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So as you may have noticed, I've been traveling a hell of a lot lately. It's been a few years since I had to do the road warrior thing and frankly, it's not as bad as it used to be, if only because I have (some) more control over my time. I have a bunch of air-travel survival rules, one of which is, never check luggage. Not only does it add time to your trip (and, nowadays, fees), it adds the risk of having your luggage disappear. And sometimes that's not even the airline's fault: I am in Seattle today thanks to a last-minute phone call that I got while waiting for my flight home to JFK. If I had checked luggage it would probably still be circling the carousel in Queens, and I'd be trying to find a clothing store open at 8am instead of drinking coffee and puttering online. Anyway, the moronic rules banning liquids in carry-on luggage have made this more difficult. I could never decide whether to put little bottles in a plastic bag, or just buy the necessaries when I got where I was going. The former is wasteful and stupid and is one more thing to worry about at the security line and I am all about getting through that nonsense as quickly as possible. The latter saves time at the airport but adds it later on, and it's also expensive and wasteful. I have finally found the right answer: no liquid toiletries. Basically you have to go back to the early part of the last century for the answers: tooth powder and shaving soap. I made my own tooth powder using this recipe (I left out the lemon peel since I was in a hurry and it's just for flavoring). You can order shaving soap (and the other accoutrements) from a few places online, and it does make for a more pleasant (and more environmental) experience than canned shaving cream. So with those two additions to my travel kit, I have been able to go straight through security without having to open any bags or take anything out that could get left behind or forgotten, and go straight from the plane to a cab or rental car without riding the luggage carousel. Tags: travel
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 Finally back home after a solid week of traveling, beginning with Fran and Leigh's lovely wedding in Florida and continuing with a week of work meetings in Seattle, which was colder than Florida but warmer than here. One of my colleagues who'd lived there for years took me over to the Olympic Sculpture Park, a miniature Storm King Mountain right on the waterfront, and I took a walk over the unimpressive Experience Music Project / SF Museum. The most impressive thing at the museum was the handwritten manuscript of Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. Yes, that's right. He wrote all three of those murder-weapon-sized novels with a fountain pen. On the flight home, I lucked into a remake of The Taking Of Pelham 1-2-3 (first time I've ever taken JetBlue and clearly I have been missing something). As I've written before, the original is one of the great NYC films of all time and far outclasses its many later imitations, including every film Quentin Tarantino has ever made. So I was not necessarily optmistic about the remake but it was quite enjoyable. Denzel Washington and John Travolta have great chemistry together, maybe even better than Robert Shaw and Walter Matthau in the original. Combining the characters of the cop (Matthau) and the original dispatcher (played by Tom Pedi) was a bit unrealistic, and avoided the shock of Caz Dolowicz's death. But it also focused on the magnificent dynamic between Washington and Travolta. And James Gandolfini ("I left my Rudy Giuliani suit at home") was superb as Mayor Bloomberg. As a lifelong New Yorker and transit buff, however, I couldn't help but notice the vast numbers of completely unnecessary factual errors in the film. The original was fiction, but based rather firmly in reality. The remake is almost complete nonsense, starting with the very opening scene, where train dispatcher Garber switches an R train to the Q tracks at 34th so he can send it to Queens on the F line. A minor point? Yes. But why put that level of detail into the film if you're just going to get ridiculously wrong? Anyone who's ever even been in that station knows those tracks aren't even on the same level. ( A Comedy Of Errors ) But it was great fun. I think my favorite line was this exchange between Travolta and Washington: "We all owe god a death. We're all going to the same place." "Where's that? Jersey?" Tags: photos, travel
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 I had a couple of very productive days in Seattle and San Jose, and then yesterday drove up to San Francisco. Even though I've been coming out to the West Coast pretty frequently the last few months, I haven't been back to this city for some years. I love it; I could live here. And I don't say that often. I'm staying in the financial district, next door to the TransAmerica building, ironically on the site of a saloon in a novel I've been reading that concludes during the start of the Gold Rush. I wandered around North Beach yesterday, eating a sorbet in the other Washington Square, buying books at City Lights and browsing used record stores, and then, even though it's touristy, I had dinner at the Stinking Rose. Where, as they say, "We season our garlic with food." A colleague introduced me to the joys of Dungeness crabs. They're a large species named after a city in Washington, generally found only on the west coast. And they are very good to eat. Especially with garlic. And very messy. They bring you a bib before you start and hot towels and half a lemon when you're done. Then I sat outside at a cafe across the street from a whole line of strip joints and listened to the Chinese Music Orchestra, which included Chinese instruments but also a cello, a banjo, and a hammered dulcimer. I am writing this in my hotel room, looking straight at Coit Tower, and I'm leaving for the airport soon. You can see more crappy cell phone photos here. Tags: photos, travel
