“There was only one road back to L.A. US Interstate 15, just a flat-outhigh speed burn through Baker and Barstow and Berdoo, then on to theHollywood Freeway straight into frantic oblivion: safety, obscurity, justanother freak in the Freak Kingdom” .- Fear and Loathing
Hiya everyone :)
22.18gmt, my uncle dave’s house, south London, my flight leaves in 8 hoursso going to make this as short and sweet as a miles davis solo when he wasin a bad mood. The last couple of days have been a jet lagged daze ofchasing after bits of paper around the capital- letter of endorsement fromSOAS for my research (failed on that one), lawyer documents for the twins, yellow fever certificates, you name it, I had to sweat to get it. But everything is pretty much lined up now; I even have a bumbag. I realise I missed England now I am back- the non-fancy number plates, the sophisticated advertising, steak bakes, interesting architecture, thinroads, mmmm its good to be home, even though I CAN’T SMOKE IN PUBS! Can there not be a smoking room in a pub that staff don’t have to go in, or could be paid a little more to work in? I would work in one. Perhaps the future is squat gigs and illegal bars.
The highlight of the 2.5 days Ihave been here though was seeing Samuthka, the sharpest former-marxist inthe northern hemisphere, we last saw each other almost 2 years to the dayin Pune, India, at a pretty bullshit ‘young people change the world’conference, we stayed up all night being righteous and the last thing shesaid to me was something like ‘when you get to my age you will have givenup your ideals and anger too’ and I was like ‘no fucking way!’, and Ithink we were kind of both right, I think I am less about fighting now andmore about building out of the (ever growing) cracks in the system thesedays, cos the bubble that capitalism works within now cannot survive theharsh wind of DWINDLING NATURAL RESOURCES and when the average man whocares about his family can no longer be persuaded that capitalism islooking out for him, then he will need an alternative, and there needs tobe a good one in place, or at least a good way by which each individualcan realise his own alternative and the necessity for direct human solidarity, and that is where our energies can be best used I believe.Capitalism will destroy itself, we just need to have some sort of glue toput the pieces back together in a less headfuck way. But I digress, shecooked me a fat south Indian meal with her grandma’s special spice mix andthen there was no need to argue anymore. But yeah isn’t it cool when youthink your never going to see someone ever again and then you do? Bonanza.
So remember the last blog? I was just about to go to Vegas. Well I did andit was actually really amazing! As rich said, it’s a Disneyland for therich adult, the best food, the best ways to spend money and make money,(allegedly) the hottest and most dirty women, the best drinks, a hot tubin my room, the best entertainment, we went to see ‘Zumanity’, a kind oferotic cabaret with, amongst other things, two girls in a giant fishbowlbeing nymph like, crazy acrobatic silk things and the spectacle of tworandom members of the audience on stage being tested to see how liberatedthey were, very very funny. And wow the most juicy steak I have ever hadin my life, bloody hell that thing was amazing, I still dream of it. Ilost all my gambling money, even though I was doing quite well for awhile, but hey, what do you expect. Vegas is really mental though, eachcasino has a theme, one, themed on Venice has a canal system in it,another a roller coaster in it, another a lake with a pirate ship… smooth
Then boom back to San Fransisco, an Mbira lesson and words of advice aboutUganda in Berkeley, then Santa Cruz, I was itching to get on the road andit rained and I had no money, pretty tedious couple of days punctuatedonly by a final naked swim in the sea with the Duffman, but then thumb outsouth with Nick and by evening we are in Big Sur, ‘the greatest meetingof land and sea’, just in time for an outdoor Open Mic at the Henry Millerlibrary (H Miller was another writer of the beat generation who wasostracised even amongst his own peers for being too sexual) with the bigsur locals, a lovely night full of fairy lights and faeries (and faerywannabies), I played Mbira and it went well even though I was drunk;forgetting the words isn’t so bad when they are in a language that you are99% sure no one in the audience speaks, ended up camping in the forestwith a guy who had open mic’d NWA’s fuck the police on acoustic guitar :).Next day me and nick went to a beaut beach and read Steinbeck’s TravelsWith Charley (Charley was his dog) aloud to each other and then hitchedback on (not in) the boot of someones car! Now that was fun.
