Steampunk Weekend at Old West Fest

As the steampunk weekend at the Old West Festival was to coincide with the Pandora Society's Steampunk Salon, even though I am running low on funds I decided to combine the two, splurge, and get a room for the night. There had been some talk about a local hotel having favorable rates for the event and so I waited to make reservations until it was pretty much too late. The decent Covington hotels in my price range were full up for some concurrent sporting event and the rest were very expensive. The cheapest was also the only one with rooms available: The Travelodge in Newport.

Online reviews of the Travelodge were abysmal. Dirt. Smells. Bugs. Even one report of blood on the sheets. Most of the worst reviews were older but the newer reviews weren't much better. I was going to take my chances to save myself at least $100 over what was next available. At worst, I figured, I would sleep in my car.

Next on the agenda was the repair of all the damage that Pittsburgh Comicon had done to my Steampunk Django cosplay. The chest armor destroyed by sweat was re-painted and sealed on the back side. The failed belt loops on my drop holsters were cut off and the leather straps were bolted directly to the holster. The plastic window on the coffin/freezer was made more secure with washers.

On Saturday morning, strapping the coffin/freezer to my car's bike rack was the last thing to do. It was raining. I didn't have a tarp so I had to make due with plastic garbage bags and masking tape. It turns out that was somewhat insufficient as the wind generated by driving at highway speed destroyed the plastic. At several points I stopped to add more plastic and tape.

On arrival, I discovered that the washers were not enough to hold the window. I had hoped it would be so that I could more easily switch it out if it cracked but apparently I will need to hot glue the window in. I was able to remount the window and there was no more damage than that.

But it does not drag well on gravel or wood chip. The small caster wheels dug in and I was literally dragging it around the festival. I ended up making one pass and then doing a lot of standing in front of the saloon or the jail. For a while I stashed it behind a fence so I could see the sights, dragging it out again for the costume contest.

Which I didn't win, by the way. Unlike Comicon, my Django walk-on music worked, and everything else went according to plan except the competition. A young boy was competing and, in any popularity contest with a kid. . . the kid wins. I don't begrudge him the victory, especially in this environment. It's that sort of encouragement that gets the kids more involved in the future.

And besides, I didn't need another Old West Fest t-shirt.

A lot of people liked my costume but almost no one got the reference. I would prompt them by saying “Two different movies but with the same character name” and a few got that it was “Star Wars” but far fewer figured out that it was Jango Fett and not Boba Fett and no one got the “Django” reference until these two patrons saw me from across the street and come up to me with big smiles.

They got it.

I would have hoped that, with all the western enthusiasts and even the cowboy action performers, there would be a greater identification than at a comicon. There was but only by a very small amount. I guess the “Westerns and Samurai” film studies course I took in college was more formative than I thought it was. Even though I had not actually seen “Django” myself until sometime last year (which I think might have been my inspiration for the cosplay) I recognized the movie's influence on other media. I had though that Django dragging the coffin around was iconic. Well, iconic yes, widely recognized, not so much.

My Vitruvius Pike persona is not the kind of person that would wear spurs. A little too urban. I little too Yankee. Remember the scene in “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” when Clint Eastwood kills a squad of assassins, tipped off by the jangle of their spurs? Yea, Pike would not be that guy. But as I walked around in my Steampunk Django cosplay I thought that the costume could benefit from spurs. I know, as a bounty hunter he might be even less likely to wear spurs but that's the thought I had. Did Franco Nero wear spurs in the 1966 film? Don't remember. Don't care. I wanted spurs.

None of the vendors had spurs but in talking to one of the performers I was pointed in the direction of Tractor Supply Company.

Tractor Supply?

Sure enough, on the way towards Cincinnati, behind the Wendy's, was a Tractor Supply and, three rows back on the right there was horse feed, shoes, tack, harness and, yea, spurs. It is just this side of Kentucky so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Would TSCs around Pittsburgh carry spurs? I'll have to stop by the next time I am passing through Cranberry or Delmont to find out.

My daughter joked that I now have spurs that djingle, djangle, djingle.

And so, with the western stuff over for the day, I arrived at the Travelodge to see if the horrific reviews were true. For the most part, they were not. The hotel had certainly not been updated for quite some time but that was not something I particularly cared about. I was looking for a clean bed for the night.

The room did have a significant odor, the sort of smell that had me think it was leftover from the cleaning staff trying to eliminate some other, more offensive odor. It gave me a little bit of a headache in the short time I was there but I opened a window (yea, the windows actually open) and left it that way, hoping it would clear out by the time I returned.

I changed, waxed my mustache and headed off to the salon. It was only a mile away and, not knowing the parking situation, I decided to walk. That took me past a parking lot concert of the religious attempting to combat an apparent epidemic of heroin in the community of Newport by singing “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus” over and over again.

