Done

We're in Bologna now, just chillin' with the Agipunk crew. Our last show was Friday in the mountains. More on that and a roundup of the all the shows I haven't written about yet is forthcoming. Whenever I feel like it. I finally dumped the contents of my camera onto the interweb, so there will be pics too. We've spent the last few days doing a lot of nothing: reading, listening to music, eating pasta and ice cream. My bandmates are catching a train to Milano late tomorrow night so they can be at the airport in plenty of time for their flight home on Wednesday morning. Julie joins me here on Thursday, and it looks like our tour will take us to Venice, Berlin, and Prague before coming back to Bologna to pick up luggage and then flying out of Milano on the 7th. No promises either way, but those of you who requested German breakfast spreads are more likely to get the goods than those of you who requested absinthe. But we'll see.

Saddam Hussein is Rock 'n Roll

So there's this Czech band called Malignant Tumour who played the Yellow Dog fest with us. They've been around for a while; I think they used to be kinda grindy but now they're like a metal Motorhead. They're older dudes, and they wear wigs and faux facial hair on stage. Last night we watched a metal show on Czech MTV that they guest hosted, and we were treated to the following video. It is a multimedia tour de force. Check it.

Czeching in, part deux

(A note - there are all sorts of important characters on this godforsaken keyboard that I can't access, so bear that in mind.) Ok, so, Poland. The fest in Gdansk was fun, though we spent the whole weekend surrounded by a coterie of drunken Poles. Before we left for Olsztyn, we took about an hour to walk around the old city. I'm glad we did, because it was fantastic--the coolest looking city we've seen so far. I have pictures that, obviously, I can't share with you right now. Gdansk is on the northern coast of Poland on the Baltic Sea. We didn't get a view of open water, but we did walk along a harbor. Used to be a German city called Danzig, and there's an obviously Germanic slant to the architecture. Walked around a cool church, snapped a pic of the oldest house in Gdansk (1541), got briefly separated from my crew in a crowded area. Good times.

Olsztyn was not the type of place I would have thought we would play in a punk bar called the Molotov Cafe. Like, not just the kind of place where people with leather clothing hang out, but actually run by punks. We played with The Assassinators, a Copenhagen band we had played with the day before (melodic d-beat punk with harmonized female vocals, good stuff), a really good local band called Utopie, and a French ska band who played foreeeeever. The bar is in the old town part of the city which was quaint and scenic. It didn't lend itself to any one or two particular camera shots, so just take my word about quaint and scenic.

The drives from Gdansk to Olsztyn and then from Olsztyn to Berlin provided a much different veiw of the Polish landscape than what we had encountered on our drive into the country. We passed through beautiful rustic countryside, which was complemented by some of the best weather we'd seen to that point. The drive to Berlin was something like 12 hours. We thought we were going to be there really late, but we rolled into the Kopi around 10pm and were told we were the first band to arrive. The Kopi is a huge, long-running Berlin squat named after its place on Kopinicker Strasse. It features five or six stories of living quarters plus two show spaces--one with a big stage and a capacity of multiple hundreds, and a more intimate space called Koma F where we played. The building was recently bought and there has been talk of eviction, so punks all over the continent have been preparing for a battle a la Ungdomshuset in Copenhagen. I did hear though that the residents of the Kopi had been in talks with the new owner and were likely going to avoid confrontation by paying some nominal rent.

Inside, I immediately felt the effects of the mold and mildew that saturate the building, and the back of the stage (where I got to play) was incredibly dank. Can't imagine living there. That being said, the people were great, and our dinner that night and our breakfast the next morning were two of the best meals of tour. As it turned out, neither of the other bands who were scheduled to play showed up. At the request of the booker, since people had showed up and payed to see three bands, we played our set a second time after a 20 minute break. It felt a little silly, but it was fun, and the crowd was even more into it the second time around. We sold more merch at that show than at any other, including the fests. (Which is not to say a lot--we will be bringing many shirts and records back with us.)

