The New Testament

Edinburgh Fail

2010-08-08T10:43:00.002+01:00

We wake up and get on the road with thoughts to get to Edinburgh early, find a place to stay, and explore the town.

Instead, we arrive to the town being mobbed. It’s the first day of their Fringe Festival, and every bed in town seems to be booked. We knew that the festival was going on, but we didn’t think it was going to completely take over the entire county. We figured for sure that other things must be able to coexist at the same time as the fringe festival. We thought wrong.

So we slop about Edinburgh and its outlying areas and for a couple hours and still can’t find a place to stay. Wandering around wand being constantly thwarted is really exhausting and frustrating. Plus the place is overrun with tourists and thespians, making the place unnavigatable. The town is on lock down for the fest, every public service agent’s patience with the bumbling tourists is non-existent, and the local marble mouthed drawl doesn’t help you get around even when they do grace you with some directions. It’s a pretty city, but we don’t get to enjoy it at all. It reminds me a bit of how annoying Austin is during SXSW.

So, whatever enthusiasm we had earlier in the day has been replaced with the dreary, foreboding dread that we’ll be uncomfortably sardined inside our car at some reststop oscillating between states of agitated unconsciousness and unrest. Or we're going to have to bunk with this boar.

The club doesn’t offer us any respite from our predicament either. It’s the kind of place that doesn’t seem like it cares about fostering music, it only cares that live music sells more drinks. The band members are awarded for their services with one free beer each. James addresses this restriction by going around and asking each bartendress separately for the band’s five beers. Ah, my little grifter.

This what the show looked like through the CCTV:

I won’t bore you with the details, but over the course of about 4 hours, we get the number of the son of a family friend of James’ dad that just happens to be in Edinburgh. At 3:40 in the morning, James and I get a hold of him and wander over to meet him at some dance club, where he gives us the address of his apartment. We are saved from spending our first Scottish evening at some grim roadside water closet.

On the way to meet our savior, we watch a wasted kid topple over in the street, like literally tip over, right in front of two cops. The cops proceeded to make an “oh snap” kind of face, make fun of the kid, and then move right along. Where are we?

Sunderland

2010-08-06T01:27:00.004+01:00

The day is covered in glue. Everything is moving slowly. Sleep sticks behind our eyes. The sun never breaks out from behind the gray curtain of moisture, and the clouds flirt with the idea of raining, but the downpour never materializes. It’s that kind of dreary day when a constant pour of rain from the sky would be an exciting distraction.

Instead, we drive circles around Sunderland, unable to find our club. We park in the loading bay of a TK Maxx and scout around. My mind is more interested in why it’s called TK Maxx. Are J’s more expensive to trademark in England?

We find where we’re looking for and Charlie quickly learns that he’s put on some weight so far on tour.

Foals. I know the name, but not the music. At least not well. But this country loves them. Every other band we play with is a Foals-clone. One of tonight’s is fronted by a cute dude whose swivel moves bring to mind the BoogieMan from Nightmare Before Christmas. Maybe that helps give an idea of how strange tonight is. Hmm, this billboard right outside the club entry way might help paint the picture clearer:

To add to the uncanny mix, the rape and murder scenes of A Clockwork Orange happen to play on the video screen during BBE’s set.

I go upstairs for a breath of fresh distraction and am met with a sex toy machine.

I’m pretty sure I know exactly what to do with the Heaven Beads, but I’m not quite sure what the Love Eggs are for. S&M eunuch role-play? In any event, all of a sudden A Clockwork Orange playing downstairs seems even grosser.

This stuff is pretty gross too. It has a piece of bison grass, not bison hair, in it. Or at least they say it’s not bison hair.

Leeds

2010-08-05T01:15:00.001+01:00

Doing laundry is annoying. Actually, the way Europeans do laundry is annoying. In Coventry we asked where we could do some wash, and they enthusiastically said they had a washer at the club. They even took the laundry from us and told us they’d wash it for us. All we had to do was pick it up in the morning. Easy enough. And so when we arrive, we get two bags of clean clothes from the club. BUT THEY’RE STILL WET. And so we have no choice but to get on the road to Leeds with two bags of sopping underwear. Luckily, the club we end up at also has a washer, and I make sure to clarify that we need a dryer as well. They smile and say “of course we have a dryer too.” So at the end of the night, I head back to the dryer with the bartender and our stuff is still wet. So now we’re on day three of trekking around laundry that’s moist. We take matters back into our own hands, but we can’t find a Laundromat anywhere. Adding insult to injury, everyone we ask where to find one just gives us a queer look. Finally, we learn that the English call them laundrettes –PEOPLE GIVE ME A BREAK. From the common first two-thirds of both words, and the two bags of clothes in our hands, you couldn’t figure out what we were asking for? No wonder all our ancestors left this place for brighter lands.

So now we have damp clothes strewn about both our hotel rooms. This is a new development in the “No matter how large or how small our living quarters are each night, we must make sure to cover every available inch with our crap” method of touring.

I forget all about our troubles when I see how cute James and Charlie are in the morning:

My chopsticks alert me to the fact that they are proud of where they’re from, and looking at my wet laundry, I realize I’m also proud of where I’m from.

Oh yeah, the show is fun too.

Leeds seems to be a pretty nice city despite what I’ve heard people say about it.

No Cover in Coventry

2010-08-03T22:03:00.008+01:00

We program the GPS to take us across town as slow as possible. We only have a 33-mile trip to our next show, but those 33 miles are filled with the expansive wasteland of Birmingham and its outlying areas. We watch a daunting exercise unfold in front of our eyes: finding something interesting to do with our day here.

I spend a good couple minutes wondering aloud what Iggy Pop gets out of hawking car insurance. I mean, really?

After a couple false attempts to find the perfect place for breakfast, we end up at the Cosy Café.

It’s next to a liquor store and has bars on the windows, so this must mean one of two things: the place has furniture/china worth stealing, or the chef is always wasted and will make some rad food. My money is on guess number two.

I have a hard time not ordering off the kiddie menu. I've never had a Turkey Dinosaur.

The Kasbah is where BBE is playing tonight, and it seems like a great club, with several rooms for shows, a la First Avenue. Dimitrious is our handler and he’s quite the excitable fellow with a wind-up mouth. Once it winds up, it doesn’t stop for a while.

At one point Dimitrious tells me than he’s had sold out shows for everyone from Kate Nash to the Cribs, and all for 50 Quid. At first I think he’s saying that the tickets to get in are 50£ each, and I’m amazed those bands are that popular. Then I realize he’s proud that the club only paid those bands 50£ each for playing sold out shows. I don’t find this inspiring.

Even with the Kasbah taking care of us, well, it’s still just an empty box during the afternoon and it still just smells like stale beer and ammonia'd puke. So I walk around town, unfortunately just finding the usual–suspects: poopy fried food holes, Every-thing-for-99-Pence stores, and a Primark. The combo of these three things has led, at least to my eyes, the UK to rival the US in numbers of obese people in front of my eyes in public places. Which is not a good thing. People in jeggings, not a good thing. Seriously.

As I'm looking for a copy of "As I Lay Dying", I come across a bombed out cathedral. A building without a roof is a pretty fun thing to walk around in. I find it mind-blowing that the steeples survived.

Finally I check out the museum of Transportation, which is interesting, despite being a bit shabby. A fascination with cars is growing in me as I get older. Some are truly sexy machines that you can tweak to do all kinds of things. Maybe that will be one of my projects some day- to have a car in pieces in the garage that I slowly weld, bang, and oil back to life. I can see myself getting kind of bored with the process though. Maybe I should just buy a car that works.

This picture is for Mike Wisti.

LOLZapalloza

2010-08-01T10:52:00.011+01:00

The band has two shows today. The first being about 30 miles away. On a farm. Some dudes get together every year and have a party called Leopalloza (I think it’s on Lee’s farm.) Once we snail our way through Cornwall traffic, it turns out to be quite the affair. Like a garden party on steroids and Carlsberg, there are two stages flanking each other, a suspended sound booth that looks a bit like the preliminary stages of the Flaming Lip’s spaceship, a couple rows of young Aspen, a rave tent made of primary colored triangle panes, and a cheetah painted car chassis filled with wood and other incendiaries for what I’m sure will turn out to be quite the blackout-wasted, paganesque happening later in the evening.

Unfortunately, we have to leave right after the band plays to make it up to West Brom for show number two.

For the majority of the 4 hour jaunt, there’s a strange sense of accomplishment hovering in the car. Usually I have a hard time getting James and Charlie out of bed by this hour, and now they’re musing about wanting to be this efficient every day. I smile, keep my mouth shut, and keep driving.

I'm disappointed we don't have time to stop and eat at this place. Do you think Smiley is still smiling?

We also have already missed this:

I’ll be honest, Birmingham, West Brom, and the surrounding areas aren’t really much to look at, and they’ve been nicknamed the Black Country. In perhaps some attempt to move past this appropriate epithet, the venue for tonight’s show is done up in every type of brightness possible. One entire floor moonlights as a giant green screen, as the other floors are exercises in space pods and garish squiggles.

Unfortunately, our hotel seems quite proud to embody its hometown moniker. Thanks to an ill-thought through combination of three adjacent buildings, getting to our room requires navigating a maze up and down and back up and back down from the ground floor to the first floor. When we arrive, there is bars on the windows and the hallway smells like hot, wet paper.Sadness crouches in every corner and creeps up on you when you turn your back to it. I can’t believe we have to stay here for two days.

Charlie and I escape for a while to the awesomeness of “Inception.” It is the third time we’ve attempted to see it, and we finally prevail. I’m going to refrain from being picky about it and just say it is way more fun than Birmingham (UK).

On the way home I start to get an undying craving for Indian food, and I wonder if Leo put the idea in my head.

I go out for some time to myself and end up with some bright orange Chicken Tikka Masala. I can’t stop thinking that it must be radioactive. I feel bad not eating it, but really, I’m not starving enough to chock down something that’s the color of an electric crayon. I don’t know what is up with this city and fluorescents, but they should keep ‘em out of their foodstuffs.

Truro and St. Agnes

2010-07-30T10:51:00.008+01:00

We start our tour of Cornwall in Truro at the Wig and Pen. I can’t tell what kind of town it is, but it sure seems sleepy.

After showcasing the band’s rock moves, we’re off to find our accommodation in the milky darkness. The plan- we’re following the guy that booked our gig out into the unknown, where we’ll met some dude at a shuttered gas station, at which point we’ll start following him back to his place to crash for the night. And so we sit in the car, under a sky clear of light pollution, listening to our friends’ band Charles on the stereo. I need to re-listen to the Charles demos, cause I think they unfairly became the soundtrack to my brain imagining creepy and psychologically disturbing things about to happen.

Of course, everything turns out to be perfectly legit and uneventful. Our host’s place turns out to be a quaint retreat tucked between the hills of Truro, which is also known as the middle of absolutely nowhere. He’s a producer extraordinaire, and his recording studio is a converted chicken coop. In the morning, the neighbors ride by on horses. I lace up my boots and tromp of down the gravel road into the hills. The faint echoes of lilac and honeydew fill my nose, and I enjoy the fresh, cool sweetness of the air as I meander along. It seems like Cornwall is a good place to get some thinking done.

We jump in the car and make it all the way to St. Agnes, which is almost the farthest West and South you can travel in the UK. It’s the type of place where cell phone signals fear to tread, or at least decide that they’re on holiday just as much as everyone else in this vacation town, and they’ll work when they damn well feel like it.

The show is being held at the Driftwood Spars, a full service vacation destination. The inside of the inn is done up in all sorts of knick-knacks, from ropes and taxidermied birds to old globes and tchotchke steel drums.

A sign about the door alerts us that our proprietress means business. The wood beams lining the ceiling make me feel we’re in a ship. The way things stand, we’re nearly close enough to the ocean that you could cast a long line and catch a meal.

We let the hotel feed us instead and take advantage of our free time to explore all the parts of the beach the signs tell us not to. I imagine there’s some pretty good creature stories tell their kids around here to keep them off the cliffs.

Cardiff

2010-07-29T22:13:00.006+01:00

Cardiff is a pretty intriguing town, if only because all the signs are in two languages and the place still retains quite a bit of medieval flavor.

The last time we were here, we tried jumping the fence into the castle and were subsequently kicked out. This time, we’re not even interested. I go exploring for something new instead. And so of course I find Obama’s shoulder choking out a terrorist Flavor Flav.

As I keep exploring, I find this:

I’m not quite sure who okay’d this piece of public art. A mom and a dad that can’t even look at each other, a man’s touch that screams keeping-up-appearances , while no one even attempts to look like they’re having a good time. I started crying.

I also find a load of kids doing their best Flaming Lips impressions in a pool. I really want to get each member of BBE into his/her own water ball, but everyone’s over the weight limit and the dude says “No Dice”. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Tonight’s venue is a converted wine bar. In an attempt to be indie chic, the walls are covered with those nubby green Lego foundation, and you can add to them with pieces acquired from the bar. It’s randomly decorated with Beatlejuice-esque models where they couldn’t glue Legos.

Our lodging is pretty strange. I probably just think that because it’s manned by a guy from Minnesota. He’s even playing Atmosphere on the bar stereo when we come in late night. He went to Saint Johns, so we’re not really cut from the same cloth. To put things in perspective, we have enough in common to get a free sample of every brew on tap, but not an actual entire free drink. The place has really cool wallpaper though.

Inggrish

2010-07-28T10:33:00.001+01:00

Well, first things first-English Breakfast. No more oil-slicked hams and sweaty cheeses greeting us in the morning, well at least not for a couple weeks. The diner we find ourselves in offers a choice your own style English Breakie, and I wonder if it’s where Waffle House got the idea of how to offer their hash browns. One offering is Bubbles and Squeak, which I just have to give a go. The version I get turns out to be roughly mashed potatoes mixed with peas. Ah, the childish wonder of English slang.

After six weeks in the EU, today is our first speaking English to strangers and having them understand every word. And we can understand their every word. Well, almost. But I can understand 89% of the words coming out of people's mouths. Okay fine, 74%, with no wind or background noises. It's interesting to be able to understand what people are murmuring in public places again.

