lollapalooza (sans photographs due to sans camera)

lollapalooza offered no disappointments, subtracting quickly tiring legs and 'lord of the flies' mentality crowds (thousands of people with one goal and no (seeming) sense of morals to prevent them from attempting anything). unfortunately, "no cameras with interchangeable lenses" could be brought to the festival, which rules out primarily every camera i own. i took a couple with the holga, but judging that my last 120 roll from all of this past school year still has not reached my computer hard drive, i wouldn't bring any type of expectations to the table for seeing those any time soon, but you never know. surprises happen every day. i took a couple on my phone with that terrible quality of one point whatever megapixels supposedly contained in that tiny glass dot. the tiny pictures just showed the massive crowd and literal indistinguishable stabs in the dark.

many good photos at http://www.lollapalooza.com/2008_files/photos/day1/default.asp, http://www.villagevoice.com/slideshow/view/111418, http://chicago.metromix.com/music/photogallery/lolla-2008-photos/533597/content?photo=1, and primarily any place on the internet found when searching for 'lollapalooza 2008 photos.'

i only attended the chaos the last day, day three, and witnessed john butler trio, iron & wine, gnarls barkley, and kanye's shows. we chose quality of view over quantity of shows in order to get fairly close crowd placements for iron & wine and kanye, which we did. kanye definitely put on a show, what with his drama and flair for the extreme. he does, however, turn me off a little solely from his ego. at one point he spoke words of how he is destined to be the greatest and how he will be the greatest and everything else that goes along with that kind of talk. the man can entertain though, i will most definitely give him that. iron & wine and john butler trio musically were quite good. john butler performed a few songs with slide guitar, a few with banjo, and the rest with regular acoustic guitar, of which he played a solo instrumental slap guitar style piece (quite better than what i expected of him honestly). sam beam performed with his band as well, which offered a good change from the previous solo show i saw of him (there is a post somewhere below about it...). mostly songs off of their newer album 'the shepard's dog,' but included new arrangements of 'history of lovers' and 'upward over the mountain,' as well as a quite good rendition of 'boy with a coin.' during their show, we were positioned against the side of the fence in the center (not in the front row, however. it followed parallel to the stage and then jutted out for about ten or fifteen feet in the center for the photo press, security, etc). there was this boy across the gap against the other side of the fence wearing blue sunglasses and hoping for every kind of attention and dancing all through the show. i couldn't resist getting his picture (double exposed with one of the beach balls flying up in the sky), so hopefully that can be developed sooner rather than later, along with a double of iron & wine and the chicago skyline and one of kanye.