love is a dumpster full of bread

hiya :)

i have started this a few times but then got sidetracked and then by the time i get back down to it it is 4 days later and nothing is relevent anymore.

it is the friday afternoon after exam week and a nice long week stretches out infront of me before mum arrives for christmas. i decided to stick to my original plan of not coming back for christmas. a month or so into it i was missing everyone bigstyle and was going to come home for christmas, but now it just doesn't really make sense in terms of money, carbon emissions, leaving hot hot unexplored california for freezing gray scarborough, breaking up my 8 months in santa cruz into small speed by chunks and having some solid alone time to transribe charlie parker solos. i also need to prove to myself that i can spend a large amount of time away from those i love in anticipation of future plans. and it is really nice that my mum is coming out- she hasn't had a nice long holiday for too long, and has wanted to come to california for ages. we are going to to drive down LAwise and find a nice quiet beach (if there is such a thing as a quiet beach near LA) and mong out . then maybe a little trip skiing after christmas (there is such a diversity of nature here- beach, mountains, desert, lakes, forest all within 5 hours or where is it).

so my exams were fine- music of india was just easy, and jazz theory quite farcical- the teaching assistant (who, incidently, is writing a jazz 'cannabis cantata' for his Masters) who was marking the papers also invigilated us for the written part, which basically consisted of 'fill in the blanks' from the vast amount of reading we had to do, stuff like '_________ was one of 2 bass players in the 40s to sing their bass line whilst playing' which noone could really remember, so someone was like 'hey joel, why don't we do the paperas a group?' and he was like 'well...i am playing piano'. so we ended up doing the whole exam as a group- the only exam i have been able to have a fag in the middle of. and the oral part was ok too-just played some tunes and handed in some arrangements and did some analysis. I didn't have an exam for UC and the Bomb, it was all coursework, but in the last class we had a pot luck and 'nontalent' show, and one of the facilitators did an improvisation dance on the theme of nuclear weapons!!! he asked me to accompany him, so i did on clarinet, and boy it was really funny, him prancing around on the tables pretending to be a bomb and then a hiroshima victim with melting skin, and finally 'positive energy'. i tried to play the clarinet like the slide whistle from the moomins.

the most exciting thing that has happened since i last wrote is that i have joined a REAL band!!! there is this thing called craigslist.com which is like a sort of free listings services for everything for the san fransisco area- jobs, houses, romance, lost and found, ''casual encounters'', musicians wanted, ride sharing, great stuff. anarchy in action. it is where i found my new house. anyway, i was having a look at the muso section and there were a couple of adverts in need of horn players for world music/fusion projects, so i replied and got a call from this guy ian a couple of days later for a full cross examination of 'where i was at' musically. anyway they were mainly looking for a saxophonist, as opposed to a clarinettist, but i got an audition. my sax playing has gone to shit a bit recently (infact for a while now), a mixture of a temperamental instrument and a desire by me to play subtley mostly, something the clarinet is great at and the sax gets annoyed at. so this was last wednesday, and i got a lift to los aptos, about 40 minutes away, with the bass player and drummer. they are both 25, nice experimental guys who are back at community college just because education is fun...they were telling me about their lineup, bass,drums, guitar piano/trumpet, and how the piano/trumpet player was one of the founding members of the mad caddies, a shithot US ska-punk band who, funnily enough, the Dead Pets once supported for a whole tour. and that he had just got back from playing 6 months at the sydney opera house, etc etc, so we get there and set up in this freeeezing garage and they play, and wow their music is FUNKY, all about fast melody lines and breaks and soaring tunes to hiphop beats and relentless bass, and lovely interplay between the guitar and trumpet. i was pretty nervous beforehand- not wanting to appear young and trying-to-be-flash but having nothing to /SAY /but then i played and, i have to be honest, ripped it up!!!! all the hours in the practice room whilst the sun shone outside seemed to be paying back, and me and the trumpet really clicked, i picked up his melodies quite quickly and then gave him a base to move off of, and then i moved off too but not as far and then boomboomboom suddenly i am dancing and playing and everyone is smiling and it is like even when i don't know what to do, my fingers do. and then after a while i moved onto sax and that was ok too, gave a better contrast with the trumpet, and at the end of the night they were like 'yeah do you want to come back next week?' and i was like 'yeah!' and then it turns out the trumpet player hosts/has residency at a coffeehouse in monteray bay (about 1 hour from santa cruz) and would i like to come and 'sit in'?? joy.

in the practice rooms there were 2 mint condition triumph motorbikes and a box of PG tips, and then it turned out the bassists stepdad was from birmingham!!! and it also turns out he is the same english bus driver that once let me on for free when i had forgot my card !! so i thanked him properly and we had a nice chat over a cup of tea. his view of america is simple- both coasts are great places with great people, everything betweent he rockies and manhatten is 'full of completely ntus people'. he gave me a big bag of PG tips when i left by way of british solidarity; i didn't have the heart to tell him i don't really drink tea.

i have finally located some bakery dumpsters thanks to advice from mark the guy who did the dance, and have been feasting on fresh baguettes, apple turnovers and avacados-mmm. free food just tastes so much better than paid-for food. the bread also goes very well with the soups i have been making. i have also had a few nice encounters along the way- met some full on crimethinc kids (except they weren't straightedge) who gave me homemade zines and told me about visiting new orleans just after katrina (the anarchists were the first people to go in and offer help), really nice, then another time had a great jam with some hobos who tried to sell me all sorts of bike odds and ends. i could have been talking to Dean's father old Mr Moriarty. 2 of them were completley unimpressed that i was english, but the third was like 'how old are you' '20'....'you've done well my son'... as though we are all trying to escape

but this frugal but fun diet was getting me ready for the joy of Thanksgiving at Rich and Ernie's a couple of thursdays ago which, as simon explained to me, has its roots in european settlers being shown how to hunt and use local vegetation to survive, and the settlers then systematically killing all the natives (to this day in my opinion) and having a big party. but these days it is all about the family sitting round a table and being happy, more so than christmas as it has not been commercialised in the same way (though there have been lots of plastic sweetcorns and courgettes lying around). so i travelled to San Francisco to give thanks with the wonderfully hospitable rich and ernie. there were about 10 people from here and there, including Rich's 90 year old mum, an marvellous old guy called Bob who had seen billie holiday and elle fitzgerald live and who was a bit like the sum total of all the arthur miller books i had read (after the war he travelled the country as a pressure cooker salesman), a ponytailed venezuelan ex-pat who summed up chavez as 'doing the right things, but in the wrong way'. incidently, i have looked on a map and my original plan of going overland to venezuela next summer is pretty much impossible distance wise, think the emphasis might shift to just getting to somewhere tropical enough for jungle.

the food was magic; i was ready. it included a huge bowl of cranberry sauce with lots of whole cranberrys in, and i was given a whole leg from the 23lb turkey to munch on, then a big mince pie (!) and lots of nice wine. the next day the sun shone i was shown the sights of san fran, went to the top of a hill and looked out over the whole city- golden gate bridge in the foreground, alcatraz off to the left, the airport obscured by all the people taking photos of themselves infront of me. we listened to the only democratic (ie not republican) talk show in the car on the day 230 iraqis were killed in baghdad. the presenters pumped up the emotions and bushbashing, hateful adjectives being thrown around all over the place, certainly not the unbias media we are used to in the UK, but perhaps necessary to counter all the right wing madnessa round. everyone was getting het up with the definition of 'civil war' and whether or not iraq is in one. who cares about definitions when thbottom line is iraq teeters in the edge implosion? but then at the same time, despite everyone saying that iraq has fucked up the bush presidency, bush is still in power, unquestioned, oil is still flowing out of iraq by the millions of barrels and the US economy has a new market to rape and pillage, and there are more terrorists to fight and scare people with, so i guess in reality bush has achieved everything he wnats


oh and you can googleearth my house (or anywhere else- it is class) by typing 1401 bay street, santa cruz, california into the search box, and then it is the house directly to the left of the arrow, covered by the trees.

oooh i went busking aswell last saturday! had been meaning to do it for ages but that day just sort of felt right. got there about 8pm, had a little spliff beforehand to get the juices flowing. i stayed there for just under 2 hours, the last half hour max played with me, and had a sign saying 'we are iPOD for the masses', which people seemed to enjoy. made just under 10 dollars, which was my target for 1 hour, but i was quite pleased with how it went generally. i started off playing very within myself and meditative and it took me a while to start really ripping- everyone says the best way to busk is to play well known tunes (with a twist) and i was just fannyign around improvising on nothing, and occasionally playing scarborough fayre or similar, but i think when i memorise a few tunes i will make more. a few people complimented me, and noone dissed me, and two people asked me to play in bands for them!!! so that was cool, don't knwo whether anythign will come of it. but generally it was great to know that i can busk and make enough to get by when travelling(10 dollars could feed and tobacco me for the day), i have never successfully busked before, me and olivier tried a bit in london last summer but just kept getting moved on.

my notsonew house is still buzzing, despite a chronic rat infestation, a broken water pipe that has made our bill ROCKET and no heating or insulation (except for eone crappy heater nowhere near my room). you can see a picture of my new flatmates on my myspace www.myspace.com/benoverthere and you can also follow a link to my music myspace site where (as soon as i work out how to upload it) you can listen to a recording a did with the magnificent james grunwell over summer. i am pretty chuffed with it, you might have to listen to it a couple of times to get the full effect, and play it loud, it is sort of a bit mogwaish i guess, hard to put finger on. put comments on as to what yo uthink!! i got an 8 track from father 'ebay' christmas, so hopefully i will be putting some more tunes on soon. it is allowing me to play clarinet over Mbira, and clarinet over clarinet etc etc, so some itneresting tings are being produced alredy.

but the greatest thing of the last few weeks has been the 8 pies i made last sunday. i suddenly got a huge and overwhelming craving for a chicken pie whilst in safeway, but i looked at them and they were overpriced and full off deeply unethical meat, so i resolved to make my own. the end result was cool- the pastry was a little dense (but nice) and the filling was top notch- steak, carrot, mushroom, pea and onion with extra worcesteshire sauce. i gave a couple to max and edmund and have eaten one every day since then, with a variety of different types of potato. pies are the lifeforce.

