Gravity, The Flaming Lips and Fucked-Up Waterfalls

Last Saturday Mike, Maya and I loaded up the car (with... ourselves? I guess no loading took place) and headed down to Chicago to try and catch Kevin Smith and one of his Q&A sessions at a convention in Rosemont. I've hit this up two other years in two other groups (once in 2001, once in 2004) with the exact same goal--failed all three years. One year I did get to meet Jason Mewes (The Jay of Jay and Silent Bob) and that was pretty cool, and I usually walked away with some free shit and a bootleg dvd or two. This year we got there too late to get tickets to the Kevin Smith dilla (again) and then tooled around the booths that were selling random shit and looked at the artwork on display from various artists in attendance. The booths had absolutely nothing, it was all junk and old toys. They had a small halfpipe to promote some new Tony Hawk game. We couldn't tell if it was actual paid skaters making use of it or random convention people, it seemed like it was paid skaters that just weren't that good. A couple of them had some decent stalls going on, but the rest kept tanking off the board as soon as they'd drop in. We did get to talk to one of the CG animators for Reboot. Mike and Maya dug talking CG and programs, I just loves me some Reboot.

After the stench and the people started getting to us (about an hour and a half in) we said screw it, took off and got some Giardelli's Pizza. I don't know if that's the right name at all but it's some delicious Chicago pizza. By this point the 2 hours of sleep we all had the night before was catching up, Mike and Maya were passing out and I jumped in on the driving action, gunning for the city without a plan in the world. I played the "look for tthe tallest building in the city" game to navigate our way to the Sears Tower and after doing a drive-by of the lakefront and Lollapalooza, we parked and hit some elevator action up.

Shooting up 100 stories in an elevator is a little hair-raising for someone whose afraid of heights, the gravity is a little much for anybody, but to top it all off they had this awful Billy Crystal monologue running the entire way [shudder]. Up top was nothin' but Urban Sprawl and a clear view of the craziness that was Lollapalooza. Before this, while waiting in line to get up the Sears Tower, Steve Holland returned a call I had left him earlier in the day about how to navigate Chicago. Turned out he happened to be a block away. After we came back down 100 stories and braved another dose of Billy Crystal, we all met up and wandered the city.

While wandering we became aware that we could easily hear the bands playing at Lollapalooza. With this in mind we made our way to Grand Central, pausing occasionally to laugh at the people being trained on how to use a Segway and the guy getting busted for looking like a hippy and having contraband to walk the walk. After throwing down on some Animal Crackers Holland had his wits about him and called out the band playing as The Flaming Lips, so we walked towards the direction of the sound and found the stage was in clear view from the sidewalk. There was a small grouping of people who had also noticed this, and a couple of security guards at the fence who seemed simultaneously irked that we could enjoy the concert without having paid to get in and also in complete indifference to this same fact. The same woman walked past and said something about us not being able to hang out right at the fence a few times, at which point we took four steps back to the sidewalk and that seemed to take care of that. It was a good show, they had a chorus of dancing Santa's and a mass of giant, blown-up blue balls being bounced, bashed and blocked by the crowd.

Post free show we wandered down to Milennium Park to check out Cloud Gate and these strange Labyrinth-esque waterfalls that would display random faces every thirty seconds or so.

And after capturing some pictures with both the caveman-like cameraphone and Holland's Digital Camera we wandered the city back towards the direction of our car. Mike, Maya and Myself took off, gunning for Milwaukee which now seemed quite a bit smaller than it did before. We hit up the Oasis for some food action on the way out of town and it was a day.