Up to 100 zombies.
One London.
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Monday, October 29, 2007
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Across America - one step at a time
The roadtrip started in San Francisco. On foot. Now I know this is a strange way to start a roadtrip but let me explain.
It was after Burning Man 2006. I'd spent a week in the middle of the Nevada desert, running around in little more than pants and body paint and being wowed by the sheer volume of collective creativity amassed in this elwire adorned, makeshift metropolis. I'd then floated down the river Truckee in rafts filled with beer and new companions and wound up in San Francisco with a tall, mysterious character known as the Indestructible Belgian.
To date the only words we'd spoken to eachother had gone something like this.
Me: I hear you don't know what you're doing after Burning Man.
Indestructible: No.
Me: Would you like to come on a roadtrip across America with me.
Indestructible (3 second pause followed by a big grin): Yes!
Several days later all our friends had flown out for London and we were left alone to begin the great roadtrip. Another conversation was in order.
Me: So, er, you do drive don't you?
Indestructible: No. (Pause) Where's the car?
Me: Um, we don't have one.
Seeing as we were in San Francisco, it seemed like a good place to start. We spent about a week wandering around Haight Street, Mission, Chinatown, through Golden Gate park and across the famous bridge. Our options and our legs exhausted, we trawled Craigslist for a rideshare out of town and got one that afternoon heading for Humbolt County and the famous Redwood National Park.
We soon found ourselves kicking back on tie-dyed cushions in the back of a beat-up blue Nissan minivan. I'm pretty sure there were rainbows on the windows and there was certainly the faint whiff of incense nestled in among the pillows and quilts. The van was dropping a couple of people off at an Earthdance festival and then continuing on to Arcata where our driver was meeting up with some friends for a contact improvisation jam and we were invited to tag along. I did some drumming, afterwards we sunk into someone's hottub and were eventually offered beds for the night in someone's art gallery. It was all very hippier-than-thou.
The next day we hitched up to the national park, ditched the bulk of our stuff at a hostel, repacked our backpacks and set out for a couple of days hiking among the giant pillar-like tree trunks with the sounds of the sea and seals baying in the background.
On returning to the hostel we got drunk with a Scottish guy called Ross and he offered us a ride back to San Fran. From there we decided we could hire a car one-way and head out for the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.
One of two things happens to you when you hit Las Vegas. You either get into scrounge mode and try to bluff your way through as much free food, booze and good times as you possibly can. Or, bedazzled by the glitz, you actually start to think you are rich. Despite not having a job or even a realisable asset between us, we duly started splashing cash (or should I say credit) all over the shop. After a couple of days we had to get out and, depositing our 'economical' San Francisco hire car with the local depot, we drove out of town in big shiny silver gas-guzzling Jeep.
We were headed for Salt Lake City, where we'd been invited to stay with a local fire fighter who we'd handed a beer to when he rocked up to our Grand Canyon campsite on his motorbike. We didn't get much past Vegas when we were drawn to the Valley of Fire State Park. Red rock formations loomed out at us in the semi-darkness, we drank margaritas at our campsite and awoke the next morning to stare up at what looked like a parliament of laughing elders immortalised in yellow-orange stone.
Salt Lake was surreal in many ways. Buying alcohol at the state-run stores with no obvious signage and a ban on advertising felt like entering some sort of communist rations store. We found ourselves variously at a Goth pub and a specialty beer bar, at the site of the Sundance film festival and the 2002 Winter Olympics, and driving across the desolate landscape of the salt lake itself.
After Salt Lake we drove through Arches National Park and Moab to cross the border into Colorado and found ourselves in Durango. Sanity returned. The locals we found at the bar were friendly, young and fun. Everyone was into skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking and...drinking.
We took the low road south of the Rockies to Great Sand Dunes National Park, with its surreal mini-mountain sand dunes and reputedly high levels of UFO activity. We explored the dunes at midnight, by moonlight, feeling as if we'd been beamed to an alternate universe, or at the very least another planet. From here it was a short and beautiful drive up through the mountains to Denver where we ditched the car and decided to continue by train direct to New York.
