Riga

If you haven't read my previous post, 'london to riga', then you might miss out on the context a bit :)

The sun was shining as I walked across two massive bridges into the beautiful and well-historied city of Riga, capital of Lativa. All signs were good. There were tramlines. Graffiti on the bridge depicted a smiling girl with her middle finger in the air and the words 'Fuck the Crisis!'. Further down wisened men stripped copper from a washed up boat and then as if by magic I wandered into this huge, joyous market, both outdoor and indoor, selling everything a vitamin-lacking hitchhiker could want. I kid you not, there was a room the size of an aircraft hanger full of fish, the next one full of meat, the next full of veg and then next one...... full of CHEESE!!!! I had landed. I sat in a corner of the market with a huge grin eating pomegranites, raspberries and sticks of individually wrapped honeycombs, watching an old man selling flatcaps and his neighbouring female stall holder who sold ties gently arguing and joking with each other, and the veg seller nearby being ridiculed for eating some sort of kale raw...

Riga, it turns out, is quite a tourist spot, with a huge notra-dame esque cathedrals and dozens of beautiful old buildings clustered round squares filled with cafes and oak trees, with acorns stuck between the translucent cobble stones. After Poland and knowing that I was now deep in ex-soviet territory I was expecting something colder, harder and more concrete. This was naive. Latvia was occupied by the Red Army twice, with Hitler taking over for 4 years during WW2. Each promised 'partnership', but the museum there told of unspeakable horrors meted out on the population, as well as deportations to siberia of anyone who might have in the past or future thought badly of Stalin and his wicked ways. Over 30 years a total of 1/3rd of the population was either killed or deported.

Consequently, and from my limited perspective, it felt like the city (Riga holds 1/2 of Lativa's entire population and apparently things are quite different everywhere else in the country) was still buzzing from its independance and revelling in its national identity. Theatres and concert halls were prominent, cafe culture was in full swing and (in contrast to what i was to find in Moscow), even the people in uniforms had a smile tingling somewhere near their lips.

My hosts, a gang of 4 arty 20-somethings, epitomised this mood. They had just thrown their hat in the ring and started 'Cafe DAD', a flawlessly decorated cafe with a piano and guitar in the corner, their friends' art on the walls and spinach soup with massive croutons floating inside. My link with them was tenuous (a bandmate of a bandmate) but they played host real nice, and on the last night i realised why the first question I was asked was what my religion was, and why there were evangelistic 'god can make you rich if you believe enough' books on the shelves- they all met in church and were the young, preppy, experience-led christian believers that make christianity seem to have its place in our generation.

I did read a slim volume called The Prophet http://leb.net/~mira/works/prophet/prophet16.html - for a taste

During the day i would walk around the huge parks and through narrow streets, pretend to pray in churches so i could look at the pictures on the walls for free, and sit on benches watching numerous young couples in love with a whole range of vague and spongy emotions. In the evenings I busked hard. The first night, in an underpass, the acoustic was excellent but the takings were poor. On the second night i occupied a spot that the night before I had seen a man playing bob marley riffs whilst his friend rapped over the top to the delight of a gathering crowd. It was at the apex of three narrow streets, near the entrance to a TGI fridays, and as the Mbira's polyrhythm bounced off the stone walls I got good money and even a box of chocolates (which I later gave as a present to a couchsurfing host and found they all had marzipan inside which neither I nor my host liked but hey).

Later 3 underage boys asked for some of my money. I told them that they couldn't take any of my money, but they could have a go in my spot playing mbira and singing. One of them picked a cup out of a bin for a hat and for a couple of feeble minutes they tried, but then one of them shouted a warning and they scampered off. The police drove past.Nearby an engineer tried to send tourists to a strip club. A few minutes later the boys were back, and this time I taught them a brief mbira song (they didn't speak english) and i played as they sang. But once more a shout went up, they disappeared into thin air, and sure enough the patrol car drove past again through the narrow street. When they appeared the third time i gave them the empty cup and tried to explain that if they sang a song that everyone knew with heart they woudl make money. When, shortly after, they ran again and the police came again, I figured it was time to go. I left some of what I had made with another, older, beggar who seemed to know them and he thanked me with vodka-stained breath and left in the direction they ran.

The next morning i went back to the market, bought more cheese, salami, rasperry jam and fruit, then got myself on an overnight train to Moscow, got out the food and started eating it...

London - Riga and why i went

I wrote the first bit of this sat in the cab of a lorry on the Polish/Lithuanian border, waiting until 4am for the tachometer to reset itself. My Latvian driver- an aging, rotund and unshaven man with a cab to match, whose un-panted trousers sat halfway down his hips as he drove- played freecell and offered me coffee (it seems all european truck drivers carry gas cookers in their cabs). He was taking me on the final leg of a long hitchhike from Holland into Riga, capital of Lativa.

I was feeling good, having- until about 3o minutes earlier- been faced with the prospect of a second night behind a petrol station in a sleeping bag, except this time 150 miles further north (and therefore colder) and with a frost coming on. I had varied between hanging around outside the slightly surreal 'Swiss-themed' truck stop waiting a driver of one of the 10 or so lorries parked outside to appear, and hitching in the dusk- and then dark- on the main road between Poland and Lithuania, neither of which appeared to be working.

But then aha! the beautiful sound of a truck engine being revved, and the driver was surprised when I accepted his offer of "only go 20km?". Much like those abominable but somehow tragic charity street collectors (the ones with clipboards), once you are in the cab of the truck your benefactor can't just leave you in alone in a tight spot, so when we arrived at the border 20km later, this amazing gent asked around a few of the other waiting truckers, using what I can only imagine as some inherent Truckers Code to get me a ride with the first guy going north. Which was now the man grunting in satisfaction and passing me cigarettes by the nightlight of the cab.

I had been making good time from the off (except on the way to the ferry, where I missed a train connection after helping a huge and typically heavily luggaged Somali family through the underpass)- taking the ferry Harwich- Hook of Holland, failing to soften any truckers in the special Ferry Truckers Lounge with my 'Berlin Bitte!' sign, and then taking beautifully fast, efficient Dutch trains to the most easterly point of Holland (my amazing 50 pound ticket took me from london to ANY dutch station), 'Hengelo Oost'.

Hengelo Oost had a whole series of streets named after famous composers- 'Mozartstraade, josephhaaydenstraade- fucking awesome. I walked through them by streetlight and felt like i was finally On The Road. Since i left my job at SOAS at the end of July and went back to Scarborough things had felt a bit like one extended goodbye, with me repeating the same plan and timescale to friends in London, Scarborough etc. My ego wanted me to go quickly and everyone to miss me lots, but as it was i was only a couple of hundred miles of overpriced railway away, with the trip long planned (in my most stressed out days at SOAS this was the end point and light at the end of the tunnel) and the season quickly turning. London was promising a beautiful and musical future, my exquisite girlfriend lay by my side and there was plenty plenty of revolutionary fighting to be done (not to mention whole tracts of punk lyrics about the tories to be penned), and for maybe just a moment I asked myself whether this was the correct path to be taking.

But it was clear that it was. For a number of reasons. In my gap year (and even before) I discovered travelling in general and India in particular; the art and science of trusting the wind and impulse (and, er, a Lonely Planet guidebook) to fill the days with great people, beautiful things, surprise and hard won lessons. (my god that sounded cheesy... but you know what i mean). When I was 17 I went with sam, lauren and alex to La Gomera (an island near tenerife), and as a totally overwhelmed youngster learnt that hippie communes do still exist, and that it is possible to play music without knowing what key you are in. When I was 18 I sat in a trance in the golden temple in amiritsar and decided that music, not politics, was what i wanted to study at university. In Goa I got high with a crazy old Italian with one white eye, at dusk watched thousands of Fiddler Crabs wave at the sky in silt left by the tsunami and decided that this was the life for me (and that I would do university for my mum and because I knew at 18 i didn't know for sure exactly whether i had everything laid out in my head correctly).

But going to SOAS to do music was probably the best decision i have made in my life, and the subsequent short jaunts are detailed in this blog (i will get round to writing about zimbabwe one of these days). So reason one for going was so i could look my 18 year old self in the eye and say 'yeah man, you knew what you were on about... duties are discharged, lets go'.

The second one was almost the opposite- not to find but to seek. Of course I have changed loads since I moved to london (5 years ago), as everyone does between 19-24 (Jeff said that he had 'never met an 18 year old who knows who they are') but, straight after uni (the time when most take stock, have a moment of panic then strike out) I started the hugely rewarding but totally energy and spacious-thought sucking job as co-president of the union. So many of parts of my life- responsibilities, friends, campaigns, scenery, institution- were the same (and for the most part i couldn't have asked for better) but my own time and energy were so limited that i couldn't give them my all anymore, and the consequence was that i didn't know if i still wanted various bits of my life or whether i was just too tired to appreciate them.

