LEGO (10 page)

I look at what I could bring and decide that I don’t need an MOC card. My MOCs aren’t really that impressive. The biplane sits on my desk, next to a rainbow mailbox and my first attempt at a self-portrait. A pair of purple arches from the Mars Mission set defines the mailbox. It has the familiar curved shape of a metal mailbox and even a red flag that can be articulated up and down. It can hold a half-dozen golf balls. It is an outstanding achievement only when compared with the self-portrait.

On a 32 × 32 green baseplate, I have laid a two-dimensional self-portrait that resembles Papa Smurf or Santa Claus, depending on the angle. I drew better self-portraits in elementary school. My auburn hair is represented by a bright red helmet, my jaw is outlined in white, and my mouth is a 1 × 6 red brick. Apparently in my mind’s eye, I am the original Nintendo hockey player.

The concept of creating a three-dimensional picture of a two-dimensional sculpture is difficult to grasp, and this gives me a lot more appreciation for how hard it is to create a mosaic just using LEGO bricks. The best mosaics are LEGO-ized recreations of famous artwork—
Starry Night
or the
Mona Lisa.
Most people mock up sports team logos or pictures of their kids. Software programs let builders match bricks and colors to mimic the shapes and hues of a photograph.

I pick up the mosaic and the mailbox, placing them on a white shelf in the corner of my office. They won’t be packed. I notice that my fingernails are getting a little long, and I’m happy about that. Prying apart LEGO bricks is difficult with short nails, and I’ve been purposely growing out my fingernails, to the mild disgust of Kate. I tell myself I’ll build better when I have more bricks—a lie I’m sure most builders have told themselves at some point in the process.

 

 

Less than twelve hours later, I’m in the second conference room adjacent to the Ravinia Grand Ballroom in the Westin Chicago North Shore hotel. My hands keep shaking slightly as I try to apply a sticker to the torso of a minifigure using a cotton swab. The process is not dissimilar to the painting of tin soldiers. It’s my third attempt.

We’re forty-five minutes into Minifig Customization, with Jared Burks of Fine Clonier Decals, an online decal store for minifigs—one of eighteen classes being held at Brickworld. Behind round black glasses and slightly curly black hair, Jared sounds like a scientist as he describes the process of altering existing minifigures to represent superheroes and cartoon characters. His hands are steady and his movements are deliberate. It doesn’t seem an accident that he is a researcher in College Station, Texas, working on understanding the chemical composition of leukemia.

The son of a screenprinter, Jared is one of the most visible members of the customization movement among adult fans of LEGO. Inspired by the Star Wars set released by LEGO, Jared started to modify minifigures; he figured he was on to something when a Greedo head (a bounty hunter character from Star
Wars)
—just the head—sold for $20 on eBay.

Jared’s business has already matured. In two years, he’s gone from selling complete sculptured minifigures to producing decals and accessories that let you create your own Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or Superman. I’m fascinated by what amounts to an entirely different secondary market from BrickLink—using LEGO figures as spare parts.

“There are two camps when it comes to customization,” are Jared’s opening words for his presentation. “Those who do it and those who don’t.”

LEGO purists cringe at the idea of modifying LEGO pieces. They argue that the challenge and beauty of LEGO come from making something unexpected from the parts that are available. Most customizers would answer that the LEGO market is like the diamond market, where supply is at times kept artificially low. LEGO doesn’t batch parts, and rare pieces can rocket up in price if they are in high demand. When LEGO produces approximately eighteen male minifigures for every female minifigure, why drop $40 on a feminine hairpiece when you can just make your own?

Cutting or painting bricks is also considered cheating. Anybody can chop LEGO, but the best builders are the ones who use only genuine factory bricks. And purists wouldn’t even think of making their own accessories. Will Chapman isn’t a purist. The owner of BrickArms has one job: he runs an online store that sells military minifigures and tiny plastic guns, which he creates out of molded plastic. LEGO as a company has made a decision not to create militaristic toys. The Pirates line, introduced in 1989, did include muskets, and the Wild West sets later added modern rifles and pistols. More recently, the licensed sets for Batman, Star Wars, and Indiana Jones have all featured guns or laser blasters. Chapman and one of his main competitors, BrickForge, which specializes in medieval weapons, are filling the vacuum left by LEGO.