And me andnick said goodbye and now the sign I found back in april could be usedproperly
101 SOUTH
first car that drove passed me picked me up, an Isreali couple who livedon a Kibbutz, all the way to San Simeone. I was meant to be meeting withJono that night but the sun set (there is no way you can get a ride whenit is dark) but not to worry! By the last light of the setting sun Iwalked back up the coast and found a beach that the town looked over, butwith a perfectly sized and positioned log so I could sleep right up nextto it and be invisible to the road and the town. I drank the beer nick hadsent with me and revelled in my solitude. Travelling with someone isreally nice, but there is nothing like just having noone to answer to orrely on or entertain but yourself (and the birds), just walking with thewaves eddying around your feet, doing a little dance, smoking a wholespliff to yourself, singing to the seagulls, reading your book, stashingyour stuff, climbing a rock, its like a constant silent scream of joy justexisting in situations like that. I was in a completely arbitrary place,meeting completely arbitrary people, and I could not exist to all extentsand purposes, and when you might not exist you can do ANYTHING YOU WANT.
So quite a lot of people have been asking me about the practicalities ofit, so please indulge me whilst I pretend to know all the answers, youneed:
A strong bag
Water
Bread and cheese or similar basic but filling foods, I like bread andcheese because I love cheese and a loaf of bread and a block of cheeselasts a day and a bit for me, which is perfect.
Something to readA
sleeping bag
And that’s it really. Honest. Perhaps I knife if you are in hostileterritory (or pepper spray, but I don’t carry either). People have hadthat for hundreds, if not thousands of years, generally if you are in abeautiful place that is enough mind stimulation, and whoever picks you upgenerally talks quite a lot, and is interested and a nice person(otherwise they wouldn’t have picked you up in the first place) and incali I never waited more than about an hour for a ride, maybe 2 hours onceor twice, but generally about 20 mins, and each car on the horizon is ahope, so you don’t really get bored, and the feeling when a car pulls overis really one of the best. Thing is, like alida, if you put yourself outand are relying on the human spirit there people just go out of their wayto help you precisely BECAUSE you have put yourelf out there. Everyonewants to live in a world where there is no fear and people help eachother, but is just the fucking daily mail and rich security companies thatturns neighbours into strangers. I look in the eyes of so many people Imeet and they have the same lust for travel that I am quenching, and it isjust like JUST DO IT! You don’t need to buy your entertainment, there is awhole fucking planet of it and your very own feet can take you there!
ButI also take
Mbira, Penny whistle
Sewing kit, camera
Spare shirt, a little money
Bivvy bag, chocolate, diary, pen, tobacco
And you kind of collect things on the way. By the time I got to LA I had aCoyote bone and two eagle feathers (all from the same great guy), a thicksheepskin jacket, a flick knife and lots of bellies full of food. And lotsof music recommendations. People just like helping people, that’s allthere is to it. And those that don’t don’t pick up hitchhikers, and that’sfine with me.But I digress, next morning a cereal bar, a long wait then a short ride toa bigger village, Cambria. Get picked up from there by Joe, a Vietnamveteran with lots of stories to tell, all of them really depressing,razorblades in Vietnamese prostitute’s arses, falling down a gold minewhen he was 28, got out of hospital in a wheelchair to find his wife hadspent all his gold money and was moving away with his best friend, carcrashes on the way to funerals, ‘I sure hope there is reincarnation,because this one has sure fucked me over’, we smoked and Jono called justas I was getting out of the car, Joe was like ‘have you got everything?’and I was like ‘yeah yeah’, got off the phone and wheres my bag? Ohfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck joe had driven off with my passport, myclarinet, my visa….fuckfuckfuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! uh oh, panicstations. I didn’t have his number, couldn’t remember his name, or hiscar, I just knew loads of peripheral details about him, like how he wasdoing up his uncles house, and how he was born in Idaho.
