There are certain markers in the city that show the progress of time throughout the year. The change in temperature and the length of days are obvious ones. A more subtle one is the nationality and type of tourist. The low season extends from the second week of January to the third week of January. After that, the influx of visitors begins anew, gradually picking up steam. First come the perpetually vacationing French, then the Italians. Soon they are followed by British who arrive to turn a glowing pink in the unfamiliar sun and get drunk by 5. Summer brings crowds of Americans.
This year, with work, Les Fat Jones and 2 Skinnee J's, I was too busy to really pay attention, and was caught by surprise when the streets were suddenly hot and crowded. As I cycle to work, I now need to bring a change of shirt. By the time I reach my destination, the one I wear on my bike looks like I fell into a swimming pool. (Too sexy? Too sexy!)
And this weekend brings a particular brand of tourist: the hipster festival-goer.
Yellow wristbands abound as people from around the continent flock to Barcelona to see Primavera Sound, a Pitchfork and Vice approved musical extravaganza.
Meanwhile, the country continues to fall apart. Sales are down, unemployment is up and the banks are in serious trouble, as is the currency they stock. Said visitors were greeted at the airport today by a literal mess.
The cleaning staff is on strike, not only refusing to clean, but actively dumping trash throughout the terminals.
Black Lips
At least there is some awesome fiddling going on as the place burns.
I spent the weekend in a town with no cell phone coverage or internet. (Apparently, those places still exist!) Fortunately, it did have television, so I didn't miss out on a tradition I've established in recent years: watching the Eurovision Song Contest finals.
Every year, European countries like Azerbaijan and Israel send the best pop star they can muster to lip synch their way to international fame and fortune. The contest's most famous winners, Abba, and the most awesome winners, Lordy, are not representative of the kind of songs featured. Generally,
it is the music you would expect to hear in a Croatian night club. The spectacle looks like the brainchild of some beauty pageant organizer who spent week doing a mountain of cocaine while watching Xanadu on repeat.
This year did not disappoint. Although a little heavy on the ballads at first, it got going with some truly wretched dance music and ice-capades caliber choreography.
But right near the end, after the singing Russian grannies and the contorting Swede (she won), I was introduced to my nemesis: Jedward. Irish twins who have made a living (make that a killing) singing on various European television competitions, they came out JACKING OUR STYLE.
Who the hell do these snot-nosed little upstarts think they are? You do not step to 2 Skinnee J's like that and get away with it. It is not enough that these rip off artists finished 19th out of 24. For daring to challenge the J's, they must pay the ultimate price. Spread the word. If those punks ever cross 2 Skinnee J's path, they are going down. It's on!
I'm very excited about this. All hip hop bands need some rivals, and I think some post adolescent boy band is probably our speed.
Another post about the tour? You did one yesterday! - you
Well, if this tour proved anything, it's that flogging that horse sometimes beats some life back into the old beast, so milk it, baby. In yesterday's post, I wrote about what happened on the tour without any real editorializing, and what is this world without me getting to editorialize? (A lot better off, probably.)
The main take-away lesson from this whole thing is that friends rock. I know you don't come here for Hallmark platitudes, but the enduring power of friendship merits some unironic hugs. The J's all walked away from the smoking wreckage of a band a decade ago with our deep feelings for each other intact. It's allowed us to come together again to do this with genuine excitement about spending time cramped in an RV traveling up I95. So many reunions seem to be driven by money or the urge to relive past glories (more on that in a moment). Those motivations were certainly present in our decision, but the just chance to get to hang out together was truly the primary benefit. These are old friendships that have weathered fights and firings. I don't take that survival rate lightly.
It is impossible to know the dynamics at play in a group of people you have never been part of, nor understand the personal drive of artists you've never even met. Nevertheless, when people who have been publicly feuding for years suddenly have a change of heart at the first opportunity to pack a stadium, one suspects that they may not be so overjoyed at the sight of each other, but rather are dependent on one another for their own needs. The cliche of performers past their prime needing validation from an adoring public is no less true for being one. In my case, nostalgia was in fact a slight deterrent from doing it once more. I mean, we haven't written a song together in 10 years! I feared that revisiting Sing Earthboy Sing yet again might be wearing out our welcome. Thanks to everyone who came for proving me so so wrong. It is gratifying to be confronted with undeniable evidence that an old creation still resonates with so many people.
There is a general tendency to see the past with rose colored glasses, but man, did we have fun in our twenties! We got to experience a life that is uncommon and exciting. There is a danger in this. At some point you have to make the conscious decision to grow up, and when your youth is that appealing, it's that much more difficult to let it go. Now, I really enjoy my life, and I've had lots of fun in my thirties too, but the process has involved making personal choices to walk away from some tantalizing opportunities that I ultimately understood were not right in the long run. (Just the fact the I now take "the long run" into consideration shows an inevitable progress towards maturity. I'll make it there one day!)
