You might remember a while back that the good people at the Caroline Collective were putting on those Bandcamp things; it's been a few months since they've done any of 'em, I think, but this coming Sunday, January 31st, they're putting on something they're calling Bandcampus: BOOKING PARTY.

The idea is to help out bands who want to tour outside of our fair city, giving them real-live experience at booking shows in venues in Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi. The BandCampers are providing a handy guide to setting things up in each of those cities -- which'll be published for free download the day after the Bandcampus, although you can check it out online right now here -- free Internet access, and "mad-libs style" email and phone forms folks can use for actually emailing and calling different booking agents & venues. Experienced people will be there to help out however they can.

Needless to say, I think this is very cool. Historically, H-town bands just plain don't leave this city real often -- we're three hours from everybody else, at the very least, so getting elsewhere is expensive and time-consuming as hell. This isn't the East Coast, and gas costs a shitload these days. Bands need to be touring extensively outside our little town, and yet when I hear of bands doing just that, it's pretty damn rare, and mostly with more established bands.

Besides the logistical issues, too, knowledge of this sort of thing is pretty sparse; I'm glad to see the Caroline Collectivites(?) doing their part to try to give everybody a leg up. The more people who play elsewhere, the better they make H-town look and the better things get for everybody in this weird, cool scene of ours.

Anyway, this thing runs from 2-4PM, over at the Collective (naturally) -- 4820 Caroline, Houston, TX. 77004. Make your plans...

Labels: H-Town News, Musical Crap, Public Service Announcements, Things To Do, Travel Stuff

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 1 comments

Absolutely non-music-related, but still, this is amazingly cool. At one not-too-distant point in my life, I went on a seriously heavy travelogue-reading jag, devouring books by smart, quirky people going places nobody in their right mind (or, at least, nobody I actually know) ever goes to. Not all of it was great, I'll freely admit (sorry, Doug Lansky), but some of the travel writers I encountered were/are absolutely, mind-blowingly great: Lawrence Millman, Tim Cahill, Redmond O'Hanlon, Apsley Cherry-Garrard, Tim Severin, Tony Horwitz, Freya Stark, & George Packer, for a few.

Pico Iyer, though, was -- at the time, at least -- kind of the top of the top. As a writer, he's intensely thoughtful, able to take a bizarre, incongruous scene like, say, the title-inspiring moment of Video Night in Kathmandu, and transform it into a serious, intelligent, utterly brilliant meditation on the technologization and cultural saturation of society. He writes like Jimi Hendrix played guitar; that is, so jaw-droppingly well it doesn't make you want to necessarily pick up a guitar, since you're unlikely to be able to do what he can do, but just get hold of more of what he does.

That's my feeling about the guy, anyway. Which is why I think it's great that he's in town tonight to promote & read from (I'm assuming) his newest book, The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. I haven't yet read it, sadly, so I'm going to have to point you to John Nova Lomax's excellent interview with Iyer on the subject, over here. It seems at first blush to be an oddball piece for Lomax, it's true, but it comes out really well -- I'd highly recommend checking it out.

And then, of course, going to see Iyer himself. He'll be at the Westin Galleria Hotel (5060 W. Alabama) tonight, Wed., April 29th; doors open at 6:30PM, with Iyer going on at 7PM, and tickets are $5 if you happen to be a member of the Asia Society (who's sponsoring the visit; thanks! although he's for some reason already listed under "Past Programs") and $10 if you're not... Hopefully it's not already sold out, btw; the flyer's got a number to call to RSVP, so get on it.

Labels: Arty Shit, H-Town News, Public Service Announcements, Random Rambling, Things To Do, Things To Read, Travel Stuff

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Decidedly non-music-related, but this guy's my dad's personal hero, right up there with John Wayne. Travel guru, TV star, author, & all-round strange guy Rick Steves will be speaking this coming Friday, November 14th, at the University of Houston Cullen Performance Hall. I'm not entirely sure what the heck he'll be talking about, but he's got a new book out called Backpack Diplomacy, and the guy's a fount of travel-related knowledge. Tickets are a little pricey, sadly -- $20 for HoustonPBS members and $25 for non-members.

