Events and Convention Coverage

      I am a rather large, overweight, geeky, African American male who does not know much more about fashion beyond what he likes to see a hot girl wearing, which usually is not much. But this guy has suddenly developed an interest in the high stakes highfalutin world of high-fashion. Makes as much sense as anything.

Actually, I am way more into woman’s fashion than one would think. I absolutely adore woman’s shoes, particularly Cavalli’s, Jimmy Choo’s, Marc Jacob’s, and Pedro Garcia’s. I am not completely ignorant of fashion, but I am not nearly knowledgeable enough to cover a fashion show, which is why I was the perfect person to do so. This isn’t E, or TMZ, this is NPN, and we give Fashion a completely Non-Productive treatment!

The full title of this production was the “Forever21 & To Be A Star ‘Walk on Water’ Fashion Show”. The “Walk On Water” part was quite literal, as the entire affair was being held on a boat; a boat-restaurant to be exact. The location was Pier 66 in Manhattan, aka the Frying Pan Restaurant, which in actuality is a converted fire-boat. It was a combined effort between the retailer Forever 21 and a new reality show entitled “To Be A Star”, which chronicles the lives of 6 women who are basically running a gauntlet of mentors in the Fashion and Entertainment field in order to become famous all in the span of 3 months. Easy right? The event was co-hosted by Kimmie Smith, editor-in-chief of the lifestyle and fashion website Kitten Lounge, who I will get to in a minute.

First of all, the models. Now I did not meet any of the models who actually did the walking, but I have found that if you go to any social event in New York City, there is a good chance that 1 out of 4 women there will be an aspiring, current, or ex-model. True to form, I met many such women at this event. Contrary to what you would believe, most models are quite down to Earth, and not bat-shit insane. Of course, you would think this because of Reality TV. Reality TV seems to know that the two easiest groups to make look insane are Black people and Models (and, by extension, Black Models). Models are easy to make look crazy because they are usually not eating a lot, hence their blood sugar is low. Anyone whose blood sugar is low is inherently moody, so there you go. And Black people are easy to drive insane if you put them in close spaces with insane people who we cannot escape (which has been the formula of every Real World season since its inception).

But I digress. The people at this event were fun and easy to talk to. “To Be A Star” is expertly executively produced by Jason Metz. Veronica Lee Anne is the publicist and event planner who made the most of the scenery, personnel, and fantastic ideas that made the night a huge success. Trust me, event planning is only slightly easier than, say, planning a large scale amphibious invasion of Europe, and Veronica is one of the best. She is the one who had the great idea to have 12 women sashay down a moving catwalk and call it Walking on Water. I thought that title was particularly witty and incredibly daring. I know people think that Modeling is easy, but it isn’t so easy when you are in heels and the runway is moving beneath your feet…

Trust me.

In any event, everything went off without a hitch, and when the show got to the last two themes of the night, “Club Wear” and “Red Carpet Ready”, the women looked Absolutely Fabulous. What was my contribution to the evening’s events, you ask? I sat off to the side (starboard or port, I’m not really sure) looking for something free to drink, and chatting up the pretty girls next to me. But I also had my trusted assistant Chantal take some great footage, and did a dynamite interview with Kimmie, who is a wonderful person. For the full experience, go listen to the 06/14/10 episode of the Alter Negro Show (http://www.non-productive.com/podcasts/index.php?id=296). We will have more Video here soon, but until then you can follow these links to find more info about the, well, everything!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/to_be_a_star

http://www.youtube.com/tobeastaracademy

http://www.facebook.com/tobeastar

            I had avoided Anime conventions for a pretty long time now for a host of reasons. The last one that I was really invested in was Otakon back in 2004. I thought I had stopped going because I had outgrown going to conventions, but I have been going to Comic Book and Gaming conventions pretty religiously since then, so that wasn’t it. I only recently was able to nail down why I have avoided Anime Cons so stringently for the last few years, and it actually did not take very long for it to hit me at all once while I was at NYAF. My revelation actually started slightly earlier this year, at AnimeNEXT in Somerset, NJ. I didn’t attend because I had a bad feeling about it, but I met up with some friends who were there. Just being outside of the place confirmed my bad feelings… I felt incredibly creepy being there. Whether I was creeped out by the people there, or creeped out by my own presence amongst a bunch of 16-year-olds I wasn’t sure, I just knew I did not want to be there.

