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
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