In the off time between shows, we’re staying with our friend Fran. She is rad and is subletting a room at an artists’ commune for the summer. The place is a large warehouse thoughtfully split up into small bedrooms and large working quarters. It’s inhabited by inquisitive cats.

Since the building is in the middle of the city, some of the residents got crafty and manipulated landscaping tubes into produce planters. I want to make one.

I spend an afternoon at the Tate Modern. Somehow I get a bit lost on the way there, and my miscalculation is exacerbated the slight sprinkle hanging in the dreary English sky. I have to keep asking people with crooked teeth for directions. I get pointed in the right direction for the fifth time and wander past a pirate ship and the Globe theatre before finding the museum.

The first floor is overtaken by a dance troupe’s rehearsal.

The Tate’s Surrealist exhibit is quite nice, as it’s not just a one-sided excuse to display the Miros and Dalis the museum owns, which is what I feel most surrealism exhibits turn out to be. It’s actually extremely varied and displays a lot of different takes on Breton’s brain child. I’m bummed that I don’t get much time to stay in the galleries and reflect on it, but a rock show calls with issues to be dealt with.

I know it’s going to be an interesting show when I keep getting emails that there is no back line sorted yet. But like most things, everything get’s sorted and the kids are lined up to party. And so we party.

I hope I never have to stay anywhere near Kings Cross again. What a CF.

Space Train to the UK

2010-07-26T02:07:00.009+01:00

It’s on. We have the third leg of our triple-crossing of the EU. There’s a big difference running around in everyone’s brains as we take on this leg of the journey- English tongues live at our finishing point. And so we put our minds on hibernate, store all out dankes, dakojems, and mercis in our luggage, and plow forward. Well, right after we go find Charlie wandering around the corn labyrinth under the creepy eye of a clown bouncy-bouncy.

There is a Volkswagon family reunion at one of our petrol pull offs.

None of us have ever traveled across the channel on the vehicle transport, so we follow the suggestions printed on our ticket and get there a couple hours before hand, just in case there’s some hold up. We arrive and the place is jam-packed. Every train before us and after us is sold out thanks to one of the transports having been canceled. So we dutifully wait for our number to be called in the terminal and decide that for our last moments in France, we should try France’s version of McDonalds- Quick. BBE has been avoiding Quick for the sole reason that, due to stiff competition from Quick, there is no BK in the whole of France. I get an Intense Milk Shake and Quick’s version of the Big Mac. I can’t say I’ll be indulging in Quick again. I won’t say it’s terrible, but it’s definitely not good. It’s no BK.

Of course, we are detained at Customs, and for far, far too long. The time for our train departure comes and goes, and we wonder when, if ever we’re going to get to England. The only thing distracting us is the other car held at Customs. The driver decided enough was enough and got out of his car (despite signs that tell you to absolutely do no such thing) and started screaming at the Customs workers. As they scream back, he says “FINE. ARREST ME” over and over. His kids and wife/girlfriend are in the car. Classy dude.

Loading onto the train is absolutely sci-fi. The cover of darkness removes all the peripheral scenery from sight, so all we can see is flocks of lights burning in different tones of white and yellow. We are ushered slowly into our train car, and I wonder if I’m actually getting onto a space freighter to another world. Come to think of it, the UK is kind of like a screwy parallel universe to my American reality.

Dornstadt Mud Party

2010-07-25T03:30:00.011+01:00

Yesterday was a drive day. Last week we did almost the exact same drive from the other direction, so we're starting to zone out a bit and not pay attention to the land scape. Modest Mouse keeps ending up on the stereo. And of course after making it from point B to C on this leg, we get to do it all over and have a monster drive from point C to D is tomorrow. YAY.

Of course, as soon as we hit Germany, the rain starts. It gets down right apocalyptic out.

This of course means that the festival is a total mess. It's well organized, but it's all standing on a pile of mud now. It's deep and slippery enough that I don't even trust taking my camera out.

So we retreat to the hotel for a bit in hopes that the ground will firm up. The place is a hilarious exercises in German minimalist taste. If you can call it that. Maybe industrial chic before industry was chic.

We go for a swim in the pool and then head back to the festival fields. Things have vastly improved and images of people chucking handfuls of mud on stage have stopped coursing through my mind.

We arrive at our tent, but we can't find our name or when we're supposed to perform ANYWHERE. It takes us a while to figure out the Germans are playing a joke on us:

And for the second time on this tour, we share a stage with Monotonix. The girl in front does not seem impressed. By the end of the set, she continues to not look impressed. I'm wondering what her angle here is- are band dudes into bitchy chicks?

Having played with and seen Monotonix before, this poor "D" balloon catches my eye. There is no way it is going to still be in the owner's hand by the end of the set.

And, yep, here we go:

So sad, used and flung aside like so many before it:

I think my favorite part of the set is when T'Nealle ends up riding the drummer. That's right, she is constantly making sure men know that they're below HER.

Alençon Rehab and Decompression

2010-07-23T03:29:00.010+01:00

Waking up in a room full of empty beds doesn’t feel quite right. I also don’t feel like I was subjected to strange tests in my sleep, so I guess I’m fine with the desolate bedroom. After everyone is up, we return to the festival grounds for breakfast because we were told to do so the night before. Of course once we’re there, they cobble together some sentences and tell us they weren’t expecting us. As I’ve said a over and over again, I don’t know French, so I’m not complaining, but we have our funniest lost in translation moments at this fest. It’s clear that the staff only know so many phrases in English and a handful of what replies to those phrases might be. Everything else is, well, barbarian talk to them.

Flustered but amused, we retreat back to our home away from home, Alençon. It’s not exactly close to where we need to end up, but it’s a space we feel relaxed an comfortable, in, which hopefully means we’ll get some work done there over our next couple days off. There’s an album to write, after all.

Highlights of our work week:

-Slept in

-Pushed the trip thus far past 10,000 kilometers

-Ate T’Nealle-made cake for breakfast

-Sat down for a couple hours to organize my music folder

-Made Horchata

-Zach found his biological father on Facebook

-Made pizza from scratch

-Discover British music publications are convinced T’Nealle is a man

-Made bread pudding out of a package of pita bread that James did his best to waste

-Find out British bum poison comes packaged like action figures

-Find a bike I can ride around the hinterlands

-Find gunpoweder flavored tea

Lowlights:

-Organized music folder FAIL

-Stopped paying attention to what I was doing and burnt the hell out of my bread pudding while trying to caramelize the top with the broiler blazing on full

-Hayfever has everyone sniffling/sneezing their faces off. Too many trips to the store for toilet paper

-Always waited until I was over-hungry before making it to the grocery store, which renders me unable to make a decision as I pace furiously through the aisles.

-Discover the town is surrounded by highways with no shoulders to bike on. I have the Frogger courage in me to run across highways full of speeding cars, but not the utter disregard for my life to bike along them with no shoulder and no helmet.

Montmartain Circus Beach Party

2010-07-18T03:08:00.009+01:00

Everything begins with a haul to Montmartin dur Ser. The moments aren’t as long today. Maybe it’s because we got an early start. Maybe it’s because we know that the beach is at the end of our drive, along with a support slot for Atari Teenage Riot. Yes, the mostly still living ATR.

When we arrive at what the GPS tells us is our final destination, I wonder if we blipped through a wormhole into an outtake scene from Big Fish. There is a giant circus tent set up 100 meters from the beach, and really, nothing else.

Meet Escargot del Mer. A whole bowl of it.

It’s a brutal way to start the evening. Zach and I pry the rubbery mollusks from their spiraled, barnacle covered shells and move them towards our mouths. The thought that the kitchen is messing with us crosses my mind, as we don’t see anyone else with a bowl full of snails. I think they’re just being kind and giving us what they consider a delicacy. And so the little blobs keep working their way out of their moot defenses and into our mouths. Ah, the niceties and pleasantries of being grateful guests.

BBE play at twilight.

Atari teenage put on exercise-rific show. At first I’m standing on the side of the stage, watching them run around and the hippies in the crowd go wild.

I wander out into the crowd to see if they’re seeing something I’m not. And they are- the lighting guy is doing an awesome job.

I don’t know ATR’s exact politics, but for some reason the thought keeps running through my mind that they’d make a great opener/accompanist for MIA.

We end the night in what I’m guessing is the next town over. Our accommodations are darkly hilarious. Our hosts insist on locking and unlocking the doors for us and won’t leave us with a key. When we’re led in, we find we have four rooms with four bunk beds in each. The hallways outside our rooms have an unnerving feel fed by yellowish fluorescent lights against green walls. Uniform, unmarked doors line the wall apposing the bedrooms, and depending on which door you open, you find a toilet or a shower. These are interspersed with sinks, and the whole thing communicates to me an X-Files vibe, as if this is where the government brings people to conduct their little alien abduction experiments. If I start getting bloody noses and find a tube in my nasal cavity, I’m coming straight here for answers. Come to think of it, I don’t know where here is, they brought us here. Well then.

Getting Reimed

2010-07-17T15:33:00.006+01:00

It’s a drive day. The moments drag. You can feel the concept of time actually exist- it's as if every second has lined up and saying hello in slow succession, each making sure you’re aware of its individual presence.

Eventually, we roll into Reims and have a very European experience. See, when you ask someone if there’s food/shopping/entertainment near by, if it’s more than four blocks away, they say “No, there’s nothing close,” as if more than 4 blocks is just too far to walk on foot. It happens all the time. We’ll ask if there’s somewhere to eat nearby, and people will say “Sorry, there’s really nothing close." Then low and behold, we stumble upon a strip of restaurants, clubs, and bars literally a kilometer long a whopping five minute walk away. I don’t get it.

After weighing all my options for far, far too long, I grab some Thai food against my better judgment. The French aren’t really known for their liberal use of fiery heat. So when my dish arrives as a basic but spicy red curry with chicken and basil, I’m pretty happy.

We pass out in a boarding house. I don't know what else to really call it. It’s a five-story building with a couple hundred apartment-style rooms. The elevator announces that some of the establishment's renters are railway workers. This select group of clientele apparently work all night and sleep during the day, so we're asked to "not run down the hall banging pots”. I have a funny thought of James bedecked with his four bags trudging down the hall jangling like an old prospector, disturbing the slumber of every door he passes. Maybe I should get him a tin cup to make the dream a reality. I already know he loves peaches and gravy.

Impromptu Show/Parking Lot Dance Party

2010-07-16T13:39:00.016+01:00

So, it seems silly to have all these friends around and not throw a show party with everyone. So we spend the day scouring the town for somewhere to play a last second. This bar looks like it'd be perfect, but we can't get a hold of someone to open the door.

We take a break and drive up the hill to check out the castle and see if we can spy any other cool bars from the medieval vantage point. Turns out the castle has an awning, stage, and PA all set up for performances there, but we can't find someone there to let us in either. Awesome venue number two:FAIL. And the turret is even wired with an antiquated antennae.

And then the West Side finds it's way into our day. It's perfect. Instruments of every ilk hang from the ceiling and sex toy dispensers warm the bathrooms. There is even an ashtray in the toilet stall.

Things get appropriately rad. Our friend Nahuel brings along his DJ strobe light set, and Simon's band opens with a bastion of EU friendly covers from Juiceboxxx to Cold War Kids. BBE then proceeds to slay.

The owner of the bar is so taken aback and excited that he makes the band sign a piece of paper, which he proclaims ad infinitum that he will hang it next to his signed Scorpions poster in the bar.

There's one low point in the evening. Our friend Aukha is s'pose to play his Chip after BBE, but the bar cuts him off due to what they claim are noise curfew reasons. They're not amused when we just take Aukha's set up out to our car, open the back hatch, and blast it through the stereo. But I think the heavens had greater things in mind for us. The bar owner, still riding his excited high, gives us a crate of 24 half liter beers and sends us on our way. We drive down the road three blocks and set up shop in a cemetery parking lot. People start arriving from the bar, the car's back hatch is reopened, and Aukha performs until his batteries die. Afterwards we have a dance party til 3 AM out under the stars. Neumarkt, you rule. Thanks for not calling the cops on us and breaking up our party.

Neumarkt Punk

2010-07-16T13:14:00.007+01:00

I thought the tattooed building I explored in Bratislava was a sensation, but when I saw it, I just assumed that all the art appeared after the building was abandoned. And obviously a lot of it was. But it never occurred to me the possibility that some of the painting may have been created while people were still living there. This thought didn’t pop into my head until we came across this:

(click on the composites to see 'em in their larger glory)

It’s where or friend Mark lives, and we kill a couple hours here. At first I figure it’s a squat, but apparently the 12 people that live here all pay 50€ a month. I’m not sure that the 9 dogs pay any rent. There was actually more dog food in the house than human food. Which is understandable, seeing as there’s no way I would risk ingesting anything other than hard alcohol in this house, just cause that’s guaranteed to be, and stay, sterile.

It’s a fascinating place, and I feel like a bit of an ungrateful dick when the first thing I think is “you’ve got to be kidding me”. The entire house is decorated inside and out, and not just with spray-painted images. Plastic fish, old band posters, anarchistic slogans, magazine cutouts, and anything else that could be pasted or nailed to the wall was up on display.

In the end though, I had to spend most of my time outside. I can’t decide if I loathe the smell of wet dog or the smell of wet dog food more. Both seem to fill my nostrils and invade my olfactory lobes - at first I can stand it, but the scent doesn’t just enter and leave with each breath, it persists and pervades until my head is heavy with the pungent fog. It’s a bit like being in a small Subway™ while they’re baking bread. It’s just not for me.

Neumarkt and Old Age

2010-07-15T12:42:00.009+01:00

Our thin-façade of luxury and detached upper-class living has come to a close. We crawl from the Hotel Tatra. It takes a haranguing to get James to pay for the beer he helped himself to from the minibar. I don’t think I would have made him pay for it if he’d just drunk it, but he went so far as to fill up his empty bottle with water, put the cap back on, and hide it back in the fridge. Somehow, we’re going to make James a man yet.