            Flash forward to the New York Anime Fest, and I am experiencing something of the same feeling, but far more deluded, probably because the space was bigger and less… intimate… than a hotel. Over the course of the weekend that same creepy feeling came back though, and this time I knew it wasn’t me because there were lots of people there my age or older, so I didn’t feel like the creepy old guy at the kiddie pool. It took me some time to process where this feeling was coming from, but I figured it out. What should have been a fun and enjoyable safe place for kids and grown-up kids, had a not-so-thinly veiled subculture of BDSM and Pornography to it.

            To anyone who is familiar with Anime, the sub-genre of Hentai is no secret. It was no secret to me before this; I love hentai. It is basically animated hardcore pornography. I knew it would be there, in face I was counting on it. What I wasn’t counting on was the seeming fact that hentai is so accepted nowadays that it was being sold pretty much side-by-side with regular anime. There were a fair number of children present at the Anime Fest; not a huge number, but some. Such children, who were probably there to enjoy Pokemon, Bakugan, or whatever their favorite anime is, where definitely exposed to a level of overt sexuality that they should not have been. That overt sexuality is now, for whatever reason, irrevocably joined at the hip with anime and the Otaku who love it. The people who religiously go to anime cons, I have observed, are generally very young, have boundary issues, engage in significant attention seeking behavior, and are for the most part hypersexual. The environment of a Con is like a pressure cooker for acting out on sexual urges due to the presence of half naked cosplayers, readily available hentai, and two factors that I have only noticed recently.

            Two more subcultures have found a comfortable glen in the Otaku Forest, one being the LGBT community, and the other the BDSM community (for those of you who are acronym-impaired, LGBT = Lesbian, Gay Bisexual Transgender, and BDSM = Bondage Discipline Sado-Masochism). When walking through the vendor area of the con, there were lots of thing for sale that, well, should not have been on sale considering the alleged focus of the audience. Handcuffs, corset’s, PVC gear, and leather wear are sort of incongruous for a Convention that’s supposed to be all about Japanese animated cartoons. There were a lot of Victorian and Steampunk clothes and accessories available as well, but there were marginally acceptable reasons for those wares to be available. I don’t know if the presence of all the bondage stuff is a symptom or a manifestation of the overtly sexual nature of the crowds that attend Anime Cons these days.

            Speaking of overtly sexual, there is apparently a helluva lot of hooking up going on at Con’s, something I am probably jealous of because I never got to do any of that when I was these kids ages. There has almost always been a lot of gender neutrality in anime, and now yaoi and yuri has exploded as well. Yaoi is romanticized boy/boy anime, and yuri is romanticized girl/girl anime. It’s not quite hentai, it’s more rated R than X usually. The yaoi and yuri fans are, shall we say, not shy about showing their enthusiasm for their favorite anime, and they advertise so loudly at Cons. It is a common sight to see people, usually under the age of 20, at cons with signs saying “Yuri Kisses Wanted”, “Yaoi Kisses Wanted” and of course, the ubiquitous “Free Hugs”. The most disturbing part is that a lot of the people with these signs are really young or really young looking, and they don’t really care who they get attention from. It makes me uneasy to think of what kind of picnic an anime con is for a pedophile, and even more uneasy to think of what every other person my age is thinking of me for being there… because that’s what I am thinking of them as well…

            An anime Con today is equal parts Gay pride Parade, Social Networking Party, Geekfest/Otaku-Orgy, and Miscellaneous whatever you want to fit in there. At the end of the weekend, I was glad that I went, and I would do it again. I felt very weird being around so many underage same sex kids making out, but you know, you get used to anything after a while.

I went to the New York Anime Festival under the pretense that I was going to re-connect with anime. I had let my interest in the genre lapse, and to be honest, I missed it. I missed my Naruto, I missed my Bleach, I missed my Bebop, and I missed my FullMetal Alchemist. So I wanted to go to NYAF to get all of this back, to find out what was going on in the world of anime, and for once, to be caught up with, for lack of a better phrase, the new shit, instead of constantly playing catch-up.

This was my intent.

As you may have guessed, what happened was nothing like that. Not only did I not become the up-to-date anime savvy otaku that I had intended to, I actually regressed in my knowledge; that is I began a love affair with all things old school. When I say old school, I mean my appreciation for the anime that I originally liked came back with a vengeance. I longed to see Voltron, Project A-Ko, Gunsmith Cats, Ranma… hell, maybe even a little Golgo-13. What I wanted to see the most, however, was Robotech. Yes, I am a lapsed Robotech fan, and that weekend I was brought back into the fold, largely through the efforts of a man named Kevin McKeever. Kevin works for Harmony Gold, the fine, fine people who have always brought us Robotech in America. He is a Robotech missionary, getting the word out that the Robotech Defense Force is back and better than ever. I was completely unaware of this. As Kevin said, there were a couple of different types of Robotech fans; the new generation, who only knew about Robotech from the latest movie “Robotech: The Shadow Chronicles” (which is available on Hulu and you should go watch immediately), and there were the “lost fans” people like me who watched the original Robotech series, and maybe even the Macross sagas, but knew nothing of all the new developments going on. What completely leveled me was the news that there is a new full-fledged live-action Robotech film in the works. That blew my mind.

