I started the day by walking down to the Art Institute of Chicago, walking through a couple rooms of the museum, thinking I'd dropped my phone, then walking back to my hotel room and finding it there. Then I went back to the museum and gave it the attention it deserved. Well, as much as I could in half a day. There is some important and interesting stuff there, so I had no choice but to go for quantity over quality to some degree.

Then, metal. Doom and/or black metal. Metal genres can be a bit slippery. Saw my precious metal at The Empty Bottle, a dive of a venue with some of the best air conditioning I've felt. Plus they had a bunch of doll heads on the wall. 

Since I never got around to posting them, here they are.

Day 1 features:

• my hotel room
• the bathroom sign I shared previously
• a lettuce wedge with a big disc of asiago cheese rammed into it
• sausages and beer
• the restaurant that sells those things
• bad corporate art
• the overly complicated elevator
• blurry lights from atop the Sears Tower

• a sign that says "Chicago"
• the greatest tragedy to ever befall mankind
• the Gene Siskel Film Center
• a pirate
• The Bean
• me reflected through grubby handprints on The Bean
• an amphitheater
• another gross structure in the park
• monolithic faces
• a classy guy
• beer, calamari and ravioli
• more corporate art

• David Byrne's movie, shot around here, was amusing. I like that he was the only character that wore a cowboy hat and that we were supposed to buy Spalding Gray as the mayor of a small Texas town. (True Stories)
• The Sugarland Express may be the only movie in history in which William Atherton plays a good guy.
• Drag Me to Hell has been touted as a return to form for Raimi. It has even been called Evil Dead 4 without Ash. While it had its moments, that is an extreme overstatement.
• I wish I'd seen Bill Irwin take on Richard Burton's role in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, because he's a pretty good actor for a guy who started as a circus clown. (Rachel Getting Married)
• Harlan Ellison needs a good punching. (Dreams with Sharp Teeth)
• Immortal Combat had 10 awesome minutes at the beginning and about 20 at the end. And whole lot of boring in between. But at least it starred Rowdy Roddy Piper and Sonny Chiba. And Tiny Lister crying a lot.
• Hatchet had good gore effects and cameos from Robert Englund and Tony Todd, which was enough for to make up for the rest of the movie, which was horrible.
• Zach Galifianakis can stop whining about not having done any film work to be proud of, because The Hangover was stupidly funny mostly because of his role (and Mike Tyson's), and Visioneers was interesting enough that I will eventually write a review of it for F.M.I.
• Martyrs was marketed alongside the glut of torture porn we've seen in the last couple of years, but it actually had a bit more of a point. While it dragged in the second half, it's almost worth a review on F.M.I., too. It also threw in some Japanese horror copycatting, but made it work again.
• If you thought Ferris Bueller was a douchebag, wait until you meet Charlie Bartlett.

So here's a picture of a fancy monkey.

And it's too late for me to do it now, so here's a picture of me with the Bobby Liebling
of Pentagram. He's probably the scariest frontman I've ever seen. Definitely the weirdest I've seen in person.

 

Posted midday on Day 3 as I try to figure out what to do.

Loooong sessions yesterday. Some interesting, some not. I noted that MySpace was mentioned only once all day … as a dying platform. LiveJournal wasn’t mentioned at all. It may have appeared on a few of the slides designed to show the dizzying array of social media platforms available, but not prominently enough that I ever actually noticed it.

Everyone kept saying “Twitter, Twitter, tweet, Twitter, tweet,” and then failing to have any concrete uses. Some, at least, have been actively derisive of Twitter, which I think it deserves. Unless you’re a protestor in Iran.

The conference is in one of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s buildings, which is less fancy than I’d expect. You already saw their bathroom signage.

Saw Crush on a Pepsi fountain. Interesting to me, because of how often I’ve had to write about the deal that allowed that to happen. I had a good gyro at a tiny place with no air conditioning.

My evening was a bit of a failure. I failed to get motivated in time to see a movie at the Gene Siskel Film Center and get dinner, so I just got dinner. Somehow it was more important to sit around the hotel room watching a Married With Children marathon while waiting for my body temperature to drop. It has been Texas hot up here.

I walked down to Daley Park, because I saw the big amphitheater and it was shiny, so I walked toward it. Lots of tourists and squalid-looking people. Unlike this charming fellow, who is all class:

He was standing under some bizarre fountain with big screens of two ugly people’s faces. I really didn’t get it. People were there with their kids, in bathing suits, just to stand in this thing. What the hell? I mean, if I was homeless, sure …

I saw The Bean, which is large and reflective. What fun. It was filthy with greasy fingerprints and smudges. Icky. Also icky was some white thing called an UNStudio, which I think was designed to give you various framed views of the skyline or something. All I could see through the little windows were sky and trees, and all I could see inside were screaming children and puddles of muddy water.

For dinner: Trattoria #10 is an Italian restaurant in a basement, and the food was pretty good – calamari with lamb sausage, sausage ravioli and a peach dessert. And an amber Moretti I’ve never had before. I think I might've overshot the max for expenses. Oops.

Posted towards the end of Day 2.

Why does downtown have so damn many Subways? This gets scarier when you add in the number of Jimmy John’s, Potbelly, and Quiznos locations. No city should like subs this much. There are also an unreasonable number of McDonald’s and CVS locations.

