Results tagged “travel”

The short version: a very good time was had by all. Sales were a little lighter than what I expected, but I also donated copies of my books to the Mu Epsilon Kappa Society for one of their events. Ditto the literacy charity auction, and those crazy people at the Saturday Night LARP, all of whom were very pleased.

Did interviews with Dai Sato (also talked to him last year — the guy's a scream), J. Michael Tatum (even funnier) and Kazuyoshi Katayama (his first time here). Still trying to figure out where they're going to be used, due to complexities I cannot go into here just yet.

Very little swag this time around apart from a paperback of the final Tomoe Gozen book, which has been tough as hell to find.

I am very tired, very achy and very happy. I'll have more to report as it comes back to mind.

And with everything else that was going on, I forgot to post a couple of choice snaps from the show.

Or, I Survived Otakon And I Got A Lot More Than A Lousy T-Shirt.

Every show's a fun show if you bring the right things to it. I brought myself, my friend Dan, a sense of humor, bottled water, meal bars, protein shakes, hand sanitizer, double changes of clothing, a digital camera, and a wad of cash scraped from a few secret savings. Oh, and my books, although I found out at the last minute that hocking those was going to take a serious backseat to some work related to the Really Cool Thing I Can't Talk About Just Yet. I sold a whopping total of one copy.

At least the guy who pulled the fire alarm on Saturday had the good sense to wait until I was done watching the premiere of Welcome to the Space Show. Between this and Summer Wars, we apparently have not one but two Miyazaki-esque instant classics to look forward to.

More when I'm not lagged.

First, a note about my revised convention schedule:

• Otakon (end of July)
• AnimeFest (beginning of September)
• NYAF (October)
• MangaNext (end of October)

MangaNext is of course the sister convention to AnimeNext, and the more I hear about it the more I like it. It's smaller, friendlier, more "bookish" (perfect fit for me), and they have a swap meet. Expect a closet-cleaning to take place well in advance of that.

Also, a discussion at GigaOm about why the Kindle will win the e-book wars: 1) Amazon has a buy-once-read-anywhere system in place that supersedes the Kindle device itself; 2) Amazon is a brand that is trusted with both books and technology; 3) Amazon also "gets" software, and should do all it can to foster and nurture that.

I agree with about 2 1/2 of these three points, and the only place I really dissent is in that Amazon may "win" but that doesn't mean I feel the battle will end with them — no more so than, say, HD's evolution ended with Blu-ray beating HD-DVD. There's a lot of work to be done with e-books that Amazon hasn't even started to touch yet. What will they do about books that are heavy on visuals (e.g., comics)? Will they allow Kindle productions to be automatically translated into print-on-demand items as well? (It would only make sense.) Will they eventually allow books to be loaned, traded, resold? Even if they're still copy-protected at every step of the transaction?

In theory, I already own a Kindle: I downloaded the PC app and bought several books in the format. I'm interested in seeing if the long-vaunted Kindle app for Android changes my reading habits. But the vast majority of what I'm interested in reading still isn't offered as Kindle product, and so for me the incentive to make the Kindle that much more a part of how I read is low. Maybe next decade.

AnimeNext 2010 was a great success. I sold out all but two copies of the books in stock, met some great new friends, saw some also-great existing ones (you know who you are!) ... all around, a terrific show. Even the round-trip travel time from the convention center to the house where I was staying wasn't that bad — and this is the New Jersey Turnpike we're talking about, so I was prepared for a four-lane parking lot in both directions. It was only going back through the George Washington Bridge that was bad news, especially since my car's A/C had konked out several weeks before. Ouch.

Even better was a stroke of luck where one of the artist's alley tables went vacant, and my good buddy Dave McCrae helped snap it up for me on the morning of the 2nd day. Said table turned out to be right in front of the main artist's alley exit; I couldn't have asked for better placement.

Yes, I'll be back next year — most likely splitting a spot with Dave (who I'm also sharing space with at Otakon this year).