Chapman is busy setting up alongside other adult fans inside the nearly fifteen thousand square feet of ballroom space on Friday morning. The public won’t be allowed inside until Saturday, and it seems there is a lot to be done before the doors open. A few tables down, purists definitely wouldn’t like what Chris Campbell is holding. The computer programmer from Arkansas, who presented with Jared, is pointing out the glowing eyes and chest of an Ironman minifigure that is a custom creation. Campbell has used a Dremel rotary tool to drill a hole into the chest cavity of a minifig and insert an LED and battery. This isn’t customization—it’s surgery.

“That would take me years to get right,” I suggest.

“It takes a lot of practice and you still end up with a lot of left arms and no right arms to match,” says Chris, noting that plastic arms tend to crack under pressure.

Chris is showing me around the booth displaying the figures that he and Jared have created. Hundreds of minifigs stand on tan displays: superheroes and supervillains sculpted and stickered. The attraction is easy to see. Minifigs feel like something you collect. These are the real action figures of the LEGO world. LEGO itself has experimented with minifigs, adding different facial expressions with the Pirates line and spring-loaded legs for the National Basketball Association minifigs in 2002.

Just as on
The Simpsons,
yellow remains the dominant color for minifigures. But with the introduction of licensed characters for the Star Wars sets and NBA minifigs, LEGO began to reproduce flesh tones in order to more accurately represent people who actually exist. Scarcity is often the key to whether a minifig will appreciate in value over time—witness the $200 price tag on a limited-edition gold chrome-plated C-3PO, ten thousand of which were randomly inserted into 2007 Star Wars sets.

LEGO has a clear presence at Brickworld, sponsoring several of the build challenges and pushing its latest products, including LEGO Universe, described by the company as a “massive multi-player online game.” I step aside to let an eight-foot-tall minifigure mascot pass by me and resist the urge to take off his head to see if the person inside the blocky suit is a man or a woman.

I’m wandering down the first of four rows when I hear a low whistle. A small crowd is gathering around the sculptures of Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago architect who is one of the co-organizers of Brickworld. He builds big, like seventeen-feet big. That’s the height of the scale model Tucker has constructed of the Burj Dubai, the tower that is the world’s tallest building since opening in January 2010. A collection of to-scale architectural models has been set up in a circle near the center of the room, so that inevitably your eye is drawn to the twisting Chicago Spire or the tan Empire State Building. It suggests that Tucker has a healthy ego.

“If I could afford to buy windows by the case, I could build like that,” a bald man remarks with a grimace as he snaps pictures.

I can understand the man’s bitterness. The Sears Tower in my basement doesn’t hold a candle to the fifteen-foot Sears Tower that looms before me. Windows are expensive. In fact, all LEGO is expensive.
Can wealth affect your place in the social strata?
An adult version of the guy who has the most toys wins. But with an architect’s eye for detail, Tucker obviously has talent, which seems a more likely reason for the petty comment.

I accidentally bump into another fan while I’m snapping pictures. David Pace is also at his first convention. I ask him if he has anything to display, and I hear an echo of my own fears coming out of his mouth.

“I didn’t bring anything. They’d sweep it off the table, say this guy has no talent,” confesses David.

As I look around, that’s how I feel. There is Chicagoan Beth Weiss, who builds elaborate totem poles and latticed national flags. Or Brian Darrow, a member of IndyLUG, the same LEGO user group as Bryan Bonahoom, who has brought the Blacktron Intelligence Agency: a thirty-by-five-foot space display that is a four-hundred-thousand-piece sprawling ocean of yellow and black, named for the sets released in 1988. Over in the corner is Steve Hassenplug, sitting at a white linen table adjacent to a series of Great Ball Contraptions, motorized LEGO setups that continuously loop miniature soccer balls via an elaborate system of levers and pulleys. Hassenplug is idly playing with a pneumatic pump that is making a headless robotic centipede dance with every push. It is mesmerizing. Here are my benchmarks. I’ve got a long way to go.