When I come back I will be able to do things i want with people i still have loads in common with, find new musical modes without feeling inferior to my peers (and get over the whole black hole of competitive musical thought anyway) and, crucially, look freshly at the political scene and figure out how best i can support my communities without a)people demanding i take a certain line on things and b)feeling guilty when i don't want to go on a demo.

don't get me wrong, the revolution is going to happen, and i am going to give it my all so i can be part of it, the question is (and has always been in the groups i have been part of) how to mobilise and empower the people who are actually being fucked by the system to fight it. The trouble is that those who really need emancipation in our society- asylum seekers, migrant workers, working class kids who can't afford university, young and old who have generally been failed by this capitalist system- are in no position timewise, mentally, emotionally, to put in the massive effort of organisation to take on the huge, well funded, insipid state. They are given just enough to stop them from dying, but only if they work so hard all they want to do when they have freetime is to eat, call home and zone out. Or, for British working class people, they have had seeded in them such low morale and angry frustration, as well as an irrational hatred of that which is foreign (literally and metaphorically) that they pit themselves along racial and local, rather than oppressed/oppresser, lines and your average student activist or fuzzy liberal just does not have any vocabulary or common ground to engage them in the fight.

does that make sense? for a perfect example look at the EDL stuff. my lowest moment as an activist came when i stood outside parliament sometime in spring and watched hundreds of white, angry, working class, disenfranchised people (EDL) and, across the road, hundreds of predominantly white, pro-working class (even if not exactly working class themselves...), angry young people (anti-fascists) screaming 'fascist!' at each other, whilst the police guarded the BMWs and Mercedes driving in between the two groups and the drones in parliament peeped out of their windows, not doubt making snide comments about the lot of us. it was heartbreaking.

but i am tangenting badly. when i am discussing with my non-revolutionary friends (some of you are no doubt reading this) why I bother when the revolution is 'clearly not going to happen', I respond by explaining that

1. the capitalist system inherently needs an oppressed working class and that people and the environment are dying all over the place because of this system
2. if everybody who had figured this out did their best to change it (rather than saying they couldn't do anything about it so why bother) then it WOULD change
3. If I am not a hypocrite

then

4. Doing my best to change things- i.e. get rid of capitalism, is necessary for my happiness and peace of mind.

I have learnt that this can only be done on a local level and the secondary benefit of this (or is it the primary one?) is that even if we don't overthrow capitalism then we can sure as hell keep that playcentre open, or make sure the institutions we are part of don't invest in the arms trade, or at the very least make some suits go home and question whether their holidays and champagne lunches are worth the suffering we have told them about or the shit we have sprayed on their heads from modified kalashnikovs.

And so when I get back i will carry this on, but in what form i do no know yet. this is something i hope to find out.

(Reading a history of china (which got confiscated at the chinese border- more on that later), it turns out that Mao and his cohawks basically manipulated it to look like the 'peasants' rose up with communist principles- infact many were just pissed off at the local bullying militia, were starving to death anyway and got fed by Mao or, worse, were straight up pressganged into fighting for him.)

but anyway.... where was I?

Oh yes, in Holland, walking through the musical streets. I had seen a truckstop on google maps before i left at what i thought was about 5km out of the town, and started walking along the hard shoulder of the motorway. A good while later I came to what I thought was the stop, but the moody Polish trucker told me the one I was looking for was another hours walk on, and he was going to sleep...

I forgave his lie when he couldn't ignore my tactical hitchhiking position in the corner of his eye and woohoo! i was in his cab and on the way to Poznan, Poland!!! Here we go... he didn't speak much english, but enough to tell me how shit my tobacco was, and to show me how to use his rolling machine to make rollies that look exactly like cigaretters (the papers have an orange filter attached to them...). His tachometer was broken so he drove though the night listening to rock music whilst i dozed. At dawn we stopped and ate polish bratwurst and supernoodles with a radioactive maroon hue. His name was Kaieta and his most memorable (and repeated) words were 'fuck life, fuck my boss'.

He dropped me off at lunchtime on the road north and I ate soft cheese and apples under the polish sun and scratched my name into a bench. There followed a day and a half of small and medium length rides with the good people of north east poland. I saw tobacco drying in the sun like smoked kippers in scarborough fishmongers. I learnt that drink driving, and overtaking round blind corners, is not uncommon. I got a potted history of poland as good as i would find in any museum and from a wide range of (mostly despairing) drivers. It seems polish politics is extremely polemic, with one party seen as the 'traditionalists' and one as the 'modernisers' but both just old men arguing amongst themselves. Same record, different language.

Poland is really a very beautiful place, similar in landscape (i suppose obviously) to Germany, but more rural and with a 'tractor driver waving at old ladies as he drives through the village' and 'haymaking with a pitchfork' vibe that i think was lost in germany a long while ago.

Even the night I spent behind a petrol station was pleasant enough- i spent a few hours under the glare of the strip lights asking for rides and wrote the first poem of the trip

Snails on the fire extinguisher
liquid petroleum gas 2
trucks with curtains drawn
sawdust in the cracks

are you going to ostrada?
nej nej no

wagon refrigeration motor
tv news mumblings
smelling dry sharp autumn cold
i buy a beer

waiting for a ride in ...

I was meant to put the name of the village instead of '....' but i never did find out where i was. i might take that last line out. very satisfying, writing poetry. sometimes it just seems the best form in which to write down what i am trying to describe, and therefore doesn't matter if it is any good as Actual Poetry.

And in the morning i got away quickly, but ended up going to the wrong border. my map of 'europa', which i found back at wilkinson house and therefore is probably sam's, is circa 1989 and still has the soviet union, rather than individual countries, borders. I had drawn in the belarus borders as i knew i couldn't go there (50 quid transit visa!) but hadn't bargained on Russia needing a deep water port that didn't freeze over, and their subsequent retention of Kaliningrad after the collapse of the USSR, leading to a totally random outpost of russia on the baltic sea... my face must have looked quite the picture when i got there and realised i was about to enter the wrong country.

and then to fast forward on a few rides and here i was with with my man on the lithuanian border. from being a bit grumpy and incredulous as to my presence at the beginning, he ended up waking me at 2am and letting me sleep on his very own bed! what a nice man.

In the morning i woke to the first of many life-affirming dawns of the next few weeks. we were somewhere in northern lituania, a thick but low mist in visible patches on the hill-less landscape, frosty tufts of grass like sculptures by the side of the road. my driver sat leaning on his steering wheel going a steady 70 and overtaking other trucks with movements like gestures. I felt a bit like Lyra on the back of Iorek bryrinson but less like a babe.

The dawn slowly cleared and the roadsigns counted down the miles to Riga, where my trucker left me at a petrol station on the edge of town.

Ubuntu

i write at my auntie's house- a plush apartment in northern Jo'burg and the setting for a weekend of recuperation after the culmination of our 'delegation' around south africa and before a 20 hour bus journey to harare and all that lies in the great country of zimbabwe.

i had the first dream that i remembered about mbira last night- a very happy thing for me as proper mbira players (of which i am a generation away from being) often talk of ancestors coming into their dreams and teaching them new parts, or giving encouragement. in this dream an old man took the mbira from my hands as i was playing a tune i know and said something along the lines of 'no, you haven't got the feeling yet, play the song like this' and played the same song in a way that made all the bits of it fit together in a very beautiful way, but when he handed it back to me again i still could n't master it. i also dreamt about riding my bike over small burgeons of grass and on and on and on.

my auntie works for the UN and it was interesting to hear the inside knowledge before and after on the 'development world' before and after we met representatives from the UNDP (united nations development programme) and the british high commission in pretoria. certainly, especially in swaziland (yet another ex-colony) people look to the UK as a country that may intervene to improve governance (i.e. help install proper democracy) and provide aid and to some extent international recognition for their social stuggles. whilst one of the people we spoke to seemed to genuinely be trying to make headway on the swazi issue (detailed in the last blog post), the un seems like a badly governed country that is as slow to acknowledge the gravity of issues as it is to act on them.

welcome relief to this beaurocracy was abundant in and around cape town. on 16th june, south african youth day in rememberance of the Soweto township uprisings in which mostly 13-16 year old children marched autonomously by the thousand in protest at having to be taught in afrikaans, and were met with live ammunition from the SA police. dozens died and white vigalantes were photographed shooting indiscriminantly at blacks in the townships. at the project we found beautiful and raw performance poetry, ragingly beautiful choirs and strong old marxists who had put the project together with tiny amounts of money and had seen a sharp decline in the amount of young people entering gangs in the area. as a white tourist i like to work to gain the smiles and respect of south african activists rather than be judged on the money i have or potentially will bring in to a project, and this was an excellent case in point. we shared food and music and talked about their home made library, funeral cooperative and reading schemes.