We point our car towards Neumarkt and hit the gas. And as soon as we're on the road, the calls for Burger King begin. I've refrained from mentioning the burger behemoth yet, but it's hard to keep doing so. Somehow, the name has insidiously wormed its way into both James' and Zach's minds, and they cry out for it constantly, as if they're freshly hatched chicks in a nest. Seriously, they're BK obsessed, and it's not just because they like the paper crowns. It's a common reststop option in Germany, but there is absolutely no BK in France, which was great but left them deprived. And now with Germany back on our itinerary, there would be a small riot in the back seat if I didn't stop. I don't normally partake in these "feeding" frenzies, but this menu item was just too intriguing to pass up:

That's right, a Chicken Nugget burger. It wasn't quite as exciting under the bun. The nuggets were smothered in a spicy take on Chinese sweet and sour sauce. Can't say I'll ever be ingesting another one of these. But hey, at least now I know, even if I do feel a little less human for it.

We roll into Neumarkt with the plan to spend a couple days with friends. Aliza, Simon, Harry, Nahuel, and Aukha take us in, and make sure we're better fed than eating BK. They let us do some laundry too. A little bit or normalcy sneaks into our lives for a day as we find ourselves wearing and BBE have band practice.

Our second night in town, we end up at a 18^th birthday on the Beach. With Neumarkt land-locked, they engage in the very Midwest ritual of building beaches around lakes. Here they've taken it a step further, and the lake is man-made as well. It's owned by some large corporation, and during the day, there’s a large pump that runs, sucking up sand from the lake’s bottom and slinging it into trucks. Apparently it creates quite the vacuum, and several people have met their maker by getting slurped down into the sand. And so, that part of the beach is off limits. Which of course means that is where the the 18^th birthday is being held (the machine doesn’t run during the night, so I’ve got to guess, aside from the 30 foot sheer drop into the water, the danger is significantly reduced. Then again, wasted people seem to find ways to make everything from kittens to spoons dangerous).

The Wooderson character from Dazed and Confused pops into my head while I'm sitting in a circle of partying teenagers. Sure, no one knows I’m ten years older than everyone else here, but I know. It’s not that cool of a feeling. And I'm no Wooderson. Which I'm totally fine with.

Bratislava Rehab

2010-07-13T13:12:00.010+01:00

The next two days are spend hanging out in Bratislava. The festival has put us up in a expensive hotel, complete with a greeting when you ender your room.

I counteract the luxury by dining on a breakfast of yogurt that's been planning on becoming cheese the next day.

Given the heat and the perfectly blue skies, it’s been hard to get a proper amount of sleep -there's so much to distract you from sleeping and the sun wears on you slowly like shoes that don’t quite fit right. But the city is beautiful, and hey, they have a castle AND a UFO.

I wake up to some dream of Brittany Spears DJing in the hotel bar below. She is sitting behind the decks looking despondent, talking into her phone as if she’s really nervous about her up coming set. I’m on my way to the bathroom when I pass her, and it’s at the urinal that my brain realizes “That’s Brittany”. That’s when I wake up in a cold sweat, of course.

It decide it's time for a walk despite that fact that it's brutally hot outside. I kind of want to find a calm park, take my shirt off, sit in the sun and read, but are you allowed to do that here? Take your shirt off in public? Slovakia did just elect a woman Prime Minister, but are their laws and police as progressive? After my failed attempt to communicate with the security guards at the festival, I opt to not find out.

I wander through town and some of the new architecture vaguely interests my eye.

But right across the street from all this new, gentrified construction stands a bombed out apartment complex.

The mural at the top of the building on the left is what initially piques my interest, and as I got closer for a photo, I realized there were no doors anywhere. So I went exploring.

As I made my way deeper and higher up in the building, my mind started getting more and more creative. At first the story in my mind just involved a cop asking me the hell I thought I was doing, but by the fifth floor, my imagination was at full tilt, placing me in a Children of Men-like hovel where a meth-head or heroin-flooze was going to pop out of nowhere and stab first/pick my pockets later. And so I climbed out on the ledge, snapped my picture, and quickly scooted back down the stairs to the safety of the street unscathed.

I sauntered back to the hotel, relishing the quirky details adorning the streets. The lego man is a bit much though.

I end the night with an original amber soda that Anheiser-Busch thought it was worth stealing the name of. I’ve got to say, I prefer the regional Golden Pheasant Dark swill.

July 10 Falconing and Pohoda

2010-07-11T13:11:00.011+01:00

For whatever reason, there’s still some chemistry in my body that tells me I must get up for the complimentary hotel breakfast, no matter how late I was up the night before or how terrible it’s most likely going to be.

But whatever, I get back under the covers. My blood feels electric from a lack of sleep, and so ironically, it takes me a while to pass out again. When I wake again at 11:30, I feel no better. By phone is bleating like an electronic sheep, and my heart is racing enough again that more sleep seems futile.

Charlie and James won’t answer their door, so Katra joins Zach, Snails, and me on a trek through the Trencin Castle. Less ornate than some of the German castles I’ve seen (or not seen, for that matter), it has a much more authentic feel, bruised and worn by the ages, yet still standing its ground, cause hey, it’s motherfucking castle. And unlike some other historical landmarks I’ve visited, the security here is decidedly hands off, so you can wander around at will, exploring every windy, low headroom spiral staircase.

There’s even a working trebuchet, and a historical reenactment area with a falconry and a blacksmith (who is decisively not going to bust his balls being 100% 13^th century and has an electric fan pumping his coals red hot for him). I et tourist trapped too and conned into buying a coin that I "made". I thought I was going to blacksmith a coin, but all I got to do was emboss a soft copper blank. Boo.

The Falconress is bewitching; her medieval leather skirt and mind control of her magnificent taloned beasts has me absolutely smitten. When she places the protective leather glove upon my arm with my very own 14-pound golden eagle, I’m immediately in love.

I don’t think she understands when I propose to her though, and she keeps going about her way. At first, I feel bad that the birds are in captivity, but I learn that most of them are rescued, and this life seems better than no life at all.

The festival is great, even if overwhelmingly hot. It’s the kind of festival weather I’ve found myself drinking rum and lemonade concoctions in in the past. Watch the Vivian Girls in an elaborate tent. It’s so repressively hot, and I’m not even moving. I become that guy and take off my shirt. The guitar plays seems like she’s melting.

Before we leave for the night, I get to witness the fabricated police state of Crystal Castles. As soon as they arrive, the art performance piece begins. They demand a security guard be places outside their dressing room, and the creation of a schito, anxious environment and antagonistic electricity in the air begins, hours before they are set to perform.

When they do eventually get on stage, they actively make people feel like their chemistry is off by blinking harsh strobes at them, and surrounding them with additional security with commands to impose additional restrictions on the audience. Once this environment is set, they launch into their glitchy, brutal music and scream over it the whole time. It’s awesomely commanding, torquing people up and working them into an uncomfortable frenzy. The set culminates with Alice jumping into the crowd and being dragged back to stage by her tour manager, and then ends soon afterward with her clawing her way back into the crowd to punch some dude who I’m guessing copped a feel. In any event, the music was forgettable, but the performance as a whole (as a purely visual experience was a bit repetitive), was amazingly intriguing that they could create so much confusion and discord at a festival that, up to that point, reminded me much more of the passive, hippie –flecked Burning Man.

July 9 MARATHON ACROSS THE EU pt 1

2010-07-10T00:55:00.005+01:00

It’s Catfish’s birthday! Today’s not much of a day activity wise. Cause we’re driving. I mean, I’m driving, from France to Slovakia. If you can’t recall how far that is from geography class, it’s 1278 kilometers of driving craziness- basically the same distance from Chicago to NYC, or from Auckland to Wellington and then straight back again. T’Nealle put together a little map of our travels so far:

So yeah, there’ s not much time for activities.

Luckily, the landscape is a treat, so once in a while we get out of the car and take a bite. Sorry, the drive fried my brain enough that I’m condoning bad jokes. But the first leg of the trek is incredible, at least when I have the alertness to enjoy it. It’s a bit startling, the swooping cliffs running directly into the sea, with just a wee lip holding the road we’re riding along. And they know how to do tunnels here. I can’t imagine what this trip was like a hundred years ago when there were only curvy roads up and down the Pyrannes.

A strange déjà vu feeling overtakes me as I progress along the coast. It goes like this- it’s lush and green, then I enter a dark tunnel, and 300 metes later I’m dumped back out into the sunshine. I’m blinded for a second and then my eyes adjust and a town comes into focus, resting in the elbow of two mountains. Everything is terracotta, cream, and windows, and there’s always a church adorned with a single steeple at the center of every short glimpse I can steal. And then the road teeters off around the side of the mountain, and the scenario repeats itself. Since I’m driving I never have time to glean any features that define one town from the next. But I imagine they’re all ruled by A Hundred Years of Solitude-like magical-realism.

So, fellow travelers, what is with the toilets in Italy? Mine had a pop up seat, and when I sat down, the thing ran on some weird mode impersonating the sprayer that keeps vegetables moist at the market. I was not impressed.

It happens, we arrive. Also, I embellished a bit- I only had to drive from St. Tropez to Vienna, where the festival is picking us up and driving us for the final hour and a half leg. Our artist liaison Katra meets us at Vienna International and we’re on our way. It’s quite nice to not be driving for a bit. Come to think of it, this might be the first time I’ve been driven around for any sort of significant distance in over a month. What if I had all those extra hours every day to do things like, you know, type in my blog? And so I have a pull of whisky and get to typing. Which is a laborious effort, seeing as I never learned to type properly. I’m getting better, but I still need to look at the keyboard since my ring fingers don’t like doing things like typing ‘l’s and ‘o’s. That’s what I get for growing up in that liminal space of computers becoming household items. I didn’t have a computer in my daily life until I was 18. So it goes.

I must pass out for a bit, cause the ride doesn’t seem like 180 kilometers. The hotel is amazing, but after all day in the car, I decide I want to go to the festival for a bit. The band stays behind and I go exploring with Katra. Pohoda takes place on the grounds of the regional airport of the city of Trencin. The airport is closed down for the weekend, and the stages are set up on the tracts of land between the runways. It seems be large enough to accommodate 50,000 people or so, but it has much more of a communal, small town feel. Maybe I just feel that way because I’m arriving late, and everyone is drunk and groping each other or puking on the ground. Katra shows me around a bit before leaving me to my own devices as I watch Autechre.

It’s a pretty surreal experience, a whole outdoor tent packed with people, throbbing in complete darkness as Autechre executed their seminal brand of off-kilter electronica. Their complete lack of a light show is intriguing. Your eyes transition from cones to rods, and faces appear in blues and browns. The crowd pulses like buoys bobbing in the ocean, punctuated with occasional MDMA-fueled hand grabs into my hair for an amazing sensory experience, I’m sure.

As soon as I try to find a cab, I realize why we have an artist liaison. Security does not speak English, and I soon discover that neither do most cabbies. So although I told myself I was going to figure out how to navigate the 10 kilometers back to the hotel myself, once a security guard stops me and puts me in a corral with a whole load of other people speaking Slovak, I concede defeat and text Katra, asking her to call me a cab. So far, Slovak is quite a bit below French and German on my “languages to learn” list, but before I ever come back here, I better learn some travel friendly phrases.

July 7/8 St. Tropez gets rich

2010-07-09T00:41:00.003+01:00

Our lazy day leaks into the next and we get a late start. Which is great, the only thing we really need to accomplish is getting to St Tropez. It’s not much of a drive to remember, until the final 30 kilometers, where the idle road gets animated and races down the side of the mountain. People in expensive cars are ripping past me and I half expect Michael Douglas to weave past me in pursuit.

St. Tropez is a vacation town, where people escape their day to day fake lives for a fake holiday life. Lots of sun, lots of expensive trinkets. It’s the kind of place families can come for a nice time, but the 14 year olds can escape for drinks and kiss boys from other towns. And see rock bands on Thursdays I guess.

Our time there is a bit of a hazy blob. We have an aloof minder, who I suspect doesn’t understand English quite as well as he pretends to. The resort has given us two unrented mobile homes to call home sweet home, which is just hilarious to me. I can’t imagine coming to an expensive resort and arriving to find out my pricey accommodation is a mobile home, protected by a huge spider. But hey, what do I know, I’m a brokeass.

We are given 210€ worth of food vouchers, which we can’t even start to imagine what to do with. The band we’re playing with, Blood Red Shoes, buys a boogie board with them. Zach and I order 500gram steaks and mussels, cause you can’t eat a boogie board.

The night ends classy. So much Moet. I can’t believe we have a 12 hour drive to Slovakia tomorrow.

July 6 Toulouse pt. 2

2010-07-07T21:48:00.008+01:00

Calm. Pure calm. Our hosts continue to be mindblowingly nice and offer to let us stay on another day. So we stay, sprawling all over the farm with only the meandering sun to tell us that time is passing. Everything is perfectly idyllic, sans Snail’s sporadic sneezing in the far off background (it stops every time she passes out to Twin Peaks). Antoine’s parents show me around the place, including the old stone hearth and the dreary hole that past farmers used to torture geese in to make that creamy perfection foie gras.

At some point, in some far, far away land, Zach discovers the number I wrote on a piece of paper and stuck in his pocket the night before. He calls, and I leave to find him in the depths of Toulouse. Such are my duties as band dad.

On the way back to the farm, there are fields of sunflowers stretching to the horizon. I imagine wandering out in them with a blindfold on and wonder if I’d be able to make it back. So I swoop back to the farm, knowing James and Snails will love coming back out here and wandering around. We make it back, and as soon as I’m out of the car, my legs launch me through the fields. Turns out that sunflowers have quite brutal, itchy stalks, and attract bees, of all things. So we float around the perimeter and get all poetic. Well, at least until we get told we’re intruding on private property.

Back at the farm, a plate of baby octopi, picholine and kalamata olives, and a nice bottle of wine greet us.

Freshly opened, it’s pungent and earthy, but with a little bit of time to breathe, it opens up mellow and full, grabbing at the sides of your throat as you swallow- the wine, not the octopi. When the band wants to leave to get some real food, I delay as long as possible to see if I can get Charlie to eat an octopus.

At the end of the day, I’m little disappointed with myself that I’m staring into a computer, but I’m recording music on it, so I figure it’s a necessary, condonable evil. I should be just sitting in the field writing, but my muse says compose, and the computer is the only bastardized instrument I have. My terrible predicament.