After some date-wrangling, number-crunching and budget-scrunching, it looks like I have my convention schedule for the rest of the year.

I'm going to be busier than I thought.

• AnimeNext (June 18-20, central NJ).
• Otakon (July 30-August 1, Baltimore, MD).
• AnimeFest! (Sept 3-6, Dallas, TX)
• NYAF (New York Anime Festival) (Oct 8-10, NYC)

I'm working on setting up sales tables for each event under the Genji Press banner. No guarantees of anything except perhaps the first two, but Otakon by itself would be a massive step in the right direction. NYAF, a nice cherry on top of an already-tasty cake.

I'm also hoping to have CreateSpace / Amazon.com editions of all my books by the second half of the year. I've seen plenty of good reasons to go with them, and to wind down my involvement with Lulu. The purchasing links on the site should not change anytime soon; there will be plenty of advanced warning before that happens.

I'll have more word on each event as the dates draw closer.

I got handed a slew of major assignments last week, so to celebrate a bit before disappearing into the salt mine I headed into New York City. Last night's Times Square bomb scare was still fresh in everyone's mind, but I suspected the worst I'd face was lousy traffic. I was right: getting into the city via the 59th St. Bridge was agony, since the entire upper level was closed for the bike marathon. (And if they didn't postpone that, why bother canceling any of my fun?)

First stop: Book-Off, at their new 45th St. location. They've moved and they're huge.

The big find here was something recommended by folks in the comments for my review of 2001 Nights: Yukinobu Hoshino's manga adaptation of James P. Hogan's The Two Faces of Tomorrow. Look for a discussion of that here, real soon.

Then downtown to the Strand:

I never leave this place empty-handed.

• James Cameron's original "scriptment" for Strange Days.
• Yasushi Inoue's memoir Shirobamba.
• Ivan Morris's World of the Shining Prince.
• Sources of Indian Tradition, Vol. 1
• HAL'S Legacy: 2001's Computer as Dream and Reality. Be interesting to see how much has changed, or not changed, in the 10+ years since this was published.

... all of which were $1 bargain bin finds.

Also found a $1 copy of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (vintage 1983). It seemed entirely appropriate that the cover sported blob of some effluvia that resembled melted chocolate, which thankfully could be removed with a little Glass Plus and elbow grease.

On the plus side ...

Being screwed out of a table (my fault, really) only slowed me down a little bit. Things got significantly better after Ronni Katz, the fine lady who was my table-neighbor last year, showed up. She cheerfully agreed to share space with me this year, and so I set up shop and started selling.

By Saturday night Tokyo Inferno was completely sold out, and many copies of Weekend and Summerworld also flew out of my hands. Pravi (my brother from another motherland [Canada]) grabbed a copy of everything and handed me a $50 that I don't think I'm going to end up breaking until I go to the bank.

Detroit Metal City seemed to be the predominant theme this weekend. Aside from watching a few episodes of it the first night — the show is funny enough that I gagged on my own tongue more than once — R2 and Ally and the rest of the LARP crew spent most of Saturday afternoon getting DMC costumes on, and attracting more than a little attention. The photos speak for themselves.

We also caught a screening of the live-action movie, which was a pretty good feature-length reduction of most of the ideas in the comic and the show. The Gene Simmons cameo is way too short, though — I badly wanted to see him deliver that deathless line "This music's so gay I can barely keep my eyes open." Expect the whole thing Stateside a little later this year, I think.

Since most of my time was spent manning the table, and my budget's been kept correspondingly tight, I didn't spend a great deal of cash on anything. A pin here, a couple of books there (one for the flight home). I dropped most of my actual cash supply on food — which is next to impossible not to do, since when you're at the hotel you're a captive audience and they can gouge you as they see fit. (Eight bucks for a bowl of soup? Cue Bill Cosby's rant about the cost of an egg in Las Vegas.)

Folks at the booth directly across from me had an Evangelion pachinko machine.

The best parts: The interviews. (Links coming.)