We hit a couple of record stores in the eastern part of the city the next day before heading to Potsdam. The public transportation in Berlin operates on the honor system: you're supposed to buy a ticket, but you can get on without one. Forrest was travelling around the city separately with a couple friends and got busted on a bus without a ticket. He got fined a cool 40 euros in an incident he insists on referring to as a "Stasi attack." Potsdam is just outside Berlin, so we had a short drive. We played in a illegal-turned-legal squat called Archiv which has been around since 1994, two years fewer than the Kopi. We played with just one other band, and not many people showed up, but the guy who booked the showed was really great. He told us about the bike tour he had taken last year, which involved cycling around Europe for a few months and then heading down to Africa. He started to do Africa with his cousin, but after his cousin's bike lost a game of chicken with a brakeless truck (cousin had jumped off in time), he decided to go on himself. He spent four months biking down to Gabon by himself. Which is insane. He got malaria four times, once nearly fatally. He talked about having to travel only at night in the hottest parts, and how it would sometimes be too hot to mend a flat because the patch glue wouldn't set. One day he covered only about 10 miles because he had to carry his bike over sand the whole way. Super impressive.

We're about to leave Brno for Ostravice, so I have to leave it at that for now. More later. Hope you're all well.

Czeching in

It is really late here (Kladno, just outside of Prague) and I need to get some sleep, but since I have unlimited computer time at the moment, I wanted to post an update here. Feels like forever since the last one. Hopefully my memory holds up well enough to make this interesting...

Flensberg was a fun show. The Italians keep warning us about how serious Germans are and how we shouldn't risk joking around with them (a la Fawlty Towers, etc.) lest we cause an international incident. But the folks in Flensberg were all laughs and smiles, so it was smooth sailing. Like sailing a Panzer into Poland in early September, for example. In fact, Poland was next on our itinerary. The drive sucked, it was something like 14 hours. The German countryside, like its Swedish counterpart, is uniformly boring as shit.

Though my feelings about Poland changed in the following two days, my initial reaction was that it was one of the dreariest places I've ever seen. It just looks positively beat down. And it seems like they thought that no one would notice if they just painted every twelfth building orange or something. The going is slow in Poland; there are almost no highways. Practically every road is two lanes with paved shoulders that make it wide enough for three cars abreast, and everyone passes in the middle (ie, into opposing traffic). It took a long time from the border to Gdansk; I don't even remember how long at this point. We were playing there the following day, which was day two of a two-day fest, but we were trying to arrive in time the night before to catch a Polish band called Filth of Mankind who we all like. At a certain point we got a text message with an estimated time of when they would play, and there was no way we were going to make it. So there was to be no reward for the long-ass drive. Once we got to Gdansk, it took another hour to find the venue. Thank god for international punk rock time, because we got there right before Filth of Mankind went on. They were good but not great in my opinion.

We played the following day. Attendance was good, and we played ok.

Ugh... the sun is coming up, so I will return to relate the past week - possibly even tomorrow. G'night.

Jealous of those of you who sleep on stationary objects

Bonjour from Flensberg, a scenic little German city near the Danish border. I'm in a reasonably priced internet cafe, so I can let my fingers do the talking for a little while. I either haven't had time to write or haven't been willing to pay exorbitant price to write in about a week. (Internet on the ferry cost €2 for 14 minutes. While expressing nostalgia last night for American Taco Bells' comfort food and comfort prices, Justin speculated that the same food here would cost "six euros and a kick in the dick.")

So let's get caught up through the past week or so. We spent two and a half days in Copenhagen. Day one involved driving 11 hours from Mannheim to play with Framtid. Great show. The next day it poured all day, so we just sat inside watching tv and doing nothing, which was frustrating. We stayed with a dude named Lasse, a super hospitable and, shall we say, resourceful punk (the kind who offers to get you anything you want and you know he can follow through with it). Our show that night was at a proper club with a "garage metal" band and a psychobilly band (the latter was actually really good). We got shit pay that night, but I swear we had a truckload of beverages at our disposal. Even I drank three bottled sodas. It's amusing to play at clubs with backstage/dressing room setups. It's nice to be treated like a "real" musician, but at the same time I catch myself thinking, "um, we can just piss against the wall outside and drink tap water and that'd be cool." Which is not to say that we aren't availing ourselves of the great outdoors with some frequency.

