Hummingbird Mentality

At 12.30, drunk on a football shaped bucket of cheap beer, standing under the quarter mile ‘Viva Vision’ screen which roofs the ‘Freemont St Experience’, watching as it runs through an absurd patriotic audio-visual demo, to whoops and applause from the assembled bikers, I think I finally get Vegas. The city is as it must be, simultaneously safety valve for and manifestation of, America’s Christian neurosis. ‘Free’ titty bars with an $18 two drink minimum, ‘limitless’ buffets twice as expensive as advertised, slot machines offering 100% or greater payout; everywhere the promise of pleasure, everywhere the sting of deserved pain. Casino’s offer a chance for limitless wealth - synomymous in the American mind with success - success without effort, the American version of equality of opportunity. Everywhere fast foot joints pump out plastic wrapped fulfillment, with the karmic retribution of obesity and expensive, perpetual, dehumanising ill health, and all of it sold under an all singing, all dancing, loud as hell, electric vision of the American dream.

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Finally got to a half decent internet cafe bail bond shop. More pictures than you want to see uploaded. Warning - these are unsorted and unnamed, many are blurred etc. This is just a brain dump for now. Click here for Pictures, or Slideshow.
Apologies if the pictures are slow to load. Dreamhost is being a bitch.

Just past Sherman’s Summit on US 395, driving east of Yosemite at seven o’clock and the sun’s setting over the melancholy prairie and the mountains. Bitter sweet memories rise with the dust haze off the highway, driving eighty feels like forty on these wide Californian roads, Josh Ritter on the stereo in a warm car with the cool blue evening light outside.
In Yosemite park you climb to Vernal Falls, a steep hike up vertiginous steps to a small ice clear lake, and hike about a thousand feet off the trail up rough scrub and granite boulder till you overlook Nevada falls and a sweet drop below.

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We spend three nights in San Francisco, and hit all the tourist spots - Cisco tower, a concrete money trap at the western end of the city overlooking the bay, and Golden gate and Bay bridges; Lombard St – the curviest in the world, which I cycle down twice, the uphill to get there restructuring my thighs and neck into aching highly stressed cords ready to snap.
On Columbus avenue a cute couple mike and Johanna stop us in the street and play a song, a heavy melody, rich and soulful, a pure unexpected joy and talk to us about the city ‘just your typical Amsterdam of America’, and how street kids, pierced and truculent, line height Asbury, where there’s ‘a Gap where something cools used to be’.

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Internet access is hard to come by in America. I presume everywhere we’ve been had wireless, but regular, reasonably priced cyber cafes are almost non existent. It’s especially impossible to find an internet access point with a headset for Skype and or an audio in, so I doubt we’ll be phoning home or podcasting anytime soon. Thankfully I brought along an aging NetMD minidisc, which I’ve been using to record our progress, so we will have some record of this journey. I’ve been keeping a notebook also, so here are some initial impressions..

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Having finally acquired an MP3 player that doesn’t crap out constantly, especially (and conveniently) when used with multiple PCs..I’ve begun listening less to music, and more to audio books and sound collages. Two I’ve thoroughly enjoyed recently have been the Paul Giamatti’s reading of Philip K. Dick’s science fiction opus, ‘A Scanner Darkly’, a stunning, and thoroughly different interpretation / characterisation that the recent Richard Linklater film; and Christopher Morris’s fusion of black comedy and esoteric music Blue Jam. I’d recommend both to freshen up your tired old playlist.

If you’re looking a more immediate thrill (while your torrents of both recommendations download), then check out this video from Disinfocon - an event held in 1999 by underground publisher Disinformation. It features Grant Morrison, yes that Grant Morrison, of Zenith and Invisibles fame, preaching Satanism. Tasty.