Where is the hotel?

the silver lining is alive and well

i am home. it's weird to be back. i got lost going to glendale today!
festivals aren't all bad. look who i ran into the other day in Norway....Pamela!

she is in Gogol Bordello. i first met her in the one and only fashion show i was in in nyc in 2001. she was helping get us dressed. and for the past few summers i have run into her all over the world. the last time i saw her just happened to be Norway too. it's weird how that works. last week in barcelona i was in the middle of a plaza in a part of town that isn't touristy at all. we were sitting there having a drink when someone came running up to me and said my name. it was this dude jp who tour managed a french band i drove around the states 2 years ago. random. in the middle of spain a dude i know that i don't talk to that lives in paris ran up to me.
normally when this sort of thing happens i can explain it like "oh i live in LA. you live in london. we're both in nyc and we ran into each other on the lower east side." and that's cool and random. but if i know you and we both happen to be in nyc then we are probably both gonna be in the same neighborhood. but spain! barcelona. awesome.
anyway... back to pamela. she plays the washboard and the giant bass drum and really, really makes the show.

pamela. i'll see you in portugal in a couple of weeks!

home is home. i am at mikes and it feels great here. it's like being in a tree house. in a week it's back to hotels. but japanese hotels! the ones with the automatic curtains and the mirrors that don't fog up and crazy bidets and where they smoke in the elevators and when you call the front desk and ask for directions they fax a map to your room. japan. i love you.

here are two of my favorite recent rooms.

emmaboda, sweden.

and copenhagen. this one is my favorite of the last year or so. maybe since 2005 when i stayed at the hotel on rivington in nyc on the white stripes tour. i spent about 6 hours in total in it. what a shame.

speaking of white stripes.... i got a new job for september today.

pull my lips back and watch me smile

i'm coming home. i'm coming to los angeles. the band is playing as i write. the show will be done in an hour. i'll walk to the hotel around the corner. i'll repack my bags. i'll take a bath. and i'll sleep for an hour or two.
then i'll wake up at 4:45 AM (8:45 PM west coast). i'll take a mini bus to Katstrup Lufthavn here in Copenhagen. I'll check in on British Airways flight #811. The plane will take off at 7:50 AM (10:50 PM west coast time). I'll sleep. The plane will land at 9:00 AM (1 AM west coast time). I'll disembark and begin the arduos process of transfering through Heathrow. Not to sound like a dick. but it's not hard. orit wouldn't be hard if people that rarely travel would just stop. Heathrow now has a high budget movie they show while you are in the security line. But no one watches and they still all take their shoes off even though they don't have to. If all goes well i will have finished my terminal transfer at Heathrow by 10 AM. I'll look for a book. I'll have a coffee. I'll wait for my gate to be announced at which point I will hang out a little bit longer. Then i'll head to the gate, probably a 15 minute walk. At the gate I will show my boarding pass, possibly be searched again, and board my flight. Normally I would wait til everyone was on before boarding. But when i have an exit row seat like tomorrow (and all remaining flights on this trip) I board early. American Airlines flight #137 will leave the gate at approximately 11:25 AM (3:25 AM west coast time) and i'll be in the air shortly after that. Then I'll sleep and I'll eat and I'll stretch and I'll watch a movie or two. Maybe I'll watch the last episode of weeds. and I'll stare at the map of the flight path for a few hours or more.
And finally at about 2:40 PM (2:40 PM west coast time) after 11 hours and 15 minutes I'll be home. I'll get off the plane, clear immigration, wait for my bags, clear customs and head for the curb. Hopefully by 3:40 PM i will be in Cali's car, in tears, firmly ensconced in LA traffic. tears of joy, exhaustion, sorrow who knows. they'll all blend together.
Seriously, there'll be no deviation from that plan. Why? Just because... how else could it possibly go down? every thing from the packing to the customs clearance is business as usual. the tears? who knows.
but i haven't been "home" since march 28. so i am counting on them. regardless, i am coming home and i couldnt be happier.

i fell asleep the other day on the flight from trondheim to copenhagen. my camera was on the empty seat next to me. i like to think the flight attendant took this photo.

I'm ashamed of the things I've been put through

Surrendered to self preservation

From others who care for themselves

A blindness that touches perfection

But hurts just like anything else

But if you could just see the beauty

These things I could never describe

Life rebuilding

when you're on a plane do you ever look at the wing and wonder what would happen if a flap suddenly flew off? do you ever wonder what your reaction would be? do you ever not care if it falls out of the sky?

I'm ashamed of the person I am

my brothers! we're one and the same

dude.
check this out... did it today.

don't run our hearts around, don't hit them to the ground

i'll tell you a big secret. this is where devo lives!

nina showed up from LA. i didn't get any pictures of her arrival as i was freaking out. her flight from brussels had landed like 90 minutes earlier and she hadn't shown up. i knew she got on the plane in LA. when i was in heathrow waiting for my flight to barcelona i tracked her flight to brussels. i saw that it was 7 minutes from landing. i boarded my flight, landed in barcelona and waited. and waited outside of customs. i finally had convinced myself that her plane had crashed on arrival in brussels. so i logged onto the internet on my blackberry and checked out cnn. the first headline i could see, and only partially, said "200 people dead in plane crash". well that was in brazil but for a second i was freaking. anyway...she came out and i was so stoked i forgot to get a photo. her bag had been left behind in chicago.

we couldn't get train tickets cause they were all booked up for the festival. so i rented a car from the aiport and we drove from barcelona to castellon spain. it's so easy driving in foreign countries! she slept the whole way because we decided that the coast of spain is pretty much the same, aesthetically, as driving up the 5 to sf.

we went and saw the stooges that night.

