haley bonar + gamelan ensemble = !!!

"There are only two kinds of people, my kind of people and assholes..." - Mink Stole in Pink Flamingos

Today started out strangely. Who schedules concerts before noon? I practically black out when I stand up if it's before noon. Anyhoo, wakey bakey peddle bikey around get some breakfast blah blah blah. It's a hard life and it's killing me. Here is a photograph of my Long Haul Trucker touring bike.


Do you like golden showers? I do. They are warm and yellow and they feel good on your legs. Next time you're in the shower with your better half, tell he/she to pee on your legs as you're getting yourself off. It's all kinds of neat warm feeling.


Snuck up on this beautiful Egret at the pond in Loring Park, right in downtown Minneapolis. I was very careful not to disturb him and I kept myself behind some tall reeds to hide myself, and this beauty allowed me to snap a few shots. I managed to sneak up on it, take the shots, and then get away without causing it to panic and fly away. One has to respect the rights of others.


The Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden. What a cool setting for a free concert. It started at 11:00 in the freaking morning though, and they didn't serve booze. What the fuck? I love being wasted first thing in the morning, it kind of sets the vibe for the whole day. They had a cool kiddie bike decorating contest and some other festivities, but no booze. Seeing music without booze makes the music seem kind of mellower and distant, like waves crashing on a faraway beach that you can't quite see.


The Javanese Gamelan music and dance was really wild. A Gamelan is a band made up of a bunch of people wearing trippy costumes and banging on tuned objects. It sounds like a combination of a chorus of bells and bongo drumming in really oddball complicated time signatures with chanting and dancing. It really was lovely to hear the sounds twinkling and chiming and seeing the people dressed in the traditional manner. What a beautiful way to ring in another weekend. Gamelan + maryjane = nirvana.



Haley Bonar has an alluringly lovely singing voice and she sings twangy heartache folksongs about falling out of cars and drinking booze like a bird singing in a tree. She's leaving Minneapolis and relocating to Portland Oregon. It seems like everybody is going to Portland these days, like how everybody went to Seattle in the 90s. Is Portland really that cool of a place to live? I'm thinking of moving to Humboldt County, that's practically Oregon. Hmmm....



It was cloudy all day and sprinkly but as soon as I got back to the apartment it started to rain for real, but it didn't rain on me because I am the golden boy the second son of God and I am magick and evol. Yeah. Tomorrow is the concert of the year for me. The dark lords are coming. The earth will shake and the sun will fall from the fucking sky because tomorrow is doom drone metal ground zero. sunn0))))))))))))))))))

it takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry...

*I never thought I would say this, but I finally entered my Bob Dylan phase. Blonde on Blonde and Highway 61 Revisited are looping endlessly as my inner soundtrack. I've been wrong before, I hated Morrissey and The Smiths until I actually listened to them without preconceptions and then I totally dug their trip, but I always respected Bob Dylan. I just never thought I'd get into his dreamworld like this. Lines from his songs blow through the cityscape in my mind like tumbleweeds across the desert.

Up until Thursday I didn't know if I would have to work today (Friday) or not, because the department I work in is supposed to be open pretty much all hours any T*rg*t stores are open, but we got an e-mail Thursday confirming that we didn't even need a skeleton staff for Friday so today was like a free paid holiday that nobody was sure was coming. That's always nice, plus I have Monday off because of the sunn0))) concert Sunday night.

I look at days like this as gifts that fell from the sky, so nothing constructive should even be attempted on a day such as today. I slept until 10:00 and then got on the bike, went to Popeyes New Orleans Fried Chicken for a gutbomb healthfood breakfast of spicy deep fried chicken and red beans and rice and Dr. Pepper and then smoked a joint the size of a hot dog and went on the slowest and most meandering aimless pointless bike ride imaginable for no reason at all except just to waste time and see beauty.


Down alleys and sidewalks, from Uptown to Downtown, just taking it all in and singing Bob Dylan and Rolling Stones songs out loud to the amusement of passersby. When I go on these stoned meandering bike rides I purposely drive super slow and purposely ride down streets I am unfamiliar with, it's a great way to slowly check out a city and see it's neighborhoods in all their ragged glory. I made sure that when I rolled smiling past crowds seated at coffeeshops I was singing the guitar solos from Monkey Man by The Stones. It's a wonderful guitar line, swoopy and curvy. I hope the people that heard me enjoyed it as much as I did.


This is my year of the flat tire. I've bike commuted most days for the last 5 years or so, and it seems like I always average about 1.5 flat tires a year, even when I was averaging 100 miles a week. Now my bike commute is only about two miles each way, but it's in downtown traffic all the way. Today was my third flat this year, a gnarly piece of bent metal I picked up down by where they are building the new Minnesota Twins stadium. I'm getting really fast at tearing my tires down and putting a patch on and putting the tire back together but I didn't have a pump with me so I had to duck into One on One Bike Studio for some air and water.