hmmm i have to go and have a house meeting now, sounds ominous (i cleaned the kitchen earlier though and did everyone else's washing up so my halo is perfectly intact).

vocables

Yeah so i thought i should wait till something genuinely EXCITING happened before indulging myself in correspondence again, but now the accumulating of quite interesting things has built up and i can hold back no longer.

spent thursday and wedensday in LA, that mecca of 'culture', doing the regetns meeting. was a really good experience actually, even though i wasn't too useful. me, erika and mark (the two facilitators of my uc and the bomb class and top people) were the contingent from santa cruz, there were meant to be 2 cars full but lots of poeple pulled out at the last minute. we drove down to santa barbara, passing through the artichoke capital of the world again, where we stopped for burritos. it is crazy taht you can drive an hour away from santa cruz and get out to a completely different vibe- this small town (castroville!) is a farming community, so loads of mexicans and very cheap food. the restaurant we went to was only in spanish, with an old mexican guyu that didn't speak english, we were the only customers, and he made the nicest burritos. delved down to the depths of my memory to remember my basic spanish, and managed to not look silly. 'y burrito supero por favor'

then got to santa barbara and met up with the rest of the group- only about 7 other people- who were busy making paper cranes to represent all the warheads in the US arsenal (10,000). the coordinators, two post-grads who went to santa cruz, have got campaigning down to an art, learnt lots and lots from them, their idea was to disrupt the meeting long enough for the regents not to be able to talk about the nuclear labs they manage and symbolically represent our lack of a voice int he process. so we woke up the next morning at 4.30am with an inspiration message about a lion 'waking up from its slumber', shaking off and going to fight a battle. then we all piled into a van and left for LA. my job was to provide legal observer and media contact outside whilst the rest went in and disrupted till they got arrested. i really wanted to be in there with them, but after the last meeting and pepper spray thing i was warned by the internatinal student office that if i got even cited (the thing 1 below arrested) i would have to get an attorney, which i can't afford, and might get expelled and kicked out of the country, which would not be conducive to stopping nuclear proliferation.

so we got the LA campus, which was tshirt weather even at 730am, prepared and everyone went in. the campus newspaper's headline was of a guy int he ibrary being TASERED by police for not producing the right id!!!http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38960 . the most disturbing thing is that i am not particularly surprised anymore by this sort of thing. found the building, i started flyering and petitioning people, but NOONE was interested. people either ignored me completely in a nervous fashion, brushed me off or, after listening to me spieling for a while, just shook their head and walked away. it was pretty frustrating. eventually i liberated a huge poster, wrote on the back, stuck it up outside the building the meeting was being held in with the petition underneath and played mbira and clarinet, hoping that people would be drawn in by that and then sign the petition. it iddn't really work. i got like 10 signatures in about 3 hours. i had been warned that people in LA were colder than here, but it was still surprising. i could almost see the bubble around the people walking past. or smell the fear. and then someone came out and said the disruption had happened, and everyone had been arrested, and then the media came and i did some interviews ( http://dailybruin.com/news/articles.asp?id=38998 ) and then we went to a park in beverly hills (!) and had nice food.

it was a really tight crowd of people, dedicated and thoughtful and with a variety of experience. campaigners in america are very america-centred, and when they start tackling international issues they can sometimes come across with a bit too much hyperbole and 'us and them' sort of thing, but they are certainly dedicated. it was also great to be able to get down to the deeper ideological questions with them on the journey, especially seeing as we had all turned up for an action that has a 0.001 chance of ever succeeding, and will take hours and hours to ever get close. so talk of campaign timescales, cooperation vs subversion with authorities, building sustainable movements etc. really interesting stuff. on the way home to santa cruz we stopped at erika's parents house in san luis de bisbo. her mum made us a phat spread, including english cheese and apple stew and ice cream, and i ate quickly and hungrily, safe in the knowledge that that is what we always do in england, so can't be rude :) . so all in all worthwhile, even though i missed quite a key jazz theory class.

we only have 3 weeks of term left, it has gone by so fast, but i think i have achieved quite alot on most fronts, except in terms of forging a good group of friends, but i guess i had to sacrifice something to the music. having said that, i am starting to get to know the crew of my flatmates, who are all nice. on tuesday night at about 10pm i was working hard when suddenly shitloads of people turned up at our house and a spontanious party ensued- it was really great! about 30 people, music making, and i was properly introduced to people by my flatmates as 'the new housemate', which meant i had an easy way to chat to people and everyone liked me, no worries, no noia! great stuff. had some great conversations and now have a base of people i know so i can go to other parties with the housmates. very good. just as i got a bottle of red and started getting myself in for the long party haul some people left and it was reduced to a stoning session, which was ok too. i was jamming with a great piano player who i thought was maybe on coke or soemthing cos he was being well intense, and then he excused himself and i noticed he had blood all round his nostril! i think i kept a straight face. and some mescalin and mushie taking, but i wasn't offered and didjn't really want any. to be fair there were some dicks there, but if they are nice to me i can be nice back. and then last night i went to another party at some beach villa thing, everyone seemed to be into 60s british rock and were a bit disappointed that i wasn't an authority on the topic.

so i am feeling much more upbeat at the moment rather than the last week or so; this time last week i was feelign well shitty. the rain had come with a vengence and reminded me lots and lots of lovely miserable england and all its people and joys. but the sun has come back, at least temporarily, and everything is ok.i think the moment of mental change was when i cooked a huge pot of potato soup, with coconut milk and assorted delicious veggies.

also last week was mine and alice's long procrastinated over open mic appearance- there are several every week but we never manage to coordinate ourselves to be in the same place at the same time to play. anyhow, we played for an hour or so beforehand and alice played me some of her new songs- which are disgustingly catchy and really good quality also- and then we decided on 'like a prayer' by madonna as our finale cover- very exciting. so yeah, we went and i think we ripped it up, alice has got a quality stage presence, even when she is stressed out, and the electric keyboard she was using kept having too much energy running through it and would cut out like 16 bars into every song, so eventually she had to play everything on guitar, but it wasn't too bad. i found myself harmonising higher than alice in like a prayer, harking back to the many years spent singing micheal jackson at st.peters. the crowd went wild. but anyway, met some cool musicians and we are going to try and set up a weekly electric jam on a wednesday, so very worthwhile. directly after there was this guy reading that allen ginsberg poem 'howl', which i thought was going to be great, but he acted out all the lines in quite a chirpy fashion almost lke he was parodying it.

beforehand we went and ate- alice swiped me into the dining hall on her card, cos my 'meal plan' got cancelled when i moved out, so took the opportunity to stock up on munchies- max showed me the excellent 'bagels in the jumper' tecnique, so got two packs of bagels, a fat slop of hummus (with too mcuh garlic in) and about 10 cookies, so well done everyone.

the other big achievement of the week was adding the final plants to full up my allotment, at midnight underneath the full moon with no torch but a wand that reflected the moonlight, and everything seemed alive. the final list of growth is
veggies:
broccoli
spinach (half of which has been eaten by gophers already)
cauliflower
beet-leaves (like beetroot but you eat the leaves)
herbs:
rosemary
thyme
lemongrass
echinasia
chives
oregano
peppermint (which is soooooo cool)
and lavender cotton, which is in the 'misc' corner.

all in a plot about 1 by 3 metres, so it is all packed in, but all good. and some of them i am told grow real quick, and so we will be able to prune and have herbs to cook with soon hopefully.

oh i saw a BRILLIANT FILM last week, dirty pretty things, really one of the best films i have ever seen, set in london, all about two asylum seekers, a nigerian guy who doesn't talk much but is the pillar of strength and righeousness, and a beautiful amelie-like eastern european girl and their stuggle, but it was one of those film that in the beginning is really funny and then suddenly it just gets dark but still is funny when you least expect it. if you haven't seen it, check it out!

the US midterm elections were pretty intense here- apart from voting in or out a generic set of politicians, there are also ltos of propositions all voters have to vote on. the main ones were prop 85, which was trying to make it mandatory for minors to tell their parents if they were getting an abortion, callous 'religious' wank (got defeated after a huge campaign, wey!), putting a huge tax on tabacco (it is dirt cheap here- the same price for 25 grams as it is for 12.5 in england) which also got defeated, a prop to make cannabis the lowest priority of police (so in theory if you were J walking with a fat spliff, they would do you for J walking! it was passed!), and a prop to increase the minimum wage to $925, which was defeated (very shit, that was the most important one in my opinion) and there was a huge campaign saying that local businesses would have to close down, which ws rubbish but seemingly effective.

since i moved in i had been hearing what sounded like walrus's screaming, and one morning last week i went and tried to find out what it was, turns out loads and loads of sealions hang around below the pier at santa cruz (which is a bit like blackpool pier i think, or brighton) and bark and scratch themselves. so now each night when i go outside and smoke i bark back to them.

so anyway after the party last night i had to get up at 730am to go to lawrence livermore national (nuclear) lab, a couple of hours drive away, to see the nuke weapons complex with my own eyes. imagine something between a chemical processing plant and an army barracks. we went into the 'discovery centre', a greenwashed museam type thing to explain all the nice things they do at the labs with the 15% of its money that doesn't got to nuclear weapons reseach. got a tour from this retired engineer who was very ncie but didn't really grasp our more probing questions. he did show is this crazy stuff that looks a bit like a dense spiders web or a bit of hard tiny bubbles, but opaque, that is made up of 99.9% air and the rest silicone, that is has just been invented to trap the dust and substance that a comet or meteorite gives off as it moves, its tail. really cool, i took some just incase i come across a comet. afterwards we got an 'alternative tour' by a lady from a local anti-nuke pressure group, who showed us which building was which etc. the police came almost straigtaway, even though we werne't trespassing or doing anythign wrong, and surrounded our little group while the lady talked.

so now i am home and there is a party here later that i need to be ready for, so going to take a little nap. i don't feel tired but quite giddy so i think it si best.

oh, and if you have a moment, sign the online petition to end the use of depleted uranium in warheads - http://www.icbuw.org/campaign/?id_topic=1&id=1 - the site also has loads of info about all the horrible effects of DU.

