Tag Archives: travel

Trauma Center

…and so ends Jairus’s Albertan Teaching Adventures – class wrapped up today. Jairus’s Albertan Hotel Adventures will continue for another couple of days.

Class was good. The students are all pretty fun and friendly, so it wasn’t too tough. Mostly people I’d end up hanging out with outside class, if I lived in ALBERTALAND. The oldest student is sixty, but he’s easily the most fun. His daughter is a professional snowboarder, his son is an actor (Dead Like Me, Final Destination 3), and he loves industrial music. I might’ve sold him on coming to COMA in April.

In other news, I stumbled upon a Wii. It is sitting in a shiny white box, waiting to be loved upon my return to Ottawa – and loved it shall be.

I had more delicious burgers today, but paid the ultimate price for them: Hiccups. As the wise Siddhartha knew, life is suffering.

Delicious beefy suffering.

white cowboys, red meat, and coloured help

Some content, perhaps.

The trip started well. I touched down around noon after a slightly-delayed (but mostly boring) flight, and proceeded directly to pay Telus far too much money for wireless access that consisted of a “System error, try again later” page. (This is what happens when you forget to setup your ICMP VPN tunnel before you leave home.)

The hotel is alright, but the internet costs more than Telus’s, and the food is seven kinds of terrible. I have vowed to never eat here again, regardless of how convenient it is.

So, in search of delicious diner food, I scanned the ‘best of’ list of the local alterna-weekly (which has a 2/3 page ad for a darkrave/powernoise party “dedicated entirely to the harshest beats” on the evening I’m leaving), and found a seemingly delicious diner. Upon arriving at said delicious diner, however, I discovered a hole in the wall with a lineup of trendy indie rockers half-way down the block.

I then cheesed it to a nearby brew pub, which had burgers of such deliciousness as to defy description.

The first day of class went mostly okay today, although there are some technical issues to be worked out with the PCs. And they forgot to order the courseware for one of the students. Also they forgot mine.

I have discovered that my anti-discrimination hat, while indeed having the reverse effect here in Albertaland, does not cause nearly as much scorn and malice as learning that I’m from Ottawa does. I get the impression that they believe me to be some sort of comically evil landlord tax-man, delivered straight from the belly of the beast so that I can garnish their wages more effectively. Or something. I couldn’t really understand what they were trying to communicate through all the talk about oil revenue and housing booms.

In the end, I built a bridge of trust through the time-tested tradition of trash-talking Toronto, and was accepted into their tribe. We then engaged in celebratory ritual consumption of sate chicken at a Vietnamese submarine shop(!) downtown.

Now, to numb my mind with hotel television.

Tour Diary – Day 2 (Columbus, OH)

Due to an equipment failure (alarm clock), we were late getting on the road to our Columbus show. We’re all running on Very Little Sleep, so things are very smelly, scruffy, and twitchy.

We also got a speeding ticket, which was nice.

The venue itself was a little place called The High Five, and while the staff and manager were very nice, the sound was complete shit and the turnout was worse. As it turned out, the booking agent didn’t give them a tech rider beforehand, and I guess the sound man was ill-prepared for the type of music we’re playing.

So, after playing to a dozen people or so, we went down to Columbus’ big goth/industrial club (Why didn’t we play there, you ask? I’ll let you know after I yell at the booking agent some more), and did a bunch of Cyanotic giveaways, and made the DJ play a few tracks from the album. Given that the crowd went ballistic, I should expect we’ll play there next time around.

It was a surprisingly awesome venue, even if the music was mostly retro and/or EBM. There was a fetish section full of people who actually knew their stuff, and were’n into not fashion. Walls of floggers, very nice racks (with bolt cutters on the floor beside them), a number of electro-play items (TENS unit, violet wands, etc).

We chatted for a bit with a few people who’re really involved in the scene here (I think Flesh Field asked Sean to do breaks for their next album), and then headed off. We’re en route now to a hotel outside Pittsburgh, and we’re going to spend the day tomorrow doing promo at record stores and alt.clothing shops. That’s the idea, at least. I haven’t heard shit from the booking agent as to where the good stores in this town are, so it might make my idea a little difficult.

Today’s driving music: Ice Cube – The Predator, Lil Jon – Crunk Juice, Empusae – Error 404

Tour Diary: Day 1

Tour Diary: Day 1
Unlabeled pictures are in my Flickr acct)

Today’s plans began with a simple task: Pick up the minivan reserved for us at Enterprise.

This plan was complicated when Enterprise changed the terms of the rental agreement without notice. Originally, the requirements were that the primary driver has a license and a credit card, on which they will put a $200 hold until the car is returned.

