Political conventions abide by the mullet strategy—business in the front, party in the back.

The venue for the closing party for the Republican National Convention is the Walker Art Center in downtown Minneapolis. Google and Vanity Fair are the hosts. Like the Google campus, food is ubiquitous; like Vanity Fair, luxury is the tone.

At the equivalent party in Denver, celebrities were falling on each other. But tonight there are no celebs, at least not of the Hollywood variety. Instead you get Henry Kissinger, who is holding court near the glass wall overlooking the city.

For a second, the spot next to Kissinger on the couch opens up. Calculating my opening line, I tell FishBowlNY's Glynnis MacNicol that I'm moving in.

But someone has beaten me there—Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube, jumps into the seat.

"What do you think they're talking about?" I say rhetorically, annoyed that I missed my chance.

"China, probably," says Ana Marie Cox.

I look back at Kissinger and Hurley and think, Yeah, that's probably right.

I finally have an answer to the question that's been on my mind all week: Why hold these conventions in the first place?

***

Like most media spectacles, political conventions are a vicious circle of attention. Of course they are pure pageantry, and of course they are infomercials for forgotten causes, and of course nothing of any real substance comes out of them. But yet they linger, simply out of the sheer force of history. Conventions are like particle colliders, with media and money smashed together like electrons. If you put this many word-starved writers and this many chatty politicos in a room, of course news will happen.

Hurley will sit next to Kissinger to discuss China near the Donald Judd sculpture.

The writers will watch, scribble, drink, and rub elbows. Getting plastered in the company of the quasi-famous people is never fulfilling, but it's always noteworthy.

On television, political conventions looks like infomercials. In reality, they are like summer camps. They're like the Super Bowl without the game, or like SXSW without the bands. But everyone watches the big game for the ads, and uses music as an excuse to rub bodies.

Conventions will always exist. You can't uninvent anything in politics.

***

No one can explain why this closing party is thrown by Google and Vanity Fair. They seem an odd paring—one aggressively moving forward quick enough to out-pace ethical questions, the other wrenching the past for all its worth.

But the pairing also makes sense. For all the talk about old and new media, the terms are mostly dead here. Print journalists might debate whether to stand during the national anthem while bloggers update their Tumblr between tumblers of Jameson, but they're now basically the same creatures.

This is the convention where the inevitable collapse of opinion and news was visualized. "Anarchist" and "videographer" are nearly synonyms here. All the protesters seem to wield cameras, further complicating the lines between advocacy and journalism, now almost blurry enough to be anachronisms. While delegates are shuffled between twin cities in giant busses fortified like tanks, protesters are creating their own media. Not only do they need to get arrested—they need to capture their arrest.

This is when I realize that political conventions only start to make sense when you're either caught in the middle of a violent protest or at one of the luxurious parties.

The parties and the protests are the show.

I wonder what Kissinger would think of this.

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