But then jonoarrived with his magician friend Eric (who had been ‘outside of thesystem’s radar’ since the Vietnam war) and they were very pragmatic andwere like ‘so what if you have lost your passport and can’t get home andcan’t go to Uganda and have no money?’ think of all the things you CAN do!And it was a sunny day and really nice to see jono and me and eric hadread the same obscure book about a tribal people called the Ik, who onlyknew hate, and that was exciting, and Jono’s mum swung into motherlyaction and sent emails round to all the people who might know Joe, who atthe time I thought might be called Jesse, and I mellowed and then Jeffturned up all the way from Santa Cruz and we bought a big bottle of whiskyand went ‘on the ranch’. Jono lives in a small Beef wild west town namedSanta Margharita with a saloon and a single jail and a rodeo and suchlike,and the whisky and jamming (we had, amongst other things, a bohran, irishframe drum) and tree climbing and last night magic meant I once againfound myself putting my finger up to the ticks, taking all my clothes off,dancing and cawing like a seagull whilst jeff and jono screamed eulogiesto the moon. It got quite tribal.BOOMBABABOOMBOOMcawwwwwwwwwwwBOOMBOOMbOOMBABA…
What do males have these days that isn’t consuming that bonds them? Prosport- consuming. Drinking- consuming, women- all consuming. I feltsoooooo good on that hot night running around in circles screaming, thecoyotes screamed back, I think I might start doing it on every full moon,though maybe it was just warm enough that night and that’s why peopledon’t do it more often.Next day all day back in the village I got picked up in, trying to find mypassport, posters up in every window, not looking good, intrigue at thepharmacy, tight lipped locals at the Mexican restaurant, then to cut along story because my little cuz wants to go to bed and so should I, joecalled my mum (I gave him my number in England incase he wanted to come toEngland when his terminally ill wife dies) and my mum called me, prettypissed off, and everything sorted itself out. And I made a good friend injoe, god/nature/the chaos theory works in mysterious ways.
Then one big fat ride in the back of a huge motor home the size of a bus(I kid you not) from san luis Obispo straight to the heart of the City ofAngels, we stopped in santa Barbara for ham sandwiches and minestronesoup, they were totally not going to give me a ride except they neededhelp fixing their motor home and I provided it, and they realised what aplucky young Englishman I was and didn’t want me getting bumraped by anyold person so ofcourse gave me a ride. I slept on their sofa and wasallowed to smoke rollies. They had one of the biggest TVs I have seenabove their drivers seats. Did you know you can stay in any walmartcarpark for free overnight if you have a huge ass camper van?LA- I had been before with my mum over Christmas and, frankly, didn’t likethe place, but this time I saw it through the eyes of the locals, firstTravis, a great kind of skater kid who lived in affluent north LA,Glendale, him and his friends showed me how they live, driving acrossfreeways to this person or that person, always trying to find somewhere toblaze where suburban curtains wouldn’t twitch.
Then 2 days later a ridedown to Carson, seen by many as ghetto LA, right down by the huge stinkingoil refineries and docks, to stay with good friend and amazingly naturallygifted drummer Moises, a second generation Mexican immigrant, but don’tlet that define him, he is one of the kindest, coolest, hippest and mostsensitive cats I have ever met, he took me to a crazy part of the LA coastwhere a road had fallen half way down a cliff and the locals had turned itinto a big graffiti space and skatepark. Amazing.Ok shit I really have to get some sleep, I have to get up again in 2.5hours and fly around another good chunk of the world. Life is amazing.Well then, Mrs mack would complain this is all description and noanalysis, but whatever, it is late, you’ll here from me again if you emailme, otherwise ill see you in a month, and this time I am HOME. But fuck,is noone coming to WOMAD? Behla? George? I can’t dance by myself you know.
Ok bye
Love ben
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
the importance of being ernesto
hiya :)
thursday night, back in san Francisco with rich and ernie, tired and happy. academic year 06/07 is ancient history and
it is SUMMER! fuck yeah. once again horizons broaden and everything is put into the context of potential-filled
summers days and life-affirming nights in any place your feet care to take you. tommorow it is Las Vegas, viva, talk
is of canal systems inside hotels and the infamous LAS VEGAS BUFFET. This afternoon i walked to the edge of the
bay at alameda, where you can see the skyscrapers of san Francisco in the fog, and it was like i had come full circle
from when i did the same 9 months ago when i first got here. what has changed? not really sure. I felt the same sense of mute happiness mixed with a slight twist in my stomach when everything is shifting and moving and you are by yourself and you know you can handle it but you are going to have to dig your feet into the sand and not let the waves knock you over. The birds were there again though, little waders chasing the outgoing waves to eat what they left behind.