Day three in K-town allowed for some exploration. We didn't start our wanderings until late afternoon, but with sun in a barely flirtatious relationship with the horizon, late nights offer up the local sights just as well as afternoons. Mila, Shravan, Forrest and I walked through the downtown on our way over to Christiania. Copenhagen is pleasant enough to walk through (and almost everyone here appears to be in very good shape), but there's nothing breath-taking about the city center. The most unusual sight, to my Yank eyes, were all the bikes. They are everywhere here. I have never seen half so many in one place in my life. Apparently Copenhagen is as renowned as Amsterdam for its pedal power. Bike lanes are ubiquitous, located at a special elevation between street and sidewalk. Among bikers and pedestrians alike, there is a stupefying respect for traffic laws. It's understandable that everyone has to be more careful because of the cyclist factor, but man, if you jaywalk you are out there on your own.

Christiania is a part of Christianshavn, an island with bridge access from the downtown. I don't know all the details (I'm sure some of you know more than I), but Christiania was given to artsy squatter types by the city some decades ago. Now it's better known for its drug transactions than for anything else, I think. We were led the last few blocks there by some dude who was paying a visit to his dealer. He said that years ago Christiania featured open-air hash markets with 20 or 30 varieties. Things are more discreet now, but hardly underground. Across the street from where we stopped to sit and drink something, there were multiple people selling joints openly. Who knew you could cop a smoke outside the Woodstock Cafe on Pusherstreet? Apparently the cops roll in every few days just to harass the dealers, but they weren't around while we were there. I regret that we didn't walk around the lake and see all the makeshift dwellings that have been erected by squatters over the years. I'm not sure how the place is organized politically either. I need to read up. Anyway, it's largely a haven for burnouts, though there was something vaguely inspiring about walking under a sign as we left that read: "You are now entering the EU."

On our walk toward Christiania, I had seen someone handing out flyers for the Erotica Museum, which I had remembered reading about a year or two ago. We found it easily on our way back to Lasse's place, and we decided to drop €15 each to check it out. It was disappointing. The first displays you encounter are ancient representations of sexuality, but you very quickly find yourself surrounded by Playboy-era Western pornography. Forrest and Shravan, who had wandered ahead of me, were scarred by big-screen bestiality. By the time I got to that room, the screen was showing some tame 70s striptease video. Two rooms down (the last room in the museum) featured a wall of tv screens, simultaneously showing bad recent hardcore porn. One even had the Paris video. But...above those were a row of screens showing a skate video. And there was dance music playing. I believe the appropriate phrase is WTF? At any rate, with my understanding that the museum is unique, I wasn't expecting it to be so superficial. Eh, whatever, we saw naked people.

Our date in Malmö had always been tentative and didn't end up panning out (hence the extra day in K-town), so we drove to Gothenberg the next day. The bridge from Copenhagen to Malmö is hella expensive, like €70. Especially considering the ferry tickets to Finland and back, we got hammered money-wise in Scandanavia. If we ever tour Europe again, the northern countries might get the shaft. They're not remunerative enough to cover the exorbitant travel expenses involved. Our Gothenberg show was fun. We played with a Finnish band called Confusa (mid-tempo melodic punk with dual female vox, check 'em out if that's your thing) who played Stockholm with us the next night as well.

Stockholm was a big disappointment. Our show was in a basement in a house about 20 minutes outside the city. Three of our friends from Imperial Leather came to the show, and it was great to see them (Amyl and Kenko are pregnant with a future punk). We played with Confusa and a Russian band called Distress. The attendance was pretty low for a Saturday. We caught some dumb drunk teenage girls trying to steal shirts from us. I didn't have time to see any of my other Swedish friends, and we had to be at the ferry early the next morning, so we didn't have time to walk around the city. Total bummer.

