I have not been lost in the
throes of my next book. That doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about my next book. It's just...well, it's just sitting there. Waiting for me to finish editing.
Editing what? Editing various unfinished projects--a few short stories, some articles, the latest draft of my Elvis book. It sounds kitschy, doesn't it? Elvis book. Of course kitsch isn't my thing--my pop culture obsession remains in the present, not the past--and there was a time when Elvis wasn't kitsch. You could argue all mega-successful artists eventually become kitsch. Merchandising does that to the things we love. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I'll be hanging out with the G4 AOTS crew at the Comic-Con, and here's the premise:
The Revolution Will Be
Televised…Courtesy of Stickam
In ages past, between
the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the Wachowski Brothers lost all
street cred, the San Diego Comic-Con was the provenance of geeks. Of
course geeks doesn't mean anything now,
other than a caricature of intensely-devoted, whip-smart creative types (and of
course the old meaning of geek—a circus performer who bites off the
heads of live animals—is long forgotten). But we’ll use geek because it’s the best we can do, and in that spirit, the true
geek ownership of Comic-con—the LARPing, comic book-obsessing, action-figure
collecting otaku hounds with their fingers perpetually stained Doritos-orange
and their heads crammed with encyclopedic knowledge of canceled sci-fi shows—is
long lost.
The Comic-Con has been co-opted, and finally, after all these
years, CEO’s have discovered the economic power of niche marketing. It’s about
damn time. Didn’t we tell you that Iron
Man would kill? That Conan was
tailor-made for gaming? That Miyuzaki was better than Disney?
We who suffered through the days of Commodore 64 and
Intellivision have seen our patience rewarded. Generation X is now Generation
X-Play. The jocks of our youth who saw gaming as a hobby for the weak now watch
their beloved professional athletes competing in Madden tournaments. Graphic
novels inch their way toward literary acceptance. Geek has gone chic.
Tracing the etiology of this seismic cultural shift is tricky—video
game technology improved, a dearth of fresh ideas led to the comic
book/Hollywood crossover, tech prices decreased—but to find the source of this
geek-to-chic shift you have to start with its revolutionaries. And so we arrive
at G4. More specifically, we arrive
at G4’s signature program, Attack of the
Show…