When we attempted to rent the car, we discovered that they had changed the terms to require a hold being placed on the credit card for the full amount of the rental, plus $100.

Given that the full rental cost is well above the credit limit of anyone involved in this little adventure, this caused a few problems.

These problems were made even more pressing by the fact that I had spent an entire day on the phone earlier in the week, during which time I discovered that Enterprise was the only car rental company within 50 miles that had any vans available.

Not having a van would mean we would have to cancel the entire tour, 12 hours before we were scheduled to play our first show.

I ended up knocking on the door of every car rental company in the cities of South Bend and New Carlyle, hoping for some kind of miracle — and in an incredibly rare stroke of luck, the final car rental company in the area had just received an early van return.

It wasn’t just any crappy minivan, either. It was a fullsized touring van. The kind with reading lights, and blinds on the windows.

I am sitting in it right now. It is very nice indeed.

After somehow coming up with a massive cash deposit (which would not have been possible without the foresight and generosity of my leslie-bee), we rented the van and headed back to home base.

Almost as if by magic, a delivery van arrived at the same time we did. Suddenly, we were armed with all 1000 copies of the new compilation CD that we’re releasing, as well as an advance shipment of the new Cyanotic and Ad·ver·sary shirts.

My friends, let me tell you something. I was very worried about these adversary shirts. The design I submitted was complicated and difficult to screenprint, the inks I chose were unusual and exotic, and the base t-shirts I asked for were extraordinarily expensive (using sweatshop-free materials is a very costly thing). If I had gone with a standard white-ink-on-generic-black-material tshirt, I could have gotten four times the number of shirts I got for the same amount of money; and so I was very worried.

Until I actually saw them, that is. These are some fucking awesome shirts.

Seriously. Fucking awesome.

So, we somehow manage to tetris a thousand CDs, a hunded shirts, six people, five equipment rigs and four fullsized luggage cases into this van, and then it’s off to Allegan, Michigan.

The venue itself was fantastic, and reminded me a fair bit of The Haunt in Ithaca. (There was a local opening band which played a pretty fucked-up cross of metal, prog, and post-rock. It was pretty weird.)

The set went well, mostly. My laptop did a lot of very interesting things that it never did during practice (of course), so for our encore we played two songs that we fucked up the first time around. It was much more awesome than it sounds – the second time around, everyone knew how the songs went and were much more into it. There was even a mosh pit at one point, which was pretty impressive considering that it was a relatively small turnout.

The sound tech asked us for our contact info and a copy of our CD, as his friend is a guitarist for Rob Zombie and Ozzy Osbourne, and also happens to manage the booking for Ozzfest. He was of the opinion that we should join the tour next summer, which would indeed be awesome, but I’m not going to get my hopes up.

It would be pretty fucking cool, though.

…

Tour Diary – Day 2

Due to an equipment failure (alarm clock), we were late getting on the road to our Columbus show. We’re all running on Very Little Sleep, so things are very smelly, scruffy, and twitchy.

We also got a speeding ticket, which was nice.

Tour Diary, Day -4

Today, much like yesterday, was full of chaos. I’m managing this tour now, it seems, so I’m trying to get all the shit in order. Madness.

We tried to break the stress by taking a trip to IHOP to partake of their delicious iced tea, which is unlimited and flows like a river.

You iHip and you iHop

Sadly, their iced tea brewing dealie was broken, and we were denied its rejuvinating powers. So we went home. And then we slept.

Today was spent on the phone with every car rental place within 100 miles, looking to find a place that both has a full-size van for rent, and also lacks a 25-and-above age restriction. This is an impossible quest, of course, so we’re going to be forced to rent a minivan, which means we’re going to have to cut two people off the tour.

One of these two people is pretty angry, but fuck him. It’s just not possible, and he’s being a jerk.

After a morning on the phone, the afternoon was spent finalizing the two tour CD-R compilations that we’re bringing with us. Most of this was wasted time, as we later discovered that my laptop sound card was distorting the fuck out of everything.

So.

We spent another hour undoing the previous four hours work, and then we were off to Invisible Records to drop it off.

Guns 'n' Rosaries
You eat out of that?STUFF
Change!Psychadelic Nun

We were there for an hour or so (the fridge full of free Red Bull may have contributed to this), and he was kind enough to spend the majority of that time giving me advice on tour management. The man is a fucking wizard.

He asked if Leslie and I could write a story or two for a book that he’s putting together on the music industry. A promoter’s perspective on how-not-to-get-fucked. (Clearly, he’s a poor judge of character.)

Then, a mostly-uneventful walk home (which was filled with tasty italian lemonade), a brief stop at the grocery store, and here we are.

