The Mid-Atlantic

So I know I haven't been keeping up with this. I hardly have any internet access so I'll just do a quick recap.

I spent four nights with my homeboy John in Jersey City (aka one PATH away stop from Manhattan and a pretty cool place in its own right). He is also the sole member of the (amazingly good) indie folk act Soul of Jonas. I met him in Rome last year and he invited me to stay with him. In New York I did the usual stuff, wandered the Lower East Side, got lost in the Met and the MOMA, ate in incredible delis, pizza places and Chinese dumpling shops. In a Puerto Rican neighbourhood I had a Tamarind shaved ice from a street vendor. It was incredible. In Williamsburg, Brooklyn we saw a bunch of bands (Anoushka or something like that, Sticks and Stones and something else I can't remember but who were awesome nonetheless). That neighbourhood is absolutely ridiculous. Imagine Queen West between Bathurst and Ossington and multiply it by sixteen. Harlem was also awesome. I spent about 15 minutes debating whether to buy a limited edition Diplomats T-shirt but didn't because they only had them in double XL.

In Philadelphia I danced all night Saturday (Low Budget of Hollertronix, Mark Ronsson) and on Sunday went to see Espers, Bright Black Morning Light and Marie Sioux in a Unitarian Church. They were all quality Psychedelic Folk of the Joanna Newsome, Animal Collective, Devendra Banhart vein.

DC is pretty awful. I got ripped off by a cab driver, stayed in a shitty hostel and missed most of the Smithsonian because it was flooded. The rain was the hardest I've ever seen, like a tropical downpour. The city also felt like a police state, with bag checks, dogs and metal detectors in every building including the public library. Plus everywhere there were reminders of mass slaughter: the Vietnam and Korean Memorials, the museum of the American Indian, the air and Space Museum (including the Enola Gay), the Holocaust memorial and the Museum of American History (which was actually closed but I can imagine). In front of the Whitehouse I chatted with some Grandmother types and torture victims in the rain as they observed the UN's international day against torture.

I met some really interesting people at the hostel. A veteran who claims he was the victim of a covert US government program showed me piles of documents proving that he has microchips embedded all over his body, has had his life intentionally ruined and is perpetually on the run. When he heard I have a journalism degree he gave me all kinds of phone numbers. I ended up on a party line with a bunch of other people just like him.

I also met a guy from UC Berkeley who is researching covert government biological tests from the sixties. This guy was more legit with actual access to the National Archives and stuff. Then there was the Lebanese/German guy who has a PHD in something to do with Native American music and is in DC working at the Smithsonian and the Berlin Anthropological museum. He had a native (Indian) accent because he learned english on a reserve in North Dakota. We drank beer together.

Baltimore (aka Mobtown) was cool. I had Sushi there and wandered clueslessly through the "Ghetto." The fourteen hour overnight bus ride to Charleston South Carolina was not cool. Torturous actually, but an interesting cultural experience. There were two transfers: one at 2 AM and the other at 6. Imagine the tiny Greyhound station in Richmond Virginia at 2AM after ten busses have rolled up and about 800 sleepy, angry people are trying to find the right place to catch their transfer south. The crowd is all black with some latinos and one or two white people. The white people though (and I'm not making this up) were so strange looking. They all had weird lips, and strange bowl cuts, dressed in oversize sweat suits and had the most vacant expressions on their faces like they were mentally disabled.

Charleston South Carolina is gorgeous. The hostel where I'm staying is an old house with two porches and a hammock. I borrowed a bike from one of the staff and rode through a neighbourhood of nineteenth century wooden houses all with peeling paint, grandmas on the stoop and little kids on lowrider bikes (everyone is black). At the beach there were sand dunes, marshes and herons.

Everyone here is maaaad cool. I think we're going out to eat soul food now and listen to a blue grass band. Later I'm going to sit on the porch and drink beer.

Snap Yo' Fingers

I heard that song at least three times last night as I completed, what to me was, the ultimate Philadelphia club crawl. We started at the Five Spot, across the street from the hostel. It was ridiculously crowded and humid, and the clinetele was a hundred percent black. They played rap and dancehall. The energy was low, alot of playas just hanging out by the bar sipping Hennesy-and-coke through straws. Alot of bumping and grinding as the night went on.

We moved to the Metro lounge where Low-Budget of Hollertronix fame plus a few more likeminded mashup, indie dance rap DJs were throwing their Saturday night party. Fucking incredible. It was everything I'd expected of that scene except way more intense. The crowd was perfectly mixed, black/white, boys/girls and they were all losing their shit. I haven't danced that hard maybe ever. Unlike their Toronto equivalents, these guys can mix. Plus the full time guy on the mic is actually exciting instead of embarassing.

After that ended we moved to Transit, a massive afterhours place with three floors. I expected to be let down but again it was amazing. The top floor was Lil' John, the second floor Bjork and the bottom was rock and electro. We danced until early. It was way past the hostel curfew but it didn't matter because the manager was with us. I passed out on my top bunk in my clothes feeling completely validated.

Maybe some other day I'll write about my New York experience but tonight I'm going to some folk show in a church.

Photos From the Road

Upstate New York

I've actually written two blog posts since the last one but the computer that I was working on swallowed them both. The Erie county library doesn't exactly have the greatest facilities. They do, however, have the original manuscript of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Fin. He's apparently from Buffalo, not Mississippi as I'd always thought.