i had my last exam yesterday, 8am, after a few quickly-passing weeks of santa cruz quirk. it was my 21st birthday a
week ago, turned ‘legal’ twice, but here you get a free drink in every bar on your birthday! and twice it was
newcastle brown ale haha, i used to get tetchy about being the centre of attention on my birthday, but this year i tried
to see it more as a chance to decide some great things to do and give people no choice but to do them with me, so off
to a theolonious monk tribute band with clarinet (it was an exploration for me of how a clarinet can hold a
performance with just bass and drumset and keep everyone interested, but this guy didn’t really manage it), then irish
style pubs, then ‘99 bottles’ which had 99 different types of beer, but no hoegaarden or krononburg, then i can’t really
remember much except some delicious lime cocktail and a moment, and then later screaming WA-AR! on the
traintracks and losing my bag (i found it), snoring,
A good birthday all in all though, and it got even better then next morning as nick and jack did a superb job helping me avoid a hangover by getting me up in time to hop the cement train to davenport (7 miles away), wow i used to dream of this
reading Harbinger round sam’s, the train, a monster with UNION-PACIFIC written on the side, slows down as it comes
into downtown santa cruz and goes round a corner, as the last few carriages come past, at say 15mph,. The three of us, squatting in the bushes near the depot with two others, sprint out of our hideout and grab the ladder things hanging down, then in a fluid movement swing up onto the back of the carriage and hide in the kind of crevice in between the cement and the wheels, heart beating fast, and sigh. when the train gets out of town and hugs the coast north, we climbed up into the top of the carriages (the train didn’t go much faster than 20mph i would say) and lay around in the sun, carriages clanging,
waving at the mexican farm workers taking breaks in the shade, looked at the birds circling around. really
special. Stillness in movement. jumped off at Panther beach, dropping our legs down the side of
the train and running along for a bit before letting go and stumbling along the sandy side, then a swim in the rough
sea, a climb up a big rock, nick accidentally pulled the leg off a crab (he could have been more careful), more birds.
Nick didn’t really know when the train came back, but when we were satisfied we walked back up to the train
tracks and walked along a bit, and what do you know the train (only 1 per day, 3 days a week) came back!, we
repeated the process but this time only managed to get on the back cars, which were empty grain carriages, so we had
to make a human pyramid to navigate them back to the comfy cement carriages. the walkways at the ends of the
roofs of the carriages kind of extend, but there is about a 2ft gap between them, and even though technically it is as
simple as jumping 2 foot over a little stream, the mental impact of the whole thing being at speed on top of a train
was something that took me a while to get over, and i didn’t dare do push ups in between carriages like the others.
but it was all brilliant! total release. that night we went back to guerrilla cinema (political films projected against a
warehouse wall on the traintracks) and saw REAL trainhopping, Technicolor glory, in all honesty it scares me a bit
too much for me to do it for fun like that (though i am sure i would get used to it), dodging train security, not
wanting to fall asleep incase i fell off, eating all my food too quickly, but (as was shown in one of the films) it is a
great way to travel around as an activist, potentially much faster than hitchiking, and a great place to meet special
people. alot of the people i have met here are thinking about doing it this summer, the last big group of young people
to do it was during the depression in the 30s where people left home looking for work, what do happy ucsc students
see in it? freedom? cycles.
bicycles- every revolution is a revolutionary act
The clarinet trio on my birthday perhaps seemed a little flat because the last band I had seen were the Esbjorn Svennson Trio, Swedish nouveau-jazz gods who really blew me away a week or so before. They have this psychic connection with each other, the drummer too cool even for the conventional riproaring solo, instead kind of bending under his kit and playing what sounded like many Tibetan singing bowls at once, the bassist as good as any I have heard, but with an ease and relaxed fluidity, sometimes also with an overdrive pedal, and then the pianist, esbjorn svennson, controlling the sound of the bassist and the drummer with a little effects box on his piano, and then playing this piano that veered from catchy but overarching pop kind of stuff, through glimpses of trad jazz and avant garde and then just POUNDPOUNDPOUND with fast shifting ostinato in the middle of the piano with his right hand and then left hand going everywhere, walls of rich sound, so anyway when I get back to London it is going to be time to really crystallise all the adjectives and ideas that have been spinning round my mind and start a new band. My ideal a few years down the line (sorry to repeat myself to those I have already told this to) would be to have a pool of say 12 or so musicians, a cellist, great jazz/funk drum bass piano, trumpet, MC, female vocals, really versatile thoughtful guitar player, etc etc and then maybe 40 or 50 songs, and they don’t all use all the musicians all the time, maybe some can just be cello and clarinet, or drum machine, sampler and Mbira, or whatever, and be able to play a completely different set 5 nights of the week. Wouldn’t that be great? And the music being the main thing, but lyrics adding an extra dimension and being penetrating in their sparseness, like
Stock exchange? Nonononono
Or
If I had coltrane’s babies they would all be called john
Or
Listen! Listen!