perhaps the most powerful day though was the day we were taken by ex-ANC youth members, who escaped the country in the early 60s to be trained in Tanzania, uganda and zambia in guerilla warfare tactics (Mandela made a speech advocating violent resistance in the late 50s just before he was put in prison and a militant wing of the ANC was established), leaving their wives and lives and coming back into the country to practice what they had learned as the white government got more and more extreme in their own suppressive tactics. we were taken to a place bang in the middle of the beautiful downtown of cape town to see the shrubby hills where no less than 60,000 blacks and coloureds were forcibly removed to the townships to make way for pretty white developments, and then travelled out to three of the townships (read black and coloured ghettos) where they had been resettled.

i have seen slums in india and uganda but never anything on this scale- kilometre after kilometre of tightly packed corrogated iron homes, the ones that were shipping containers looked the most stable, with small fires, tiny shops selling pumpkins and potatos, ladies carrying children on their backs and whole lives on their heads. we stopped and smelt the air where just 20 years ago hundreds were killed, maimed and abducted in running battles with the police, where only 15 years ago the ailing white rulers sent in agent provocateurs to turn zulu against xhosa to prove that blacks were always going to be violent and would never be able to run a country, and where even today we are the only white faces that can be seen. but we were being led by a man whose history and presence commanded respect from us and potential pickpockets alike. this was a comrade whose brother and father had been killed under aparteid, who had left his family to fight for his beliefs and who still, amost 20 years later, was living in the informal housing sector waiting for the government to build him a proper house. another legend we were lucky to have access to.

South Africa in a paragraph is one of inequality with such the extremes so starkly across racial lines that at times it feels like apartheid rumbles on through the much more subtle rule of the dollar, much in the same way that imperialism rules through the dollar rather than the gun in much of the world today. however, despite a government that bleats socialism but actually is liberalising markets faster than you can say 'IMF', the people on the ground have the concept of ubuntu i.e. support and empathy for your fellow man, firmly fixed into them, and i guess this is the only way to keep smiling when the perils of post-apartheid capitalism keep life so hard

and in my travels there always seems room for the absurd (indeed, it is essential). here it involved a 7am trip to an evangelical church in the heart of johannesburg- at least 700 people in a huge room focussing on a slick-haired, greasy brazilian 'pastor' who praised god and money in equal measure. he and many others wore tshirts saying in huge letters 'SACRIFICE IS A MUST'... which ofcourse meant giving shitloads of your money to the church (him). we were subjected to a 10 minute long film, the first 3 minutes of which detailed 'mr chippy' and how shit his life was before he ignored the protests of his wife and gave 2 months entire salary to the church. the second 7 minutes surveyed in details all the material possessions he now had as one of the most successful businessmen in south africa. we were then all encouraged to pick up an envelope from the front, stuff it with as much money as we had (if we didn't have enough we were, happily, allowed to bring it back the next week)... if we didn't do this, it was implied, there was little welcome to be had here. everyone loved the hope this man offered and it was painful at times, however the music they played and we sang to- the reason i was there- was somethign between hard drum and bass and 'feeling hot hot hot' style pop and i danced my tits off.

National Unification Strategy (NUS)

written on 11/56/09 but held back without internet till now... i think some of it was perhaps a bit rash...

This whole thing is kind of funny. I am in Johannesburg, a city that
oscillates between the brooding, colourful hope and exhaust that I smelt
in Kampala, and the stulted, wide boulevards of an LA suburb, with
teenagers licking ice creams and mirrored office buildings sitting at
every corner. Not that this somewhat negative impression scratches the
surface of what I am sure is a great and beautiful city- I just haven¡¦t
had a chance to explore it. We have been in southern africa almost a week,
chauffered between fancy hotel and wood panelled board room over and over
again, meeting various organisations and getting to know each other- a
group of 10 ¡¥youth leaders¡¦.

Having said this, some of Africa was found on a 3 day sojourn to
Swaziland, a landlocked absolutist monarchy that is home to just over 1
million people and the highest HIV rate in the world. We took the 6 hour
drive from Jo-burg as the landscape changed from flat prarie land to deep
valleys and hills that are almost mountains. The Swazi people are really
lovely, relaxed people  who are for the most part off the tourist trail
and so tiny crime rates and no cynicism. We visited some growing co-ops
and walked a little in the hills.

My fellow ¡¥youth leaders¡¦ leave me flummoxed. Four work for the labour
party, either as campaigners or PAs for MPs. One of them used to work for
Liam Burn, ex-immigration minister and a total Daily Hate Male. Three have
close links with the NUS, including it¡¦s vice-president- an organisation
that this year has decided to campaign against binge drinking (as opposed
to free education, student housing or anti-racism) in a bizarre twist that
makes students effectively pay to be mothered. The rest are trade
unionists (always good eggs, and this case is no exception). Talk is of
nonsense NUS and labour insider politics- this in between meetings where
we hear how the world bank is withholding aid, people are dying of curable
diseases if they are not dying of AIDS and many of the people we meet look
to the UK government and therefore the labour party to ¡¥do something,
please¡¦.

The juxtapositions are everywhere: a meal where the pay of NUS full timers
and general sabbaticals was bemoaned before we met the Swaziland NUS who
have NO money and have to go cap in hand to local NGOs and pay for meeting
venues and transport out of their own pockets. Talking about fair trade
food over a meal in which half the food ordered is wasted. Intense
meetings about our collective solidarity followed by a shyness in engaging
with the people we meet on a social level immediately after.

The wrong people have come on this delegation. SOAS development studies
students would not only bring so much more to the table when we meet
genuinely knowledgeable, interesting and inspiring people (we had to
clarify what ¡¥Harare¡¦ was today) but they would also understand the many
pitfalls of westerners coming to help ¡¥develop¡¦ for 2 weeks staying in
well fucking posh hotels and sponsored by coca cola. They would also be
committed to do something beyond these weeks, something I seriously doubt
members of this group are (guys, if you are reading this please don¡¦t be
hurt, I think you know anyway) Even in ethnomusicology we talk about the
¡¥insider/outsider¡¦ way of doing fieldwork, (fieldwork is what this
essentially is) and taking a community on their own terms using its own
value sets to figure out what practical steps we can take together to
forge real positive change. This, by contrast, sometimes comes dangerously
close to voyeurism. We visited an orphanage for all of 45 minutes, handed
out food and listened to them sing (which was magic, and I briefly fell in
love with the soloist), cuddled them a bit and then spent the journey back
talking about how much we pity them. Awwww. I had a short but intense
moral dilemma shortly after- should I go and say hello to the woman in the
house dying of HIV induced TB who needs her mother to speak for her?
Everyone else was.  In the end I decided that playing mbira to her might
make the experience overall positive and I did and it was nice, but only
just.

In contrast to the lack of real Politik amongst the delegation, the people
we have met- reprentatives from the zimbabwean and swazi national student
unions, who regularly face imprisonment and beatings for standing up to
the state; members of civil rights groups who travel for miles from rural
areas to meet us; aswell as the taxi drivers and hotel porters that speak
the truth wherever you are in the world- are amazing and it is a real
honour and inspiration to spend time with them. And there is proper
revolutionary activity happening- the Swazi equivalent of the trade union
congress asked for a photocopier and 10 bikes so they can take the truth
to rural areas. Also in Swaziland, the last demonstration to free two
political prisoners ended when the police got a good hiding and ran into
the hills. The people we meet are young, totally dedicated, totally
lacking the egos of the Britist student movement and all the stronger for
their lack of cynicism about the political process.

And this is what I am here for and makes the whole corporate sponsored
endeavour worthwhile. Despite what Ed said about how I could do this by
myself if I really wanted and avoid being tainted, the bottom line is that
I wouldn¡¦t have access to these people if I hadn¡¦t come with ACTSA and
they wouldn¡¦t have access to the myriad of possibilities that are brewing
in my mind for what we can do from London.

The perspective on my life that I feel I have almost entirely lost in the
big city with the big job and dense (but joyful) squatlife is beginning to
return, and I once again feel that I can interact with the world on my own
terms and get excited by the big and small things. I have the same cycle
each time I go far away from home- the initial elation and exhaustion of
travel and solitude gives way after a week or so to some strong pangs of
loneliness and the question that ¡¥if this is what I feel the best thing
for me to spend my time doing is, yet I feel kind of homesick and lonely
then what is left?¡¦. This usually co-incides with the residual bits of
cannabis leaving my system and along with it the fuzziness that makes many
things bearable, but soon both these things turn from bad to good and a
clarity comes that is the marrow in the middle of the bone that I secretly
look forward to. I am almost there ļ.