Theoretically this would be a three-day trip, with two overnights on the train, but Amtrak works in mysterious ways. The lines it uses give prioritise freight over passenger trains and by the time we reached Chicago we'd been delayed by over six hours and had missed our connecting train. Amid much confusion, long waits for further instructions and being herded like cattle from one waiting room to another processing room and out to a reception desk we were finally handed $60 and a room voucher for the night. Score! Not only did we get a shower and a proper bed, we had drinking money and a full day in Chicago before the next train the following evening. We quickly buddied up with a Swiss guy called Raphael who was to stick with us, drink for drink, all the way to New York.
See more photos from the great US roadtrip.
It was after Burning Man 2006. I'd spent a week in the middle of the Nevada desert, running around in little more than pants and body paint and being wowed by the sheer volume of collective creativity amassed in this elwire adorned, makeshift metropolis. I'd then floated down the river Truckee in rafts filled with beer and new companions and wound up in San Francisco with a tall, mysterious character known as the Indestructible Belgian.
To date the only words we'd spoken to eachother had gone something like this.
Me: I hear you don't know what you're doing after Burning Man.
Indestructible: No.
Me: Would you like to come on a roadtrip across America with me.
Indestructible (3 second pause followed by a big grin): Yes!
Several days later all our friends had flown out for London and we were left alone to begin the great roadtrip. Another conversation was in order.
Me: So, er, you do drive don't you?
Indestructible: No. (Pause) Where's the car?
Me: Um, we don't have one.
Seeing as we were in San Francisco, it seemed like a good place to start. We spent about a week wandering around Haight Street, Mission, Chinatown, through Golden Gate park and across the famous bridge. Our options and our legs exhausted, we trawled Craigslist for a rideshare out of town and got one that afternoon heading for Humbolt County and the famous Redwood National Park.
We soon found ourselves kicking back on tie-dyed cushions in the back of a beat-up blue Nissan minivan. I'm pretty sure there were rainbows on the windows and there was certainly the faint whiff of incense nestled in among the pillows and quilts. The van was dropping a couple of people off at an Earthdance festival and then continuing on to Arcata where our driver was meeting up with some friends for a contact improvisation jam and we were invited to tag along. I did some drumming, afterwards we sunk into someone's hottub and were eventually offered beds for the night in someone's art gallery. It was all very hippier-than-thou.
The next day we hitched up to the national park, ditched the bulk of our stuff at a hostel, repacked our backpacks and set out for a couple of days hiking among the giant pillar-like tree trunks with the sounds of the sea and seals baying in the background.
On returning to the hostel we got drunk with a Scottish guy called Ross and he offered us a ride back to San Fran. From there we decided we could hire a car one-way and head out for the Grand Canyon and Las Vegas.
One of two things happens to you when you hit Las Vegas. You either get into scrounge mode and try to bluff your way through as much free food, booze and good times as you possibly can. Or, bedazzled by the glitz, you actually start to think you are rich. Despite not having a job or even a realisable asset between us, we duly started splashing cash (or should I say credit) all over the shop. After a couple of days we had to get out and, depositing our 'economical' San Francisco hire car with the local depot, we drove out of town in big shiny silver gas-guzzling Jeep.
We were headed for Salt Lake City, where we'd been invited to stay with a local fire fighter who we'd handed a beer to when he rocked up to our Grand Canyon campsite on his motorbike. We didn't get much past Vegas when we were drawn to the Valley of Fire State Park. Red rock formations loomed out at us in the semi-darkness, we drank margaritas at our campsite and awoke the next morning to stare up at what looked like a parliament of laughing elders immortalised in yellow-orange stone.
Salt Lake was surreal in many ways. Buying alcohol at the state-run stores with no obvious signage and a ban on advertising felt like entering some sort of communist rations store. We found ourselves variously at a Goth pub and a specialty beer bar, at the site of the Sundance film festival and the 2002 Winter Olympics, and driving across the desolate landscape of the salt lake itself.