All I need is a free or very cheap practice space in London, then some imagination and early morning forest walks. On that note, if anyone is looking for a housemate or two next year let me know. I think it might be quite tough for me to readjust to urban living, the forest just sucks all my problems away into its vastness, hopefully a band will be the anti-dote to that, but I can’t be sure.
3rd best thing about santa cruz- two (sometimes three) chipmunks are on hind legs on a pallet when i wake up in the mornings looking at me, they eat peanuts out of my hand and i call them alvin, simon and theodore. their tails waggle fast whilst they eat. there are also a family of mice that come out at night and try and break into my rucksack so i can’t keep my rucksack too close or they climb on me, sometimes i give them peanuts too.
But endless goodbyes! the downside of being transient. lots of strong hugs, which of course is great, but still everything
tinged with sadness and inevitability a bit. the worst is with the people you know you could have got on with really
well if you had had more time or chance had happened differently, saying ‘yeah, wow i really enjoyed your company
from afar, ill see you on facebook’. after naive scepticism at the beginning, i say goodbye to loads of people i know
are going to have such amazing lives and create great things, max and jack being cases in point, i saw jack off on the
greyhound, he was going to ‘trail blaze’ for 10 hours a day in the hot sun, sleeping on the trail, he is this [-] close to
being able to just stand there and be like ‘yo...’ and do his half poet, half mc thing with epic lyrical twists and
captivate everyone in the room. edmund, my first flatmate, who didn’t really leave the house much, was ‘asleep’
when i left, even though i had lost my wallet and there was hubbub, and gian carlo, the guy my fees were going to
pay the wages of to look after me, who was younger than me and straightedge, hadn’t been seen all day since max
put a hash cookie with a thank you note from ‘building 11’ for him. but I gave max a fat hug and maybe he is coming
to england at the end of summer.
Also had to say goodbye to Jackie, the girl who was serving Brie at Food Not Bombs one Wednesday (a testament to the levels of high-quality surplus goods here). For the second time since I got here it was all ‘ben stop worrying about chasing after girls you have not really anything in common with, just relax and wait for girls like this!’. she plays (mostly) banjo and sings like you imagine Ma Joad must have sang when she was young, and we sat in some trees and drank homemade lemonade and she showed me some constellations and then we broke into the uni swimming pool at 3am and swam with steam rising up from the pool, the sound of the disturbed water echoing around. But as usual (the last months) I meet the best people when either I or they are about to be somewhere completely removed from where the other is, so we said bye bye. Right now she backpacking in the central valley.
the american police are a money making machine. They have QUOTAS of the amount of money have to fine people, and there are lots of different departments- the santa cruz county police, the santa cruz sheriff, the university police, the highway patrol, all justifying their existence all the time. BULLSHIT. If you get a DUI- driving under influence- not only do you have to pay THOUSANDS of dollars in fines, or go to jail, but you also have to PAY FOR YOUR OWN REHABILITATION PROGRAMS! Or go to jail. So they put the poor ones in jail and charge the rest through the nose. And if you are under 21 and have drunk so much as a SHANDY that is a DUI. And if you don’t’ have your seat belt on that is $100 on the spot fine. And if you piss on a cops face…well I dunno about that, maybe you would get your head blown off.
Even national park rangers have guns and can arrest people.
i just can’t stop listening to nick drake. i am listening to him right now. ‘the world keeps raining through my head’
My mum came for a week just before our birthdays (hers is the day before mine), we borrowed Jono’s trailer (very kind of him) and had a lovely time. Once again mum was really tired from her busy work life in the Boro but she took to the trailer park like a duck to water and was soon talking about selling our house in scarborough and buying a caravan in wales. I told her it wasn’t my ideal. That weekend we went with uncles rich and ernie to Yosemite, the crown jewel of all California’s natural wonders. The photos on face book tell the story better than I can in words, but Yosemite just has the best bits- huge waterfalls with drifting mist floating across and cooling your face, huge 2000ft rocks screaming out of the ground with tiny mountain climbers as small as pins half way up it, then huge mindblowing vistas that look like something out of lord of the rings…epic. Also some of the biggest trees in the world (in terms of volume), giant sequoias, huge things, you can cut a hole in them big enough to ride a hummer through and the tree will live on regardless.