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Seattle broke its all-time heat record yesterday, with temperatures breaking 100 degrees. I was there and I can report that, yes, it was hot. Last winter I was amused, while visiting my brother in Tucson, at the local paper being filled with stories of how to deal with record-breaking cold temperatures (ie, below freezing). The Seattle Times here (sadly, the other local paper, the Post-Intelligencer, is one of the daily newspaper casualties) was full of articles like Northwesterners not acclimated for record heat, Heat exhaustion or stroke: What to look for, what to do, Tips to stay cool, safe in the scorching heat and (of course) Dog day cares keeping pets cool in heat. I would normally be excited to be in the presence of history. I would love to have happened to be in a sports bar as Mark Buehrle threw his perfect game last week. But I really could have done without this one, not least because a town where 103-degree temperatures are unheard of is also a town where air-conditioning isn't ordinarily necessary. Or very good. But I didn't have to suffer that much in the heat. I was mostly suffering in Seattle traffic, a delayed flight, and a wait for a car at the San Francisco airport at the Avis counter, where the motto seemed to be, "We try? Hardly!" I will be glad to be home tonight. Tags: travel
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I'm staying tonight in a new hotel in Lancaster, PA, that was built around a couple of historic houses, one of which was apparently a station on the Underground Railroad.  The houses are literally incorporated into the hotel and conference center in a very strange way; one house kinda just sits in the lobby of the hotel, and the other's basement is exposed through glass, where signage hints that there was a tunnel from the house to a local tavern that was used to hide African Americans on the run from slavery. The houses are part of the Stevens and Smith Historic Site, and a $20 million "educational and interprative complex" is planned for the site, but so far, what they have is a couple of odd exhibits in an otherwise standard convention center. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I guess it's good they didn't tear these houses down, but it feels so casual and disrespectful and out of context. I am just picturing convention-goers exiting the "Freedom Hall" (I swear, that's the name of the conference room across from the Underground Railroad exhibit) after some mind-numbing keynote speech by a horrid motivational speaker or a big-shot in the eastern Pennsylvania widget industry.  They've got their badges around their necks, they're checking their voice mail or looking through their goodie bags to see if there's at least a decent pen or something, and oh gee, look at that brick cistern terrified people used to hide in a few hundred years ago. Yeah, cool, is there going to be an open bar at WidgetCo's event tonight? (Or, in my case, gee, weird, let me take a couple of cell phone pictures and go back to the room to do email.) To be fair, it's just opened and there is more work to be done. And this is a vast improvement over destroying it altogether as has been done too often to historic places like this. But, it's ... strange. Tags: photos, travel
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I spent Tuesday in Texas. We had crossed the state line from Louisiana the night before, stopped at San Antonio early in the morning, and by breakfast time we were in Del Rio, the "queen city of the Rio Grande." We spent the rest of the day rolling across ranch country, cactus flats and through small faded towns like Langtry, Sanderson, and Alpine. It seemed like a minor-key kinda day. The vastness of the state is overwhelming; it's harsh and beautiful and unforgiving. Whatever you think of Texas politics and Texas culture, you cannot deny the power and the history of the state and the incredible fortitude of the people who created it. It has a bloody and brutal history, but so does this entire country; as always, Texas did it bigger and badder, but there's a little Texas in all of us. Today's song is "Texas (Sun to Sun)." Before the advent of the eight-hour workday, agricultural workers who worked from sunrise to sunset were often said to work "sun to sun." The sun rose and set on the train today without us ever leaving the state. ( Texas (Sun to Sun) )Tags: photos, songs, travel
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I'm freeloading on someone's wireless connection during a stopover in El Paso, Texas. The train is running a bit ahead of schedule so we're sitting at the platform for a little while. I took a walk alongside the train, and it's pretty windy but much warmer than in New York right now. So I'm taking the opportunity to upload yesterday's episode of song-blogging, a new song about New Orleans and Louisiana. On Monday, I left New Orleans on the Sunset Limited, which goes due west across Louisiana, through New Iberia (home of Dave Robicheaux), Lafayette (hometown to some of my favorite Cajun bands), Lake Charles and then on to Beaumont, Texas (a trip immortalized on Lucinda Williams' Car Wheels On a Gravel Road). The extremes of history and music and beauty on the one hand, and poverty and toxic waste and corruption on the other, inspired today's song, "Sunset Limited." Playing faux-accordion on a D harmonica, and for the first time on this trip mixing in some Photo Booth performance footage with video and photographs shot from the train (and, in the second half of the third verse, Sunday night in the French Quarter), I put this video together on Monday evening. I didn't invent the word "song-blogging" but I can't find any instances of it used as a verb meaning writing songs as real-time documentation. It's very different from any songwriting I've done before -- it resembles the speed-writing of February Album Writing Month but the pace is faster and the songs are more immediate, about the things I've been thinking about on that day's travels. If I'd gone to Louisiana or New Orleans on a different day, or if the paper I was reading at Cafe du Monde had not had a huge story on the levee reconsctruction (or lack thereof) I might have written a different song. Making the accompanying videos is a great way to illustrate the trip and, I think, more interesting than the usual photostream on Flickr. I mean, I'm doing that too, but lots of photos are in the videos that won't be on Flickr either because they aren't that good or because there's just too damn many of them. "Sunset Limited" also illustrates a few of the