Now, I'll be honest -- while I like the guy okay, he's not my favorite travel writer (that's a tossup between Redmond O'Hanlon and Lawrence Millman, although they admittedly do somewhat of a different type of travel writing from Steves), or even my favorite travel TV host (current winner? Andrew Zimmern, hands down -- I'll never, ever eat the bulk of the things he tries, but hey, at least now I have a vague idea of what they'd taste like if I did). He is however, pretty much a travel biz icon, and well worth listening to. And going by what I've heard of his latest book, he and I see pretty much eye-to-eye on foreign relations and travel, in that we both believe the best way to coexist with our neighboring nations is to send real-live Americans out to the far corners of the world with backpacks rather than guns.

Plus, I have to respect -- albeit in a back-away-slowly-and-keep-smiling kind of way -- a guy who includes such handy phrases as "I have no venereal diseases" in his Spanish-to-English phrasebook. Truly, truly classy.

Labels: Political Stuff, Public Service Announcements, Random Rambling, Things To Read, Things To See, Travel Stuff

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 0 comments

Okay, not literally, but that's kind of the idea. Y'see, yours truly will be hopping on a jetplane at the end of this month to fly to beauteously hot Tucson, Arizona (which is a lot neater, somehow, than it was when I was a child & was forced to spend my summers there). There I'll meet up with my Dad & drive north listening to his Neil Diamond's Greatest Hits CD on infinite repeat, all the way up to Flagstaff & the Grand Canyon, where we'll fulfill Dad's lifelong desire to hike the damn thing.

We're no Supermen, mind you -- I think the trail we're taking (Bright Angel Trail down from the South Rim, hang around at the bottom a bit, visit Phantom Ranch, then back up to the North Rim, where we'll pass out & wait for the once-a-day shuttle bus back to the car) is pretty much the Grandma Route -- but Dad's planned the whole thing out pretty nicely (I hope), so it should be a cool, if painful and exhausting, trip. If we don't die, that is, or collapse out of sheer exhaustion because we're both in a lot worse shape than we think we are (honestly, I think he's in better shape right now than me).

And yes, over there on the right is my daughter, who's mad as hell that she doesn't get to go with Daddy & Grandpa. Assuming I survive this, munchkin, I promise...

At any rate, seeing as I'm going to be stuck with my Dad's godawful musical tastes for a full week, I've been frantically cramming my iPod full of as much "Grand Canyon-esque" music as I could possibly think of (to be fair, he's bought his very first MP3 player for this trip for pretty much the same reason). I tend to get a little nuts about stuff like this -- for our last trip, to Sweden, I packed my iPod with candy-shiny-sweet Swedish/Norwegian pop, spending hours and hours culling through piles of music to see what the absolute perfect songs would be, y'know? In the end, sadly, since I was traveling with the wife, the midget, & my wife's mom, there never really was any "alone-time" to ever listen to the damn playlist.

On the good side, the last time we went to England I did pretty much the same thing; I had two separate playlists, one of more pastoral, folky British stuff (for those long drives through the twee English countryside, obviously) and one of more Mod-ish, urban-sounding stuff. And again, it being a "family" trip, there wasn't a whole lot of time on my own, so the iPod stayed in my backpack for 95% of the trip (other than the mind-destroyingly long plane ride, that is).

One day, though, I ended up by myself on the train out from London to Windsor, sick as a dog and wishing I'd done like I almost had and stayed on the platform 'til I could catch the bus back to my sister-in-law's house. So, since nobody was paying much attention to me and standing felt better for my stomach & head than sitting, I put on the headphones and went to stand by the doors, watching the bleak train tunnels roll by. And listening to the "urban England" playlist was freakin' perfect, I swear -- The Jam really is the best possible soundtrack for the blighted, graffitied, concrete-and-rubbish side of Britain. (Although yeah, Cock Sparrer and New Model Army worked pretty well, too.)

These days, though, my Music Library's big enough it's gotten away from me, and so despite already spending a ridiculous amount of time picking and choosing songs for this next trip, I'm left feeling like I'm missing a whole bunch of songs I could be putting on my rapidly-growing Grand Canyon playlist. I'm also feeling a bit more pressured since I long ago topped out my iPod and now have to judiciously remove stuff if I want to put anything "new" on there -- I already had to remove some stuff so I could fit Joel R. Phelps' awesome Blackbird on there.

