into, as it inevitably would, a list of hoary old classics (we set an arbitrary date limit of 1987, and few of the authors named were up against that deadline), but I did briefly derail it into a discussion of the theory of canonization: why just picking some favorite stories is a bad way to give a fair portrait of the field, whether there is such a thing as a "sell-by" date in SF whereby old classics lose their savour, and some other matters I may post more about later. At any rate, a considerable number of the works named in the panel are ones I think are rapidly approaching their sell-by dates, if not already passed them. Not that I encourage this aging process: I merely observe.

I spent a considerable amount of my remaining programming time at the con watching cartoons. Some fellow had put together thematic programs of old theatrical cartoons, and showed them on a computer projector. One program was titled "Cartoons and Classical Music": even omitting Fantasia and "What's Opera, Doc?" he found two hours of cartoons focused entirely on classical music, most of them parodying the concert-going experience. (The boiled shirt-front always flaps upward into the wearer's face.) Most of the music was by Liszt. (Four cartoons featured the same Hungarian Rhapsody.) The rest was almost all Rossini and Suppe.

At a large, elite, but public, evening party I finally, after many years of hearing about it, got to try Keith Kato's nuclear chili. It was hot, to be sure, but not unbearably or egregiously so. If I was sorry at all for scarfing an entire helping, that came hours later. (No, not that kind of distress. Spiciness affects not just the mouth.)

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I always meant to write an article comparing and contrasting different treatments of the same piece in different cartoons. I would have limited it to full-length cartoon treatments. As you more or less note, the big three would have been Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, Rossini's "Largo al Factotum," and Suppe's "Poet and Peasant Overture."

As a footnote, Popeye does some of the best piano faking in cartoons in THE SPINACH OVERTURE, which uses the Suppe. Usually, piano playing in cartoons just means moving the fingers at approximately the right time. RHAPSODY RABBIT is a particularly sad misfire in this area, as the rest of the cartoon is so good, but hand-wise, they don't even care if he plays the same note over and over (while the music change) or goes up instead of down or vice versa.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"The Spinach Overture" was one of the cartoons shown. The piano playing may have been good, but what I mostly noticed is that the animators frequently forgot that when a character is speaking, their mouth ought to move.

The major division in the orchestral-concert cartoons was between those which had musicians (besides the conductor and soloist, if any) and those in which the instruments just seemed to play themselves somehow.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I was mostly thinking in terms of cartoons that showed the musicians, though BLUE PLATE SYMPHONY (I think that's the title) with Heckle & Jeckle, just has them singing to invisible instruments.

Fleischer cartoons, which include Popeye, were made animation first, and then dialogue was added. Jack Mercer (Popeye) and Mae Questel (Olive Oyl, Betty Boop) ad-libbed quite a bit, and the trade-off between seeing lips move and getting those great off-the-cuff touches these voice actors put in seems to have come out for the best.

[ron-drummond.livejournal.com]

The SF "sell-by date" is different for every story, and some precious few don't have one at all.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Apropos of your last line, the acting head of the art department once guest-taught a class of mine. For the entire class, he gave us his favorite chile recipe, which I think I still have somewhere. "Why is it called 'double burner' chili?" I asked, naively, thinking of multiple pots bubbling away on the stove. "Well," he said, "It burns on the way in..."

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I'm curious about the results of the canon panel?