problems with doing this. The performances are usually first or second takes of brand new songs and, as a consequence, are pretty rough. And, since I cannot write and take pictures at the same time, I sometimes end up writing about things I didn't manage to photograph. There are no photographs to go with the verses about the dog on the chain and the kids playing outside, but they went by too fast for me to put down the guitar and get the camera. Observant people will notice two things about the video of me playing the song on the train. Yes, the video is flipped, since Apple's PhotoBooth application behaves like a mirror, and yes, the train is moving very slowly; we ran into some traffic and while I would have preferred to have the scenery flying by, I was running out of daylight. And no, the video is not lip-synched, but like every Apple application, iMovie has some brilliant features and some staggering deficiencies, one of which is that you cannot intersperse photos with video and keep the soundtrack of the video running. So I had to split them up, and then synch the video back to the sound by hand. ( Sunset Limited )Tags: songs, travel
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I'll be leaving New Orleans on the Sunset Limited in a few hours, after a one-night stopover here. I haven't been here since 2005 and I have to say, it's pretty sad. I have always had mixed feelings about this town: As a musician I feel compelled to like it, but the loutish tourism, horrifying poverty and racism, and terrible crime rates aren't exactly attractive. Katrina seems to have destroyed a lot of small businesses that have been replaced by corporate chains and businesses desperate for tourist cash. Kinda like Ghouliani did to Times Square. Unlike the other times I've been here -- my first trip was in 1988 with some college friends -- I couldn't even find any decent music in the French Quarter. Walter "Wolfman" Washington was playing out at the Maple Leaf, but with no car and not a lot of time (and 35-degree weather) I wasn't in the mood for that trip. I walked up and down Bourbon and Royal Streets and heard almost nothing but disco and club music, or dreadful rock-blues cover bands playing way too loud. There weren't even any street musicians, but perhaps it was too cold for them. I finally happened on a Bourbon Street bar called Huge Ass Beers (I give them credit for at least not trying to be falsely authentic) with a couple of guys playing blues in the back. Nothing to write home about, and I didn't get their names, but they were having a good time and so were the other folks in the bar, mostly a hardcore band from San Diego and their girlfriends. This morning I had coffee and beignets at Cafe du Monde, which is at least still there and intact, and walked around a little more. Even in the heart of the French Quarter there are a lot of boarded-up storefronts and for-rent signs. I'll be glad to get back on the train. Tags: photos, travel
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The gig yesterday at the Woodsmen's Festival was great fun. The day started off with a vicious thunderstorm and torrential rain, but cleared into a near-perfect day by the time we did the sound check at 9:30. I played with the Belles Trio, who were alternating sets with two other bands including some other friends of ours from the Philadelphia area, and it was just a great day of listening to and playing music outdoors in a pretty spot. We had a decent-sized crowd, but nothing like the chock-full bleachers around the field where the competitions were happening. The chainsaw races were loud, but the timber-felling was truly impressive. Not only do these guys bring down a sizeable tree (actually a log stood on end) with frightening dispatch, most of them land it on a small peg -- it's not just about speed, but also about accuracy. This area of Pennsylvania (we were in Potter County) once had the largest sawmill in the country, and almost all the trees in the area are less than a hundred years old since just about every tree was cut down back in the 19th century. There are tours to go see the very few old-growth trees left. Apparently one of the reasons old trees were preserved, in small groves of a dozen or so, was in case of fire. You needed to save enough logs to rebuild your house if it burned down. I spent today driving down through Pennsylvania and Maryland to West Virginia, for Old-Time Week at the Augusta Heritage Festival. In other words, I'll be surrounded by fiddles and banjos for a week. Luckily, there's at least one other harmonica player here. Time and connectivity allowing, I'm posting photos to Flickr. Tags: gigs, photos, travel
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 My job took me out to the west coast last week, starting off in San Diego and finishing up in Silicon Valley, with the weekend between to drive up the coast. I've driven the Pacific Coast Highway once before, in 2002, but starting further north. It's a stunning drive, interrupted every fifteen minutes by the need to pull off and just look at the ocean. Also, a reminder that I'll be doing my own songs tonight as part of the song circle at the Kings County Opry at Freddy's Bar and Backroom, 6th Avenue and Dean Street, in Brooklyn, starting about 8.30 p.m. ( Lots of photos below )Tags: photos, travel
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steelbrassnwood's journal
I'll post more about the show in Toronto when some of the pictures, sound and video start coming in (I think this may be the best-documented show Mike and I have ever played) but in the meantime, I'm posting some pictures from my stop at Niagara Falls (on both sides of the border) on the way home. It was a cold and rainy day, but in a way that made it more magical. The main problem with these photos is that the most powerful experience of the Falls is not the visuals, but the sound and the vibration and the power that you feel.
On Friday we went to La Fiesta de los Vaqueros, the Tucson Rodeo. I've never been to a rodeo before and I have to say, aside from some qualms about animal cruelty, it was much more impressive than I thought it would be. Especially the kids, most of them under 10. (To the left, a real live rodeo clown, who thankfully had very little to do.)
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