If you recall, in “Independence Day” with Will Smith, there are a couple of gigantic air battles between the USAF and the Alien Fighters. Both of these battles took place with the backdrop of a giant alien starship in the background. When I watched that, all I could think was “wow, this looks exactly like what a Robotech movie would look like”, except, you know, the F-18 Hornets didn’t transform into Giant Robots. The failure of machines to turn into giant robots is endemic in our military, and something needs to be done about it immediately… but I digress. The point is in my mind the groundwork for such a movie was laid way back then. Only now, when Warner Bros. is realizing that they have milked Harry Potter for all it’s worth and hey! People seem to like Giant Robos, has a Robotech movie been floated down the river. Robotech was my, and a lot of other people’s first introduction to anime, maybe other than Voltron. I remember vividly the first time I saw it because it was a cartoon where people actually died… and stayed dead… like for real… no coming back! This was definitely a watershed moment in my life. Robotech is, to paraphrase Mr. McKeever, an animated Soap Opera in Space with Giant Transforming Robots. Think Battlestar Galactica with more believable acting.

Robotech is ripe for spinning as many stories as possible, and Harmony Gold is determined to make sure that Hollywood doesn’t spin straw into crap. They want to spin that straw into, well; Gold, and they are doing everything possible to make sure that happens. Kevin did a great job of getting that point across, as during the two Robotech panels that he did, he was peppered with doubts and misgivings from an audience that had obviously seen the Transformers and G.I. JOE movies. This was an audience that had seen those movies and were, let’s say, less than pleased. Basically, I think we are all a little gun-shy about having our favorite series and memories brought up and “re-imagined” into unrecognizable crap. Kevin is very good at his job however, and I think all of the fans present left feeling reassured that Harmony Gold would do it’s level best to make sure that no movie put out would be bereft of story, character, and plot. Warner Bros. did an admirable job with the HP movies, so there is some reason for optimism in this area.

Long story short, the Anime Fest brought about a lot of feelings in me, some great, some… well, fairly uncomfortable, and I will definitely get to those stories as well. But for three days, I was living in the days of Robotech, Irresponsible Captain Taylor, and the days when anime didn’t consist almost solely of soul-rending emo-madness that made one want to cut themselves (Deathnote, Berserk, Battle Royale, I’m looking at you…)

Last year’s Comic Con had many high points for me, but the high point for most people was the “Venture Bros.” panel. Occupying a full size ballroom, it was standing room only to see the people responsible for Adult Swim’s most popular series currently. The room was packed with fans, some in costume to see the series creator and voice of Hank Venture, Chris McCullough, James Urbaniak (Dr Venture), Michael Sinterniklaas (Dean Venture), and Doc Hammer (Dr Girlfriend (!)). I was there to cover the Con, but I was really there as a fan more than anything. I love Venture Bros. Because I used to watch Johnny Quest religiously as a kid and teenager. When I would think back on the show I would think about how odd it was that these two kids (Johnny Quest and Hadji) were constantly being thrown into life-threatening situations and saw more than their fare share of men die at the tender ages of 15 or however old they were. I am pretty sure they even killed some people themselves. It all made me wonder, what the hell were these kids going to be like when they grew up? Actually, Johnny Quest left me with a lot of questions, some of which I probably think about waaay too much….

But that’s neither here nor there. I believe that the people who appreciate Venture Bros. the most are the ones who grew up watching the cartoons and action TV shows that VB takes many of it’s references from. The plot is hysterical in and of itself, but it’s the pop culture references that put the entertainment value of the show over the top. That is not to say that you have to get the references to find the show entertaining, I just think that is how one gets the most out of the show. The strength of the show is in the writing; VB has some of the wittiest, smartest, most natural sounding writing on television. It’s the writing that attracts fans who are not familiar with the references and the source material for the show. I have personally enslaved many of my friends to the show by simply exposing them to one or two episodes that they never would have watched on their own. Once they were taken in by the unparalleled humor of the show, they were hooked.