Then that night rich and ernie took us to a native american casino (apparently gambling is too immoral for white Americans and is illegal, but if the natives want to do it, well our working class will go and spend all their money there), amazing food, strange atmosphere, lots of people losing lots of money, tower of power playing in a kind of stadium outside (my old band member trumpet player was part of the opening act for them! I said hello and he was his usual LA torrid but nice self), a stunning, I mean stunning, native american girl about my age with a sad face taking shit from fat white Americans in a 1950s style diner, serving them steaks and ice cream Sundays, $100 dolls of Pocahontas in the casino gift shop… native american lucky charms selling like hotcakes so people can WIN MORE MONEY, quite a lot of bullshit really, can’t really evoke the atmosphere properly but I guess you can imagine. Was certainly interesting though.
so the plan is to get back from vegas, spend a couple of days in santa cruz, then hitchike down to LA (about 500 miles over 7 days), stopping in Big sur for an open mic, then san luis Obispo to see Jono, jam and let him try and fulfil the idea in his head that his friends party harder than English people… I don’t’ think so, then to LA to be shown round Hollywood and long beach by a couple of hardcore punk kids named Travis and Jared and a great Mexican djembe player named Moises respectively. I lost my wallet so have exactly $123 dollars to get to LA and out with, going to be a challenge.
Ok, going to cut it, if I start talking about the what I have learned and what I have learned about america here im not going to stop, let it brew whilst I travel around over the next week.
Whos going to be in London on 28th june?
Ok speak soon, hope the sun is shining on everyone
Love Ben
thursday night, back in san Francisco with rich and ernie, tired and happy. academic year 06/07 is ancient history and
it is SUMMER! fuck yeah. once again horizons broaden and everything is put into the context of potential-filled
summers days and life-affirming nights in any place your feet care to take you. tommorow it is Las Vegas, viva, talk
is of canal systems inside hotels and the infamous LAS VEGAS BUFFET. This afternoon i walked to the edge of the
bay at alameda, where you can see the skyscrapers of san Francisco in the fog, and it was like i had come full circle
from when i did the same 9 months ago when i first got here. what has changed? not really sure. I felt the same sense of mute happiness mixed with a slight twist in my stomach when everything is shifting and moving and you are by yourself and you know you can handle it but you are going to have to dig your feet into the sand and not let the waves knock you over. The birds were there again though, little waders chasing the outgoing waves to eat what they left behind.
i had my last exam yesterday, 8am, after a few quickly-passing weeks of santa cruz quirk. it was my 21st birthday a
week ago, turned ‘legal’ twice, but here you get a free drink in every bar on your birthday! and twice it was
newcastle brown ale haha, i used to get tetchy about being the centre of attention on my birthday, but this year i tried
to see it more as a chance to decide some great things to do and give people no choice but to do them with me, so off
to a theolonious monk tribute band with clarinet (it was an exploration for me of how a clarinet can hold a
performance with just bass and drumset and keep everyone interested, but this guy didn’t really manage it), then irish
style pubs, then ‘99 bottles’ which had 99 different types of beer, but no hoegaarden or krononburg, then i can’t really
remember much except some delicious lime cocktail and a moment, and then later screaming WA-AR! on the
traintracks and losing my bag (i found it), snoring,
A good birthday all in all though, and it got even better then next morning as nick and jack did a superb job helping me avoid a hangover by getting me up in time to hop the cement train to davenport (7 miles away), wow i used to dream of this
reading Harbinger round sam’s, the train, a monster with UNION-PACIFIC written on the side, slows down as it comes
into downtown santa cruz and goes round a corner, as the last few carriages come past, at say 15mph,. The three of us, squatting in the bushes near the depot with two others, sprint out of our hideout and grab the ladder things hanging down, then in a fluid movement swing up onto the back of the carriage and hide in the kind of crevice in between the cement and the wheels, heart beating fast, and sigh. when the train gets out of town and hugs the coast north, we climbed up into the top of the carriages (the train didn’t go much faster than 20mph i would say) and lay around in the sun, carriages clanging,
waving at the mexican farm workers taking breaks in the shade, looked at the birds circling around. really
special. Stillness in movement. jumped off at Panther beach, dropping our legs down the side of
the train and running along for a bit before letting go and stumbling along the sandy side, then a swim in the rough
sea, a climb up a big rock, nick accidentally pulled the leg off a crab (he could have been more careful), more birds.