i keep thinking about buying a raincoat or something, but then i remember that everything is relative, and that england is bleak and freezing right now, and i will enjoy it more if i can remember how beautiful it is here even when it is a bit cold :) . how is the weather there, and everything else?

desanitization (originally sent 31/10/06)

just done that stupid thing where i have lots of leftover food and decide to cook it all in one go in one pan as an omelette but then there is far too much food and i have to throw some of it away anyway (although at the moment i am just leaving it and hoping i will be hungry again soon)

i hadn't eaten for ages anyway, which always makes me think i can eat more than i can. got called to a surprise (to me) meeting at 8pm just when i was abotu to eat to discuss the next steps for the girl who has got federal charges against her after that demo the other week. as you would imagine, the university bosses are being well underhand and trying to get people to make statements against her, recording conversations with supposed 'impartial advice' people and generally trying to show they are hard nuts and are not going to be compromised by a few smelly anarchists. i didn't really have much to input, what with not knowing anythign about the legal systems here or having any experience of these type of things and how to sort them out. apprently you can ring the 'district administrator' and ask to have charges dropped against someone even if you are only a member of the public. crazy stuff. there seemed to be a bit of an unspoken 'we know none of what we are doing is really going to help, but we have a duty to do it anyway' running through the meeting though, and i didn't feel very energised comng out of it.

during intros in nearly all meetings here they do a 'silly question' or ice breaker or whatever; today it was 'what are you going to be for halloween?'- here some couples go as matching things (!), so someone was going to be a doughnut to someone elses cup of coffee, and another peter pan and wendy. thanks to a random encounter at the weekend i had a solid answer- i am going to be a marine (with full on marine formal dress) with a clowns face and red nose, like in Oh what a Lovely War. originally when this person gave me the marines outfit after i told her i didn't have anything to wear i thought i might put a bullet hole in my head, but i think being a clown face does the same job in a less aggressive way. i am also going to speak in an mid-west american accent for the duration. i hope we get to attend some good parties- someone said today that santa cruz is the halloween capital of the world, so much so that in the downtown area tommorow night any fines you get (for drinking, littering etc) and TREBLED, so you have to pay like $480 if you have an open can on the street!! american capitalism knows no limits.

americans on england:
do you have forests?
does weed exist there?
do all english people drink like tanks?
do you go to france much?
do you like your accent?
"english people make me /think /so much...

so anyway, everything is pretty swell here apart from getting slightly tired of being asked the same things all the time and people pretending to understand what i am saying when they don't. i spent most of the weekend in my allotment, which i am now sharing with a lovely girl called elisa, who shares more than 3 letters with alida, and our plot now consists of

chives
cauliflower (which i thought was brocolli when i planted it)
basil (which actually is looking pretty peaky and yellow already)
peppermint (i was so excited when i realised peppermint is actually a plant)
lavender cotton
spinach

when we first started working we just had a load of weedy, dry, lumpy sandy soil, and the process of converting into a healthy patch was possibly the most enjoyable thing i have done since i got here. it is so peaceful i breathe deeply without even noticing it. also the seeds that lauren gave me have now started to grow a second set of leaves, making them look like green diamonds from above.

you know i was saying how weed was mashing my head? well i think maybe i just had some bad stuff then, because more recently everything has been much morerelaxed, though i must admit i haven't been smoking with random people much since that time. i have been having great times with my Mbira instead though; i now completely get what i read in books last year about how players think the mbira 'teaches them' new patterns and how melodies can be formed from the various harmonics available. i go out after everything is finished for the day (like i will when i finish this email) and smoke and play and my mind wonders off to different things and when i am thinking about bad or frustrating things or things i wish i hadn't done (and maybe this is a sort of paranoia in itself??) i find that the music i am making is similarly restless and it almost feels as if my negative energy is going out through the instrument. i must add a disclaimer to all of the above that maybe this is all just a construct of the cannabis, like the appeal of buckets full of jelly babies.

spent the weekend before this one at an anti-nuke conference in santa barbara, which is just north of Los Angeles. had a really nice time getting to know the people from my UC and the Bomb class who turned from people you see twice a week and debate with to people you can hug and jam with. (the activist crowd here hug quite alot, boys on boys and everything, which is brill but because i have been missing good hugs, but the shift has been so sudden i briefly became really self aware when hugging which was wierd but now it is ok again). the conference itself was really interesting, though i don't feel like we are going to make a dent in the US military juggernaut anytime soon, and i learned a shitload about native american history and their current struggles. it seems like the last big legitimate racism here directed against the native peoples- the pope created the 'doctine of discovery' when cook and others were setting sail around the world, basically saying that it was a good christian's duty to either convert any natives they came across or kill them, or at the very least take their land, and this law was used as recently as 1996 to justify repossession of native american land by the federal government!!! unbelievable. also 70% or all american nuclear waste is currently dumped on native american reservations (cos the peopel can't afford to say no to the money reparations offered cos they are in such a tight fix) etc etc the list is as long as my arm, but got to meet some amazing native american elders who are fighting for their rights and have a chat with them. there is a remote possibility i will be able to visit a reservation at some point and stay with a tribe called the Western Shoshone and do a bit of ethnomusicology fieldwork (:)) but everyone makes promises at conferences that get forgotten i guess, especially big ones.

santa barbara the town and campus is pretty insane. they have automatic paper towel dispensers and urinals that disinfect your piss /as you piss /by releasing blue goo from inside the urinal when your piss lands on it/. /playboy rates it the 4th biggest party campus in USA./ /word on the street is that 1/3 of students have herpes and i heard one guy asking if a girl wanted to sleep in his tent with 'we are in santa barbara after all...'. there are 9 square blocks filled entirely with students, thousands of them, mostly minted, with huge fraternity and sorority houses with their bollocks latin crests painted on the houses. it was the closest i have come to the OC so far. in amongst all this shite though was a 'tent city' in the middle of campus where about 20 people were camping out to protest about 24 families who are being kicked out of their houses to make way for more student accomodation. on the last night me and a few others camped with them in solidarity and had a great jam with this big tall black guy (a rarity on campus) who was rapping about how the last 4 years of his life at uni were so shit and racist and after i was like 'it can't be THAT racist' and he took me to the nearest toilets which had white power slogans and monkey references scrawled all over the cubicle walls. i couldn't believe it. then later, just as i was getting comfy in my sleeping bag at 3am, the guy who gave me tent space was like 'ah, you have rizlas, do you want to go on an adventure?', and he took me on his handlebars to the beach and then along a cliff to this little spot where someone had build a wooden platform out of the cliff and nailed 3 chairs to it. great stuff.

we have mid terms exams here, had music of india on tuesday, was possibly the easiest exam i have ever done, just multiple choice then some true or false!!! "an alap has no rhythmic accompniment, true of false??' i could have shat on the exam paper and still passed. tommorow is jazz theory exam though, which is going to be pretty tough, i have to (amonst other things) play chord progressions on the piano and SING, and improvise infront of the whole class.

i cooked a full english breakfast for my flat on sunday (minus beans and hash browns) to mark my leaving. it sort of reinforced my decision to go- only max said thank you for the food or commented on whether he liked it or not. i asked edmund if he enjoyed it and he shrugged and left the room (but to be fair he ate it all which i was happy about) and. one of my flatmates is coming round on friday to pick all my stuff up, then i will slowly move in over the weekend. it is going to be cool i think. ohoh! there is also this thing called 'free skool santa cruz' starting next week where members of the community just put on lessons according their skills, i guess like a formal skill swap, but there is a whole course on bike /building /and maintainance, trips foraging for fruit and other things around the town, survival in the woods trips, how to cook acorns, how to brew mead, all these things just because people want to share the knowledge. amazing. should start one up everywhere. before i left sam's dad was telling me about trotsky's 'transitional demands' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transitional_demands) and i think this maybe a really relevant one.

and i played 'soccer' for the second time on friday also. we lost 5-0 but i gave up thinking i was too cool for school and playing in midfield and switched back to defence where i was pretty pleased with how i played (only 1 of the five goals was when i was defending, the others i was rolling subbed off or fannying aroudn being a striker), put in some well solid challenges but then got a yellow card for slide tackling. i got the ball. YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SLIDE TACKLE!!!!!!! bullshit. i tried to explain to the ref that slide tacking was the highest art in football but i don't think he fully understood what i was saying. american footballers are nippy and can be skillfull but have little spacial or positional awareness and, apparently, have grown up thinking challenging hard is a bad thing, so it was a whole different ball game and one that we lost. i was well impressed with this girl from new york who was playing left back- she had that cooler than thou east coast attitude with her descrete eyebrow piercing and long shorts, looked like she had grown up on the set of the film Kids, but she was really good at football and kept shouting at me to do things, which i thought was great.

so yeah, some things are starting to grind me down a bit, mainly american fear and rudeness, but mostly i am feeling much more settled these last weeks. santa cruz is starting to open up her secrets to me (turns out the girls who had my bike all of last week have 3 huge cannabis plants growing on their yard, and let me taste one of them, then gave me a sizeable bag of bud butter for nowt!!! buzzing) and i am excited. simon is coming at easter and we are going to bike down the coast. the more the merrier.

speak soon
love ben

tactics

it is a well hot day today here, you can't even stand out in the sun for too long, forcing me to cut short my digging up of weeds in my new little allotment plot. when i got it on monday (for free!) the groundslady was pretty skeptical about whether i would be able to grow anythign this late in the year, but we (me and tess, my co plotter) are thinking that some herbs will be hardy enough to survive the winter outside, and maybe also some pumpkins. i just have to work out how much manure and stuff to put on and where and when, and we are off. people in the plots next to us are growing peppers, tomatos, broccoli and all sorts of great things.

it is almost totally silent down on the allotments, which is a mindcalming change from the last few days, which have been mega hectic. as part of my UC and the bomb class, we had to do a 'creative project', either direct action, education or long term planning. so me and this girl raquel were the only ones that wanted to do DA, and decided to tie it in with a meeting of the regents, who are the uni of california's top brass (who will earn $$$ from contracts with weapons labs) and responsible for all sorts of social and environmental evils, aswell as being completely unnacountable and deaf to the students wishes. so on friday i visited raquel's turquoise camper van (there is a camper van park at the top of campus which seems the most ethical and community based living arrangement on campus, plus well cheap) to spray paint some masks and banners with 'UC nuke free' etc on them. while i was there this guy came who had been diving for like massive oysters (can't remember what they are called here) and would we like some? so we ate these oysters or whatever in fajitas with avacado and loads of salad and stuff, was delicious. they all cook communily there all the time and even have a communal BBQ, which is a far cry from the sterilised canteens that i have to eat in.