I wander inside to go to bed and find this guy crawling about the place. Seriously, when I kicked him by accident, I thought I had hit a cell phone left on the floor. I poked at him for a little bit, trying to get him to walk near my finger without actually grabbing me with his deadly, spiny legs. What beastly coleoptera.

France obviously doesn’t have the noise control that America does, as planes fly over, quite low and screaming, all night long. So much for perfection.

July 5 Toulouse

2010-07-06T20:43:00.001+01:00

I wake up outside. Everyone is around me, which means they either aborted their plan to sleep by the pool in the lawn chairs, or got busted. Turns out both are a little bit true: there was a moat around the gate to the pool that thwarted our inebriated would-be-intruders, and then the camp security discovered the clan and took Snail’s I.D. to guarantee that we pay for our stay in the morning.

So we dust ourselves off and make our way back to the beach for a final goodbye. As we stand on the sand, we watch a man boogie board down the dune. The guy obviously thought more about how to balance the entire way down than how to stop at the bottom, and he crumples and disappears into a cloud of sand. He’s somewhere at the bottom of that picture.

After a couple hours, we wind into Toulouse, and it’s a hilarious French dream. Buildings are capped with Spanish tiles and quaint cafes made of stone and mortar bump up against each other, all adorned with striped, smoking girls. I find a lizard on the bridge, and I just want to reach down and adorn him with a little beret.

Antoine and Mickey Mouse (apparently that’s what Fish Bone named her when she was their tour manager, and I can’t find any reason to stop. She has nicknamed me Couer Savage.) are our hosts/caretakers for the night. They make sure we have way, way too much to eat, and eventually, to drink.

I am amazed to see that it is actually called Bud over here as well. Ah, copyright infringement.

The stage is done up in mirrors, and the night proceeds accordingly. Which of course means the club goes nuts and the crowd joins BBE on stage to do the twist, among other things.

Antoine takes us back to his place to crash. Well, most of us. Zach stayed behind to party his face off. And so the rest of us have a good laugh about how drunk he is and where he’s going to wake up as we roll into our lodging. It’s a farm out in the countryside, and although charming, there is a faint sense of horror movie in the air. The night ends with the bathroom light flickering in some sort of poltergeitic Morse code. I wonder if a pig with red eyes will be visiting my dreams tonight?

July 4 FREEEDOMZ

2010-07-05T21:53:00.006+01:00

I wanted to buy a load of fireworks and go wild on the beaches of San Sebastian today. Unfortunately, I just can't quite wrap my mind around the fact that NOTHING IS EVER OPEN ON SUNDAYS over here, so I didn't plan ahead, and so we have no incendiary objects to light up our day. Nor did we wake up near early enough to make the trek all the way to northern Spain. And so we head off for Playa de Pyla, Europe's largest sand dune. I think the claim is a bit overambitious, like when a little roadside stand exclaim they have the world’s best boiled peanuts. But I’m excite for the beach nonetheless. As is Charlie- he dress up super French in all stripes.

We run. We jump. We watch neophyte wind gliders and silently wait for one of them to crash into a dune.

It starts to get cold, and we have a hell of a time getting out of the car park. The machine just keeps barking French at us and not raising the arm. After 25 minutes we figure it out and make our way to, well, we don’t know. We have nowhere to stay arranged. We are on the far West Coast of France where everything is expensive, plus, there’s no town nearby. We have no tent. But we cruise the forested strip and I convince everyone it’s going to be a nice night and that we can sleep outside. This type of thing is not Charlie’s cup of tea, and I can see his brain twitching about behind his eyes, trying to figure out the geometry that will allow his long, lanky body to sleep in the car.

Of course, this coastline is a tourist destination, so the campsite we find ourselves at is equipped with everything from a swimming pool to several restaurants. Charlie attempts to bury his fear of the outdoors in a steak dinner. Zach acts as his garcon to heighten the illusion.

The rest of us tromp of to cook potatoes on a dying fire. It’s kind of a failure, but it’s pretty funny to chew of smoke crusted slabs of starch. We end up down by the ocean with the rest of the band taking pulls from a bottle of vodka, their own way of dealing with the fact that they’re actually sleeping outside tonight. I love it, I’m laughing inside so hard. Am I cruel?

James announces that he saw a video on Youtube of a guy placing a bottle of wine in a shoe, and then banging it on a table until the cork popped out. He decides to bang a naked bottle of wine on the car tire, and when that doesn’t work, he places it in a boot and bangs it against a rock until a camp neighbor creepily pops out of the bushes to offer a corkscrew. How long that guy stood in the bushes watching James, I have no idea.

Charlie appears and recounts running into one of the camp security guards. The man was flustered with Charlie, because when we drove into the camp, I guess we were supposed to wait at the gate and pay. The man bellowed at him “Why did you leave me!”, to which of course, Charlie could only laugh.

And with that, I lay down under a pine tree as the band stumbles off with plans to hop the fence into the pool area and fall asleep in lounge chairs.

July 3 Nantes, Nonce

2010-07-04T00:14:00.011+01:00

On the way out of Paris I spy what looks like another Invader piece, but maybe it's just done in his style. I get distracted thinking about it, and blam, I think I got another ticket. This time I’m done in by a quick, blinding blob of an led light on the side the road. I’m confused, because I was actually going 110km, which I was under the impression was the speed limit. I guess I’ll find out in the mail.

Nantes is beautiful, right on an Atlantic Ocean estuary. Large pieces of art balance on the banister like minimalist Stargates.

The sun is out, there’s a minor breeze, and Werewolves of London are on the outdoor PA system. I’m down. The venue, Les Ferrailleurs has a ginormous poster advertising an upcoming Converge show. Maaaaaaaaaaaaaan, I wish we were playing that show.

After the band soundchecks, I lie out on the pier and try to detach a bit. The sky is heather gray through my glasses. When I stare up at the clouds, which are magnificent cottonball variations, but don’t focus on anything in particular, I can see the layers of moisture at different altitudes flow and weave against each other. Different depths are constantly whirling about inside the clouds, like one of those magic eye puzzles where you need to "focus" past where the page really is to find the image. Nothing ever comes into focus, but you can see the clouds warp against each other in 3D. And sorry, no drugs are involved in this experience.

Not everyone in attendance that night was quite as clear headed as I was though. After we were all packed up and ready to getting moving to the next party, one of our fun-liaisons announced that he had a "GORGEOUS IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Since it is driving on the wrong side of the road and you don't know where were are going, give me the keys and I will drive you!!!!!!" I can't help but laugh. I tell him not to worry about it and to just concentrate finishing the two beers he has in one hand and the joint drooping in his other.

Our crash pad for the night is awesome, but just as extra precaution, our host's cat take the liberty of sniffing around and making sure everything's safe. He's a cute lil guy that really likes to get up and personal.

July 2 Quixote vs. Logorama

2010-07-03T02:02:00.006+01:00

I was right about the old ladies that run our hotel- they can't bake bread. Our morning rolls do their best cardboard mimic, and we are out the door. We keep getting told that tonihgt's show is on the beach in Paris, which we think is impossible given the lack of a large body of water, but we're open minded folks. France's countryside continues to adorn iself in a wardrobe of honeycomb grains and plaid fields of sunflowers. Windmills dot the landscape like massive, slow moving Mercedes icon tumbleweeds. I wonder if the spinning giants were inspiration for LOGORAMA...

Oh, and if your job doesn't condone swearing or cartoon ass grabbing, then this is NSFW. But so, so worth 10 minutes of your day.

Oh French animation company, you're just one more reason to love this country.

We arrive in Paris and are told by the counter attendant that we have 5 rooms. Hell yes, our first time ever all having our own space. We'll probably not make proper use of all the personal time, but the potential is there.

We show up at the venue, and Plage de Glazart is not quite what we expected. Like so many places before it, Paris says, "If I don’t got it, no problem. No beach, I’ll make my own damn beach". Tons and tons of sand have been trucked in to make a small 20'x40' beach on the outskirts of the city. And BBE plays on it. It’s some of the best sound on tour, but maybe that's my umbrella drink talking. A short rain pour drops the muggy factor from the stifling 38 degrees Celsius it was when we arrived. Beach party, rad. So rad, I forgot to take pictures.

They have some funny little courts set up, and the kids say it’s for a game called Petanque. They look at me like I’m off my rocker when I say I’ve never heard of it. It turns out to just be Bocce ball, and they respond with the same horrorfied look when I announce that’s what it’s called in Minnesota (with a little research, I learn that they’re actually two different games, but they're similar enough. Seems like if you have more space and grass, you call it bocce. If you have less space and hard ground, you call it petanque).

We return to the hotel and our good luck is exposed for what it really is: a mistake. And so we have three rooms and get to do the appropriate sharing. The other two have been occupied by unknown phantoms that apparently like to smoke a shit ton of cigarettes and play on Macbooks. We know cause that’s what was sitting on the beds when we accessed the rooms. Anyone looking for a cheap computer?

July 1 Church Vibez

2010-07-02T22:16:00.011+01:00

We don’t really want to leave the womb of Alençon. Well, the contemplative artist in us doesn’t want to leave. The party band inside us want to get the hell out of Dodge. And so we shoot over to Orleans (pronounced oh lee owns) for the Campo Santo festival. In the ramp we park on Disco Centaur level, which means tonight will get rad.

The poster outside our dressing room confirms it.

It’s a sauna inside our dressing room. It's the type of gooey heat that infiltrates your body. Zach and I can’t stop eating little frozen candy bars. Bounties and Mars and Lion funsize bars, they’re just so good cold. Every time I watch Zach open another one I think about the scene in Tommy Boy when Chris Farley squirts ketchup directly into his mouth. And then I open another candy bar myself.

While BBE gets interviewed in the sauna, I wander around the site. The festival is held in the shadow of the adjacent cathedral. I wish Sunn 0))) was headlining.

I wandered back into the dressing room to see what the band was up to and made a grave mistake. They look like Pringles, they smell like Pringles. They taste like life is getting sucked out of you.

Ghinzu, tagged by BBE.

At some point, Zach signs a dude's rolling papers. The next time some asks the band to sign something ridiculous, I'm going to suggest the person at least present a cheeseburger or a stray cat. Those kinds of things would be way cooler to sign.

As everything wraps up, we make it up a craggly stone road to our hotel. It's called the Jackotel, a proudly advertises it's a two star hotel on it's gate. The place smells like it’s run by old ladies that know how to clean with vinager and musk, but not bake fresh bread. The old, cute man at the front desk speaks no English, and tries to only give us one room for the five of us. After a bit of grunting back and forth, we reach an understanding, get our three rooms, and get to internetting/passing out.

June 30 Tubing Attempt

2010-07-01T01:12:00.009+01:00

I have this grand plan to find the French version of river tubing. So everyone I come across, I flash them a picture of people floating down a river and ask “Do you know where I can find this?” Eventually I get the response I’m looking for – a giddy head nod and a beaming smile. I’m directed to a cute, quaint town that’s not quite on our GPS. Saint Leonard is where we find ourselves and it turns out they don’t rent tubes. Finding five tubes became impossible, as were kept being told “Will be hard, as they don’t use them in tractors anymore.” So although Saint Leonard is beautiful and relaxing in a Norman Rockwell sort of way, it’s no Red Wing tubing excitement. Not that I was trying to replace the glory of the Cannon River, but just perhaps get a French fix until I could get back to the good stuff back home.

On the way home we have a brutal trip to the grocery store. It’s always a mistake to visit the grocery without a list when you’re hungry, but somehow you always tell yourself you’re not that hungry and it’ll be fine. Then you wind yourself stalking through the aisles with a cart full of stuff like Andy Capp hot fries and a rotisserie chicken.

Eventually we make it back to our beautiful little home. T’Nealle pits the crowd of cherries we picked before we left and we proceed to make an awesome rhubarb cherry tart.

So, our friend Guillaume (G1) makes his way to town. He’s been telling me that there’s going to be a BBQ tonight, which sounds perfect. Unbeknownst to us, the BBQ is at our place. Good thing we made a huge tart. James musters up the man inside of him and summons up a fire in the grill. We stuff some meat and rice into grenade shaped courgettes, roast artichokes on the fire, and sear some sausages. All our new French friends are excited to feed us the wonder of melted camembert. I know it's a Normandy classic, but I doubt the store-brand, bargin bin tuilles of cheese we're inhaling are as fierce as it can truly get.

It’s a great, clear night. To hammer home the idioms that are lost in translation, jokes are told with emphatic hand gestures and “you knows!?” as punchlines, and we eventually all fade into a wine addled slumber.

June 29 Versailles

2010-06-30T02:23:00.007+01:00

The sun is blasting, so we make grand plans for Mz. Antionette’s royal gardens. We carry our things down 111 stairs, but before we hit the road, we help this dude jump start his mini.

Instant Karma. And so we weave our way out of Paris. Alas, Versailles fails us. It’s prohibitively expensive to get in, so instead we press ourselves up against the gates for the closest view possible and tromp alongside the barricade looking for a weak point to sneak in. No dice.

Frustrated and irate, we started some fires, piked up some heads, and continued on to Alençon. After our show last week, we were told to come back and stay anytime. And so here we come. On the way we stop at a water closet, where they sell "fweets". I was worried Leatherface was going to be manning the stand, but we made it past unscathed.

Turns out that we didn’t actually play in Alençon the other week, so when we show up, we recognize nothing. Imagine our surprise when we arrive at the address we thought was going to be the venue we stayed at, and instead a cute man arrives on a bicycle sporting a bowtie and asks us if we are from New Zealand. This is about to get rad. Or Blue Velvet-y.

He invites us into his home and gives us water and a menthe aperitif, which is to be mixed in with your water. It explains the crayon green beverages that we’ve seen people drinking in bars everywhere since we showed up in France. It’s, mmm, okay. I’ll chalk it up to acquired taste.

We are led down the street to an empty home. Its got beds. Its got a kitchen. A washer. Wifi. I don’t know who’s house this is, I don’t really know who this man Terry with the bowtie is, but I like it. We thank Terry and mentally prepare to make our way to another random destination. Our friend Romain texted us and said to come to his friend’s house. Rumor is that there is a Pool. SOLD.