And my mind races forward to zimbabwe¡K we have met quite a lot of
zimbabweans here and I have picked their collective brain about the
current conditions in zim, ability to travel, availability of goods etc
(apparently they have rolling tobacco so I can stop smoking imported
Camels¡K). The bad news is that in their desperation for food and fuel the
people killed lots of the wildlife and chopped down lots of the ancient
trees in the national parks. This is shit, but I have heard that some of
the national parks in the north are still pretty ok. I have also made
contacts with some Jazz musicians in Harare and it turns out that there is
a Jazz festival on 24-6 June in Harare, just at the right time to for me
to make a leisurely overland trip there from SA. I have brought some good
musical materials with me and have been learning new tunes on the Mbira at
every opportunity.

And so we roll on. Tommorow we tour a coke factory. I am going to go well
armed (with facts) and then cape down early next week.

Baku nin

ahoy! or, as they say here: salam! that and 'sahol' (thank you andgoodbye) are the only two words i have picked up here in baku, azerbaijan,to my shame. it is all one seems to need though, with muchgesticulating, mostly the action of putting donor kebab in bread, thestaple street food here. they mix it with yoghurt, coriander, tomato,cucumber and spices, a far cry from flames or similar, and also about1/5th of the price.

you find me (or i find your inbox) at 1230am local time sat with asunburnt chest eating peanuts from the minibar in a very posh airconditioned hotel room in the 'new' part of the city. i have just hadquite a special night- we went to the home of mir taymurhttp://azari.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai123_folder/123_articles/123_mirteymur_architecture.htmlwho is going to do live art during our concert on monday. he and hisfamily were amazing; their house in the walled old town is a piece of artin itself, filled with his sculptures and paintings and those of his wifeand students. he seems obsessed with curves, including the '[infinitecircle' that is essentially a short cylinder that is turned over at onepoint so if you were to draw a line along it with a pen you would coverboth surfaces.we ate walnut cake and he showed us the work he has done over the last 40years.

i have been cast as the 'boy' among the three of us (the trio thatmakes up our band has a azeri violin player and an iraqi-british oud/daffplayer- search 'ben sellers soas' and have a look at any except the firstresult, which has bad sound- they are both a few years older than me)which is brilliant as a)i can act like a boy and be silly and b)when i doadult things, like drink lots of azeri vodka and not fall all over theplace i look dead cool.

anyway, point is mir teymur's son looked just likeme so , although we had no language in common, we took to each other rightaway. the whole thing was like something out of arabian nights (or maybedisney's aladdin) with a stooped old man showing his treasures among highshelves of books, canvases, sculptures and old soviet photos. after toolong centred around this hotel catering (very well) for businessmen andtheir too-tanned wives this was a breath of non--airconditioned air and aglimpse at the azerbaijan of old.the city itself is really lovely in its own way, reflecting it'sgeographical position straddling east and west- turkey to the west, iranto the south, the caspian sea to the east, russia to the north- and racingto put soviet times behind it. much of the city is a building site, withmassive tower block hotels and apartments going up literally everywhere.there is oil here and lots of it, baku is the starting point of a pipelinethat extends through 3 countries to turkey where it supplies muich ofwestern europe's oil. even in the tourist video the 'i' of azerbaijan ismade from an oil tower.

i have only seen a certain side of the citythough, apparently a drive only 20 miles in any direction will show theroads turning to dirt and the people on the breadline. why aren't wesurprised? despite this, the city seems much more egalitarian than someplaces i have visited- less beggars and dodgy people than both uganda andindia, and no sense of a menacing police force. the streets are filledwith ladas and mercedes and nothing in between.

and i must segue for a moment into something that seems to be taking aneven more central role in my life these days- food and its appreciation.here it is all about LAMB and flat bread- lavash- and its variousmanifestations. there are also many nuts and fruits in savory dishes- weare talking cherry rice, apricot and butter lamb that literally melts inyour mouth, spinach with raisons... i could go on. the man from del montesays DA.

my days are made of rehearsal, deciding which swimming pool to go to,wandering round the city and fulfilling pretty random engagements. thecompany that is paying for us to be here represents- from what i cangather- upmarket boutiques (jewellrey, clothes etc) and other hideouslyexpense outlets, our violin player had met him at christmas and he hadinvited us over. he is paying for everything, from minibar to internet totaxis, fucking strange and generous until you realise the amount of moneythat must pass through his hands and our status as a cultural jewel forhim to show off to his friends.

on wednesday night i found myself in thebeautiful fountain filled courtyard of a traditional carpet making factoryfor an 'open rehearsal' with this guy and his guests. we ate caviar andthe essence of rose petals (rose petals boiled with sugar in water thendistilled) and drank vodka and hennessey cognac (supposedly the best inthe world) with, amongst others, the conductor of the national orchestraand the wife of mr hennessey himself. i learntafterwards that she had flown into baku from vienna just to meet this guyfor a potential business deal. we were the court musicians, entertainingthe drunk royalty whenever they desired.

i was told to play animprovisation thinking about 'the people who died in the earthquake insichuan' when i told him my grandma was from there (she isn't, i don'tknow where is from, but thats the only name i could think of). i almosttold him she had died in the earthquake just to shut him up. i played itand played it well, and he talked on his mobile phone. we were just likethe food- there as a glorious symbol for people who didn't necessarilyappreciate it for what it was.

among the other guests was a russianbusinessman who said little and had on his arm a beautiful blond nymph wholooked 17 at the oldest and was his wife. pretty fucking sick but again,what was there to say? today we were asked to go again as the guy wasentertaining one of george bush's brothers. the oud player is an iraqirefugee. we said we were busy.

earlier in the day we had met two professors from the conservatory inbaku. they were amazing, intense guys, one of them was a composer with 4gold teeth who could not sit still. the violin player, sabina, hadcomissioned a piece from him which he presented. it is avant garde andminimalist and i haven't decided whether i like it or not, but it iscertainly powerful and the first work that has been commissioned for me!

other highlights have included a full body massage from a buxom russingduring which i had to full my head with dismembered bodies and stuartpearce in order not to get billowing erection. infact, since i obviouslystopped smoking weed when i came i have been RIDICULOUSLY horny all thetime, aswell as remembering my dreams and writing them down as much aspossible when i wake up. two mornings ago, still half asleep, i wrote

stealing a bike. man in door saw me, was painting but didn't do anything.rode past cops. last day of term, went home, all partying in gower street,cleaner took notes. massage not hard enough.

strange eh? when i read the notes i remember the images but not the orderof them. its cool though to remember dreams as normally the weed killsthem all off.oh and yesterday we played a gig at the azerbaijani parliament!!! part ofthe 90th aniversary of the parliament with the president of azerbaijan andfull of ambassadors and chicken on sticks. ambassedors and theirentourages are as bad as soas undergradutes for fighting for the bestfood... we thought noone was listening to us but various people came up tous afterwards and said they liked it, and the croation ambassador said hewould like to invite us to a festival in croatia! so watch this space.

the fact thati am here as a 'musician' is kind of cool- i have always saidi wanted to be a musician and my family have always smiled and wished megood luck but i could tell they didn't think it was a feasible option, buthere i am, finished degree and taken all expenses paid to the old sovietrepublic to perform the musical masturbation they call improvising :).