and we also went to a couple of tedious, frustrating meetings about the PLAN for what we were going to do when the regents came (first time in 12 years or something) which culminated in us deciding that we there were too many variables (viz no. or police, location, numbers of people, willingness of people to be human shields etc) to actually make a plan, so we all went home.

then the next day about 2 or 300 of us massed and marched to the building the regents were due to meet in. i had forgotten how much i feel at home in the demo situation. the idea was to not let them get into the building to have their meeting, because each person in the meeting only had 30 seconds to speak and the regents didn't listen anyway. the regents would be silenced liek we are silenced when it comes to their decision making. so we arrive at the building, everyone ( making lots of noise, and there are some speakers, then we hear the regents haven't arrived yet, which is good news, so we go to all the doors of the buildings but, alas, on one of the doors the police came and formed a human shield so the regents slipped in and we had missed our chance. so everyone grouped together and had more speakers, then everyone decided to not let them out of the building, so we formed a human shield around the building for a while, linked arms, but nothing seemed to be happening and everyone was sort of milling then the new plan was to just group up around all the doors, which we did, and then out comes a couple of coppers with the regents! so arms lock tight and a copper pushes me and shouts at me to get out of the way and i say 'no officer' and the wall stays strong and they retreat. the regents look passive, or try and pretend to be slightly amused by the situation (there are 4 of them here at this point, 2 more have got away). then everyone expects them to try to get out a different door, but 5 minutes later one of the regents, a bit tall grey haired man comes out like he has just been like 'a bunch of students cant stop me', and again it was me and my mate richie who were quick enough to get infront of them and then everyone linked onto us and the fucking regent leans down to me (he is very tall) and he is like 'excuse me, but i have a kid to be picked up from kindergarten' and i say to him 'well mate, if you are going to involve yourself in these types of things you are going to have to face the consequences' and he shoves me a bit more then they retreat again. but then the cops try and forcibly push us all out, waving batons, and riche gets pulled to the ground by 2 coppers and his tshirt gets ripped but then a mob of people drag him away from the cops, but then suddenly everythign has turned ugly and this girl adele, a slight build african-american anarchist was being dragged along the floor by a load of cops, so everyone dives in to try and grab her back but the cops drag her into the building, but keep the door open, and so a load of us charge at the door, and it is almost like a rugby scrum with 3 lines of cops and about 7 lines of protesters (i assumed the scrum position) pushing, and we were getting the better of it, and they were being forced back and back and we were screaming 'LET THEM GO! LET THEM GO!' and the cops started screaming GET BACK! GET BACK! and then BANG out come the extended batons and they start smacking people at the front, so a few people fall back and suddenly i am right eyeball to eyeball with this screaming copper and i am screaming at him and he is being pushed back and this lasts about 4 seconds until a shithead cop behind the cop i was pushing against gets out his mace and for a second i think 'wow, the line of the mace looks beautiful' and then suddenly i can't see and my whole face is burning like never before and i struggle back from the crowd and try and get some water in my eyes, and then people and cameras are crowding round and about 6 of us have been maced and suddenly all the energy has gone out of the demo because people are SCARED and shocked by everything.

so the mace really really hurt, it got in my contact lenses so i had to take them out which hurt even more, then someone in a suit brought a bucket of ice and there were terse thank yous and then suddenly i was feeling pretty chuffed that i had actually had a scuffle with an all-american cop and he had chicked out and pepper sprayed me. then eveyone was shouting 'calm down, calm down' and everyone sat down and discussed what to do next. most people were concerned for the 3 people dragged into the building by the cops, but then there was word that they had brought in riot police from berkeley (san francisco) who were massing in a nearby carpark. and then everyone really got quite scared and, to cut a long story short, a deal was done whereby we agreed to let out the 2 remaining regents peacefully and then our friends would not be arrested, only 'cited' (fined). soon after i couldn't see anything and was pissed off that noone wanted to continue to fight (surely the people arrested would not have wanted us to just give up, and be forced to bargain witht he cops, because we had the upper hand adn they were still inside!) and a few of us said we wanted to continue a sit down protest but everyone was like 'no you are jeapordising the safety of our friends!' and i was like 'this has shown that the regents don't listen, they just call in the physical authority of the state, this is the pivotal moment!' and everyone thoguht i was being stupid and insensitive, except richie who agreed. so we took a peek at the riot cops then i went to collect my long board (that isn't mine), IT HAD BEEN STOLEN, but just cos all the abovew had happened and i was still feeling a bit shaky i barely thought 'oh shit' and just walked home in silence (my MP3 player broke the other day when i crashed on aformentioned long board)

then yesterday it turned out i was on the front page of the santa cruz sentinal (http://www.santacruzphotogallery.com/gallery/protest) having my eyes washed out after being maced, with richie in the other photo (of the guy sprawled out among cops). Then in the evening i had my UC an the bomb class where most people thought the action was a bad thing! we had a heated but reasoned debate but i was very sad at the general attitude of the students. the thing is, the protest was a natural reaction to everyone being silenced and denied the right to be heard, so OBVIOUSLY people are going to be angry, and whatever happens after that is the collective decision fo the group, and if all these pacifist ney sayers had been there, and there were 2000 people instead of 200 then maybe things would have been different, but you just can't stay at home and then tell everyone after what SHOULD have happened. but we were accused of being a mob and fighting for the said of fighting and what were we going to achieve anywya? the sting int he tail is that one of the girls arrested has been charged with an offence that coudl put her in prison 'battery of a police officer', and she coudl be expelled, so all the people who wanted to negotiate with the cops have been sold down the river like they were alwasy going to be.

but met some proper anarchist types who have promised to show me to sights (but were well secretive). apparently most of the good punk shows happen in houses rather than venues, which is cool too.

the reason i had a long board not a bike htat got stolen is another annoying thing- we did our usual guerilla cinema then music on the beach thing on friday, met some people but then i got a puncture so we went back to this girls house to try and fix it, but she didn't have the right type of pump, so she gave me her longboard so max could tow me to the bus stop and i left my bike there, but when i went back the next day to pick it up i couldn't for the life if me remember where her hosue was, because i was too pissed the night before to pay any attention to where i was.... so until next friday (if they come to guerilla cinema again) i am bikeless, and have to explain to her that i got her longboard stolen... shit.

only other big happenings of the week is that i have been allowed to move out, with no excess fees or anything (except $80 for the keys i lost), in a couple of weeks. this is really good news, gets me out of the campus bubble, cooking my own food, chilling with wider cross section of people, allowed to play music in my own space, cheaper, own room, garden, bike to the beach before breakfast etc etc. i went to visit last night, there were loads of people there (even though only 4 other people live there) and it was all quite rowdy, but i think that will make a nice and exciting change from here, even though i will probably get a lot less work done. they have huge plants everywhere, one of them is into jigsaws, they make homemade lemon and ginger ice tea and have a cat called parker (i hope the namesake of the thunderbirds character). everything there is just much more like a home and less like a hotel. my flatmates were ok when i broke the news to them- giancarlo already knew (was probably part of the decision making process), edmund pretend not to hear me and i had told max earlier, so all ok. max is thinking of putting in a tranfer request to a different room too, i don't blame him.

i am off to santa barbara for the weekend, 4 hours south (and HOT apparently) for a conference about nukes, there is a woman from yorkshire CND speaking i think which is quite funny. hope it is not another talking shop waste of time, but from the people i know who are going i don't think it will be. but i need to eat before i go- got a taco in the fridge- so will go.

Thursday

i am on another one of those literal losing streaks. in the past week i have lost my keys, my drum hoodie, my notebook, 2 pens and a pouch of baccy. the keys cost 80 bucks to replace! bastards. it is so frustrating, and i feel like as soon as i mission to find one thing i lose something else.

was vaguely searching the web for alternative living arrangements and came upon a house with a 'small room with big windows' that was only 450 a month (instead of 680 which i am paying to SHARE A ROOM with 2 other people) so i decided to go full swing to try and move out. but guess what? i have signed a contract saying i HAVE TO STAY on campus ALL YEAR unless i can prove i have suddenly become poor, or ill, or expelled. which is fucking bollocks. even if you have a morgage you can get out of it within a year. you could get out whenever you wanted at dinwiddy. BASTARDS. the more i find out (or rub up against) this university, the more it seems like a shitty corporation, which essentially i think it is.

so i went to visit the house that only costs $450 a month and WOW it is amazing! it is hard to find becuase it is surrounded by trees, it has a porch with a sofa, then a dog, a cat, a piano that belongs to the house, front and back garden, lots of instruments and 3 undeniably beautiful girls (and one not so beautiful girl) who are looking for a male roommate 'incase any shit goes down'. my room is about the same size as my room in dinwiddy, but with one of those raised (1 1/2 size) beds so there is quite alot of floor space. all the residents were well chilled, all in education, they 'try to limit parties to weekends', blaze and, judging by the short amount of time i was there, eat lots of avacados. and they liked me enough to offer me the room there an then, which i was chuffed about. so big emphasis on getting out of halls if at all possible. i think i upset max though, i told him earlier today that iw as thinking about moving out and he seemed quite sad (i would be well sad if he moved out- the people left don't even really add up to one persons worth of friendship) and then i got a call about htis house and went to see it straight away, btu couldn't be like 'yeah im off to view this house' cos my other flatmates were there and i wouldnt like to not be able to move out then have to live with them knowing that i want to. when i got back just now he was asleep, and we were due to go jam togehter so i woke him up and he didn't seem very happy and just went back to sleep instead of coming to jam. i will apologise and explain in the morning. also in the morning i am going to go and state my financial hardship case to the powers that be. i have put together a mostly truthful compelling case that can be backed up with mostly truthful evidence but after that night spent on york station platform i don't trust anyone in authority to trust or believe me.