The best part about the Venture Bros. experience was that the people responsible for making the show are just as funny as the show they produce. The ease with which they interact with each other translates well to the screen. Watching the Venture Bros. panel was very much like watching the show itself. The personalities of the writers and the actors clearly shine through in the finished product; it is a good thing that they have such amazing personalities to do the show. Fortunately for everyone in attendance, a great show makes for a great panel, and the crowd was in stitches for much of the way-too-short time we had with the principle players. They showed a preview of Season Two, which had everyone in attendance foaming at the mouth to see it. At this date Season Two has aired, and it was well worth the wait, living up to the hype built around it at last year’s Con. The best part of the panel was that outside of the panel you could find people like Doc Hammer and James Urbaniak wandering around the Convention floor just like anybody else. Just saying, the same could not be said of Seth Green. Anyway, this year Doc Hammer and Jackson Publick will be at the Con as Special Guests. If this article has sparked any interest in Venture Bros. For you, or if you already a fan, it is well worth it to seek out their company this year. I know I will.

Bruce Timm is one of the most important men in my life. I only found this out very recently though. You are probably asking yourself if Bruce Timm is one of the most important men in my life, one would think that I would at least have been aware of him before very recently right? Well, I say in response, you do not know me very well. I am very often ignorant of the people who are responsible for the things that I enjoy the most. And Bruce Timm definitely qualifies as a man who is responsible for a good deal of the most enjoyable, quite frankly highest quality television available since the early 1980’s. Let me guide you through some of the CLASSIC cartoons that Mr. Timm has been a part of.

Mr. Timm is most well known for his involvement with DC’s entire run of animated series, from “Batman: The Animated Series” on. These series all had a good deal of continuity, which is essential to quality, and ran from one to another in a fairly smooth fashion. Batman blended into “Superman: the Animated Series” (with “Batman Beyond” in between), and Superman went to “Justice League”. “Justice League” then went on to become “Justice League Unlimited”, and next the Wonder Woman animated movie that will premier this year. He also executive produced much of “Teen Titans” and was involved with many of the various Batman, Superman, Batman Beyond, and Justice League animated movies that were made during the DC animated series illustrious run. Now, I must say here that I have always been FAR more of a Marvel guy in terms of comic books, but when it comes to cartoons, DC wins in every category by far. The best compliment that I can give to “The Dark Knight” is that it almost was as good as an episode of the original Batman series.

Batman the animated series had a way of giving depth to characters that one wouldn’t think possible. I always said it had the best acting on television, which was especially bad since it was animation. Many of Batman’s villains in this incarnation where portrayed as tragic figures, especially Mr. Freeze, Clayface, and Two-Face. You never knew which way Catwoman was leaning (good or bad) and seemingly, neither did Selena. Harley and Poison Ivy very nearly deserved a show of their own. And then there was the Joker. People will argue this of course, but my favorite incarnation of the Joker is Mark Hamill’s. He was insane, dangerous, murderous, hilarious, and had the best laugh. You could always count on Joker episode to deliver, and it is hard for any series to be consistently good with any character. As for Batman himself, he started out as clearly having a Batman side and a Bruce Wayne side, but as the series progressed, and really, it helps if you think of all the series as one continuous story with different story arcs focusing on different characters, he becomes more Batman-all-the-time. It makes sense however as the dangers they face become more and more serious, and as Superman begins to lose control of his anger…

Ah, but there we encounter the greatest story in the animated series, the evolution of Superman into a real boy, as I like to call it. Superman as we all know is an alien. And all he really wants is to be human. Well, in the animated series Lex Luthor and Darkseid give him his wish, introducing him to two particular human emotions; pride and anger. Over the course of the series, Superman learns that he likes being THE Hero, that he does not like losing, and he does not really know how to handle frustration. One of the most psychologically thrilling storylines is the degradation of Superman’s control over his anger, and the effects it has on the Justice League, and the world in general. If the last Superman had some of that substance it would have been way more interesting. I mean, I enjoyed “Superman Returns” but it just does not stand up to the Superman storylines from the “Justice League Unlimited” series.

Bruce Tim has Produced, Directed, wrote, and Art directed all of these series. These are quality works, and just part of his professional body. I watched all of these shows religiously, and though I still Make Mine Marvel, when it comes to superhero cartoons, nothing surpasses DC’s masterpieces, and it is in large part due to Bruce Timm. It is, in fact, these shows that have pushed me to want to write even more. So, thank you Mr. Timm, for putting out some really good cartoons for all of these years, when a lot of other companies were really half-assing it. Timm’s work has shown me what is possible when people take a fantasy seriously and put hard work into it; a truly great story can be born, and in some cases completely reborn.