Barcelona from dbspin on Vimeo.
A few weeks ago I travelled to Barcelona, capitol of the Spanish province of Catalonia. On the last day, I cycled through the city and took a few low quality videos with my phone. These were too shoddy to post anywhere, so I had a play with them in final cut. The track is ‘The Weight of My Words’, by King of Convenience. Remixed by Fourtet. Most of these videos were taken in the cities oldest quarter, the Barri Gotic.

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

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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, …

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 …