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 Scenes from a Mall: GenCon RPG/Anime Festival, Part 1 by Brian Orban
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 This is day one of my "con report", which is pretty spontaneous in it's construction. Hell, the best part about Gencon isn't it's content or it's participation or whatever, it's the location. Welcome to Milwaukee, the city where dreams come to life! Or appear to, through the drunken haze! Seriously, we're driving into downtown yesterday, and you see the fermentation tanks, these six mammoth structures rising from the east side of the river, the chamber in God's revolver. This is where the magic happens, the town where PBR [1] comes from. Which I totally forgot about, until we got lunch. There's a mall right across from the convention center with a construction similar to Pentagon City [2], in the multi-tier big open area way, except that the stores aren't as ritzy [3]. So we go to the food court, and I notice it contains a bar. Except forget that, they're serving beer in normal eateries. I had my subway sandwich alongside a 32 oz tub of PBR. See, this is why I don't go to the mall anymore, why I'm forgetting basic facts like "there's no arcade in Fair Oaks" [4] and "the mall sucks". If I could hang out in the Springfield [5] food court and drink giant beer tubs while looking at high-schoolers skipping school (at Annandale?) I'd move down there [6]. Or maybe just to Milwaukee... So things finished up around 6:00 pm, official activity-wise, so Matt Taylor and me went to the anime room. They show anime pretty much round the clock, and it's got chairs and it's dark, so you can nap too as long as you don't snore too loud. So no napping for me... but I did see Porco Rosso, which is the most brilliant anime ever. It's about an Italian pig in the 30s that's the world's best seaplane pilot. Later, we went to a bar called the Safehouse, which is easily the most creative and inventive bar concept I've ever seen. As great as it was, though, it reinforced the notion in my mind that concepts are completely unnecessary for a bar. But the main concern is a lack of dancing space, and I have to say that the dance floor here was minuscule, and the labyrinthine design (think the room-to-room case scene in Evil Dead 2) means one is easily separated from it. Anyway, more on that bar and the fun inherent in PBR City next time... Editor's Footnotes: 1. Pabst Blue Ribbon, stupid. If you're really living with Post-Collegiate Malaise then you recognize PBR as the taste on your tongue when you wake up in the morning. 2. Pentagon City is a mall outside of DC--located, as you probably guessed, near the Pentagon. It's not actually a city... And adjacent Crystal City isn't made of crystal. Anyway, it's about 4 stories tall, but most of that is open space; the stores are located on the perimeter around a huge atrium. 3. Ritzy in this case refers to Electronics Boutique (wow, it's not just a store, it's a boutique!) and the Sharper Image. Is it just my imagination or has the Sharper Image gotten much duller than it used to be? Time was, they'd have sold cutting edge stuff. Now they don't even stock MD players, GPS scanners, thermal couplers, flux capacitors... It really makes you think. 4. Fair Oaks is another "ritzy" DC-area mall. Fair Oaks boasts a Sears, unlike the other DC malls. So you might go out to buy a pair of Levi's and come home with a lawnmower! 5. Springfield [Mall], yet another DC-area mall. This one the worst of the three. For more information about DC shopping malls, consult your local public library... 6. Possibly a subconscious reference to the Steely Dan song, My Old School, as in "[When they're serving beer in tubs,] that'll be the day I go back to Annandale." Although nobody knows whether Donald Fagan was referring to the Northern Virginia "Annandale" or some mythological one.
Copyright (C) 2000, Post-Collegiate Malaise. |
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