After Salt Lake we drove through Arches National Park and Moab to cross the border into Colorado and found ourselves in Durango. Sanity returned. The locals we found at the bar were friendly, young and fun. Everyone was into skiing, snowboarding, rock climbing, mountain biking and...drinking.
We took the low road south of the Rockies to Great Sand Dunes National Park, with its surreal mini-mountain sand dunes and reputedly high levels of UFO activity. We explored the dunes at midnight, by moonlight, feeling as if we'd been beamed to an alternate universe, or at the very least another planet. From here it was a short and beautiful drive up through the mountains to Denver where we ditched the car and decided to continue by train direct to New York.
Theoretically this would be a three-day trip, with two overnights on the train, but Amtrak works in mysterious ways. The lines it uses give prioritise freight over passenger trains and by the time we reached Chicago we'd been delayed by over six hours and had missed our connecting train. Amid much confusion, long waits for further instructions and being herded like cattle from one waiting room to another processing room and out to a reception desk we were finally handed $60 and a room voucher for the night. Score! Not only did we get a shower and a proper bed, we had drinking money and a full day in Chicago before the next train the following evening. We quickly buddied up with a Swiss guy called Raphael who was to stick with us, drink for drink, all the way to New York.
See more photos from the great US roadtrip.
Dust
Waking, barely conscious, you are baking. Your throat is caked, dry. Your eyes clammed up, your nostrils stiff with dehydrated snot, dust, muck. The sun throbs onto the tent, pulsating in time with the blood in your head - water! You fumble for the bottle, fingers feeling feeble like swollen toes, unable to get a grip on the rimmed lid. Fuck. You slop the bottle to your mouth, water splashing down your chin, washing over dried slobber. You drink.
The suffocating heat eventually drives you out, blinking madly, into the desert sun. It attacks: above, behind, beamed up from the white dust below, shot from the side mirror of a parked car, refracting into thousands of tiny needles doing unwanted acupuncture on your eyes. Wind rips at your hair and miniscule dust bullets batter your skin.
You are part of the colour, character, artistic expression and raw possibility that describes itself as Burning Man. Its community, creativity and collective conscience. The attempt to build something from nothing, then reduce it to nothing again.
In as much as the sense of these places and people can be captured, this is a fleeting glimpse of them - like dust before a lense - in the very instant before they blow away.
Arrival is departure.
The suffocating heat eventually drives you out, blinking madly, into the desert sun. It attacks: above, behind, beamed up from the white dust below, shot from the side mirror of a parked car, refracting into thousands of tiny needles doing unwanted acupuncture on your eyes. Wind rips at your hair and miniscule dust bullets batter your skin.
You are part of the colour, character, artistic expression and raw possibility that describes itself as Burning Man. Its community, creativity and collective conscience. The attempt to build something from nothing, then reduce it to nothing again.
In as much as the sense of these places and people can be captured, this is a fleeting glimpse of them - like dust before a lense - in the very instant before they blow away.
Arrival is departure.
Wednesday, October 03, 2007
Travelling Zoo
Driving. To Vienna. For a weekend. Mad. But the chance to take a tour bus complete with band, performance artist and hula hoopist across four countries and back in three days was just too random to pass up. The gig was with Klub Kohelet - an all-girl outfit that runs club nights in Vienna. London's Guerilla Zoo had been invited and they needed an extra driver. I wasn't doing anything that weekend and I'd never been to Vienna.
Everything was condensed that weekend. I'd started out on a roadtrip with seven strangers all trying to navigate around eachother and ended up with a bus-load of people that felt more like family. The gig seemed both compressed and extended at the same time. Sleep deprivation was starting to set in. We'd driven 18 hours to get there, gone out for food and spent an afternoon wandering around the city. Our hosts had set up beds for all of us but I'd barely had the chance to use mine until I fell into it at 5am, drunk and still buzzing with borrowed energy.
