International Steampunk City

The lead-up to the International Steampunk City (ISC) in Waltham, Mass was a tad unsettling. I had contacted the organizers, offering to do a presentation on the Mystery Airships of 1897 and they had responded positively. Then, about a month out, the website disappeared. And not just the sort of error when a server is down but the kind of message when the domain is no longer registered. It turned out that Jeff Mach, the guy who runs the Steampunk World Fair and other cons, had been forced out of his position at the ISC. He had given organizers a month to get their act together before he pulled the website and Facebook page that he had been maintaining. That very same day, actually in the time it took me to realize that the site was down and walk downstairs to send an email from another PC to find out what was going on, I received an email from the academic track coordinator confirming my time slot at the Waltham Public Library. I never quite figured out what had actually gone on to cause such a falling out between Jeff Mach and the rest of the ISC organizers but the festival was still happening.

Thursday

I will say that drivingEuphorbia's Subaru Forester for 10 hours is much less stressful on my knees than driving my Honda Accord. It probably has much to do with the more upright seated posture. I am in the market for a new car by the end of the year as my Accord has over 200,000 miles on it and the rust is beginning to take its toll. Maybe I'll have to look at a taller car.

We had made our plans based on the general convention assumption that things start on Friday afternoon. Thus, we drove up on Thursday. We walked around Waltham a bit after checking into the hotel but most things were closed. We ate at the Watch City Brewery. The waiter asked "Were you in here last week with a bullwhip?"

What is it about me that I look so much like someone else, especially when I have taken great pains to grow out my beard into something unique?

Friday

Since the ISC organizers canceled the few Friday activities they had scheduled, we chose to drive into Boston for the day. Lots of 18th Century history. Lots of walking around. I found a bookstore with a first edition copy of James Dugan's "The Great Iron Ship", a history of Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Great Eastern.

The hotel room at the Crescent Suites was the best that I have ever been in. It was huge and had a full kitchen. Sink, stove, microwave, coffee maker, even a dishwasher. It made me want to have a room party. I should have made an extra effort to initiate just such an occurrence with the other resident steampunks I ran into at the complimentary breakfast.

Saturday

The opening ceremonies were just next door at the watch factory. They did not start right off so we went to see some of the dealers inside the factory. One had some Waltham watch parts at a much higher price than is probably appropriate for broken watch parts. She did have a lens measuring tool that I thought was neat but decided not to buy because it wasn't $20 neat.

Elln Hagney, Executive Director of the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation and the person running this show, announced that they oped to have 10,000 in attendance. That sounded like a lot but considering that it was the entire town opened up to the event and weekend passes were only $20 I expected there would be quite a few non-steampunks and other locals who signed up to see what was being offered.

I also learned that the locals pronounce it Wal-THAM rather than WAL-tham.

It was a very long walk from the watch factory to downtown Waltham itself. The people at the hotel had called it a three minute walk. Three minute DRIVE, perhaps, but I think that is merely another indication of the car-centric culture. A complete lack of understanding what it is like to walk somewhere. Intersections have buttons to press for the light and the crosswalk lights don't seem to light unless you press the button. Cars rule the streets and pedestrians need to ask permission to cross.

After getting our buttons, we started walking up towards the museum and I discovered my cane was breaking. Again. It was a hardwood cane with a steam boiler gauge epoxied to the top and even though I had made efforts to have it epoxied securely it just couldn't take the stress of use. Looks good but fails. I went back to the information center and asked if they could hold it behind the counter for a few hours.

I missed Anabel Graetz's workshop on Victorian Oratory and also David Gordon's lecture on photographer Eadweard Muybridge mostly because of the poor structure of the printed program. They had a grid of events and locations but for locations like the library, they said "lectures" and you had to go to another page in the program to find which specific lectures were at what times in the library. I can see having that as a sort of placeholder when you don't quite have the program filled out but when the final program goes to press, that needs to be filled in, even if it's a simple comment like "Victorian Oratory" and the details of what that means are on a different page.