perfect example of the climate of fear that is all around here: when people do their laundry(the room is right outside my front door) they sit and wait for it to be done, even though they live a minute away, incase it gets stolen, even though the washing machine doors lock!!!

the naked run happened two nights ago, it wasn't when i thought it was before. it was actually really brilliant- at one point there were at least a few hundred people, all running right around the campus which is quite big. a few people from my classes were on it, and i feel that has broken the ice a bit. unfortunately max didn't come, he was dillying and dallying and in the end i just had to go without him, but he was a bit annoyed at himself for not doing it in the end i think. i got cold after a while and went back and put some clothes on, then heard there was to be a drum circle, so took my sax, and when i got there it was indeed a drum circle but a naked drum circle, with everyone huddled close togehter and dancing. there was a girl there from my jazz class and so we had a bit of a duet to the drums. then someone came round with white body paint. there were some 'militant' naked people on the run who shouted at all the bystanders to join in, and occasionally one would go up and hug someone and they would run away or scream. it was justified i guess, because people were gawping and taking photos, but aswell it is sort of elitist in a way, like 'i dare to take all my clothes off and you have loads of inibitions and i feel great and you don't even know how great and liberated i feel', which is entirely against the spirit of it. but i guess it only matters which stance gets more people joining in.

went to san francisco on sunday and monday to watch a free bluegrass festival called 'hardly strictly bluegrass'. it was in a massive park in the centre of the city with 5 big stages, one called the 'porch stage' and anothe rthe 'rooster stage', and saw some great music. a guitar player who played bass, rhythm and lead and great political lyrics all at the same time can't remember his name, then elvis costello, looking cool, then bob weir from the grateful dead playing grateful dead songs. i had never heard grateful dead before but apparently they were huge. loads of people here have tshirts of them. i had only eaten 2 bananas and some cereal all day and i fell asleep whilst everyone danced around me. it was good though. they played electric guitar solos on an acoustic guitar.

we stayed at max's friend aileen's flat at san francisco state uni (they have a university wide network of unis called UC that i go to one of, then each state has its own uni aswell), where some people dress up as somethign every day (we saw a doctor, a 20s frenchman or something, 2 nurses and loads of people who looked like the most stereotypical hip hop pin ups constantly adjusting the ridiculous position of their caps). we travelled with a russian girl called anna who lives nearby who ha other friends at the uni, one of whom turned out to be a poet, and who spoke over the Mbira and talked of feeling lost but being ok. anna says in russia they call newly arrived immigrants as 'FOBS', 'fresh off the boats', and share with them a collective hate of rich persians.

on sunday night max took me on a huge badly planned mission around the whole bay area to try and catch thetrain to go home,- the train left from near where we were, but he took us to the furthest connection on the other side of the city, and we missed all the connections. we hadn't eaten all day and ended up stuck in the middle of industrial zonage just outside the city, but then we took a deep breath and found a fajita shop and then took a long walk in a random part of the city, midnight coffee and doughnuts and then back to san fran state with apologies.

i have met a guy in a punk band from LA who wants to bring his band and play a gig here, so i am going to try and put a night on and raise some of the £4200 judith and mariah need for school fees (a IT college in Holloway) so they can get a good chance of a full 2 year visa and good chances of ok employment after. i don't really know if being deported will affect their chances of getting a visa, but the website www.joskos.co.uk (i think) promises 'employment in the field within 6 months or your money back' and also offer help with visa applications. they specialise in foreign students i think. the band sound cool and thrashy but i havne't the first idea how to market a punk gig here. i havne't even been to one since i got here, even though there are loads going on. maybe something for next term.

oh! this morning i woke up to my first shoot from the seeds lauren gave me; it is tiny but there none the less. it has two mini leaves. someone gave me a basil plant on tuesday when i enquired where she got it. it was looking a bit yellow and ill, and still is, but i think it just needed some love.

in my Uc and the Bomb lecture (for which i had a presentation today that went quite well- all about Bechtel Corp and influence of big business on US nuclear policy aswell as project for new american century and all that ) we have to do a 'creative project' to get a good grade, and from about 20 people we had to split into groups to do either 'education, long term planning or direct action'. there were only 2 of us who wanted to do direct action! and all my proposals were met with an arkward silence, either they didn't understand me or thought i was being too radical. but they didn't say ;your being too radical' they just sort of sidestepped what is aid. and my ideas weren't even that bad, just stuff like having loud noises of war (bombs, planes etc) in the regents (managing board) meeting, or doing a sit in of the stage or a die in or whatever. so we are just going to fuck about wearing masks and handing out flyers and writing letters.

tonight alice showed me the hidden away studios, and played me some the tunes she is making. she has a truly exceptional voice, and can write much better tunes and words than i expected. got a bit of confidence back playing clarinet with her, you really don't have to do much to make the clarinet sound beautiful with piano, and it put into perspective all the worry i have about being substandard and not progressing musically. but anyway, going to try and record a song a month. i have even found a nice female vocalist (it is hard asking someone who already sings so well like alice to sing my songs, cos i always feel like they could just be singing their own songs instead).

ok, enough rambling. my flatmate edmund has been bitching about how the kitchen is 'always messy' and makes a point of washing up things i have alredy washed up up when i get in to make a point. so now i am going to wash up a bit.

attached

it was 'first rain' here (of the autumn), when generally people here go running naked. about 9pm there was a big siren that went off, but i didn't go to it. i was busy. tit is getting quite chilly here, more so than i thought. the forest smells so different and lovely now though.

the most productive things i have done all week are buy a bike, some honey to go with my frozen yoghurt, and done an hour of volunteer work for the food coop. i was like 'can i volunteer for the coop?' and the girl was like 'take out the trash' and then 'sweep up' and then 'do the washing up' i was well chuffed. who says anarchists never take the bin out?

had a pretty great night the other night. it was friday, and me and max both had bikes (i got a bike!) for the first evening and we were going to head down to the guerilla cinema then maybe jam on the beach, so strapped sax to back and rode off, but didn't get far before saw man with drum, so had a jam with him, then a adrenaline pumping ride down a long fast hill(at loeast 2 or 3 km) with no lights int he pitch black and cars whizzing by. then i tried to use my fake national railcard id to buy some wine, didn't work, so we went into the safeway car park, got out instruments, and played until a random norwegian guy came and agreed to buy us some wine. then down the train tracks to the cinema, it was 10pm by now and it was meant to start at 8, but you know what anarchists wer elike, and we were just in time for the beginning of the feature, called 'life and debt', all about the IMF and WTO effects on jamaica. it was really eye opening; ever time i hear about the IMF i remember how TOTALLY and holistically they fuck over countries and leave them with no options. it was done by starting off with US tourists and it took you through their bubble existence and then would spin off to the issues, so the tourist eats a banana and it goes off on one about how the banana trade has been destroyed etc etc. but some intense images- beautiful milk being poured down the drain by the gallons because of US subsidised powdered milk (the us subsidise it 134%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) whilst down the road rastafarians go through the open cast rubbish.

an old bearded man called 'the mule skinner' started talking to us, i think primarily because we had some wine, and he had some weed (i had left mine at home by accident) so all were happy. he told us stories like a proper american, "i was the fastest mule skinner north of santa rosa", and i was like 'are you a travellin' man?" and he was like 'ahhh, i need to git me a mule, then we can go up to the north country! hahaha i ain't never left here before" and then for ages when he figured i was english he was like "hahahahahaha!!! you from eeengland!!! hahaha, well ain't that something". all this time most of the people watching the film could hear him, and i am sure were getting pretty pissed off with him, so eventually iwas like lets go to the beach after this and talk but now lets watch the film etc etc and then another hobo came called bruce, and when the film finished (i woudl really recommend the film) me, max and bruce went to the nearest beach (one straight road away) nd by now i was rushing and excited by the sea and sang a song abotu the sea

and bruce got int he spirit and sang along, and then had some really lovely (but slightly impatient) moments playing the sax loud to the sea and dodging waves whilst still playing, was amazing, then max played some gypsyish guitar and i danced and realised i hadn't dance for ages and had missed it without knowing and then we spoke, and then we were meant to be meeting one of maxs friends who had a beach hut and was a having a bit of a do and he rang them and they were heading to another beach up the coast, but bruce knew wehre it was, and then i was like 'so are you coming bruce?' and he was like 'do you feel comfortable me coming?' and i was like 'well, ofcourse i do, cos we are having a great time, and so does max, but we both know that when we get there the preppy punks who are there weill be like 'who is that hobo?' and might not be top class' and he was like 'yes... i know when to say goodnight' and he was going to take us fishing and we said goodbye. then we headed int he direction we were told, biking and feeling free on the quiet coast road and then this stupid 4 by 4 drove past and someone shouted out of the window 'I LOVE YOU!' and i shouted back 'GET A SMALLER CAR!" and then we chased the car and then we lost it and then it was behind us again and it stopped and we asked them where X beach was and they were like 'do you want a riattade?' and so we put our bikes in their ample boot and got in. and anyway it turns out these people are sort of in a way the people i have been waiting to meet for a while- one of them was JUST LIKE commie cath, looked like her and was an artist but younger and less cynical and without a cackle. and can't remember the names of her two friends but anyway, they were all about telling everyone they met that they were beautiful and went on 'vision quests' where they go out into the desert and fast and have thoughts, and live in a buddhist commune (which has space and is really cheap and is close to campus...) and have medical cards for medicinal amrajuina and it was lovely chilling with them on the beach etc. we went for a spontanious naked swim!! and long chats. but even in that situation i was a bit cynical with all their hippie chatter, not that i doidn't agree with an of it, but i dunno, i guess maybe i am just more conciouos of all the shit outside (and inside) of the lovely beach town. maybe just anger at myself for being troo politically inert. but anyway, every event of the evening seemed to conspire together to make for a wonderful evening

but then max lost his bike lock so our bikes are still at the beach till his mum mails him the spare! bit of a shitter. we were meant to go today but he didn't pick up his mail in time.