Anyways, I'm in Boston now staying with my dad's cousin. I don't really have the energy to write about my last week, as a lot has happened, but I will list some of the highlights:

Niagara Falls is dull, even the kitsch. Downtown is the most depressed, boarded up, crumbling place I've ever seen.

Buffalo is amazing. The art gallery is better than Toronto's. The chicken wings are stellar. And Buffalonians are either the most sullen, dangerous looking people ever or incredibly friendly depending on if you're being hustled or not. I got hustled but I'm saving that story for a future blog post called "Conversations with Americans" that I guarantee will be filled with sex, violence, drug abuse, class warfare, racism, xenophobia and religious fundamentalism.

Cortland, New York is the small town where my dad grew up. It's pretty and kinda slow. I stayed with my dad's highschool buddy who is also the former mayor. I went with his family to see motherfucking Dave Matthews in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was the whitest experience I've ever had by far, and I've had some pretty white experiences. It was also kinda good...

Anyways, now I'm in Boston. An amazing place.

The World Cup in Toronto

And so it's world cup time again in Toronto. When the great Portugese underclass of this city rise up and honk their horns for eight hours straight to celebrate their one nil win over former colony Angola. My friend Mike wrote about his experience at Toronto's favourite Angolan bar yesterday on his blog romsaca.blogspot.com

Today I'm putting on my Sao Paolo FC, Cicinho jersey and going down to the local Brazilian hotspot to watch the game. Do I know anything about sports? No, but it doesn't matter because the beer is cold and no matter who wins there will be street dancing and perhaps some brawls.

I forgot to include, in my far too hasty post about Montreal the other day, a picture of some Quebecois-Algerian guys who sat beside me on a park bench. While I ate my smoked meat, they smoked weed and then in broken english asked me about Vancouver. They liked the beaches but not the incredible dullness. They claimed Montreal was the greatest place on earth and seemed to be especially excited about multiculturalism. They talked to me at length about how Jews, Arabs and Greeks all get along in Montreal and how I must learn French. They encouraged me to visit Algeria and reminisced about the beautiful sand dunes they had once known.

Also, I now know my travel schedule. Tomorrow morning I go to Niagara falls. I'll explore Buffalo for the day before hopping on a bus to Cortland, New York where my father grew up. I'm staying with a high school friend of his, the former mayor for a night before heading on to Boston.

Montreal in the Summer

The quick version of my trip to Montreal: I stayed in the Plateau with a very beautiful girl. We spent alot of time hanging out on the patio listening to A Tribe Called Quest, PJ Harvey and Nick Drake while drinking heavy Quebecois beer like Maudite and Fin Du Monde. The nearby Mile End neighbourhood is an amazing confluence of Hasidic Jews, Haitians, and hip people. I walked through a Just for Laughs gag and realised that it's mostly staged: Those "unsuspecting" people are actors!

Tam Tams makes me embarassed to be human. The weekly neo-hippy extravaganza is one part massive drum circle, one part medieval battle recreations and another part faux ethnic bazzar. Imagine the body odour of thousands of peace loving dreadlocked Quebecois youth in the summer humidity.

The Smoked Meat from Schwartz's deli just solidified my opinion that vegetarianism is completely immoral (and perhaps even anti-semitic). Likewise, the chewy Bagels that I ate in Mile End were far better than that doughy shit they sell at the supermarket.

Old White Men

I love when old white men feel aggrieved about one thing or another. Last week while reading the crypto-fascist website Canada Free Press, I laughed as pundit Arthur Weinreb bashed The Globe and Mail for their anti-Harper rhetoric. His accusation were based on an innocuous article written by my homegirl Eva Salinas. Weinreb calls the article a "textbook case of media bias" and an attack on Stephen Harper. The problem. Eva uses sources that are skeptical of Harper's plan and even one that "no one has ever heard of before."

It's funny because when I read the article I see sources as diverse as the mayor of Burnaby (one of BC's largest cities for all you unfamiliar with geography west of Mississauga), the wife of recently deceased MP Chuck Cadman (a tireless advocate of stricter anti-street racing laws whose name Harper has hijacked), a Vancouver defense lawyer and an activist whose sister was killed by street racers.

Most of Weinreb's hysteria is about Eva's use of this last woman. He writes, "The Globe and Mail quoted Nina Rivet who lost her sister to a [sic] street racing which doesn’t seem to be as much as a problem for her as the fact that Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party are now in power." Waaaaa. Poor guy is mad because people don't think like him.

It's an interesting case-study. A British Columbia woman writes an article quoting other women directly affected by the story. Some mysogenist in Ontario gets all huffy calling the sources worthless and goes on to defend Our Dear Leader the Prime Minister (an Ontario born Anglo male) from these rabid accusations and then accuses the entire mainstream media as having a liberal bias.

In other angry-white-man news, I have tickets to go see Robert Fisk tonight at Concordia University in Montreal. Now this is a Caker I can get behind. His reporting from the Middle East is consistently solid, contrarian and, despite the constant attacks against him, never ending. He's also one hell of an entertainer. Seeing him all blustery and red faced in a packed auditorium cracking jokes about Osama Bin Laden's mom is about as good as it gets. I'd go see him over The Blue Man Group any day.

Tomorrow I'll post some Montreal pictures. You can look forward to dreadlocked, mud smeared neo-hippies dancing wildly to the beat of a hundred drums and some more conventional pics of smoked meat sandwiches.