I took plenty of pictures in the museum because, well, museums are neat. Especially industry museums that have old equipment you can get close to. They had a hand crank dynamo that I recognized because I had one almost just like it, except that mine was lacking the hand crank part. I'll need to look into getting something like that so that I can make it functional. Also, while I was taking pictures I was approached by someone from the Boston Glob who, seeing my decent camera and the care and attention I was taking in my photography, handed me a slip with a URL on it so that I could submit my photographs to the ISC Festival photo site. When I post my photos online, I almost always do so under Creative Commons Non-Commercial license, that is, so long as people give me credit for the original, they are free to distribute and modify my pictures. I like to share. But to give my photos to the Boston Globe, I am not so sure about that. Certainly they are a commercial endeavor and they have the potential to make money off of my photograph for which, if I am lucky, I will receive only the name credit and no financial compensation. Their terms seem to suggest that the copyright on the photo would remain mine but it is done in sufficently vague language as I would not be sure. So, no. I'm not posting my photos. Sorry, you are professional journalists. I'm not going to do your job for you.

But what I really wanted to do was bring my Great Grandmother's pocket watch home. It was manufactured in April of 1881 at the American Watch Company in Waltham and this was an opportunity to bring it back to the place where it was manufactured. I would have loved the opportunity to show it to museum people and look at records and see what more I could find out about it but the one person at the exhibit was busy the entire time talking to someone else and I didn't want to interrupt. I was able to compare it with a display of the evolution of lady's watches and understand its place in the evolution of watches.

There was a cellist performing in another room of the museum, she seemed to be laying musical tracks. It was very ambient and really inappropriate for the acoustics of the room it was in.

In a neighboring room, an artist had a very nice model of Harper Goff's Nautilus. He also had some steampunked USB flash drives that were very nice as well but far to expensive for flash drives.

After the museum it looked like rain was on the way so, rather than getting caught out on the commons when the rain finally did arrive, we started back on the long walk back to the hotel. We had heard there was supposed to be a shuttle bus between downtown and watch factory venue but didn't see it any bus stops nor anything in the program paper.

When the rain finally did come, we ducked into the watch factory "museum" to wait out the worst of it. This little museum was really just a single room with a few display cases. The bulk of exhibitry was at the Charles River Museum.

Once we got back to the room I took a short nap before collecting my stuff up and driving over to the library for my presentation. When I arrived at the library and identified myself to the staff person near the door he gave me a presenter badge and said that it was good for all the festival's venues. I had already bought one for the gate price of $20 without realizing that, as a presented, I was going to be comped. Not that I feel bad about this. It's supporting the cause and I'd be willing to spend the money whether I was presenting or not but it would have been nice to know that in advance.

Before my presentation there was a presentation by Samuel Sobek and Stephen Ebinger on 19th Century and Steampunk Gunsmithing. This was not your typical Nerf-gun mod presentation but a presentation on deep concept. They started with an idea set within 19th Century history and technology. In this case, a clip-fed revolver. The idea is that a revolver would have six cylinders and, with an additional mechanism could have a clip that reloads the cylinder with an additional 6 cartridges. It sounds a bit stupid adding the clip to load a cylinder. Why not just use the clip to load the chamber and skip the cylinder altogether? Well, if you are Samuel Colt and you are trying to maintain a patent on your revolvers then it could make sense. So, once with the concept they started building a functioning prototype. Well, as neither of them are gunsmiths I expect that it won't be an actual firearm but, in the end, they will have something that will rotate the cylinder, load cartridges and empty spent brass which they will then turn into a commercial kit for sale.

I like the concept and philosophy. The idea that a weapon should have a reason for being the way that it is rather than just putting a bunch of fins, wires and doo-hickies on something and calling it steampunk.

My presentation was in a conference room rather than a lecture hall. The person running the academic track said that she didn't realize that the two rooms in the library were of different sizes. Attendance to my program was small and so having the smaller room wasn't a factor but the person running things should have had a walk through.

Here in Pittsburgh, I have been involved with Confluence for over a decade now running the video room and whenever we have moved or though of moving to a new venue, the con com did a walk through. Different program has different requirements and doing the walk through allows people to decide which rooms are for panels, which are for the art show, dealers, filk, the video room and so on.