Arktorus Rann punctuated the night for me. In person they looked too clean-cut to produce their complex rock sound but on stage they transformed into a writhing, gnashing animal. Steranko followed with their trademark high-energy punk rock and the crowd went wild enough to knock the live visual artist Vort's work flying. He was jamming with paint to VJ Azz and the bands and somewhere inbetween were hula hoops, pain-fuelled performance art, poetry and DJs from the UK and local scene - it was all becoming a blur of colour, light, sound and stimulation.
The zoo gates were open and Vienna was swinging with the Guerrillas.
(Big thanks to Klub Kohelet for coffee, beers, beds, meals and mutual love.)
For more information on Guerrilla Zoo antics see www.guerrillazoo.com
Everything was condensed that weekend. I'd started out on a roadtrip with seven strangers all trying to navigate around eachother and ended up with a bus-load of people that felt more like family. The gig seemed both compressed and extended at the same time. Sleep deprivation was starting to set in. We'd driven 18 hours to get there, gone out for food and spent an afternoon wandering around the city. Our hosts had set up beds for all of us but I'd barely had the chance to use mine until I fell into it at 5am, drunk and still buzzing with borrowed energy.
Arktorus Rann punctuated the night for me. In person they looked too clean-cut to produce their complex rock sound but on stage they transformed into a writhing, gnashing animal. Steranko followed with their trademark high-energy punk rock and the crowd went wild enough to knock the live visual artist Vort's work flying. He was jamming with paint to VJ Azz and the bands and somewhere inbetween were hula hoops, pain-fuelled performance art, poetry and DJs from the UK and local scene - it was all becoming a blur of colour, light, sound and stimulation.
The zoo gates were open and Vienna was swinging with the Guerrillas.
(Big thanks to Klub Kohelet for coffee, beers, beds, meals and mutual love.)
For more information on Guerrilla Zoo antics see www.guerrillazoo.com
London zoo life
Tourists in London last month may have thought the locals more than a tad strange. When the tide was low, a clandestine group of costumed people unloaded bar stuff, a sound system and lighting from a van disguised as a commercial vehicle and set up a party on the exposed Thames shoreline. Sand was sculpted into a VW beatle and octopus, dance music pumped out across the river and musicians played an unusual set that involved singing through a megaphone. Passers by at Gabriel's Wharf gazed down on the scene as if watching the antics of exotic animals in a zoo enclosure. Those who did venture down to the party were taken aback when they offered to pay for drinks at the bar, only to be told it was completely free. A tall blue neon man seemed to raise his arms in celebration. Of course, I'm sure it was nothing to do with a desert celebration with a similar centrepiece, no commerce and extravagant art culminating in its own final night on the other side of the world.The river people
Two weeks ago, South Bank was deserted. The only people there were the ones who had little choice - the beggars who huddled in sleeping bags under Southwark Bridge, or who sat with plaintive signs scratched on cardboard requesting food or change. There were a few runners, pounding the pavements after work and a handful of businessmen on their way to or from some appointment or other.
Fast-forward a few weeks and the scene is nothing like the riverside I had come to know through the winter months. the sun is glinting off lamp posts and windows, putting smiles on the faces of tourists and locals, making the river glisten as it races between the bridge supports of the thames. The sunshine transforms London and Londoners. The pubs overflow, punters spilling into the streets. Overcoats are traded for t-shirts, sleveless tops and short skirts. Flip-flops are dug out from the back of the closet. Ice cream vans replace the chestnut stands. Bikes, skateboards and strollers abound. Even the colours change. The black and grey winter uniforms are replaced with bright greens, oranges, blues, reds and pinks. The ferries are suddenly packed with tourists and performers line the riverside walkways.
Winter: exit stage right.
Written April 2006
Fast-forward a few weeks and the scene is nothing like the riverside I had come to know through the winter months. the sun is glinting off lamp posts and windows, putting smiles on the faces of tourists and locals, making the river glisten as it races between the bridge supports of the thames. The sunshine transforms London and Londoners. The pubs overflow, punters spilling into the streets. Overcoats are traded for t-shirts, sleveless tops and short skirts. Flip-flops are dug out from the back of the closet. Ice cream vans replace the chestnut stands. Bikes, skateboards and strollers abound. Even the colours change. The black and grey winter uniforms are replaced with bright greens, oranges, blues, reds and pinks. The ferries are suddenly packed with tourists and performers line the riverside walkways.