POWER!Lights + Camera = Action

Tomorrow I advance all the venues, and we drive up to South Bend to spend the rest of the week practicing and getting to know the gear. Martin wants me to give him a ring to fill him in on what’s happening with the venues, as he’s just as concerned as I am about the fact that the booking agent is a completely useless douche of colossal proportions. I am afraid of what we will learn.

…but now the time for Demolition Man draws near.

Update: We went with Robocop.

August 29, 1997 – NYC

In The Terminator, there’s a scene where Sarah Connor is told a speech by John Connor’s father, that John Connor’s father heard from John in the future.

John is born, Sarah tells John the speech, and then John grows up and tells it in the future.

…so who wrote the speech?

…

I now understand why my father owned a handful of Cadillacs. They are like driving inside a big couch. A big, $70,000 couch with 300hp and power 4-way lumbar controls.

It was worth every penny we paid Hertz. Do you know what it’s like to drive to NYC, and not have your legs or ass hurt when you get there?

I could go on about the car, but I will leave you with this: After crossing the border to the US, we switched the onboard controls from metric to imperial, and promptly forgot that the readout was now in MPH instead of KPH. We went up to about 100-110MPH before we noticed that the cars ahead seemed to be approaching at an alarming rate. The ride is just that smooth.

…

New York City was very big. Overwhelmingly so.

Even more impressive than the physical scale of the city was the economic scale. Where else in the world can you support a video game store that only sells retro/weird consoles, like $500 Intellivision and Coleco bundles, or Hello Kitty Dreamcasts?

I’m having a hard time writing any of this without sounding like a tourist.

Greenwich Village was blindingly fantastic, and anything else I say on the area would be a massive understatement. The rest of Manhattan was a bit too much for me at times, to be honest. Too much money, too many shiny things. It was like a giant set of <BLINK> tags had encapsulated the borough. I much preferred the architecture (and renegade craps games) of Brooklyn, or the back to back graffiti walls of Harlem.

The Siouxsie show was fantastic. Performing with her were Budgie, Knox Chandler (guitarist/multi-instrumentalist from The Psychedelic Furs and countless other bands), Kris Pooley (keyboardist from Jane’s Addiction), and Leonard Eto (from Kodo, widely considered the world’s preeminent master of Taiko drumming).

Again, anything I say about the performance will be wildly misleading, simply because I don’t have adjectives large enough. Instead, I’ll tell you that someone made the mistake of fucking with Leslie at the show (we got your back, ), and Leslie made the shitheaded sonofabitch cry like a girl.

Didn’t know who they was fuckin with.

…

Back in town, the show on Tuesday was great, aside from the (surprise!) turnout. Luckily, our expenses for this show were very small. A rental van, some food and spending money, a few dollars, and flyers. It’s hard not to break even, really, given those expenses — but it was close, for a while.

There seems to be a new crowd that is starting to come out to the shows, I didn’t recognize at least half of the crowd, and they all seemed to have a blast. I would very much like to see more of them, they seemed more interested in participating than complaining and sniping.

It’s hard, though, to tell if some of the new people are being friendly because they’re friendly people, or because I’m the complete stranger with blue hair who hangs out in the DJ booth. Anyone who’s ever played a show outside their hometown will know exactly what I mean.

…

It was great to finally meet Caitlin, after chatting online for the last seven years or so, which is almost long enough ago that meeting people online got you strange looks from your friends.

She is smart, clever, and capable. She’d do very well here, or overseas, or anywhere she chooses to be. Here’s hoping she’ll make the choice.

Toronto.

…and we crossed the street as fast as we could, the familiar words of hatred in the air.

Bitch. Cocksucker.

They had already knocked the girl down in front of traffic, and she was screaming, sobbing, screaming. The man who almost ran her over had tried to help, and he was on the concrete, three times my size. That left two of us, and six of them.

We got her out somehow, fighting to protect a young lady the size of a twelve-year-old. She didn’t even know we were there, I don’t think. Only that she wasn’t being thrown around anymore, and she was getting away.

By the time security and the cops arrived and dealt with the others, we had made it to the underground parking and out of sight. Leslie kept the police looking elsewhere long enough to share a few cigarettes, and eventually she could talk again. She was from Ottawa, her name was Diane, and between the drugs and the crack of skull on asphalt, she was in pretty bad shape.

The squad car found us eventually, of course. Her boyfriend had already been arrested, and she managed to tell the police that he had her money, her ticket home, her everything.

The security guard asked me if I was alright, and I said that I was. Then she waved to us as the police car pulled away, and by that time it was daylight.