on friday daytime i had made a 'decoupage flowerpot' (i think decoupage is the act of sticking things together with half pvc glue, half water) out of an old big tin can and a few copies of the new yorker and other papers. then put the paper-with-seeds-in that lauren gave me in the pot, and soil, and poked some holes int he bottom, and now i am just waiting for flowers

but anyway, i digress. the people we met on friday invited us to a birthday party near campus for the next day.. got there, and was treated like a wierd smelly party crasher by the people int he room that opened the door to me. was a bit wierd, but then went into the garden where the people who we met the other night were at, and it was really great, met some really top class guys and gals. there was a guy with a tshirt saying 'save dafur' and i asked him 'how would you save dafur' and he said somethign like 'well, the UN won't do anything and the arabs are too unruly to sort themselves out so america should take unilateral action " and i was like 'do you want america to invade dafur" and he said 'well, the word /invade is a /bit troublesome...' and i was like 'are you jewish' and he was like 'yeah and also a zionist'. but at least the conversation was stimulating. i met a guy who i had previously met at a bike coop, and we chatted about music when we met again and then i went and chatted with someone else and sparked a fat spliff, and he tapped me on the shoulder and said 'do you know that gives you cancer?' and wow, i didn't smoke again at the party i got a bit noiad. then later am Mbira jam with 2 beatboxers and 2 really great MCs, possibly the most intelligent, relaxed MCing i have ever heard from this guy who just looked and behaved like a sort of skinny tall george. he rhymed rasputin with disputin'.

adn they had 2 kegs of newcastle brown ale!!!! hahahaha that was all the alcohol there was, great eh? tasted great. but the best thing there was the conversation, it reminded me of how bubbled up campus is;because they were in a stimulated environment the conversation was just so much more significant.

and there was talk of a buhhdist coop just outside the campus, and also two coops in the town, both of which are dirt cheap and have spaces... i think maybe i will move out of my campus bubble at christmas. it is ok here, but i had a bit of a revelation last night remembering that i was here to experience AMERICA aswell as uni life in america, and i have seen plenty of uni life here and it isn't THAT cool, even thoguh it is very beautiful and easy. and i thought if i had the same militant attitude as 2 years ago when i properly was intent on smashing the system then i would be actively seeking out somewhere else than a campus to live on, i would be trying to be in a coop from day one, and i think i have been a bit blinded by convenience here. the only drawbacks to living in the town would be thats its a mission to get into uni every morning and i might do less work, but i will be in a town with a proper social structure not an imposed, artificial one. so i am going to get someone to take me to one i hope. what do you think? it will be difficult to say goodbye to max and a fewothers, but i think he will understand and it makes social if not logistical sense. i was thinknig last night this is my first chance to do the proper alternative living thing, and it has taken so long to be in this position that i have forgot i wanted to do it!

then , sunday, alice and her flatmate tess cooked a delicious sunday dinner. tess's thing was to cook her flatmates sunday dinner back in dublin where she went to uni so it was all carrot and cream cheese, chicken stock, sausages, roasted veggies , apple crumble and cream. tasty to the extreme. it was so nice to eat a meal around a table with good quality food and drink and pride taken in the cooking. then some Mbira with alice, then went home and cleaned the bath (as according to our new cleaning rota, as part of our 'living agreement', where we had to decide by what time of the evenign our chores would be done, and how long we can leave things in the drying area and for fucks sake man, there haven't even been any issues since we got here!!! stupid.)

then practiced john coltrane's mr PC on guitar and clarinet, then went off to the piano at the nearest dining hall but it was pitch black and we didn't have light so we just played in the pitch black improv, not coltrane, and it was going nicely and then these two guys appeared and asked if they could jam, and we said yes, and then a minute later like 8 people came dancing down the stairs, one with a flute and one with a violin, and it was all very dark so we couldn't really see each others faces so i just went over and was well intense with the flute player and she was into it and we swapped ideas and managed IT at times and all the others danced and sang and whooped and max kept banging out the chords on the piano and it was AMAZING!!! and it went on and on.

most common questions people ask me - 'where are you from' england 'which part?' yorkshire... in the north east. and generally peopel don't know ANYWHERE in london except for london and manchester united, so why do they bother asking?.

so that was class, then they had classes int he morning, so did max, but earlier i had given $10 to some people visiting a flat furthur down who worked for UPS to get me some wine. so went to pick it up, and we headed down to the 'meadow', where everyone gathers on a night but where i have never been to yet, and there was noone there cos it was 1am on a sunday, but we sat down, 4 boys and 3 girls who all knew each other and me sort of, and they smoked a BLUNT ala kids and the north bay, and i smoked, and there were only 3 of us smoking and i got SO STONED, like very very stoned, and then we were walking and i was suddenly like 'who the fuck are these people who i am with, i cna't remember what i am doing here at all' and noone was talking to me, and then they did and i was so stoned i could only say yes and no and so they left me alone and i withdrew into muself fast and it was proper all encompassing paranoia but i didn't know where we were and didn't have a torch of my own so i had to stay with them and walk behind them and then left at the first opportunity, but it was HORRIBLE. and then i came back to my flat and fortunately giancarlo had gone to bed, and i really battled hard not to be noiad with my flatmates, and once i had managed to tell them what had happened it was ok and we watched cartoons then slept, but SHIT MAN i was so stoned, i was lying in bed tripping for about an hour. all the signs are pointing to me just stopping smoking (lots of) weed.

and now it is tuesday and another day full of music. jazz today was excellent again, i feel inspired every lesson, but music of india is a bit slow. this evening we had a lecture on 'how to make an atomic bomb' in our UC and the bomb lecture. we are going to los alamos, where they design all the US bombs, to have a look around, should be quite good. someone walked past me outside the music centre in a tshirt with 'ISREALI AIRFORCE' and the crest in big letters on the front.

what is the point of itunes? i only realised recently that when you convert a song on your laptop to itunres format or rip a cd in itunes, it doesn't let you share it freely, and you can only give it to a certain amount of people. what a load of shit!especially at a time when music is becoming freer and freer. why do people not just boycott itunes and use any of the other thousand ways of playing music on cd players, computers and mp3 players and just use MP3s? i guess it is something to do with the aesthetics of the ipod. mayube one day it will be impossible to sell music because it will all be on the internet, so musical artists and groups will have to earn their money by PLAYING music live to people. having said all that, it is possible her (if you have itues) to listen to anyone elses itunes collection in our college who is on the network, which at any one time is massive. that is cool.

so another week has passed by, and i do feel more settled and with purpose. once again there are not enough hours in the day to do all the things i want to do, and i think i prefer it this way. i do want to get off campus more though and meet a more diverse group of people. i am going back to san francisco this coming weekend to a free bluegrass festival, so that will give me a weekend away.

attached is a photo of my three flatmates, from left edmund, giancarlo and max. their expressions are to an extent reflective of their personalities.

it is late.

sam sent me an email about his first throes in Dinwiddy, and i wanted to be there with him. when i read emails sometimes i am back in england.

2nd letter home

just got back from this terms first College Republican meeting. It wasn't as gory as i had hoped. there were about 30 people, with a lady chairwoman clearly being groomed to be some republican intern somewhere. lots of 'tabling quips' (rehashed stories of being abused or loved whilst doing stalls), 'hippie' bashing, pleas for help canvassing in San Diego next month, and only one mention of the KKK ("we should have all worn suits or em.... white hoods to scare all the new people.... errr bad joke"). then the local candidate came in with pizza and coke and made a speech about the 'big tent' of the republican party and 'moderate, reagan like republicanism' "who freed slaves? the republicans. who gave women the vote? the republicans? who set up the national parks agency? the republicans" and so it went on. he even claimed the biggest section of the californian gay population were republicans.

i was hoping to be able to tell you how my second jazz theory lesson went, at which we were due to be playing a blues infront of the rest of the class. i have been practicing for a few days, asking many people what they thought the idea of the blues distilled into, reading books and tying myself into knots (after that disastrous clarinet audition i wasn't feeling very confident). however, max found a grand piano in one of the dining halls (which naturally has a wicked acoustic) and three nights ago we went there and just RIPPED and all my fears were assuaged. it was really really special man, i felt like a flying fish, fluttering around between the piano chords and finding the path of least resistance and then occasionally going for it and jumping high out of the water and holding it for as long as the atmosphere would allow and then plunging back down again and then shutting up for a while. it just sounded rounded and exciting and beautiful in parts. we went to a different piano last night with some more structured chord progressions in mind and it was a different thing we were producing but as good in different ways. for years i have been unable to make the leap between playing my own blues scale with bits of chromaticism and vaguely following the accompaniment to be able to place individual notes with specific functions and movements into the music, and therefore to extend and/or implicate the harmony of what is going on, but things are starting to fall into place now and the clarinet is looking more like a piano in my head. which makes ben a very excited boy. but anyway, the it is so lucky that i have winded up with a great piano player that is also a great person living one and a bit metres below me (he is on the bottom bunk). he is very unassuming, but you can tell he has grown up in a very stimulated environment. he just casually drops in things like 'oh, you know tom waits? yeah, he's my dads friend'. it also turns out he has a semi-broken heart, having split up with his first love just before he came here, even though she came here too! it is a long sad story with lots of victims (her brother died in a car crash earlier in the year and max ended up organising the funeral) but he still thinks one day their love will prevail. you;ve got to admire a person who is totally caught up in the mega-emotions of love and loss and is so cheery and nice you don't even notice.

talking of loss and death, a girl from the university jumped off a bridge to her death on saturday, word on campus is that her weed was laced... not very pretty man. she was 18.

but anyway, my final course choice for this term are jazz theory, music of india and 'UC and the bomb', all of which i have on tues and thurs (so i have mon, wed, fri off). the readings for jazz theory are pretty mental; it is the lectures own book and it is all about god and uniting the mind, body and spirit, and long metaphores about roses and the blues.:

"...thus, when our awareness broadens, heaven then becomes more than a place in which to either believe or refute; it can become a level of consciousness..."

"...spirituality is channeled through our spirit and uses the intuitive self and subconcious mind to translate and decode messages'

the lecturer is a really great musician, and it is great that he is taking 'jazz theory' to mean something more holistic that technical method, but i just get the feeling reading to his stuff that he thinks he is able to write down what is a really abstract concept and set of emotions in himself that are not necessarily universal. he also talks quite alot about god and implies that you need a connection with Him to truly feel the ;'creative spirit'. but anyhow, we will see what happens.

music of india is pretty cool- there are a few hundred in our class, compared to about 15 at SOAS, quite a change, and the lecturer is a great sitar player who plays in our lessons (for my fellow widdessians, alice went and chatted with the lecturer, told him the score and when he found out Widdess was our teacher, he apparently got well excited and told us not bother coming to his class cos we must know it all already from Widdess! apparently he is world famous inindian music circles. so he invited us to his graduate class, which i have so far sacked off).

