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Project:
A-Kon finally got the facility it needed in 2004. The larger location
didn't remove the event's quirks, but it eliminated the convention's
space shortage and turned it into a different kind of show. In the previous years that the author of this site went to the convention, A-Kon always was crowded and cramped. The solution was to find the largest convention hotel combination in Dallas, the Adam's Mark hotel that is connected via skybridge to the convention center across the street. Finally, with the space the convention needed, the dealer's room got all of the open strolling and shopping area that it never had before. More importantly, A-Kon used the open space to give vendors and fan artists extra space for exhibits and tables. Those who have attended Otakon and its huge artists' alley hall would get an idea of what A-Kon had; it looked as if no one who wanted space at A-Kon was turned away. The added space for the vendors and artists changed A-Kon from just another large convention, giving it a festive street fair feeling. The Adam's Mark did not have enough elevators in its three guest room towers to comfortably handle the never-ending peak traffic of an anime convention weekend. Usually, fans are advised at conventions to not use the elevators and take the stairs, but fans complained that the access from the stairs to other floors was locked or blocked, leaving them only escape access to the ground floor. That made the elevator service the only way to get even from one floor to the next, it seemed, and made the elevator traffic even worse. The author sneaked through some interior hotel service corridors a couple of times to avoid the elevators. Rather than making it look as if they were kicking the author out of places he shouldn't have been, sympathetic hotel employees showed the author the best paths to the lobby. Also, the Adam's Mark did have the best fan buffet ever spotted by this author, a second-floor treat that had shockingly low prices. The hotel charged $2 for a slice of pizza, but they defined a "slice" as one-quarter of a pie, while some vendors say a slice is an eighth of a pie. That move made the hotel a strong competitor to delivery companies and a nearby food court. It was one of the high points of the weekend. This site wanted to bring you more more pictures of the J-rock bands that graced the convention, but promoters and managers didn't want pictures taken of most of the groups. A big exception was young singer Nami Tamaki. She's enthusiastic about her work, and seems to be trying to stay as much a normal teenager as possible. The 16-year-old Tamaki does not have a voice as powerful as older singers such as Koda Kumi, and she'll have to work on the high end of her register, but her dancing is great to watch. And that dancing is where you could tell a lot of work was done. It's hard to tell from our pictures, but Tamaki had eight dancers with her on stage, each prettier and more energetic than the next. None of the other singers with backup dancers that we've seen have had more than two dancers onstage, and it's a credit to Tofu Records that they went to the expense of bringing over the people to fill the stage. Thanks to those performers, it was as much a dance show as a singing show, with the sort of constant motion and action you'd expect to see only in a choreographed Broadway musical. The author felt fortunate to get the pictures he wanted, because he was working with this second-string equipment. During the previous weekend's two-convention trip, the shutter on his Canon D30 digital SLR started malfunctioning, a sign that the author took too many pictures in the year since it was last fixed. The Canon camera's gone back to the repair shop with hopes of a reasonably low estimate. In the meantime, the author broke out his backup camera, the Olympus C-2100UZ from three years ago. It's still a good camera that can handle 80 percent of the D30's work, but the C-2100UZ doesn't respond as fast as the Canon. That's why the author missed some shots during the Saturday night costume contest (including Doc Fraga's debut in his wrestling mask). If you tried to look at some of the pictures on Saturday and found blank spaces; apologies, but the cell phone internet access was weak at the convention, and some uploads failed. We managed to fix all of that by Saturday night after the costume contest was over. The best the Adam's Mark offered was dial up access because their advertised high-speed access didn't work. As always, the author missed some of the events he wanted to cover. On Saturday morning, an eight-actor event was scheduled for the same time as a panel on Yoshitoshi Abe's work featuring Marc Hairston, Carrie Savage and Jonathan Klein. This writer went to the eight-actor panel and forgot about the Abe panel until Savage reminded him of the event when she spotted the author in a hallway. And the author nearly missed the start of the costume contest for an unusual reason: the event started nearly ten minutes early. Assuming that A-Kon would follow the standard convention pattern of ridiculously late starting times for the contests, the author was sitting at a table, the notebook PC plugged into a wall outlet, when contest announcer Brad DeMoss said the event was going to start on time. The author stopped the FTP upload, shut down the computer and rushed into the ballroom, just in time to see the first entry. That interrupted upload was another reason there were some pictures and files missing from the web site over the weekend. The acting star of this show was Scott McNeil. who seemed to always have a cloud of fans around him and never stopped signing autographs. At the planned actors' autograph session, McNeil got his own line because so many fans wanted to meet him. Long after that session was over, McNeil still was signing autographs; at one point he sat on the floor, signing as fans surrounded him. An hour later, McNeil was sitting at a table near the big artists' alley, signing stuff for anyone who came up. The line for that impromptu session nearly merged with the weekend's other long line, for Megatokyo artist Fred Gallagher and Sarah. Gallagher's line nearly ran out of fans for a few minutes, then it seemed to grow by 100 people. At that eight-actor panel, McNeil and other big talkers like Vic Mignogna, Michael Coleman and Sean Schemmel were on one side of the row, while the quieter actors such as Lauren Goodnight and Nancy Novotny were on the other side, patiently waiting for a chance to talk. Goodnight did most of her talking at another panel where she helped teach cosplayers how to act on stage (project your voice, never turn your back on the audience). Novotny was one of the actors (including Greg Ayres and Tiffany Grant) who weren't invited guests but went to the show, anyway. In the dealers' room, Grant added a $36 shoulder vibrator to her Hello Kitty collection. At least the trip to Dallas started out with a good omen when the author was bumped from an overbooked flight. Most people would complain, but the author wanted it that way because the airline compensated him with a voucher good for a substantial credit on another flight - enough to all but pay for the next trip's transportation to AnimeNEXT. And the author arrived only two hours later than planned. On the morning of the convention's second day, the author of this site took a necessary pilgrimage to the near west end of downtown Dallas. Walking over to Elm Street and heading west, a short walk led to Dealey Plaza, the left-hand turn from Houston to Elm, and the six-story building that once was called the Texas School Book Depository. The author had traveled to Dallas every year since 1998 for A-Kon, but the convention never had been so close to the place where John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The site is smaller than the old films and pictures would have you think. It was a tiny place for the world to change in 1963. The spot of history for the world is just another place for Dallas natives, and the plaza and its "X" in the middle of Elm Street was deserted early Saturday morning. No memorial marks Kennedy's death at the plaza; that's left for a structure a couple of blocks away. So isolated are conventions from the world that it wasn't until the author returned to his hotel room on Saturday night that he learned that former president Ronald Reagan had died. Reagan may be the last president to come anywhere close to being universally popular. |
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