Uganda

so i got off the plane in uganda to a fully yellow moon hanging in the sky like a fat opulescent apricot straining on its branch, judith and mariah took me back to their apartment just outside kampala that they had just moved into from a more crazy place, i think because they thought i would be uncomfotable there. we used their place as a base to do not very much- cook delicious food (they have a very carbohydrate orientated diet, americans would hate it even thought it is physiologically totally sensible if you live in the real non-SUV world) with things like matooke- mashed green banana-, posho- mashed plantain-, chapati, akona- ground millet, and then meat in sauce that you dipped everything in. good fish too from lake victoria, nice beer. then the twins introduced me to freddie, a radio producer for the 3rd biggest radio station in kampala, dembe FM- 'peace FM'- and i hung out at his radio station and interviewed all the big names of ugandan music, very fun and all for the good cause of my degree, some really interesting conversations, the things that are really big in popular ugandan music are ragga and reggae; hiphop is just starting to come up from the streets into the mainstream conciousness, and there is also alot of god music, and therefore interesting ethical dilemmas- should god music be played in nightclubs, which are still full of christians but christians mostly engaged in some sin or another...

then two amazing things happened. first, we went to these islands on lake victoria, me, judith, mariah, and this other guy also called ben (he is ben1, i am ben7) who i am shared an apartment with last year in london and who is also into his refugee support systems, anyhow this island was quite like paradise, purple cranes, yellow birds with huge huge feathery tails that flew by the dozen from the bushes across the beach we were on as soon as the sun turned from yellow to red, waders nibbling snails, jays diving for sardines, achingly beautiful sunsets, fire on the beach every night with various holidaying gringos, i felt a bit like a sage here and there, one night there was a big party of newcastle students our age, first big trip abroad, the fire (that normally would have silenced everyone and made me paranoid) and 'impressive' (to those who either need to feel impressed or contemptuous when meeting new people) experiences meant we could talk quietly enough that the secrets could be heard behind our words and we could slip into the night with our ideas intact, next day monkeys, a tiny village/town thing int he middle of an island with sprinting children, the next night judith gave me a masterclass in cooking on an open fire- she made it in such a way brances could be fed in to regulate exactly the temprature of the fire. i got sent to find salt in the nearest village, had almost the entire village lauging their heads off as i tried to explain salt through various hand jesters, and then they laughed even harder when they finally realised what i was after.

i also stopped smoking weed whilst i was out there, after 3 days i had a sweaty and very depressed night where everything came crashing down, then the next night, or maybe the night after that, i had a night of not euphoria but a sudden grip on my brain where all the experiences of my year in america and now uganda a bit were brought into perfect focus and i realise that i have grown up loads and changed a bit too, and that really the world is my oyster and i actually understood it as opposed to just deducing it, and i can be whoever i want to be and dictate my own social and cultural agenda, and through that make political change, and not fall for any of this paranoia nonsense and dance and i realised that really my mum, my grandma and getting j and m to canada are really the only truly important things in my life and thats fine and cool and as it should be and i got a bit worried that all my friends, alot of whom are now in long term relationships (when my band reformed when i got back all 6 other members were in or close to the big L, with cheesy gawps to prove it), would be too in love to have those 12midnight to 3.15am chats that are the things of life blood, but actually since i got back that has been the case except for sam and lizzie, who are similarly skeptical about the comfort and mindless joy of love so we have been doing those platonic all nighters that i still feel are where i am at, but anyway i digress, got over the weed, felt great, then boom i am back in scarborough and caning it in.

other amazing thing after the islands, i had heard rumours of mbira music in the east of the country, and my contact had another contact, so we had a long hot bus journey north east, where the civil war raged for 20 years until recently, got invited to a wedding, and then the next day made our way to an old wisened mans village to hear his music. wow. a 10 piece mbira/marimba/drum/vocal explosion oh my gosh something amazing, i will send you it when i have it rendered, music so full of energy, the village came out to greet and spend time with us, we drank homemade hot millet beer out of a common put through huge cane straws, shared instruments, laughed alot, there if you aren't married by 18 you are a bit wierd, if your not a parent by the time your 20 there is definitely something wrong iwth you (cos you die when you are 40), a philosophy as relevent as our 'family planning', there they lobby for existence, if there is not enough food to feed everyone people stop having so many kids according to the advice of the village elders, or people die, and that is accepted, and those who survive the day thank god and sleep easy knowing that tommorow they can have another day.

then i interviewed the singer through a translator, very candid, then they played more and for the last song i jammed the fuck out with them! yes! one of the best days of mine and the other bens life i tell you. all in the beating sun, kids eating mangoes like apples, hands on hearts, kick your shoes off and dance. after i have had 150 eyes on me, wondering if one of the two white men in the whole 50 mile radius can dance or not as i dance, i can go to any bullshit club or gig here and be the only person dancing! and thats what ive been doing a bit.

The Haircut I Never Had

“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

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

castrati

hiya :)

just got back from busking for 1 hour 20 minutes on my Mbira during which time i made exactly $1, not very cool. i was on the famous broadwalk, loads of tourists strolling around, lots of people were into it but noone wanted to give me any money, even with my 'iPOD of the masses' sign and then, on the reverse side 'help me get to Uganda so i can learn from a master'. i guess i need a)a new sales pitch or b)another instrumentalist, of which there are loads around but they are all either lazy or unreliable, or both.

But whatever, i like playing and need to be in good condition for when i go to uganda in june wooooooooo i booked my plane tickets last week, cost almost exactly the amount as the 3 months rent i have saved, so its like im going for free, if you look at it one way. i lost my false teeth in a choppy sea last weekend (quite comical at the time, and i am kind of getting used to not having front teeth, they really aren't that important except for bubblegum and clarinet and eating melon) and have been spending the time i would have been practicing in the library delving for the first time really into what ethnomusicology actually IS, its history, methods of fieldwork, heros, villains etc etc. it seems the debate at the moment (and in anthropology aswell i guess) is to what extent a researcher in the field can be an objective observer, and whether this is even as worthwhile as the researcher trying to immerse themselves and be a participant in the culture they are studying. it all comes out of the shitty colonial past and its legacy, and how researchers are often percieved to have similar facets as old colonialists, or tourists, and how the idea of a westerner being able to come in and then purport to define and understand another culture is pretty arrogant, and how to get round these things. it seems i could even do a fieldwork project on the process of doing fieldwork if i wanted to. but that is a bit esoterical for me, i think i am either going to investigate how and to what extent lamellaphone (Mbira) traditions are being passed on through the generations in rural uganda, or how urban hip hop artists are responding to their culture and what it is about hiphop that has made it even reach to the far corners of the world. but great stuff, i feel like i am finally applying my learning to something really useful and exciting.

so when people ask me here what i have been up to, i tell them about that but then i tell them that generally life is amazing because i am sucking the sugary juice out of every moment and that really does have alot to do with living in the forest, though it unpredictable ways. in the last month i have spent maybe 4 nights under a roof (when it rains) even though i could stay in numerous places any night; it is starting to be a bit unnatural and stuffy in houses, i feel like i am slowly being de-conditioned back to a more kind of bestial (in the nicest sense of the word) state (it could also be that it is often pretty hot here at night). i just cannot emphasise enough how much more easy and joyful it is on the mind to open your eyes in the morning to light sprinkling through leaves and birdsong so close. most of the time i sleep in a hammock, hard to get out of, so my bed is in my rucksack and all i need to make it complete are two trees. punch the sky.

and i have been going on little trips to try and see california as much as possible before i go. my jazz teacher uses the word 'trip' to mean general journey, within a song or within a human's growth, something necessary i guess, and i wondered on friday 6pm, as i stood at the north edge of santa cruz on highway 1 with my thumb out, what exactly people are looking for when they go on a trip. the night before i finally had a defining 'acceptance' moment when i felt like i was in the fabric of the people i was around when, at a keg party (a party with a barrel of beer) for ryan's goodbye and hello to a fishing trawler in seattle, i was having a little dance in a trailer and everyone was like 'KEG STAND BEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!' and i smiled and felt my legs lifted above my head as i held onto the keg and beer was pumped directly into my mouth and everyone was like '1234....' and i managed to hold on with open throat for 34 seconds, very respectable i was told, keeping the british end up, and noone noticed when i stumbled off into the forest a little while later to throw up spagetti and beer.

but anyway, i digress, the week before me and nick hitched up to a deserted beach about 20 miles away just to watch the sunset over the water and for kicks (epic pics on facebook), on the way back the crazy old hippie driver was telling us about arcata, 200 miles north, which he said had 1000 year old redwood trees and the nicest people in the world, so we decided to go there this weekend, but then nick was busy but i was in the travelling frame of mind so i decided to go by myself. that weekend there were 2 great jams happening and a BBQ at my old house, but i shunned them all for a trip into the unknown by myself. why? i like these people, i don't have much time left with them, why go? what are we travelling for? what was i looking for? solitude? the unexpected? i couldn't work it out, and felt a bit bad, but then i got a ride and then another, who told me that there was no way i was going to get to arcata and back in 5 days, so i let him drop me off at half moon bay, a little town between santa cruz and san fran, where i slept in a huge tree by the beach and reassessed. i decided to make my way up the 1 (the highway that winds slowly up the coast and is the stuff of chilli peppers songs and dreams i think) and see how far i got, instead of taking the faster but less beautiful 101.

