Here is where things get a bit blurry. Whereas I have very distinct images for virtually every other day of my trip, Albany Anthrocon is a bit of a low-resolution muddle. Or to be more precise, the images are still there, but the order in which they actually occurred is not at all clear to me. I suppose this is an effect of being in the same place for 4 days - something I most definitely didn't do at any other time during the journey. The other odd thing is I find it hard to know quite what to say about the convention; it's almost as if, in describing it, I'm trying to get a handle on some communal experience, rather than a personal one, and I find the latter much easier to do. Still, what the heck. The next few instalments may be a little shorter than usual, but I will try to limit myself to things which I can be reasonably sure happened on the day in question.
The day in question today is the Fourth of July. American patriotic fervour in full swing, and whereas furries are a rather misanthropic bunch, American furries are by no means immune to patriotism - as if being American were a more salient property than being human. If you detect a note of derision, please be assured it's completely unintentional. My real feelings in the face of American patriotism (at least as expressed on the level of the individual) is a mixture of fascination, envy, and amusement. You would probably find it equally if not more bizarre if I were to argue that part of the symptom of Australian patriotism consists of a general disdain for patriotism, and a refusal to practice it (if you want an example, Marko Laine's instant removal of the Australian flag from his Kangaroo plush, for philosophical reasons) But enough cultural comparisons for now...
I woke up in Albany on July 4th, on the first day of my first furry convention, and soon discovered that nobody really knew what was going on. Everyone was wondering when the dealer's room was going to open. Reports and rumours circulated in an atmosphere of general confusion. The maids, who were running to a much more organised schedule, came by to clean the rooms. They were delighted at all the plush (the same plush which, according to various elements within the fandom, they ought, at very least, be terrified by.)
Sometime later in the day I decided to get my furry 'portrait' drawn by Jim Groat. I was wearing a T-shirt with a wolf and Indian on it, and he seemed a little disappointed when he learned that it was a wolf rather than an Indian which I wanted to be drawn as. As it turned out I didn't like the drawing at all, and rarely look at it. This has nothing to do with Groat's skill as an artist - he's very talented, and it's a perfectly good drawing - it's just that I discovered that if I were to have a furry alter-ego, I really don't want him to look like _me_ at all. If anything I find the sight of my own features looking back at me from within a quasi-lupine face rather silly, and obscurely disappointing. Perhaps the drawing is rather too much on the human side for my liking. I definitely think that the snoutlessness (a word which my spellchecker will certainly query) of humans is one of our most unfortunate conditions, and I definitely suffer both from snout-worship and snout-envy - of which a psychoanalyst would no doubt have something illuminating to say.
I don�t believe I bought anything else on that first day, though I did an awful lot of wandering in and out of the dealer's room, and eventually did buy a Red Shetland T-shirt (which I think I should wear one day to a university function, to get a feminist theoretical perspective on just what's wrong or right with a dangerous looking, sexually attractive, female, human-horse morph making an obscene gesture at the observer. Is this empowerment or exploitation. Or is it exploitation posing as empowerment. Frankly, my predictions that, if Chaucher's 'Treatise on the Astrolabe' is a misogynist text, they won't find anything very positive to say about Red.) Being of far more questionable moral status myself, I spent more money on Groat than I did on anyone else at AAC, I think.
So what was it like to be surrounded by furries for the first time? It was, and remains, a rather paradoxical experience for me. A simultaneous feeling of excitement and kinship, and of disdain at being surrounded by so many people, irrespective of who they are. As a result, I find that my emotions and behaviour at furry cons oscillate quite widely between wanting to participate, and wanting to lock myself in my room, or go for a walk around the block (as an example of both impulses occurring almost at once, at Confurence 9, after deciding to go to the Masquerade, I had to run up onto the roof of the hotel - which was only a partial success, as rushing outside to find oneself surrounded by the outskirts of Los Angeles is hardly a perfect remedy for claustrophobia.)
An even better question, perhaps - as this journal is up on my website, and read by non-furries, including old friends of mine - what is it like being at a furry con at all? What is furry about at all? As someone who co-wrote the FAQ for this newsgroup, I ought to be able to answer that question, but whenever someone asks me, I find myself at almost a complete loss (not that furry is necessarily hard to explain - I just frequently find myself at a total loss when people ask me to explain myself.) As a result, I'm not even going to try to answer that question here. My advice, if you're interested, is to type +furry +anthropomorphic into a search engine :/
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Towards evening word got around that there would be a fireworks display up the road tonight. Fourth of July - you know. Yeah, I knew. We set off fireworks on Regatta Day, and all that. So, come nightfall, I became part of a big throng of furries, which became part of an even bigger throng of people, who presumably were part of a collective nation-wide throng moving to hundreds of communal vantage points all over the country, as America prepared to let loose a colossal "Yeeee-haw!" at the prospect of being American, whatever that meant to the millions of individuals concerned. |
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(In Australia, it would probably be viewed as a good excuse to watch some fireworks, but there was a very definite sense of it being something more than that, here...)
Well, it was a hell of a show. Albany is a state capital, but not a big city by American standards, so I wondered what the display might be like in, say, New York City. In any case, it was more things exploding in rapid succession than I'd ever seen before. It was totally spectacular, and went on and on, yea, even to the point that it got even just slightly boring, and I got a little uncomfortable from standing still for so long. But it was a buzz, all right. A friendly, communal high, where I almost felt American for a while - and that was a strangely moving experience.
But the highlight - or at least the thing that always springs first to mind when I recall that night? The big office building beside the area from where the fireworks were released, was obviously the object of an innovative form of advertising promotion. The lights in the offices had been left on in such a pattern that they spelled out the name of what I assumed to be a chain of discount supermarkets or department stores. So the breathtaking spectacle of the Fourth of July fireworks display took place against the backdrop of a towering sign which read: "PRICE-CHOPPER"
It was a major poetic achievement.