The ferry from Stockholm to Turku takes about 11 hours, including a quick stop on the way at some place called Marie Hamina. I (ignorantly) expected most of the trip to be through open water, but we spent a lot of time passing through Swedish and Finnish archipelagos. We had picked up Borys, the last 1/3 of the Agipunk crew, in Stockholm, so we were rolling seven deep at this point. We got a pair of rooms down below (€16 for a room that sleeps four; not bad) to catch some shut-eye and shower. (Current shower count two weeks in: me, 4; Justin, 4; Shravan, 5; Forrest, 5.) I slept a few hours, showered, went upstairs (the ship has like 10 floors) and read for a while, rested some more. I had finally picked up a Cormac McCarthy book while in JFK when I realized the book I brought with me was in my checked bag. I'll pretend I chose it because people have been telling me I should check him out, but really it was the Oprah sticker on the cover that sealed the deal. If you're ever feeling a little too good about life, I suggest cracking open The Road.

Once we disembarked, we had a short drive up the coast to Pori. Our show was at a nice little bar with a good sound system, but very few people showed up. There had a been a fest in town that weekend, so playing on Sunday night was catch-as-catch-can. We stayed at an apartment less than a block from the venue. The guy who set up the show lived there, and he said he was going to go sleep at his girlfriend's once we got settled in. Instead he stayed up talking loudly and listening to music with a couple of his drunk friends. Our group had started out spread out between two rooms, but almost everyone quickly migrated to the bedroom when it became apparent that the late-night bullshit session wasn't ending any time soon. For some reason, Borys stayed in the living room, and the rest of us all had a good laugh when one of the drunk locals told him to "feel free to get naked" (to which he responded with genuine geniality that he'd "rather be sleeping"). I finally went out to ask them to take pity on our tired asses and shut up, and the dude who lived there was sitting on the floor naked puffing weed. I would have been moved to salute and sing the Finnish national anthem if only I knew the tune.

The next morning I popped into a record store next to the venue. It was full of rockabilly and other stuff I don't care about. If I had gone the other way up the street from the apartment where we stayed, I would have encountered a much better store and possibly gotten the jump on the Heresy/Concrete Sox LP that Shravan scooped up for a measly €15. We got to Tampere early, so I had time to walk around. Decent town, but the most interesting things I saw were a museum devoted to Lenin and an "erotic restaurant" discreetly named Big Tits. Tamepere actually has a long punk history, and we played at what I was told was a legendary club called Vastavilde (or something like that). We played with Selfish, one of the bigger Scandinavian punk bands going. We played one of our best sets of tour - and sold nothing save one record that was purchased before we played. There appears to be no logical relationship between how well we play and how much merch we sell. The punks have been very stingy to this point.

Oh, for the one or two of you who know Nahmi, we saw her in Tampere. She's living near there with Perttu. She's still totally fucked up, Perttu is still a drunken wreck...and they're having a baby! Hooray!

We had to drive all the Selfish dudes to the gig in Helsinki and make a couple stops along the way, so we didn't get there till about 8:30. That left essentially no time for me to explore, which was really frustrating. I had been looking forward to seeing the city. And the little bit of walking I did caused me to miss Kuolema's set, which was further frustrating. Otto, the drummer for Kuolema and Selfish, set up all three Finland shows and is a really good guy. And a really good drummer. Kuolema US tour in spring '08. Allegedly.

We went to a bar to kill time after the show before driving back to catch the ferry in Turku back to Stockholm. On the ferry, we immediately got a room and hit the sack. I must have slept at least 7 hours, though it didn't feel like it. I took a shower and got some food, and before I knew it we were driving off the ferry toward Malmö. We were hoping to have a place to crash in there or possibly with Lasse in Copenhagen on our way here in Flensberg. Neither panned out, so we drove all night. I caught some sleep on the floor of the van.

So here I am. The memory card on my camera is full, so I'm going to have to upload pictures for y'all sometime soon. Till then...

I wear my sunglasses at night

No time for a proper update. I'm in a public library in Tampere, and there's a bar in here. Really. We've had a long few days, a lot more travelling than sight-seeing. Shows have been ok, but not great. I hope I'll have time to write more soon, but internet access has been spotty.