up early the next morning, squashed banana and peanuts, got a ride quickly to the bottom of san fran and then a train to the dead centre of the city, a lady named suzanne saw my Mbira and we chatted, turned out she was going north too and would i like a ride? yes please, so the potentially very time consuming job of navigating san fransisco (and getting to a place where i could get a ride out) was sidestepped, and we chatted about uganda and her trips to bosnia as a NGO bod and positive language, they dropped me off at a little beach town named stinson where there was a kind of fete thing going on, hot dog, bluegrass, pretty girls in citrus dresses, onwards! got a few little rides, one with a french stone oven maker, another with 3 gentlemen in a mercedes who tried to catch me out on my knowledge of cellists (not that i claimed to know any), then a magic ride with a kayaking instructor and drummer, he was only going a little way up the 1 but by now i had decided to head towards some hot springs about 50 miles inland, and he was going that way. we stopped by his house in santa rosa for a jam, and the jam was so good i decided to accept his offer of a diversion from the hot springs (which i would have been lucky to reach before nightfall) to his friend the carpenters house. he told me it would be a 'trip' so we went.

jason the carpenter and drummer/bassist was quiet, greying hair in a ponytail, his friends were a (by now familiar) assortment of the good, the bad and the slightly crazy, we drank stout and jammed hard, they had an old moog synth that i got acquainted with, 3 jams lasted about 45 mins each, no stopping, not much eye contact but riproarslideaway stuff, he had these cow bells that were tuned pretty close to my mbira so it got pretty intricate at times, lush, then pasta, garlic and butter and hammocking it up. woke up the next morning and oh my goodness, just near where i am sleeping there is a full on lake!!!!!!!!!!! with canoe, surf board (i worked out to put on the canoe to form a bed) dragonflies, the works, and no humans! so i spent most of the morning lying around on the canoe reading carlos castanada and silently canoeing or swimming to the reeds where the dragonflies were (blue, red, gold) till they all saw me and flew up all at once in a chute of colour.

but then it started getting really hot and i was in the middle of nowhere with many directions home and pretty scummy water in my water bottle so i walked the 2 miles or so back to the 101 and sat down in the hot sun and waited for a ride. it was mothering sunday and i wanted to get to a phone so i could call mum before she went to bed but there was nothing happening and every time a car came by and i stood up i got dizzy and sort of fell back down again, a mite scary, but then a huge white chevy truck pulled up containing a heavily tattooed gent and his chatty girlfriend, i passed around a spliff but he said he couldn't smoke because 'i am in rehab....and a quaker'. at first he was a bit condescending towards me, calling me 'rainbow boy' i guess cos i looked and smelt like a hippie, but i am quite adept these days at figuring people out, and second guessing what they are thinking of me and then becoming, for a short time at least, what they want me to be (i could talk for ages about social dynamics of hitchiking, they are fascinating and very conducive to great conversations and working out the psyche of a group of people, if you ever want to hear 10 life stories in a day, go hitching) so i told them how happy i was that this was the first truck i had been picked up in (true) and that the slipknot loud on the cd player was pumping (also true), and headbanged along in the back, and we all opened up like flowers to each other, he had just got back from quaker chuch where he had spoken to the congregation about his feelings towards his mothers death in a car crash 2 years before. the loud music, fast driving and kind of subdued fraglity of his manner made sense and i told him some stories of england and he smiled.

then they wanted me to try some of their organic high-high weed, so once again i found myself back in santa rosa in a motel eating fast food and smoking a huge blunt. the guy was like 'because i can't smoke, every second toke you take you have to hold in for 30 seconds'. i did and then i could barely walk, they were new lovers to each other and were eager for me to go so they could romp, so we got back int he 2007 chevy and suddenly we were stopped at a gas station and they were pointing towards the freeway. i could hardly think, so i grabbed as much of my stuff as i could and said a cheery goodbye.. as i stepped onto the tarmac a police cruiser slowly cruised passed me, my heart skipped a beat (hitchhiking is illegal, i have never got any bother but my state of appearance with shocking red eye meant there was potential for problems). i realised they had dropped me in about the worst place ever to try and get a ride back onto the freeway (i was about 70 miles from san fran), there were roadworks where i would normally have hitched from, cars whizzing by in every direction, pollution and no shade. so i sat down and tried to gather my thoughts and hitched.

but no rides for ages and i was getting a bit weary, then out of nowhere this little old bum appears, much like the one at the beginning of kerouac's dharma bums which i was and am reading, who told me it would be better to hitch round the corner. i told him i would never get picked up there because that area was full of roadworks. he told me to trust him and walked off. so i walked around the corner, and lo and behold there is a big cardboard sign in the dirt saying

101 SOUTH

with a littel smiley face, and i was like NICE ONE! and picked it up and IMMEDIATELY this little white VW polo pulls up, and we are in the middle of a busy lane of traffic so i hold all my stuff to my chest and jump in, turn to the driver and it is this girl, and we look at each other for about 3 seconds, stopped with shit loads of traffic piling up behind us and had this crazy connection, can't put it into words, maybe you know what i mean, it has never happened to me like that before, and we said hello, and then she drove, and we didn't look at each other again for a minute, was funny but in a very warm way, and she was only going 5 miles down the road and we started chatting, and after preliminaries i was like 'what are you all about' and she was like straight away 'happiness' like she had anticipated the question, and i was like 'thats funny, me too!' and then we chatted some more, and she had been grocery shopping and was only going 5 miles down the road, and i said that was a shame that she wasn't driving further cos i was enjoying her company, and she was like 'im going to drive further' and in the end she drove me all the way to san fransisco!!! like an hour away or something. and we had such similar life stories, similar parents, similar problems, similar ways of dealing with said problems, i think that was the main thing, like the sea of life had both rounded us in the same way and it was like there was nothing to say and it was just nice to share space with her, and i was obviously still very stoned from the blunt and was struggling to express myself well, but i managed a stirring few words on my views on activism and how that fits into every day life, justification of existence and happiness, and she said i was inspiring, but then she told me about her life, and she is a rock for the people around her whilst she tries to keep her own head above water and i told her that i wasn't the inspiring one, she was, i was just floating around california like a child in a womb, no worries, she was one of the people that are the dam that stops the tide of human suffering overwhelming everything and it was a shame she was driving because i wanted to hug her tight. then we got over the golden gate bridge and we stopped and got out and i played mbira to her with every fibre i could muster and then we said bye.

and then i sat for a while on fisherman's wharf and let that wave pass over me and then i had a huge pang to go and see rich and ernie, i wasn't sure whether they were back from their cruise but i decided to chance it, walked a long way but got there, and they were in (first they thought i was a cold caller and didn't answer the door) and whoop home for a moment, artichokes and happy conversation, ernie thought the photo of him with simon made him look old, it didn't, then an exceeding comfortable and warm night. mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i fell asleep thinking i had answered my questions about trips and goals. i dreamed about love.

and i only lost my mobile, my california lonely planet and max's stove, a good weekends work.

' why do you call a car park a car park when a park is somewhere there are trees?'
'do you call trees trees in england?'

alice recorded me playing Mbira and then overdubbed some lovely guitar and vocals on top. you can here it on her myspace page, its called bukatiende www.myspace.com/alicemacleansmith

fuck i now have a continuous line of hair between my collar bone and my pubes, i think i am getting close to being a man, scary stuff, im going to be 21 in less than a month (gutted that i have missed an entire year of 21st birthday parties) and i still consider myself only containing a little recepticle of knowlege, last night max and all that crew had some hardcore mudwrestling and although i could see the greatness of it in theory, i just didn't really feel like doing it, i went and played and talked quietly about music with a guy from my latin american class, then went to see jono who has been on a hunger strike for the last 8 days (admirable) and then bed before midnight. i don't want to grow up but it kind of seems inevitable. maybe i just need some botox. but then i look around me and so many older people are so immature, maybe age has two meanings

oh wow check out this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6654175.stm
china, capitalism, corpse, comedy

so i have about 3 weeks left, agenda items
record definitive music with max and others
write short notes to people telling them they are excellent and thank you and that they should stop worrying
mum coming in a couple of weeks, we are borrowing jonos trailer, i am actually really looking forward to it (another sign of growing up)
write some sort of eulogy to america, i have lots to say but hard to crystalise it
spend at least 2/3 days on a drunken rampage with jono et al and rip some stuff up

oh no im suddenly spent, once again i read my words back and they seem very self indulgent, so forgive me, but who gives a fuck you can see me soon and berate me face to face :)
soon
love ben

citrus

hiya  :) 

happy easter, hope it bounced like a bunny. i woke up on campus on easter
sunday before most other people and was on my way to sit by my garden and
take in the morning sun when i saw all these little plastic eggs poking
out from around and about, filled not with chocolate but with bubble gum
and condoms! way to go progressive 'campus living' staff. reality came
back though when i got to my garden- it is totally thriving, except for
the broccoli- about a month ago the first heads of broccoli came through
but i didn't know you are meant to pick them right away so i left them to
get bigger and they lost their fruit and flowered! oh well.