Turns out there’s a wee tennis court too. I don’t know if there’s a proper name for this type of tennis, but the court is about half the size of a regulation court, there’s some additional strange markings, and you play with racketball looking rackets. This simple game of tennis is soon BBEized into some bastard version of Assault.

We swim. We eat pizzas. We use bad French. A girl arrives that everyone is chiding and teasing. Turns out she slept with one of their friends last night and then told him in the morning that she’s not interested in pursuing things. I try to give her a high five, but I think she thinks I’m assuming she’s easy to bag and hitting on her. Ah, the joys of not knowing French.

We make a new friend, also named Guillaume. We’ll call him G2. BBE explains the story of the Rainbow Warrior, a GreenPeace vessel that was bombed by two French agents in the Auckland port. France apparently never apologized for this terrorist attack. So Guillaume apologized for France. It has been done. Basically, the eight people at the party are some new best friends. Especially the girl that drinks Smirnoff Ice and laughs like a pig.

June 28 Louvre pt2

2010-06-29T00:08:00.021+01:00

I wake up and make it out for an afternoon on my own. Even though I keep being told that I can't take it all in, I want to see as much of the Louvre as possible. So I jump on the Metro and get cracking. It's starting to prove to be another alluring day in Paris, complimented with a relaxing breeze. People of all shapes and sizes are lounging about on benches and picnic clothes as I stroll through Tuileries Gardens. Right before the gaping mouth of the Louvre, this guy was renting sailboats. Once again, I'm thwarted by my dismal Frenching skills. Next time, I will make sure I know how to say "Cute French dude, I would like a sailboat, please."

Yesterday I noticed that the gate attendants didn't so much as glance at mine or James' ticket as we entered the galleries, so I take yesterday’s ticket and flash it to gain free entrance for the second day in a row. Perhaps I’m adding to the problem of there being so many strikes closing the museum, but I doubt it (I feel even less worse about my actions when I leave the museum hours later- beneath I.M.Pei’s pyramid, the two level museum gift store is flanked by a sprawling mall, with everything from a Starbucks to an Apple store). Of course the dude in front of me in line gets stopped and asked for his ticket. In the confusion of him fumbling in his pockets, I scoot pass him and in. Score. Of course my overactive, paranoid imagination starts to get a the better of me, so I scoop up a discarded ticket bearing today's date off the ground (these people are notorious litterers) just in case I get asked for proof of purchase at some point.

So, one of my favorite iconesque pieces of art is Martorell's painting of St. George slaying a dragon (it's in Chicago). I'm not sure why it appeals to me, but I think it has something to do with the combination of gold and wry chuckle it puts in my belly that people actually believe(d) in these stories.

Apparently, it's part of a pentych, and the Louvre has the other four pieces. I'm not sure what slaying a dragon has to do with being judged, dragged, and decapitated, but I'm sure religion has a way of making it all make perfect sense.

Here's another St. George that I pieced together.

The Venus de Milo proves to be more interesting than the Mona Lisa, but nowhere near as grand as Nike of Samothrace. I guess like all art and music, half the popularity is the hype.

This guy snuck up on me.

I love when pieces of art like this survive. I wonder how much art existed depicting harmless human nature, only to be destroyed over the years by puritanical regimes and mindsets.

I wonder if Jim Henson came here before coming up with his idea for the Skeksis.

Meandering thought the Louvre is a bit dreamy. You see massive amounts of art that I've only seen before in books. There's even a couple pieces that I'm seeing for a third time in person, after catching the touring Louvre show in Atlanta and Minneapolis. These are two of my old friends from those exhibits-

I make it to the last seconds before closing time and head home. As the train doors slide open and I step onto the platform, I have a vague déjà vu state of mind. I figure is just the "I've seen this painting somewhere before" line bouncing around in my head. But I feel like I know this place. Turns out it's the Metro stop that some of the scenes from Amelie were filmed at. Man I love that movie. Someone go home and brush their teeth with foot ointment for me.

Later that night, our French booking agent, Guillaume, invites us to check out another one of the bands he's taken under his wing. So we excitedly make a trip out into the depths of Paris to survey the nightlife. Maybe I should have had the foresight to realize there might be something slightly amiss when we made our way out of the underground and the Metro sign was made up like an Alice in Wonderland prop.

Things at the l'International seemed pretty normal. It's a sweet bar that puts on free shows in the basement almost every night of the week. We catch a couple tunes by Sarah W Papsun and when they finish, and another guy started setting up his amps and keyboards on stage. Totally normal. And then I turn my back for one minute...

Speechless.

June 27 PRIDE and the Louvre, pt1

2010-06-28T17:38:00.016+01:00

It's Pride weekend! But it’s not quite as exciting and extravagant in France, probably since A) everyone here seems to be quite proud to be at least a 1 on the Kinsey scale, and b) most people are constantly acting more homo than they actually are. It’s great. Go France!

During a more thoughtful moment of my day, this article about Storme in the NYT made me excitedly weepy. There’s always a swell in me that, without fail, manages to blindside me when I read about people that stand up for truth, beauty, and goodness with the entirety or his/her mind, body, and soul, especially in the face of disgusting, overwhelming, myopic opposition. It made me want to revisit Stone Butch Blues and go find a theatre with the new Stonewall Uprising film. I’ll probably have to wait til I get back to the USA for that though.

And I'm off for my day of photo album restocking. The Louvre is actually open. The last time I was in Paris (which was also my first time), it turned out that I chose my one day to visit unwisely, and the place was closed. Not this time, even though the website announce that “ due to a strike, the museum may or may not be open” - how so very French.

So we got in line to get in (James tagged along), and while we waited, a girl leaving the museum gave us tickets to get in. Score.

The main entrance to the Louvre is through I.M. Pei's pyramid. Which looks cool, but is like a huge greenhouse. And here I was thinking I was going to escape the sweltering 91 degree day that it was in Paris into a nice, cool museum. Instead, the first few galleries were sauna hot and smelled like armpits. I was literally about to start crying.

Luckily, the deeper into the beast we crept, the cooler it got. And this place is truly a beast. People will tell you that you could come here every day for a month and not see everything. Sure, it's harmless hyperbole, but with James and I getting lost every five minutes, it doesn't seem far off.

That's the Mona Lisa back there in the distance. Color me unimpressed. The Mona Lisa experience the museum allows you to have is muted and cold. It is a piece of art in a police state (I suppose ML has a lot of perceived and cultural value, but does it really warrant two guards and a barrier to keep you 20 feet away in ADDITION to the two panes of bulletproof glass? The Pieta says yes, I say, probably not.).

This reminded me of a James Ensor's "Vase with Skull and Flowered Hat"

This painting was bigger than the short side of most people's homes. That girl is a normal sized girl that I didn't shrink in Photoshop. Man, Napoleon must have been a huge dickhead. This is a painting of his coronation.

This is me trying to take a picture and getting punched by a security guard. Then I got thrown out as they yelled "no cameras!"

Actually, I got through the Louvre without getting yelled at or kicked out. Finally.

These guys tried to entertain us on the way home. Behind the bench is a cart with an amp bellowing a midi accompaniment. Man, no one can play without backing tracks these days.

We made it back, but didn't think about buying some food before trudging up the 112 stairs to our flat. How many stairs in a mile?

The trip down is a lot fast than the trip up. In the French grocery we shuffle around, not really sure what to get. Everything is so expensive in Paris, so just buying with French printed all over it and hoping for the best is a bit more of a dubious experiment, since it requires some financial backing. I end up with a can of cassoulet and crossed fingers.

It definitely wasn't the Haute Dish duck-in-a-can I was dreaming it'd be.

June 26 Solidays

2010-06-27T12:27:00.009+01:00

At yesterday’s festival we were discussing who were the biggest music personalities in the world? Like, who did people know everywhere? What artists have that elusive appeal to become objects of adoration and intrigue across the globe? We’re wondering because there are a lot of names at these festivals that we don’t recognize, but at the performances, thousands of people are going batty and singing along. Rodrigo y Gabriela? Leftfield? Who are these people? We decide Shakira and U2 are the two living, performing bands best known across the planet. Then we put on SheWolf and promptly stopped talking about Shakira.

We roll into Paris for the Solidays festival. It’s an enormous affair, but it’s meticulously run and beautifully set up.

BBE is playing mid-afternoon, and until then, the organizers have everything from Shiatsu massage to breathing exercises set up to distract the bands while they wait. I get frustrated with the line for the massages and just wander around in the blistering heat listening to the ocean of French swirl around my ears. I go to get a drink and figured tequila flavored beer was a good idea. It wasn't.

Unfortunately for us, the festival is so well organized that they recycle the dressing rooms. Which means we get kicked out for another artist. Fair enough, but annoying. Coincidentally, Jamie Lidell, one of the only artist’s names I recognize and the only artist I want to stick around to see, is the artist we get kicked out for. Maybe that’s why I didn’t’ find his set later in the evening to be as inspired as I was hoping.

With all our gear and nowhere to hunker down at the festival, we make our way into the city to find our accommodation. We’ll be staying in the flat of our French booking agent (yay Guillaume!). Finding the apartment isn’t a problem, but finding parking, that’s another story. I got a bit dizzy circling the neighborhood over and over again in concentric circles. I did feel like quite the superstar after parallel parking our car on a hill into a spot 8 inches longer than the vehicle though.

And so we lounge away the rest of our night up on the sixth floor of a Parisian apartment complex. We sit around in our underwear as the temperature continues to hold strong at about 85 well past midnight. With the windows all spread wide open, you can hear cars singing between gears below as you mindlessly stare into the neighbors’ flats, which are formulaically graced with baguettes and pottery. I imagine crawling out through the dormer onto the narrow ledge and shimmying up the tiled roofs, where I’m sure there are hundreds of black cats demonstrating perfect posture as they look out over the city. And as I sit searching the Internet for what time the Louvre is open this week, someone somewhere is playing Leonard Cohen on the stereo. Suzanne sashays softly into the room. I get it already. I understand why people love Paris. Teach me French already.

June 25 Evreux a gogo

2010-06-26T12:13:00.005+01:00

We unfortunately have to leave the cocoon of Alençon and make our way to Evreux for the Rock Dans Tous Ses Etats festival (I don’t care if you’re French or not, that’s a mouthful). Just as well roll into town, we pick up our booking agent Shane at the train terminal. We’re conducting a small exploratory test to find out if it’ possible to squish six people into our Renault for the 12 hour drive to Slovakia that’s coming up soon (for everyone’s sanity we end up ruling against it).

So we show up on a huge field in Evreux dotted with tents and little stands to buy unnecessary wares. Much to my amusement, Brother Ali is performing. I know the world is a small place, but I didn’t expect to see another Minnesotan involved with these festivals on this trip. I don’t know why, I just didn’t. After he performs, we joke a little bit about how it’s frustrating that we persevered through the entireness of Minnesota’s bitter winter, and then we don’t get to enjoy the usual reward that is the Twin Cities’ amazing late spring and blistering summer. Instead we have to come over to cold, rainy Europe (it’s actually beautiful out at that exact moment, but the moist trial of Munich is still fresh in my mind). Poor us.

BBE plays on a stage sponsored by some ubiquitous sponsor. All those logos with block letters in muted fluorescents on top of toilet swirls all start to look the same to me. For some reason, the stage is enclosed within a fun little cage, as if there might be an Ultimate Fighting match held later in the evening. It turns out to make a lot of sense, packing people into the space that sounds the best, instead of letting them sprawl all over the place the way you normally can at a festival. A sick part of me wants to let a tiger loose in there and see what happens though. After BBE is done with their set, or course.

Right after BBE, I got to watch part of the flummoxingly strange excitement that is Babyshambles. It’s been a murmured question all day, found in every corner, and snaking it’s way though the crowd “Is Pete going to show? Will Babyshambles play or just get in a fight” (maybe that’s what the cage stage is for). The crowd swells in front of the stage, and at the appointed time, the show begins. Just like it should. I remember seeing Cat Power years ago, and as she started to have one of her panic attacks on stage, I remember wondering if I would feel shorted if she DIDN’T have an episode. The same type of question runs thought my mind as I watch Pete strut around the stage. I’m glad things go according to the script. A meltdown seems like it’d have to be contrived at this point.

Right after their set, I left for the production office under the guise of collecting our fee, but I just wanted to see if there were any good tales of the fears and potential lunacy/disaster of booking Babyshambles as a headliner. The stories were flaccid compared to the obvious relief on everyone’s face that Babyshambles actually 1) made it on site and 2) performed a whole set without someone walking off stage. No matter what I thought of the band, I’ll say this- BS were the only performer with a smiley face next to their logistics schedule posted to the office wall.

June 24 Elysium

2010-06-25T19:57:00.000+01:00

France is not letting us down in the nice weather department. We spend a bit of the morning strolling around Besancon’s music stores looking for some auxiliary equipment, and are confronted with a load of funny fliers concerning the French team’s pathetic behavior in the World Cup. I’m not a diehard futbol fan or anything, but the French team’s whinny, juvenile behavior being answered with an embarrassing defeat was pretty entertaining.

I make a bit of a miss-step on the road by suggesting we duck into Ikea for lunch. They don’t have Ikea in New Zealand, so this is the bands first foray into the Scandinavian labyrinth. But the cafeteria ends up being closed, and I get yelled at for taking pictures. FAIL.

And we’re off into the French countryside. Maybe all these fields of van Gogh yellows and ochre’s will get tiring, but for now it’s completely taken me into its cadmium calm. Things just get better as well roll up to our venue for the evening. Le Labo Sonore is literally out in the middle of nowhere. Up until 2 seconds before we arrive, I’m convinced I put the address in the GPS wrong. This is farming country.

I can’t even tell you exactly where I am, but it’s about 10 miles outside of Alencon (there’s a little hook on the bottom of the “c”, but I don’t know how to type a cedilla), somewhere in Normandy. The club is a compactly contained sanctuary with a bar, venue, and a full apartment for the bands. It’s surrounded with grass fields on every side. There are some stately, grand trees interspersed among the shafts of grains, and I feel a little bit like I’m in the that scene of The Shawshank Redemption when Red finds Andy’s box planted in the oak roots (you know, under the obsidian stone).

