Handful of Marbles

2009-02-26T12:52:00.002+08:00

Bye Bye Baby, Baby Bye Bye....

The last time I listened to that song I was in Dalian, China.

Anyway, I'm done here. I was going to delete the blog but I realised I quite liked looking back through it, like an old diary, but I don't really feel like writing, and haven't, in the same way for a while. Maybe when I go on tour again I'll want to but right now, I've nothing to say that fits here and I'm so busy on other little and not so little projects that I've decided it's time to do something else. If you've been reading, then I thank you.

zaijian.

2009-02-26T09:34:00.003+08:00

"Sporting woman, is she...?"

Quoting form an article in the Metro (2/24/09)

“Rapelay,” a Japanese video game, was recently pulled from Web sites such as Amazon and eBay, but anti-violence advocates are shocked it’s still available for download elsewhere.

As described on mobygames.com, “Rapelay” players take the role of a pervert who, after an arrest for molestation, sexually assaults the young woman he first attacked, along with her mother and younger sister.

“This is not what you want in the world if you want to end sexual violence,” said Harriet Lessel, executive director of New York Alliance Against Sexual Assault. “Does it talk about the seriousness of rape and how it destroys people’s lives?”

Yesterday, she and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn urged video game distributors to pull the game.

Illusion, the Yokohama-based software company that released “Rapelay” in 2006, states on its Web site that the product isn’t available for sale outside Japan.

It was hard to know where to start. It seems the company feels that a game available to (presumably) adolescent Japanese boys is less offensive than a game available internationally, as though that's an excuse (I wonder if there's an argument being prepared that it's culturally acceptable to portray rape as fun in Japan...). Anyway, two simple questions seems to me to clarify why this game isn't harmless fun-or even a good bad-taste joke to be sniggered at when the girls have gone to bed.

1> Why don't they make the game so that the protagonist is raping / sodomizing men?
2> Why wouldn't that game be marketable to its target demographic? What thrill would that game lack that rapelay contains?

Even the title "rapeplay". FFS.

I am ever amazed and appalled in equal measure.

2009-02-13T08:31:00.003+08:00

Analysis kicks your ass.

Or rather, in analysis you kick your own ass, a lot.

Then you examine just exactly why you were kicking your own ass and what for.

Strangely, this works. Because we're usually doing this all the time but without examining it.

The stuff I've come to realize...

2009-02-13T08:23:00.002+08:00

Pass The Dutchie by the left-hand side.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/12/far-right-dutch-mp-ban-islam

Erm.... on the one hand this looks like the British Government denying someone their rights of free speech. On the other it's a tepid bureaucracy completely unsure of how to address the issues of religious diversity because, fundamentally, they either don't know how they feel or are afraid to be candid about how they feel. So they panicked. Either way this move was a grand show of moral cowardice.

I don't agree with religious persecution. Nor do I think that any religion and its execution are above scrutiny. The film should have been judged on its (de)merits, not silenced. Censoring the movie only allows the BNP et al to grind an axe, and it demonstrates to any so-minded religious extremists (of any stripe) that the UK, on the whole, is scared by the subject.

Let this asshole show his movie. What's so scary about a movie? (Unless the movie said " take arms, lynch people in the streets, burn down their places of worship, go to this website to learn how to tyranize..." - but we already have laws against doing that, right? so presumably that wasn't the issue). Let the extremists get all animated - surely kow-towing to either one is unacceptable. Would the director of a right-wing movie speaking out against Judaism be denied entry to the UK? Or against Chrisitianity? Scientology? Wicca? Santa Claus...?

I guess a by-product of this decision is a backhanded support of UK Muslims but really, that seems more incidental than intentional to me. Or am I being cynical? Was that really the prime concern here?

I loathe fascists of any creed but I support their right to opine. Just as I have the right to call them ignorant, craven, simpleminded f***wits who might better serve the world by dying and donating their organs so good, useful people can live. This is democracy working, right? Of course, should they decide to oppress or censor anyone then I think it completely acceptable - even compulsory - that they be stopped with force, whatever it takes to put them down.

But preventativly, sunlight's the best disinfectant where any kind of fascism or racism exists.

It would be interesting to know who made the decision. And where their spine is kept.

2009-01-22T11:50:00.008+08:00

January, sick and tired you've been hanging on me....

2009 is barely a month old and already...

I am surprised at how happy I am over Barack Obama becoming The President. I liked his speech; I liked that he included atheists in addition to all the supernatural beliefs; I liked that he promised that national security won't be at the expense of personal liberty; I liked it all. Good days. I only the wave of optimism carries us through the tough months coming up before people start bellyaching that they're not getting their share of Constitutionally assured happiness. (I think this is a basic misconception and cause of much distress in American life. I don't think Brit's, for example, expect to be happy. Americans seem to, and seem to feel cheated if they don't get it. I'm just saying...at least they aspire to something rather than settle for it, I guess....).

I especially liked that Dick Cheney was in a wheelchair. Reminded me of Mason Verger...

However, the month started sadly with the death of my old friend Steve Edgson. When I was about 22-25 I was in a band with Steve. We weren't successful - it was a very Coventry, underachieving experience in many respects, although the band did have its moments. Steve was the clarinetist (which says much of the band and the times). What saddened me most about his death was that, at 53, he was so young. Despite my urge to eulogize feels improper to talk about Steve here, it's probably enough to say that I can't think of Steve without smiling. He had a very Coventry sense of humor (the place does have some defining characteristics beyond The Specials, spiteful violence, unemployment and a crappy accent) and he was one of those people for whom a smile was never far from the surface. A true English eccentric; creative, individual, and very very quick-witted, which for me is one of the prime indicators of intelligence (do you know any smart people who aren't funny? Friends and family of Stephen Hawking cannot reply). I hadn't seen him for years and was shocked at how sad I felt knowing I'd never see him again. An ex-girlfriend (doubtless trying to get me off the phone) once said, quite wisely, that missing people is like spending time with them. I guess I've been hanging out with Steve a lot of late. I wish I was as witty as he was, I wish I could make someone laugh like he still makes me laugh, I wish I was as sharp as he was. Life is too short and the people you want to see you should see and the things you want to do you should do an--I suppose--the people; you should do them too. I'd like to think Steve would agree.

2008-07-19T04:11:00.006+08:00

Good Morning, Good Morning.

I've got nothing to say but it's O.K.....

Last weekend I was the Production Supervisor at the Bon Jovi show in Central Park. It was a big show but really, these days, the only real challenge in doing a show like that is staying awake for a series of 20 hour days. Unless it's a band I'm working for directly a gig is a gig is a gig, there's just more shit to deal with than usual. By the time the band got onstage I was well into the load out and trying to go home - which is as it should be.

This week I went to Red Rocks near Denver for a venue visit. I'd never been there before and it was breathtaking. I'm doing a show there (not on stage, but as a production monkey) in a few weeks so it was good to get the lay of the land. There's something about Denver that I really like - maybe it's because the west seems to start there and there are some big f***-off mountains down the road. And people in Colorado are so frigging healthy; hiking and running up mountains and shit. Freaks. But wholesome ones. One could imagine settling down with a nice girl from Colorado and opening an organic milk farm or a tent store, after running up a mountain for breakfast. If I wasn't such a deadhearted git I might do just that. But sadly, I feel like such a tumor in places like that; like everyone's so nice, and they just can't appreciate just how much I'm not...

Traveling was a schlepp - flights were booked silly and at Denver airport there were endless Orange Alerts set against the calmest airport environment I've ever been in. A public address system endlessly and pointlessly told bovine-blooded people to be terrified of a non-specified threat.It was like there was an agenda to scare people and to wind them up for no reason. But who would do something like that?

Nothing to do it's up to you

2008-06-19T10:26:00.005+08:00

Parklife

Spent today measuring Central Park. Looks like I'll be working there soon, installing and removing a big gig. I've done it before, working production on the Dave Matthews (hacks out phlegm) back in 2003. I did pretty well on that one and managed to avoid hearing the band much at all.

I'm very lucky this year as since I've got back from China (where I dodged all kinds of bullets with my early return) I've only had to commute to jobs along the west side of Manhattan. As the festival season rolls around I think fondly of each one, knowing that every day I'm waking up in my own bed, not in a pool of sweat in a large metal coffin to spend the first hour of the day scoring passes, meal tickets and towels so I can shower in a cubicle made dank and rancid by the effluvia of countless dozens of roadies before me. No, I don't miss that.

I do miss hanging out with all the people I know through touring though. That's an eye-opener. After traveling months on a bus it's sometimes hard to adapt to civilian life, and now, even months after finishing my last tour in September, I still have to remind myself not to say somethings out loud or roll my eyes too obviously. The people I've toured with know what I mean.

At least I've been keeping busy instead. In fact, this afternoon, after I'd filled my map with measurements I spent the day slaughtering a French bloke and his Vietnamese wife in a very vivid style. The details of which you'll have to wait for until it's finished, or published.

But boy, do I have fun when I'm left to my own devices. Tomorrow I hope to slaughter some delivery boys and girls and visit a museum in Nanjing. A man needs a hobby.

2008-06-13T10:51:00.003+08:00

Oh. Bollocks.

I guess this was kind of inevitable, and as my very clever friend Sarah said, there have been no studies so far as cell-phones, in their current ubiquity, have only been in common use for 10 years or so so it's a little early for studies....but this is the latest in radiation surveys on phone models from CNET. And radiation leads to brain cancer, etc, etc....

We're all doomed. Maybe those bluetooth headsets aren't so wanky after all?

2008-06-10T20:00:00.004+08:00

Over the Water

I'm trying to enjoy the city this summer now that I'm here. It is the best city in the world and I'm all the more appreciative of it after 5 months in China (which I've been missing this week....hmmm).

Although I promised myself I wasn't leaving Manhattan for months this time, I went across to Brooklyn at the weekend to see the Telectroscope (techincally this is acceptable because I could walk home, if I needed to). This is billed as a tunnel to London that goes under the Atlantic and, using mirrors, allows New Yorkers to stare at people on the South Bank near Tower Bridge, and vice-versa.

Silly as it sounds I'm glad people are still making art like this - even though it's akin to a giant webcam mounted on Fulton Landing. To be honest, once one had looked at the people in London looking back at you looking at them, it was kind of done, but still, sometimes one gag is enough. Ask Wyclef...

And it's hard to beat the view here - unless you're from Sydney or Rio.... here's an old faithful, just because...

2008-06-02T22:07:00.003+08:00

Postal Boots

Holts in Camden is the best place to buy Doc Martens. I've been going there for over ten years and bought several hundred dollars' worth of shoes last time, just by accident. I went in for some laces and came out with these amazing George Cox, Red Suede Loafers....

The bloke sold me some Royal Mail doc's this time, which I wasn't sure of as, well, who wants postie feet? It's like having plod shoes or something....anyway, they are the first pair of docs I've have that haven't flayed my heels while I wore them the first time. I was so comfortable I could talk to the dullest TM in the world on the phone about his LD's travel plans without thinking about violent murder yesterday, which is a first. And any shoes that can simmer the endless, blackhearted rage rock my world.

I saw Duran Duran on Saturday in Central Park. I never thought I'd use the word "vintage" or "classic" to describe them but their singles were still really really good (I used to have a girlfriend who loved them when I was 18 but I was into the Jam and too cool for DD, even though I liked all the singles. The shame of it, it was a very Catholic, guilty pleasure). Simon Le Bon is sort of creepy though. He's pushing 50 and still talking like he's sexy and 25, which sounds a bit like a pervy uncle flirting with bridesmaids at a wedding. "Okay, this is for the ladies, who know what it's like to be wet..." His dancing is ridiculous too, which was an unexpected bonus and cheered me up. Back in the 80's one could be excused for some of those moves, they were "weird", "arty", "androidy" or something of the time. Now they just look daft, especially as done by a podgy 50 year old. John Taylor is still one of the coolest English pop stars, really. I suspect that Simon Le Bon is a little pissed off that John Taylor can upstage him so easily, mainly because when he did the band intros he gave everyone props but when he got to John Taylor he started the crowd in a chant of "play the fucking bass, John" which sounded a touch charmless....or is that just me?

2008-05-30T22:52:00.003+08:00

First Porn Star.

This is the Burges. It looks kind of bland here but when I was growing up this place was treacherous at the weekends after 10:30PM because it's where all the chip shops, kebab shops, bus stops and taxi ranks were. This meant that late at night all of the drunken hordes who'd been filling themselves with rum and coke, strong lager, and cider and black came here to get chips or find taxis. There were always fights; every night, and always some girl caterwauling in white high heels clutching her chips. It was good training. I think people from small cities in England develop a 6th sense about violence out of necessity, and often the ability to become invisible. These are spiteful places because the towns and cities are so small there's a good chance that if you get into a ruck with someone you'll see them again the next week. And there's fuck all to do in places like this except dance and drink and screw, like the song says. Only in Coventry blokes never danced much and to chat up girls they favoured beating up all the other blokes in the room as a mating ritual. Aah, the good old days. God knows what it's like now...probably the same with hoodies and more kitchen knives.

Lady Godiva who mysteriously rode through the city naked to reduce taxes on the people. I'm not sure if I was an evil landowner that my wife riding a horse through town with her kit off would encourage me to lower taxes, but whatever. Maybe I missed that class in evil squire school...? Anyway, as it's part of the city's history every hour, on the hour, a naked plastic woman on a horse pops out of the clock tower in the City Centre to give us all a pervy thrill. Oh, and the bloke covering his eyes above is the original peeping Tom, who supposedly went blind after copping an eyeful of the naked posh bird on a horse riding down the street. Whether this was because of divine retribution or excessive self-abuse, historical records are unclear.

2008-05-22T17:02:00.006+08:00

Coventry Canal

I ran along the Coventry Canal towpath. It's been redeveloped and it leads through the industrial corridor of the city and it's quite pretty in places. I stopped my run this morning when I got here:

This is the factory where I first worked when I left school. It's mostly closed now but it used to be a big chemical factory and we'd unload tons and tons of chemicals and spare yarn for reprocessing. It was hard and dirty work and a great impetus to get out of Coventry and not end up like the old men who were working there with rotted lungs and who would argue about their brooms. No disrespect to factory workers - I come from a long line of coal miners - but it made it clear to me that I didn't want to get stuck doing that forever. There's a fence up there now, but back when I worked there you could, if you had a boat, sidle up and walk directly into the factory. Considering the amount of volatile chemicals in there (I still have burns on my arms from some of them) I always thought it would make a vulnerable target. But I guess back then the IRA preferred pubs and post offices, both of which were bombed in Coventry.

This is the junction of two canals (Coventry and Bedworth Canal and the Oxford Canal). Back during the industrial revolution these were the freeways of the time, which is a quaint idea now. They were built with 7 inches difference in water lever, hence the lock that connects them. Even back then no one could agree on formats, not even for water.

Enough of the History of the Midlands - I'll be getting into WWII Military Insignia or model aircraft next. (For the record, the Germans had the best uniforms, hands down...)

There was still a lot of institutionalized drinking in England. Many of the people I saw along the canal were just drinking to kill time. It was sad to see - all of these people would have had a purpose 50 years ago, even if it was a shitty job making car parts. What's going to happen when all the disenfranchised people get bored of being broke and hopeless? When their children grow up seeing everything but getting nothing? Here's a man taking four cans of lager in a bag for a walk. It was about 10:30AM...

I noticed in England there were plenty of Cross of St. George flags flown over pubs and houses and gardens. I gather that there's been a debate there of late about the nature or English nationalism and if it's possible to be proud of England without becoming a racist fuckwit. It's a shame pride in one's history and culture has been hijacked ever since I can remember by the BNP and their ilk and while I might feel proud of some parts of English culture I feel stymied by what the fascists do with that kind of spirit. And make no mistake, they're on the rise again with the BNP getting elected to local councils and a soft-peddled message of "Immigrants are taking over...". The sad thing is I can't see anyone really taking to the streets in opposition like they did against Oswald Mosley and his cronies back in 1936 on Cable St. Not nowadays. The country's been fleeced first by Thatcher (who should be tried as a traitor) and then it seems by Blair too of late - the disenfranchised will want to blame someone and there's no working class any more. Might as well pick on the Poles, the Somalians, the Muslims....thirty years ago it was that Pakistanis and the Indians, fifty years ago the Jamaicans, before that the Irish and the Jews.... in hindsight, maybe I jumped the gun wanting to celebrate being English. Monty Python, The Beatles and The Office don't really make up for all that, do they?

And this flag was flying over a pub in a traditionally Indian / Pakistani part of the City. My dear old mum reckoned it was because of St. Georges day. Me? I think there's not too many people who have a GIANT cross of St. George flag under the stairs for one day of the year - not unless they're trying to make a fucking big point to all the people in the neighbourhood.

And as you'll agree, you can see how some people would want to protect their racial purity, and natural superiority....I mean, look at us, on the march. I'm filling up...

But what do i know? I'm still against selling-off British Telecom and I find it hard to say Tory without adding the word Scum.

2008-05-22T00:07:00.003+08:00

Coventry.

It's a strange treat coming here; like visiting a nostalgic theme park.

I was particularly taken today by a display of drinks in a discount store. The flavours, which are a little hard to see, are Iron Bru and Dandelion and Burdock (which I can't describe but if I said it was nearly a liquorice flavour soda it would be close) are popular kids drinks, except these are "fortified" with Vodka (note also Orange flavour and finally, "Blue" flavour, like someone couldn't even be bothered to come up with a name, "Fuck it, it looks like paraffin, let's just call it blue...."). Such low-quality it seemed to me that I took a photo for the blog.

I've taken photo's wearing big mickey-mouse ears on the North Korean Border and in Tian'anmen Square without a problem but I got told I wasn't allowed to take photos in "Home Discount" in Coventry. I can't think why, I mean, what's wrong with selling very cheap alcopops? Wouldn't you be proud of it? I guess industrial espionage is a big problem when you're pimping crap like this. When I was younger we'd joke about super strong lager like Tenants Super but these days even those Wino's drinks seem to have acquired some dignity. Still, with no more jobs in the country you have to have something for the young people to do, eh?

The "Home Discount" emporium. Stricter security than the centre of China during the Tibet Protests...

2008-05-20T18:06:00.002+08:00

Just in Case There Was Any Doubt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEtZlR3zp4c

Not too much to argue with here, is there?

2008-05-17T04:07:00.005+08:00

Picture This...

Nearly everyone on facebook will have seen this photo soon, I'm sure, and the accompanying text sent with it goes something like:

"interesting pic showing Chinese Military donning Tibetan Monk's robes before going on to riot and cause trouble disguised as monks.....circulate this pic please"

I don't know what the Chinese army were doing carrying a bunch of Tibetan Monk's Robes as the photo doesn't really prove anything, but it's hard to think of another credible explanation. Doubtless the Chinese Government will say something like "Chinese
Soldiers prepare to go undercover to infiltrate separatist groups" or "Why is the Western media interfering in China's domestic policy?" (and thus changing the subject, again).

But....hmmmm....

I love Beijing and the people and the country - one can't blame a population for its crappy Government, right? But I can't help but think of two places all the indignant Westerners should be focusing their energies instead of bitching and chest-beating about China on the Guardian Messageboard; places closer to home with human rights issues - it's smug, racist condescension focusing largely on China's Human Rights problems--of which there are many--without trying to clean up one's own back yard; like fixing/civilizing those savage little yellow people takes precedence over, say, an illegal prison near Cuba, or the treatment of immigrants in prisons in the UK....and I love the USA too, btw. It is a fucking great idea, truth be told, better than all that classist bullshit I grew up with. But nowhere gets it completely right and while China should not be excused there's just something so sanctimonious about the concerns with China's human rights issues now. Lots of haughty, colonialist hand-wringing that smells just off. I don't think China's faults should be ignored, but it's like people are soooo upset about it yet at home, with issues with their own Governments.... I mean, to be honest, considering what's happened since 2001 it's risible that the citizens of both the UK and US can get upset at what happened in Tibet when they're funding the situation in Iraq. And symptomatic of a western point of view of Asia. I'm not defending the appalling Chinese Human Rights record, or saying it shouldn't be brought out for discussion, but it's the superior tone it's discussed in I object to. And if you've seen white people in Asia this might make even more sense; we're like a rash....

To be honest, after spending nearly five months in China I just can't see China changing to adopt Western standards. Why would they? Their culture is over 5000 years old, and they revolutionized their system only 60 years ago (Before the PRC was formed in 1949 China was, mostly, run as a feudal society with the poor being eternally very poor and the rich being very rich, hence the revolution after the disillusionment with the Emporer and his over-privileged, ineffectual ilk). They're already getting all the trade they want because of our demands for cheap products. Assuming that at some point in the future the Chinese government is going to say, "Shit, this system seems to be getting us lots of money and influence, but you know, isn't it time we were just a bit nicer?" is naive, bourgeois bollocks. China's only real issue will be when its own middle class start wanting the same freedoms of travel and investment as we have in the West. That's what 's going to change China, not some sabre rattling from Western Governments who dare not upset China too much in case it impedes the import of $2 towels and tee-shirts at Wal-Mart (Or Asda, in the UK) and thus alienates their own voters.

China's name in Chinese is Zhongguo which means "Middle Kingdom". They don't care so much about the rest of the world as most of their experiences of the rest of the world in recent history have been negative - be it the Japanese invading Manchuria, or the Portuguese and British forcing trade concessions on China (the Opium War, which funded the British Empire, was the UK going to war with China for the right to sell heroin to the Chinese people....), or the French, Germans and Americans all coming to get a cut. So of course, yes, they'll improve Human Rights for the Olympics...sure. You want fries with that?

That's what I think. But wtf do I know? My last last job was holding a flashlight for Holly Hunter at a sales conference...

Anyway, soldiers playing fancy dress, anyone?

2008-05-07T11:09:00.003+08:00

Pig People

Back in New York now for 2 weeks. The time has flown because I've been working pretty much non-stop since I got home. I've just finished ten days running a corporate hostility lounge for the Tribeca Film Festival and this week I'm working on the Rainforest Charity Concert at Carnegie Hall.

The corporate hostility lounge was a freebie place to hang out, see short movie screenings and to get a drink during the film festival to credit card holders. What I'd forgotten, as it's been a while since I worked at a special event, is what pigs people are. After a couple of days where some people had figured out there were tasty snacks passed around at 7PM every night and a free bar, people were coming for the food and then abusing the wait-staff because the free food was too slow in arriving, or it wasn't the menu they'd expected, or the free bar didn't have the right brand of whiskey / vodka. The free popcorn and dips table was like a refugee camp with people filling their pockets with popcorn and walnuts and power bars like they were starving. Honestly, this after reading some more Freud about man's destructive, violent nature and I'm just about done with people. It's depressing watching fat, greedy fuckers grab handfuls of nibbles to line their pockets - this wasn't an impoverished student film fest. but a middle class, high end credit card do....no one was going hungry yet people behaved as if a) there wasn't enough free popcorn for everyone & B) like they had a right to abuse the staff because of some dubious, heightened status because they were in a fucking ballroom no completely open to Joe Schmo.

On the plus side, I met some good people who were working the event and who were equally shocked so I guess not everyone should be tarred with the greedy fucking pig brush.

New York is the best city in the world. I'd nearly forgotten, Beijing is a foxy minx and LA a daydream but coming home and I realise I love it here. After 11 years one would hope so.

Everytime I blog now it seems I tap into a reservoir of bile. Hmmmm. Maybe I'm done? Maybe my cold black heart is all writ out?

See? Every cloud....

2008-04-17T21:51:00.003+08:00

"Dong Bei Ren"

....which means North-East person, in Chinese. The NE people have a fierce reputation in China (and that's fierce as in feral, not fierce as in Chelsea). Anyway, in the Northeast I visited two cities: Dalian and Dandong.

Dalian from the hill. It's a HUGE port, miles of containers - I've never seen anything like it except in Hong Kong. It's also famous for being beautiful and maybe it is by Chinese standards although I didn't get that so much - they're big into football, see the giant ball in the middle of the funfair. Every taxi driver wanted to talk about football, it was like being in Highbury. There are some nice beaches there which looked pretty clean even though the water was freezing. (I'm English so I paddled).

Russian Street in Dalian. The Chinese were grateful to the Russians for helping win the war agains the Japanese (I think) and granted the Russians the right to run trauns from Siberia to the port at Dandong and I guess this themed street developed in response. It's a curiosity but like themed streets everywhere in the world just sells tat.

From my hotel room in Dandong I could look across the river at North Korea. The hotel kindly provided telescopes in these rooms so you could spy on North Koreans doing something Axis-of-Evily, like playing Hacky-Sack or fishing in the river at low tiede. The nefarious bastids, evil hacky-sack, too, I'd wager.

This is the most Eastern part of the Great Wall. The river is the border with North Korea, beyond are North Korean fields where they are no doubt growing evil rice. It looked like a very understated border - I kind of expect with the Evil Chinese (are the Chinese still evil? I can't remember...) and the Evil North Koreans that there'd would be all kinds of blofeld shit along here and machines for making poisonous clouds that can rain acid on white babies and rockets aimed at the West but I didn't see anything. Then again, they're kind of friendly and it's bit like the US / Canadian border at Windsor, them being evil together and that. Having lots of guards would only get in the way of their evil plotting against us, right?

See? as if to prove my pint - this is the border check when you come into China. Looks like a cafe if you ask me. Probably come over for a cup of tea and a chat about killing the imperialist, capitalist scum down in Taiwan....while trying to buy D&G fake bags, of course.

The bridge on the right is the remains of the one the US "accidentally" strafed during the Korean war. North Korean left it this way. Later the Chinese rebuilt the bridge on the left. At night they're both lit up, but the one on the left is lit only half-way because the North Koreans can't be arsed making it look pretty at night. Of course, I think that's because evil plotting's easier to do on an unlit bridge, isn't it? And I suspect the Chinese made their side all schmancy just to show off....

Look! North Korean fisherman doing some evil-fishing!

Behind me, the Great Wall and on the right, North Korea. On me, big, fat eyebrows I borrowed from Neko Case.

2008-04-17T12:02:00.006+08:00

Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again.

Sort of.

I am enjoying my last few days in Beijing and because of some unforseen good juju from the Chinese web guardians and because my other blog had reached capacity I'm back here.

A lot of nothing has gone on since I last blogged - I've been hanging out, writing, traveling a little and pondering life's big questions such as "mortgage, how to pay?"

But in a rare show of brevity I'm going to let some pictures speak for themselves, mostly.

Below are some photos of my trip to Pingyao, one of China's old banking capitals in Shanxi Province about 500 miles or so Southwest of Beijing. It's an 11 hour train journey, which is pretty comfortable in a soft sleeper unless your compartment is full of NOISY OLD PEOPLE WHO CAN'T SPEAK OR DO ANYTING QUIETLY EVER AT ALL EVER FOR ANY FUCKING REASON. Which was a shame for them as when my stop came at 4:32am I obviously couldn't get out of bed in anything other than a BIG SHOUTY WAY.

A man needs his hobbies, eh?

But, enough. Pingyao:

Things weren't so tough in the Ming Dynasty. Sure, the buildings were small but they did have plasma-screen billboard advertising.

An unfortunate name for a restaurant?

A modern manhole cover.

Can't help the Chinglish....Pingyao Beef is delicious (and sometimes it's donkey 'beef', but whatever, yum yum, piggy's bum). But noddle?

My hotel was along here....

Hova, big with the Mings, it seems...

2008-01-14T20:45:00.000+08:00

Long time no type.....

For some reason the govt have allowed me to access my site this evening so I'm using the opportunity to tell you that I am and have been blogging here recently, as this site I can get onto regularly and reliably.

See you there?

http://howdoyousay.normblogs.com/

2007-11-15T07:43:00.000+08:00

Evenin' All.

I think the weirdest thing is that I haven't been here for 2 1/2 years and I feel completely at ease. Shame my Chinese sucks, but at least it's amusing the kids.

Web access seems completely unrestricted except for some BBC feeds. I feel like I've been gypped a bit, as I remember it being harder to get to some sites.... I was hoping for a man in the wilderness feeling but here I am, not even in the country a full day and blogging. Imagine if Captain Oates had said, "I'm just going outside and may be some time." only to return a couple of minutes later to tell everyone, "Did you know there's an Esso garage just behind this big snowdrift....?" I feel a bit like that.

And on that note, I'm off to Starbucks, where small is still called fucking tall.

2007-11-07T10:53:00.000+08:00

All That You Can't...

I'm going to China for three months tomorrow. Don't know anyone there (not really) and have only a vague plan of what I'm doing beyond learning Mandarin. I'm excited by the Stingray feeling (anything can happen in the next half hour!). I had this plan 2 years ago just before The Strokes started touring. Going to China for an extended period is the second item on my hit list. I am a very lucky boy.

By take-off I'll be fit to burst and feeling like the first 8 bars of Metal Guru or the guitars and horns on Eddie's Big Bird where it doesn't sound like it will ever come down or Paul Weller playing anything on a Rickenbacker or all of I Want You (She's So Heavy) but especially the bit where George changes pick-ups half way through or Albert and Matt playing GfC or hearing Reptilia live or Common People in front of 90000+ people and I don't care if they're my mates because they all rule or my new polka dot shirt that only took 25 years to get here or shopping with Mick at Oswald Bailey and cooing like affected effeminate pigeons over the linings or laughing with Rob and Graham on the way home from The D&T after stopping at the Parson's Nose or Audrey looking for Cat or Li going batshit-crazy on the roof or hearing from someone who's got under your skin or listening to Embarrassment and Gangsters in 12 hole burgundy docs or typing THE END after 118950 words and 439 pages and I'm spent.

Not sure I can blog from Beijing - I think there may be a block on the site. Guess I'll find out soon enough. Not that you'll miss me, I know you're all fickle tarts and you'll all be over at Harley's, Lucas's and Jamie's blogs once I've gone.

Happy Holidays. See you in 2008.

Maybe.

2007-11-07T04:55:00.000+08:00

Ruby Murray Worry

I am concerned. Many of my (washed) tee-shirts smell of curry when I take them out of the closet.

There is no curry in the closet. What if I'm starting to smell of curry and my tee-shirts have caught it? Then what? It would be a disaster, socially, that is. A catastrophe.

2007-11-02T21:04:00.000+08:00

More Tooth Aches:

Nothing going on so I'm fixating on my new tooth. I was thinking that as I'd spent so much on tooth # 30 and it doesn't do anything other than look vaguely off-white in my mouth how much better it would be if I'd had it fitted with a little light like those kids in Shibuya have on the ends of the cell-phones? Then I'd have a disco mouth, which I've always quite fancied, and I'm sure it would add a whole new dimension to lots of activities. It might even get people to pay attention when I'm talking.

And as for getting my teeth fixed before going to China--apparently I messed up. A friend sent me a snippet from the esteemed UK Sun newspaper that told of a dentist called Wang Wal who, to help his patients relax during procedures, procured prozzers to give them blow jobs. I'm not sure how this worked, or if I'd be able to sustain the required interest while a man drilled into my tooth (wouldn't it be strange if it became an erotic fixation and you had to do it at home afterwards as the "only way it works now, love"?) but I felt gypped. I'm going to check on Dr Wang Wal's practice to see if you get the good drugs as well and if you do, then I'm taking a bumper bag of sweets and no toothbrush to Beijing....

2007-10-31T07:15:00.000+08:00

SS Starbucks

Only in New York. I was in Starbucks at 7:45AM on Tuesday morning (this is the day before Halloween) killing 10 minutes before an appointment when I noticed that sitting nearby was an SS Officer, dressed in a green wool SS Tunic, jackboots, black jodpurs, mirrored aviators--the full monty. He struggled to put on his utility belt (water canteen, empty clips, etc) and then started chatting with another couple of guys who came in. It looked like they all wanted somewhere to hang out.

His conversation was how the country was going to hell, how the biggest concentration camps weren't run by the Germans but by Stalin, blah, blah...all, no doubt, opinions based on very selective readings of history. He claimed to have guns in New Jersey, (which was worrying) and he wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest as he "couldn't be himself in New York anymore. And he never thought he'd say that." (Lots of survivalist and right-wing weirdos live in the Pacific Northwest)

He'd gone to a lot of trouble to look like a stylized SS Soldier (although I doubt many of the original Nazis had styling haircuts and Rayban Aviators...) but the funniest and most insulting thing was his complaint that he'd watched The View (Women's magazine program shown every weekday in the US, higher brow than most) and "all I'm going to say is that there were three white women, probably Jewish women, arguing with Whoopi Goldberg. You know? You see what I'm saying?" I wasn't sure what cock-headed point he was making to his simpleton friend, other than maybe it was obscene they weren't all anglos (quelle horreur!); but excuse me for being amused by the thought of the SS tuning in to The View, and then getting offended. I guess even pig-ignorant, impotent, fantasists playing at make-believe meanys have standards...

2007-10-31T07:01:00.000+08:00

Spooky Tooth

It's a sad sign of the times when the only thing one does of any note is visit the dentist. Today I went to another dentist to get a root canal done. He couldn't numb it. I know, because every time he put a very cold thing on it to see if it was numb it still hurt like a bastard. He gave me like 6+ shots with a syringe straight out of a Tim Burton movie and was kind of getting tired with me not getting numb; but probably not quite as tired as I was getting with him sticking a freezing cold piece of whatever on my hyper-sensitive tooth. I know, I'm mummy's poor little soldier today...

So now I have one tooth in my head that's cost me $3000.00. It doesn't even look that good but it will, I've been promised, not trouble me any more ("You've lost your nerve!" he quipped to me). This is one good thing as in two weeks time I'll be on a flight to China and I don't want to learn the Mandarin for "What are you doing in there, doctor, because it hurts to buggery?" The other good thing is that I got some vicodin, and only a churl would complain about that. I'm not sure if it's to dull the soreness in my mouth or the red ache of my amex statement. Whatever, lucky me I could afford the treatment.

I wonder what people do here if they can't afford treatment - it's kind of criminal that one has to pay for all this stuff (actually, I think it's true of dentristry in the UK now, too. It didn't used to be--thanks margaret thatcher, you evil old crone. Couldn' we burn you on the bonfire on November 5th instead of a Catholic effigy--you did more to f*** up the country than Guy Fawkes ever attempted with his gunpowder plot). I mean, don't we all pay enough taxes these days to cover things like essential healthcare, or did I get something wrong?

Oh yeah, I forgot. I'm paying Haliburton and Blackwater to get that oil for my SUV. Sorry, my bad.

I think it's time for my vicodin....

2007-10-14T20:21:00.000+08:00

A Happy Place; Like My Dentist's Chair...

Nothing to post about over the past month or so. Got a Chinese visa, have booked a flight, and have spent the past five weeks working on this:

It's now 115,000 words long and 429 pages high. There's a strange satisfaction in the numbers, regardless of whether its any good or a pile of crap. More type-memory than flight-memory. Arf.

Over the remaining four weeks before my trip I'll be trying to rewrite the 115,000 words as best I can so i can forget about this completely once I'm in China and start work on the next one, which I'm eager to get into like a fat kid with his Christmas chocolate. I'm quite surprised at how dark this one is, and then again I'm not. It makes me laugh, and if I can ever sell it, maybe it'll do the same for you; or not. I really can't tell anymore. I just take what comfort I can from its heft.

In other news, when I've not been rewriting what I've already rewritten (which is the best part of writing for me, kind of like overdubbing guitars when you're in the studio), I've been listening to Keren Ann, Terry Hall, Albert's guitar playing, rediscovering Kate Bush (The Sensual World reminds me of a coach holiday to the Moselle Valey near Koblenz in 1990 with my then girlfriend. The river was glassily placid and there were small fires streaming ghostly smoke across the surrounding vineyards; it was amazing. I wanted a job piloting a barge up and down the river so I could see it every day. I still wouldn't mind that, to be honest), Feist, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. I've even managed-afer 5 weeks of being home-to get my time back for running the course around the park. And finally, on Friday, I went to my dentist and he insisted on giving me gas for a filling which meant that by 8:30AM I was floating around his office like a big, pink blimp and giggling as he gouged a hole in my tooth with a steel spike; it's an unusual place to feel happy is a dentist's chair. Life is good here in New York City. What's not to love?

Which is why I'm considering leaving for a year and going to live in comparative poverty. It doesn't do to get complacent, does it?

2007-09-26T06:21:00.000+08:00

120 Days of Sock'em:

I am tidying my apartment - it's something that I've avoided properly for months but I've run out of places to put my clean laundry so it had to be done.

Because on every tour I end up buying new socks when I run out of clean ones or when all my bags get nicked I've accumulated over 120 pairs of socks. Including the unopened packets that I also brought back with me I reckon I don't need to wash my socks for nearly sox months.

For some reason, that impressed me. I was going to see how many I could fit on my feet at once but then I remembered I'm at home now, not on tour. (I still haven't completely let go of the idea...)

I've also acquired a big, fat, sox month long business visa for China. I'm leaving on November 13th. That should be interesting...

2007-09-22T11:54:00.001+08:00

Hammer Horror.

I got back to New York after my last trip exhausted, as usual, but also glad of the extra time I spent in London and Paris.

It's a strange feature of touring / traveling that getting home is both a good and bad thing. I'd ached for my own bed (literally in my bunk on the bus-a bunk that had started to smell of rabbits, for reasons I could never fathom unless it was either me or Albert below, but we're both very clean--just like Paul's Grandad) but when I got back I found myself missing England more than I ever have.

My American friends have told me my accent is back and I know when I was in England I was slipping in my Coventry accent again; deliberately too--which is about like making yourself fat for a laugh.

(Coventry Accent 101: Say Water without pronouncing the T, same with Butter. Use the word Scratter to describe someone who doesn't pay their way and is always trying to cadge ciggies or drinks or anything. Affirm everything not with Yes or even Yeah but with "Arh." said with a dipping chinese-style third tone. Duck is pronounced with a nasal U sound and no C. Not that we use the word Duck-off there much. Call a bread roll a Batch. Replace the words really and extremely with the word Dead. Classy, innit?).

Anyway, back in New York I started watching some of the twenty DVDs I bought in HMV and Virgin. These are mostly old British films and largely a bunch of 1970's Vampire films made by Hammer Productions. They were all shot in England with parts of Suffolk, I think, made to look like Transylvania. They were all full of comely wenches and most had Christopher Lee in them as Dracula. Oliver Reed makes an appearance as the Werewolf (he was dead good-looking before the drink destroyed him) and Peter Cushing is the man I'd most like to have as my grandfather if I could have a third and Peter Ustinov wasn't available.

Ingrid Pitt - Vampire Hottie. Part of me still wants to date a Goth (and Goth was still cool in Coventry and Leeds long after the rest of the world had got into rave music. Amy Lee got married already, didn't she?).

Christopher Lee - the James Bond of Draculas.

It's strange how these cheesy, dated movies have stood up over time. I can still remember scenes I'd only seen once on a Friday night when I was about 12. They left an impression, that's for sure. To be fair, comely wenches and a single flash of boob (usually by the end of the second reel) coupled with dark and powerful undead super-antiheroes is a powerful aphrodisiac for a 12 year od boy.

It's funny to find a vivid sense of self in something from your childhood. The same can be said when I listen to The Jam, I can instantly be transported to being angry and eager and fifteen and crazed with a huge unsatisfied appetite for life. Not like the jaded old tosser I am now.... It's good to know that those feelings from back then don't go away, but something happens over time that makes them less accessible.

I also got copies of David Essex's movies That'll Be The Day and Stardust, both classic (if a little contrived) British Rock movies back when we were good at such things. Ringo was in That'll Be The Day (and Keith Moon makes a cameo!) and it was one of the first films me and my brother recorded and kept on video (along with Papillon and Billy Liar).

To a large degree these movies were--apart from hanging around at soundchecks when The Jam played Birmingham--my first introduction to the behind the scenes world of the music business (there were no VH1 Confessionals back then). I think it's still pretty accurate now. Well, everything except the bit about making dogs OD on Acid. I don't think anyone does that anymore these days.

2007-09-13T21:36:00.001+08:00

Things to do in Paris When You're Dead.

After the tour I felt dead. I usually do. And despite being in one of the most fantastic cities in the world (and it is...) and being in very special company I still felt tour-drained.

However, I saw some very wonderful sights, some old, some new.

Place des Voges - I think this is my favourite Parisian park. It looks like the setting for a monet painting.

None more dead.

This is Serge Gainsbourg's grave. Last time I went it was raining and I was smoking gitanes. I left him a pack. This time I didn't have any fags for him. Definitely too much fucking perspective. (Note the respectful fan tributes - even the metro tickets left for Serge didn't litter the other graves nearby. Not like the abomination that is Jim Morrison's grave in Pere LaChaisse--where the scummy hippies scrawl their pompous bollocks over the nearby gravestones and sit and get pissed nearby. Because it's important to write your tired, tepid, stoner insights on unrelated gravestones. Because your unique insight and vanity means you don't have show any respect for the surrounding families. Fuckwits. Kill them. Kill them all.)

Ever get that feeling someone's walked over your grave?

How cool is this one? It looks like Gaudi designed it--and it's got my name on it.

I liked this one because it's got the world's most depressed statue on top. Whoever was buried here wanted to be sure someone would always be grieving.

And Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's dual grave. Fittingly minimal. Dead classy.

Montparnasse is my favourite Parisian cemetery. I think being an old git enabled me to enjoy it all the more. I'm starting to feel like I'm robbing time from one of them....

I got to visit the catacombs for the first time. They're an amazing labyrinth running for miles underneath the city. This location was originally a quarry but they moved the human remains buried at Les Halles during the plague years here when they developed Les Halles. Later, in a super-French style, someone decided the bones needed to be stacked stylishly. It's spooky and surreal and fantastic.

On my last afternoon I went to a gig. Because I love them so. Fortunately this one was in a park next to the Seine and in true French style what would be a throway field in the UK or USA was a design triumph with balloon rides in it, a cool railway bridge, a riverfront esplanade, several water features and fountains and two giant glasshouses open for exhibits (well, one was, but I'm not complaining). Got to love France. If you don't, you're probably dead. Trust me on this.

Balloon rides - I have a feeling there's some link to the Montgolfier Brothers here but I'm guessing (and too lazy to look it up).

People in glass houses....

Oldies but goodies....this never gets old. It's always breathtaking, especially when it's up close.

From underneath the base it seemed completely implausible that it was built when it was as it's so huge. It also looks like a giant weird spaceship. As places to go when you're hurting, Paris has to be one of the best...

2007-09-09T04:54:00.001+08:00

Ghost Town:

I was born and bred in Coventry. For years - from the age of about 12 until just recently - I wanted to get as far away from it as I could. At the end of my last tour I went back to visit my mum and my brother and for the first time in ages found the place intriguing and illuminating. (It probably isn't for anyone else...)

Coventry once boasted a busy, overcrowded, medieval-designed but developing city before WWII. The city centre becamse so congested the council were trying to find ways to relieve the congestion. Then the Luftwaffe blitzed it during the war, and razed the city centre to the ground. From a bustling medieval city centre to a wasteland with a ruined Cathedral in no time at all.

Not wasting any time (and after the allies bombed Dresden in return--see Slaughterhouse 5, so it goes) the city was rebuilt quickly int he post war years around a new city centre design by architect Donald Gibson. His revolutionary idea was to remove all the cars and to pedestrianize the centre of town.

Sadly, this had the effect of making the town centre one of those good-on-paper ideas as it sanitised the city centre and made it bland and lacking in dynamics.

Then, in the 1970s the city got hit badly by the recession when all the car factories and heavy industry started to close. Double-whammy. Coventry changed from a place where my grandmother's generation would once talk about the city's character and craftsmen with pride to turn into the most violent city in Europe. There was nothing left.

This is where I grew up.

What I noticed on this trip is that compared to almost anywhere esle, and with the recent redevelopment, it's not such a bad place. It has a lot going for it. In fact, the main problem seemed to be the people. Many were aggressive and feral looking, almost all of them looked round-shouldered and beaten. When I first walked around the city centre on the recent bank holiday afternoon I was surprised by the sharp stares and skulking aggression I encountered before I realised that I may be a poncey git from New York now but I did grow up a spiteful little fucker, just like the little shits hanging around the precinct trying to menace the shoppers.

Once I got my game-face back on I had a hoot walking around Coventry. The city's improved a thousandfold since I lived there, there are cafes and restaurants and stores open at the weekend and it's not so bleak (but that might be because I don't live there). I felt sad for the people; there was a haunted look to many faces that went beyond the usual English dourness. I remember when I lived there that not only did I feel like I came from nowhere, there probably wasn't much point in trying to aspire to much outside. It's shit, innit, Cov? Women who'd look at home striding the streets of Manhattan pushed prams hunched over; kids who should be developing games companies or starting businesses skulked around the centre of the precinct. If everyone in Cov said it was brilliant for a year the city would go into turnaround, I'm sure.

Friends I've made since, from other regional cities didn't share this view. They might say Leeds is shit but it was never the end of the line for them. Or they'd brag about Sheffield like they were - gulp - proud of their hometown. All foreign feelings to me.

It's a shame that the song that captured the tone of the city in 1981 can still be relevant today. Back then there'd been a recession, now it seemed more like an attitude, or a nickname that's been allowed to stick. Give a dog a bad name....

Enough of my yacking. This is where I'm from.

I'm from Coundon (pronounced Cown-Dun). My mate Graham was in the Coundon Dogs, they rode around on 50cc scooters. I didn't have a scooter so I wasn't cool.

This lush lawny area is misleading. Until I was 10 it was waste ground that we'd ride our bikes over. In fact when they were laying new pipes (water,gas, etc) we used to roll them down the hill towards the traffic, sometimes with people in them. I went down a few times in a steel drum. And we used to roll old car tyres down the hill but they sometimes went into the oncoming traffic and we'd have to leg-it. Kids, eh?

This is the street I was born on. Everyone's got three cars now. Back when I were a lad there was at most one Ford Cortina per house.... Those are conker trees - we used to strip them every autumn, first with sticks and later with a nut tied to a bit of string you could lob up over the branch and then yank on to shake the conkers down. We made a right mess. We didn't care about playing conkers so much as getting them. It was a good place to be a kid. Plenty of fresh air and space.

These flats up the road from my mum's used to be considered a bit fancy. Roger the poncey, short-tempered hairdresser lived in one and he was divorced, which was considered quite outre back then. Now it seems they lack a certain class. I'm a great believer in being able to gauge a nation's pysche by its pornography and its advertising. This truck says it all. This shop used to sell women's clothes now it sells cheap booze.

The road into the countryside just past the White Lion pub at the top of my mum's street. When I was a kid we'd ride our bikes up here; when I was an adolescent we'd drink in the pub and try to go snogging with girls. I did a lot more bike riding than I did snogging. What can I say? I was a late bloomer.

People often jump off these blocks of flats when they can't handle living in them anymore.

Coventry's infamous ring road. It's a local road for local people. Not many outsiders get it right first time.

We used to run across the ring road but someone put up a big boring fence so now you have to walk over bridge. It's no fun. However, it gives a view of the city centre. The brown building is the Post Office. The IRA tried to blow it up in the 70's. Bleak, innit?

Part of the pedestrianized precinct. At night, when the shops shut and the people go home the city centre gets very empty and the only people you can see wandering around are packs of kids on their way somewhere or shitfaced on cheap/potent lager. That's when Cov' gets menacing. Doesn't look so bad here, does it? It's lairy at night. You don't make eye contact.

This used to be HMV where I came to read the music papers without buying them. A forerunner of Barnes and Noble in that respect. Now there are a lot of 99 Pence stores in town and this huge Pawnshop. That's a bit depressing.

The Burges. Where the chip shops, the bus stops and the taxi-ranks are. When the licensing laws in Britain meant everywhere had to close at 11PM (pubs) or 2AM (clubs) by about 11:30 and 2:30 this place was teeming with drunks trying to get chips and buses and taxis. I saw more fights here than I care to remember. You had to keep your eyes open. Anyone who wanted a ruck knew here was the place to start it. And all repressed English towns at closing time are full of angry people who want to fight. We'd walk down here to the Parson's Nose chip shop which was the best chippie in Cov. This photo was taken at 11:30AM on a Tuesday. The pub, the Coventry Cross, was doing a brisk business which made me sad that people didn't have anything better to do. It seemed indicative of the overwhelming feeling of the city.

The Parson's Nose and Mr Porky's. Two late-night institutions. Yes the sign does say Faggots, Peas and Chips All In. No, I'm not going to tell you what that means except to say that it was the primo-after pub meal if you could afford it. I rarely could so I'd usually get Saveloy and Chips. Typing this is making my mouth water.

The woman who ran the Parson's Nose was infamously rude to people--especially girls. There was always someone crying outside of here and often another row brewing.

Mr Porky's - he sold pork batches with stuffing. (Batch is Coventry for bread roll or bun. But it's a batch, right?). Never let it be said we didn't have any choice.

You'd eat your chips on the walk home as you'd never have enough money for a cab (well, townies might, if they had apprenticeships or something).

The station, looking south towards London. That misty strech of track always seemed like the portal to another world. I rarely went to London. It was like Narnia to me as a teen. And when I finally escaped and moved there, the world really did open up. But this view reminds me of being abitious and clueless.

Good. Now I've got that out of my system....

2007-08-29T06:05:00.000+08:00

Luxury Coach-Class Travel:

Trying to do everything in a tiny space sums up really one of the greatest stresses of touring. Even though we're traveling on a luxury coach (and yes, they come nicer than ours, but really, once you're on a half-decent tour bus it's all much of a muchness) we still all exist inside coach-class spatial confines. For example, this is my bunk and the only private space I (or any of us have). And by private I mean you're separated from everyone else by a curtain. A curtain that, say, Brian can yank open at any time and say, "Hullo Dicky. Are you havin' a wee polish in there, are ye'?" This is most annoying when you are having a polish; not because of the interruption but because it's Brian.

This is bedtime.

This is the back-lounge. In every back-lounge on every tour bus in the world exists red-eyed roadies watching something marginally crappy or very funny in perpetuity. And it smells of man. And cigarettes. And dead air. That said, look at Brian, Vicente and Jamie having fun. This is what it looks like to have fun. On every tour bus there is usually a tour-video/DVD that everyone watches and then quotes relentlessly. On this tour it was every episode of the British TV show Still Game.

None of it so terrible, just terribly small.

The best thing about this bus are the windows in the bunks - a rare feature. And they open too, which is a Godsend when you wake up in the baking heat inside a metal tube that 8 other men have been sleeping in.

A room with a view.

The first few days on the bus are okay. You get your little space sorted. You're hanging out with people you like and the tour stretches ahead of you full of promise for the excitement and romance of places you'll visit (Paris! Lisbon! Copenhagen! Reading....) but after a while something strange happens on every tour.

At some point you become tired of dressing and hopping around in a narrow aisle traveling at 60 miles an hour; and of watching people brush their teeth; and of trying to contort yourself to take a leak while being jostled around city centres; and of having to be with people around the clock (even people you like a lot and despite the fact that it's nobody's fault). This is when the bus starts to attack you. Suddenly every sharp corner jabs at you; every full cup is spilled at every short stop; every bump and lurch happens as you're just about to sleep; everything you need is packed in a bag you can't reach; everyone gets in each other's way and every time you want cereal there's no milk and every time you want a cold soda there's only warm beer. I've never been on a tour where this doesn't happen. Never.

When I first became obsessed with music it used to sustain me through the tedium and the desperation of living somewhere that life avoided. Time dragged in my home town, and the worst time of all was on Bank Holidays when the stores wouldn't open for Sunday and Monday. Time crawled for two whole endless days while I waited impatiently for my life to kick into gear and begin. Music was the one way I thought I could escape a dull life and get out to see the world. And I was lucky.

So it wasn't without some irony that at the end of this last tour that I was deposited in a village 12 miles away from my mum's house at 1:30pm on a bank holiday Monday. I felt like i was in an episode of The Prisoner, the series where Patrick McGoohan can't ever escape from The Village.

Cheery Bye.

2007-08-20T02:25:00.000+08:00

Scandinavia:

Göteborg:

It seems very Scandinavian to have buildings with lots of lit logos on the outside. The above was in Göteborg.

Jamie enjoying the rider in Oslo. They'd kindly prepared some kind of deviled eggs for us. The aroma stayed with us all day and all night...

Strange Norwegian advertising...I didn't go into the store, funnily enough.

Copenhagen. Another logo building.

Rare shot of Brian not giving the V's.

People pay to go on this.

Nyhaven.

This is how it used to look backstage....perhaps it's for the best. So much Facebook.

Matt's Mardi-Gras drumkit.

2007-08-20T00:52:00.000+08:00

A Curse on Thieving Pikey Bastards.

Truth be told, after 8 days I was quite looking forward to leaving Scandinavia. While it’s beautiful and the people are as friendly as people are anywhere I was tired of switching currency every day and of the high prices; it was time for a change.

Our last show was in Aarhus, Denmark’s second city, so we were told. I’d never been before – normally we don’t get further than Copenhagen or the Roskilde Festival. We arrived early, walked around town for a bit (it’s pleasant enough, a river banked by small café’s and restaurants in the town centre, a big redbrick copper roofed Danish church type thing – all the usual) and the venue was clean, warm and seemingy well-run. Before I set foot in there and before we’d loaded our gear onto the stage the local crew had hung our backdrop – usually the least favourite part of my day. I hate hanging that backdrop, big, unwieldy thing that it is…..it looked like it was going to be a good day.

A river runs through it.

Every city has a red-brick, copper roofed building in the middle - sometimes several.

We set up the gear, washed clothes in the laundry in the room next to the dressing room, and found good WiFi reception in the main dressing room. This meant of course that everyone brought their computers to go online, i-chat, download music, and generally stare at their facebook profiles wondering what obscure book, film or record they could add to make themselves sound more interesting.

After soundcheck, at 7 pm, the venue manager told us it was time to adjourn to the restaurant nearby for dinner. This we did in dribs and drabs and by the time the support band had arrived to eat I was on my way back to the venue to check my Facebook inbox.

When I got to the venue I thought, for one moment, that someone had moved them all. I called Matt back at the restaurant and asked him if he’d put the computers on the bus for safekeeping. He hadn’t. Someone had come into the venue, walked upstairs and taken all six Mac’s sitting from the table in the dressing room.

We were incensed. We accused the support band, we accused the venue, we ran around the neighbourhood looking for the culprits. I must have missed them by minutes. A hippy wandering around in the backstreet told me and Jamie that “three foreigners, 3 middle-eastern men” had come past him with computers, but he was vague about where they’d gone. I grabbed a bicycle and combed the nearby streets looking for them, for anyone, although after a few minutes I began to suspect the hippy more than any spectral arabs. I still do.

We didn’t find them – we found a sheet of paper that had fallen out of someone’s computer case. In the end the haul was 6 laptops, software, one ipod, cash, travelers cheques and Todd the bassist’s passport.

The police wouldn’t come to the venue so I went to them to file a report. The cop taking down the details couldn’t be bothered entering all the information I gave him so he told me to fax it in. If he’d been any less interested he’d have got his cock out and gone home. I know it’s not a murder or a violent crime, but it was US$20,000 worth of computers…..it didn’t look like they were so busy in there. Maybe we were just foreigners?

Back at the venue when I returned the security door was again unlocked. Nice.

The venue manager told me he didn’t believe any of his staff were involved. I pointed out that it would be almost astronomically coincidental if someone just happened into the venue just as we were at dinner to go directly to the main dressing room (without touching the support band’s gear or the guitars on stage or the venue's computers) to take only our computers and to leave again without being seen by anyone. I thought it more likely someone at the venue was involved. Its got to be a pretty short list too, and, I'd say, it starts with him.

The day ended sourly; venue staff getting in the way and being obstinate about it, people leaving the doors propped open like a bunch of fuckwits, and every one of us realizing that someone we were working with that day had stolen our stuff and was laughing at us – it made us suspicious of everyone there, which was a shame. It's no way to go through life and everyone we'd met earlier in the day seemed so hepful and amiable. In the end we were all glad to leave. At this point the senior venue manager hadn't deigned to call me back.

I replaced my computer the following day (but not the contents which has all gone) and insurance claims are already in process. None of us care about the machines as much as the irreplaceabe information and personal photos and documents that were lost. The shadow of identity theft still looms a little but mostly we’re over it. I was surprised at the violent fantasies we all share—there must be some kind of universal victim’s rage that has otherwise calm people wishing violent pain on the perpetrators (my favourite is jumping up and down on slow-cracking ribs – it’s not the worst by a long shot either. So much so that I wouldn't feel comfortable repeating them all here).

I hope whoever has the machines enjoys them, and that the money made from the sale pays for lots of cheap cigarettes, booze and fried food. I hope the thieves’ lives in the arse-end of Aarhus continue in the same vein until they become middle-aged men living on petty thievery. I hope the horizon frustrates like a line never to be crossed and that their lives become stale and tired like their imaginations and caabilities. I don’t believe in an interventionist god or a Catholic after-life accounting but I do believe that character is destiny. Just to exorcise this episode from my mind once and for all (in a couple of years you'll be an anecdote); I hope the bitterness of a wasted life eventually turns from a dark, despairing miasma over everything you do into a few black, pernicious cells that divide and multiply in your colon or your gonads or your spleen. And I hope, when you’re pronounced terminal and your family gather around, you realize what a waste of organs you were and what a tremendous amount of nothing you amounted too. And I hope you see disappointment and shame in your bastard offspring's eyes when they look at you.

This week we’ve been to Amsterdam, Brittany & London and been paid for it. Next week I'll spend an amazing three days in Paris. Then I'll go back to New York and live large. How much did you get for my laptop? Fuck you, you thieving pikey bastards.

2007-08-08T05:07:00.000+08:00

Sneaky Days Off.

Proper, do-nothing, be-bothered-by-no-one, days off on tour are rare for me. It's my job to be on-call for problems so I'm used to it (If I'm honest, it freaks me out when I'm in Asia on vacation and I spend a day without something coming up; it feels unnatural to get back to my hotel room and there's no note about a problem with a ticket or someone needs some money or someone's put their trousers on backwards, etc, etc....). On Monday we had a day off in Lisbon and no one bothered me. I almost felt a bit guilty about having a paid day off but then I realised a couple of things.

1. There are so many days, even on the easiest tour, where you don't get any down time or rest for days on end, so somewhere some karmic credit must accrue.
2. There's a high likelihood that the reason I'm not being bothered is because I planned well beforehand. As Matt keeps saying: "We're professionals...."
3. Don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

But just to spoil things, this big-nosed, shiny-faced, ginger-eyebrowed git keeps getting in all of my photos.

I did what work I needed to do at the hotel and then jumped on the subway and ran around the old part of Lisbon for a couple of hours. This has to be the best perk of my job - you can keep the tedious avaricious after-show parties with limp-egoed wannabees, you can keep the meet and greets with celebrities in feral, stuffy dressing rooms, and you can fuck right-off with your impotent Hard Rock Cafe branded sex and drugs and rock and roll image and imagery (yawn) but please, leave me the good gigs and days off in cool places. Thanks.

View from the afternoon.

Bob Eiffel's left-over lift nestled deep in the heart of Lisbon's earthquake district.

I wandered around the Alfama and climbed up to the Castle de Sao Jorge on top of the hill. It was built by the Moors / Muslims and while there I pondered on the universal theme of organised religions everywhere: build big castles and consolidate your power base (Ever seen St. Peter's in Rome? Knoworramean?). Back in the day even the tiniest castle would have taken forever to build, and this one was a doozy on top of a hill. I'm glad they did though, the views from the ramparts were great. Shame about the busker playing the tin whistle inside while dressed in quasi-medieval gear. Still, I suppose the tourists liked him.

The parque at the castle. Things don't get much more typically Iberian.

Tourists and castle and Lisbon. (The tourists just aren't as round over here as they are in America, it has to be said. Unless, of course, they're American...).

Note the ironic framing of picture to show my scorn for organised religion. Even when I'm a tourist I am still, and always will be, sticking it to the man.

I went home for a run along the River Tagus, which was another treat. Going trotting in unusual places is always interesting and the riverbank by the Parque das Nações was peaceful and lined with interesting modern buildings and, more importantly, hardly any people.

In the morning we were scheduled to fly on a budget airline to Göteborg via Brussels. I tried not to brood on the potential for disaster and instead enjoyed one of a diminishing number of nights in a bed. Once we play Göteborg we will have exactly 2 nights in a proper bed to look forward to in 17 days. Now that I've realised this, it's a wonder I'm out of my pajamas and on my feet at all this week.

2007-08-05T07:32:00.000+08:00

Do You Remember the First Time?

I came to Lisbon about 16 or 17 years ago with a girlfriend. I was a spotty twenty-something with possibly the worst shorts known to man. Walking around the Prata again tonight reminded me of being here in (something like) 1990. I remember being very skittish back then, and very excited. I would get anxious when the dealers hissed "Hashish" at us down near the Tagus; tonight I barely looked up from my book on the subway as the token Saturday night crazy loudly created in front of everyone's faces. I've lost the naff shorts too somewhere along the way. When I first came to Lisbon I'd hardly traveled anywhere and now I gauge my excitement levels when I go somewhere new against my first trip to Lisbon, or Amsterdam, or Berlin.

Last year when I was here with The Strokes I was a little overwhelmed by the gothic decay of the place (It seemed like the kind of place Nick Cave would kill you in); tonight I found it endearing. I walked up to the Barrio Alto for the view in front of the Port Wine Institute but the park was closed for rennovations and the funicular (who doesn't love a good funicular,eh?) was on blocks for repairs. However, the Barrio Alto is as byzantine as ever and there were good buskers singing Fado for the tourists on the streets. Nothing ominous about the place at all. I guess last time I was feeling a little overwrought being half-way through a ten-week tour of the world.

What I should have done last year is prayed at the Bank of the Holy Spirit. Or maybe my Portuguese isn't what it should be? I'm a little fascinated as to how this bank works - is it really taking deposits for Catholics to cash-in on the other side like I learned as a kid? How do you make a deposit? Can you accrue interest on Good Deeds, or is it just like a crappy checking account? How does one marry the Holy Ghost and rapacious commerce? Or is it just me that thinks this is more hypocritical tartuffery...? It's probably just me. It often is.

The architecture in Lisbon reminds me of South America and the language sounds like Russian. The subway echoes Deco design and is full of clean-lined marble. The public buildings are as grand as anywhere else in Europe. Below is an example of a more recent design - it's the train station at Oriente. Huge and flowing and overbearing and spacious all at once. Loved it.

Mr Eiffel built an elevator here. Bugger was at it everywhere, wasn't he? I guess back in the day no one wanted to walk up the hill to the Barrio Alto. Or maybe Bob Eiffel just went to unsuspecting cities with his meccano. "You know what you lot need....? What you need is a big fuck-off lift right in the middle of town and I've got just the stuff you need for it outside in the van left over from another job..."

2007-08-02T12:21:00.000+08:00

2651 Romeo

Yesterday I took a flying lesson. The hardest--or at least the most trying--part of it was getting to the Essex County Airfield in New Jersey. Even at 11AM on a Tuesday morning navigating the traffic entering the Lincoln Tunnel was a chore - it felt more like a Friday. In fact, since I got back from tour, New York's felt hot and oversubscribed. Either more people are here because it's the summer or more people are out on the streets because of the weather. Either way, too many people. Not enough speed. Go play down your own end.

My instructor was late. Not the most auspicious of starts and while he was polite and apologised, I didn't feel reassured when he told me he was late because he'd got lost on his previous lesson--they'd tried to land at the wrong airfield.

Still, once I stepped through a door into a hanger full of small single prop Cessnas I didn't care so much. There is definitely something exciting about aircraft, especially piles of them in a big shed. He rushed us through the pre-flight checklist where I felt like a kid waiting for the batteries to be put into his Christmas present.

This is what we flew in. its a Cessna 172.

Taxiing is hard - you steer the plane on the ground by moving the rudder with your feet. I was crap at that; it was like my Salsa lessons except without the tinkly music and the B.O.

Then we lined-up for take-off.

When we got to Five Hundred feet the instructor gave me the controls and told me to turn right while still climbing to One Thousand Feet. It was exactly the same feeling as first driving a car where there are too many simple things to do at once. It pitches, rolls and yaws; it accelerates or stalls; it drifts off-course. The mild wind bounced the aircraft and buffeted us around, which gave the feeling of flying diagonally.

I kind of got the hang of it soon enough (thanks, in no small part, to X-plane 8.60 the simulator programme I've been practising on / playing with instead of writing and/or advancing Albert's next European tour - Sorry Albert....) and suddenly there I was flying over New Jersey; looking down on the I-287, turning 180º above Lincoln Park Airfield at 1200 feet and doubling back for the instructor to bring us in to land. Sitting in a cockpit for landing is a rush like few others. And I've tried many.

In the far distance you can see Manhattan. And below us, the good people of Montclair, NJ: you poor, unsuspecting fools....

It was the toppest fun I've had in a long time. I'd love to be good at it, or even competent. It's completely addictive (or maybe that's just me..?) and, I imagine, a lifestyle one could immerse oneself in--like surfing, or diving or somesuch. I could see how one would want to, but not necessarily how one could afford to.

For now, I might try taking cheap introductory lessons wherever I can. My next chance will be Baginton Airport but in truth I've got my eye on Santa Monica Municipal to try flying over Venice Beach and the Pacific. How boss would that be?

2007-07-24T11:44:00.000+08:00

New Career in a New Town:

One of the very best things about this tour is waking up in a different country and culture every day. In Spain I woke up as we passed the hills behind Barcelona (they're as definitive as the hills behind San Francisco as you drive in from the airport and as easy to recognise). We got to the hotel for our showers in Castellon which is a strange town near the festival. It doesn't seem to have any town there and was closed for the three hours we were there on a Saturday afternoon. It was the same as last year, spooky and quiet and empty.

Benicassim is a big chaotic festival. It's good fun and has great bands but it's managed strangely. The press are allowed to run all over the backstage area so in effect every artist is being asked for a five minute interview every five minutes by everyone, which gets old quickly. I spent a month advancing everything in detail, even down to what type of electricity our bus would need to run the Air Conditioning while it was parked only to find out our passes weren't at the hotel ready for us and there was no immediate bus parking available for our bus.

It's not bad, and people are so nice, but it's just faintly amusing and/or irritating to have to do something three times over or ask for the same question three times over to get things done. Where are the towels? Can I get the sandwiches we have on the rider (requested at 5PM - arrived at 12:30AM)? I got shown where the showers were only to have to spend another half an hour looking for the person with the keys to unlock them (Por favor! Tienes usted este llave, por favor?). The catering was good, once you got through the wall of stormtroopers collecting meal tickets.

Still, each festival has its own character and this one is undoubtedly Spanish. Best thing (I say this with hindsight) was the band went onstage to open the main stage at 9PM. All was good until near the end of the set where they're playing the song 101 and the entire main stage power went down. Lights, PA, everything. God bless the audience for finishing the song while the band bravely spanked their mute instruments. The audience were the bolocks, totally. The band went off, the stage got back-up power back on. The stage manager begged me to put the band back on.

They went back and played one more song and the head electrician told me we had to come off stage while they swapped generators. Thing is, everyone got slightly aggressive and arsey as though we were being awkward when I said. "Okay. but if we come off again then that's it. We're not going back out there again for a third time."
The electrician seemed to take this as a threat and wanted to have a pissing competition "This is not your decision. You don't decide this."
"Actually, I do decide when the band go on stage. But he (the stage manager) is telling us to go back on and keep playing. You're telling us to come offstage. There are thousands of kids out there who don't think the show is over. Who makes the decision? Right now there are three of you telling me different things and I don't know any of you. Where the fuck were you five minutes ago when the power went down?"

We came off stage, which was fair enough--bad shit does happen, but it was a typically panicked response to a situation that needn't have happened. At the T in the Park fesitval the people who stop and start the shows are given very big red laminates so their authority is obvious from both the band and the festival production side of things. There's not some baldy cunt turning up with a mouth full of sandwich getting all shouty all of a sudden. Oh well. If I wanted predictable and dull I'd work in a bank or in the promotions department of a record label.

We got out of Benicassim at 3AM after watching The Arctic Monkeys. They're great. I like being at Benicassim, but it's more fun when you headline, then people don't look so surprised when you want towels in the dressing room. Or food. Or showers. Or electrcity onstage.

We got to Nimes at lunchtime the following day. The gig was in a Colliseum. Catering was up and running and it was amazing. The sun was out but it wasn't too hot. Three of my favourite bands were playing. I saw old friends from the other touring parties. It rarely gets better.

Love playing at French Festivals. Cool, hip, well catered, on top of their game, organised. The pictures say it all. We shared a compound with the Monkeys, there were suitcases and dirty socks everywhere. Bands are the same whether they're from Rotherham or New York City.

The Arena in Nimes. 2000 years old. Albert went onstage after the pre-show entertainment of polar bears eating some giraffes and some bloke called Brutus bludgeoning some Christians to death with the pelvis of a donkey.

If you look closely you can see Albert's catching a (blurry) ball pitched to him by The Arcade Fire who were playing football on the floor of the arena while Albert soundchecked.

An empty arena at soundcheck. All of us (esp. the Americans) bemoaned the fact that if this had been in America then no one would have been allowed to walk around inside for fear of litigation. Inside the Nimes Arena one could climb all the way to the top tier on uneven stonework without handrails, pathways, safety lighting, a guide, or elevators. In the US, some pointless twonk would trip and sue the colliseum because in America no one's responsible for themselves for anything at all ever (unless they're successful).

Albert onstage. Incredible show. Already my favourite gig of 2007. Both the Arctic Monkeys and The Arcade Fire were great (even though the Arcade Fire had some technical problems they're such a good band it doesn't matter). Apparently Alex from the Monkeys had his first woman flash her boobs at him while they were playing. That's something a man always remembers, I'm told. Singers the world over can compare where their first time was. Usually, it's Australia.....

Sunset over the Colliseum.

And this is The Arcade Fire onstage when it got dark.

We drove overnight from Nimes to Charles De Galle Airport where we got off the bus to fly home while the bus went back to the UK until the next leg of the tour. It took so long to go through security that when I texted our bus driver with a message when we got to the gate, he'd already driven to Calais. One strange thing about CDG Airport is once you got through security it has the worst selection of food of any airport anywhere in the whole world. Even La Guardia has more choices. Strange, for a country with such amazing food. I wondered if it was a final Fuck You from the French, as if to say, "Oh, leaving France are you? Well if France isn't good enough for you then eat some crappy food you filthy splitters...." Such a shame as it's a nice building. Steve got ripped-off trying to buy phone credits too and once he complained the woman got all beligerent with him in French. Nowhere's perfect and it is Paris, after all....

They did have a HUGE departures board one could read while you waited in the interminable line to got through security. It was like the best menu I'd ever read. I wanted to get on so many flights - to Beijing, Hong Kong, Hanoi, Sydney...the list was endless. In fact the only place we all agreed we didn't want to go to was Houston, TX.

Jamie gave me a special sweetie for the flight. I have never slept so well in poverty class. Never. And then when I got home and couldn't bear to watch any more TV with crap scripts (why is 90% of US TV full of macho bollocks? Everything last night was full men saying the kinds of thing Bruce Willis says in Die Hard movies - even on BBC America. It's so poncy. Our security guards are really really hard and they never say anything poncy. On every TV show all these fey twonks with manorexia are all trying to be tough; so desperate. And people believe it! They should meet our friends Colin and Bubble and Paul and Smogg and Danny....).

I fell asleep again for another 9 hours. Yay me. Back home in a bed that doesn't shake all night. All I have to do now is turn my sense of humor off while I'm away from my touring friends for ten days and I'll be right at home. Apparently I am too sarcastic. I always find it's people who can't keep up who say this. And people who can't keep up dismiss all wit as sarcasm to avoid having to admit they can't keep up. I think humour is a sign of intelligence (although I agree excessive sarcasm is the bastion of cowards. It should be a spice, not a portion). But I'm off on another rant here when I should be out enjoying living in New York City.

Today, life is good. There are divine moments every day, if you can find them. It's not even noon yet and I've already had a couple.

2007-07-22T08:06:00.000+08:00

Cheese is all you need.

I love being in Europe. Love It. We drove from Suffolk (north east of London – no one knows where it is) from the nice but dull Latitude Festival to Köln, where the hotel had gummi bears on reception and a line of nice old German people checking in before us. A long line. I gasped in quiet desparation and then, moments later when the über efficient reception staff had processed the line, I gasped in quiet admiration. Gots to love Germany.

Sleeping on a bus isn’t proper sleep so the first thing I did was pass out on my fluffy and immobile bed. I woke up with a strange German man in my room delivering complimentary fruit. I was so dazed I thought I was in my apartment and I kept asking him how he’d got in until he left --after he’d delivered the fruit of course. He was German after all.

That night we went to The Rhine to watch the fireworks. Köln have a display on the river for a reason no one understands every year. God bless them for it, they were amazing. Thirty minutes of perfectly synchronized fireworks. Only in Germany (or Switzerland, or Japan…) could the fireworks not miss a beat for a 30 minute pop/classical medley.

Germany was so hot. Almost unbearably so and even with the (wimpy) AC on our bus after 10AM we are all melting – no surprise, it’s like a big metal oven sitting in the sun, is our bus. We all of us woke dehydrated and with our tongues three sizes too big. And it smells great in there of course. Nine men, in a big, hot metal box baked by the sun. Oh yeah. Best thing is, when I wake everyone up and the band all get up at the same time. It’s like Dawn of the Dead. This morning when I did it me and Brian (our backline tech’) watched them getting out of bed and sang Thriller for a soundtrack. It looks uncannily like the video only they aren’t all in sync as they grope for their socks, toothpaste and trousers.

In Heidelberg, the venue was next to the river Neckar. Vineyards clung to the hills either side of the vally, smoke drifted from small farm fires through the trees, and the local Heidelberg roller-skating club circled the town. It was a bit like a monster movie town with a castle on the hill above the houses – obviously where the evil Baron Heidelberg was conducting strange and Godless experiments on innocent farm lads and lasses from the neighboring countryside. There was a lot of scaffolding up around it. I think this week Evil Baron Heidelberg was having new windows fitted.

Brian noticed an interesting cultural moment in Subway (serves him right for going to Subway in Germany, I say...) in Heidelberg where an American family were ordering their food. They used words like “Give me, I want” etc. In Europe this is universally considered bad form and quite rude as it’s too direct and too much of a command. In Europe people use requests rather than commands. I’m not critical of this myself as I know how it works in America and I know it means something different, but it does jar when heard overseas. I was faintly amused as I’d wager that, if told, the Americans would take offense to be told they were giving offense…or am I being uncharitable?

In Vienna it was so hot it was unbelievable. Hotter than it was in Vietnam. There was a general residual odor of unwashed bods too, which was special. A salty, spicy smell. No Viennese Fancies there. No Teen Spirit either.

The venue in Munich was in the middle of the city centre. God knows how our driver got the bus and the trailer down there. I couldn’t look, even though I was supposed to be navigating. Just to make it interesting as I argued with some nice Bavarian men who’d parked in our reserved parking (to be fair, they read the reserved sign and once they realized there was an official sign in true Bavarian style they pissed off. Good Bavarians obey all posted signs, it seems) a Copper turned up and squirted his sirens behind us to get us to move. I went over and gesticulated in the manner of inarticulate bus-parkers the world over and he took one look at me stood standing there in my tracksuit bottoms, calf-fur clogs and me Ooga Booga tee-shirt, rolled his eyes and reversed away to from whence he came. Ooga booga shirts scare German rozzers. That is, quite literally, sticking it to the man.

We had a day off in Dijon, France. We had to stop to give the driver a chance to sleep. It’s a beautiful town even though I was as sick as a dog and could barely make the effort to get off the bus. The people were friendly and indulgent of the three ill-advised words of French I know and the town was ornate and bite-sized enough to enjoy and see in one day. Sure enough, both plates in my evening meal came with mustard style creams and sauces. Delish.

I thought, even with the promise of delicious mustardy type sauces on everything, that Dijon might be a bit of a dull place to live, flirty waitresses and impish-eyed bakery sales women notwithstanding. And at night ye-olde town centre was overrun with bored kids on skateboards like provincial towns everywhere. For a moment I felt a bit sorry for them until I remembered that Paris was only 2 hours away and the south of France only 3 hours away. Spanwny gets. They deserve to be bored. No existential angst there, not when you can get on a train to the Riviera.

The show in Angouleme (above) was another winner – amazing catering – lamb stew, spectacular cheeses that defied naming but were all stronger and more pungent than the last, bread you’d want to be buried in and a view of the medieval town from the festival site that really set a certain tone. The French have a lot to be arrogant about and to be honest, outside of Paris, I’ve encountered nothing but friendliness and hospitality in France. (The shame of an Englishman admitting this). I miss the European cultures living in America. New York has its own thing, and so does SoCal too, but the middle of America feels the same to me for 2500 miles – I’m sure there are differences, its just by using the same money, language, and chain retail outlets, the subtleties of difference go over my head. We’re off to Spain now – I just woke up and saw Barcelona out of my bunk window and again we are somewhere different for another day. A whole new plate of cheese to look forward to.

2007-07-14T20:29:00.000+08:00

Back on Hard Ground:

Belfast was nice and clean after Oxegen and the ground didn’t ooze when I trod on it and people didn’t kick mud at me. We also went for a ruby which was a rare treat. Spicey food that tastes spicey - not like in the US where spicey means slightly vinegary, the like hellman's mustard.

Then there were four shows around England that were good fun, mainly because I always enjoy the first week or so being back in the country. Our ferry was delayed so we had to rush from Stranraer to Liverpool but we did get time for a fuel stop at some random little backwoods trucker gas stop. Next to it was a weirdy supermarket - ALDI maybe, somewhere super cheap anyway that sold brands that ripped off big brands. Like cornflakes that weren't Kelloggs but came in a box designed to look exactly like Kelloggs. Anyway, Brian found these biscuits which were aptly named as we were going to Liverpool, home of the original E's.....

We went to Portsmouth too, which has these three islands in the middle of the estuary – I thought they looked like WWII gun enplacements, but in fact they were built by Henry VIII (not personally). It was good to see the sea. And there’s something special about the English coast for me. It’s not spectacular in the sense of Big Sur or expansive like, say, the beaches near Perth, Australia but it has a certain something you don’t find anywhere else. The sea was grey/green and choppy and a large Brittany Ferry sailed within a couple of hundred yards of the esplanade and it looked brilliant. There are divine moments every day if you’re lucky enough to catch them. This is our bus on the sea front with one of Henry VIII's defenses on the left of the picture.

I put 2p. into an arcade game and won a quid - in 2 pence pieces. I carried them around all day but finally got fed up with them and left them in the dressing room. The wanton excess of rock and roll.

We got to the Latitude Festival the following morning and the artist showers didn’t work, and the dressing room wasn’t ready, and the promoter was being stingy with meals but I decided instead to enjoy looking at the woodland around the site rather than get bummed out. Like Albert’s always saying: happiness can be a choice.

Here's the lake behind the stage. It looks delightful.

A few yards along the path were lots of spent shotgun cartridges. Hundreds of them. I was hoping someone was trying to off the festival hippies living in tents by the lake but I never heard any shots. Unless, of course, they'd killed all the hippies before I'd arrived. There's a thought...I guess happiness can be a choice...as well as a warm gun.

And here are Matt's drums waiting patiently in the trailer to go onstage. The show was good but it was poorly managed.

I read Alex James’s book – a Bit of a Blur yesterday. It’s very good. It’s very Alex too. He’s very witty. All of Blur were/are – although none of them made a career of being a caddish fop quite like Alex. He always came out with the best one-liners, and in the most fey voice possible. I remember him criticizing my French once as we went into a Parisian night club (Lilly la Tigresse, maybe?) and I’d tried to say thanks to the doorman. Alex, of course, speaks excellent French – I speak only three words of French and apparently I’d got all of them wrong. I quite respect the fact that he knew what good manners were even if he chose to be ill mannered most of the time, or at least very haughty. That's much classier than just being an oik outright. I remember he also put the staff at the George V in their place as we went back there to party after the MTV Awards Paris once, which is no mean feat as they are the snottiest hoteliers among the snottiest people on the planet. The book’s well-written and candid but in a way that doesn’t really betray any confidences--the only person he really tells-all on is himself, which is gentlemanly of him. He doesn't dodge himself either - he acknowledges he was a brat but also understandably says, to my mind at least, that it was his job. Which I think it was (although I was glad to not have to look after them). He doesn't excuse himself with a load of rationalising, self-aggrandising bollocks. It may be my age but I’m not so sure that there are any pop stars around in England these days with the class of Blur and Pulp? They certainly had some panache.

I also read Pearl Lowe's book All That Glitters, which was disappointing. While she's candid about her drug use that's the only thing she's really candid about. She dodges around so many issues I felt she was spinning a version of events and I wasn't supposed to notice. Certainly it seemed that she only wanted to be in a band as an excuse to be famous, not because she wanted to write or be a musician in the first place-she blew too many opportunites for that and Powder were never more than a very peripheral band. It rings false that she cared about being a singer when, given every opportunity to succeed, she blew it. I can't remember a song of Powder's or anyone talking about that Powder gig that blew them away. Pearl's desire to be famous without doing anything to earn it plays a repetitive key note throughout the book. The whole Gavin Rossdale paternity test fiasco is written to emphasise that Pearl was only trying to sort out who her daughter's father was and then it was the evil lawyers who made her follow up on the paternity test and subsequent maintainence payments. It all reads a bit disingenuously, as though Pearl wants us to believe she never thought of any of this by herself. Pearl as some kind of naif wandering through Britpop and without a conniving, ego-driven bone in her body. It reads like she's selling something. But that's junky style, in essence. There was something hollow to the tone of the remorse in the book to my ears. Whatever, it's okay as a book, but Pearl's only real issue, in Pearl's eyes, seems to be her drug addictions, on which she pins all her selfish behaviour. As a drunk myself I think this is a cop out. I think ones addictions are only symptoms and dealing with the addicition might be difficult but it's not addressing the root of the problem. The self-justification wore a bit thin after a while. She's very candid about her drug use. She's been clean for 2 years. Good for her. I really hope she stays that way. It's hard work. And I hope her daughter stops having photo's taken with spotty youths sucking her breasts. There's got to be better ways to get everyone to notice you. She could do some work and become good at something instead.

** Just read this quote on The Times online.
"Daisy was indeed revealed to be Rossdale’s child. Pearl sued for Daisy’s school fees, which Goffey had paid since she was six.
“This guy’s a millionaire, he can at least give Danny back the money he’s spent,” says Pearl "

I've no interest in defending Gavin Rossdale - sounds like he's being a bit snide BUT insisting that now he's minted he should be reimbursing Pearl's boyfriend for money spent over the years on private education seems to contradict the motives given in the book for clarifying the child's paternity, s'all. Bless her, I think she's got a point, but she's such a complete merchant, and I think I'm irritated because no one's supposed to notice this, as though everyone's dim or something and will believe all of Pearl's flannel. Wonder if it would be such a big deal if Supergrass were charting higher?

2007-07-11T02:24:00.001+08:00

Crazy Celts.

Got to Glasgow via Amsterdam. Lost 11 pieces of luggage on the way. I felt guilty that none of it was mine – just for a minute until I changed out of my dirty clothes and into my clean ones. Mmmmm, yes, fresh socks….

Glasgow Airport still smelled of fires. When I saw inside the airport where the car had crashed I was horrified. If they had driven through the doors successfully hundreds would have been injured. The doors led into the main international check-in area. It was a Saturday, the airport would have been running at full speed. I felt angry and indignant and full of cheer when I heard the stories of brave and hard Glaswegians who tackled the bombers. One guy called John Smeaton is a local hero for tackling them and in true Glaswegian style you can buy him a pint online. He has over 1000 pints bought for him at his local pub. Another guy, a cabbie, saw the bomber who was on fire after they’d just rammed his cab. He got out and kicked the bomber in the balls. After the incident the police took his sneakers for forensic evidence so the local paper took him shopping for a new pair of Nike’s. The way the airport has recovered and the business-as-usual attitude of the people I met working there was inspiring. And hearing more about how these dickheads are operating now that I’m in the UK just makes me angry and intolerant. Fuckwits, the lot of them.

This was the scene less than a week after the attack. Nuff 'sect to everyone at Glasgow airport.

I spent four hours at Glasgow Airport later trying to get the bags back in a cycle of well-intentioned futility. 200 bags had gone missing on flights from Amsterdam to Glasgow alone that day so our 11 were part of something greater….and consequently not a huge priority for anyone else but me. I got 9 back before we left for the first show, with visions of random pieces of luggage (including the drums) following us around Europe for 2 1/2 weeks.

The luggage that did arrive in the hotel lobby with Marc and Albert.

There were apparently no Wellingtons to buy in the whole of Glasgow. I bought some cheap knock-off Timberlands instead. They worked. The mud at T in the Park was a bit of a drag. At the Oxegen Festival in Ireland it was a soup.

After Albert’s set at Oxegen, and once everyone had got back to the dressing room – giving Connor Oberst a ride on the way as he was trudging along the service road by himself (he’d seen some of CSS and we were discussing the praises of their singer’s glittery spandex which reminded me I’d wanted to see them too)—I set off into the public areas to see CSS. They’d finished by the time I got near their stage, which was a drag, but I couldn’t believe the mud. And more to the point, I couldn’t believe that people were so completely at ease in the mud. I walked across the site a couple of times to see The Hours and Brian Wilson and The Killers and a bit of Daft Punk and in the course of it I saw:

The Oxegen Refugee camp. This is general public's campsite as viewed from artist's catering. The red cross were due to visit with soap later that afternoon...

Sinking boots.

People passed out (this guy had to be stretchered away by Medics). Some people tried to help him, others just took photo's of him with their camera phones. It was sad. He was in a coma. Security heckled him with a loudhailer, laughing at their own jokes like a bunch of wankers.

People dancing to My Chemical Romance – it seems that if you like a band you get to kick mud up in the air at people – see the back of my jacket for reference. Check out the guy in the centre of the picture. It was mid-afternoon and he could barely walk and was content to fall over in the mud, so much so he's invisible here. This wasn't the exception to the rule...

Some people were so covered in mud that they’d abandoned all pretense of hygiene and were throwing themselves, and each other into the mud (Brian, our tech’, saw a pond of mud with 6 guys in it – if you got too close to them, they jumped you and rolled you in the mud). In fact, covering each other with shit seemed to be the order of the day and an accepted hazard of being at the festival. I guess I missed that memo. I can’t figure out why you’d spend all that money to roll in shit. It can’t be comfortable. Maybe it’s fun? Either way, I made a good target.

But at night, it’s strange sight to see. I liked watching Daft Punk’s amazing light show – I think it’s difficult to be witty and awesome all at once, which they were. The Killers were a bit bleh, Brian Wilson's set sounded great although it wasn't such a spectacle. The Hours were great - Anthony looking like a Sheffield Springsteen all through his set.

I watched, stood in a slurry of mud, as drunk people who could stagger at best had no chance and were falling like flies. There was an otherworldliness to the place at night as the damp truly settled in; people stood spaced-out staring glassy-eyed at nothing, the Ferris Wheel looked pretty, although it was surrounded by a legion of muddy starey-eyed zomboids. The end is nigh.

2007-07-05T12:16:00.000+08:00

Can You Believe IT!!!! I'm a WINNER!!!!

See this email below....I'm so excited.

From Reddot_coca@winning.com

COCA/REDDOT PROMOTIONS
BZ/GP004 ONLINE DRAW
OUR REF:#457UCRP

AWARD WINNING NOTIFICATION

We are pleased to inform you of the result of the just concluded annual final draws held on (30th June, 2007) by Coca-Cola in conjunction with the Reddot Promotion, your email was among the 3 Lucky winners who won £1,000,000:00(One Million British Pounds) each on the THE REDDOT/COCACOLA COMPANY PROMOTION.

However the results were released on (2nd July, 2007) and your email was attached to ticket number (7PWYZ2007) and ballot number (BT: 12052007/20) The online draws was conducted by a random selection of email addresses from an exclusive list of 29,031 E-mail addresses of individuals and corporate bodies picked by an advanced automated random computer search from the internet. However, no tickets were sold but all email addresses were assigned to different ticket numbers for representation and privacy.

The selection process was carried out through random selection in our computerized email selection machine (TOPAZ) from a database of over 250,000 email addresses drawn from all the continents of the world.

This Lottery is approved by the British Gaming Board and also licensed by The International Association of Gaming Regulators (IAGR). This lottery is the 3rd of its kind and we intend to sensitize the public. In other to claim your £1,000,000; 00 prize winning, which has been deposited in a designated courier. However, you will have to fill the form below and send it to the claim manager of THE COCA COLA COMPANY for verification and then you will be directed on how to claim your £1,000,000:00 which has already been deposited in the Bank in your favour.

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AGE:...................................
SEX:...................................
ADDRESS:......................................................
EMAIL:....................................
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Name: Mike Davies
E-mail: claimdptm@winning.com
Phone +44 703 1897254
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You are to keep all lotto information away from the general public especially your ticket number and ballot number. (This is important, as a case of double claims will not be entertained). Staffs of Coca-Cola and the Reddot Design Company are not to partake in this Lottery.

Accept my hearty congratulations once again!

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See you in Hawaii. I'm rich, goddammit it. Rich!

btw, I'm updating Albert's Myspace blog too on tour - check out the link in the sidebar......

2007-06-28T03:38:00.001+08:00

Catalina:

Ever since I started visiting LA I was always mildy curious about Catalina, a dark shadow in the Pacific haze off the coast of LA. Seems most people either come here when they are kids or the never come here at all. Kind of like Lundy off the coast of North Devon, without Tarka the cowing otter.

I like to take photo's of places I've been. And I mean exactly where I've been. Here's the hotel. It's author Zane Grey's old house. All of the rooms are named after novels of his. I know you can't tell which one it is unless I point it out so it's that nice one, at the top of the small foreground hill on the right hand side, just down from that gazebo thing, which is actually a chime tower that didn't chime much. Got it? Good.....

And here's the harbor, including the spot on the far side of the quay by the red roof on the dockside where I took the picture of the hotel from above. This is a small obsession of mine. Once, me and my friend Scooby, flying on fresh, self-picked mushrooms (Fillongley in da' house!), spent the night walking from one side of a playing field to the other to see where we'd been (and to see if the trees were really smaller over the other side of the field as they appeared. They never were). I never really got over that.

For my birthday one year, Scooby bought me a brand new toilet brimming with brussels sprouts. He deserves credit for that. That was an original gift. We had to make our own fun back in those days - before nintendo and PS2. F*** guitar hero - give me a royal doulton full of sprouts any day.

Avalon (above) is a very pretty town. And very quiet. Hardly any cars, mainly very expensive-to-rent Golf Carts, which I liked. Must suck to be a teenager though - and I thought there was bog-all to do in Coventry....

There are semi-submersible tours. I went at night to see the spooky fish. I saw a couple of Lobsters and a bit of flappy seaweed. Nothing even a bit spooky, though. Not any halibut hauntings, shark stabbings or fishy frightenings or anything at all alliterative, late-night and creepy. Not like New York, I thought. Halibut Hauntings? I ask you...come on, Hattie.

The sub looked like a dodgy French club when we first got on (should I say 'Boarded'?) but I simmered down later when they turned the lights out and it got all A Life Aquatic. The best bit was seeing the phosphoresence in the dark....

Here you can see me actually thinking in Ringo. It's the submarine. That and the fact that the only rhythm I have comes from being raised Catholic.

Here's a view inside the hotel room. The room was named after Zane Grey's novel The Vanishing American. It wasn't that nice a room - kind of tourist vacation quality - but I liked it. I liked because it wasn't the usual kind of hotel I stay in on tour (they're nice, usually, very nice, nicer than me, mostly. But they do get a bit samey) and also because of the way the light fell on it, it seemed quintessentially Californian, especially as the sun set behind the hill out back. Gots to love the light in CA.

Mmmmm. Delicious California.

On Catalina they have Buffalo. In fact they're not really Buffalo (Buffalo live in Asia) they are Bison. They were intrroduced to the island by a film crew who were filming a version of Zane Gray's The Vanishing American. (Wheels within wheels, eh?) After filming the film crew left the Bison behind saying they didn't know how to round them up. Now there are up to 250 Bison yomping around the Island. They were cut from the movie. They are big and hard-looking.

The Wrigley Family (they of the Chewing Gum fame) were the first to try to develop the island for tourism (and to institute rules regarding its conservancy after they sold their shares). They have a ranch still in the middle of the Island called The Secret Ranch because you don't see it until you're on top of it. They still keep Arabian Horses there, which are beautiful. I guess they thought the same about me. Espeically this guy. I didn't know whether to be intimidated or flattered - I was both. I mean....crikey! Was Catherine the Great really into all this....? (Way to Go, Catherine. And I really mean: what a way to go...)

I had to sit down for a minute with some people my own age. Turned out nice again.

The road led up to the Airport in The Sky, which is a very small airport only capable of landing DC3's (which are still in use from Long Beach bringing the mail). They built the airport by leveling the tops of two mountains and flattening them enough to lay a runway between the two. This is the view from near the end of the runway.

A cute little airport - kind of like Long Beach or one of those Deco feeling airports (Burbank too, maybe?). I like airports and I like planes.

We were told under fear of God himself not to go out back near the rich people's planes. It was like being on a school trip. I think in America people worry about both litigation and liability too much and also about people doing dumb things like wandering on to a live runway, although you'd have to be pretty stupid to do that, no? I guess that's what irked me about the warning. By implication the guide was calling everyone a f***wit. Maybe I was just being touchy....?

It must be very nice to have a private plane to fly to Avalon of an afternoon. From the ramp you could see Palos Verdes Estates on the mainland through the afternoon haze. California is beautiful. I don't know anyone from PV or anyone who knows anything about it - it seems pretty luxurious to me. But then again, coming from Coventry, so does almost everywhere in SoCal.

And this was the view in front of the airport. Go on, tell me you wouldn't have had a look if you'd seen this. I showed my friend and he asked. "Did you take that picture because it looks like a penis?"
"Yes." I was quite proud of myself. I had a camera full of willy jokes.
"Oh." he said, not quite infected by my ebullience. He gave me a look full of love even though I was a dopey twat. In fact he sounded the same way my mum did when she found out I'd started smoking. I could tell he didn't think it was all that funny. I resolved there and then never to share my todger pictures again. It would be my secret hobby that I couldn't even tell my best friends about.

But then it was time to update my blog and...and....and they're funny, goddammit.

The ferry back to LA leaves in the evening. Even got back in time to feast. Delicious day, no?

I am listening to Keren Ann a lot. Too much. Soon, she'll be calling Gwen Stefani to get advice on how to get me to stop.
But until then....

2007-06-23T01:17:00.001+08:00

Solstice Canyon.

A quiet, beautiful, almost private place just off the PCH. It's a lovely mile and a half walk along a path through undergrowth filled with rutting animals to the boulders and waterfalls where I clambered, desperately trying to convince myself that I was somehow still seven years old and not a million and a half years old, like I am.

Look, here's me clambering. You could be forgiven for thinking I'm stalking game from this photo', or at least doing something daring. I'll let you think that. I definitely wasn't trying to navigate my way up the waterfall without slipping on dog pooh or potato chip packets; no, I wasn't, not at all. I was exploring and stalking, like a wild man. Yes.

Note I have my hair partially tied back. I think men (or me, specifically) shouldn't tie their hair back in pony-tails as it looks well, a bit pony. So this is my compromise. It's a partial pony, favoured by French Alpine skiers. Better be a bit of a wanker who can ski than a complete tosser without any style who can't.

Of course, I could get a haircut. And aside from the fact that it would give me cause to visit the lovely Mika one more time this month, it would also mean I'd have no hair. And that, friends, would mean I'd look exactly like a right banker in all my suits.

After Solstice Canyon I ate delicious fried evilness while admiring the pacificness of the pacific. Top trumps. It took two and half hours to get home. Gots to love LA.

I went to see the Watts Towers in Watts. I tried to visit them before in January but I got lost in Watts. Not the best look for me, was that. I drove around in smaller and smaller circles trying to find my way back to the freeway, waving at all the nice young men who were enjoying the afternoon sun by communing on the street corners. It was quaint. I called my friend Rob in London as I was driving around. "I just called for a chat." I said. "I'm er, a bit lost in Watts."
"Are you scared?" he asked from the comfort of his house in south London.
"No." I said. "I just called for a chat."
"From LA to Streatham, on your mobile?"
"Yeah. So?" I kept thinking of Reginald Denny stopping his truck at the intersection of Normandie and Florence just after the Rodney King verdict. I like to class myself as English but on this day I had to admit I felt white. Sad that, isn't it? But maybe not so unusual, only unspoken in polite circles.
"Just asking." he said.

This time I didn't get lost. I liked the Watts Towers. The strangest thing about them for me was that after Simon Rodia spent 33 years building them he just upped and left them behind, I think he gave them to his mate or something. That seemed very sad.

It has been nearly a month since I got back from Vietnam. I was missing lording my inherent wealth over poor people. Can you believe there weren't any poor people here for me to gloat over? Look at this place - shameful. Not one measly beggarwoman or hungry child outside the Watts Towers. How am I supposed to prop-up my insecure personality without paupers smiling up at me as I shower them with small coins? This isn't a proper vacation, that's all I can say.

Afterwards I went to see Gwen Stefani (in concert, not at her house or anything like that. I'm not allowed to do that anymore--by law). I like Gwen Stefani - she's like a larger than life cartoon character, which I think is an essential attribute for a pop star. I wasn't expecting her manly talking voice though, that threw me a bit. I didn't get to see the No Doubt reunion and I missed What Are You Waiting For, which is my favourite, as I'm old and prefer getting into the car and out of the parking lot before seventyleventy thousand people do the same thing. I heard the song as I walked away and it reminded me of Harley, as he rings-out PA systems with that song when he's mixing shows. I was going to tell him but I read on his blog that BA had lost his luggage for days so I thought this: I bet Harley couldn't give a monkey's willy about me hearing that Gwen Stefani song from the parking lot right now, so I didn't tell him. But I was thinking of you, H. Hope you got your bags. And the home address of the guy who manages luggage for BA.

Now the Solstice has passed I enjoyed this cheery thought. From now on we're on a downward slide through to December 22nd. Days are getting shorter, life is pasing us by, winter is rushing headlong at us and soon our feeble aching bones will be shivering under bitter winds and against spiteful, driving rain.

And I'm in a good mood these days, too.

2007-06-12T06:42:00.000+08:00

It's All Too Beautiful:

Halong Bay, Vietnam.

I couldn't post pictures before while in Vietnam. But now I can, so lucky you.

Actually, as you'll see, lucky me.

You get to Halong Bay proper at first by "sailing" on a boat from Halong City for about 45 minutes. The bay is made up of about seventyleventy million limestone islands along the coast of Northeast Vietnam and Southwest China.

Some people live in floating houses on the bay. They farm fish. Each house sat atop a cage for breeding fish in the salt-water below. Most had dogs on them as alarms to prevent fish thieves from stealing the goods. Alarm dogs for fish, whatever next?

When the tourist boats got to the "Amazing Caves" (Which were, I have to be honest, pretty amazing) they waited around while the tourists transferred into little row-boats to land at the caves. As we stopped to switch boats, a small fleet approached, each boat captained by a pretty girl who tried to sell everything from Choco Pies (marshmallowy type biscuit/chocolate things) to cigarettes and whisky from her floating 7-11.

These kids lived on the water. They'd fashioned a raft out of an old polystyrene container and they were rowing around the bay. The water is very deep but they didn't care. Note the guy in the boat at the back rowing with his feet.

So we were all joking about being stung by a jellyfis as we saw plenty of them floating through the bay. "It never happens," said Chi, our guide, as we stopped near an oyster farm for a swim. It took me around 2 1/2 minutes in the water to get stung.

On our boat there was an Australian surfer (he'd got lost...) who had some antihistamines (jellyfish being a big problem when you're an Aussie surfer). I took one, which was just as well as 1/2 hour later the gland under my arm got tight and my lips started to tingle with the poison. Later it moved down my spine and through my kidneys. It's a weird feeling is being poisoned. This is the sting the morning after. You should have seen the other guy....(and everyone suggested peeing on it...everyone.)

The bay went on and on. I sat on the poop deck with my my fizzy ginger pop and frizzy ginger sideburns, looking for all the world like a pale, bloaty crap Bond Villain. I simpered every now and then to get some sympathy for my throbbing stings. As I was competing with this, no one could care less...

Quite right too...

2007-06-09T23:09:00.001+08:00

Hanoi:

It's easier to pictures than it is writing about it. And besides, don't you just like to watch sometimes...?

Hoan Kiem Lake

This is the lake in the centre of Hanoi. Sometimes, when I was feeling especially ebullient, I would run around it at 6:30 in the morning before the sun got too high for pale, blue-skinned, below-rock dwellers like me to be out. It's a little over a 1 1/3 miles in circumference and in the mornings, at about 6:30, lots of nice Vietnamese people also like to exercise around the edge of the lake too. I know they were nice people as I spoke to them. All of them.

In the middle of the lake is a small island called Turtle Island. It is an ancient monument to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, who were all born in this very lake. Local legend has it that there is still a huge turtle living in the lake, but since he didn't get in the movie like the others he's rumoured to be little more than a bitter drunk, endlessly swimming up and down boring hapless tourists with stories about growing up with Michealangelo, Donatello and the zany Raphael. I never saw him. He must have been down the pub when I was there.

Look! See the nice Vietnamese people enjoying their bodies first thing in the morning. It is true I hardly saw any fat people in Vietnam. When I got off the plane at Newark the first thing I thought was this: Aren't there a lot of fat fuckers at Newark Airport?

In addition to badminton (who's nets were strung exactly at the right height to garrotte a 6ft tall jogging westerner. Some war habits die hard, eh chaps? And boy, did I laugh...I laughed and laughed, as I fell gasping to the floor clutching my trachea....) people were doing Tai Chi in groups. One old guy was punching a wall for fun. He looked like he'd auditioned for the role of mean Mr Myagi, but never got the part. (Maybe Hanoi is full of failed film wannabees? The Vegas waitresses of Vietnam...?) On the east side of the park was a huge aerobics class that spread to both sides of the street. Directions were shouted out over the music (I couldn't see who was leading the class, but obviously everyone else could) and lots of women were bending and stretching on the street. Some of the moves were a bit rude. As I ran past I noticed that some of the grannies were doing saucy pelvic thrusts and doing them quite well too. Maybe being a Granny, that's something you've had a bit of practise at? Then I felt a bit weird that I'd been appreciating the pelvic thrust of someone's granny (Not that it would have been any better if it had been my granny).

Train tracks. I looked for a band to photograph on them but no one in Vietnam has the time or inclination to be in a band. I think they're all busy trying to make a living instead.

This is what it looks like just before the lights change. Come on, lover....

A nice peaceful pagoda on the west lake. Possibly the quietest spot in all of Hanoi.

I liked the streets in Hanoi. I liked the way the electricity power cables are a cluster-fuck. It's the roadie in me - I notice things like that. (When I went to watch the Water Puppet show, before it started, I saw that the curtain wasn't hanging straight. It bugged me so much that had it not been for the fact it was hanging in a pond of stagnant water then I might have gone over to straighten it).

A lovely street market.

Many of the streets in Hanoi seemed to sell the same thing, making them look almost themed. This street sold chinese lanterns, decorations and lots of red envelopes for giving money during festivals.

This street was a motorbike maintainence street. These lovely gelato-looking things are, in fact, different oils and grease for engines. I only found this out because I bought one on a waffle cone.

Lots of vendors all over Vietnam carried their wares like this. I think it's really hard work. They were all women too, I don't remember seeing (m)any men doing this kind of work. The men were all busy selling motorbike-grease waffle cones.

Everyone had Bananas. Often the women selling fruit like this on the street were quite cheeky with westerners. Being a vain, imperialist pig, I enjoyed their flirting and the feeling of power it gave me. Despite my 6ft height, I am a very, very small man.

When people weren't carrying things on bamboo planks over their shoulders, they carried them on their bikes / motorbikes. I saw everything from 3 live, caged pigs, large panes of glass, to heavy machine-tools / drills all balanced precariously on the backs of motorbikes.

Recycling. Arf.

It's very, very fresh.

No, I didn't....

Squids in.

We met under a Banyan Tree after dark, the city hot and chaotic around us. These women spoke no English, I spoke no Vietnamese. It sounds romantic, right? I pointed at their giant deep-fryers and they fed me with unhealthy fried deliciousness. We never spoke. I wonder if they're missing me now? I miss you, deep-fried meat-pasty-thing Ladies, I miss you.

2007-06-09T06:56:00.000+08:00

Picture This:

Some of the remaining photo's of the end of the trip. I'm done with opining now ("aaand I'm spent"). So, now I've got nothing to say...

A road sign on the way to Hanoi Airport - note the special horse and cart lane.

Inside a Chinese Temple in Saigon. Peaceful.

And just to keep you in line....do all religions have punitive deitys?

70Km North of Saigon is a religion called Cao Dai. This is their temple. The religion is all-inclusive and based on buddhism they also incorporate elements of Christianity, Taoism, Islam & Confucianism. The temple is overdone and kitsch ( to my all seeing eye) but fascinating. Tourists are allowed to watch (and photograph) the four daily services. The different coloured robes on the right represent the different religions and the closer to the All Seeing Eye at the end of the room you sit, the higher you are in the temple's hierarchy. Victor Hugo was posthumously named the Chief Spirit of Foreign Missionary Works.
And why not?

The All Seeing Eye.

Along the Mekong Delta.

Note the forest of TV ariels above the floating poverty.....

When I toured with Pulp and I was doing everything too much and a bit of a knobhead someone joked that "Kurtz had gone too far upriver." (They were right, btw). Here he is, over 10 years later...still doing the same thing. Hot, sticky, covered in flies, mmm looking good....

I ask you, would you jump into this and swim?

these Water babies would....

My last night in Ho Chi Minh City and it rained like a bastard....

On my last night in Hong Kong on the way back home. Did I mention yet that I love Hong Kong? I did? Oh, sorry...

Now the only thing I've got to talk about is my love for backpackers.....

2007-06-09T06:16:00.000+08:00

Motorbike Pimps:

I encounted a couple of motorbike pimps in Ho Chi Minh City. I don't like pimps, it's a loser's way to make a living. Their pitch is this: hassle you as you walk along the street in the posh downtown (Dong Khoi) area as you walk past the Gucci stores etc. After about 5 minutes of relentless badgering and when they finally concede you don’t want a motorbike taxi they change tactics and offer to sort you out with some girls, almost in a pantomimed version of what a seedy pimp on a motorbike would say.
"Where you from? Where you going?"
(Whistles in reply)
"You want girls? Very pretty, nice girls, just for you…”
This was kind of annoying - especially when they park their motorbikes in front of you to stop you walking.
So I started to reply, “No thanks mate, but I’d really like to fuck you.”
That did the trick.

I've discovered whistling helps get rid of street vendors too and they ply their trade elsewhere, sooner, for some reason. Today’s top whistles have been Neil Diamond, Peter, Bjorn and John and also Eagles of Death Metal.

Yesterday it was the Bonzo Dog Band’s Urban Spaceman and The Rutles Ouch! The Beatles' Your Mother Should Know is hard-wired into my brain and I keep whistling it everywhere I go. I have no idea why. Suggestions on a postcard please--address them to Richard the Pimpfucker at the usual address. Everyone around here knows who that is.

2007-06-08T07:03:00.000+08:00

Jail Bait:

Just to jump topics for a moment here.

Every time I hear about Paris Hilton I always think to myself: Isn't it about time they released the Manson Family?

2007-06-07T22:34:00.000+08:00

Vietnamese High School Girls.

The High School Students go to school in white Ao Dais (one of the few times it’s acceptable to wear trousers under a skirt – Trousers under a skirt are like socks with sandals for men). They look immaculate as they ride their bikes. Sometimes there’s three or four on a bike: one driving, one texting, another looking bored and one at the back changing the gasket for the oil pump on a Honda 50 CC moped engine. And they never, never ever--even on rough, dusty country roads, have a speck of dirt on them; even the one fixing the engine. I don’t get it.

In my hotel room, if I walk to the bathroom it’s so hot I come back red-faced, sweating like a chased pig, clothes transparent with sweat and salt stains like an embarrassing white tide-mark around my waistband. How do they stay so immaculate-looking?

I guess I’m getting old if I can see four teenage girls on a bike and all I think about is how clean they are.

2007-06-05T10:54:00.000+08:00

More War: What is it good for?

After the DMZ and the tunnels in Hue I visited the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City / Saigon and also the Cu Chi Tunnels 50Km outside of Saigon. Finally, after countless tours and exhibits I finally feel like I have a grasp of how the war developed and who was involved. And it’s way less black and white than it seemed.

History – skip it if you know it. I didn’t before i went to Vietnam:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War

In the blue corner - the US and the Southern Vietnamese. In the red corner -- the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong (VC).

End of History lesson.

I thought previously that the US had stormed into Vietnam to get the Commies and shouldn’t have been there, period. This is only half-true (the shouldn't have been there half...)

55000 US troops killed. 3 million Vietnamese killed.

Previously I’ve been disparaging about the US troops in the Vietnam. Not anymore. I can’t imagine being 19 or 20 and from the Midwest and sent to a difficult, unfamiliar, hot and humid jungle environment to fight for the Southern Vietnamese who look just like the people you’re trying to kill and, not only that, can sometimes support the NVA too. You wouldn’t know who to trust, you’d be scared, playing an away-game and you’d want to go home. Armies train soldiers to dehumanize their enemies – it must be harder to kill someone you think is trying to raise a family and look after their land as opposed to someone who is a baby-eating monster - and who do you (de)humanize when everyone looks and behaves the same to you?

A tiger trap....

In the Vietnamese Museums the US are depicted as monstrous imperialists. This point of view is not without merit and the US Foreign policy leaves a lot to be desired, then as now. However the soldiers were soldiers were soldiers. The NVA propaganda movie we were shown at the Cu Chi Tunnels made me sympathetic to the US it was so biased. I know this is to be expected but all the displays are like “This is a picture of the Americans panicking.” or, “This is little Chan. She can shoot a rifle and though she was too young to join the army once she had finished planting rice she followed the soldiers wherever they went. She was so fearless she was awarded the medal for being the "Most American Killer.” (as opposed to her friend who was awarded the title of "Most American Executioner.")

Another one ran: “These are the Vietnamese people fighting the imperialist Americans by night and planting their rice by day (Cue shot of smiling peasant with rifle slung over the shoulder as he plants rice in some kind of pastoral idyll).” It’s to be expected, but I don’t imagine for one minute that the inhumanity stopped with the US troops. As far as I know all fighting forces dehumanize their enemy. The Japanese did for the POWs, the British did in China and I suspect India and Africa, The Germans did and the Russians definitely did. I can’t imagine the North Vietnamese upon finding a ditched US pilot brought him home for tea and cakes before letting him finish out the war sleeping in Granny's room…..

An abandoned tank in the woods around the Cu Chi Tunnels. Back in the good old days it were once nothing but mud around here as far as the eye could see...

Anyway, I think all soldiers are brave (braver than me, that’s for damn sure) and necessary. But only a crappy government ever has to use them. (Hello Margaret Thatcher you vile old witch, Hello Tony Blair, you fop….then again George was going in regardless wasn’t he, despite what the rest of the world thought, eh? May as well have joined him to get the oil...it's not like your kids will ever go to fight).

The tunnels only come in women's small and children's sizes...this park ranger challenged everyone to squeeze down the original opening.

Fake steps down to a real tiny tunnel.

I could walk down the fake steps, but I wouldn't fit any further. (Does this tunnel make my thighs look big?)

So, back to the war museum. Along with Dachau it’s the most disturbing exhibit I’ve seen. From the Vietnamese point of view there were despicable mass slaughters (My Lai and Senator Bob Kerrey’s swift boat patrol – these people should all be in jail for life or investigated for murder), the affect of the 21 million gallons of Agent Orange that was deployed, still creating birth problems now--4 generations later. There are still 55 gallon drums being found in the countryside that have leaked into the eco-system, babies born deformed, joined together or with Downs syndrome. (Governments should be forced to clean up after themselves in a war – the US should be addressing the Agent Orange and unexploded ordnance in Veitnam; Britain should be clearing the Falklands of landmines….etc, etc), and there are still many unexploded bombs, grenades and landmines that every so often maim or kill children or farmers (40000 farmers maimed or killed since the end of the war). The photos are graphic, especially of the babies murderd at My Lai and the two fetuses in jars as examples of what Agent Orange does in the womb: these are beyond words. For the Americans there are also victims of Agent Orange – the servicemen who handled it all the time, for example. And there’s a mental cost of the war. How you can have your photo taken with a decapitated corpse (as some US soldiers did and as the Vietnamese love to display to show them what monsters the Americans are compared to the kindly, rice-planting NVA) How do you get to a point where you can pose with severed heads? Or slaughter entire villages? How do you cope with following your enemy down a tunnel into blackness and an invisible death? How do you live after that? How do you ever go home?

Recovered ordnance at the Khe Shan museum.

At the Khe Shan museum on a hilltop in the DMZ you can go into a US sandbagged dug-out. I can only imagine how scared you would be in there, staring at the jungle in 100 degree heat all the time knowing that not far away, beyond the greenery and through the heat, there was amassing a large force of alien people who wanted to kill you and who knew exactly where you were. I think it would be easy to discover you were someone else while you were there. I mean, I find out I'm someone I don't like about halfway through every poncy rock and roll tour that I do...even when there's good catering and daily showers.

Anyone can play guitar.

It cost US$6 for 10 machine gun bullets. Not as much fun as going to the shooting range in Hawaii with Brian, but a good second.....

And it's a sport, most of all. One where you can wear a bumbag / fanny pack as you participate. They even have nice Lady Guns (see below):

2007-05-31T19:30:00.000+08:00

Oh, Superman.

I saw Laurie Anderson in Starbucks in Union Square just before I left for Vietnam. She smiled at me. I smiled back because she looked familiar and I’m friendly like that. But, I digress…

In Asia, and I suppose any poor country, being a Westerner is similar to being famous; people are always vying for your attention. Admitedly when your famous they want you and your attention, and when you’re rich in a poor country they want (usually) your money, but ultimately, the effect is similar. Wherever you go you're not short of attention, be it a street hawker trying to sell you some tat or some kids who call out "Hello" as you walk by. Wherever you go, you're comparatively very rich - even if you're a lowly backpacker.

I think some men develop a strange arrogance that they’d never pull-off, or even attempt, in their own countries; a kind of Superman Complex. I suspect it's the lamest gits who do it because back home they're the people with the least power--kind of like poor-quality TSA officials who get ignored when they're out of uniform but who get to wield a small amount of power at work and consequently milk it. In Asia these guys are easy to spot and seemed more common than they should be.

It does get a bit tiring constantly saying “No” to Motorbike Taxis, Cyclos, Restaurant Hawkers and the like, but it’s not like they’re bugging you for any other reason than they want to make a living; it’s certainly not because any of us whiteys are so special. And over there we are very rich in comparison, pretending we're not is kind of silly and pointless. (I didn't see any Vietnamese take a year off to go find themselves after college or to--slaps back of hand to forehead--get away from their cruel and gruelling music-business jobs for some r n' r traveling around for three weeks). But like the newly famous, there’s a tendency for some to be gauche and arrogant – waving away the pesky little natives with a regal flick of the wrist, as though the attention means anything in the first place, and the dismissive air correspondingly means whitey is just too above it all, too over this shit.

At it’s most obvious it’s the plug ugly bastard with the cute yellow girl--like the French bloke on the plane from Hue to Saigon. He looked like one of the baddie collaborators in a WWII war movie or maybe Quasimodo's ugly mate, she looked like she danced and she was showing way too much skin in her tight Bebe sequinned top and short denim skirt. That doesn’t take much to work out, and it’s more common than I thought it would be. On the plane he was showing her the map in the magazine and what the sick-bag was for (well, not an actual physical demonstration....) as if it were her first time in the air. To their credit (I know, judgemental bastard that I am) she seemed affectionate with him but at some level and to casual eye the reationship seemed uneven. I don't bemoan anyone finding love anywhere, but there's something unsavoury about picking up country girls overseas. Or am I saying that just because I couldn't?

I saw another guy trying to pick up a stunning but very demure Vietnamese girl at Hanoi Airport. She gave off no signs of interest that I could see, but this twat—who looked like he’d not only been hit by one ugly stick but had been beaten daily since he was a child by a whole forest of ugly sticks – was coming onto her. If she’d been in the west she would have been out his league, completely - and maybe he's one of those guys who always plays out of his league? - but the fact he was traveling alone to a resort town in a developing country and dressed like a muppet told me that he probably wasn't. He was simpering and smarmy. If she'd come from New York she would have told him to F*** Off, that much was clear. But she was a nice Vietnamese lady and (probably) wouldn't do that.

There’s a cockiness to some numptys who are plain rude and you know these people wouldn’t dream of behaving this way at home. One geezer walked into the Catholic Cathedral in Hanoi, walked up the aisle, started taking photos during the service, and then walked around again, stepping through groups of praying Vietnamese catholics without so much as an excuse me. Can’t imagine him doing this in a church in the West. I think it’s because that in some way some Westerners can find Asians not quite people because of little perceived commonality between the races and because to a degree, at least in the Cities, you know you're not going to get messed with by anyone as a rule and can float above the local society if you want to. (I know this works the other way too – a quick walk as a Westerner through Ho Chi Minh City or Shanghai will tell you that much - or even smaller towns in China where they’ll shout “Laowai!” as you walk past – it means Foreigner).

The sales tactics are sometimes extreme and persistent but I’ve found calm ignorance works as well as sanctimonious indignation (hawkers leave you alone if they get no reaction-they ain't got time to waste). Whitey walks through the poor areas looking regally at the poor and maybe hoping to pay peanuts for tat to take home ("I got this G.I. Zippo lighter for less than the locals pay for it!"--"Great, do the locals buy fake G.I. Zippo lighters then?"). The Asians see Whitey and start hustling so they can feed their kids. They know you've got money - how else do you fly to the other side of the world and not work for a few weeks? One can’t really complain about being hustled if you walk through a street market as whichever way you cut it, you're waving your wealth around, whether you mean to or not–-if you want solicitous and subtle service go to Bergdorfs where they're calmer about trying to get your cash. I suspect some people get off on the attention and of the dubious power it gives them to be dismissive. In fact, I'd put money on it.

This isn't true of everyone, not by a long shot, but it's true of many. You can see it after a while; the haughtiness, the affected superiority, the lack of respect or interaction. And you know that these tossers back home would be the emasculated cretins who have no power or dignity in their own lives; the guy no one listens to in the office, the bloke who can't get on the packed train. I guess the extreme example of this are the sex-tourists. I didn't see any obvious prostitution while I was there, except for the motorbike taxi guys in Saigon who, after I'd told them several times I didn't want a motorbike taxi ride anywhere, would offer to get me women - the logic of such a sales trail I couldn't quite fathom: don't want a taxi? How about a shag with a whore then? There were a few dodgy looking Karaoke bars and massage places I guess, but the Vietnamese don't seem like an overt people in whatever they do - unless they're motorbike taxi drivers.

And to be fair, as far as dubious-looking relationships go who am I to judge? Ten years ago in New York when I went for my green card interview the Immigration Official thought I was the American marrying my ex-wife into the country as she’s ABC. Now that I think of it, was he saying I'm plug ugly and white and she was cute?

2007-05-31T08:35:00.000+08:00

Hue:

Hue is in Central Vietnam, about 700Km south of Hanoi. My flight from Hanoi was delayed by 5 hours, which was a nice bonus. The good thing about flying in Vietnam is that the service is like old school Western flying, with polite staff (even when you’re not in business) and little meals, even a sandwich on very short flights. It seems like a long time ago that there was any real service on flights, although it was probably only pre-2001. I was half-expecting them to have a smoking section….

Hue was once the capital of Vietnam and in its centre is a still a huge ancient Citadel with a 10Km walled circumference and a lilly covered moat.

Inside is the tallest flagpole in Vietnam, allegedly. I looked everywhere I went but I saw none more taller although it was election week / Ho Chi Minh's Birthday and there were lots of flags out for the lads.

Inside the vast Citadel area was an even more exclusive former Emporer's Palace, with its own 2 1/2Km long wall and moat.

This is the East Gate. It's ornate but in comparison to the main entrance it looks like the back door....

I took a motorbike tour around the city which I was initially wary of and had asked about a helmet. Thu, the proprietress of the business running the tour, waved me off; her brothers (of which she had 9) were the drivers – we were safe. Turns out she was right and I was being a wuss. (She also asked where I was from and then spat out a series of quick British punchlines / TV Star Catchphrases / regional comments such as "fancy a pint, love?" and "Awright my darlin'?" It was weird, like a performance she'd learnt from and for tourists. It made me feel uncomfortable for a reason I still don't understand clearly. I guess she was trying to be hospitable - she had comments for Americans and Australians too, but it felt like an unecessary performance...it made other people laugh but to me it felt like; look, the cute little Vietnamese lady can say "Booyaka!" too, just like Ali G. Isn't that funny? I feel like I might be being too harsh here, and the woman was busting her balls running her business and taking care of her large family so fair play to her, but you can't help how you feel. She could have been friendly and Vietnamese and that would have been fine for me. I'm digressing, more on backpacking culture later, though...) On the motorbikes we zipped around Hue for 5 hours from pagoda to temple to ancient tomb. By 10AM it was 38 degrees – even on the back of a motorbike the air felt less like a breeze and more like a hairdryer. It was ace. (after 10 minutes zipping around I was thinking I should have bought Jamie's motorbike....)

It was the rice harvest - in different parts of Vietnam there are 1, 2 or 3 harvests a year, depending upon how far south you live. The work is all by hand and is excruciating, bent over in 100 degree heat up to your shins in water all day picking rice, or carrying 80Kg bundles of the stuff. They earn about US$0.30 per kilo. Out in the countryside, the cattle and sometimes water buffalo wander freely onto quite major roads.

Just 10 minutes from "downtown" Hue is the Japanese Bridge, a gift from a noblewoman to the little people. It's exquisite and in the middle of nowhere. It's 300 years old or so and still in its original condition. During the midday heat the locals come and lie down in it.

When the rice is picked it is dried on the ground or on sheets laid along the roadside (which explains why there's occasionally pieces of grit in rice...) and the farmers rake it over to dry it before bagging it.

I took this as we passed a woman with a load of live ducks on her motorbike. I saw all manner of things carted around on motorbikes - live ducks, live pigs, large panes of glass, machine tools, everything....

This is the famous Bunker Hill and one of the said Bunkers. They were first used during the French war in Vietnam.

Runing below Bunker Hill is the The Perfume River, so named after the flowers that bloom briefly on it when the weather is right. The small boats in the distance house families of up to 6 who live and work in the tiny covered areas. God knows how....

On the second day in Hue I took a trip to the old DMZ near the 17th Parallel between North and South Vietnam. The history was interesting to hear but it was strange to imagine what had happened there now that it was once again productive farmland and lush mountain forests. There were photo’s at the former Khe Shan military base museum showing mountains cleared of foliage by Agent Orange and Napalm. These days it looks like a tropical version of Scotland without all the fighting. At one point our bus was stopped on the road by some kid. A minute later there was an explosion on the hillside and as shower of gravel as a mining crew blew a hole in a quarry. It was a kind of Vietnam War reality moment.

This is one of the exhibits at the former Khe Shan military base. At most museums I went to they had a display of American shells and bombs. Khe Shan was an important point in the war, the NVA faked a build-up of troops around it in the mountains and the Americans correspondingly over-defended the base, drawing troops away from other areas so that when the NVA launched the TET Offensive the US had soldiers in the wrong places. Khe Shan is a deserted, overgrown base by a small town now - the photo's in the exhibit show it as a huge military installation.

Nice Chopper.

Here's the overgrown landing-strip out back...

We stopped by this bridge which was once on one of the 5 Ho Chi Minh trails that led from North Vietnam down to the South to supply the Viet Cong with arms and supplies. part of the reason the US used Agent Orange was to cut a swathe (the Macnamara Line which was never completed) through the forests right across the country from the ocean to Laos to make it impossible for the NVA to continue the trails. The US stopped all but one of the trails.

While we were there some local kids went batshit crazy begging (under the tutelage of their father / uncle) for this woman's water bottle. They pestered her and pestered her and were just like kids anywhere with their excitement and their clamouring. When she gave it to them they shared it amongst themselves as they walked away. When they'd had enough (and before they'd finished the water) they chucked the bottle casually over the railing of the bridge into the river below and immediately ran across the road to another Westerner to beg them for their water, as if the real fun was in trying to see if they could get it in the first place, even if they didn't really want it.

The ongoing entertainment on our hot and sweaty bus ride (It was again 100 degrees in the shade) was hearing the Canadian guy behind me try to get inside the tee-shirt of the girl from San Francisco. A man shouldn’t ever listen to another man trying to shag a girl, there’s no dignity to it, and it’s too easy to hear when he’s lying, like this guy was most of the time.** At one point I thought she was going for it too. If she did then they'd probably have deserved each other, they were elite backpackers (you can see them both in the bridge photo - she's taking pictures in the middle, he'd changed into a tight tank-top during one of the stops and he was "casually" following her along the bridge. And yes, I was watching both of them. That's what gets me off....). But you know when someone has a slightly better experience than you one minute after you’ve said something, regardless of what you say? He did that – he’d taught here; bungee-ed there; and gone mine-clearing everywhere (or been attacked by machete weilding africans somewhere else). It wasn't possible for the guy to just be impressed or to say I don't know. Whatever this girl said to him he could top, which I guess is why he’d been traveling alone for 10 years because who wants to hang out with a knobhead like that? He wasn’t a bad looking guy either, but he did keep pulling Blue Steel every chance he could, which was funny after a while. it kind of looked like he'd just been slapped around the face for most of the day. Bless. Free fun for me though, small man that I am.

The North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese were once separated by this river. One side would build a tower and a flagpole and then the other side would build a tower slightly higher and erect a bigger flagpole. One side would blast speakers with music and propaganda then the other side would get more speakers and do the same thing only louder.

This is the 230 metre high (755 ft) Rockpile that the US used as a lookout in the DMZ. After the whole area had been treated with Agent Orange and Napalmed it was nothing more than a big pile of rocks, funnily enough. The US soldiers used to have to be airlifted onto it by helicopters.

We also visited the Vinh Moc tunnels. People lived in these for 5 years under heavy US shelling. Even holes made by US bombs dropped from B52s had been converted into air shafts. 17 babies were born down here, and strangely, 6 of the tunnel exits came out onto this beach. See what I mean about the war seeming incongruous in the face of such beauty?

Inside one of the tunnels: I'm 6ft tall and if walked with a hunched back and my head bowed I could get through most of these. There were three levels connected by stairs and trapdoors, the lowest level was excavated to 23 meters. It seems impossible when you're down there that anyone could have dug them as the complex is so vast and involved. There were rooms dug out in the side for people to sleep in (they were tiny) and even a room they used for baby deliveries near one of the exits....

This is the main meeting room at 15 meters underground. 40 people could fit in here - 40 Vietnamese, that is; not 40 porky westerners. They used to show movies down here as well as hold concerts and meetings.

Back in Hue it was sunset.

And I got back to my room and my little mate. I liked having a lizard in the room - even if he did hide beind the headboard on the bed. The greedy little bastard ate 5 moths for dinner one night when I came in and turned the light on. I was impressed with him to be honest. He was quick. And I guess moths are good for you as there wasn't an ounce of fat on him.

** I, on the other hand, have never sounded like a twat when I've been trying to chat-up a woman. Nor have I ever lied, ever.

2007-05-19T14:52:00.001+08:00

Orange Crush

On our way to Halong Bay the bus stopped, both there and back, at the half-way point so we could all go to the bathroom and buy some souveneirs from a store that seemed to be in the middle of nowhere.

Inside the store was a large warehouse space where they sold soft drinks, biscuits, crisps, ice-creams, postcards, clothing, hats, laquerware, embroidery and the like. There was even a factory with a few dozen people working on sewing machines putting all the stuff together. There were signs outside saying "No Photos" which I initially, and wrongheadedly, put down to the evil sweatshop bosses not wanting to be caught in the act of exploiting all the piece-workers who were doubtless working 19 hour days and sleeping under their sewing machines.

Wrong; so, so wrong.

The store was an outlet for - and I'm paraphrasing the sign on the wall here: "The survivors and families who were affected by Agent Orange in the American War. The sale of these goods helps support these victims and their families."

The guy who took my money for the bottle of water and peanut brittle I bought had no arms below the elbows. So many of the people working there were doing so quite happily with missing limbs and distorted features. On the return journey we stopped at the sister store across the road and I noticed the girl behind the book counter because she was beautiful with long dark hair and a smooth round face. When she turned her head her other eye was completely disfigured, as though part of her skull had melted beneath the surface and both eyes looked in differen directions.

I've seen a couple of beggars here who worked their disfigurement with aplomb. There was a woman by the main lake in Old Town Hanoi who walked around with a small hand-held placard in Vietnamese showing before and after pictures of herself - she'd been pretty, but then something had happened whereby her face had melted away and she'd lost her right breast - she had a topless photo to prove it that she showed to validate her story. There was also a guy by the hospital who waved his stumped thigh at me as he balanced on crutches and shook his bowl.

In the case of the woman by the lake, my initial and shameful response was to give her some money to make her go away so I didn't have to confront her ugliness (Her lower left eye lid drooped to reveal a red gash of inner eye flesh, her top lip was partly missing to show her skeletal teeth and gums). But I waited while she tried to explain her story to me in Vietnamese. I thought I could do her the courtesy of not throwing money at her and running away. Obviously she'd dealt with her disfigurement and her ego and had, in some way I still can't quite appreciate, learned to make it work for her. I guess from her point of view, if she can earn fat sums begging from rich westerners what does she care for our motives? But it struck me that in the west I'd never see begging like that. I know there are guys with no legs outside subways in New York but I can't recall any being so brazen and in your face with it. No bare stumps brandished to get the revulsion dollars; precious little burn-scarred skin shown on the #1 train at Times Square. I think it would maybe result in open hostility and disgust.

I'm not sure what my point is here, other than in a poor country a symbol of the poverty might be how little room there can be for sentimentality or middle-class niceties when it comes to trying to get by. Beggars can't just beg - they have to parade their afflictions and wounds to compete. What else do they have? Or maybe it's just a technique that works on sensitive Westerners - the same protocol as the street hawkers use when they ask you over and over if you'll buy something: if we could bear to be impolite from the get-go then they'd get the point, but somehow, we can be bullied through our own softness into a sale. How many times do people get caught after initially saying no only to tell the motorbike hawker their destination when he asks where they're going, and then to get drawn into a negotiation? How many times do we get into conversations with the guy selling crap postcards and become engaged instead of just ignoring him? It's an interesting social comparison that those who need the small amounts they earn from us to survive have obviously understood on some level. I've noticed since I've just started saying no and ignoring the hawkers they leave me alone immediately (whistling Queen songs seems to help, too). But when I've been polite and said "No thank you, I don't want a motorbike, thanks." and been less offhand and dismissive they've badgered me endlessly.

I also realised my pity is worthless to anyone except me. It's no use to a woman who's been disfigured unless I get my hand in my pocket. Pity is such a self-aggrandising, impotent feeling. It does nothing except for the person who feels it - and who wants to be pitied? (Btw, in the West the beggars I do resent are the ones who try to illicit pity and who display an affected simper and snivel. Not that I'm one to advise on the marketing of beggars but really, pity isn't a good angle, it's the whinging of begging and the flip side of pity for me is contempt, which is why I maybe don't like feeling pity myself, it's a dirty feeling--that may sound callous but if you've encountered the beggars I mean then you'll know what I'm talking about and if you haven't you'll just be thinking I'm a heartless wanker; which of course I am).

I'm trying to work out if there is a dignified way to visit poor countries as a rich westerner (and we are all filthy, stinking rich, every one of us, in comparison) without the trip being a twenty-first century version of Victorian "Slumming it." I was fascinated walking around Hanoi because, as I've said, people live on the streets. It's the culture. But it's not the culture for the rich Vietnamese - they're not sitting on small plastic stools and eating from a plate on the sidewalk only a few feet from the traffic like most of the people I've seen here. And I'm trying to work out which things are culturally viable differences (and therefore photographable), and which things are just a product of being poor - which is a universal indignity that doesn't need plump, rich white people pointing cameras at and digitising to show their friends over $5 lattes on their $2500 laptops. From what I understand the average Vietnamese person earns around $50-60 per month. Maybe the line of demarcation is hazy and vague, like the line between porn and erotica? I know it when I see it.

But back to the Agent Orange. The American War (as it's called over here) ended 30 years ago. It's a sin that people are still suffering and are living off in their own community outside of Hanoi (or that's how it appeared to me - maybe that's not the case). It's a timely reminder with the Iraq Invasion still in effect. Governments don't win or lose wars - people do. And Vietnam and the Vietnamese won theirs - it's a Communist country, which is what America was trying to prevent - and still there are young people with melted faces or who's every step twists their spine in awkward spasms a generation on.

But not on our streets. Is that just because we're richer?

I bought a book from the pretty girl. She was cute and I'm a dreaful flirt: A People's History of the War - printed and badly typeset in Vietnam. They were also selling some US Account of the tunnel warfare a Chu Chi and the blurb on the back went something like: "A Story about the brave US soldiers who climbed into tunnels so dangerous it was like crawling into Hell." I wonder if the girl with the melted face saw the irony that she should be making a living selling some jingoistic US account of a war that left her so scarred? I hope she was selling marked-up, pirated versions of those books.

I'm going to the DMZ zone in Central Veitnam next. I want to be a respectful witness to a terrible human event rather than a voyuer.

I'm genuinely not sure how to go about it.

2007-05-19T09:44:00.000+08:00

Halong Bay:

Halong Bay is north east of Hanoi, and eventually borders Southern China. I took a two-day boat trip there this week. I'll post photo's when I'm not being oppressed by the pinko-commie regime, but until then I have to say those pinko-commies do a jolly good sightseeing tour.

There were eleven of us on the boat - brits, aussies and a couple of young republican americans. We lucked-out with the people as apart from the muted republican sentiments there weren't any fuckwits (unless maybe I was the fuckwit and they weren't telling me - kind of like if you're playing poker and you don't know who the loser is at the table then it's you). We cruised through the islands, went to see an amazing cave which was surprisingly amazing, and then went swimming near an oyster farm. I got stung by a jellyfish, which wasn't quite what I'd asked for (I didn't do the wee-on-the-sting remedy for the sting that someone I know did in France last year...funny as it was, it didn't work) but I doused it in vinegar and one of the Aussies had some anti-histamines, which was lucky as about 1/2 hour later I could feel the poison spike in the gland under my arm, tingle in my lips, and ache across my back. That wasn't painful so much as creepy. Still, I got lots of attention so what did I care? In two years the story will be that I was wrestling with a giant squid to save a boat full of women from certain death (death by squid? Hmmm...?).

We slept on the boat, replacing the Vietnamese techno music the staff wanted to play (Why is that music so ubiquitous? I don't know anyone who likes it....and you can hear it in western China, northern Vietnam, I-fucking-biza, London, LA....) with some indie-rock and folk. Then one of the American guys tried hitting on the English girls by explaining how to play blues harmonica and I went to bed instead of sniggering behind his back and pointing. I'm maturing, see?

I'll post photo's of Halong Bay when I can. And I won't attempt to describe it, except to say Bond Villains definitely live there. Actually the Vietnamese Government refused permission for a Bond film to be shot there so they went to Thailand instead. Blofeld probably has a souveneir stall in one of the caves by now. It would be more lucrative selling badly photoshopped postcards and overpriced cola than trying to take over the world these days I reckon.

I'm heading south tomorrow. Everyone who'd been south had horror stories of the south - horrible locals, tons touristy of rip-offs and muggings and I wondered why I'd spent my money on a flight to Saigon when I could have just gone down to the East Village on the #1 train.

Arf.

I did hear about a company that arranges "cultural" tours where, for a fee, you go to teach English in China or work at the Terracotta Warriors museum as a guide in Xi'an. That sounds like fun. Here, on the South China Sea, a long way from New York and any responsibilities and any practicalities (like bills...), it's easy to imagine never really going back.

2007-05-16T15:46:00.000+08:00

Commie Girls are Cute:

Hanoi: I wasn't quite expecting Vietnam to look so much like, well, Vietnam as it did when we drove in from the airport; rice fields, people wearing conical hats, lots of mopeds - some with crates of piglets on the back - all of it just like a photo from a travel book. As we got closer to Hanoi there were huge warehouses for Yamaha and Canon too. I guess that makes it a developing country.

Hanoi is manic - it makes New York look quiet. I was overwhelmed at first, simple things like walking down the street became mildly stressful. The sidewalks, when there are any, are full of parked motorbikes which means you have to walk in the road, which are full of fast-moving motorbikes. Crossing the road is another adventure - I've done it about three times on a red stop light where the traffic is stopped (mostly) but usually you have to walk across the street as though playing a game of frogger while legions of motorbikes carrying one, two or even three people bear down on you. To everyone's cedit, I've not seen any accidents so far and on the afternoon of my second day I've acquired a certain nonchalence in wandering through the traffic.

People are friendly although I started to feel guilty taking photo's of them. People live out on the streets here - they cook on the streets, nurse babies on the street, hawk their wares on the street - there are countless little street kitchens and stalls selling food (and those which I've tried - little fried pastries and meaty spring rolls--have been amazing). I keep thinking "photo op" and then I realise I'm being a clumsy rich westerner photographing poor people while they're busy being poor. So I've stopped now. By far the funniest people I've met are the girls selling pineapple slices and bananas. They wander the streets with two baskets balanced at either end of a plank that they balance on their shoulder and they try to pose for photos and get you to hold their fruit so that you'll buy some. So cheeky, so cute. I wonder if I could smuggle some home with me.....

There was this kid waiter too, who was very friendly but who had the most fecund nasal hair I've seen in a long time. There were bushels of it. It looked out of place on him as he looked so young but it was there, like something you'd see peeking around the corner in a German Swimwear catalogue in 1974. It was hard work not talking to it instead of him.

Btw the way, Mosquitos about 25: Priest Nil. I was doing fine until I went to see the Water Puppet theatre which takes place in a standing pond of water. They were all over me like a buffet, to paraphrase Rob Dryden.

I can't post pictures or access the main page of this blog from Hanoi (or any blogs for that matter). The man won't allow it.

2007-05-12T23:04:00.000+08:00

Stanley Market

The best thing about the Coastal Defence Museum was the view. Which looks like this.

Afterwards, I went to Stanley Market on the South Side of Hong Kong Island. Stanley Bay looks like this.

Stanley market is geared for tourists and I'm sure there are bargains there although I couldn't see anything I wanted - except maybe a cashmere sweater - but who wants to buy a cashmere sweater in 28 degree weather and chimp it around Vietnam for a fortnight? Not I....

On the bus home across the aisle from me were a young English couple. They complained and bickered the whole way back to Hong Kong Central bus station. After a while they sounded like the third day of rain on your tent during a camping holiday. I'd like to apologise to the rest of the world if we all sound like this. Once, when we were taking over the world and stealing from places like China and India, the British were quite good at things like urban infrastructure and engineering. Hong Kong's kind of a testament to that, in some ways, I think. Nowadays, because everyone can travel, our world contribution is two dopey twats comparing Repulse Bay (sapphire coloured water and beautiful sand on the South China Sea) to Weymouth (tired Georgian sewage outlet on the English Channel) and a selection of adjectives that ran to one word: shit. Your camera is shit. What kind of shit point are you going to make now? This bus is taking the shit route. Etc.

One of the advantages of Britain being an island used to be that fuckwits like this couldn't get off it easily. I am so, so sorry.

Symphony of Light:

I didn't expect to like this. I wandered out to the water's edge looking north towards China at 8PM just in time to catch the nightly 15 minute-long symphony of light. From speakers somewhere around the convention centre I could hear the music and the narrative - in English and Chinese. The music was pretty naff, it started like some cheesy Canto-Pop and then morphed into something you'd expect to be playing during a Chinese documentary showing lots of landscapes. But that aside, the symphony of light is a light show utilising dozens of the buildings on Hong Kong Island and on Kowloon across the water. It was genius; whole sides of skyscrapers and museums lit up in perfect timing to the music - parts of one skyscraper here, a strobing hotel-front on the Penninsula Hotel there, a sparkling building facade hundreds of feet high somewhere else. I was mesmerised. Here are some stills to try to convey the scale of the light show. Anything with a spotlight on the roof, or any building with any distinctive coloured light was involved. The only thing I wished when I saw it was that either Lucas or Dave Byars could have programmed it to some decent music, but really, for the scale of it, it was pretty amazing.

The Hong Kong Island side....

And the Kowloon side...both sides worked in concert with one another too...

2007-05-12T22:08:00.000+08:00

Big Buddha:

Friday was a nice day. So I took a nice boat ride across to Lantau Island, 15KM away from Hong Kong Island by ferry. On Lantau there are some beaches, which I generously spared the locals and tourists by avoiding, a few prisons, and a giant Buddha on top of a big hill.

The Buddha at Ngong Ping looks like this.

If you pay HK$60 (US$8?) you get a vegetarian meal in the monastery and admission to the Big Buddha Museum. The flags along the pathways are in preparation for the Buddha's birthday celebrations later this month. It was very windy and they looked great, so vivid, and so noisy, snapping in the wind.

The view down to the monastery.

You can't really see the sea from the mountain as it's hidden in the haze. That's a reservoir that's perched above the Shek Pik prison to the bottom right.

The meal was terrible. Is it churlish to not like the monk food? Actually I hardly saw any monks there at all. I did see a ton of official monastery souvenier stands selling bundles of incense for offerings, and all manner of giant buddha tat - bookmarks, buddha fridge-magnets, etc. etc.... I always find that sort of hawking off-putting at anywhere that's supposed to be religious. I know it probably pays for the upkeep but.....

The Curse of the Golden Flower.

Today's adolescent photo: Out the back of the kitchens the turtles were at it. It was like Sodom and Gomorrah in that cage....this is what happens when they work out they're not going to be eaten because the monks are vegetarian; they party like Wyckyd Sceptyr....

And the VIP Hospitality left something to be desired. Then again, it was in keeping with the food....

Still, the best was yet to come. I was on top of a windy mountain. I didn't fancy getting a bus back to the ferry and then another hour on the boat so I decided to take the new 5.7Km cable-car back down the other side towards HK Airport and the subway station.

I tried to get a car to myself but got lumped in with a miserable German girl. We tried not to talk to each other but finally gave in when the cars stopped for 10 minutes and we were swinging (quite literally) in the wind from side to side. Imminent death didn't pep her up either. I mean, it's bad enough entertaining thoughts of your own demise never mind having to share those moments with some random sourpuss. Oh well, she was probably thinking something similar about me.

When we got going again and we crested a hill the view was this. It's hard to explain how breathtaking it was. The HUGE Hong Kong Chek Lap Kok airport looks like a toy below.

And then there was the water jump....

This photo is slightly tilted to the right, that's the angle the wind was blowing the car at....

But the best thing is that the cable car connects to the subway line and I was back in my hotel 45 minutes later where the evil jet-lag caught up with me and sent me to sleep until 9:30PM.

2007-05-11T21:09:00.000+08:00

Last Nite:

Up on a hill....

Okay, enough with the lyrics.

This is the view at night (of Admiralty) from Victoria Peak. The photo's can't do it justice. I took the tram up this time - it crawls up the hillside at a 45 degree angle (ie: very steep). The floor is scalloped so that if you're standing you can get some purchase and you don't slip backwards. It takes only 7 minutes to get to the top.

Along with Rio de Janiero, Hong Kong has to be the most spectacular looking city I've ever been too. I just have to work out how I can afford the quarter of a million dollars it costs for a 350 square foot apartment here now. That's a lot of rider writing and day-sheet typing....

This is Central and behind that Tsim Sha Tsui (Kowloon). My hotel is next to the Orange Stripey building.

I also went to Temple Street night market where I imagine once one could find a bargain. These days it was full of tat - cheap souvenier stalls selling key fobs and fake wallets and comically fake watches, the usual..... I did get my fortune told, which was interesting. I'll be sure to let you know how accurate it is if he's right. Of course, if he's wrong, I'll never mention it again. I can tell you this: I have stubborn ears. In England we would say Pig Headed, but I never thought is was meant quite so literally.

I ate at this crap food place. It got busted for hawking while I was eating. I was listening to the cops argue with the owner and they kept saying "Europeans" in Chinese which made me a little paranoid. Still, one has to try these things. I thought that because there were plenty of Chinese eating there that it was a good bet...that and the fact that they had a soap opera playing on TV that you could watch. The old bloke serving automatically got the hump with me when he brought me an opened bottle of beer and I sent it back (I don't drink). Not to worry though, he sold it to the next couple who sat down 10 minutes later.

And here's today's adolescent picture. I'm confused, I tried to translate the Chinese quickly and it seems to be all about food and banquets and drinking. I guess this is tailored to the man who thinks with his belly.

Weirdo.

2007-05-10T09:23:00.000+08:00

Hong Kong

The fifteen hour-long flight was extended by a late arriving inbound aircraft from Hong Kong and then by a painfully slow departure. All in all, we were on the plane for about 16 1/2 hours. My ipod died too, just for fun, right at the start of the flight. The best thing was the bloke sitting next to me and I didn't speak once to each other at all. I should have got his number to find out when he was flying again. The perfect traveling companion. Mind you, when I was married it was also possible to go 16 hours without speaking to each other too so I guess it's not so unremarkable.

Hong Kong is one of the most efficient airports around, so much so that the only delay was waiting to go through immigration because of the lines - even then, when you got to the desk the had a little tray of gummy candies for you to try while the nice man stamped your passport. I was in my hotel room 1 hour and 20 minutes after landing. Whoever runs JFK should come here and take notes. Scratch that; whoever runs JFK probably can't write so what would be the point?

I dropped my bags off in my room and wandered down to the Star Ferry Terminal before my jet-lag kicked in (I slept about seven hours on the flight, but I've learned not to trust that as a rule of thumb). Sure enough, by the time I was walking on the promenade at Tsim Sha Tsui and staring boggle-eyed across the harbour, I felt very tired. Got back just in time to crash out.

I love Hong Kong. It's one of my happy places (along with New York, LA (sometimes), Berlin, Beijing, Hawaii, Sydney, Beijing & Beijing). Something about the place makes perfect sense even though it's a chaotic cross between New York, San Francisco, London and China all at once. It's truly international. It's a working city too, so the harbour is always busy, and the whole place is a jumble of commerce and industry, from cheap hawkers in the markets to the huge International Finance Tower that dominates the island skyline.

The IFC tower and Victoria Peak from the ferry.

The air in Asia smells different - the air when you land in London smells damp and fresh, in New York it smells dry, metallic and carbonised, in LA it smells warm, like hot blacktop, and sometimes musky; in Asia it smells steamy and ripe, like there's a different kind of tropical pollen in the air, and like there are unfamiliar vegetables cooking somewhere that you can't see. I love it. It's the same in Xi'an and Tokyo and Hong Kong. For some reason since I've arrived I've been noticing smells, whether it be the ripe, steamy air, or the diesel for the ferries, or the green seaweed smell of the seawater by the ferry dock pilings, or the cooking Pork in the restaurants near my hotel, or the cigarette smoke of the old geezers who've walked up the Peak which rises 1200 feet behind my hotel.

This morning I climbed Victoria Peak for my daily exercise. It's a sheer path up the hill and it took me nearly 50 minutes of uphill walking to get there. It's so steep! Sweat beaded on my arms and hands and ran down my face, I was thirsty and sweat-soaked at the same time, kind of like being in a sauna (only I was wearing more than a towel and my speedos). When I got to the top for good measure I ran the 3KM loop around the Peak. It's the best running track in the world with the best views (I'll take my camera tomorrow) but by the time I'd finished I was beat. The sun was getting too hot for me. It was 7:52AM. It took over half an hour to get down. I cheated for the last few metres by using the commuter escalator.

This escalator is 800 metres long and in the morning between 6am-10am it runs downhill to take people to thier offices in Central. After that, it runs uphill until Midnight. Considering that some of the streets are sheer climbs and taxis are permanently gridlocked this was a genius idea. Also, because of the tropical sun, the escalator connects to the covered walkways that inter-connect buildings in the Central area allowing pedestrians to walk over the traffic and in the shade. I've got to think that whoever designed the infrastructure of Central Hong Kong was German or Japanese, as it makes so much sense. The road layout is undoubtedly English (it feels like Central London somehow) but the logic of the connected walkways most definitely isn't English, not in the least.

Below is a street near my hotel, which looks like every other backstreet in Hong Kong. Now imagine the smell of barbequing pork over an industrial-sized kettle full of endless boiling water.....

On Thursday, I've since learned, all the museums are closed, so I took a bus up to the Kowloon Walled City . This is now a park (see photo below) but up until the 1990's it was a lawless labyrinth of drug dens and crime, which, to be honest, is what I went for. Instead of getting boosted for my trainers by some skag-smoking 8 year olds I had a nice walk through the park and said hello to some old grandads, which was probably better for me in the long run. Although, when I asked them to tell me some stories about what it was like when they lived here, back in the day when they were all impoverished and high on British Imported Opium (something you don't learn in History classes in the UK) they got all cantankerous and started caterwauling. I thought old people liked talking about the good old days? Some people, they've got no respect for history.

The strange thing is the buses in Hong Kong are all British Double-Decker buses so I was sitting on a bus that was exactly the same as the #36 to Keresley; the bus that I used to take to school. The view was anything but similar as it meandered through Mong Kok. I was especially pleased to be able to use my Mandarin on the bus driver too, it seems slightly more useful now than it did two years ago. Then, when I was here, people refused to answer me but now I'm hearing a lot of Mandarin spoken. I have to say I didn't have a clue what he said when he answered me though.

And they have trams too; just like Manchester, but without all the thieves, guns, crap fashions, acid-cut drugs and unwarranted sense of self.

Finally, an adolescent moment. How could I not take a photo...?

2007-05-05T17:06:00.000+08:00

Into The Valley

Landed in L.A., drove some, ate properly, established that I have no inherent skill at guitar hero, didn't lose any sleep over it, in fact slept log-like, awoke feeling trunk-headed for an hour or so, drove to the desert, drove past some outlet stores - accidently spent $250 on clothes I don't need but would have been foolish to not buy - drove again, ended up here.

***k me! What a place.

I've only ever seen places like this in Westerns or that bit at the end of Thelma and Louise. Above is the view from Keyes Point (although it looks like that place in Morocco in Babel, doesn't it? Where the kids were shooting their rifle from). Looking down on Indio (and therefore the Coachella site somewhere--hmmm, maybe the rifle shooting thing would have been a good idea). Breathtaking. I love that in America you can drive up to the top of the mountains near LA. In England a) the land doesn't really go this high--not often & b) if it did the only way up would be on foot, grumbling all the bloody way.

The view was breathtaking.

In the Joshua Tree National Park (below) I felt like I was in a theme park - I didn't really think it would look so much like it did on TV. Sad, isn't it? ( I remember my ex-nephew once, upon being shown a photo of the castle in Spain that was the model for the Disney Castle, complaining that the Disney castle look more realistic). There was hardly anyone around and the space was amazing. I felt very alone. But it wasn't spooky, as much as it was calm. I wanted to camp out there.

We visited the rock where Gram Parsons was semi-cremated by his friend. I don't know that I'd do that for my friends. Apart from the fact that it's a long drive there's a $15 charge to get into the park these days. If I'm taking you there for a good secret cremating it's not as though you'd be able to pay the $15 back later, is it? So if we are close, don't be expecting me to do a Gram Parsons on you when go (unless you leave me the money in an envelope or something. If you want to be left by the side of the freeway, which could be a romantic gesture, or cobbed brusquely into a canal, I'd definitely be up for that. Assuming you didn't want me to drive too far, not with the cost of petrol these days).

In the spot where the attempted burning took place there was, I'm told, once, a lot of graffiti. I was glad there wasn't any there really. If you've been to see Jim Morrisson's grave in Paris it's obvious why. All those tossers writing pointless garbage over all the surrounding graves and for what? For Jim Morrisson? No. For themselves. Who cares? No respect for the other families. Simpering wankers. And don't get me started on The Doors; the Lizard King, my todger!

The small pile of rocks in the picture below is about sixty feet high. The rocks and boulders in the valley look like they were dropped there in prehistoric times, which doesn't make any sense as everyone knows that dinosaurs only had little arms and would not have been able to move them. Some rocks' positions kind of defied comprehending.

The joshua trees went on for miles and miles. I felt for U2, poor buggers, trying to pick some good ones to stand next to. Each one had it's own charm; much like U2, one would imagine.

We drove back into LA without hitting any traffic. That was a first and, I suspect, a last.

2007-04-28T02:32:00.000+08:00

Life's A Gas

Quite literally, at my dentist's office. Went in to get a sharp random pain checked-out. Turns out I had a fracture way down in the tooth. Have to get a cap (I'm going for Gold, btw).

I am very clean living now so when I got the laughing gas I sucked that stuff up and tried to breath deeply, like you're supposed to. I was high as a kite in seconds. Then I got the Novocaine, which is such a specific feeling it made me laugh out loud. How do you explain to your dentist that the reason you're laughing is because the injection he just gave you reminds you of a night out in London in 1996? Or that your tongue is so numb it feels like someone else's and you're kind of french-kissing yourself (it was the gas...it made giggly sense at the time)? You don't, not if you want to get any more of the good stuff out of him. I have to compliment his needle skills. I recently went for a blood test at another clinic and the girl taking the samples had all the finesse of a thumbless elephant prodding my arm with a staple-gun, but with my dentist I barely noticed.

But oh, the drill, the smell of burning tooth....the pressure on the nerve as he found the fracture (which felt exactly like the original pain that had sent me in there in the first place). He gave me more novocaine. I was still guzzling the nitrous oxide and smiling, too.
"You like that gas, don't you Richard?" he said.
I giggled. Hell yeah. What's not to like?

When he really got into it, and he and the nurse had their hands in my mouth and were hollowing-out my molar, my entire head felt numb. It was pretty good actually. I was so drugged I was able to let my mind wander in exactly the same manner as it does when I'm drowsy in my bunk on a bus, or when I'm not quite asleep on a plane: I ended up thinking about sex. Quelle surprise.

Then I started to wonder, if going to the dentist and having someone carving up my teeth has me thinking about sex, am I creating a monster? Will I develop a fetish? Could I find myself saying in the small hours, "I'm sorry love, this just isn't working. How about you shine that flashlight into my eyes and dig around on lower-right-seven with a fork?" just to be able to get it on in the future?

I'll be sure to let you know...

2007-04-27T11:46:00.000+08:00

Absolutely Nothing At All:

That's a line from one of my friend's band songs from about 1986. It has no bearing to anything other than it makes me happy to think of them. They were good, but they were from Coventry so they kept pulling the rug out from under their own feet; that and the singer, who copied Bowie shamelessly but made it a taboo subject to mention, went a bit barmy, which is a shame. There but for the grace of God... I saw some friends from the UK last weekend at gig. What a difference an hour or so of belly-laughing with your mates makes to your week.

I've been at home. There is so little to blog about when I'm at home it's pitiful. The things I like to do at home (don't get ahead of yourselves here...) aren't so interesting for me to write about, never mind for anyone else to read about. But I have this blog and it keeps pouting at me from the internets while I'm surfing travel websites.

I did read this interesting article on the disappearance of comedy from the modern novel. Flawed but interesting, if you like reading about novels.

I also saw an inspiring interview with Geoffry Canada, whom I think is one of the most important and inspiring New Yorkers I've ever encountered. He runs an organization called Harlem Children's Zone, which is an initiative to develop educational opportunituies in Harlem; addressing the families and the children's needs from an early age to give them an alternative to the less aspirational routes that the kids would be exposed to in Harlem. They do amazing work and it's a relief to hear a positive black voice that isn't running some tired faux-gansta' bullshit or working a solely political agenda (Which I'm always sceptical of, whether from a white, black or 'other' standpoint). There's not a lot of airtime given to straight-edged, pragmatic, hard-working black leaders in the media talking about strengthening their communities one child at a time - I guess it's not such a compelling subject (as far as I can see; I'll admit, it's not something I'm policing closely, I'd be hapy to be wrong) - and I imagine the squeaky wheels get all the oil, right? But it's inspiring to know that while there are duplicitous bastards like Reverend Ike syphoning cash out of the community and Snoops pontificating on misogyny in every media outlet after the Imus incident while making as much money as they can from pimping the people they claim to represent; there are also people doing the right thing, quietly, without fanfare, and trying to have a positive effect on the next generation, and one that isn't based on getting their disposable income from them at some indeterminate point. Check out the Harlem Children's Zone and give them some tax-deductible money if you're so inclined.

Aside from this, I've been writing non-stop (but not on the blog). I'm on page 295 out of 353 of a rewrite today. Got a deadline to meet before I go away but I'm not kidding myself. I'm taking an old laptop to Asia (one I don't care if I lose) so that I can work out there too. Like I can't write for three weeks; who am I kidding?

Recommended Reads:
We Need To Talk About Kevin by Lional Shriver. Astute, affecting and horribly timely.
The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene - Simply a master writer.

2007-04-18T08:32:00.000+08:00

Thanks to St. Hubbins...

....For favours received.

I got the upgrades to and from Hong Kong when booking today. Thank you, St. Hubbins, patron saint of airline upgrades.

Off on my travels again in a few weeks: Hong Kong, Guangzhou / Guilin, Hanoi, Halong and Ho Chi Minh City and not one pop concert in any of them.

That's May done, then. Have to figure out June now....

2007-04-15T22:52:00.000+08:00

It's quiet; almost too quiet...

I love Couch:

A week off tour. I feel normal, or as normal as I ever get to feel (I'm still talking to myself and spitting like a pissy camel behind slow-walking people on Broadway but, hey....). I've written a lot and am feeling faintly encouraged on that count and, quelle surprise, I'm close to booking a vacation in Hong Kong and Vietnam because that's just what I like doing on my off-time. But I've a few things to take care of here first, the least of which is figuring out how I'm paying the bills over the summer.

Small moments of happiness this week included seeing Elvis Costello crossing Broadway with his family (gots to love New York for random understated celeb' sightings) and finally getting my legs to run 5 miles continuously (on Tuesday they argued at doing 2. A month of 5 mile runs and I won't be considering amputating a limb as a way of getting rid of the excess tour weight). I've seen tons of movies, read continuously, and have been eating heathily. It's the simple things I'm loving right now. It's amazing how few of them being on tour allows.

The only bummer in the past week (apart from the nausea at mile 2 last Tuesday...)* is that The Jam / Paul Weller allowed Start! to be used in a car commercial. A part of my youth shrivelled when I saw it, but I guess it's how things are now. I'm sure Bruce Foxton and Rick Buckler can use the money and I wouldn't begrudge them that, although Weller's got to be minted already....

So, as hoped for, being at home is mellow and relaxing. I miss the travel (and the laughs) but not the relentless responsibility of touring. At the rate I'm going I'll be in South East Asia again by the middle of next month. Who knows, I might even move there...? But for now I'm happy tour managing my own vacation. It's like a busman's holiday; tour managing is such a particular skill-set, it's a strange feeling to be able to use it outside of work. And it's a pleasant surprise too, to find booking and researching a vacation so much fun and such a breeze to do (Thank you the internets...and a shout-out to St. Hubbins too - I'll be calling on you soon....). Once I decide the route it will be booked inside 30 minutes. All I have to decide now is how long I stay in Ho Chi Minh City and where I'm going to eat in Kowloon....Bummer, eh?

*Kurt Vonnegut dying is obviously in a class of global bummerdom, and not to be trivialised with my petty complaints.

2007-04-08T03:35:00.000+08:00

The End Has No End.

Not true.

The tour finished yesterday when Albert played on Late Night With Conan O' Brien. Ironically for a show that airs at 12:30AM we loaded in at 7AM. JOy of the deepest kind. Brian and I (who'd both had about 1 hour's sleep the night before after getting back from DC) both loaded in and then fell asleep on the sofas in the dressing room for a couple of hours. Like two crispy, grizzled bears.

After the show all the gear went back to various rehearsal studios / houses and we all met up to watch Conan air at 12:30AM. It was a fitting way to finish the tour.

Then I slept like a drugged pig. Mmmmmmm.

Today I'm finalising the tour accounts, which is easy enough even if it's boring. But trying to deal with this:

Isn't so easy when this

is on TV.

I've really got into Walker, Texas Ranger. Or rather, compared to processing piles of receipts, I've really got into Walker, Texas Ranger. It's the very best of crappy TV. TV you can watch without watching. And there are seemingly hundreds of episodes on TV all the time.

Back home and my apartment is clean, which is a small blessing. And I can eat properly again, rather than feeding on crap like this:

This is a Philly cheese steak. I ate two on Tuesday. Wrongness in a sandwich. They taste as good as they look bad.

Thursday, when we were in DC, would have been my 10th Wedding Anniversary, had we not divorced. Today the tour finishes. It's a strangely timed week. The phone isn't ringing with minutae anymore, and the email questions and arrangements have stopped, and personally I have nothing at all planned for the rest of my life and no one to plan it with. I feel kind of light. It's a strange feeling. Not a bad one, but strange. It's quite exciting to feel that the future is so open. And not a little scary.

It will pass. Everything does. That's what's great about being alive.

2007-04-02T10:43:00.000+08:00

Waiting At The Lights, Know What I Mean?

I rented a van to get everyone to and from the United Palace show with Bloc Party. This is the traffic outside the Lincoln Tunnel at 11:10PM on Friday. It was taking over 10 minutes to go forward one block at one point. Like a good, snotty Manhattanite, I blamed all the Bridge and Tunnel traffic but I was told later that a bus had crashed over in Jersey so I guess one can't entirely blame all the B&T people.

And then this was Saturday afternoon near the same location.

I didn't really care, I'm so glad to be back here. I love New York. It's home and it's one of the most amazing cities in the world. And the women are so beautiful, like few other places on the planet. I spent most of the weekend sighing wistfully and feeling like I'd been punched in the chest.

Thing is, once I've got rid of Chazz Michael Michael's body (which I acquired on tour) and been here a couple of weeks I'll be itchy to travel again. I've already been looking at the Cathay Pacific website - 23 Asian cities in 21 days.....hmmm.....

And how can you not love a city where you can buy a life-size figurine of an adolescent wizard balancing on a broomstick that looks strangely like a flat-ended tail?

Spent Sunday morning on the phone with my mate Mick from London. He told me about a reissued version of Young Americans with a bonus DVD. After a (typical for us) couple of hours talking about Bowie in the 70's trans-atlantically I had to go to Virgin to buy a load of CDs & DVDs. Spent the rest of the day watching them. Even when he's being a ponce Bowie's still Dave and the Greatest Living Englishman as far as I'm concerned (And I'm happy to admit that he gets it wrong often but to my mind he's still trying and he made all those LPs from Man Who Sold The World through to Scary Monsters {and okay, Let's Dance} so like McCartney he should be allowed to make any records he likes forever. He's earned it). Like Lennon he's from the (maybe extinct?) strain of working class English who aspire to something better both intellectually and artistically. Maybe Jarv's the last one in that line that I can think of..? I'd love to be wrong here.

One week of shows left. It's a gentle re-entry into life doing shows while being at home. Maybe by Saturday (when we finish properly) I'll have adjusted to being back and I won't sit in my apartment wondering why my phone doesn't ring and buzz with incoming emails. Maybe...

Still, if I feel weird I can always walk around and look at girls for a bit. That usually helps.

2007-04-01T03:29:00.001+08:00

Uptown Top Ranking

Once our very clean bus dropped us on 4th Ave & 13th Street we all piled off with our luggage (I had seven bags and an old printer to get home) and took cabs home.

Waking up in my apartment felt luxurious. So did going to Whole Foods to spend $90 on fruit and salads. I've f***ed my back up somehow so I'm limping around like Charles Laughton in the Hunchback of Notre Dame but I'm home so it doesn't matter really. But I'm a gimp, that's for sure.

The two shows this weekend were way uptown near the George Washington Bridge. At the end of the street the venue is on you could see the sunset over Jersey and the river.

...and the GWB itself. Normally I only ever see its faint, strung lights from 6 miles downriver or so.

The shows were at the United Palace Theatre on 175th St and Broadway. It's an amazing place, one of the 5 "Wonder Loews" that Loews Movie Theatres built, one in each borough of New York City. It opened in 1930 and it's garish in its opulence inside.

Here's the foyer. It would have been an amazing movie theatre in its heyday, and could make one now...

This was the first rock show at the venue. The building is used as a church by Reverend Ike who, as far as I can see, offers to pray for poor people if they send him money. (Quote: "Make sure that you enclose your Faith Offering for the Church Ministry, whe you write. Don't ask for "something for nothing." That could bring "bad luck." Let me Pray for YOU, and YOURS, for Good Health, Healing, Joy, Love, Success, Prosperity, Good Fortune, and More Money." In his 16 page full color magazine he asks for money for prayerts on each page and also promises prosperity in return. Reminds me of the old Popes and thier long held practice of simony.... And as anyone who's read the New Testament knows, Jesus was always about the money... I'd go as far as to say the Reverened Ike is a thieving charlatan. Reverend my cock. Didn't Jesus throw the money-lenders out of the temple about this time of year...?)

I think being raised a Catholic and then growing out of that faith has made me sensitive to this kind of tartuffery and bullshit. Click on the photo below to read the "letters" in the parish magazine. I can't do them justice.

Check out the standard advertising 'call to action' underneath the letter "signed" P.W. The whole magazine is full of these faux-handwritten-font asides reminding you to pay....

The whole magazine is full of this shit. Titles like "Even her DOG became a millionaire!" Why would a spiritual organisation have to hard sell the cash benefits of faith? Isn't the reward supposed to be in the afterlife? Isn't living a good life reward enough?

It pisses me off to see people exploited so callously. And while a cold judge could say anyone who buys into this bollocks gets what they deserve maybe isn't appreciating the desparation that people live with and the faith that people hang on to to get them through hard and otherwise hopeless lives. Being middle class makes me forget that not everyone has the choices I have. Shame there isn't a hell for Reverened Ike to rot in. I wouldn't have his thoughts.

We're definitely back in New York. Even God is a graft.

2007-04-01T02:23:00.000+08:00

Coming Home.

If you look under your seat at the Spectrum Theatre in Montreal this is what you'll see. This is the route under the venue. It looks like a set out of Doctor Who? Note the TV buried into the earth. I felt like the venue and 2000 Canadians were going to crash onto my head when I walked through. Of course, it's always all about me...

Marc watches the bus get washed at 1:30AM. We should have been nearly home. We weren't. We didn't get back to Manhattan until 4:30AM, even crossing the north of the Island at 4AM to go around and enter the West Side via the Lincoln Tunnel. I remember watching midtown rise on the horizon and then I realised we were on the George Washington Bridge heading towards Jersey with Manhattan slipping away behind us. If I'd got out and taken a cab I'd have been home in 15 minutes, instead it took another hour. I was so wired when I got back that I spent another hour on the phone calling friends overseas until I'd simmered down some.

Of course, I can laugh about it now....

Ha. Ha Ha.

2007-03-29T14:01:00.000+08:00

Bus Stop, Waiting.....

We are still at the fucking bus wash. Been here for 40 minutes and can't get in and can't get out. I am tempted to hitch to New York with all the money. Please baby jesus, get me off this fucking tour bus and into my apartment.....

Aaaargh! Aaaaaargh! Aaaaaaaargh! Aaaaaaaaaargh!

2007-03-29T10:29:00.000+08:00

Bostonia:

So on the way into Canada I was given a hard time by the Canadian Immigration person for basically not phoning ahead to let the Canadian border know that a whopping 10 people were to be crossing into Canadia at Port Huron in the small hours of Saturday morning. The alcoholic (and if it takes one to know one then it similarly takes one to spot another at 50 paces) old crone was annoyed we'd distrubed her cushy graveyard shift and she had to get off her lazy ass to type-in some passport numbers. Kind of ridiculous to think that we were given a hard time because of this. I mean, isn't processing passports as people come through her job? Best line she said to me was, "Because I don't care how long it takes. I'm getting paid to be here."
Yes, I thought, but definitely not as much as I am.
Anyway, that aside, I liked being in Canada.

When we came to the US Border somewhere between Montreal and Boston we were again stopped, quelle surprise. This time the very polite immigration police asked us into the room and then searched the bus. Oh, how we laughed when they came back with someone's toiletries smelling of the kind of herbs used in baking rather than cooking. We all had to empty our pockets in turn (my most incriminating posession was an Ouef Fondant or Cadbury's Cream Egg and some Jurlique hand cream. And no, they're not related items...); everyone's prescription medicines were emptied out onto the counter (said herbacious person also had a couple of pill bottles that looked like they were full of smarties, such was the range of pills that poured out of them. Grave as the situation could have been, it was hard not to laugh seeing fifteen different types of sedative poured out on the counter). In the end they confiscated the controlled prescription medicines people had without prescriptions and gave a certain someone a warning. They were very nice about it and they could have been so much meaner.

Today's show in Boston is the last day we'll be on the bus. From now on we'll be sleeping at home every night and commuting to shows. I've been counting down the hours... Sure enough, everything that could be slow and awkward today was slow and awkward, parking, taxis, etc, etc. And then suddenly the band were offstage and somehow we're on our way home to New York. I'm too tired to be very excited but I am very excited. In six hours I'll be in my own bed.

Update - our driver stopped to wash the bus on the way home along the i-95. We are driving home after being away for four weeks and he choses now of all times to wash the bus. I couldn't care right now if the bus was covered in baby parts and vomit. I just want to go home, to my bed, and get off this fucking bus that keeps attacking me with every sharp corner it has whenever it can.

2007-03-28T03:02:00.000+08:00

Fell In Love With A Girl.

This rarely happens on tour. I never have the time for one thing, but at the start of the tour I threw a bunch of novels in my bag in a brief, optimistic spasm. I never thought I'd get to read any of them, never mind most of them. I read "Alligator" by a Canadian writer, Lisa Moore. It's amazing. Her writing is so good, so precise, so specific. I finished the book quickly (which has an alligator on the cover too, which is never a bad thing in my book) and tried to find other titles by her, of which there are only two. I couldn't find them in the USA, but in Toronto yesterday I found a collection of short stories called Open and these are also wonderfully written. The first two I finished over an omlette late last night; I couldn't put the book down and ate a whole meal groping for the plate, not taking my eyes off the page. I love it when this happens. Cynical and jaded as I always sound I'm always really waiting eternally to be inspired and amazed; and when it happens it's always the best feeling. Like being in love.

I also read Pat Barker's Blow Your House Down which evokes a certain time in Northern English history. One of those books I fell into - it's a grim world she describes, but compelling and vivid enough for me to smell the damp viaduct arches and the cold northern winter evenings. The Dark Room by Rachel Seiffert is excellent too.

We're in Montreal today. The venue is in a sleazy part of town. The Quebeconians (?) are brusque and dour. It's like being in a crappy part of Paris. I love it. Love. It. And sulky/sultry French-Canadian girls are great, like pouty Parisian women; cute if you don't take them too seriously. Imagine a five year-old giving you evils and attitude while stomping around in her mum's oversized shoes...

Oh and Canada = Cadburys. Thank you Jesus.

2007-03-27T04:37:00.000+08:00

Toronto:

We left the kids on a bench in Royal Oak, Michigan. We tried throwing them into a tree but stopped when we saw we were being filmed by at least 3 CCTV cameras. This being America, we envisioned being pulled over by cops later for littering a tree with bears, which might almost have been worth it. As it was, a passerby asked Duct-tape guy if the bears were ours (it was 1AM) and then suggested they looked like bombs. Frankly, anyone dumb enough to think that someone would bomb the arse-end of Detriot by leaving four bombs disguised as valentine's bears on a bench at 1AM is either a scriptwriter or too stupid to be anything other than an donor for nice bright people with failing organs and terminal illnesses. Cute though, aren't they?

The view from the afternoon. I've noticed a disturbing trend - all over the USA and now Canadia it seems you can go to Meet Donald. Why would anyone want to? He always strikes me as a bit of a tosser. I guess people would like to meet his money--if indeed, he really has any. Me included, as long as I didn't have to touch him.

Now the tour is winding down (12 days left), the days off are actually like days off. Albert and Matt have an afternoon of promotion in Toronto while the rest of us hang around the one hotel room we've kept on for us to hang around in. I went out for breakfast at a place called Eggspectations which had one notable feature - a bilingual bottle of brown sauce.

Brown sauce (delcious, fruity and spicy) is a staple of the english diet, and it is rarely seen outside of the Sceptred Isle (which can only be due to the fact that it's an acquired sophisticated taste and all the other countries in the world are peopled by natives with vulgar palates), that I was happy to see it here. And, as an added bonus, it was labeled in English and French. Despite the centuries old animosity between the two countries there is, I think, a grudging affection between the British and the French. We're both beligerent, haughty, and have a strong sense of independence. Certainly looking at Europe from the viewpoint of spending 10 years in America it seems that Germany, England, France, and Holland all have so much in common that it's almost funny that they view themselves as separate from each other.

And Canadian maple syrup tastes more of maples than American maple syrup. When I toured with Pulp during 1995 I could tell the diffence between different champagnes just by taste (Moet and Chandon was very much considered cooking champagne). 10 years in America and now I'm an authority on syrup. Quality.

Yonge Street, Tronto.

Today's the kind of lazy day where you call friends or email all your ex's because you have time to wonder how all the people you've known are doing. Toronto is rushing through its Monday afternoon outside, everyone looking forward to six pm, or whatever time they knock-off. Our day is more nebulous, check-out at 2PM, bus call at 11PM to go to Montreal.

Time is always so relative, especially on tour, and it never seems more so when you're hanging around in a foreign city watching everyone else's world flash past. Like being in Tokyo, or Xi'an, or Berlin or Perth you see that all over the planet people have similar schedules, similar concerns, similar lives; lives that not only mirror your own but at the same time are completely independent of your world. We're none of us so special nor so unimportant. I think that's one of the things I like most about travel. It makes you get over yourself. Despite language and social status, we are all so alike.

Working in an environment where there's always someone to meet you at the airport, always a rooming list of the the best rooms at the hotel, always a crush of people trying to hang out in your world (not always, I admit, but more often than not. What's a bit of poetic licence, eh?) it's easy to get used to a certain amount of attention - however disparaging I might be about said attention. It's good to be reminded that you're not only not all that, but you're not even any of that in the scheme of things. When I was younger and needier I used to think that Aleister Crowley's quote "Every man and woman is a star" meant that I was (allowed to be) special too (where I come from one was never encouraged in such thinking). And maybe it did, then, but nowadays I think the emphasis for me is on the every man and woman.

2007-03-23T07:19:00.000+08:00

Columbus, OH

Let us not talk about Indianapolis, IN. Let us not dwell on its endless suburban highways and it's "nearby" Staples that was a 3 mile walk and didn't have any replacement printers in it when I got there. (My printer died for breakfast. And I can't write with hands anymore. It's a kind of devolution. Soon I won't be able to read from paper....). In fact the only interesting thing about Indianapolis, as far as I could tell, was that the promoter's rep came from Hawaii so I got to talk about Hawaii for half an hour at the end of the night. Which was nice.

But Columbus, Ohio, who knew? I took it as a sign that when the very pretty girl went into the North Market that I too should see what food stalls they had in there for me to eat lunch at ( I didn't ever claim to having a sophisticated decision making process) . I found a great vietnamese food counter and got a chicken soup (Pho Ga). After weeks of white bread and potato chips the hot, spicy broth with beansprouts and cilantro tasted amazing and I felt healthy for the rest of the day - I didn't eat a M&M until 7PM. It felt like the first day of spring yesterday, warm and sunny. And just to make us all smile a little more Marc got a ticket for jaywalking. I couldn't get any closer for the photo without risking annoying the cop some more. It cost him $86.00 to cross the road. Actually, crossing the road was free, it was giving the cop some lip that cost $86.

Today we have a day off in Chicago. The rooms were ready early, the sun is shining, the pretty girls are out on the street (There's always a day, every spring, especially in New York, when the weather changes and the girls come out. It's usually an unspoken thing, but every bloke I know knows about it when I've brought it up. Another reason to look forward to going home). I went to the diner I like to visit on Chestnut and read a ton of emails from friends. I felt normal walking around the city--no empty suburban highways here. There's a DVD player in my room too, so $60 later, after a snout around in Virgin's sale bins, and I'm watching Snatch and rewinding to translate Brad Pitt's genius Pikey accent. Life is ok, today. I'll be home in New York in less than a week. And I'm thinking about my friends, which is like spending time with them.

2007-03-21T00:56:00.000+08:00

McJob:

McDonalds is objecting (again) to the use of the term "McJob" being used in dictionaries. They object to the definition which is more or less:

"an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, especially one created by the expansion of the service sector". (Oxford English Dictionary).

McD claims this term is "an inaccurate description of restaurant employment" and "a slap in the face to the 12 million men and women" who work in the restaurant industry.

Oh, do fuck off.

I hate McDonalds. Never mind that they sell crappy food and ruthlessly target children with their heinous clown; never mind that their marketing is insidious and duplicitous. They are trying to protect and perpetuate their lie (we care, we sell good food. we are your friend, we are kind people concerned with you and the welfare of your children) by silencing any criticism of their practices in any form. I fundamentally oppose any coporation that tries to silence free speech and that is prepared to bully people who object to their vulgar business practices. While it's impractical, I know, to avoid all the companies who do this (as I'm sure most do/would) I have chosen McDonalds to boycott. I haven't eaten in one for years, and will not give them any money. In n' Out manage to sell burgers of a certain quality; why not McDonalds?

And if there is any doubt about their rapacious, greedy corporate nature, take a look at the McLibel Trial (Below). It's reason enough to not give this company any more money. And I know there's a Quixotic element to boycotting one of a million nasty companies; however, one can but try.

McLibel Case

2007-03-20T12:31:00.000+08:00

Picture This

Random photos...

On my way back from the Porn Warehouse in Austin (you'll have to read the previous entries for an explanation. It wasn't for me, it was for a friend. Honest) I saw this guy at an off-ramp to the I-35. He's photogrpahed in the side-mirror to the van I was driving. He was begging at a stop light. On his backpack (which you can't really see clearly) was a sign that said Free Hugs. I felt very guilty that this man was begging while I'd just been entertaining thoughts of buying expensive sex-toys as a throwaway joke. Even though I was sitting in the car with the money and he was begging I felt right then that he had all the dignity in the world compared to me.

'nuff said already. Nashville, who knew you were into this?

This was a sign in the elevator in the hotel in Nashville (which was staffed, incidentally, by the nicest, most polite people in the world. And you know I'm an authority on politeness....). I wondered what prompted the elevator manufacturer to install a sign like this? Lack of confidence? And to be honest, if you got in an elevator and it had an in-built giant sign that said (effectively) "Dont' Panic" wouldn't that kind of undermine the message?

This soldier standing next to a printing press was on a platform about 12 feet in the air outside a printers. At first I thought it was touching how someone had dressed him up as a soldier - this is the heartland after all and they were probably missing someone sent over to invade Iraq - but when I thought about it some more it scared me. Someone had bought a uniform and dressed a mannequin as a soldier then managed to position him on a platform twelve feet up in the air. It didn't strike me as a yellow ribbon tied round an old oak tree as much as it struck me as a big fuck-you. One would have to be quite angry to go to those lengths.

2007-03-20T10:02:00.000+08:00

South By Southwest (Absolutely the last time I say anything about Texas)

Where do I begin? Shall I count the ways?

You are a wanker if:

1> You refer to South By Southwest as "South By"

2> You wear your credential (let's not call it a laminate because it's not) around your neck while you're walking around the streets of Austin. These are not cool, and even if it's an all access laminate for God's gig in heaven, it's still wanky to wear your pass outside of the venue. At SBS more than anywhere they don't infer any coolness on you or really give you any special rights, as the guy found out when he refused to move from the side of the stage when it was time for the band to come off. Silly boy. That pass had no effect, did it? More to the point, it didn't give you any special powers or make you invincible either, did it? Wanker.

3> You work at a record company and you try to get extra wristbands off the band you're there to see. You earn more than they do, stop leeching.

4> You work at a record company. *

5> You insist on trying to inch your way backstage to hang out near the band; slow-creeping down the bar, chatting to the arrogant tosser of a barman--who, for one solitary week in March has more than ten customers and finally gets some attention--sliding your way towards the Mexican bus-boys, over to the fire escape and exactly in the way of anyone who's trying to do a 45 minute changeover in 10 minutes. If you were wanted backstage you'd be backstage already. That's how a tiered pass system works. It's not an oversight; you don't have the right pass because you're not wanted there. There's no point trying to ignore this obvious fact while slurping a piss-weak beer and getting slammed in the legs by flight-cases and looking pissy. Apologies if I bruised your sorry-ass with a high speed Fender 2 x 12 Hot Rod Deville; silly me, I was trying to put the gig on. That noisy music stuff? Yeah, that was us. I know, I know--terrid roadies. Don't they know that you've come to South By because you're in the "Music Business"? Don't they know that you're talking to some fucking troll at the bar and it's IMPORTANT? Don't they know that, that, that.....that you've got wristbands, goddammit?!

6> You went to South By Southwest and you didn't need to.**

7> You had anything to do with organising the music programming /production side of this fucking festival. It has so little regard for the music, it's painful to see it billed as such. Only a few years ago it was a destination for indie-minded people to go to see bands that were under the radar and hadn't broken yet, or couldn't get anywhere. Now it's a huge corporate venture with the music coming a sad last to everything else. I felt like the music and the performances were almost annoyances as they're given so little attention compared to say, the cocksuck that's pass allocation or something really significant. And it's not that I don't get that there's a lot going on but really....

For example:

Our soundcheck clashed with an instore performance. Fair enough. I set our arrival time at the gig to 11:30PM as there was no point getting to the venue directly from the instore (at 7PM) to unload our cases and do nothing but wait for 6 hours. This was a big No-No apparently and the day before I got several calls from people wigging out that basically we were being inconvenient (it was such a big problem that no one had thought to call me about it until 24 hours before the show). Bit of bad luck that. Anyway, even on the night I get calls from people asking me to bring the bus in three hours earlier for no reason other than they're fucking clueless. So we turn up at 11:30PM (even though the guy from the label told me the wrong load-in address. Luckily I ignored him, but see note # 4), unload the bus and wait with our gear by the dumpsters out back as there is no room in the club to store gear. if we hadn't been so "inconvenient" then we'd have been sitting outside by the dumpsters for 6 hours, instead of one. Had someone known what they were talking about they would have worried more about managing the stage than whining about us coming in late with a bus that caused no problems whatsoever. And even if it was difficult, so what? Isn't it about the gig? Or am I missing something..?

During our show the stage manager is absent from the stage and Albert's set runs over. The venue starts threatening to pull the power - the stage manager is nowhere to be seen - hiding, no doubt. Had he done his job earlier there'd have been no problem. But why the fuck would he do that? It's South By.... I later heard the venue got fined because we went over curfew. Good. They should have. They were ignorant. But it's nice to see the City Of Austin taking another cut from the festival by way of fining venues for excess noise at 2AM on 6th Street. BFD.

The Stage Manager's advance consisted of telling me what time we had to be there for soundcheck (too early) and then asking us to share gear. When the Mooney Suzuki shared gear as per the Stage Manager's request the following night they had two other bands (after the fact) ask them for money for the privilege (The HooDoo Guru's wanted $75 for use of their bass rig...). We didn't share gear, except when the band before us forgot all their drum parts and a guitar and Albert's band helped them out for free (as you would). We managed the stage during the change-over to hustle everyone out of the way. The Stage Manager wasn't present. A ton of liggers were however, all trying to be special by proving they didn't really need to move out of the way of the crew moving flight-cases. Those fuckers hurt when they clip you, don't they? Sorry about that.

You can only collect your passes in person. What a joke that is - seven people need to go line-up for up to two hours to get credentials because the tour manager can't collect them all. We didn't bother and went credential-less for the whole festival. The writstbands guarantee nothing anyway and for any cool shows the only way you get in is to know someone.

Ironically, Albert played at the Blender Party on Friday night and it was the best-run event I've ever been to at South By Southwest. Someone had invested in proper gear and a realistic schedule. I almost enjoyed doing the show. (Similarly, there was an instore at Waterloo Records and although they had very limited facilities they were at least welcoming and helpful. I didn't feel like an inconvenience at Waterloo, either). Strange how the corporate party got it right but the music festival treats all the bands like shit. At SBS there are limited facilities, limited production, no riders, nothing much of anything. It's like the emporer's new clothes of festivals. Why is that? And if I sound churlish and ungrateful consider that I've been putting on gigs for 20 years in one way or another and I completely understand the problems of managing large groups of uncoordinated people. But if the focus of the festival is as it's pitched, the music; then it needs to be the focus of the festival. Not some aside to a load of wankers getting loaded and jerking each other off; or included in the festival as a barely tolerated inconvenience. I know most bands are crap at dealing with practical matters but treating all bands like they should be grateful for being treated like cattle belies the advertising somewhat, if you ask me. Kind of forgetting the point of it all.

The best thing for me was the SBS staff tee-shirts. They had a stick-man holding up the world as a design. Yeah, that's right, you pompous fuckers; you're really carrying a burden there, saving indieland, keeping the world of music alive. For fuck's sake....get over yourselves. Go to Glastonbury or Virgin (UK) or Roskilde or Hurricane or Big Day Out to see how a proper festival works for a ton of bands. That Texan hippy bullshit vibe is bogus and hypocritical.

However, I loved seeing my friends there. I love my friends and my friends who were there were also feeling sidelined by the whole thing. We hung out a little and giggled at the two most common looks: a> Black skinny jeans and jacket (band person) or b) Jeans & untucked checked shirt (label person). I even have friends from Texas there, although they don't live in Texas anymore. It's something we don't bring up. Like a prison sentence that's been served or something.

For the record, I don't know how the band felt about their visit to South By Southwest. Just because I think it's a bag of sick doesn't mean they do too.

* With the exception of Rough Trade Records or if you're one of my friends and you work at a record company. Being my friend trumps being a wanker from the label - remember this on my birthday. It's november ninth.

** Not strictly true, but it sounds good.

2007-03-19T15:57:00.000+08:00

The Last Thing I'll Ever Say About Texas, Here*.

So the week in Texas passed more quickly than I expected it to. I think a large part of that was because SBS (to give it its proper acronym) was such a blur of activity that time flew there.

At the Dallas show we encountered our first torrential downpour just after we loaded-in. The sky before the storm was green, it's something I've never seen before. It was a biblical amount of rain, which is fitting for this tour. On this tour since January we've / they've endured fires (x 2), stabbed wheels, thefts, a collision with a runaway villain, and now floods ( in Houston the rain was so heavy the slide-out lounge flooded - a full-on water everywhere flood, not just a drip here and there). I think we're working our way through the ten plagues of Egypt which means, by my reckoning, we've got at least Lice, Rivers of Blood and Unhealable Boils to look forward to.

Erm, actually, I might have two of those covered already.

Under the weight of the approaching storm Josh and Marc played a little wiffle ball in an abandoned lot, laughing in the face of an angry god with their underarm serves and wild, effete swings. They reminded me of a young Hall & Oates playing on the streets of Philly, honing their harmonising chops, before they were swept up up in the yacht rock phenomenom. Just two kids, believing in a dream, hanging out with poor black children and stealing their music, cutting off its balls, and selling it to white people. Hall and Oates that is, not Josh and Marc; Josh and Marc were just bored.

Or maybe I read the Hall & Oates bio' incorrectly?

The venue where we played in Dallas is about to be converted into a Starbucks. It's the first time I think I can say without reservation that it is definitely an improvement. People get very sentimental about all these nasty old club venues, I suspect because they don't know any better. I guess I'm not the sentimental type as I think it would be better to burn them all down and to replace them with a parking lot or a Pottery Barn. Not that I like Pottery Barn per se, but you get my point. Why a venue that caters to live music has to smell of piss and beer and have no facilities (even for a live gig, a flat, safe, workable stage would be nice sometimes, as would a PA system that wasn't wank or a local tech who didn't know everything because he was once a stagehand at a Cradle of Filth gig and still has the sticky pass to prove it) is beyond me. Or rather, it's not (no one invests in the venues and the audience accepts them), but why anyone gets attached to these kinds of toilets I cannot imagine. Maybe these are the Unhealable Boils we're supposed to suffer on this tour (the other ones, not the ones I alluded to above....)? But Yay!- a Deep Ellum Starbucks! Finally something to look forward to in Dallas, besides having a picnic where a president was assassinated through the face in front of his wife.

When I woke up in Houston our bus was parked at the back of the venue. The venue was a converted box / warehouse on the edge of Chinatown. It was an Unhealable Boil. There was no one on the streets except beggars. Across the street was the modeling agency, pictured below. I didn't realise that there was such a demand for a 24/7 modeling agency in Houston. Are people there always putting on surprise catwalk shows round the clock and need models? I am confused and not a little cheered. Who doesn't like a fashion show? Lots of pretty girls walking up and down like giraffes with broken pelvises in clothes.... To think that one could pop up at any moment excited me, even though it didn't happen. Go models of Houston! Go with your crazy surprise Fashion Shows!

The people we met in Houston were very nice though. Except the taxi drivers, who were all wankers or weird. I've traveled in taxis all over the world and these were the worst I've ever encountered. Still, what do I care? They're driving taxis in Houston and I'm....oh yeah. I'm on a bus in Tennessee. That'll show them, won't it?

* Except for South By Southwest, of course.

2007-03-18T08:51:00.000+08:00

Deaddy Bears Picnic.

A tour bus is a very masculine place, even with a bunch of fey lightweights like us on it. (Jamie pointed out this morning that our obsession with watching Grey's Anatomy and eating at Whole Foods makes us the most un-rock and roll touring party ever...). That said - and I have to be quick as I've just downloaded a new episode and I'm hoping to watch it by stage time; I mean, wtf is going on with Meredith these days?! - with 8 men living in close quarters with one another it can't help but get a bit blokey on the bus. (I bet even Japan's tour bus did the same). So, as if to counteract this, teddy bears started appearing at truck stops - I guess flowers aren't a good option as a humanising touch on a tour bus. We have 5 bears now littering the seats, and in some cases, and I'm naming no names, bunks.

Then one morning in Houston - and it had to be Texas, too, didn't it? - I woke up to find one of the bears stabbed through the heart. This brought out the creative streak in the murderer because later jam was smeared over its chest like blood and the following morning the bear had a skull head. Later still, one of it's brothers was found hanging from the roof.

I don't know whether to be upset that we can't leave anything nice alone, or relieved that we haven't all softened so much that we're no longer men enough to murder a poncy teddy bear when it sits in our seat.

I will say this however, if anyone touches the teal bunny I will fucking maim them.

2007-03-17T04:15:00.000+08:00

Texas:

Oh Jesus Christ. And they do it all in your name, mate.

Every evening I get to see corridors like the one below as I walk around and deliver my day-sheets (sheets outlining the following day's activities that I type up for everyone so they know what time to get up and be ready to leave, etc. etc. No one reads them and then they spend the next day asking me what was on the sheet). Sometimes walking around a hotel at night can be spooky. This hotel was very quiet.

I can only assume everyone was in their rooms watching the Christian DAYSTAR TV CHANNEL. Almost all of the men on the channel have very trimmed and dyed beards, and weird starey eyes. When I saw a few moments of it (and that was all I could take; my dead black soul unable to bear the presence of such pure Christian love for any longer) I saw a segment in which a man was talking about his wife's 14 year-long battle with depression; depression eventually cured by a dream of Jesus coming down and telling her (I'm paraphrasing) "enough with the depression already." The woman was then able to put 14 years of depression behind her because of her faith. I thought it was interesting that her husband didn't seem to examine why his wife had been depressed for 14 years... to be honest, and I'm taking a wild guess, but being married to a man with an unnatural beard, starey eyes, who couches everything in divine a self-aggrandising context might depress me for 14 years too. But what do I know? I have no soul. Not anymore. I watch everything with blank glassy eyes and try to remember what it was like to feel moved by something. However, I've just come back from South By Southwest so that might have something to do with it.

Seeing as it's such a Christian state, and people take their god very seriously here, if not their adherence to all that tedious religious doctrine, I was surprised to find that the devil had won out on the hotel Movie Channels. There were 49 different channels of full penetration pornography on my TV. Maybe that's why the corridors were so quiet at night?

Tangentally, while shopping for stage props (dont' ask) a few days later in Austin, I had the fortune to visit this fine emporium. Next to the I-35 interstate a few miles outside of town, it is a huge shed full of smut. It has a discreet parking lot around the back and inside it's like a blockbuster video store full of scut. I had to look in the "toy" section and I have to be honest and say I obviously come from a very small town. There were appendages there longer than my limbs, and thicker too. Nothing makes me realise how pedestrian I am than seeing the range of toys, gadgets, titilaters and plain old flesh-wreckers on sale in a porn store. That, and seeing who is buying all this stuff. That's more interesting, to be honest. Especially if you can follow them home and then, later on, back to work where you'll be able to blackmail them, or maybe date them. Or both. Which would be like Christmas and your birthday all at the same time.

2007-03-13T13:10:00.000+08:00

There's a Strat' in Me Kitchen....

What am a gonna' do....? And here's several thousands of dollars worth of guitars ready for load-out. Because the guitars get all sweaty every night on stage, we run them under hot water in the sink to kill the germs and to rinse off the fan flakes that get stuck to them before we put them back in the flight cases. (Btw, imho UB40 were crap after their first single; a cabaret covers band...).

Backstage in San Francisco at Popscene. Yes, that's right, the dressing room was in a fire escape. It was worse for the support band; they had a landing just like ours but without any drinks on it. Living the dream.

And from the ridiculous, above, to the sublime, below. This is the view of Boulder from the van on the way to doing a radio session thirty hours later. The mountains were magnificent and I want to go back to hang out there sometime when I'm not working; maybe to catch and tame some bears? That might be a chuckle. If they don't have bears I'll go catch me some Elk and train them. Can one train Elk to do bank robberies? Please write in with your Bear / Elk-training stories....

2007-03-13T07:39:00.000+08:00

Dallas - Spring Is Here:

Yes it is. And I've been staying in my room watching movies, which has been great. Children Of Men was good - Clive Owen is from my hometown so I like him, especially when he swears in a Coventry accent. Jesus Camp was terrifying, truly. Venus was great too. I guess one's old when one identifies with the Peter O' Toole character. The film made me homesick for London too, or rather, for being in London and in love (although not necessarily with a woman fifty years my junior).

It's good to feel the sunshine and with the clocks going forward it's lighter later, which is also good. Texas is wide and vast and flat outside the window; a gothic kind of flat and empty. (Note the poor people's houses right next to the hotel. Across the street from the hotel-not pictured-is a vast Mall with lots of high-end stores. It must fuck with you being poor and living next to giant Macys, Versace & Gucci stores...? I grew up quite poor--I dont' want to exaggerate my ghetto credentials like all us middle-class people are fond of doing; we never went without in our house, for example, becuase my mum worked hard to keep us together after my dad died. But I still carry it with me. I've only just now started to get rid of my prejudice against money and the moneyed. I'm glad our lack of cash wasn't rubbed in my face when I grew up. There was just a posh part of town that we drove through occassionally but I certainly didn't have to look at a giant retail emporium I couldn't afford to shop in every day. That said, that posh part of Coventry I just mentioned? One day I'm going to buy it and turn it into a car-park. That'll teach the buggers....).

Looking at the horizon stretching forever I kept feeling alternately alone and spooked in turn. I am in contact with friends by text and email and very rarely by telephone - I have friends in LA, NY, London, AZ & Berlin that I stay in touch with. All of them are virtual relationships in that I hardly ever see these people although I spend a lot of time thinking about them. I permanently have one pavlovian eye trained on the message light on my blackberry and feel kind of let down when I just get a work email or text. Incoming texts and emails are like tiny sugar hits all through the day.

This is my hotel room in Dallas. In this room, where the dust floats slowly in the sunlight and where the air is very still, if I sit very quietly and don't move, it's like I'm not in it.

2007-03-12T14:16:00.000+08:00

A Night Off In Dallas, TX.

In Boulder, CO I had a quiet word with myself; I really am letting myself get out of hand with all the negativity. Consequently I decided that, in the words of my old granny, if I can't say anything nice then I shan't say anything at all.

We are in Dallas.

2007-03-11T01:43:00.000+08:00

California Love:

We get to the LA venue. The crew there are talking a good game. The venue is beautiful, an old dance-hall style room with big chandeliers. On the surface, it’s all good. There’s a strange vibe though, and much macho posturing and butch roadie talk; we’re a step up the evolutionary ladder from people wearing all their old laminates or utility belts with every type of wrench and bat-shark repellent attached. Everything is going okay, the doors open, the support band play and then there’s change-over. Suddenly everything goes to shit. The monitor guy can’t remember where anything goes, the lead vocal mic’ is pulling shocks, no one knows how or why but suddenly all these “experienced” guys have all fucked-off, only to come back later when the problem has been solved to dance behind the curtain on stage like twats. Bunch of c***s. I’m not so surprised, it’s LA and everyone here talks a better game than they deliver, but it’s tedious. Frankly, if some wanker wants to stomp around a venue posing and competing in the world’s most roadiest roadie competition I’m happy to let him. I’m not playing. But when they can’t deliver or spend more time competing with their own vanity than they do doing the job at hand it’s a waste of everyone’s time and fucks up the show.

[I am redacting the comments I previously posted about certain people from the Music Business in LA. I think those comments were probably illegal, although the description of someone having the intelligence and finesse of a drunk, spastic moose still stands]. Suffice is to say that I never have any respect for people who work in music with the sole aim of hanging out with the band. It's no surprise that people are like that, it's the other side of the coin of what I do to some degree, but one has to be about the music first. If you're not then you're a bit of twat in my book.

However, I will still admit to the following: At least my enraged feeling is better than last year where there was a lighting guy who’s head I wanted to slam in a car door until it popped every single day when he opened his fat mouth, just like Vinnie Jones does in Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. Whatev’s. The world is full of dickheads, right? I’m just meeting all mine this week… But I’m setting myself a personal goal of not slapping [person's name removed] before the end of the tour. I have to remember I’m not in Coventry anymore.

We drive to San Francisco. I always get sad leaving LA. I feel like there’s another life I’m not living there, and that maybe I should be.

I couldn't work there though. I always feel like I need to shower in scalding hot bleach when I leave LA music people.

Heart Of Darkness:

Albert plays a show in San Francisco. The morning after I take the rental vans back to U-Haul and Avis respectively. I get into arguments at both locations. At U-Haul although I’m five hours early for my 24 hour rental, the girl claims I’m 30 minutes late as I said I’d be back at 9AM. Silly moo. At Avis the guy checking the car tells me to tell the office the mileage. The office guy gives me a hard time because I didn’t check the car in correctly. I tell him I gave the keys to the van to a man I met on the street outside who was smoking crack cocaine. He believes me. Eventually he gets the guy from the garage to vouch for me. Fuckwit. By 10AM I’ve had two arguments wile returning rental vehicles back in perfect condition five hours early. Boredom.

My skin is falling off, it's pretty disgusting. I think it’s because I’m biting back lots of bad words I want to say and they’re coming out through my epidermis. It takes so much energy to be so pissed off all the time and not let it out. It’s like having a toothache or trying to hold a basketball under water the whole time. I’ve realized if I hang out with solely the traveling party it helps some.

I had a dream last night about a friend of mine I’m hoping to catch up with at SXSW (A dull, hellish drinking festival in Texas) and I woke up feeling happy. We won't have time to catch up, but I’ll take anything I can get these days by way of a good feeling.