I feel better when Duane Collicott waves to me from the middle of the third row of LEGO creations. I’m beginning to understand his point about the difference between a convention and a public display. He’s snapping together a red-sloped roof, putting the finishing touches on a model of the Grand Traverse Lighthouse that he has been commissioned to build. The real lighthouse sits on Lake Michigan, and Duane will drive his thirty-inch, six-thousand-piece version there later in the summer.

I place my hands on my thighs and squat down like a football coach watching an intense practice, unintentionally mimicking the stance of many builders as they critique other’s work.

“Do you have to use jumpers? It looks like you have a half-stud offset—”

“Actually, I needed to offset it in two directions,” replies Duane. He removes a portion of the roof, and we’re suddenly discussing the placement of the green window frames and how Duane was able to avoid making the walls too thick. It feels good to use the language of building, and it goes a long way toward making me feel like I belong.

The first table inside the door belongs to the Toy and Plastic Brick Museum. Tiny gray bricks from the 1960s, a quarter of the size of standard bricks, sit under glass displays next to an eighteen-inch tall LEGO sculpture of Scooby-Doo. I’m hoping to meet the founder, Dan Brown, but the table is unmanned.

Dave Sterling, a Wisconsin plastics engineer for the aerospace industry, comes up next to me and admires some of the first LEGO bricks. He fidgets alternately with his short brown hair and the front of his Led Zeppelin T-shirt before inviting me to lunch with him and his wife, Stacy, and their friend, Abner Finley. It’s like college orientation at the convention—you tend to stick with the people you meet first.

Over lunch at Quizno’s, we talk about our LEGO collections. I explain that separating bricks that have been stuck together for years has left my teeth and fingers sore at times.

“It’s kind of gross. I’ve got my brother-in-law’s old bricks and they occasionally have a taste when I use my teeth. And that taste is something like ear wax,” I tell Dave.

“You know, you don’t have to use your teeth,” Dave says.

“Your teeth and fingernails can even damage the bricks. I’ve bought used bricks that have teeth marks and that is not cool,” adds Abner.

“What other option do I have?” I ask.

“LEGO makes brick separators,” says Dave.

Sure,
I think.
That’s a great practical joke to play on the new guy. Oh yeah, Jonathan, there’s a separator. There’s also a group of elves that can finish whatever you’re building while you sleep at night.

“No way,” I start to protest, but Dave interrupts.

“Yes, they’re little green triangles. They’re maybe two dollars,” says Dave. He goes on to describe a slope with ridges. It latches on to a plate or brick in the same fashion as a bottle opener, allowing you to snap up or down and separate stuck together elements. I am suddenly self-conscious over the length of my fingernails. Dave has just made my weekend.

The Ravinia Grand Ballroom has been transformed in the few hours we’ve been gone. Hand trucks roll through the plush lobby in a steady stream, pushed by guys wearing shirts from the Greater Midwest LEGO Train Club. The parking lot is filled with trailers. LEGO creations have been secured in silver restaurant rolling shelves and storage tubs packed with paper to keep elements from breaking apart in transit.

People are still unloading when the opening ceremonies commence. This year, the convention has grown from 238 to 330 participants, with 80 percent between twenty and fifty years old. Tormod Askildsen, the head of LEGO Community Development, has been asked to give the keynote address. With light brown minifig hair and a trim physique, he gives off the vibe of a TV reality-show host. Albeit a host wearing a bright orange T-shirt that says “Mindstorms NXT” on it.

“So much has changed. It used to be that LEGO created value, but now value is being created across the community. It’s nice to be together on the ten-year anniversary of the first dialogue between LEGO and adult fans of LEGO. We launched the Web site in 1998—we didn’t even have an e-mail address because we were afraid that people would contact us.” Tormod pauses as the room laughs along with him.

“We realized that we needed to find out where our future growth would come from. The LEGO mission is to inspire and develop the builders of tomorrow, and AFOLs are the builders of tomorrow. This is a very complex hobby that most people don’t understand. It’s so much more than a toy for kids. We need to work together to show people this,” says Tormod.