So, seeing as I've pretty much hit a wall, I figured I'd throw it out there for any & all to contribute -- any suggestions? Anything particularly Grand Canyon-like that I ought to put on there? I'm not talking specifically about songs that refer to the Grand Canyon, mind you (although I've already got Sugar's "Hoover Dam," which isn't too far from there), but more about songs that'd work for me hiking my out-of-shape ass down into the heatstroke-inducing bowels of the earth and/or staring up at the clear-black night sky for the first time this decade. I've kinda been leaning towards lower-key, more stark, country/spacey-sounding stuff so far -- Explosions in the Sky, Son Volt, Damien Jurado, Death Cab, etc. -- but hell, I'd love to hear ideas, if anybody's got any.

Comment away, if you feel so inclined...

Labels: Admin Stuff, Musical Crap, Random Rambling, Travel Stuff

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 6 comments

Ah, yes -- home sweaty home. Been back a week or so, actually, but I've been feeling a bit weird about the Internet thing and music in general (more on that in a sec); sorry it's taken me so long to finally crawl back online.

It's strange to be back in H-town, I have to say. After spending a few weeks wandering the clean, efficient, pretty streets and highways of Denmark & Sweden, it was something of a shock to return to the steambath that is this city, with the freeways that are ugly, ugly, ugly and practically drowning in advertising, the streets where garbage always seems piled high pretty much permanently, and the people who're only friendly to you if they want something from you (mostly, anyway).

Granted, Scandinavia was expensive as hell -- I can't bring myself to look at the latest credit card bill, because I think it'll send me running out into the street, screaming. But y'know, at least you get something for it. We were there partly to visit family, most of whom live in Uppsala, a large university town north of Stockholm, and Soderfors, a teeny-tiny ironworking town 45 min. or so further north, and so we quizzed them in-depth on taxes, the educational system, crime, the whole deal.

The tax thing's heavier than it is here, naturally -- most citizens pay 30% of their earnings, with the wealthy paying up to 50% -- but apparently it used to be worse, with the richest people in the country actually owing 100% or more of what they make each year (Astrid Lindgren, the author of the Pippi Longstocking books, got hit like that, I'm told). A while back they decided to make it a bit more sane, though, and dropped the cap to 50%. Again, though, you get something back for your money, a lot more than you do here. Free education through college for anybody who wants it (I only met one guy, a cousin named Jan who happens to be a skinhead & classic car fanatic, who hadn't gone to college; he works at a custom concrete fabrication yard), healthcare whenever you need it, benefits when you're out of work, in school, or retired, a ton of vacation time, the whole nine yards. After feeling like I've watched my tax dollars get flushed away for the past five years, in particular, it seems very tempting.

The funnier part, though, was when the Swedes started asking us about life in the States and Houston in specific. It was a little ridiculous to see the beefy, tattooed skinhead guy lean across the table to me with a worried look on his face and ask, "but is it safe to live there? Do people get murdered or robbed?" And, trying to be honest about our country/city, we responded by saying that no, it's not all that safe, and yes, people do indeed get killed or robbed, every single damn day. We also joked about freeway cameras -- Sweden's covered with 'em, and if you see a flash up above the roadway, that means you'll most likely get a speeding ticket in the mail -- and about how the first time they tried 'em here, it seemed like people shot most of 'em up. (They thought that part was pretty entertaining.)

Of course, there's also the matter of scale -- Sweden's only got like 8 million people or so in the whole country, about a fifth of whom live in Stockholm. Houston alone has, what, 5 million people, and that's probably not counting people who live in Katy, The Woodlands, etc.? Traveling to the U.S. for these folks, especially the more countrified, Stockholm-hating cousins in Soderfors, would be like somebody from Delaware traveling to Texas.

We invited everybody to come visit, naturally, but most smiled and just said, "maybe." Jan, in particular, seemed interested -- he said he'd heard New York was awful, so he wanted to visit another U.S. city -- and we told him that Houston's far from a tourist-friendly town (unless you're into sports, I suppose), but that there are things to do here. His dad, however, laughed and said what I think must've been the Swedish equivalent of "yeah, right!", so maybe it ain't really likely. The $1200 a person pricetag for plane tickets might play a bit of a role in that...