I tell the band that there’s been a change of plans and ask them what they’d like to do for the rest of the tour, because I’ve decided I’m never leaving this place. I stake out a place on the patio and alternate between flailing through learning to use my Euro store watercolors and reading Mrs. Dalloway. The sun gets a bit too intimate with my shoulders and leaves me with a slightly sore sensation of Sunshine clap.

Perhaps the French countryside is actually a Siren for the soul. I would probably end up destroyed if I gave into its enchanting calls. But for now, my will is strong and my soul is content.

Not only is this place transcendental, it sheds a bit of light on a question we’re been asking out selves for weeks. Every time we look in a host’s freezer, there’s no ice trays. What exactly do Europeans do for cold drinks? Well, tonight we learned how to make French ice cubes, and like a lot of things European, it involves wasting as much plastic as possible! Yay! You fill the bag with water, freeze it, and then pop out individual cubes. The excitement?

June 23 Besancon Caverns

2010-06-24T11:42:00.000+01:00

The day starts with Great Shreds. I don’t know how you could start your day any better.

Now, after all this time off, we’re really slow at getting moving, and at this rate we’re going to be late for our first French show. I can’t believe it. I won’t have it. So of course, the fuzz caught me in a French speed trap. Our unheroic duo of do-gooders busted me going 140km/hr in a 110. I thought the speed limit was 130, and they explained that the fast zone started in another two kilometers. BOOO.

Eventually, we crawl into the town of Besancon. The roads are windy and spidery, creeping through the city down every crevice between buildings. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be driving a van right now. The roads veer wildly, and not only left and right, but up and down steep hills. It’s like I’m stuck in a nightmare version of San Francisco.

The club is a quaint bar where the shows are held in the basement cellar. The cellar door has been replaced by the front half of a corvette, and you have navigate your way through its hood to make it to the show. It’s pretty cool, even though there’s that Tour Dad part of me that’s scared I’m going to hit my head and end up with tetanus.

After the sprawling madness of big city Munich, this small town is so nice, if a little surreal. There are men drinking a bright, mint green beverage at the bar. The walls are decorated with unholy amalgamations, like pheasant dog pirates. There are two kids, no older than 10, pouring beers- they have to get up on a stool to serve them. Then we slink down through rough, stone walls to play in a 18x45foot crypt. The part of me that’s not Tour Dad feels like I should be pounding absinthe.

Our host for the night turns out to be the proud mom of the two kids that were serving beers at the bar. The flat is appropriately decked out in the interests of kids who don’t have money to waste on “official” fan club gear. Hand scrawled GREEN DAY banners hang from the ceiling. And I keep hoping the painting on the wall is a take on Broken Social Scene’s artwork.

June 22 FRANCE! (Strausbourg)

2010-06-23T19:14:00.015+01:00

We're doing it. We're getting out of Germany. Deutschland, I've loved you so much in the past, but this time through, you've been positively melancholy (that's a funny word combo, but it's proper, I swear). Despite our best efforts to sneak out during the food-coma lull after lunch hour, the vindictive soul of Munich has figured out that we’re leaving, and it does all it can to keep us there. At least that’s my explanation for getting stuck in some horrific traffic on the way out of town (a semi truck caught on fire and we got drive past the remains of it’s smoking skeleton. Can’t say I’d ever seen the husk of a completely burnt out truck before).

As soon as we get near the French border, the skies start to open up. The sky is blue, who knew? It’s more than just clear skies, it’s genuinely sunny out. When we arrive in Strausbourg, the French girls are all doing what they do best, running around droopy faced with big sunglasses and tight sundresses. Maybe I'm biased, but the town's seems pretty enchanting.

I came here for two reasons. 1, to get out of Germany. 2, to see the cathedral. It's one of those structures where you wonder how it was build before the age of Caterpillar, and then you wondering evolves into questioning why we don't build such magnificent things now that we have better technology.

Charlie is scared to climb the 330 or so stairs to the top. If he only knew that there was going to be a nice squawking seagull to help him find his way down.

We visit the museum as well. A lot of Europe has this awesome policy that if you're a student of art, you get into the museums for free. You're supposed to have some special Art Student card, but we look and smell like artists, so we usually end up getting waved in.

I got my brother some nazi zombie shooting targets for his last birthday. Maybe this was the original inspiration. Well, I think Wolfenstein 3D was the shooting target inspiration, but....
Ah Duchamp, you cheeky bastard. Selling dollhouse versions of your art. It's cute. I want one.

Monkeys make sushi all wrong.

And this is the retaliation for Freedom Fries I suppose.

June 21 Disney Castle and Weeez out

2010-06-22T19:27:00.012+01:00

Today, we’re off to Neuschwanstein castle. It turns out to be a further drive from Munich then I expect, so we make a pit stop in a small town at a little shopping complex for gas and some food. You know the kind- there’s a grocery store, a liquor store, a bargain-bin clothing store, and a dollar store (okay fine, Euro store). It's the kind of place that people with flame-detailed cars shop. James and Zach are in love.

While they do a dude version of Glamour Shots, I duck into the Euro store to see if I can find some sunglasses and some watercolor paints.

As I’m browsing I discover the Erotic shelf. At the dollar store. With penis sheaths.

I start to wonder what’s going on in this small German township. I hope they’re not as thrifty when it comes to their choice of protection.

Neuschwanstein is an amazing castle. But like a lot of things these days, the people that run the grounds aren't as amazing as the attraction. I should have been more wary when the sign at the ticket counter used the same language as the sign in front of bear cages.

So yeah, our tour guide, not so amazing. I mean, I shouldn’t really criticize the guy, because I don’t know how to speak German. And he did deliver the entire tour in English, so he’s got one up on me, even if it did just sounded like he was regurgitating a tour fact sheet. It actually sounded like he was regurgitating. He had this wonder-inducing guttural voice, and he paired that with this super scary German thing of having the last word of every sentence drop down an octave. You know, the way people bellow when they’re commanding mountains to move, or chanting evil spells. Or running out of air. Whatever it was, apparently everyone in the group of 40+ was laughing so much by the end of the tour (I got kicked out, more on that in a sec) that BBE missed half of what he was saying. Perhaps all he was doing was cursing all our future generations.

So yeah, I’ve been dutifully taking pictures to get my photo gallery back up and running. Usually this is a good thing, because it means that I can show friends pictures of things I’ve already forgotten about. But today it got me kicked out of the castle. Yes, they told me several times that there was no photography, but I figured that was with a flash and with a real camera. And then not even five minutes into the trek, I was pulled off to the side, sternly talked to in that throaty echo, and pushed out a door hidden behind a tapestry. Not to be defeated after being exiled to a cold, claustrophobic stone corridor, I shimmied up an emergency exit turret to get up to the third floor and salvage seeing at least half the castle. I got about 20 sublime minutes to myself before my tour caught back up and I was rediscovered. And after all that, the pictures I took aren’t even any good.

And this I just found disturbing. There's another version of her with Photoshoped brown hair on the other side. Do you think she works as a nutcracker during the holiday season?

Nuff said. After we make it back, I made up what I figured was an authentic Deutschland meal as a final thanks to our hosts Adam, Kevin, and Joe. I took ground pork, mixed it with a load of onion and garlic, wrapped it around pickle spears, covered it in some sauerkraut, and baked it. Finished that off with some fresh spaetzle, apflekraut, salad, and a crate of bier. Not a bad way to end our unexpected Munich interlude.

Although a bit harsh, I think the label of our amber sodas that night basically sums up our stay in Munich.

June 20 Album Restocking

2010-06-21T01:48:00.011+01:00

And this is how my day begins. I mean really, I don’t think he moved an inch. My sister should be proud.

Today is 1€ admission day to the museums of Munich, so we head back down south to check them out. Part of me can’t believe that we’re heading back to Munich, but our stay there is drawing to a close- Wednesday we have our first show in France. If it’s rainy there too, I just might cry.

Man do I love art museums. All I want to do afterward is go home and make things. I’ve never gotten the hankering to go home and start carving marble, but it does make me want to invest in a half decent wood shop. There are so many cool chairs and cabinets to be made.

A while ago I saw my first Tejo Remy and got really excited. I remember sitting in the gallery and sketching it into my journal. I’d always thought it be really cool looking to someday have a wall completely covered with different cabinets. You know, stacked from floor to ceiling, wedged in from wall to wall, all designed and constructed with varying aesthetic ideas, their contrasting colors butting-up against each other, while all fulfilling the same function-providing drawers and cubbies to store things. But the thought of carrying and moving all those cabinets was enough to deter me. But Tejo Remy figured out a methodical and practical way that I might be able to still have my wall of drawers and cubbies someday, directly across from my wall of mirrors, obviously.

Neo Rauch. Makes me wish I was a little smarter, or at least wish I knew a bit more about German history. I'm not getting the allusions. All I'm getting is pink mixed with a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

This was smaller and less gold than I thought it was going to be. I hope this doesn't mean all Klimts aren't as gold, bold, and stunning as they are in my books. Hmm.

Max Beckmann has grown on me over the years. Such brutal colors.

I thought about buying a poster of this piece and sending it to my mom as the new Fox Family portrait, seeing as she has referred to her seven children as her little monkeys.

And this picture reminded me of my friend Aisha. She’s a classic beauty.

June 19 Stars

2010-06-20T21:20:00.000+01:00

The sun may not be able to power itself out from behind the clouds, but we're getting out from the overcast of Munich. We’re on our way to Hof for a festival brandishing the unfortunate name In.Die.Festival. Yes, I suppose it makes sense in German, but it looks ominous to me. Or at least off enough that if someone tries to give me some koolaid at the end of the night, I won't be politely turning it down and danke-ing my way out of the complex . Our friends Adam and Kevin are meeting us up in Hof, and we keep getting excited emails about how we’re opening for this band Ash. I’ve heard the name but can’t pull up any of their songs in my brain. Snails keeps saying they have a song about a girl from Mars, but the only thing that comes to mind is Hum’s stone cold jam Stars.

On the ride up, I start to keep tabs of things that make our Renault Scenic awesome. So far:

1) It fits everything, which is amazing seeing as James brought four bags with him

2) It passed a couple Porches on the Autobahn today

3) It has secret compartments. They would be even more secret if we had floor mats to cover them, but for some reason, we don't. These lil cubbies are starting to come in handy as a traveling bar.

Make that a traveling liquor cabinet, seeing as no one in the band is nice enough to serve each other.

About an hour outside Hof, the sun comes out. In my hotel room, there is a hair drier that looks like a suck-n-cut. How could this day not get incredible?

And we arrive. All my mind can murmur is: Ash, Ash, Ash. I don’t even know who this band is, but their photo is starting to ring some bells. Maybe? I feel like I remember seeing a picture of them opening some festival and there being no one there. The Hof seems to be a bit of a sleepy town, but that apparently hasn't stopped the promoters from plastering the burg all over the place with pictures of past shows. I only really recognize the World/Inferno Friendship Society, who played at the Foxfire with Lifter Puller and The Get Hustle. Maybe that’s when Craig met Franz? Anyway, I remember the set starting with flaming cymbals. I could set this town eating W/IFS up hard.

While we're waiting around for things to get set up, the band get's in a game of kiwi ball. The rules of this game include dribbling poorly, running crooked, and being generally uncoordinated as a whole. You win when you get one person frustrated enough to kick the ball over the fence and down a hill into oncoming traffic. Let me tell you, it was a good game, the teams were evenly matched, and there was a quite a bit of back and forth until Zach got a good toe on the ball and off it sailed.

Things wrapped up over on the stage and we were summoned over. Sound check is awesome, cause there's full stacks for everyone.

The night, is a blast. Adam and Kevin, two of our hosts for the past week, are in fine spirits. Well, at least mentally. Quaffably, they are in terrible spirits. Somewhere on the way to the show, they picked up a 30 shot sample pack of some of the nastiest, sugariest, mind-stabbing concoctions you can imagine, all for the wrong price of 8€ or something. All I know is that James understandably puked after his third crème de menthe pineapple.

And after all that bum poison, this is how the night ended- With my soon to be brother-in-law passed out. That marker was calling out to me "draw some dicks!" but I was in my typical state of sage restraint.

June 18 SNAILS

2010-06-19T18:34:00.000+01:00

Today, the dream remembering is up to me. This morning I woke up in a haze involving my friends in the band Poison Control Center, who I luckily and randomly saw in MN hours before leaving on this tour. So, in dream world, I see this dude walking away from me down the street wearing one of my favorites shirts (a shirt I recently lost in real life somewhere in Argentina). I ran at one of those dream speeds, where it seems like I’m moving quite fast, but for some reason, hardly gaining on my goal. But when I do, I tackle him with a panther-like leap. It turns out to be my friend Joe from the aforementioned PCC, and we have a good laugh and talk in that dreamy Charlie-Brown’s-Mom-talk sort of way. Pat shows up, and he’s wearing one of my shirts too. I’m thinking I might be having separation anxiety from my wardrobe all the way back across the Atlantic.

Today T’Nealle procured a new moniker, definitely an improvement on last tour's Meat Sandwich: Snails. Why? Because this is what she did yesterday. I took a picture of my own mollusk. It was as big as my finger and having a very French meal of escargot. Which I’m pretty sure is sluggibalism.

It was nice for a bit after the latest rain that brought out Snail's snails out in force, so we had a wee walk around before it decided to rain again. Please explain: As I was walking home I saw a case of this:
I looked around to make sure no one was trying to Ice me, Germany style.

My day pictures of walking around haven't been so nice. All dreary and overcast- and I thought that was only going to happen to us in Scotland. Painting our days make it a bit more bright an vibrant.
We end the day at our friends' flat. Things devolve into drinking games. Snails does her best Killer Joe impression as Zach hurtles bottle caps at her. This is how one become road tested. Or road weary, I'm not sure.

