:: Music As Social Agitation Records::

:: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 ::

so we are on a brief one hour layover in detroit. tim is playing the station video games for the first, but promised not to be the last, time. damn, the greyhound routes and schedules are fucked up in michigan, taking all these sideways and heading hours in the opposite direction of the designated end point. and so begins our 30 day bussage. the first route slapped both me and tim hard in the face. it began with lab's dropping us off at the milwaukee station to frantically board a bus that was apparently an hour early but leaving right away at 3:45am and ended at 8pm the next evening. 16 hours. ouch. we had a four hour layover in chicago station, which was actually really nice. my whole last 24 hours though have been plagued with trying to find internet access in order to turn in my weekly article, finalize some more show details and work on the housing thing for NYC (still homeless, still worried). after a half hour of searching, i found a coffeeshop 8 city block away. big blocks. the second i stepped out of the station it started pouring down rain, the way it had when we first got off the freeway. the storm put most NW heavy rains to shame. within a few minutes i was walking barefoot through the oily lakes (wet flip-flops don't work at all) and shawled by a button up shirt i had with me. i got to W MADISON street and took a right towards the heart of chicago's financial district. it was 7:45 am and the streets were filled with suited and dressed high-rise, 200 grand earning office people, 98% of them wielding umbrellas. then there was me, trekking rapidly through them in shorts and a mesh hat, barefoot and soaked. the weather and the buildings and the thunder were surreal enough, and i felt like i was in a video. actually, the first floors of these buildings, with their 18 elevators and huge security desk and hundreds of people filling in felt like a modern version of "the apartment" with jack lemmon and, fuck i forgot, but she was hot as hell in the movie... anyways, something about the dark radiance in each. plus, there is nothing like a rain-soaked daylight urban scene in an old black and white film. or something. anyways, i walked ten blocks into this chaos before i figured out i had gone in the wrong direction. 20 minutes later i was at westgate coffee, trying to dry off and drinking the shittiest (burnt) drip i have had in some time. btw, people don't know what you mean when you say DRIP coffee out here. the show last night was fun. john set it up at this bar called "white's bar" and we played with him and his bandmate (your best friend), tim a____ and another band whom i will remember later. the place was tiny, but real cozy and though the street out side of it was a wide, three laner, it felt like one of this corner, neighborhood bars. the night ended unlike the way it progressed, but more in line with the feel of the bar, with a flogging molly cover and then more flogging molly on the juke... oh yeah, in case you didn't know, tim's name on tour is sanchez (a mispronunciation in winona). our show in milwaukee, i mean menomenee falls, fell through. after two weeks of trying to get a hold of spencer to get details for the show that "was still on," ewe wound up at a gas station in his neighborhood getting tips from a girl he went to high school with. we looked up his name in the phone book, called the number. his mom said he moved out and we got his cell number. called it several times in the next hour and some before leaving a message (didn't want to leave one off the bat because then he would know it was us). i decided we should go to a busier part of town, a hip part of milwaukee and try to find any shows and possibly jump on a bill. about two blocks into a younger, hipper strip we passed a bar and saw a few bands loading in. after ten minutes, in which i looked in the weekly to see what was happening on monday night (an open mic was our only other option). i went in to ask the booker, which happened to be a band-dude, to see if we could get on the bill. i told him there was three of us and that we didn't need much time, but that we would love to play since our show fell through. 10 minutes later, after he had asked the other bands, we were on the bill. we played with pattern is movement, the silence (apparently with members of camden who keep popping into my life) and new blind nationals. it was a fun show and all the bands were super nice. we each played 3 songs. i went first (with bow, blue-purple failure and eulogy) then tim and labrynt. be the end of the night i was pretty tired, though all the bands were real good.... the night before that we were in madison at the glass nickel pizzeria playing with freddy faggot and screaming cyn cyn and the pons. the bar/show was in the basement. the restaurant above. it was a nice place and the people were really friendly. we got free drinks but no free food. tim did score a pizza order that was messed up though. he keeps scoring these flesh-items that neither me or labrynt can eat. cyn cyn and the pons were fucking awesome. it was dancing, sassy rocking pop music with keyboards. almost like what electro-clash would be if the continent electronic music developed on split in two the smaller chunk developed separate and independently, with different resources and environs. i think the website is cyn-cyn.com ...we will be sure to get you all the websites for the kick ass people and places we met... we are now off to ann arbor to play a show at patrick elkins house. we randomly bumped into him at the greyhound station in kalamazoo yesterday as he was off to his parents and we to saginaw. wish us few trips as gruelign as yesterdays, homes -nto bus stations/rides- to crash at and luck with getting our NYC housing situated. thanks to greg for looking into that for us.... (side note to self, so i can go maybe a day without having my entire hand covered with words and numbers, hawaii = early mag experiences getting past now. library as most yin-yanger of them all. also, "maid to last forever" as description of work of the bhodishatva). oh, and for my own records, last night: bow, blue-purple, leash, journal, sailor, a framing, all is sun. or something... 12pm, Wednesday August 25th, 2004. -mattfu

:: brs 2:15 PM [+] ::
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