so yeah, apologies for not being in touch for ages, no excuses really
except that all my internet time has been spent devising worthy comebacks
for lizzie's acid facebook tongue, having a nice full day to day existence
and evenings rarely spent alone. it is hard to really pull out the most
significant
bits of the last couple of months, but i have been dreaming about home
alot so i think i just need to splurge.

so this week is the second week of the spring term, my classes are
jazz improvisation
latin american music
javanese gamelan
literature of the sea (!)
demilitarization of uni of california

pretty fucking chilled out if you ask me. i am back on clarinet for jazz,
it was frustrating to the point of angry tears to begin with cos every
time i try to tongue a note my false 3 teeth move about 2 milimetres, giving
a sort of unwanted glissando effect, but now i can kind of control it. i
am getting back to the level i was at before my teeth caved in, but this
term we are expected to PLAY THE CHANGES hard and fast, and before writing
this i have spent 2 hours trying to master just 6 bars of music. and i
haven't. lit of the sea is as cool as it sounds, got my leather elbow head
back on and think fondly of mrs mack, i have realised just how much the
sea is part of my history and my soul, right back to begging to be allowed
off school so i could go and look at the caught lobsters in the harbour,
seeing gavbob for (hopefully not) the last time byt he holbeck hall and
selling watermelons on the beach with sam "WATERMELONS, FRESH JUST SMELL
'EM"

before we started up again though it really felt like a time of flux-
after i finished my exams me and jono, this really class guy who always
when i ask on the phone 'hows it going' replys 'its going', dropped some
liquid
acid onto some sugar cubes and went to the beach; my gosh it was
something. (can i put the disclaimer in here that i don't in any way
encourage anyone to do acid and would discourage it unless they really
really want to and are by nature happy people who can handle themselves
and crazy things). i can't even begin to put it in words, but ill try

i lost my teeth in the sand and it was nice and sunny and then just as i
started laughing and couldn't stop
this girl ann, or sparrow to her friends, she is in my gamelan class and in
one of jonos
classes and is a bit in the ether like alida but at the same time nothing
like
her, but very very nice, she turned up, and jono had mentioned she might
ring but then she was just walking past on the beach, and she was quite
shocked because she expected people on acid to be uncontrollable and
crazy and stuff, but then she found my teeth in the sand wooooooooo but
the sun was hot and i lay back and the birds had vapour trails and
everything was SO BEAUTIFUL and shimmery and a huge waves of love kept
passing over me and then we went way out on the pier and looked at the sea
lions and fuck the sun was setting and the birds were flying around and i
was feeling a bit giddy and grasped onto the railing and watched the sun
set and it was so beautiful, the clouds were like the most delicate silk
fabric made up of a million colours as the sun set, rippling and
shimmering like they were on a holistic washing line, and as the sun set
and changed from yellow, through every colour, to deep blue, the clouds
seemed be be being sucked with the sun around the earth and i think i said
that everythings value should be measured in terms of this sunset,

i wondered if i would see the sunrise

and then a tiny problem when we saw tessa and patrick from protests and i
didn't have any teeth in and gave them huge hugs and smiles and didn't have
anyidea what to say, but then we went to the end of the pier and jono asked
me about scarborough, and sparrow talked about  the sperm
whale mating noises you can hear when you swim underwater where she lives
in northern california. and then to be a bit briefer, we went home for a
resupply, then back to a different beach and i lay back and
BLISSED OUT, it has never happened to me before and i couldn't imagine it
until it did happen, it was like every sense i had was roaring
YEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
BLISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS

like my ears had these tones in them, could have been the seagulls
singing, could have been the waves roaring, probably was actually now i
think about it, or the frogs or grasshoppers, and then my body was lying
face up with every bit possible of me in the sand, kind of with a small
rise in the middle so i was giving it a backwards star hug kind of, and i
could feel my atoms merging with the sand and back and forth, and the sea
in my nose, and if my eyes were open i could see stars throbbing and
dancing and if they were closed i saw crazy patterns and correlations
but i wasn't thinking of any of these things, i was just THINKING

mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmarghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

blisssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss

but LOUD like it was a revelationa and tribal scream and groan.

and then back up to campus, jono had looked a bit sketchy when we had gone
back into the town before but now he was ok, we went into the forest,
jono gave a monologue, then we found a great tree and we told each other
stories, me
for the first time since i have got here and maybe ever to such length,
told them about the travelling things and described the details of the
golden temple and mcloed ganj to people who really wanted to hear about
it! and talked about the nature of story telling in general and how
powerful it can be and how it is a dying art, and then we went back to
mine and listened the first sigur ros album and ate soup and rice and
smoked weed and then i was saying how the album was like our acid trip,
and we were at the beginning of song 5, after lots of epicness and it is
sort of a slow swelling broodyness but beautiful and thats where we were
at, and then it goes crazy again shortly after and jono produced some
mushroom chocolate and then sparrow had to go catch a flight to seattle,
but she dropped us off at the pier, and we watched the sunrise as i
peaked on mushrooms and
.............................................................. me and jono
sat in the early morning completely alone under sleeping bags in silence
on a bench as the colour in the sky changed again from deep blue, mist,
clouds parting, rays from behind the hills, clouds vibrating and melting
and moving and changing colour and fuck every animal getting ready for the
new day, the seagulls waiting all along the rail to jump in first light
and get the fish, the sealions sleeping in a LATTICE WORK, about 15- 2Oof
them just under the surface of the water swimming in perfect formation
into each other , tessalating, and floating, asleep!, and a couple of them
barking, and mm mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm a different bliss, and then when the sun
was up before it had come through there were clouds and mist, and it might
have rained, so we headed for the bus stop, but we got distracted by a
piece of modern art with rock in the shape of orange peel that you could
LIE IN and it was EXTREME COMFORT and if you lay in it one way you faced
the sun, which was just starting to burn through the mist, so we sat
there, maybe 45 mins, and the sun eventually burst through and it was
another sunnyt day in santa cruz!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
then i walked home and felt

happy and full of joy

and i still feel that at a much more subdued level to this moment.

yeah, so basically it was really immense and once again, but even stronger
than before, i am going to try and give as much love out to the world as
possible, i had many a revelation, temporary maybe, sometimes it felt like
me and jono were
reading each others minds, we would just continue conversations we were
having seconds, minutes, hours before with oblique references and know
what each other meant. as i say hard to put into words (and now i do
theysound obvious but i was more like i felt them in my being rather than
thought of them logically) but

know your place. the american indians see it as key and i agree, knowing
your place in the world in terms of how you are just atoms and emotions
and just to BE and feel and notice and how we can't do it all, but we can
do it all by doing what we are doing, and homeand family and that most
beautiful and unique but fragile and difficult bond with those you love
the MOST MOST like your mum, but how that is all ok anyway and just to use
every second to try and work hard on it and on yourself

religion/spirituality- it doesn't matter WHO SAYS IT , but WHAT IS SAID,
if the most religious people from each religion actually TALKED TO EACH
OTHER
about a)what their great leaders said and b)how to apply it to today,and
thought of it like that, rather than CATHOLIC or MUSLIM,or MYSTICIST,
then where would the worries be????????????????????????

how powerful i am if i just tap into my BESTIAL ROAR

how, if i concentrate, i can step back from all the realities i exist in
and see them all in a circle infront of me and just be at one with them
all and myself at the same time

that it is all crossroads, NOW IS MY TIME (our time), when i go back to
england i
could do A MILLION things,

and maybe my focus on my music is blinding my to music

but the blissing out was the best.

is this all hippie bullshit? actually very possibly, the more i understand
where this whole eternal love thing is coming from
the more likely it is that it is all a delusion anyway and i should instead
be spending my time fighting for social justice and not
blissing out till the world can bliss out. the biggest thing i have been
grappling with recently is the kind of obvious fact that
working towards personal liberation and working towards social liberation do
not go hand in hand, may even pull in opposite ways.


and then the next morning it was time to eat a big omelette and clean the
hot tub anticipation of mr simon's arrival (simon is 1/7th of the flogged
pony, an old time beenthroughitalltogether friend and has a huge nose) in
the evening. wow it was like a little piece of england in my front room!
much joy ensued and that sunday we biked to san francisco- took 2 days, 80
miles or so mostly along the famous Highway 1 right by the sea, met lots
of crazy locals and had about 1000000 punctures on my back wheel, then
swapped sleeping bags and cereal bars for the comfort of rich and ernie's
glorious abode and meatloaf, ernie took us out for ONE POUND HAMBURGERS on
the morning we left, sat next to 2 cops with guns and daft talk, later in
the day we cycled
about 40 miles and still weren't hungry. oh and we went to alcatraz! to be
honest it didn't really seem that bad- no electric chair, no experiments,
nice views of the bay, musical instruments allowed at the weekend, all you
can eat food, a bit like ucsc really.