I decided to get some miles in so I headed out of the city on the bike superhighway, saw Hurl and his lady going by in a flash of spokes and steel somewhere out there on the edges of downtown, and I rolled out through Saint Louis Park and Hopkins.


What a beautiful day for just riding around slowly doing nothing. I love just being aimless and stoned and free, with nowhere to be and no sense of time. Just wasting time by gliding effortlessly around the city taking it all in and feeling so much love and fellowship with all the other oddballs drifting around pointlessly and gloriously like trash blowing in circles in the sidewalks of my mind. It's such a crazy wild gone world and it's so great to just drift through it.


People need to slow down and unstructure their lives, just say fuck it all and have days and weekends dedicated to just aimlessly wandering in whatever fashion they prefer, walking or biking or skateboarding, whatever, just get drunk or high or whatever turns you on and open your eyes and let the wind blow you and talk to psychotic people on the street and just dig everything. There is so much beauty everywhere, you just have to let yourself see it and taste it and smell it and fuck it and let yourself get fucked by it. I love and want to fuck and get fucked by the pigeon on the roof, the wind that moans across the telephone wires, the bizarre retro neon sign at the men's clothes warehouse, the puddle of water that sits stagnant like a radioactive tumor in the construction zone, it's all wide open and gaping and reaching it's hand out towards you.

...the last time I was in California

Everything is nailed down, tickets bought and vacation approved. I'm travelling light, mailing my camping gear ahead of me, and taking just one carrying bag and the clothes on my back onto the aeroplane to the sea, bailing at LAX and taking the train up the Pacific Coast through Big Sur to my main man's pad in Cambria. Death Valley is a lethal 120 degrees in the summer so now is just time tick tick ticking until October when the average high drops to a bearable 90 degree average on the flats and cooler up in the mountains. We're going on a run from The Salton Sea through Death Valley (some real Manson dune buggy brigade hole in the earth shit) to Mojave to Joshua Tree (where Gram Parsons shuffled into the next life) and then up to my possible future home in the towering redwoods and fog of Arcata/Eureka/Lost Coast. I regret not taking many pictures last time I was in Death Valley/Mojave, but we were in the middle of a couple weeks of solid 24/7 tripping from the moment we got up until the moment we hit San Francisco. When you're tripping your brains out and smoking pot by the bushel photography takes a back seat to just hanging on and enjoying the ride.

Last time we left MPLS tripping and drove the whole way across the country in a brand new Jeep. I don't remember leaving but my tried-and-true method to avoid the endless Mid-America/Nebraska doldrums is to leave MPLS in the afternoon and keep enough pharmaceutical stimulants handy to drive through the night because in the darkness you don't have to look at Nebraska or any other of those flat states, and the next day you're coming down and the sun is coming up and the great Rocky Mountains are looming in the distance. Nothing against the flat states, but when you're driving across them the distances are so large and the land is so flat that you see a smoke plume in the distance and figure it's 20 minutes away and then 3 hours later you're still driving at the smoke plume and it's no closer.

Jesus fuck I have the music cranked right now. 200 peak watts of soft-clipping NAD power envelope amplification through big classic vintage Advent Loudspeakers, the floor is moving like a motherfucker. Afghan Whigs rattling the windows. Nothing like good loud music through real speakers.

The last time Bob and I drove this drive in the 24/7 trip I remember nothing until we hit the town of Mojave. For real, we were dropping doses from sunup to sundown. We ended up in some beat 20 Mule motel watching Charles Bronson movies and trying to trip even further out to find some essential truth. I have a million memories of the town of Mojave but I don't know if they really happened. I have a memory, almost a mirage, of a dog walking into the hotel room and looking around and then walking out. I have no idea if that happened. At about that point the whole trip turned orange. We somehow took turns piloting the Jeep through the Mojave and through Death Valley and got out in the dunes and everything turned creamy orange like the rocks at Zabriskie Point and I remember Bob puking out the Jeep door and climbing huge rocks and descending into the valley was like descending into an orange inferno. Everything in Death Valley really does turn into a Manson trip, especially if you've read the stories about the bus driving up into Golar Wash and through the Panamints.

I remember San Luis Obispo and staying in this Travellers Inn and Bob getting on my ass about my admittedly loud snoring (when I'm fucked-up I snore like a chain saw)and then we were in Cambria staying in some Brit-owned motel and tripping on the beach all day in a scene right out of Fear and Loathing. Higher than the sun. Bob really loved Cambria, and I see why. It's a little high-class town with a stunning Moonstone beach and a main street strung with artsy boutiques. I do remember in Cambria the cracks started showing, we had been tripping for a solid week and even pros get sketchy when the days start stringing out into weeks. I don't remember what we started arguing about but Cambria is where I started to be aware of the rot setting in. We should have taken a break. We didn't. We fucking hit it harder.