• Dai Sato, he of Ghost in the Shell, Casshern, Eureka Seven, Ergo Proxy, Cowboy Bebop, and ... look, if that list didn't convince you he's heavy sugar, you're in the wrong blog.
• Shinji Kimura, background artist for Tekkonkinkreet, Akira, Steamboy, and creator of a wonderful children's book: Hipira.
• Tsuchie, he who created the Samurai Champloo soundtracks.

Another interview, with Greg Ayres, was cancelled — he'd either left the con early or ... well, at this point I could just quote rumors, but that's crass. File under: No Idea What Happened.

The LARP was kicked to Sunday night, but more than worth waiting for. A wonderful time was had by all.

<bitching>

The general tone for my flight out to Dallas was set when I struggled into the restroom at the tail of the plane and tried to get Business Done, only to be interrupted by someone jiggling the door handle.

"I'm in here!" I called out.

The door handle continued jiggling violently. I regretted that I have no extra appendages with which to jiggle the thing back. so I raised my voice: "I'm in here!"

The door handle continued jiggling and then the door rattled in its frame, as if — no, not "as if", the idiot on the other side was indeed trying to yank the door open anyway. That or pick the lock.

"WAIT YOUR TURN!" I shouted as loud as I could.

Yank yankity yank yank clatter.

I finally gave up (concentration's shot, can't do anything now), climbed out, and shot the old man standing there the meanest stare I could muster. Hearing aids in both ears. Deaf as a tree stump, most likely. I've been told I have the patience of several saints rolled into one, but at that point the saints had all gone marching out.

The airplane A/C was cranked up brutally high. By the time we made our descent, I felt like someone had been shoving slivers of ice into my sinuses with a funnel rammed up my nose.

The guy two rows behind me was playing with his iPhone 's GPS and accelerometer while we were landing. (Yet another in the endless list of reasons why I despise iPhones: they attract idiot users like fluorescent lighting fixtures draw flies.)

The business center at the Hyatt was out of stamps. Nope, they didn't have a postage meter either. I gave them the package I needed mailed along with $5 to cover the cost of getting it properly stamped. Now watch it come back to me because the date on the international mailing label is wrong or something stupid like that.

The in-room coffee tasted weirdly foul. The coffee packets didn't appear to have date stamps on them, but I suspected they were stale.

Post-travel inventory: one splitting headache, one runny nose, and a few new cusswords in my vocabulary.

</bitching>

... On the plus side, the shuttlebus driver was a real sweetheart.

I spent Sunday at my parent's house — first time I'd seen them in months, since they were overseas and enjoying the company of relatives in Turkey and Ireland. There was home cooking, tech support (dad's notebook needed a wipe-down) and some musing about Comic-Con and Otakon, much to my surprise.

Popped back through the city on the way home and hit Book-Off. Among the things I found there was the soundtrack to the NHK taiga drama version of Furin Kazan (aka Samurai Banners). The score's by Akira Senju, he of Mystery of Rampo — but more notably to some, the composer for the Fullmetal Alchemist movie. I also ran into a cheap copy of one of the untranslated Black Jack volumes — that'll come in handy for comparison when the corresponding translation arrives.

Full Otakon 2009 photo gallery is now live.

Look fast for the Shamwow Guy cosplayer.

I'm back from Otakon '09 and getting caught up with everything. This may take as much as two days. I've got some coverage of the show up already, with more to come. There's a roundtable discussion with Mary Elizabeth McGlynn that I have to upload, but the Q&A that took place on Friday was two tons of fun.

That lady is a gas and a half.

More later, including a possible new story/novel idea.

I spent Saturday with my folks in Jersey, celebrating the birthday of a family friend, and then from there swung quickly through Manhattan to test out a theory I had about whether or not Google Street View was any good at helping me find curbside parking in a given neighborhood. The short answer: Yes, but bring change anyway, just in case. (Free parking on weekends is not totally dead in the city; it’s just one of those things that I’ve come to not count on at all.)