There, I'm done. My next post will (probably) be about something else. In true Catalan form I'm taking advantage of the long weekend to escape the city (in my case, for the Spanish equivalent of Kansas) so next week will hopefully bring pictures of funny signs, terrible haircuts, or whatever other reason you might check this place for.
How much rock and roll is too much rock and roll? One of life's great questions which will not be answered here, because all I can say for sure is not this much. Nope, this much rock and roll is just fine. The month of May was so rocktacular that someone should write a song about it.
First up, Les Fat Jones.
In the summer of 2004, brother Eli and I spent countless nights (probably nine or ten, which I am apparently unable to count to) shaking our tail-feathers to indie hits at Razzmatazz, a giant factory turned club in Barcelona. It was the era of Bloc Party and the Rapture, and dancing til dawn was always in the cards. Other than a few concerts recently, I hadn't been to the place in years, but the memory of the summer of clubbing kept the Razz flame burning, albeit softly, in my heart. It was therefore something of a personal victory that Les Fat Jones got to play a show there on Saturday 5th May. We had a new banner! Victor jumped! People came and were rocked. Our album is still available for free download, so grab a copy and learn the words for our next show. June holds our first out of town gig, so yay.
Then...
On Tuesday 8th May I embarked on the 2 Skinnee J's Pre-Apocolypse Now and Forever Tour. (We are absolutely nothing at all if not hyperbolic.)
The days leading up to my departure were hectic. Working in education (I use both the words "working" and "education" lightly) gives me lots of vacation time. However, it's at specific points during the year, and one month before the end of term is not one of those points. Nevertheless, my boss had reluctantly acquiesced to my pleas for time off and I wanted to leave everything in order during my absence. A mere ten minutes before I was due to leave, a teacher called to quit, effective immediately. (The level of professionalism in the foreign language teaching world matches that of the New York Jets, and the results are often the same too.) I scrambled to find a bunch of contacts so that my boss could deal with it and hopped in a taxi. I had a plane to catch. (See above re: professionalism)
Two flights, a German layover and a Sherlock Holmes movie later (Robert Downy Jr. should have an award named after him for most charismatic actor in a shitty movie. see also: Iron Man 2), I touched down in Miami the next day just as the rest of 2SJ were arriving from New York.
Our last reunion was in 2010 and, as fun as it was, I pretty much figured it would be the final one. The format, semi-acoustic with a Q&A session, was one step removed from dinner theater, and it appeared we had effectively ridden our horses off into the sunset.
It is no doubt a sign of our advancing years that it took a cruise to pull us out of retirement. (Also, retirement from music means getting a job...) 311 invited us to play their second Caribbean boat bash, and in a move that is probably surprising to nobody, we accepted. ("Music? Sea and sun? Buffet? Uh, no thanks. I'm too tied to my nine-to-five." - no musician ever.)
Since playing together involved rehearsing for the first time in a couple of years, flying me in from Europe, and getting everybody to Florida and back, it was decided that we would add some dates up the east coast. And thus, a tour was born: 4 days on a cruise with 3 shows, and six more from NC to NYC.
On the day of our arrival in Miami, we rehearsed as a full unit for the first and only time. Fortunately, I have muscle memory for those songs and after a couple of takes, it was like riding a slightly wobbly bike.
On the 10th, along with a couple thousand of 311's most devoted fans, we boarded the ship and set sail (or rather set giant fucking smoke stack) for the Bahamas. I'd never been on a cruise before. It's like a giant floating resort, half hotel, half mall, that does it's best never to remind you that you are at sea.
As we pulled away from the mainland, people gathered on the upper deck for the first 311 concert. Unfortunately, so did angry clouds that began chucking lightning down as the band took the stage and the show was topped after 30 minutes because:
The next morning we got to the island, which was nothing more than a strip of beach and a restaurant. The ship sat offshore, launching little ferries of passengers to the beach. It was all very sci-fi, if science fiction involved reggae, weed and a lot of tattoos.
The Imperial Starship floated in orbit near the tiny sand planet...
Over the next three days, between grazing like sheep at the various all-you-can-eat restaurants (I typically had four meals: breakfast, lunch, pastrami and dinner) we played three shows. The outfits, designed and made by Joy Lewis, were awesome and not as hot as they look. They did shrink over the course of the tour, which is sad. I had been planning on keeping the black one and starting my career as a superhero, but Uncomfortable Sausage Man doesn't seem particularly imposing.
Shut up, crime!
Video Keytard B.A. prepared video projections for the whole set which were so cool, they would have been distracting if they were not behind me.
The whole experience on the boat was an opportunity to reconnect not only with each other, but also with some bands we had played with in the past. This culminated in a collective tribute to MCA during our final show. Although the Beastie Boys didn't invent rap, they certainly introduced it to a lot of white people, and it's probably a safe bet that this cruise wouldn't have existed without him, so he really deserved much more than our butchering of a classic.