Rather than take the bus or train cross-country, by the way, we drove. We rented a sweet, sweet Volvo S80 (pickup not as good as I'd hoped, but it held all of us plus our ridiculous amount of luggage, had heated seat cushions, and ran on biodiesel(!)), which sadly became the Crapmobile after we made the mistake of parking under a tree outside our hotel in Norrköping. We got the insurance, so hopefully that'll cover birdshit, but maybe I'd better check the credit card bill after all and make sure we didn't get hit with a cleaning charge or something -- one thing I noticed in Denmark and Sweden is that absolutely everything costs something.

Just to give a quick rundown of our trip, we started in Copenhagen, over in Denmark, which was very cool -- I wish we could've stayed there longer, but we had hotels booked all the way across Sweden. We saw the Little Mermaid, rode the rides in Tivoli (well, a few of 'em, anyway; one ferris wheel ride for the three of us cost about $20), and visited the near-death commune at Christiania, which was extremely strange. Imagine an abandoned military base taken over by hippies and artists and then sort of left to see as the years went by, with quiet people biking everywhere and staring in a not-too-friendly sort of way as you wander past. (Not that I blame them, mind you -- I found out after the fact that the cops staged a huge incursion back in May and sparked a riot; thinking back now, it makes a lot of sense that most people seemed paranoid and hostile. Heck, we could've been police infiltrators...)

After that it was a train ride across the Oresund Bridge and into Sweden. We hung out at the Malmö Festival in Malmö (mostly 'cause it was outside our hotel room window), then rented a car and headed south. We hit the recreated Viking village at Foteviken, played in the sand on the south coast at Mossbystrand, hiked up to the incredible standing stones at Ales Stenar (which means, I believe, "old stones"; duh...), situated right on top of a grassy cliff overlooking the Baltic Sea, and then proceeded to get lost, get crazy pantomime directions from a Swedish lady, flatten a tire, and discover that our cottage at the hostel/resort place we'd booked into in Växjö had been given away. Ah, fuck. Best Western Royal Corner, you guys are lifesavers, as are the kind mechanics the next block over who stayed open to refill our tire for free. (Everything in rural Sweden shuts down between 6 and 7PM, with the possible exception of bars and restaurants.)

From Växjö we first went to see an awesomely spooky abandoned castle, Kronobergs Slott, then drove north to Linköping, where we checked out some cool old 19th-century Swedish buildings and I got lost while trying to get back to the car (yes, again). Then on up the freeway to Norrköping, which is this old industrial city that's been "reclaimed," with the old waterways and industrial buildings turned into parks and museums and such. Another place I wish we could've seen more of, but we were due to meet my wife's sister's family in Uppsala and didn't want to be late. We zipped through Stockholm and on up into Uppland, meeting the fam and having the first of several cool family get-togethers.

That night we went out on the town, mingling with Swedish students who all looked like they could be models for Gap ads and settling down at a river-side bar to drink. Well, okay, not me -- I don't drink much in general, but I would've if I wasn't driving, 'cause drunk-driving in Sweden is a major taboo, and the first time gets you slapped with a hefty fine, an automatic 3 weeks in jail, and the suspension of your license besides (I didn't ask what happens to repeat offenders). We had a good time, sitting around discussing religion and politics -- cousin Stefan's a religious history grad-turned-Cisco administration professor, and cousin Elisabeth's husband Michael's a lecturer in political science. When Michael turned to me and regretfully confessed his secret love for Rush (the band, not the asshole radio guy; he follows them from town to town when they tour Sweden), I could tell we were pretty deep in the cups.

After Uppsala was Soderfors and more merrymaking, this time with the whole tribe in attendance. The whole thing was a whirlwind, and I won't go into it here 'cause the names & stories wouldn't mean much to anybody else... And finally, we hit Stockholm, staying in the top-floor suite of the Hotel Sven Vintappare in an amazing old building built in the 1600s in Gamla Stan, the city's "Old Town" district (which is on its own little island in the middle of the city and is largely car-less). Yet another place I dearly want to go back & visit -- we got to see some of the sights, like the Skansen open-air history museum, Pippi Longstocking-land in Junibacken, the Vasa Museet (which has gotta be the only museum in the world devoted to a ship that sank before it ever left the harbor), and the Riddarholmskyrkan, where all the kings and knights are buried, but there's still a ton we didn't do.

Argh -- gotta go; par-tay time in the park looms. More later...

Labels: Random Rambling, Travel Stuff

gaijin || Link || E-mail || 2 comments