The first day of the conference went well enough and was about as helpful as I thought it would be. Some, but not a lot. The bathroom in this building had a sign that amused me. Here’s a picture of it:

That’s the only picture I’ll be posting today, because I don’t have proper software on this laptop and I don’t remember my FTP password even if I did. I could also have posted a picture of the wacky elevators in the hotel, where you have to insert your room key ridiculously low to make it go, but I’m too lazy to edit that one in Microsoft Paint.

Downtown dining actually seems somewhat limited, so I went to a place called Berghoff because it had its own beer. The amber was bizarrely buttery, and the lager was unremarkable. I had a lettuce wedge that frightened me by having a large disc of asiago shoved into it, and a sausage plate that underwhelmed.

I then went back to my hotel room for a bit and strategized my touristy stuff, at which time I realized that I had walked past the Sears Tower twice earlier in the day without realizing it. So I raced down there, gave a crackhead a dollar because he gave me a tourist brochure and some truly useful information, and went to the 99^th floor. The 103^rd floor was closed for renovations. What a gyp.

They also make you watch part of an episode of Modern Marvels before letting you up, which was annoying. As it turns out, and as the crackhead informed me, there was a fireworks display scheduled for that night on the pier, so I stayed up there to watch it. I told some Australians and a soccer mom about the fireworks, and they were grateful for the information, but the soccer mom got offended and walked away when I used the word “crackhead.” Video, of the fireworks display, here. With background tourist chatter of varying degrees of stupidity.

It was definitely a good move to go up at night. During the day, it would’ve just looked like city, but at night it looks like Blade Runner. Lots of lights climbing impossibly high. Purty.

Then I went back to my tiny hotel room, turned on my tiny TV and got the first real sleep I’d had since Monday.

• As a matter of policy, I see all WWE movies in the theater. They understand stupid. And punchy explodey. Even within the restrictions of PG-13. (12 Rounds)
• Michael Rapaport has a knack for playing characters that are so awkward that they’re borderline retarded, and giving one hallucinations of superpowers was hilariously tragic. (Special)
• Speaking of punchy explodey, I decided to watch all the Death Wish sequels. The third one is the best, but they all have their moments. Protip: If you’re a woman, stay far, far away from Charles Bronson. He needs someone to get raped so he can take revenge, and your name will instantly go to the top of the list.
• Wow, The Limits of Control was slow. But also a lot of fun in the Jarmusch way. It’s his most Jarmuschy movie ever. I probably should’ve reviewed it for F.M.I., actually.
• I decided to watch as many Jekyll and Hydes as I could following a chance viewing of the brilliant and innovative 1931 version on TCM. The 1999 version, in which Chinese medicine turns Jekyll into Hyde so he can become the foretold avenger of justice known as the White Dragon was too damn slow. The 2006 version in which Tony Todd keeps biting women on the face and has to wear a giant monkey head was the clear winner. Spencer Tracy’s version was a snoozefest.
• Julianne Moore’s face-straining weeping is getting a bit old (Blindness).
• This Shadow Warriors is the cyborg soldier movie starring John Locke from Lost, not the mercenary movie starring Hulk Hogan, Carl Weather, Martin Kove and Shannon Tweed … which I also own.
• Karl Urban gave the best performance in the new Star Trek.
• Adrien Brody is only comfortable in things that are bittersweet (The Brothers Bloom).
• Yeah, I watched something called Big Boobs Buster. It was about a girl who can’t get a boyfriend because she’s flat-chested, so she gets revenge on all the busty girls in school. Wanna fight about it?
• Golden Temple Amazons wasn’t any classier.

Still, I've been going to A-kon for literally half of my life, and I'll probably keep going. It, and the people, still amuse me. As evidence, I present tired, miserable cosplayers eking out something resembling romance from the bloated weekend, and a thing I don't know what is that I saw hanging from a Highlander replica sword:

    

• Tropic Thunder had a couple of good moments, but was mostly as overrated as I thought it would be.
• Fatty Drives the Bus, however, is about Satan disguising himself as a tour guide so he can abduct the souls of people destined to die in a bus crash. Clearly superior.
• Shane! Shane! Shane! Shane! Shane got off lucky. Anything would be better than another five minutes with that damn kid.
• You don't see a lot of movies that follow the Nazi soldiers as the good guys. Cross of Iron's approach might be the only way to make an antiwar movie that actually has an antiwar effect.
• Strait Jacket is what anime is supposed to be but often isn't anymore. Icky monsters, weird technology, and angst.
• I'll be grateful when the current trend of frontal male nudity used for comedy is over. Observe and Report may have taken it as far as it can go.
• Young Jacqueline Bisset looks like young Elizabeth Hurley, except less like a whore.
• I was a bit disappointed in Crank 2 ... until the end, which stopped being lame and jokey and took a left turn into awesome.
• Marie and Bruce was written by Vizzini (Inconceivable!), so I had to watch it, despite Matthew Broderick, who delivered the awful, shallow performance he can be counted on to deliver. I will, on occasion, admit to kind of liking My Dinner with Andre, so it was worth a shot.
• Anything with Tom Waits in the afterlife is worth seeing.
• The Dead Pool had Jim Carrey lip syncing to "Welcome to the Jungle" for about half the length of the song. There's no excuse for that.

I attended with people I know from the Internets, one of whom took over my camera. She knows a thing or two about such things or twos, so it has been confirmed that my camera does, indeed, suck. She took all the pictures, except for those of the graffiti in the men's room, which was all me. Dirty talk about Princess Peach needs to be preserved for posterity. Also, this charming little lass whose name is either Goya-Ra or Quail Jerk: