What I've learned from driving a 14 year old boy to hockey practice

1. 14-year olds are insanely frustrating. Perhaps they should all be quarantined until further mental development is achieved.

2.

I give up, California

I've tried and I've tried to write about my trip to California. From the moderate amount of time there, I formed some very strong opinions, but I haven't been able to express them clearly. Then I thought, fuck it, I'm lazy, let's go on Youtube.

Let's allow some music written about SF and LA to speak for itself. Feel free (to all .5 of you that read this) to point out that I picked songs which validate my point, being that SF WAS the bastion of enlightened American life. That was many lifetimes ago and what is left is a city that prides itself on being better than every other city (especially LA), but which embodies just as much superficiality and wealth. Where LA has Maserati's and small dogs in Fendi bags (or whatever's trendy. If it's not from Village de Valeur, I don't know it), SF has trips to study meditation in Burma and small dogs in Lululemon bags. Both lifestyles are in the same economic bracket, and I can promise you no one in SF lives in a mansion because they recycled enough cans to live in Russian Hill. LA can be gross, but it doesn't pretend to be anything other than that, and I appreciate a city that recognizes it faults and just rolls with it. Quite literally, as I believe cars outnumber people.

San Francisco:



[Though this dude has an AMAZING mustache. Points for that]




Los Angeles: (for the record, LA radio stations overdo this very exercise by playing ONLY songs which mention LA in the lyrics, most frequently "LA Woman" by The Doors. I refuse to post that since I think it might negate my "cool" argument)

Ok, Let's Get These States Over With

Idaho

Never before have I been so bored in a state. Never. And I’ve been to Ohio (zing!). Boise is surrounded by mountains, but everything looks like sprawl. It’s like a town that people got lost in on their way to somewhere else. Or like that town in “Silent Hill”, where you keep trying to leave but every time you take the road out of town you’re back in Boise again. Maybe Boise is someone’s purgatory come to life. A place there the town is slowly taking pieces of your soul until one day, you forget how you ever got there or where you are going.

Also surprising was that, after years of being and on-off smoker (though that whole hippie yoga shit has made me far more of an off in the last 6 mos), being in bars that allow smoking was actually totally disgusting.

Way to go, Idaho. One of, like. 6 states that still allows smoking. And you’re not even in the south!

Moving on.

Utah, or, where the Mormons roam

Salt Lake City, you caught me by surprise. Here I was, thinking I could just make a few cheap quips about Mormons and mountains, and I’d be done. But you’re proving to be a formidable force against my total snark.

Well, not completely. You did get us stuck in traffic as soon as we hit the city. Imagine my delight that the reason for this traffic was because church has just let out from the Joseph Smith giant Vatican-esque center. How can I NOT make jokes? And it’s true, many of your resident do attend BYU, where they are not allowed to grow beards and seem to have married young to avoid that whole “sex before marriage” clause. But they are polite, and seemingly genuine. And the city actually has some vintage stores, a tattoo parlor, and many many Mexican taco carts, AKA, you have a population of hipsters somewhere, and for that I applaud you.

And most importantly, Utah, you are actually really gorgeous. No wonder Sundance is held in your snowy bosom. Which is an apt phrasing, as you are full of snow covered hills.

I’ll even forgive you making me re-live my winter nightmares because you did it with such grace.

And of course, you do have THUNDER SNOW.

Wyoming

Once when I was at Interlochen Arts Academy summer camp, I made a very dear friend named Emily. She was from Jackson Hole, Wyoming and we were the best of pals. I was a sheltered weirdo from the Midwest, and she was a wild child who talked about sex and drugs, and I’m pretty sure that summer was the first time I’d ever kissed a boy (let’s not talk about how old I was), so I was both in awe and utterly terrified of her. In retrospect, maybe all her stories weren’t exactly honest, but it was camp. You could be whoever you wanted to be. Then camp ended and we were sad so I planned to go visit her, but backed out because at that point in my life, travel seemed overwhelming. So in conclusion, Wyoming, with your snow storm held-over from Utah and your ranches next to the highway and your hills and plains, you will always have a special place in my heart.

Colorado

I knew someone who used to complain about how flat Michigan was, and I just assumed he was some kind of Western elitist. Alas, no, he was telling the truth. Denver specifically is surrounded by the Rocky Mountains, which are probably pretty nice if you’re closer to them.

I saw about 3 blocks of Denver, so I can’t even pretend to judge it. I was excited that, unlike that last few towns we’ve rolled up to, there is actually a “downtown”. Skyscrapers! Also, Broncos? That’ll do, Colorado. That’ll do.

Oregon: Something very, very strange in these old woods.

Note: Tour is not conducive to blogging. Let's just enjoy reliving things that happened two weeks ago, while in fact tour is over and I am in Chicago...

Not to get too Freudian, but over the years, I’ve had a number of reoccurring themes to my dreams. Extremely dense natural settings, especially forests, have been a prominent one for years. You can imagine, then, how excited I was to find that Oregon looks like this:

Only a quick ride outside of Portland, Multnomah falls can’t really be portrayed in photos. You need the full effect. The heaviness that permeates all the colors. The constant drone of water hitting water. I kept thinking what it would have been like to be there when, in stead of a highway, the river extended directly into the lake.

STOCK PHOTO BECAUSE HOW TO DO YOU TURN PHOTOS CLOCKWISE??

No matter how dopey-hippie it sounds, there is an intense majesty to nature in the Northwest.

Even in a BFE ("bumble fuck Egypt") town like La Grande, OR, the mountains led to a certain...pensiveness....wait, maybe that was Hipstamatic

The future

According to NPR, McDonald's is holding is first ever job fair, hoping to hire 50,000 people to staff their new 24-hr McDonalds.

In the future, we will all work at McDonalds and Walmart, preferably in the same building. Those who choose to escape this fate will be ostracized and live in the shadows, trying to avoid the roving bands of McDonald recruiters.

On the road...

Song of the moment:

On getting to Portland

America being poor as it is, I bet Greyhound is experiencing a resurgence of riders. No more is it just for the extremely unwashed (that only accounted for maybe 30% of the passengers). It’s not even that cheap, considering that you are paying to get somewhere 3 times as slowly and with accommodations enjoyed mostly in kennels. For 15 hours, you enjoy such games as, how do I get this weirdo to stop falling asleep on me, will this drunk guy vomit or get kicked off the bus first, and which of you is most likely to decapitate your seatmate?

Rules for riding the overnight Greyhound bus:

1. Always bring food with you. Otherwise you might be forced to eat a sandwich you bought at 12AM in Sacramento from a convenience store.

2. While waiting in a bus station after dark, avoid eye contact with strangers. While this may seem unnecessarily defensive, it will save you the time of trying to explain that, no, you are not looking to “hook up” while in line for the bus. But thanks anyways.

3. If your seatmate is writing demonic scriptures to him or herself, it’s bet to avoid engaging them in a vigorous religious debate.

4. Know that you probably will not sleep, so be prepared to arrive in the morning with very little idea of where you are, why you are there or how you got there. [Note: The inability to fall asleep can be counteracted with alcohol or drugs. This will make you a part of the majority of your fellow bus riders. However, this is only advisable if you want to disregard rules 2 and 3].

With these and other tips, you too can enjoy a luxury also shared with such members of society of jail inmates and the criminally insane. For both, the same rules apply: find your best bitch face and sleep with one eye open.

Live Blogging Exhaustion, Part II

Place: Portland, OR. One 15 hour bus ride from SF to Portland. One drive up the coast for another person. One drive between SF--Vancouver--Portland for other. Now we sit in the green room, staying awake by sheer group momentum.

Douglas Fir Lounge. I appreciate your awesome room, and that we are staying in a hotel I only have to walk 5 minutes to.

The Southwest, a non-chronological update

I'm in SF right now, but with spotty internet and only a vague interest in remembering the southwest, I'm going to plaster my car written interpretations of NM, AZ, and the rest.

Like most people from the North who haven’t traveled farther south than Virginia (maybe that’s just me?), everything here feels foreign (except the feeling of not speaking the correct language. I don’t really speak French OR Spanish, so I’m used to being confused by background conversations). The farther west we traveled, the more the landscape became dry and flat, its only punctuation the mountain ranges dotting the horizon. Fences penned in flocks of animals everywhere, though they hardly seemed in a hurry to leave with way. There was a strange slow feeling that overcame everything, the only movement from the dust clouds.

Goats in the Texas plains....

New Mexico from a car

The native plants will kill you

The plants, unless they are cacti, are browns, despite it being summer weather, signs on the road warn against dust storms, and, oh yea, border patrol sets up random check points within the US. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, when their version of “checking” the cars consists of glancing at the inhabitant, they’re just looking for anyone who looks a little too “Mexican”. At first I was shocked, then I remembered that Arizona had set the trend for personally violating laws based mostly on race, so I shouldn’t be terribly shocked New Mexico was on that ball. Seriously, though, it felt like every 10 cars on the highway was a border patrol SUV, just….patroling. Or on the way to patrol.

This is the closest I’ve been to Mexico, and I have to admit I had no real concept of how long the US hugs the Mexican border. You can, at parts, actually see THE FENCE they built. It’s a pretty serious fence, too. The amount of money they spend on building fences and patrolling the borders and convincing people that Mexico is the cause of all economic woe could be used on….well, just about anything else.

Not much else can really be said about Arizona. There are some amazing mountains surrounding some towns that I can only imagine vacationing in. There is a lot to be said about amazing topography, but maybe they could have created towns that weren’t sprawling strip malls. The gallery we played at, Solar Culture, has such an amazing vibe to it. It’s at one calm and energized, and it was the perfect place to begin our tour with Sharon Von Ettan, who has a voice that can break hearts.

Phoenix was basically another sprawling mass. The palm trees, at least, were greener. But good god, what a sprawling, lame town.

On the way we hit not one but TWO different check points. The US is serious about Mexican border patrol, my god.

But there were sand dunes. It was like crawling through a Mojave, but outside of Yuma, Arizona.

Live Blogging Exhaustion

9:22 PM Pacific Whatever-the-fuck time. I think it's Pacific? At this point, days and time have no...more...meaning. I am currently at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa, California. Our shows are really going well, everyone sounds amazing, and I am so frackin' honored to be doing this. However, I am also pretty exhausted. We go on in...an hour or so I think? The sound guy most definitely is a yeller, so here's hoping no one gets chewed out. I am also in possession of a BMW 3-series, owned by someone probably lost to sea (John, if you read this, you'll understand why I stole your car and took in to SF. That, and it's literally 0-60 in 2 seconds.) Traffic at all hours, an amazing and terrifying plasticine sheen. Beaches that are beautiful even when it rains. Los Angeles, you are at once a dream and a nightmare I think I've had before.


I did, however, get some sick shoes on consignment.

SXSW: or, we’ll sleep when we’re dead

Austin, like any liberal city in the US, stands out amongst a sea of conservative communities. It reminded me of Ann Arbor (Michigan, for those not so Midwestern) at certain points, except with 90 degree weather in Mid-March. Capital buildings, cute coffee shops, art galleries, river walkways. Were it not for the fact that I know in the summer it becomes meltingly hot, I would certainly consider this an optional home. The river (or was it a lake?) proved to be a necessary escape point from the SXSW madness.

CAW!

But enough about Texas landscape (we’ve already done that), let’s cut to the grit: SXSW, or, when Raybans overran the entire Southwest. 350,000 concert-goers, thousands of bands, countless cans of free Lone Star and just as many taco trucks. The streets were PACKED with musicians and viewers.

The pace was intense. Play a show, move the gear, go to a show, play another show, attend party, go to another show. All while fighting crowds and lines and trying desperately to find free bottled water (free beer? Everywhere. Water? Not so much).

Some places were more into it than others.

I was lucky to catch some great bands and play some good shows. We started out at Red 7, a venue that normally caters to the more punk crowd but, for this evening, was hosting a wider range of bands. A personal favorite of mine were the Luyas, a band also from Montreal but who I had never had the opportunity to see perform. We both had some problems navigated the sound system, but our individual sounds still came through.

The Luyas rocking it with light bulb accompaniment

Little Scream

Daytrotter.com hosted us for a recorded web performance. It was amazing to have an almost endless amount of time to set up, sound check, and a couple times to re-do takes. Plus we got some badass photos. You can check out our performance, as well as that of the Luyas (and check out their music here, it's wonderful). Daytrotter recorded a countless amount of bands while at southby, so I’m not sure when we’re going up, but check out the site, it’s a great place to listen to new bands.

During the day, Austin is probably 80% traveling musicians, 20% locals attended shows or trying to get the hell out of town. After hours, though, the natives start to come back. Suddenly you find yourself wandering the streets at 2 AM, trying to hook up with your friends (a nearly impossible feat at SXSW, especially if you have a Canadian phone that doesn’t work EVEN though they said it would, thanks a lot Solomobile), surrounded not by your fellow musicians but by drunk University of Texas frat guys. “Where am I?!” you say fearfully to yourself as another person yells “get off my back, BRAH!”. Then a tiny voice inside your head says “Don’t you know? You’re in TEXAS”.

Texas: or, I can see Mexico from my house

Texas is an infamous state, isn’t it. “You all can go to hell, I’m going to Texas” (it’s hot enough to confuse the two). “Don’t mess with Texas. “ and my personal favorite, “Don’t mess with Texas Grandmas”, courtesy of the bumpersticker on Mike Hotlzman’s skyblue ford hatchback.. Either way, Texas has always existed as a legendary state, a place both viewed with awe (they still have the death penalty! Everybody has a gun!) and fear(see the former). However, being from Michigan, a state known for not needing the death penalty because you’ll possibly get shot there, I know not to rely on stereotypes. Or at least I am vaguely aware of that. Well, I try. Sometimes.

After enduring a cripplingly terrifying flight (for me at least), we landed in Dallas. Or to be more precise, we landed in Irving, TX, a suburb of Dallas. And like all suburbs, it left a lot to desire. Unless you desire Walmart, something called Whataburger, or Goodwill (actually, I did desire that last one. I got a great sweater and an Irish flag belt.)

Typical highway. fail.

Sprawling highways and chain restaurants snaked through the landscape. Sprawling highways named after Texas’s most revered natives.

I guess at least it was the first one? No, that's still not ok.

It should be noted that the people of Texas are outrageously polite. Smiling at perfect strangers, making small talk to whoever is around. As a native Northerner who has lived mostly in cities, I find this extremely disconcerting. I would say it was the weather but I find extremely hot weather makes me less friendly, more homicidal.

It’s also worth noting that, being an angry city person, I am used to a general political stance of “maybe Obama isn’t the best, but he’s better than the last few (except Clinton. He was the best)”. Which is why I spent about 20 minutes in the bookstore marveling at the political table that boasted books such as “Obama Zombies”, the telling account of how the youth movement behind Obama’s election was based on brainwashing.

Or perhaps you would prefer this more concise evaluation of Obama’s administration

I also got a window into the demographics of Irving, TX.

This change in demographics does lead to some amazing advertising;

Colbert?

All kidding aside, I’m probably just bitter because it’s TOO GOD DAMN HOT.

The further west you go, the more the winds pick up, the landscape gets dustier and you’re left with a vague fear you’ve stepped into “there will be blood”. The copious amount of small oil wells do little to assuage this fear (um, there would be a picture if I could figure out how to turn it vertical).

Being on tour, most of my pictures have been taken from cars, so it’s rare to capture that fact that, once you leave the urban centers, Texas does have a majesty to it’s landscape.

Please ignore the dashboard.

I leave you with my personal favorite song about Texas, by Jon Wayne.

Welcome back, welcome back, Welcome back

My adventures began on the snowy mountains roads of Vermont. Having crossed back into the US to begin a tour with Little Scream, I found myself lamenting that this would be the last time I would see snow until next winter (or until the freak April snow storm inevitably happens in Montreal). Maybe lamenting isn't the right word....excited? elated? You get the picture. I tried to take some pictures (using the camera generously lent to me by Lisa), but mountain photos out of a moving vehicle don't really do any justice. It was absolutely gorgeous, to say the least.

No wonder Vermonters are so...wait, what ARE Vermonters?

Flying, or "you are all, at this moment, actively a part of my living nightmare"

Despite my best efforts, caravans or covered wagons have not made a comeback as a viable method of transportation. Due to this, I found myself sitting on plane bound for Dallas out of Newark, desperately trying to control to impending sense of doom I felt. All logic fails to make any appeals. All I can hear is the roar of the engines and a screaming baby and as the plane wobbles through turbulence and I have another drink to maybe bring a vague sense of calm I think "why oh why are they making me pay $4 to watch television?!". No amount of Pranayama breathing can make me forget I am 40,000 feet (thats 12,192 meters for my metric system friends) in the air wobbling up and down and up and up and down and...

I did, however, take some photos, thinking "this is probably the last photo I will ever take. But if it's not, they'll make nice blog pics..."

New Jersey has never looked better.


Landing in Tejas.

But in fact I survived, much to my own amazement, though apparently not to any of the people having "normal" reactions to flying. That is to say, they managed to stay uncurled out of a ball. Imagine that...