Winter: exit stage right.
Written April 2006
Exhibition in Paris
Paris is many things to me. On my first visit I hated it. On my second visit I discovered art outside the Louvre. This exhibition at the Pantheon particularly grabbed me. Other favourite places include the Pompidou, the Rodin sculpture garden and the Latin quarter.See more arty pics around Europe.
Pardon my French
It is quiet here. Somehow normal.
After the pace of the last two weeks in London - finishing up at work, downloading two years' worth of knowledge onto to new staff members, a hurried weekend with grandparents and a flurry of goodbyes - it's a gentle release to sit by the river Soane, attempt to order lunch in French and be led through the corridors of a new language at a relaxed stroll. As I approach, some doors open. Others remain shut. But I'm confident that, in time, I'll explore the rooms, peer into corners, identify the creaks of each floorboard, follow the patterns on the ceilings and know the view from each window. There's a mixture of impatience and pleasure in this. I am breathing a new air that both awakens and calms me. It seeps into my pores and sucks into my lungs, it filters my brain of the smog and silt, feeding its cells with the finer stuff.
Physically, I'm at home with my backside pressing into the concrete step of the narrow fourth-floor balcony. One foot rests on a low wrought-iron swirl, the other becomes a steady table leg, my thigh a benchtop on which this notebook rests, my pen connected as if through arm direct to mind. And, finally, I am able to write.
Below me: the slow click of high heels and trudge of larger boots as a couple return from dinner out. The whirr-clatter, whirr-clatter of a cyclist entering the lane, the irregular shaa-voom of passing cars and low growl of the odd motorbike. Above and before me: the white peaked frames of eleven French doors and the silhoutted shapes of a family of chimney stacks, breaking the skyline at uneven heights. The sky is in parts clear, in others daubed with airy cloud. Here and there, a veiled star can be seen.
The pose numbs my buttocks and I retire, content, to bed.
Written August 2006
After the pace of the last two weeks in London - finishing up at work, downloading two years' worth of knowledge onto to new staff members, a hurried weekend with grandparents and a flurry of goodbyes - it's a gentle release to sit by the river Soane, attempt to order lunch in French and be led through the corridors of a new language at a relaxed stroll. As I approach, some doors open. Others remain shut. But I'm confident that, in time, I'll explore the rooms, peer into corners, identify the creaks of each floorboard, follow the patterns on the ceilings and know the view from each window. There's a mixture of impatience and pleasure in this. I am breathing a new air that both awakens and calms me. It seeps into my pores and sucks into my lungs, it filters my brain of the smog and silt, feeding its cells with the finer stuff.
Physically, I'm at home with my backside pressing into the concrete step of the narrow fourth-floor balcony. One foot rests on a low wrought-iron swirl, the other becomes a steady table leg, my thigh a benchtop on which this notebook rests, my pen connected as if through arm direct to mind. And, finally, I am able to write.
Below me: the slow click of high heels and trudge of larger boots as a couple return from dinner out. The whirr-clatter, whirr-clatter of a cyclist entering the lane, the irregular shaa-voom of passing cars and low growl of the odd motorbike. Above and before me: the white peaked frames of eleven French doors and the silhoutted shapes of a family of chimney stacks, breaking the skyline at uneven heights. The sky is in parts clear, in others daubed with airy cloud. Here and there, a veiled star can be seen.
The pose numbs my buttocks and I retire, content, to bed.
Written August 2006
Roadtripping revived
My original roadtripping.org website housed tales and pictures from travels in Papua New Guinea, East Timor, Singapore, Denmark and Sweden. I'm going to re-post some of these under 'original roadtripping blog' and use this space for writing, observations and trips now that I'm based out of London. Expect Spanish adventures, London beach parties, Austrian jaunts, Scottish stories and more.
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