I swung through Book-Off — saw that one coming, didn’t you? — and nabbed a few goodies, among them the original novel of The Year of Living Dangerously.

Also snagged the first few untranslated Guin Saga books:

I’m planning on filing the originals next to the U.S. editions and using them as self-teaching tools, along with my copies of the Oldboy manga and a few other items that aren’t exactly classics (Sakura Taisen, cough cough) but are fine for the sake of readability and comprehension-building.

Another thing I stumbled across was — okay, nostalgia time — the soundtrack to the anime version of Peacock King. It's all hard-driving guitars, smoldering ballads and Emulator / CMI synth sounds, all guilty pleasures of mine. (They even made a live-action version of the story in Hong Kong, which I should cover one day if I can ever find a decent DVD of it.)

On the way back to the car ....

As the Beatles once said, "A fine time was had by all."

Art Review - 'Art of the Korean Renaissance' - Korean Treasures at a Crossroad in Metropolitan Museum Show - NYTimes.com

The Korean art gallery at the Metropolitan Museum is a trim, tall, well-proportioned box of light. But it’s just one room, and a smallish one at that, reflecting the museum’s modest holdings in art from this region and the still scant attention paid to it by Western scholars.

So no surprise that the expansive-sounding exhibition called “Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600” is, by Met standards, a small thing too, with four dozen objects. Most of them — ceramic jars, lacquer boxes, scroll paintings — are compact enough to be stashed in a closet.

In Kyoto, a Call to Not Trample the Geisha - NYTimes.com

The crush of tourists [in Kyoto] coincides with an ever-declining number of geisha. A record 927,000 foreigners stayed overnight in Kyoto in 2007, the last year for which complete data are available, up from 803,000 the year before (though tourism is believed to have dropped sharply since the financial crisis began last year). Meanwhile, there are an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 geisha in Japan, compared with more than 80,000 in the 1920s.

A good weekend was had by all. Went down to my friend Sarah's house for her birthday, enjoyed games and good cooking, Chinese buffets and Japanese import PS2 games. It's taking more time than I thought to get caught up, but I should be completely back to business by tomorrow. Look for some new material by then, in a couple of different departments.

Next weekend I'll be visiting my good friend Sarah in Jersey, and making a key stop on the way back: the Princeton Record Exchange. There, I'll be unloading most of my existing collection of vinyl. Most of it is actually my wife's — between us we have mostly Eighties heavy metal, punk, underground / noise / alternative / college tunes, and some weird one-off bits. (CM von Hausswolff's Life and Death of Pboc, for instance.

After mulling over selling off the collection picemeal on eBay or Craigslist or the like, I decided it was just easier to dump the lot there and be done with it — there's only so much time I can devote to curating a collection like that, especially when most of anything important in it has already been released on CD or as a download. Most of them aren't in great shape, anyway — they've been played pretty aggressively, the sleeves are rather ragged, and neither of us were terribly obsessive about keeping them in forensically perfect shape anyway.

The nostalgia of the LP never completely left me. I loved the fact that LPs had cover art you could hang on a wall (as opposed to postage-stamp-sized CD sleeves), how turntables had tonearms that looked like surgical instruments from a science fiction movie, and that little electric sput that jumped from the speakers when the needle met the record. And I don't think vinyl will ever quite die — not as long as there are wheels of steel and DJs to man them, and milk cartons to shove the records into. And folks like me to go digging through them.

Some bits 'n pieces from around the way.

