the soundtrack to the day you wish you'd had
I am officially knackered. Jetlag done got me bad, mama… or something.
I’ve got a gig tonight (just a restaurant gig with a guitarist, hence it not being on the gig list), so must get ready, find smart restaurant gig clothes etc. as well as sending out CD orders, and dealing with the speeding fine I got before I went away…
but all I want to do is sleep some more.
Now, y’all know that my favourite ever surreal news story was the one about Mark Thatcher being arrested for his part in an attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea, but this comes a very close second – “Man gets breakfast tattoo on head” – it’s a few months old, but I hadn’t seen it til today (thanks Steve!)
genius.
Home now, back in London (well, Hertfordshire, but it’s near a tube station, so it’s London). Flight was fine, watched two more episodes of Doctor Who on the plane, got a lil’ bit of sleep, then arrived at Heathrow to find that Virgin had lost my bass. Again. Remember, it happened in LA in January? Actually, that wasn’t Virgin was it? Oh well, anyway, they lost it, left it behind in NYC. But it’s on the way to me now, according to mylostbag.com.
Time. To. Sleep.
wow, you go away for 7 weeks, come back, and find a new prime minister, a smoking ban, a massive terrorist weirdness thing going on, Wimbledon tennis in full swing… Will i recognise it when I get off the plane? Have all the men grown Amish beards? Have all the laydees grown Amish beards???
I fly to New York tomorrow, and then – hopefully – to London on Tuesday. We’ll see what happens with all the mentalism that’s going on in England at the moment… Does anyone have an email address for the nutters with the non-exploding car bombs? It’d be nice to email them, tell them how much they are potentially disrupting my travel plans, and ask nicely if they wouldn’t mind changing their method of protest… I’m sure they’d listen if they heard my concerns about the airlines reinstating the restrictions on hand-luggage…
Altamont – just the name carries so much resonance. The place where the dreams of flower power and the 60s summer of love, woodstock and hippies all went to shit because The Rolling Stones didn’t realise that – unlike in England where ‘Hell’s Angel’ just meant ‘biker with a beard and a personal hygiene problem’ – American Hell’s Angels were largely racist outlaws, who took great delight in stabbing a black dude to death at the gig.
Anyway, that was a completely different Altamont, given that it was in California, and we’re in Illinois. However, there must be some sort of spiritual link between the two, as the shitty motel we’re in definitely feels like the kind of place where a nasty murder could take place…
Still, cheer yourself up by watching this YouTube vid of me playing at the house concert we did in Dallas – Brian who organised the gig owns a Rick Turner Model 1 bass, which I HAD to play… the improv in question is a variation on the ii-V funk guitar thing that I used for the loop demo vid on YouTube, with a bit of the melody from Chameleon by Herbie Hancock in the middle of it, and lots of gratuitous shredding, but it’s a great sounding bass!
So, after having been given a ‘circuit city’ gift-card with an unspecified amount on it, I decide to act on one of the things I’d been threatening to do since getting to the states on this trip, and buy an iPod.
We drive to the nearest CC, in Canton, and head in. There are no 80gig iPods on display, so I ask the guy who works there, who’s stood nearby. V. friendly, but as it’s only his second day, he goes to ask where they might be found – it’s all fine, everyone has to start their job somewhere, and I’m always happy for new staff to take a while to work out what’s going on.
While he’s gone, we check the amount on the gift car – $70-something bucks (thanks, Nancy!!!!) – and notice on the wall a sign that says iPod buyers get a $30 gift card included – basically $100 off the cost of me buying one, and even cheaper than lovely friend who works for Mac can get it for me for.
New boy comes back, and rings it up on their computer, but the price is more than it was on their website, so he looks it up, and has to call over a friend to help. Friend clearly knows how the system works, but has THE most offhand disinterested manner I’ve encountered in any shop, other than perhaps Guitar Centre… Anyway, he takes off the difference between shop and web pricing, and then says there’s no giftcard. It’s out of date – what the hell’s it doing on the wall then says I, I’m not interested without it. L is by this time laughing, but close to sitting in a corner rocking and sobbing like Romanian orphan… Supervisor is consulted, OK we can have the $30 off, so he takes it off, then charges us for it, so that he can give us the card. I give it back to him as part of the payment, he swipes it, gets confused by it not having anything on it, then says ‘ah, you can’t spend the giftcard on this’… so only the $70 card will work on this payment, which is OK as I want to buy a perspex carry case thingie anyway.
So we get the iPod sorted, I hand him the carry case and the card, he swipes it and before I get the chance to say ‘er, that says $24.99, it’s only $19.99 on the shelf’, he’s rung it up, so we need to go to the front desk for a refund. Into the queue at the front desk, new boy is now dealing with awkward customer number 2 and has a ‘is my whole working life here going to be like this????’ look on his face. He apologises, but none of this is his fault…
disinterested goon eventually rings up the refund, puts it on the card and hands me stuff, no apology, no nothing.