For example, I don't think I could have guessed that my presentation would be attended by only half a dozen people but I would have put money on Katherine Moseley's "Corsets, Goggles & Empowerment: Women & Steampunk", which was the program in the conference room before me, requiring more space. Had the programming people see the space at the outset, they might have scheduled things differently. On the other hand, I would have been sorely disappointed to have been in the lecture hall space and only had half a dozen show up there, more so that the same amount of people in the smaller space.

We had dinner at Tom Can Cook, which made up for the mediocre experience I had at the Malaysian restaurant in Boston the night before. Not that the food was bad there, it's just that it did not suit my tastes.

Sunday

Instead of walking into town or seeking out the shuttle bus (which we knew was actually in existence but still didn't know the details of) we drove to park near the commons. Today was going to be dealer's day.

I spent the better part of an hour talking with the gentlemen of the Boston Wheelmen. They had their vintage ordinaries out riding about the commons. They also had a few period safety bikes and one Star (that looks like the "penny farthing" but with the small steering wheel in the front). At one point, one of the wheelmen was talking to a modern, spandex clad, aerodynamic alloy frame cyclist who fearfully would not climb aboard his high wheeler.  This wasn't even to ride around, it was just for her to sit on the machine. She said she would do it if her co-rider would do it first. He did and she then chickened out.

I should have tried it out as well and maybe even actually given riding a try but most of my time talking with them was me talking about airships and explaining to them what steampunk was.

I spent a lot of time over the weekend explaining to people what steampunk was. It seems that a lot of the natives weren't aware that their town was going to be the site of such a festival and that it was going to be filled with people with waistcoats and top hats, corsets and parasols.

One of the dealers on the commons had the crappiest steampunk stuff I had yet seen. Up until this point, steampunk was something that people cobbled together from other stuff. Goggles were actually safety or welding goggles repurposed with a new paint job and some gears and stuff or were built from scratch with plumbing parts and leather. This particular dealer had steampunk branded merchandise, like what you would expect in the Halloween costume aisle at Wal-mart.  It was cheap and I suppose if you were just getting into steampunk or wanted to steampunk your kid for a weekend festival it would be alright but I actually thought it a bit embarrassing

Across the street from the commons, on the 5th floor, were the quality dealers. Yes, the fifth floor. I suppose you get what space you can. It turns out that the programmers realize the flaw in putting dealers across the street on the fifth floor of a building where you have to have someone turn a key to take shoppers up on an elevator and next year they will be directing people to get tents and set up on the commons.

There was a parade lead by Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band, the only musical group that I had really wanted to hear all weekend. I didn't see anywhere on the schedule where they had an actual concert, otherwise I would have been there. Did they only do the parade? In any case, after they marched from the museum to the commons they headed back towards town. We weren't sure where they were going but I had marched in parades back in high school and wasn't interested in reliving those days to that extent so we got in the car and drove back to hotel to then walk to the watch factory becauseEuphorbia wanted to shop at one of the dealers before they closed. In walking over to the watch factory, we saw the parade approaching, much diminished as it's nearly a mile from the commons to the watch factory and ta number of people bailed as we had.

At closing ceremonies, it was announced that the festival had gone very well. The police had reported no incidents and not even any trash left about. It would seem that steampunks are courteous and tidy.

Finally, Emperor Norton's played a few songs before things closed up. I would have liked to have heard a full concert but they had marched and played the whole way from town so I merely missed it because I didn't feel like walking. They will be at the Steampunk World's Fair so I'll get to see them there.

I enjoyed myself in spite of some of the bumps in the road with the way everything was spread out and he way the program was printed. It would be interesting to come back and see how they clean up some of the issues but something I missed out on was the social aspect. There were a few opportunities to talk to people but with everything so spread out, the likely of just running into someone you know and having the opportunity to talk was small. One would need to make plans in advance or through cell phone to meet up. Again, I should have made that effort at the hotel, talking to people at the complimentary breakfast and inviting them to the room in the evening.

The International Steampunk City apparently made their 10,000 in attendance. Congratulations, Waltham.