June 17 Kim Jong Illz

2010-06-18T09:59:00.001+01:00

Charlie has a dream. Like me, he doesn’t dream often. Maybe it’d be more fitting to say we don’t remember our dreams that often, cause there’s probably always something flicking around behind our eyes at night. After hearing Charlie’s dream, I’m disappointed he doesn’t remember his dreams more often. Maybe I need to sit by his head and send more wayward texts. SO:

Kim Jong Il is hosting the World Cup. The stands are packed and filled with enough fervor to make KJI beam. Rockets and confetti flare as representatives from each participating country start running around the field. KJI announces that a few lucky spectators from the crowd will be hand chosen by him to join the futbol heroes circling the pitch. So of course, Kim Jong Il points directly at James, and says something like “You are Chosen!” James of course, adverse to any sort of physical activity, (and probably confused what he’s even doing at the World Cup), replies with doe-y, dilated eyes “Thanks, but no Thanks.”

Kim Jong Il is not one to be told NO. And so he reaches out WITH HIS MIND, pushing into James’ head to will him onto the field and do KJI’s bidding. James’ mind does not put up a fight. Instead, it welcomes anyone that wants to come and party with it. KJI is quickly horrified by the traumatic incoherence storming about in James’ head. The crowd doesn’t understand why KJI is wailing in pain, beat red, down on his knees, and grabbing his temples as he stares at James. James stares right back with the disinterest of a cow.

And then Charlie unfortunately wakes up. I can’t tell if I’m laughing at Charlie’s dream just because it’s so amazing, or because I’m imaging the entire thing played out by puppets.

And with that running through my head, I step out for a coffee. I know that they do things different here, but all I was hoping to find was a nice little café where people were lounging about, enjoying their beverages, talking to other human beings, reading a book or paper, or working on a laptop. Make the coffee however culture dictates, but that type of atmosphere sounds like it should exist universally. And maybe it does. But every café I found was solely occupied by individual Germen men, each stoically sitting with espressos, their legs crossed as they all clutched on to cigarettes and intently stared glassy-eyed eyed off in some unfocused direction. What are you trying to do there buddy, burn a hole in the wall across the street with your brain lasers?

My café excursion is a bit of a failure. And so I return home. Mrs. Dalloway or Plants vs. Zombies? The correct choice looks quite clear in writing, and my brain doesn’t even seem to consider this a question, and yet, somehow I keep making the wrong choice.

June 16 When in doubt, go to Dachau

2010-06-17T22:11:00.011+01:00

I left the house with a spring in my step to go pick up our car. It was raining so hard I ended up taking the train even though the rental office was a measly 2 kilometers way. But whatever rain, I don’t care, we’re getting out of here. But the Fates have other ideas in mind. The car waiting for me is not a VW Passat Wagon, and I don’t know how they can claim that it’s similar, beyond it is a vehicle with four wheels and goes forward. It's a SEAT, and it’s just so small. I was excited for a fleeting moment when the counter girl explained to me that it was like a Mercedes. But when I felt the engine putter to life, I knew this car wouldn’t be with us long. But I go get the band so we can have a good laugh before visiting a couple rental offices to find a bigger car. And after not one, not two, but three rental cars, we are blessed with a Renault Scenic.

I am glad this car works out, because Hans at the service counter looked like he was going to have an aneurysm if I told him in my English devil tongue one more time that the Opel Insignia he was trying to get me to take was just too small. Now, even though I'm happy with the car, what is up with the key card? Really, what is wrong with a good, old fashioned key? We are driving a grocery getter, not a lady killer.

We’re on the road, hell yes. Oh wait, no we’re not.

On the way out of town, the show is cancelled. We pull off onto the side of the road to weigh our options. Go to Koeln anyway? Head back to the purgatorial safety of Munich? Ugh, just going back to where we came from seems like conceding some sort of defeat. So, even though it’s raining, we decide we have to do something. ANYTHING. So we stop by Dachau to see the concentration camp memorial. Might as well make the day as depressing as possible.

My first thought when I walked in was “this should be destroyed”. Yes, we should never forget what happened here, but we should not be retaining and preserving all this space screaming echoes of pain and hatred. Couldn’t this space be used for something that benefits humanity-a school, a human rights nonprofit, a park?

But as I walked though the area of reconstructed bunkhouses and the well-maintained, original building foundations, my thoughts towards the memorial changed, even though my disgust didn’t. The feeling of a vacuum being held up against my mouth persisted as the gravity of the environment started to make sense to me.

People really do need the whole structure, the overwhelming vastness of the site to really hammer home what happened here and how cruel it was. And by maintaining it as a site with homely, approachable buildings constructed of four walls and a roof like any other building there is the unspoken allusion to the fact that the men that ran these camps were men like any other. They were human and they were corruptible, and they were infected by the most horrible perversion of all, believing they were superior to other human beings. Seeing as this type of sadistic sickness persists toady, right now, I realize we need reminders like Dachau. It doesn’t make me feel any better though.

We make our way back to Munich, reflective but not defeated. All in all, we’re lucky, and life is good. Now if it would just stop raining

June 15 Munich Groundhogs Day

2010-06-16T12:39:00.006+01:00

So, I’m getting the hang of making sure I use the right country code and the correct number of zeroes and ones in front of all the foreign numbers I get to call. But I inadvertently mess a couple up on the first try. Which leads me to wonder: All those mis-sent text messages around that world that don’t make it to their intended recipients, what happens to all those? Are they just disappearing in to the collective ether and leaking into space to confound ? Causing cancer? I like to think that they’re affecting peoples’ dreams. All those drunk, poorly typed after-bar sexts are turning into surrealist wet dreams, while the 4 AM angry, drunk ones turn into nightmares. I’m pretty sure I’m on to something here.

We try to go culture ourselves despite the rain. Museums, I love you but I don’t have 10 euros for each of you. So we just poke our heads in the lobbies of museums and explore their gift shops.

Honestly, I could spend just as much time in a good museum gift shop as in the museum itself. Sure, a lot of them are just full of schlocky, over priced rubbish, but some of them are filled with just as much creativity as the galleries. Chicago’s MCA gift shop comes to mind. The Pinakothek der Moderne is right up there.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for cheeky postcards, but I love being able to flip through the catalogues for past exhibits and the catalogues for other shows that the curators put in their museum versions of RIYL.

Tonight’s tour task requires settling on a car for the first five-week leg of the tour. We’ve been looking for days and have come up with some ideas, but we need to get moving tomorrow and need to make a decision. I mean, I have to make a decision, that’s why I’m band dad. Everyone likes to throw out ideas, but no one can be bothered with following through with the details of actually getting a vehicle rented. That’s what I’m here for. The band wants a van, but a van seems kind of excessive seeing as everyone in the band is a hobbit. They also want the cheapest thing possible, which is most definitely not a van. But I attempt to fulfill everyone’s desires anywho, which entails me over thinking things and making things a bit more complicated than they need to be. I do the same thing when I’m trying to make ramen more interesting. At about 7PM, I’m staring at a sheet of paper filled with my scribbles and a load of different quotes and I realize there’s just not that much difference between one company and the next. So I close my eyes, flail a finger in the paper’s general direction, and book the one I land on. VW Passat Wagon (or similar). Will it work? We’ll soon see.

I felt a bit funny making nachos the other night. We are in Germany after all. So tonight I make a real deal German feast. I almost go for the mystery meat in pretty cans, but I decide against it. If I was just cooking for myself, I would have gone for it.

Sausages cooked in sauerkraut, blue sauerkraut, spaetzle, roast potatoes. It rules. I want more now.

Oh yeah, and New Zealand scored their first world cup point ever. Three of my four New Zedders don’t care.

June 14- What Happens in Munich when it's not October?

2010-06-15T00:20:00.014+01:00

The next three days we get to spend in Munich. The tour is set up around summer festivals, and those tend to go down Thursdays through Sundays, so we have a couple blocks of days off here and there to go exploring and become thoughtful world travelers. Unfortunately, Mother Nature wants no such thing. And so the weather is awful. I was pretty excited to come on this tour for a handful of reasons, and one of them was finding out what those fabled, beautiful European summers are all about. So far, my memories of past Minnesota springs/summers beat out European summers days hands down. And that’s without me being completely romantic about my home town and forgetting about the absolutely unbearable humid summer days that make me want to slit my wrists (which of course I would never do. Obviously, every true Minnesotan knows that on those truly insufferable summer days, that if you slit your wrists, the wall-dense humidity would push moisture into your lacerations instead of letting any blood out, and you’d die of hypertension. Which I hear is no way to go.)

The first day there’s actually an extended break in the rain, so I go on a pretty nice exploratory walk with James. We talk about heavy, soul searching things- Rilke would be proud. Then James gets infatuated with taking pictures of the turtles in the park we’re strolling around. Apparently, there are no wild turtles in New Zealand.

As James is shooting his brains out, I spy a duck-looking bird with a wad-of-gum-looking growth on it’s bill; it’s swimming around like it’s wound up wrong. One of its legs is just kind of flailing about behind it in the water and not really propelling it anywhere. I feel bad that it’s hurt, until I see others doing the exact same. It must just be an attention grabbing technique to make sure onlookers don't pay all their attention to the turtles.

At the end of our stroll through the park, I hit up my first beergarden. I don’t quite get what the raving is all about. There being no-one there probably didn’t help, but really, it’s just a shack that serves beer surrounded by a whole load of tables for people to pound their beers at. Sitting in a parking lot with an OE 800 in a paper bag is about as exciting, if not a little bit more so since I guess I could get a ticket. Sitting in the grass of Chicago’s Millennium Park legally sipping wine and listening to jazz flow from Pritzker pavilion is definitely more enjoyable. Maybe it’s just this particular beergarden. I was planning on giving another one a chance, but it rained for the rest of our stay in Munich.

I haven’t seen any of the amazing graffiti yet that people talk about. Sure, the ghosts and the sign re-appropriating are cool and all, and but not exactly mind blowing.

I was pretty excited to see my first Space Invader piece though-

(and if you haven’t seen “Style Wars” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop”, get on it yo). The addition of the mustache and diarrhea definitely complete this piece.

I don't know what the artist was thinking leaving them out in the first place. Maybe I can arrange for a little graffiti tour when we’re back in Munich next week. IF THE WEATHER DOESN’T SUCK.

To compensate for the unsavory weather, we cook an awesome nacho dinner. Far as I can tell, there are no cheap Mexican restaurants in Germany. Scratch that, far as I can tell there is no cheap Mexican food or ingredients in Germany. Even finding tortilla chips and beans was a task and required exploring several supermarkets. America, it’s little moments like when I’m in the grocery store desperate for beans and tortilla chips that I truly, deeply, madly miss you. Even Tabasco is 6€ a bottle.

June 13 Bochum to Munich

2010-06-14T11:37:00.001+01:00

One thing that frustrates me in Europe is that there’s no mobile phone plan equivalent of the Euro. I can use the Euro in at least 16 countries, but I have to get a different phone plan/sim card in every country I visit if I want to avoid crazy roaming fees. I know, waa waa, poor me. But it’s annoying. I already can’t use my American cell phone over here, so it’d be a nice treat if I didn’t have to travel around with a pocket full of sim cards. I’m starting to feel like Stringer Bell.

Part of me is willing to pay the roaming fees just so I can have the same phone number everywhere I go. But my UK sim card keeps reading “SIM CARD ERROR” every time I insert it. So after some false starts, I end up with a Vodafone sim card. The false starts involved me going to established cellphone service stores (Tmobile, O2, etc) and them telling me my only option was to sign a contract for a year. At least cell phone carriers are keeping the lying-to-your-face style of service consistent across the globe. So I find myself in an electronics store run by some kind Arabs, and my phone is up and running in about 8 minutes. I realize as I watch the dude at the fake mobile store maneuver my phone in his hands that the reason I couldn’t get the UK sim card to work is because I putting it in upside down. Stupid estanger.

And we’re off on our way to Munich. It’s a pretty monster 6 hour drive, but my Midwestern blood enjoys it a little bit. We planned ahead and got an early start so we could get the rental car back in time. But even with time to spare, it turns out that everything in Munich is actually closed on Sundays, including where I want to return the car, so I end up showing up at the airport rental return (the third return location we visit) late. I blame it on flying into an airport an hour farther away than the airport I thought I was flying into, and the desk agent takes pity on me. She agrees it’s dumb that Ryanair says they’re flying to a town they’re not actually in and waives my extra day fee. I would have been on time if I had that extra hour, really. I swear.

And so we start our little respite in Munich. We stock up on some German bum poison at the local grocery store.

We can’t quite bring ourselves to buy pre-dyed eggs to eat for breakfast though.

June 12 SOMEWHERE I DON'T KNOW THE LANGUAGE

2010-06-13T23:47:00.000+01:00

So, I wake up in London Stansted. I’m interested to see how the next step goes, seeing as I don’t have a return ticket to the US yet, and the last time I went through UK Customs, they held me for an hour until I could prove I was leaving the country. But this time, nothing. I s’pose it helped a bit that I’m immediately traveling on to Germany, but they also didn’t rifle through my bag at all.

On the other side of Customs, I was greeted with this dumb ass cake at 8:30 in the morning. I guess I’ve heard that people eat cake for breakfast, and hey, why not, it’s not much different than a doughnut. But I’ve been eating airline food for 12 hours and I have no need for dry cookies and cake. I grab some bottles of juice, which of course are confiscated five minutes later for being over 3oz/100mL at the next checkpoint. Annoyed for 1) forgetting about the stupid liquid rule and 2) for needlessly wasting, I tromp around a bit.

I start to get a strange feeling that something’s not quite right. After poking around on the internet for a minute, I realize that the airport I think I’m flying into in Germany and the airport I’m actually flying into in Germany are two different places. Two different places by about an hour. Waa waa. Where I’m actually flying into is nowhere near Dusseldorf, which is where the airline advertised I was flying into. That’s like advertising a flight into Minneapolis and actually landing in Saint Cloud. That’s what I get for flying the budget airline. I don’t really care, other than my car hire pickup is at the airport that I’m not actually flying into. So I land in the town of Weeze (please tell me that residents of this city are knows as Weezers. Please). And so the improvising begins. Luckily, I didn’t get my car from a budget rental agency, so the world behemoth Hertz is able to accommodate my miscalculation with their last unreserved vehicle. Oh Ford Mondeo, you’re a pretty rad station wagon.