Pulling up to the hotel in San Francisco Bob hit some poles sticking out of the back of a construction truck. I wasn't Bob, I wasn't driving, I won't venture an opinion on this development, other than to say that all the sudden we're tripping our brains out and are in an argument with some construction workers and our civility towards each other was straining around the edges. We check into the hotel and being the fiend I was I called a cab for the Mission District and Bob and I rolled down to where the BART comes up on Mission around 16th 0r 18th, but Bob was familiar with the smack holocaust that hit the East Coast in the 1980s so when Bob saw the zombies of the open-air drug supermarket of the Mission District he freaked, got the fear, headed back to the hotel room. I got hassled by some brothers who tried to burn me on my first try, for some reason they called me "New York City", maybe it was because of how I was dressed, but I called them on it and finally connected though the fuckers refused to honor the price point and basically ripped me off for 33.3% of my cash, but nonetheless I made it back to the Tenderloin hotel room where Bob was going through some sort of psychedelic ecstatic epiphany. I was going the opposite way, fiending my way into needle city. I promptly blissed off into the next dimension and slipped into bed where I would waste (which I now regret) the whole second half of the vacation in a half-asleep narcotic hypnagogic dream state. Days passed while Bob went out and explored the beautiful city of San Francisco or did whatever, while I just pumped myself full of waking dreams and blurry scenes. I think I stayed in bed for 3 solid days in one stretch, narcotized to the gills and one step away from turning blue and stopping breathing forever. We got into some sort of argument where Bob was going to stay and fly back and I was going to drive the Jeep back but the next thing I remember we're driving out of California and up across the country again.

Somewhere. Laramie? I was so fucked up I cannot even remember what cities I was in, but late one night in I think it was Laramie we stopped to get gas and it was my turn to throw a tankful in so I pumped it and set my wallet on top of the Jeep and we drove off. A state or so away I remembered that I set my wallet on top of the Jeep. We turned around and hours later sailed into early morning Laramie (or wherever it was), and found no sign of my wallet at the gas station. When I called the credit card company from a payphone they told me the State Troopers had it. Apparently it fell off the Jeep in an intersection and somebody turned it in to the cops, who then proceeded to book it into evidence in case it was part of a crime scene. The funniest part was that in San Francisco I was ready to deal with Mexicans to cop dope so I had a cheat sheet all written out with various drug weights and prices so I could haggle smack prices and price break points in Espanol if I had to. Now the cops had my wallet with a huge English to Espanol drug lingo/conversion sheet. It was the weekend and since it was booked into evidence I couldn't get it out anyway until Monday, so we just turned around and kept driving back to MPLS.

I had no money from that point on, and the drugs ran out, and Bob and I were well beyond our fraying points with each other so we just gunned that Jeep for home and kept driving without talking to each other. We drove solid from the Pacific Ocean to MPLS without stopping except for gas and food. It was crazy, and now looking back the whole thing was like a hallucination. I've driven cross-country a handful of times but have never experienced anything like that whole insane trip. I wish I would have documented it better. It's a miracle we didn't get killed or arrested and I don't think I would tempt fate by attempting a cosmic journey like that again, but it was something that I'll always have. Tripping all the way across this grand country and getting my mind thoroughly blown. Even the dark aftermath where Bob and I didn't talk to each other for years has all blown away in the wind. We did way too many drugs so the outcome was inevitable, but the fallout from the whole thing had an interesting result. Bob ended up leaving MPLS and went to Cambria where he found, if not his own personal nirvana, at least a better way station on the road of life.

Now, with nothing tying me down here in MPLS now except ghosts and economic circumstances, I'm psyched for the second leg of this cosmic road trip. I'm going to soak up vibes regarding where to start the rest of my life. Next year I'm going to who knows where, but it will be somewhere and it will be beautiful. It might be desert or somewhere on the Pacific Coast Highway or up in the redwood forests, I'll know when I feel it. The drugs can't happen again, I don't think we'd get out of it alive, but at least this time I'll be taking pictures and documenting it.

flying on the ground is wrong

Word to the wise if you have vacation time coming, there's a wicked airline price war going on right now. I was expecting the usual $350 to $400 plus tax for a round trip to LA from MPLS, which is about the same more or less that flights to NYC or SF usually have costed me. I just scored a round trip through Orbitz in the first half of October to LAX with a stop in Denver each way for $150.00!!! Shit. Maybe I should end my moratorium on talking to my parents, if I played nice and sucked up to to them maybe I can snag the cash to go to Amsterdam or Paris. And never come back.

minneapolis pride parade 2009

Went to the Pride Parade with Heather holy shit I'm coming on drank some cough syrup now it's hard to type the Pride Parade and the Mayday Parade are ones I try to get to every year blah and yeah yeah yeah. This is off topic and juvenile but I hate the bands Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear or whatever the fuck they call themselves and hearing that goddamn faux Beach Boys mashup fake techno-sounding happy happy bullshit. Those kinds of happy trippy hipster kids need to get hit on the head with a hammer a few times, pound a little dirt and cynicism into their skulls. Many more pix if you follow the Flickr trail and I'm anxiously waiting on Liz The Who Cares Girl for for some photographic goodness from the Seattle Pride Parade.