and since the stooges were there we ran into eric fischer. eric was the first tour manager i had when i did guitars for j. he tutored me and now he's flying all over the world in private jets with the stooges! tonight he was on pit duty which meant that every time iggy jumped in the pit eric was there to help him out. iggy likes to dump bottles of water on his head and eric gets nailed too.

then it was back to the hotel. murph had had enough!

the next day i went to soundcheck and she slept off some jet leg. and when i came back in the afternoon we went clothes shopping. did i say the airline had lost her luggage? so we went bargain clothes shopping so she could stop wearing my metal t-shirts. much to our surprise we were pretty sucessful in the neighborhood surrounding our hotel.

this was nina's first european festival experience and it's a pretty good one for one's first. there is a pool backstage. the catering was good. and we saw antony and the johnsons play to a packed tent at 8 pm. he played each of our favorites. the one about being taken care of when you get old and die and the one about one day being a beautiful woman but for now he's just a boy.

then we ate and finally nina got to see what i spend my summers doing.
lars getting ready for the show.

here's the dino gear condensed into a 10 x 10 foot space. all on rolling risers. waiting for wilco to finish so we can place it on stage.

we mark all this stuff off earlier in the day. like this.

i don't have any photos but nina helped set the stage up. she was in charge of putting the set lists in their appropriate places. it was harrowing for her but she did a perfect job! here she is after finishing. she's in the background. i am trying to get the band on stage and try to get j to pose with himself as he is on the tv behind doing some spanish interview.

and finally. nina's first dinosaur show! it happens to be the best one i have seen in my life. and in front of about 20,000 screaming kids! here's nina's view point.

j was ripping.

spaniards rule.

and then..... DEVO!

tomorrow i'll tell you all about the beach and the lobsters i now call feet.

lose my heart on the burnin sand

this

became this

when iggy invited about 200 people on stage duing "no fun". i am sure hundreds of other people have written about this already. but this was my first shot seeing the re-formed stooges. it was hectic and rad. i realized though as they spent a good 7 minutes clearing the people off the stage that it was a way for the dudes to get a little rest in the middle of a long set. that's cool. iggy's 60.

give up for now, keep on this way

i spent the last few days in perth. we went to rottnest island. check it out, if you want to see where in the world rottnest island lies on the face of the planet. we rode bikes and checked out the quokkas.

helmets were mandatory, fyi.

we went into the indian ocean! now i only need to go in the arctic ocean and i have them all. this was the side of the island that had the shark fence.

its a great feeling being at the end of the world.

and finally.... the quokkas showed up! i had my back turned and i heard j say "ahhhh! it's eating my bike!" and there it was my first quokka.

little did we know but lars is bros with the quokkas.

but it's not hard to bro down with them. j was yelling "now you have lice!"

before we headed back to the mainland we went to a cafe on the island. after we ordered we were waiting for our food filling out postcards when the waitress approached. here we are on an island 10 miles off the coast of the most remote city in the most remote country in the world. and they had the new dinosaur jr cd! so incredible. i always think how great that must feel for the people i work with when someone in a weird, remote place admits to being a fan. or when you get an offer to play in singapore. surely even the most famous rocker can remember playing in their basement and now a girl 18,000 miles from where j grew up has his cd!

the ferry back was a nice ride that got pretty cold 15 minutes before we landed in perth. we passed some awesome ships delivering goods to the middle of nowhere.

this is perth. just in case you don't get to come here sometime.

tomorrow it's 27 more hours of this, back to singapore. then to london. then to barcelona. i'll meet nina at the airport and take the train with her to castellon!

death is forming, forming death

hey. the internet in australia sucks! get with it fucks. it's 2007 and i am paying $30 for an internet connection that is slower than dial up that i had when i was 12.
clubs don't have it. hotels don't have it. even cafe's don't have it.
so if you're wondering why i haven't posted that's why. well that and that when you have to fly to every city you don't have time or energy to deal with prehistoric internet.

just another reason that the USA rules supreme in all things that make living good.

excess baggage

auckland to sydney today. this is the third flight into sydney in a week. 9th flight of 36 total for the whole summer.

my war, you're one of them

i just got back from a walk with larry. we tried to walk from coogie bay to bondi beach but the weather was not happening. i didn't mind the rain though. i think it was just the combination of the rain and that bondi was just a little farther than we thought that cut the trip short. it was like being on the new england coast in the late spring or something. constant rain, but not too cold. the rain came a little out of nowhere. but kind of you knew it was coming but just the 5 minutes before it happened. the waves swelled and you could see it coming across the ocean.

but we pressed on and walked in it for a good hour. like i said, i rather liked it rainy instead of sunny. it made me feel like i was fighting against something. and since that is what i was doing in my head, trying to push certain bad thoughts to the back, trying not to beat myself up or make myself feel bad...it was nice to have a physical manifestation to fight against. to press on against.

guess what day it is? i know you think it's saturday. but it's really sunday. i know that the dateline above will say the 7th. but it's the 8th down here in the southern hemisphere, 17 hours ahead of los angeles. and i haven't written about sundays for awhile. i'll tell you that they make me feel the same no matter the hemisphere, apparently. homesick. heartsick. lost. lonely. and to top it off, while the temp does not reflect what those of us that grew up with real winters know as winter. the light does. and it's just the same. it's always more about the light than the temperature, i think. it's the long shadows before the day has started. they are in full effect down here.

i like this hotel room. its' view of the ocean. its' two beds with the yellow and white striped comforters and the heater cranked up to 25 degrees c. now i know why people want to live on the water. it's nice to sit and get up and stare out the window. nothingness. it can bring you back. now i have to go to work. on a sunday night no less. wish me luck.