We arrived back in Miami on Monday morning, and got on a plane to fly to Raleigh NC. The flight was uneventful except for the part where we were STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. At one point, thousands of feet up in the air, there was a flash, a loud bang, and the plane banked to the left and started descending rapidly, before recovering. I don't know how long the whole episode lasted, but my thought process was: underwear bomber? malfunction? lightning? everything seems to be ok. i guess we'll live. As we exited the plane, we overheard the crew talking, confirming that we were STRUCK BY LIGHTNING, something that had never happened to them before.
The shows up the coast were all great. The rooms were packed, the crowds were psyched and our spirits never lagged.
The opening bands were awesome. The first, Sound of Urchin, an old school new york band, augmented their lineup with a bunch of teenage guitarists from The House of Rock, whose energy and exuberance won the crowd over every night.
The second was Royal Teeth from New Orleans, a melodic band where everybody gets a drum. They played every show with talent and enthusiasm. I don't doubt that big things lie in their future. Plus the singer looks like Joel!
The backstage at the Norva Theater remains nicer than your house. (I know I've never seen your house, but does it have a piano, leather furniture, a pool table, ping pong and a jacuzzi? It does? I'll be right over.) The 9:30 club never disappoints. We saw our old friends the Almighty Senators in Baltimore. All great things. The super talented Ashly Covington, whose hands have probably sold you something at some point, took tons of pictures which you can see here.
The only sad moment was pulling into New York knowing I had only 24 hours before getting on a plane back to Barcelona. Which I did. And took a cab straight back to work. Still, endorphins trump jet-lag, and I'm going to be high off this for a while.
"Where the hell have you been?" - you.
Actually, if you read my blog, you probably know where I was. You may have even been there with me: Tourcation 2012! It was an awesome experience that I will discuss in detail. Lots of stories and photos coming soon. But while I prepare that, let's talk about where you've been. From the newspaper reports, the answer seems to be "teetering on the brink." My trip stateside included daily readings of the eurozone crisis. I was afraid I would come back to a country with no money. I don't mean a country where nobody has any money. That's already the case. I mean a country literally without a currency. Now, I'm no economist so I won't attempt a lengthy explanation of European economic policy, the imminent exit of Greece from the common currency, the gross mismanagement of the Spanish national bank. Instead, I will use these pictures from across my street as a concise illustration of the Spanish economy:
I look forward to a peanut-based economy. I only hope nobody at Goldman Sachs is a squirrel.
Do you have turnstiles where you live? I have lived in Winnipeg, Ottawa, Paris, Montreal, New York and Barcelona, and they're in all of those cities, so I figured they were pretty ubiquitous, but perhaps, like my students who assume that every country shares an undying love for a million different types of pork products, I have misoverestimated their popularity. I say this because I go to the airport twice a week for work and every time I see somebody standing baffled in front of the turnstiles that lead to the train. These are not the confusing metro turnstiles with the ticket slot on the left. (Yay for me! I am the 15%) Just the regular, stick your ticket in and go through kind.
I witness all sorts or travel-related stupidity at the airport. Like the inability to transfer from the train to the shuttle bus. (One train, one shuttle bus. Even your mathematically challenged writer figured that one out the first time.) I think that when we travel, we often forget to pack a few of our IQ points. They're right there, next to your socks. Grab 'em.
Today at the airport, I got to see a whole different kind if stupidity: hippie stupidity. It's perhaps the least surprising kind, but one of the most entertaining/annoying brands there is! Riding in front of me on the shuttle, one free spirit, her hair wrapped in an "ethnic" cloth, turned to the black woman next to her and struck up a conversation, asking where she was from.
"Cameroon," the woman replied. At the girl's blank look she offered, "Africa."
"Oh. I have some friends from Benin."
The two countries are separated only by Nigeria, so that displayed some geographical acumen. But then she continued.
"Do you have a favorite dance?"
The middle-aged, elegantly dressed woman looked up from her cellphone, bemused.
"Dance?"
"Is there one kind of dance you like?"
"Like a tribal dance?"
"Yeah."
"Well," she said patiently. "There are a lot of tribes with different dances."
At this point the we came to a halt, and I got up and ran from the bus to avoid strangling the girl.
As I reflected on my exasperation, I realized that what bothered me most. Hippies disguising their one-worldy ignorance in childlike naivety comes with the territory. But what left me aghast was that the hippie girl was Asian. Then I considered my own prejudice: that a non-white living in Europe would have more cultural sensitivity just because of the color of her skin. Granted, this is based on the assumption of a certain experience living in another culture, but if anyone should be aware that your skin color does not solely determine that experience, it's me. I guesseveryone's a little bit racist.