We leave, happy with iPod, dumfounded that the shop is still open…
Circuit City – avoid unless peoples gives you lovely gift cards.
The Simple Way are a community in Philadelphia, modeling what has been termed ‘new monasticism’ – simple living, working with the poor and needy, setting up micro-businesses that recycle, running after school programs etc… Good peoples. One of the people who runs it, Shane Claibourne, has spoken at Greenbelt in the past – a fascinating and inspiring bloke.
anyway, their neighbourhood was destroyed in a massive fire yesterday, and they lost their community centre, homes, cars… a whole load of stuff. Go to their website to read about it, and if you can, to donate to help them and their neighbours rebuild their lives.
the next installment of the tour blog is coming soon, worry not…
OK, I’ll be delving back into all the blog stuffs that I missed out on while the server was down, but for now, here’s what happened on Thursday with my flight to the US. My eventual destination was Ohio, but after looking at all the flight costs etc, flying to NYC and then getting an internal flight worked out cheapest AND gave me a chance to visit the lovely Shark and TH – flight times; leave london at 4pm, arrive NYC at 6.40, at the SharkTank by about 8.30, evening with them, fly to Ohio the next morning.
Plane takes off a little late, no worries says El Capitan, we’ll still be at Newark Airport on time. uneventful flight as far as the NY area (films watched – For Your Consideration which is more Christopher Guest magic, An Inconvenient Truth which should be sent on DVD to every house in the world, utterly vital viewing, And Casino Royale, which has far too much poker playing in it to be truly interesting, but wasn’t a bad way to waste two hours.)
Anyway, in the air over NYC, we get a message from the Captain that we’re going to have to land at JFK instead of newark. That’s not so bad, methinks, JFK is easier to get into the city anyway… but we enter a holding pattern. For hours. Eventually land at JFK, another message from Los Capitinos saying that they aren’t sure if we can get out here, then another saying we can’t and they’ll have to refuel and fly us to Newark.
Eventual arrival time in Newark – 11pm, time arriving at the SharkTank – gone 1am.
Emails have been sent to Virgin to see what they’re going to offer by way of compo. I’m thinking 25,000 airmiles would be sufficient, we’ll see what happens. 12 hours sat in the same seat, no extra meal, only one extra glass of juice or water for all that extra time. Not good service at all…
It’s a universal process – you get onto your chosen mode of public transport (plane, train, and I guess coach…), and until take-off or departure, you sit in your designated seat, waiting and hoping against hope that a better seat is available and that you get there before someone else does. It requires a certain amount of focus and determination to secure the four-in-a-row empty seats on a 747, and in all my years of flying I’ve only managed it once – on the way back from San Francisco, jan 2006.
But that’s not the point of this ‘ere blog post – the point of this, my dear bloglings, is to tell of a bizarre happening. On, in fact, that is still unfolding around me as L and I sit here on the TGV from Lyon to Paris (Lyon because we managed to miss our direct train from Geneva to Paris, and had to re-route – it’s times like this that you thank God for month-long rail passes, fo shiz…)
No, the strangeness unfolding around us began with us following the universal process listed above. We boarded the DOUBLE DECKER TGV (DOUBLE DECKER???? How bad-ass is that! I’m like a 10 year old kid, all excited to be travelling on such fantastic futuristic transport. It couldn’t be better unless the Jetsons were serving drinks!) and took our allocated seats (on the top deck, no less – YAY!!) and the carriage seemed pretty empty. all good. The train pulled away, and no-one else showed up, so L and I moved to the table seats in front of us, to get a lil’ more leg roomage. All good for about 4 or 5 minutes, when four oriental women arrived (I’m trying to work out if they are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or from somewhere else – I’m not having much luck working it out, and it’s not that important, but I do like the be able to furnish you with these details). So these four show up, and start looking curiously at the numbers on both the tables (that’s 8 seats for four people), and point out that these are their seats. No problem, we move back to our seats. And, it seems, just in time, as their arrival then proved to be akin to the appearance of a couple of scout-orcs over the hill in a LOTR battle scene, and over the next 5 minutes EVERY seat in the carriage was filled with oriental peoples from the same party! All of them, hundreds of them, appearing from nowhere. Where the hell were they when the train pulled away from the station? Who gets on a train and doesn’t go and find their seats?? Where does one hide that many tourists on a train? So many questions, with very few plausible answers… Definitely the strangest thing I’ve experienced on a train.
OK, first up, I’m in Geneva, so I have an excuse. However, for those of you in the UK, why the hell weren’t you voting for Tim Vine last night on Comic Relief does Fame Academy?????? How could he be evicted??? It’s a tragedy, fo’ sho’… Equally bizarre was Sundance Head being evicted on American Idol, but that’s another story.
secondly, how old does it make you feel that The Joshua Tree came out 20 years ago this week??
and thirdly, thanks to the lovely Rev. Gareth, I give you the weirdest thing on the entire internet.
