America

East Coast, West Coast

Finally got around to editing my audiolog from America. Doesn’t quite make sense as a podcast, but what the hey!

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Listen:

Download:

High Quality - East Coast, West Coast 128k, 44.8megs
Low Quality - East Coast, West Coast 64k, 22.4megs

While I was at the anti DRM demonstration at Apples 5th avenue store, I also interviewed a member of New Yorker’s for Fair Use, Jay Sulzberger. The interview was too long to include in the program, but if you’re interested in issues surrounding DRM, net neutrality or wiretapping, check it out below.

Interview - Jay Sulzberger, 96k, 12megs.

Show Notes:

00.00 - Introduction
00.52 - Car to airport
02.33 - LAX
04.30 - Inglewood
07.15 - Backpackers Paradise Hostel LA
09.42 - UCLA Campus
10.40 - Hollywood Hills
12.15 - LA Hostel Morning
15.37 - Yosemite Bug Hostel
16.31 - Yosemite Bug (contd) - Talking about LA and SF
24.29 - Yosemite Bug (contd) - Dave’s Story
30.36 - Verner Falls Yosemite
31:40 - Half Dome Yosemite
33:45 - Central Park, NY - Talking about Vegas
44:22 - 57th and 5th, NY
46.28 - 5th Avenue Apple Store - Interview with Free culture NYU
48:58 - End

I’m releasing this under a Creative Commons, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

All music included comes from the album Bad Things Happen Every Day, by Magnatune.com.

America

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Leaving Gotham

The rain fell my last morning in Manhattan, as if it personally disliked me. It dropped in fat wet polyps that hit and burst as I dragged a sodden case across 55th st. Mere hours before, less hours than it takes to realise last nights felafels have no intention of leaving your stomach either quietly or at a reasonable pace, I’d been drunk and warm and trying to keep my eyes off the midget porn. I had in fact been knocking back Corona’s and ‘Ass Juice’ with the Vitka and his filthy assistant, retired porn star and current roller derby queen, at a seedy punk bar in the East Village. In Midget porn, the money shot is not when a link of thick wet splurge hits chin, but rather the suitcase shot. After all loving has ceased, the differently tall sex worker on the recieving end is neatly lifted, folded, and placed in a suitcase, presumably to be shipped to the next empowering. On the way here we had eaten some cheap imitation of falafel, more of which would follow, perhaps in an effort to negotiate, in some (un)savory mayonnaise filled language, the surrender of the first serving.
I flolloped into the hostel, eyed daggers at the snotty eurotrash counter monkeys, threw my luggage into a laughably insecure storage shed, then raced downtown to spend my last, few, damp dollars on corny American candies for a hot, young, punk chick of my acquaintance; because that’s just the kind of attentive, modest, stallion of masculinity I am. Kind of like the one Ronan Keating is going to ride in the next paragraph.

At fifteen hundred feet above the surface of the spinning earth I’m struggling with Phil Dick’s ‘Valis’, the schizophrenogenic dissociative account of Dick’s gnosis that linear time is a perceptual fallacy; while on the cabin’s in flight video Ronan Keating rides the majestic but elegant beast previously mentioned through a CGI desert, singing - blessedly - in absolute silence. Through Dick’s slyly rhetorical postmodern dialectic my mind becomes fixated on the possibility of a future beneficent hyperdimentional me reaching back through the unimaginable expanses of linear time to facilitate my mental evolution, demonstrating somehow the illusory nature of ‘reality’. Is this Buddha, a universal or particular eternal conscience out of time - Grant Morrison’s alien visitation, Jung’s synchronicity? Is it a pile of drug addled shite spouted by a narcissistic middle aged science fiction writer, struggling to compete in an L. Ron cornered market?
On four screens at once, Mr Bean, posing as a barber, infinitely more amusing without the laughter track, shaves off a mans toupee, then attempts to repair the damage with glue and scraps of shop floor hair. I try to ignore the doughy unattractiveness of the Irish heads around me, raise my dining tray, and attempt to sleep.

America

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Leaving Los Vegas

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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America

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Pictures

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.

America

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Yosemite and Vegas

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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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San Francisco

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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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America

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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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America

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