This weekend was the Steampunk World’s Fair, where I read for the first time from my upcoming novel (exciting), saw a lot of great costumes (very exciting!), and had the usual problems with some elements of the subculture (Me? Have problems with something? Surely not!).

Overall, though, it was great, and I’m still beyond thrilled to have been invited. There were some wonderful costumes, both subtle and flamboyant. There was also a baby with a mustache glued to its face; every time I saw it, it was wearing exactly the expression you would imagine from a baby that has been brought into a huge room full of people and had a mustache glued to its face.

Pictures are still coming in (I didn’t take any of my own, because they would have been a series of nicely-accessorized blurs), but this shot is my favorite so far:

The subtle colorway, the texture, the pose, the face – it reminds me of a Sargent painting or something. Call me a nerd, I just really like it.

Bonus: while I was at the World’s Fair, I received some good news: my story “So Deep That the Bottom Could Not Be Seen” will be appearing in the Way of the Wizards anthology! That was a nice cap to the weekend, for sure.

Now back to the grindstone, with a new goal in life: to get some Dr. Scholl’s in my zombie-fighting boots pronto, because those things get PAINFUL. Wow. Flat boots are supposed to be more comfortable! Why do you have to make a liar out of me, boots?

Up at Fair Food Fight Films this week is Soylent Green, everyone’s favorite pretend-you-saw-it sci-fi potboiler.

Here’s the thing: Soylent Green gets a reputation (rightly) as being one of Charlton Heston’s most insufferable performances in a SEA of insufferable. And the last few minutes, with him bellowing “Soylent Green is made from people,” is one of the top movie twists of all time, delivered so badly that it’s become a punchline for unappetizing foods or movie “surprises” we all saw coming.

I remember seeing this movie as a kid and thinking it was TERRIFYING, but whenever I thought about why I couldn’t really place it, because Sol’s death scene and the final five minutes, which were the parts people kept suggesting to me as the scary ones, didn’t bother me in the slightest.

Sol was treated with more dignity than most people today can hope for, and I thought listening to your favorite music while you die painlessly after a long life was the best possible way to go. And the Soylent thing seemed like a great idea to me. You have limited resources but an abundant source of meat; why the hell wouldn’t you package the nutritious parts? It’s not like people are inedible, or that life in that city is precious. I mean, be real.

On the rewatch, I realized why it was so terrifying – it’s basically a documentary about the future, and even as a kid I must have recognized how easy it was for women to be stripped of their rights (again), for the planet to finally collapse under the weight of overpopulation, for the food supply to just suddenly stop forever.

So yeah, this movie is terrifying, and it’s worth your time despite Charlton Heston being in it. There are so many little things about it that are chilling to see, because it looks straight-up like today’s news. And that’s good social commentary, and it’s fantastic sci-fi.

Check out the full rundown here.

Artist Marina Abramović is currently performing her interactive piece The Artist Is Present at MoMA. She sits in a chair, and people come in and sit across from her, and they look at each other.

This is clearly about a lot of things. This is about connection between people, and about humanity as performance art, and about how long you can go without crying, and about how celebrities can cut the line and sit without waiting. (I’d argue this is for their safety and the general calm or something, but the kind of people who are skipping work to go to MoMA and sit in this exhibit would never, ever, EVER break their cool to a movie star, and we all know it.)

However, I have to think that the enduring point of this piece is that people on the internet will:

1) get interested in anything.
2) get obsessed about anything.
3) form a community about anything
4) get bitchface about anything.

Take this photo:

This woman is another artist who appears several times in the photo set; as far as I could see, this is the only time she’s covered, though she tries to vary her appearance every time.

Below the photo are the following comments:

Oh, internet. Never change.

On Friday, I went to Alaya Dawn Johnson’s launch party for her 1920s vampire novel Moonshine. It was a flapper party. I was not missing that.

It was a great party – live music, performances, people complaining about their suits at length. But the best part about it was that the gallery was so far on the West Side that hipsters piling onto the street from out of nowhere just looked as though they had crawled out of the slime of the River, adjusted their ironic 80s fashions, and then set out their shamble across the city. I am not exaggerating when I say that literally hundreds of hipsters passed us, on this non-major cross-street at the far edge of the city, over the course of the evening. I still don’t understand where they all came from. Eventually partygoers gave me possible transportation options like “magical bridge” and “dirigible,” and I believed them all, because THEY JUST KEPT COMING.

Bonus: that party also ruined my impression of New York as a place where hipsters are obsessed with being seen in superhip exclusive nightclubs with five bouncers, which I carried over from my time working for an event planner. Turns out this is wrong! People in New York will, in fact, enter any venue where lights are on and sound is coming out, much like moths, or nightgown-wearing young ladies vacationing in remote locales. A good two dozen people walked into this party off the street, saw that 95% of attendees were dressed like a silent movie, AND WENT WITH IT. Twenty minutes later, they would wander out again, looking confusedly at the book they had somehow bought. Meanwhile, all the costumed partygoers were sipping drinks and giving them the side-eye. It was glorious.

There is photographic evidence of this nice party, but this photo in particular captures the mood of the room:

Photo: Ellen B. Wright | http://www.ellenbwright.com/

It catches that sense of fun that was going around all night, with Alaya soaking up the good vibes, AND a pair of party-crashers doing the Charleston in the foreground. Dance away, participatory hipsters! (SERIOUSLY, WHERE DID YOU COME FROM.)

So, I promise I have a Cookson and everything lined up for next week, but this week I am slammed with work on all fronts and my blog posts look like a Tumblr. I know! I’m sorry!

Two things.

1. Pre-emptive apology: If this CSI Miami intro-pun thing is not funny anymore and I am totally behind the times, somebody should tell me, because I laugh every time I run across it, no matter what. I feel suspiciously like I am that person who was the VERY LAST PERSON to give up laughing at the “WAZZZAAAAP” beer commercial.

(Note: I never actually laughed at that, because I hated it and everyone in it, but I am always wary of being the last person in the room to be like, “Have I got an amazing cutting-edge cultural reference!” and then I do a Fonzie impression and everyone’s quiet for three thousand years until the building crumbles because of tectonic plate shift and I fall gratefully into an abyss.*)

via Disney Princesses

2. Speaking of really dark fairy tales that can easily become more horrifying, this week I wrote up a steampunk remake of Hansel and Gretel that’s in the works for next year.

In theory, I approve (steampunk and dark fairy tales and incesty overtones, what’s not to like?). However, the news that they’re trolling the cast of Twilight like a suspicious old man at a Kinder Kare has me worried, because I don’t know if you have noticed this, but that crew is not necessarily made up of the best actors in the world. (Or in their fifty-foot radius.) I know that movie is popular, and I understand that casting Jackson Rathbone sounds like a wise move, but I urge you to actually watch one of those movies and re-evaulate, because for real.