• Criterion has a new box set from their Eclipse line, the Hiroshi Shimizu set. All date from the pre-WWII era and sound like the kind of thing that would make a nice counter-complement to my Tokyo Inferno reading — they're gentle, lyrical tales, although they do feature some of the same sorts of characters that I'd like to include in the book itself.
• Longstanding indie/foreign film distributer New Yorker Films is set to shutter its doors after 40+ years. Their movie library is likely to be auctioned off; if I had to hazard a guess, I'd say Janus/Criterion, Milestone and Fox/Lorber/Wellspring would probably divide the spoils.
• William Stout owns a bookstore in NYC devoted to architecture and design. I worry that specialist bookstores like this are slowly on the way out, no thanks to skyrocketing rents and the exodus of bookstore inventories to online venues.
• Otaku unite! The Taipei Times has a piece about a strip of stores in the Taipei City Mall devoted to manga/anime/J-culture lovers. Maybe I can find an excuse to go to Taipei once our travel budgets are restored...
• Most New Yorkers have probably heard by now of the plan to make Times Square a car-free zone. It sounds to my ears like a fallback from the more ambitious plan to charge people $6 to come into Upper Manhattan during weekdays — the more reasons you give folks to walk around in the city, the more they're likely to do it (and use mass transit in the bargain).

Finally, we've all heard about Philip José Farmer passing on at the venerable age of 91. A shame, because I suspect only now I'll be getting caught up with him good and proper — apart from the Riverworld books, that is, which actually quite underwhelmed me.

Part of the problem there was how I couldn't help but contrast them to my favorite work of this that I've read so far, his novella "Riders of the Purple Wage", published in Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthology. "Wage" was, to borrow Harlan's own words about PJF's earlier story "The Lovers", "an explosion in a fresh-air factory". It was, by Harlan's own estimation, the finest story in that whole collection, and while its Freudijungian pretenses have not dated well, it's still such fun to read that it makes the Riverworld series look terribly warmed-over in comparison.

If people have suggestions for Farmer reading apart from Riverworld, post 'em here; I'd love to hear your takes.

A reminder: I'm going to be at WickedFaire this coming weekend, with books for sale and at least one panel discussion appearance. Everything I have will be available signed at the cover price ($12), as opposed to the $20 I normally charge for Internet sales. If you can make it out there, this is a great way to pick up everything I have in stock, cheap!

My next convention appearance (where I'm actually in a selling capacity) won't be until the end of August, when I turn up at AnimeFest with Tokyo Inferno in tow. There is also the chance I'll be selling at NYAF, but that has not yet been nailed down, and the cost may simply be too prohibitive right now for that. I'm also considering I-CON, although I haven't been there in ages and my experiences with it were, to put it mildly, not positive. I hope things have improved since.

Or, How I Spent My Time At Comic-Con 2009, NYC. (The title's a double pun that most any NY-based comics/manga/pop-culture fan will spot immediately.)

Thursday: I galumphed on over to the city in the evening and swung by Book-Off, which was in the process of having a massive shelf-clearing sale. Walked out of there with a disturbing amount of material: a whole bunch of Ryu Murakami novels in Japanese (many of which have English counterparts, for the sake of cross-comparison); an original Japanese edition of the L: Change the worLd novel (also soon to be translated; more reading material), and a couple of other tidbits that I have yet to identify but which look interesting.

Friday: Glommed on a bunch of stuff at the show for cheap — the Samurai Champloo series artbook (in English), the rest of Lady Snowblood, the gaps in my Berserk and Blade of the Immortal collections. The only panel that day was the Vertical panel at 6PM; they were not going under, thank goodness, but they had to cut their list of titles way back for '09 while they reorganized and secured new funding. Went to dinner with friends downtown at Risotteria, which was way tasty.

Saturday: Panels galore. Del Rey, Bandai, Funimation — and in between I stalked the show floor and made a few contacts. Cinebook are bringing a whole slew of French and European bandes dessinees titles to the U.S., including a long-time favorite of mine, Yoko Tsuno — briefly available in English from Catalan Communications but now long gone. They were elated to know someone out there was as thrilled as they were about this! I also talked to the folks from Fanfare, publishers of many of Jiro Taniguchi's manga, and arranged to check out some titles from them when time permits. Also scored an autograph from Yuri Lowenthal for a friend...

Sunday: Only one panel, VIZ, and then a lot of showfloor spelunking. Got caught up with an old, old friend — Greg Rucka. He's sort of a big deal.

Went back downtown and ate dinner with friends, then snapped a few shots of New York oddities on the way up to the train station.