I make my 90 Kilometer journey to the airport I thought I was flying into. The band won’t show for an hour, so I go exploring. I don’t quite understand why, but there’s a desolate section at Dusseldorf International called Airport City. It has a dreary post-apocalyptic chill to the place, all the way down to the windows that are smashed out for no apparent reason and green mold growing up slick wet walls. In the hour I wait, I don’t see one person walk out of any of the poured concrete office buildings.

The sad environment is interrupted by HUGS. I find BBE, and they have a hilarious time watching me relearn how to get a car up to 200 kilometers and hour. We get to where we need to be and I’m pretty excited for some German band hospitality at this point. Meals in Germany tend to rule, but tonight we just get money to go fend for ourselves. Which means we end up eating pizza. Pizza dude has a whistle that he toots relentlessly when he needs his peon to pack up pizzas in boxes.

The show is fun and we’re off for the night to a weird apartment. Ah, the free accommodation grab bag, you never now what you’re going to get. The owner of the flat isn’t even there, but he calls up and talks my ear off about what lights not to use (kitchen ceiling, because it doesn’t create a good mood), and that we should sign the ceiling and/or his band book. I don’t know what this dude does to pass the time, but I do know that he has computer printouts of the Scrubs sitcom characters taped up on the wall of his kitchen. I’m rendered speechless and pass out on a mattress.

June 11 FLIGHT TO SOMEWHERE

2010-06-12T12:53:00.005+01:00

I’m off on another European tour with my friends Bang Bang Eche. Last time I left the US to meet up with them in Europe, I managed a type of lifestyle clean slate by selling my car. You know, the old optimistic “sell all your worldly possessions and you’ll be released from their hold” kind of thing. Nothing of Siddhartha proportions, but you know, baby steps. This time round, it seems my version of a lifestyle clean slate is accidentally wiping my computer hard drive while reinstalling my OS. It’s actually kind of nice, seeing as I’d amassed so much crap on my computer over the years. I have all my music and writing saved elsewhere, so I feel pretty fresh, ready to re-teach my computer to make my life easier.

A giant, overwhelming heart pang sneaks up on me though, an initial small rumbling in my stomach that becomes a full blown internal quake as I realize it’s implications- I erased all my pictures from the last four years. At first, I figure other people have pictures of me from the last four years, so whatever. But then I start recalling all the little things I’d shot, some things that have already started slipping from my memory. I’m really torn about losing all the stealth, forbidden pictures I snapped in museums across the world of pieces of art I didn’t want to forget. All that brilliant street art in Buenos Aires, the foggy Chilean antiquities, the dramatic galleries painted up blood red and littered with gold frames filled with shipwrecks and disinterested ladies. I’m going to miss all those pieces of art that, for inexplicable reasons, appealed to my soul in some unspoken way.

So, the pictures will begin anew. But before getting to that, I have to get out of the U.S. My schedule to do so includes running around getting last second supplies and staying up all night doing preparation things that I don’t even remember now. I get distracted in Walgreens and wonder what the clearance of Magnum condoms says about the men in the Crocus Hill neighborhood.

I make it to my sister’s high school graduation at 2 PM (yay Beryl!), from which I jump into a cab to the airport. I have a pretty hilarious ride with a cabbie that is pretty sure I am going on the road with a skinhead band since we’re starting the tour in Germany. I have a laugh that turns into a shiver, as the idea pops into my head that this guy might have been a convert to anti-rational thinking after watching ICP’s “Miracles” video and actually believe that Germany is filled to the brim with skinheads. The thought fades and here I am at the airport, whisking through the lines, and I’m at the gate in less than 20 minutes. Hell yeah hardly used Terminal 2.

So my flight to London is on SunCountry’s inaugural flight to London. That’s right, the rickety (at least image-wise) regional airline’s first ever flight to London. I don’t have any fear of flying, so it’s just kind of hilariously exciting to me (if something mechanically grave or weather terrible is going to happen on my plane, then so be it. What am I really going to do about it? Rally up my inner John McClane and jump out of the airplane at the very last second, using the airplane door I popped off first as a parachute and then as a sled as I slide down the snowy Himalayas to safety?) . The gate is done up in pictures of the Queen and the Beatles, there’s tea to be had, and a crown and diamonds that you can wear for a photo op. As some women try on the diamonds, there’s murmurings to their boyfriends “If you really loved me you’d…” Pathetic.

The cookies are good though.

I wander onto the plane ready to pass out. But first I’m greeted by a little gift bag filled with an Elton John BlueRay, a suduko book, a passport protector, and a blue bag. I’m so excited by the booty, it takes me an extra three minutes to fall asleep for the journey. Seriously, couldn’t they have just made my ticket 10 dollars cheaper and just not given me this stuff?

Somewhere down the line, the plane has a stop in Gander, Canada, which I suppose I get off the plane for, but my mind never quite grasps what’s going on. There’s a bit of a dreamy feeling as I walk down the tube from the plane to the tarmac. As Canada’s brisk cold bites my cheeks, I feel like zombies should be coming out of the dark at the edge of the runway, and we need to fight them off before the plane will start up again, 30 Days of Night style. As I said, I didn’t quite wake up. If it wasn’t for a nice girl, I probably would still be asleep on a bench in the Gander airport.

And back to sleep.

12/03/09 Osnabruck

2009-12-04T19:49:00.009Z

One day melded into another as I found myself driving all through the night until we hit Osnabruck. Making it through 5 countries in a day ain’t bad by my count (UK, France, Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany).

For breakfast I decide to have a drink in celebration of my completed driving marathon. I don’t know why, but apple juice and rum reminds me of Bundaburg Rum from Australia. Perhaps it’s the sticky, sweet taste. Perhaps it’s because I’ve been awake for 27 hours and I’m having lucid memory dreams.

The hotel we're staying at let's us check in early and they have swanky toilet paper.

We have all afternoon to catch a nap and go guitar shopping.

Then we drive around a bit looking for the club, which turns out to not be where the GPS tells us it is, and I chase down some guys who I decide in my mind are the people dropping off our backline for the tour. I speed them down all Grand Theft Auto style, but they turn out to just be some random guys that now think I’m a lunatic.

Well that was short lived- we were all fired up about how much space we had in our Volkswagon T5. We could stretch out, someone could take a nap in the back, you know, the real perks of touring in a van. But then we show up at the club and meet our back line: instrument after instrument stares us down in steroid bursting cases. Ironic change of circumstance, this time the awesome backline company brought us too much gear. With kindness in their hearts, they left us an extra guitar amp and bass amp just in case we have problems with the ones we ordered. Unfortunately, thanks to the beefed up flight cases, we can’t fit the spare amps in the car. The heavens have a funny sense of humor. Last night our emaciated backline left James playing drums whilst sitting on a bucket and now this. But I rock some mad geometry with T’Nealle and vacuum-pack the back of the van full of gear. So much for being all excited to use the rear view mirror for the German leg of the tour.

The club is volleyball-tastic. You have to walk through a party bus to get to the front door, and the building is surrounded with sand, shade structures, and coconut oil dispensers. RADICAL! There is another party bus in the parking lot that sells drunk food. Charlie of course has to get a pizza-stuck.

After the show, I thought a girl was complimenting me on my beard, but it turns out she was really just totally into my belt. Later she told me that she missed my band but heard we were super awesome and wanted me to sign her dress. Well, I guess that’s what happens when you miss a band- you end up asking their tour manager to sign your dress. I’m sure she’ll still cherish it forever.

12/02/09 SWEET PARIS!

2009-12-03T19:09:00.001Z

I had plans last night to wake up early and go to the Tate for an hour. And although I still woke up early, it seemed like a bad idea to fit one more thing in. We already have to get a taxi, get to the Eurostar, get on a train to Paris, go rent a van in Paris, reacquaint myself with driving on the right side of the road, and get to soundcheck on time, and then leave after BBE’s set to start our 8 hour drive to the next day’s show in Germany. So yeah, 34 minutes at the Tate seemed like a bad idea. I’m sad, but it just wasn’t meant to be this time through.

I eat my last English Breakfast (tear) and we sardine into the taxi. I can’t even see James in the back seat, can you?

The train ride to Paris goes even smoother than I could have ever hoped, other than I get a lil sick on the train. I can’t even remember the last time I got motion sickness, but I persevere and make it without perfuming the train car with my English Breakfast.

Charlie goes on the quest for the rental van with me. We almost get the nice Scandinavian rental car desk attendant to come on tour with us. And so now it’s 6:30 and the firs thing I get to do is drive in Parisian rush hour traffic. Holy shit, it’s like driving in a massive, scared school of fish. Two of my immediate thoughts are:

-Great Britian, I miss your yellow light flashing before turning green

-Paris I like your little eye-level green light, but I don’t like that you don’t have a signal light across the road.

The club is super swank , a little underground deal that just keeps going and going as you walk down the stairs. The dressing rooms and actually caverns cut into the ground. Our backline, alas, suffered a bit of mistranslation. So we have no kick drum and four guitar stands. Interesting.

Micky is our Artist Liaison, and he takes care of us like battle champs. We hit up a quaint mood-lit French/Italian Bistro and proceed to sophisticatedly inhale beef tenderloin, tuna steaks, gnocchi, and pesto penne with a couple bottle of Valepeccio wine. If they feed me like this every night, then fine, if you twist my arm, I will do this forever.

We take shots with Micky and effervesce at each other “you the best”, “no you the best”, “no you the best”, “no YOU the best” etc. Micky is totally into Rush Hour.

Holy shit I left GB and I’m in a country now that doesn’t have English as it’s first language, and the dj STILL plays Parklife, Smells like Teen Spirit, and Song 2. WTF?!?

BBE finally gets playing around 1AM and the crowd starts a CIRCLE PIT. A very nice, excited circle pit with no slam dancers doing the skankin’ pickle or whatever it’s called.

At the end of the night a girl and her friend are glowing as they ask me to sign their notebook. Well, why not., I do know how to clutch a pen and move it around on paper so that it looks like something. She tells me that she just loves the Junior Boys, and I realize she thinks I’m one of them. COOL. Enjoy your autograph! XOXO, LUV U FOREVA! THX FOR LISTENING!

12/01/09 Day Off

2009-12-02T07:02:00.008Z

It wasn’t really a day off. At least not in a lazing-around-in-the-steam-room-recouping-while-beautiful-Amazonian-people-in-loincloths-attend-to-your-every-hungover-need kind of day-off (those day’s off are much better). Instead, I spent the day zooming around with T’nealle to pick up my new glasses (saw a fox in the heart of London, yay human encroachment on animal habitats!),

picking up merch in Reading (screw you and your tractor beam, Reading. We must have driven around in circles for another hour trying to escape the under-construction roundabouts that wouldn’t let up exit towards Heathrow), contimplating what was running through Iggy Pop's mind when he agreed to do car insurance ads,

and dropping off the car at the airport.

It took six hours. Definitely not an exciting day. But I totally got through my first two weeks ever driving in the UK without destroying anything on the vehicle, or another vehicle for that matter (okay, I scraped the hub cap on the front parking side a couple times. Have you ever tried parking in London? You need to have those whitewalls kissing the curb. Anyway). When we finally get back to the Walrus, my brain’s just not working quite right. So I go for a walk and check out the London that you see in all the books: Big Ben, Cleopatra’s Needle, Buckingham Palace, Gordon’s Wine bar.

It’s cute, and it’s funny to see all these landmarks while having flashback memories of learning about far-off places like London as a kid and it seeming like such a mystical place that only kings get to visit if they’re lucky. Instead, here I am, watching people piss on the monuments while I try not to get pick-pocketed. Ah, the destruction of such lovely concocted childhood fantasies.

11/30/09 The Garage London

2009-12-01T07:00:00.021Z

We wake up. We get in car. We drive straight to London. This is our longest drive of the tour, and when we tell peeps from the UK that we are driving ALL THE WAY from Newcastle to London, they go blank as a sheet. They tell us there's no way, that we can't make it, that it's JUST TOO FAR. People reading, fyi, it is a six hour drive. That's it, just six. I can handle it. Now Fargo to Seattle, THAT'S a drive. But I digress.

As far as the drive goes, I see why some English settlers just coming over to the new land hundreds of years ago came to settle in the Midwest- because instead of driving from Newcastle to London, I could have just as well've been making my way from the Twin Cities to Madison. The only differences were that I was on the left side of the road and you couldn’t stop every 50 miles for cheese curds. And there was no Wisconsin Dells to alert me that I was almost at my final destination for the day. Even the bathrooms along the way had a kinda Heartland feel:

So yeah, the drive was full of rolling hills and green. I was all worried earlier this week that the UK’s historic flooding the previous week would make traveling up north hell, but instead we just saw a couple flooded fields (today was actually our first time driving in the sunlight since Stonehenge). Not everything looked like the Midwest though:

London is nowhere near as heart-palpitating to drive through when there's light out. That's right UKers, I made the treacherous drive AND finished by 3 in the afternoon. Hoe bour them apples? And at the venue and it is already a party:

Balloons from the night b'fore still fill the 600 person venue, so we make the most of it. AND we get to hang out with our friends and tour-mates from the US- HarMar Superstar. We were actually so busy hanging out that we forget to take any pictures together. Ashton would be disgusted with us.

At some point BBE does an interview with a subsidiary of the BBC and someone calls in on Charlie's phone. She of course ends up an unwitting part of the interview. Zach loves it.

While HarMar is on stage, BBE dresses up like him and his band.

Then of course we bumrush the stage and sing the chorus of Tallboy with HarMar. T'Nealle ends up high enough on Denver's shoulders that she gets vertigo and falls off into me. Charlie has a seizure of glee. It's awesome. I'm sure there's pictures on the internet somewhere.

We end the night at the Lex. It's great to hang out with friends and get tags of love.

After a couple martinis, Charlie gets all band crushy on a Libertine member at the bar. In true fashion, a sign of affection is misread and Charlie almost gets punched. So, we decide it's time to start making our way back to where we're staying, The Walrus. But not without a pitstop. I got a picture of T'Nealle using her failsafe McLovin id to get booze. She's so happy!