UC and the bomb is very interesting- there is no teacher, it is all peer to peer learning with a couple of faciliters, which is great stuff except a bit slow as the facilitaters are hugely eager to make sure the consensus decision making is working, leading to lots of pauses. but we have had good discussions pon nuclear policy and more general foreign policy. they are an interesting bunch of people that take the class. one of the facilitators is a spitting image of Kai, and is called Kai!!!!!! the only other kai i have ever met. and even has the same hair, except longer and with dreadlocks piled on his head. we are all going on a field trip to a nuclear research facility in a couple of weeks.

went on a 'disorientation tour' with the general activists around campus, passing where they had got rid of military rectruiters, etc etc (the stop the war group were on a government list of subversive groups for a while) and ended up at this huge tree called tree 9 with loads of great branches so it was easy to climb to the top. it was MASSIVE and when i was half way up i thought i woudl stay there, but gradually i worked my way up and beat my fear and got to the top, where there was a beautiful view, a laminated photograph of the same view pinned to the tree and a interesting conversation about resurgent german fascism with a german feminist who was also at the top. but there were good people on the talk.

food is something that is occupying my thoughts quite alot at the moment. i was forced to buy a '55 day meal plan' as part of my housing contract, which means that roughly once a day it is 'all you care to eat' for me. and the choice is quite immense- every day there is pizza, pasta, burgers, chips, burritos and torillas, salads, all manner of sandwiches, industrial size tubs of mayonnaise, plus whatever food they have cooked specifically that day, like a meal or whatever etc etc and so in the beginning i was really taking advantage of all this (keeping the TAKE ADVANTAGE OF ALL FOOD OPPORTUNITIES mindset of SOAS) but then i started feeling greasy and bloated. but on the plus side, i put some bagels down my pants every lunch and then have breakfast the next day for free. it was also time for the occasional 'organic food vs cheap food' debate the other shopping day, with all the other factors playing themselves out (type of shop, type of things i needed, does coconut milk need to be fair trade?) but in the end the nicer food won, mainly because i was outside a nice shop at the time, but i went to safeway anyway because you can get 4 litres of tropicana for $5, (£3) with a clubcard. what can you do? but anyway, had delicious spinach, broccoli, strange mushroom, coconut and onion with rice last night so it was worth it i think.

on friday me and max went to see 'paradise now', a film about two potential palestinian suicide bombers, at a 'guerilla cinema' showing on the side of a warehouse on some disused train tracks near campus. we got there 30 mins late, and guess whose voice comes wafting down the train track? none other than george galloway, who is on the screen being interviewed about lebanon and being his usual aggressive self. jokes. the americans were loving it (he was wearing these red rimmed glasses). i was cringing till the end, when he really layed into the interviewer, asking her if she knew the names of any of the countless lebanese or palestinian political prisoners (hostages), but how gilad and every other isreali prisoner was known worldwide. she was actually speechless. that was quite good.

The main film was great- you got to see day to day life in palestine which was really interesting (what exactly does a refugee camp that has been there for 50 years actually look like? actually they never showed any of them, so i still don't know) and it also manages to be quite funny in parts, but the end is quite predictable.... infact the funniest thing was the redneck sat behind us who kept heckling- there is a bit in the film where the hero has to decide if he wants to spend the night with this beautiful girl or go and be a matyr, and he chooses the latter, and the redneck, completely missing the poing, shouts "VIRGIN!!!" at the screen. we got a good introduction to the proper political scene in santa cruz though- quite alot like the people at the square social centre in london i feel but a little more cheery and optimistic. there is some really good stuff going on- a 'free school' which is like a more formal skill swap where anyone can be a teacher (i suggested a make your own instrument workshop but they already had it!), also a 'trash orchestra' that seems quite radical and lots of copies of Harbinger and other good literature. we got plied with alcopops and patter though, which put me on my guard a bit (i guess they think we are new to the whole scene and need to see that it isn't all hardcore politics and anti-imperialists are humans too:)) but all good. it does have a radical small town feel, which is great. there was a demo in a town 20 miles away that is mainly populated by mexican immigrants on sunday, and i thought long and hard about going, but in the end it was 1pm and i was only half way through my clarinet practice, and i decided music just in these important moments need to be prioritised, even though i know the demo would have been great fun and a chance to see another side of the USA. they were talking at the cinema about a phone tree so when more raids happen on immigrants people can get down there quick and form a human shield or whatnot, so will be doing that i think if the time arrives.

despite all this, i am still yet to find or be invited to anything resembling a party. i think i am just not meeting the right people, perhaps because i live in a flat with a 'community assistent'. in a way it is good, because i am not getting too fucked ever and can play lots of music but still, it is irksome. i thought i could take the good pits out of american pie and at least experience the decadant american house party... maybe soon.

speak soon
love ben

first letter home

It is11pm here on the west coast of america, where the voices are loud, the legs are long and the sun is strong. Today has been the first proper academic day for me- i had a music induction at 9am, followed by a placement exam, an audition for clarinet lessons, an audition for the UCSC wind band and then a beauracratic battle to find out which courses i could and couldn't do. The placement exam went ok- the hours of exercises whilst counting cars for SBC paid off for the harmony/melody bit of the exam, but as usual my aural skills were hopeless and my knowledge of Western musical history patchy. The clarinet audition, which i was half nervous about and half complacent about, went really badly. I haven't had lessons for 2 years, and though i have been burning my arse practicing all summer, it is impossible to replace the knowledge of a teacher, and it seems i have overlooked some fundamentals like controlled breathing, timing and poise. apparently i am letting the instrument control my breathing, rather than my breathing control the instrument, and as a consequence my tone quality is poor. The teacher, Mark Brandenburg (!), seemed entirely unimpressed with me, and even less impressed when i tried to talk my way into his lessons. It didn't help that there were half a dozen shithot annoyingly preppy players waiting with me, with their A clarinets (which are used in classical orchestras, rather than the standard Bb that i use) and unabashed boasting. so, although i havne't yet recieved the email from him telling me whether i am in, i very much doubt it. Which is a right bummer, because that was one of the main reasons i came here.

If you have clarinet lessons, you also have to be in either the wind band or orchestra, so i immediately went for my wind band audition. This went better, with a friendly teacher who went off one one about the time he went to york with a load of boys and got mobbed by St Margarets girls schools' girls. He was impressed with my sight reading and Mozart, and I think i am in. however, now that i am not going to have lessons (i think), i might sack the wind band off, even though they are playing Carnegie hall in New York in spring. what do you think?

It turned out after that I don't have to do any of the 'core courses', which are a grounding in western tonal harmony, and i can go straight into Jazz Theory and Computer music synthesis (though the latter clashes with Music of India, at least for this term) provided i sweet talk the instructors. I am in a funny situation- because none of what i am doing counts for credit either at SOAS or here, it is almost like i am unaccountable to anyone, which means i can do anything i like. i could even sack off music altogether and do latino studies, or environmental studies, or Hindi. I still might, though i have satisfied the minimum requirements for this term with just Jaxx Theory, Music of India and Gamelan, and will have lots of free time to write music, walk in the woods etc.

There are plenty of woods to walk in here- my college (where i live) is surrounded by huge redwood trees that extend ad infinitum. There are very friendly deer that forage about the place, and at night if you walk into the woods a bit the grasshoppers are deafening. I took a little wander last night with my Mbira and the first spliff of my stay, and it was lovely. I find I can only play my Mbira when i am feeling peaceful, otherwise i get impatient, but last night it was all good. Its funny when an inanimate object can give you a better insight into your mood (i guess the same thing happens when you choose what music you want to listen to). Suddenly a group of completely typical OCesque (not that i have ever seen it...) girls walked past, boys hot on their trail, and i layed flat so they wouldn't see me. Alice (the girl from SOAS who is also here doing music) described the conversation of many here as vacuous, and i think that is the perfect word, just useless and boring. I was feeling the pinch when i first got here in terms of lack of stimulating conversation, and it made me feel lonely, but as the days go by the interesting people emerge and all is well.

The lowest point was at our building induction (the college is spread out in buildings holding about 40 people each, with a 'Community Assistant'- i guess a bit like a prefect- who is there to help people by hindering their misbehaviour) where it was spelt out that there was to be no alcohol, no drugs, lots of inane whooping and no smoking within 25 feet of any building) where i felt like i was back on that summer camp in india last year where well meaning young adults in positions of low power are so niice but well annoying and treat you like babies. Then i reconciled this with the fact that most of the people here are 18, just out of their christian parents' bosom and very, very naive. So i got on with it, and it turns out that the majority of people get battered quite alot. Unfortunately I live in the same flat as one of the afore mentioned Community assistants so i can't even have a nice glass of wine with my evening meal.

But the past couple of days have been cool, and i have had many a good conversation. Many people here are eager to learn about the world and are open minded, which is really good. And the jamming is also very good. I followed the sound of a drum beat to a nice latino guy called Moises, and soon there were 4 guitars, a violin, a mandolin and a jazz Real Book to play with. We did a wicked and spontanious version of Miles Davis' All Blues, it sounded wicked, followed by some bluegrass, some bossa nova and long conversations about the LA hardcore scene.

But anyway, i am digressing. After my morning at the music centre i headed over to the east field (you can see all of these places at www.ucsc.edu) where they were holding 'OPERS', a US version of freshers fayre, with good BBQ food and lots and lots of stalls. This was a real eye opener. I smiled to see the US version of the Socialist Workers Party and (would you believe it) Workers hammer party peddling their papers and raising their eyebrows at me when i told them my political orientation. There were also stalls for many religions (people with tshirts saying 'i am a zionist'), ethnicities (including the 'mixed race' society, who were very vague when i tried to find out what they actually did), sports (ultimate frisbee is massive here, and everyone is surprisingly good at 'soccer'), the republican party (with a 6 foot cut out of Bush- i am going to their meeting next week), radio stations, campus publications, environmental groups et al. there was one really good group called the 'disorientation collective' who are very Crimethinc.y (www.crimethinc.com) and promise to show the underbelly of university life (it turns out every nuclear warhead in the US arsenal was designed at california's universities). There is a good political scene in santa cruz- recently the government rounded up over 100 illegal workers from the town (which only has 50,000 people in it) and there is a big campaign to fight back getting started which is fairly prominent on campus. they use the same slogan- noone is illegal- as no borders did back in london. How can i not get involved. On sunday there is also come guerilla cinema on a disused railway line somewhere which is showing that 'paradise now' film.