I spent a few hours at the salon (3rd floor of Molly Malone's in Covington) talking to some people that I don't get to talk to much. Even when I see them at something like the Steampunk Empire Symposium I don't get to talk to them much with all the convention stuff going on. It's unfortunate that most of my involvement was my lamenting my unemployment situation.

There was music going so most of the talking was yelling. As the evening got on, it changed from overly loud background music to excessively loud party music. At that point, events such as these devolve into dancing and drinking and maybe yelling at the person next to you asking if they want a drink or to dance. I pretty much abandoned the project shortly after that and neither dancing or drinking appeals to me and it is essentially impossible to converse under those circumstances.

I walked back to the hotel. The god-bothering was over. The room had aired out. I slept.

Sunday was a very different day at the festival. Firstly, I dressed in my more typical garb. Frock coat. Gunbelt. Badge. Sword. I also wore my new spurs because. . . reasons.

On Saturday, one of the performers was gifted with a print by artist Brandon Batie. Batie had taken the performer's photograph at last year's festival and then had digitally painted it. He had done the same with me and I had hoped to run into him again to ask about that and, if nothing else, to have him take a photograph of me in my Steampunk Django because I wanted pro-level pictures of the cosplay. As I had been wearing a mask on Saturday when he was there, he didn't recognize me and I wasn't able to catch up with him. As it was, he had left a print for me with the performers and, once I was out of the mask on Sunday, they recognized me and gave me the print.

Now I need to seek out a frame and wall space on which to hang it, the latter being the more difficult task as most of my wall space is blocked by book shelves.

I spent most of the day hanging about the Cincinnati Steampunk's table talking to people about steampunk and filling in for Aloysius when he had to pop off to do official steampunky things such as the costume contest and Nerf dueling.

Aloysius would typically manage the “This is what's us locals are doing” part and I would handle more of the “What is steampunk” things. One young lady said that steampunk was kind of crazy but also kind of cool.

Crazy cool. Yes. That.

On the other hand, at one boint a young boy came by the table and was handling everything and asking stupid questions. He even reached to pull my gun from its holster.

Some advice to parents; festivals are not your daycare. There are horses. There are knives. There are guns. And, also terribly important, there are people who might not take kindly to your ignorant little morlock literally running amok. If you cannot control your kid, do not expect us to do it for you.

What a little jackass.

When we weren't conversing with the public, Aloysius and I were conversing on a wide range of topics. The one I want to mention here is time travel.

No, sir, I don't like it.

Well, for the most part. I blame “Star Trek: The Next Generation” mostly but television in general has a bad track record of writing good time travel stories (One of the exceptions being Harlan Ellison's original script for “City on the Edge of Forever.). Movies tend to do better, but not by much. In part, I think it is literally how much time they spend dealing with time. A TV show doesn't typically have the time to present a complete and cohesive view of how time works before they have to start throwing paradoxes and such into the mix. Tropes upon tropes that need to be neatly wrapped up under an hour. And, in the case of “Star Trek,” they overused the time travel plot device. J.J. Abram's reboot disappointingly started with time travel to justify every change, using time travel as a plot hammer.

Aloysius askled me then about good time travel and I mentioned Mark Hodder's series that starts with “The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack.” The series is all about time travel and alternate universes and takes a while to let you in on that. He reveals the details piece by piece and even when you know it's time travel and think you know what's going to happen next (because it's already happened) he is able to put a twist on it. It should perhaps be unsurprising that the model of the flow of time and the introduction of paradoxes parallels that presented by Ellison.

I didn't get a chance to talk more about that because when I mentioned the main character of Hodder's series was Victorian super-adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton, Aloysius thought I was talking about the 20th Century actor Sir Richard Burton, which lead the conversation down a different path.

As we were packing up do go, Aloysius expressed that he had enjoyed the time conversing with me. I did as well. In many ways, this is what I find most satisfying in any convention (or festival) setting. Talking with people on topics of interest. Intellectual conversations that engage my brain. So many of my conversations lately are out-of-work related.

And, I'm going to say this right now, when I'm at TeslaCon in a few weeks (if that plan doesn't crash and burn) I might want to spend a lot of time in the tea room. If you see me there, or even if you see me anywhere, come and talk to me about things. Talk about history. Science. Technology. Literature. Costuming. Things.

Not my life. Not my job.

The last thing before the five hour drive home was the quick stop at the porta-john. As I walked over, and with the end of the day temperature cooling, I put my hands in my pocket and discovered a vest button. How it had gotten off of my vest and into my pocket I have no idea. I dodn't remember it coming off and ending up on the ground. What is worse is that, on checking the two vests I wore over the weekend, I discovered that I was not actually missing any buttons.

I may be loosing my mind.