Nick didn’t really know when the train came back, but when we were satisfied we walked back up to the train
tracks and walked along a bit, and what do you know the train (only 1 per day, 3 days a week) came back!, we
repeated the process but this time only managed to get on the back cars, which were empty grain carriages, so we had
to make a human pyramid to navigate them back to the comfy cement carriages. the walkways at the ends of the
roofs of the carriages kind of extend, but there is about a 2ft gap between them, and even though technically it is as
simple as jumping 2 foot over a little stream, the mental impact of the whole thing being at speed on top of a train
was something that took me a while to get over, and i didn’t dare do push ups in between carriages like the others.
but it was all brilliant! total release. that night we went back to guerrilla cinema (political films projected against a
warehouse wall on the traintracks) and saw REAL trainhopping, Technicolor glory, in all honesty it scares me a bit
too much for me to do it for fun like that (though i am sure i would get used to it), dodging train security, not
wanting to fall asleep incase i fell off, eating all my food too quickly, but (as was shown in one of the films) it is a
great way to travel around as an activist, potentially much faster than hitchiking, and a great place to meet special
people. alot of the people i have met here are thinking about doing it this summer, the last big group of young people
to do it was during the depression in the 30s where people left home looking for work, what do happy ucsc students
see in it? freedom? cycles.
bicycles- every revolution is a revolutionary act
The clarinet trio on my birthday perhaps seemed a little flat because the last band I had seen were the Esbjorn Svennson Trio, Swedish nouveau-jazz gods who really blew me away a week or so before. They have this psychic connection with each other, the drummer too cool even for the conventional riproaring solo, instead kind of bending under his kit and playing what sounded like many Tibetan singing bowls at once, the bassist as good as any I have heard, but with an ease and relaxed fluidity, sometimes also with an overdrive pedal, and then the pianist, esbjorn svennson, controlling the sound of the bassist and the drummer with a little effects box on his piano, and then playing this piano that veered from catchy but overarching pop kind of stuff, through glimpses of trad jazz and avant garde and then just POUNDPOUNDPOUND with fast shifting ostinato in the middle of the piano with his right hand and then left hand going everywhere, walls of rich sound, so anyway when I get back to London it is going to be time to really crystallise all the adjectives and ideas that have been spinning round my mind and start a new band. My ideal a few years down the line (sorry to repeat myself to those I have already told this to) would be to have a pool of say 12 or so musicians, a cellist, great jazz/funk drum bass piano, trumpet, MC, female vocals, really versatile thoughtful guitar player, etc etc and then maybe 40 or 50 songs, and they don’t all use all the musicians all the time, maybe some can just be cello and clarinet, or drum machine, sampler and Mbira, or whatever, and be able to play a completely different set 5 nights of the week. Wouldn’t that be great? And the music being the main thing, but lyrics adding an extra dimension and being penetrating in their sparseness, like
Stock exchange? Nonononono
Or
If I had coltrane’s babies they would all be called john
Or
Listen! Listen!
All I need is a free or very cheap practice space in London, then some imagination and early morning forest walks. On that note, if anyone is looking for a housemate or two next year let me know. I think it might be quite tough for me to readjust to urban living, the forest just sucks all my problems away into its vastness, hopefully a band will be the anti-dote to that, but I can’t be sure.
3rd best thing about santa cruz- two (sometimes three) chipmunks are on hind legs on a pallet when i wake up in the mornings looking at me, they eat peanuts out of my hand and i call them alvin, simon and theodore. their tails waggle fast whilst they eat. there are also a family of mice that come out at night and try and break into my rucksack so i can’t keep my rucksack too close or they climb on me, sometimes i give them peanuts too.
But endless goodbyes! the downside of being transient. lots of strong hugs, which of course is great, but still everything
tinged with sadness and inevitability a bit. the worst is with the people you know you could have got on with really
well if you had had more time or chance had happened differently, saying ‘yeah, wow i really enjoyed your company
from afar, ill see you on facebook’. after naive scepticism at the beginning, i say goodbye to loads of people i know
are going to have such amazing lives and create great things, max and jack being cases in point, i saw jack off on the
greyhound, he was going to ‘trail blaze’ for 10 hours a day in the hot sun, sleeping on the trail, he is this [-] close to
being able to just stand there and be like ‘yo...’ and do his half poet, half mc thing with epic lyrical twists and
captivate everyone in the room. edmund, my first flatmate, who didn’t really leave the house much, was ‘asleep’
when i left, even though i had lost my wallet and there was hubbub, and gian carlo, the guy my fees were going to
pay the wages of to look after me, who was younger than me and straightedge, hadn’t been seen all day since max
put a hash cookie with a thank you note from ‘building 11’ for him. but I gave max a fat hug and maybe he is coming
to england at the end of summer.