then we cycled back on the hamburger fuel, we were feeling great but the
sun was setting and there hadn't been a secluded enough beach for a while
but then SHIT! suddenly we come upon the this amazing idyllic beach,
complete with driftwood and axe for fire, deep maroon sun shimmering on
the sea and not an angry local in sight. there are some epic photos here-
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=87
690328

and all the time we had been away an idea had been brewing to do some live
sessions now i had the magic fingers of simon on bass and with access to
max's recording equipment ending as soon as i moved into the forest, and
so when we got back i invited all the most thoughtful and talented
musicians i had met since i got here for roast veggies and mashed potatos
and someone brought a case of wine and wooooo some intense stuff, at one
point we had drum, bass, guitar, violin, me on piano/dancing and a raucous
mc, i would put the tracks up somewhere accessible but they are all 25
minutes long... really top stuff though, certainly an avenue to persue
back in blighty.

and then jeff the guitar player drove simon and me to the airport in his
open top car, only sting in the tail was a really vindictive phone message
from my flatmate rose about spilling wine on the carpet and generally
being 'disrespectful', but in the last few months i have been learning to
try and hear what people are saying behind their words and absorb all
unjust anger with eye contact and give out as much compassion and love as
i can muster back. but that, and a note saying 'you should really start
washing up now your not paying rent' made me hasten my departure and the
same day i packed up/gave away/threw away most of my possessions, put my
rucksack on my back and walked into the woods.

and a new chapter started. actually arguably it began a few months ago, and
maybe that walk was the climax. people are just the key!
if you have good people around you that you connect with, then you no longer
NEED people, if you know what i mean.
at last i have met a few people who i have really clicked with which has
been cruxial. i
was starting to wonder whether it was something changing in myself that
was making me not able to fully connect with those around me, but then
i met zoe, a girl i had met a couple of months ago and swapped books
with- i lent her beautiful mutants by deborah levy, one of my all time
favorites, and she lent me the Stranger, a classic french novel, anyway
both books delve deep and unabashedly into the human psyche and
have a certain careless take on existence, so when we met again (she is
isas friend from childhood) we could ignore all the usual preliminary
smalltalk and have one long, tangent filled conversation  about everything
all at once, like dean and carlo marx when
they sit knee to knee with each other and see the universe as a
grandfather clock that they take to pieces bit by bit, study, and then
put back together again, and it carried on over the next week or two as
we went to crummy house parties and sat outside away from the debris
and talked with red wine sincerity, and we shared max's keyboard in
my house as others watched tv in front and made music that was abstract
enough to drive everyone else crazy i am sure, but honestly it was like
we were having a conversation, or at least making eye contact in
silence, and then one night a few weeks ago it was daz's last night
before he went home and we went to the beach to play drums, then after
we got told to shut up the only thing left to do was skinny dipping in
the angry sea, then later there was a storm and we went for a bike ride
at 5am, wet limp rollies in our mouths, joyful, and i hadn't even
considered any romantic possibilities until we kissed, and then didn't
stop thinking about them or her until she left three days later for the
east coast with only a note and 3 mix cds by way of goodbye. you can
hear her music at http://www.myspace.com/bellyboats , well worth a listen,
she plays
accordian.

so that was that but then i met jono and jack, a forester and poet who
helped me build my dwelling, and some other people and everything s kosher.
but anyway, living in the woods is COOL in so many ways.it is a spot about
10 minutes
into the low forest, someone has cleared a circular space about 14 feet
diameter, with a tree nearby that can be climbed to see all around. we
were originally going to build a bender, like a dome made of bent
branches, but the branches we found were a little brittle, so instead
we build a sort of lop sided teepee, elaborated with a tapering dome
stretching back into the forest between trees, enough for 2 people and
some stuff or about 6 people squashed in, to give you an idea of the
size.

i have been achieving a long held ambition of getting up before
11am on a regular basis, this morning at 730 birdsong interrupted my dream
of a scarborogh college rugby trip and a pretty girl and by 9 i had my
clarinet going in the practice room, it is so wholesome i could be in a
hovis advert. secondly, i can entertain people without worrying or being
noiad about people being bored, because there is nothing boring about
sitting round a fire in the woods ever! and i have developed a real taste
for whisky with hot water. and waking up outdoors just puts one in such a
great frame of mind for the rest of the day, and walking the 3km or so
back  home at night gives a real and actual way to escape the (i have
decided) pretty stressful and confusing monolith of an overtly capitalist,
big brothery campus.

and my head is clear for music making. on sunday i went to the beach with
max's top class condenser mic and recorded the sea and the birds for a
while, my personal project this term is going to be writing a sea song all
based on the semi-drone of the sea, using the best musical themes that
have come to me in the last few years that i never managed to turn into
full tunes.

there is, to temper the otherwise unadulterated joy of the woods, the
constant possibility of being found by police or campus staff and either
getting a huge fine (if i am there at the time) or having all my stuff
taken away and disposed of (if i am not there), or both. the latter i am
not too worried about, all the stuff i have is expendable and important
things like my passport are safe somewhere else, but apparently they tend
to search in the early mornings and the idea of being woken up by a pigman
with an angry face and a large fine leaves me cold. and i won't be awake
enough to give a plausible excuse for being there.

oh and i have pretty much decided to go to uganda in summer if i can
afford it, for the duel purpose of seeing the coolest twins in the world
and doing a bit of ethnomusicological fieldwork with rural folk musicians-
they play a type of mbira there and have the same fascinating issues of
folk music finding its place in a changing (but not changing that much)
society, also a huge hip hop and reggae scene there (i just can't take
either genre seriously in america, at least not among the rich white kids
that seem to always be listening to it round here- it is the music of
liberation and struggle, not fucking stoned beyond believing melodrama),
so lots to investigate. mariah and judith know a radio producer there i
can use as a starting point, and i am hoping to get something really
worthwhile down so i can merge easily into post-grad stuffiness later on
in my life.

i think i chatted before about Free Skool Santa Cruz,
basically a load of lessons, discussions and workshops put on by the
community for the community, from bike repair to anarchic medatation,
sowing to train hopping. last wednesday i went to an avacado core
carving workshop, loads of fun, every town should have one, and it
avoids the cliqueness that affects other similar non-heirachical groups
because there is such variety everyone can find their place, and
because it is so explicitly for everyone, everyone accepts everyone
else really readily, and the whole thing is a great way to radicalise
people- in a place where everythings value is measured in dollars this
can turn everyone on its head.

so yeah, that is just what has happened over the last 3 weeks or so,
before that there were some funny things too but they escape me now,
except for the night i met up with this guy i had randomly chatted to
before at drum circles, who told me people 'misunderstood him' as a
'sexual predator', we ended up going to play music on campus and, fuck
man, he was just far too intense with girls much younger than him, so me,
as a person who truly believes in live and let live, should i tell him to
go? should i warn anyone? should i tell him to sort himself out? after a
while i wanted to leave, and he wanted to stay, so i reminded him of a few
fundamentals and left, but i didn't really feel too good about it.

oh and shit! abby took me to Big Sur  last weekend(isolated coastal/hilly
beauty) and we
stayed with some of her friends on top of a huuuge hill overlooking the sea,
in the evening i was going to go to bed but the promise of guinness on tap
took me to the village pub
where everyone knows everyone, generations mingle happily and all the
underage kids (including me)
drink in the parking lot. after a while i ventured into the actual pub and
there is this cool
dreaded and beautiful girl playing guitar with older male cellist that i
played in monteray with before christmas!
well we didn't actually play together, but we were on the same bill, and we
had complimented each other, and
he remembered me! so i played a little penny whistle with them and started
getting properly drunk and before
i know it it is 2am and we are all driving in convoy up this ridiculously
steep hill with the fog rolling in, and then
stop on top of this ridge, you can see the mist circling around for miles
around on each side int he valleys,
we played- we shared the guitar, then cello, me on mbira, the guitarist girl
playing my penny whistle, i would have a million
dripping adjectives for this scene except i was too drunk to remember much,
except that the girl gave me some raw
broccoli to eat and i forgot to take my teeth out and the broccoli got
mangled in the teeth and they just stopped working,
period, until i bent them back into place the next morning.

yesterday i found myself counting the days till i get home, scarborough, i
think i am kind of ready, i want to be somewhere on the cliffs with the
kinder, i
want to see how much alfie, lee's baby, has grown, i want to shout at le
chat for becoming a piglet, i want to get large haddock and chips with
scraps on the foreshore, i want to munch on rasberrys in sams garden...
but oh it is 830PDT, me and jono need to eat pasta in the communal kitchen
and not leave a trace of our whereabouts.

ok, email me some home
love ben




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