There were also lots of 'fraternities' on campus. if you don't know about them (which i didn't until recently), they are sort of American Pie style clubs that people pay to be a part of and in exchange get access to the 'best' parties, free alcohol, the chance to mingle with sorority girls and be nicely groomed for rotary club style adulthood. the ways people find to feel loved. anyway, next week is 'rush week', where all the fraternities have open free parties to try and get you to join them, and even though i have been warned about frats, i am going to go and experience it.

I am sharing a small room with two other guys, max and edmund. max is a proper quality guy from the same small town as tom waits (who bummed fags off his dad back in the day), into rock climbing, mandolin playing and making me milkshakes. edmund seems a complex character, lacking many a positive emotion, but i am working on him. blame the parents. next door is giancarlo, the afore mentioned community assistant and gym guy. he has realised i am his age, and is cutting me a bit of slack, but it is still irksome to have Authority, any authority, living next door. I initially thought opting for a cheaper, smaller shared room was a bad idea (i have almost no space to call my own) but i don't spend much time there- i am writing this email in the living room, where there is a nice speaker, a LAN connection and a sofa so it is ok.

Santa cruz town is wicked, i can see why it is a bit famous and not symptomatic of america at all, an interesting mix of small non-chain stores, beats, beaches, a funfair just like scarborough, lots of hippies and nice bus drivers (who have consistently believed my true story that i lost my bus pass on a bus on the second day i was here and let me on for free). they even have lots of charity shops (where i bought all my pots and pans) and thrift stores. everyone is friendly, but everyone is much more friendly when they are working for a shop you are in. someone offered to help me choose tinned tomatos the other day. i mean really....

so yeah, everything is turning out pretty kosher here after a couple of nervous days in the beginning. i am missing everyone lots though; there is noone i can hug properly here or get excitedly stoned with (cannabis consumption is done with lots of cool poise round here...). YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO COME AND VISIT ME. it is really a set of sights to behold.

first letter home

It is11pm here on the west coast of america, where the voices are loud, the legs are long and the sun is strong. Today has been the first proper academic day for me- i had a music induction at 9am, followed by a placement exam, an audition for clarinet lessons, an audition for the UCSC wind band and then a beauracratic battle to find out which courses i could and couldn't do. The placement exam went ok- the hours of exercises whilst counting cars for SBC paid off for the harmony/melody bit of the exam, but as usual my aural skills were hopeless and my knowledge of Western musical history patchy. The clarinet audition, which i was half nervous about and half complacent about, went really badly. I haven't had lessons for 2 years, and though i have been burning my arse practicing all summer, it is impossible to replace the knowledge of a teacher, and it seems i have overlooked some fundamentals like controlled breathing, timing and poise. apparently i am letting the instrument control my breathing, rather than my breathing control the instrument, and as a consequence my tone quality is poor. The teacher, Mark Brandenburg (!), seemed entirely unimpressed with me, and even less impressed when i tried to talk my way into his lessons. It didn't help that there were half a dozen shithot annoyingly preppy players waiting with me, with their A clarinets (which are used in classical orchestras, rather than the standard Bb that i use) and unabashed boasting. so, although i havne't yet recieved the email from him telling me whether i am in, i very much doubt it. Which is a right bummer, because that was one of the main reasons i came here.

If you have clarinet lessons, you also have to be in either the wind band or orchestra, so i immediately went for my wind band audition. This went better, with a friendly teacher who went off one one about the time he went to york with a load of boys and got mobbed by St Margarets girls schools' girls. He was impressed with my sight reading and Mozart, and I think i am in. however, now that i am not going to have lessons (i think), i might sack the wind band off, even though they are playing Carnegie hall in New York in spring. what do you think?

It turned out after that I don't have to do any of the 'core courses', which are a grounding in western tonal harmony, and i can go straight into Jazz Theory and Computer music synthesis (though the latter clashes with Music of India, at least for this term) provided i sweet talk the instructors. I am in a funny situation- because none of what i am doing counts for credit either at SOAS or here, it is almost like i am unaccountable to anyone, which means i can do anything i like. i could even sack off music altogether and do latino studies, or environmental studies, or Hindi. I still might, though i have satisfied the minimum requirements for this term with just Jaxx Theory, Music of India and Gamelan, and will have lots of free time to write music, walk in the woods etc.

There are plenty of woods to walk in here- my college (where i live) is surrounded by huge redwood trees that extend ad infinitum. There are very friendly deer that forage about the place, and at night if you walk into the woods a bit the grasshoppers are deafening. I took a little wander last night with my Mbira and the first spliff of my stay, and it was lovely. I find I can only play my Mbira when i am feeling peaceful, otherwise i get impatient, but last night it was all good. Its funny when an inanimate object can give you a better insight into your mood (i guess the same thing happens when you choose what music you want to listen to). Suddenly a group of completely typical OCesque (not that i have ever seen it...) girls walked past, boys hot on their trail, and i layed flat so they wouldn't see me. Alice (the girl from SOAS who is also here doing music) described the conversation of many here as vacuous, and i think that is the perfect word, just useless and boring. I was feeling the pinch when i first got here in terms of lack of stimulating conversation, and it made me feel lonely, but as the days go by the interesting people emerge and all is well.

The lowest point was at our building induction (the college is spread out in buildings holding about 40 people each, with a 'Community Assistant'- i guess a bit like a prefect- who is there to help people by hindering their misbehaviour) where it was spelt out that there was to be no alcohol, no drugs, lots of inane whooping and no smoking within 25 feet of any building) where i felt like i was back on that summer camp in india last year where well meaning young adults in positions of low power are so niice but well annoying and treat you like babies. Then i reconciled this with the fact that most of the people here are 18, just out of their christian parents' bosom and very, very naive. So i got on with it, and it turns out that the majority of people get battered quite alot. Unfortunately I live in the same flat as one of the afore mentioned Community assistants so i can't even have a nice glass of wine with my evening meal.

But the past couple of days have been cool, and i have had many a good conversation. Many people here are eager to learn about the world and are open minded, which is really good. And the jamming is also very good. I followed the sound of a drum beat to a nice latino guy called Moises, and soon there were 4 guitars, a violin, a mandolin and a jazz Real Book to play with. We did a wicked and spontanious version of Miles Davis' All Blues, it sounded wicked, followed by some bluegrass, some bossa nova and long conversations about the LA hardcore scene.

But anyway, i am digressing. After my morning at the music centre i headed over to the east field (you can see all of these places at www.ucsc.edu) where they were holding 'OPERS', a US version of freshers fayre, with good BBQ food and lots and lots of stalls. This was a real eye opener. I smiled to see the US version of the Socialist Workers Party and (would you believe it) Workers hammer party peddling their papers and raising their eyebrows at me when i told them my political orientation. There were also stalls for many religions (people with tshirts saying 'i am a zionist'), ethnicities (including the 'mixed race' society, who were very vague when i tried to find out what they actually did), sports (ultimate frisbee is massive here, and everyone is surprisingly good at 'soccer'), the republican party (with a 6 foot cut out of Bush- i am going to their meeting next week), radio stations, campus publications, environmental groups et al. there was one really good group called the 'disorientation collective' who are very Crimethinc.y (www.crimethinc.com) and promise to show the underbelly of university life (it turns out every nuclear warhead in the US arsenal was designed at california's universities). There is a good political scene in santa cruz- recently the government rounded up over 100 illegal workers from the town (which only has 50,000 people in it) and there is a big campaign to fight back getting started which is fairly prominent on campus. they use the same slogan- noone is illegal- as no borders did back in london. How can i not get involved. On sunday there is also come guerilla cinema on a disused railway line somewhere which is showing that 'paradise now' film.

There were also lots of 'fraternities' on campus. if you don't know about them (which i didn't until recently), they are sort of American Pie style clubs that people pay to be a part of and in exchange get access to the 'best' parties, free alcohol, the chance to mingle with sorority girls and be nicely groomed for rotary club style adulthood. the ways people find to feel loved. anyway, next week is 'rush week', where all the fraternities have open free parties to try and get you to join them, and even though i have been warned about frats, i am going to go and experience it.

I am sharing a small room with two other guys, max and edmund. max is a proper quality guy from the same small town as tom waits (who bummed fags off his dad back in the day), into rock climbing, mandolin playing and making me milkshakes. edmund seems a complex character, lacking many a positive emotion, but i am working on him. blame the parents. next door is giancarlo, the afore mentioned community assistant and gym guy. he has realised i am his age, and is cutting me a bit of slack, but it is still irksome to have Authority, any authority, living next door. I initially thought opting for a cheaper, smaller shared room was a bad idea (i have almost no space to call my own) but i don't spend much time there- i am writing this email in the living room, where there is a nice speaker, a LAN connection and a sofa so it is ok.

Santa cruz town is wicked, i can see why it is a bit famous and not symptomatic of america at all, an interesting mix of small non-chain stores, beats, beaches, a funfair just like scarborough, lots of hippies and nice bus drivers (who have consistently believed my true story that i lost my bus pass on a bus on the second day i was here and let me on for free). they even have lots of charity shops (where i bought all my pots and pans) and thrift stores. everyone is friendly, but everyone is much more friendly when they are working for a shop you are in. someone offered to help me choose tinned tomatos the other day. i mean really....

so yeah, everything is turning out pretty kosher here after a couple of nervous days in the beginning. i am missing everyone lots though; there is noone i can hug properly here or get excitedly stoned with (cannabis consumption is done with lots of cool poise round here...). YOU WILL JUST HAVE TO COME AND VISIT ME. it is really a set of sights to behold.