Also had to say goodbye to Jackie, the girl who was serving Brie at Food Not Bombs one Wednesday (a testament to the levels of high-quality surplus goods here). For the second time since I got here it was all ‘ben stop worrying about chasing after girls you have not really anything in common with, just relax and wait for girls like this!’. she plays (mostly) banjo and sings like you imagine Ma Joad must have sang when she was young, and we sat in some trees and drank homemade lemonade and she showed me some constellations and then we broke into the uni swimming pool at 3am and swam with steam rising up from the pool, the sound of the disturbed water echoing around. But as usual (the last months) I meet the best people when either I or they are about to be somewhere completely removed from where the other is, so we said bye bye. Right now she backpacking in the central valley.
the american police are a money making machine. They have QUOTAS of the amount of money have to fine people, and there are lots of different departments- the santa cruz county police, the santa cruz sheriff, the university police, the highway patrol, all justifying their existence all the time. BULLSHIT. If you get a DUI- driving under influence- not only do you have to pay THOUSANDS of dollars in fines, or go to jail, but you also have to PAY FOR YOUR OWN REHABILITATION PROGRAMS! Or go to jail. So they put the poor ones in jail and charge the rest through the nose. And if you are under 21 and have drunk so much as a SHANDY that is a DUI. And if you don’t’ have your seat belt on that is $100 on the spot fine. And if you piss on a cops face…well I dunno about that, maybe you would get your head blown off.
Even national park rangers have guns and can arrest people.
i just can’t stop listening to nick drake. i am listening to him right now. ‘the world keeps raining through my head’
My mum came for a week just before our birthdays (hers is the day before mine), we borrowed Jono’s trailer (very kind of him) and had a lovely time. Once again mum was really tired from her busy work life in the Boro but she took to the trailer park like a duck to water and was soon talking about selling our house in scarborough and buying a caravan in wales. I told her it wasn’t my ideal. That weekend we went with uncles rich and ernie to Yosemite, the crown jewel of all California’s natural wonders. The photos on face book tell the story better than I can in words, but Yosemite just has the best bits- huge waterfalls with drifting mist floating across and cooling your face, huge 2000ft rocks screaming out of the ground with tiny mountain climbers as small as pins half way up it, then huge mindblowing vistas that look like something out of lord of the rings…epic. Also some of the biggest trees in the world (in terms of volume), giant sequoias, huge things, you can cut a hole in them big enough to ride a hummer through and the tree will live on regardless.
Then that night rich and ernie took us to a native american casino (apparently gambling is too immoral for white Americans and is illegal, but if the natives want to do it, well our working class will go and spend all their money there), amazing food, strange atmosphere, lots of people losing lots of money, tower of power playing in a kind of stadium outside (my old band member trumpet player was part of the opening act for them! I said hello and he was his usual LA torrid but nice self), a stunning, I mean stunning, native american girl about my age with a sad face taking shit from fat white Americans in a 1950s style diner, serving them steaks and ice cream Sundays, $100 dolls of Pocahontas in the casino gift shop… native american lucky charms selling like hotcakes so people can WIN MORE MONEY, quite a lot of bullshit really, can’t really evoke the atmosphere properly but I guess you can imagine. Was certainly interesting though.
so the plan is to get back from vegas, spend a couple of days in santa cruz, then hitchike down to LA (about 500 miles over 7 days), stopping in Big sur for an open mic, then san luis Obispo to see Jono, jam and let him try and fulfil the idea in his head that his friends party harder than English people… I don’t’ think so, then to LA to be shown round Hollywood and long beach by a couple of hardcore punk kids named Travis and Jared and a great Mexican djembe player named Moises respectively. I lost my wallet so have exactly $123 dollars to get to LA and out with, going to be a challenge.
Ok, going to cut it, if I start talking about the what I have learned and what I have learned about america here im not going to stop, let it brew whilst I travel around over the next week.
Whos going to be in London on 28th june?
Ok speak soon, hope the sun is shining on everyone
Love Ben
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