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.

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.

Leaving Los Vegas, the radio warns of the danger of ‘Progressive Creationists’, lefty nuts who don’t accept the literal truth of a seven day creation, dangerous ‘liberals’ who presumably don’t consider the consumption of shell fish mortally sinful. On NPR, a baseball umpire talks of paying dues in the little league, at $12k a year, as if promotion were inevitable, as if penury were a noble investment in some grand bottomless pyramid scheme. On a petrol pump in Ashfork south east of Vegas, the screen says ‘God bless and support our troops’, as the black blood of christ fills up the belly of our car.
The motel we stay at has a special rate for pets. Technically you, Buba, Conchita and Dolly could have quite the evening for $41.50 inc. tax. On the TV, blinking sleepless big screen local news, a church is being audited by the IRS for giving anti-war sermons before the first Persian Gulf distraction – seems it’s goodbye charitable status. They should build a Jesus casino here in the desert, what an apposite synthesis that would be, with dancing topless nuns, and lazarus slot machines; the lord givith and he sure as fuck taketh away.

Where Nevada is composed of sand and dust, and the crumbling hillocks of eroded mountains, Arizona is flat plain grassland, and tight wind raked Utah Juniper and Gamble Oak; the state is dotted with small bright prosperous towns with tacky industrial museums and tourist attractions. It’s roads are endless straits, their vanishing points wet mirages and the heat haze reflections of distant automobiles. As we pass Grand Canyon airport, two miles outside the park, a vast forest fire – a managed burn – billows in the distance and the trees and land turn red in the smoke filtered light.

The majority of tourists today are Japanese, not just elderly couples but punk teenagers and even a couple of brown cowled nuns of some religion – neither Shinto, nor Buddhist – I can’t identify, wandering gentiley around the interpretative centre. The hole itself, when it comes, is much as you’d expect – five thousand feet above the Colorado river at it’s base, and ten miles form South to North rim wall – you stand facing an incomprehensible gulf. The canyon rises out of igneous rock, melted and resolidified crust, up to metamorphic layers fused under enormous heat and pressure, to once living layers of sedimentary sandstone and bright angel shale, cliffs moss spotted with Pinion Pine, thriving out of near dry rock; and at top limestone, eroded like the Burren into smooth lips and darkened hollows. This network of interlinked fissures, drilled out by the Colorado river – a brown sediment rich torrent, dropping fourteen thousand feet through the swollen dome of the Colorado plateau; has been eaten out by multiple oceans and twist cracked by plate tectonics and battered by monsoon seasons and freeze thawed by freakish diurnal and seasonal temperatures, weakening its underlying layers till they collapsed to widen the fissure further on either side. Geologists estimate it’s age at six million years, but this vast tare in the skin of the earth reveals rocks up to a couple of billion years old. From where I stand I can see 94 miles along the winding peaks and troughs of the Canyon, despite pollution – as in Yosemite, sulfate particles hang a haze over more distant vistas, a weird blur to Irish eyes.

We move to Hopi point for sunset, below us the Colorado river clearly visible for the first time – thick and mucky, cutting a dirty crooked path through the canyon. It gets cold quick, my breath steaming as the sun hits the lip of the Canyon, and close by a baby boomer gloats to his wife that after global warming’s wiped us all away, this canyon will still be here, and I wonder if it will open up to swallow Arizona and the sad hot reaches of North West, and the photography nuts are out in force, yelling degrees and compass points and checking their watches, ‘Get the edge of the sunset..Did you get that? That was spiritual..That’s gonna be my computer wallpaper.’ Afterward, driving toward Phoenix, when I close my eyes I can still see the Canyon – no specific view, but an amalgam, gray coloured cliffs crocheted and wrinkled, casting blue shadows on the earth below, crinkling into infinity.

When we arrive, Phoenix Arizona is torn up by the installation of a billion dollar light rail system, one I’m told would have cost a 20th the price 30 years ago; the city centre a dead zone of corporate monoliths – Price Waterhouse Cooper, Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan; Scottsdale and Tempe the only signs of life in this second largest US sprawl.

At the hostel, a strange creepy place in a bad Latin ghetto; I talk for hours to a mysterious nomad, with degrees in psychology and philosophy, about Herman Hesse and Sam Kinison and the benefits of flossing, even after they turn out the lights and we stand in the front porch, him like an old oaken Indian, his face changing in the darkness, one moment sagacious, the next somehow wicked.

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.

Next day you hike eight miles uphill, bushwhacking work at eight thousand feet and up, and face the Half Dome, a great granite hemisphere which seems shorn in two so that one side overlooks Yosemite valley almost five thousand feet below. The last four hundred meters you climb with the aid of two cables, loosely hammered into the sheer rock face – cables you drag yourself up whilst other visitors on their way down swing past grinning ‘nearly there’s', as you prepare to loose your grip and plummet. At the top you collapse, breathless for the hundred and first time that day, too empty to do more than stare into the perfectly blue sky. When finally you move, you cross to the domes northwest face, to twitter at the edge in waves of shock at what you’re doing, leaning over and further and closer to the drop, leaning with a gusty wind behind, inches from certain death.

The place is like Everest, superficially intimidating, yet often visited. To you it seems epic, like the roof of the world. Near Himalayan views in every direction somehow provide the energy to start down, sliding backward, one hand on either steel cable, rappelling without a safety. Then the decent, eight miles of scrag and step and broken dusty path, and a Tennessee racist in a home made ranger uniform ranting about ‘the blacks’, down to fresh water, stolen and no doubt parasitic, from the Vernal waterfall, and down into the sleep of the dead.

Next afternoon a detour to Bodie ghost town, the partly restored but mostly ramshackle remnants of a 19th century mining community, where you gawp at rusting model T’s and in the windows of school rooms and bars and at the mine rusting and still – the buildings far apart, standing proud against the desert and the cool unfeeling plains.

….

In the desert night falls, and I take over the driving. Licenses, who needs em? The road appears, post by reflective post, straights and dips and tight turns, death Vally invisible on either side. We stop the car and I walk out into the desert, to where the road disappears, and look up into the sky, still a little red from the cities ahead and behind, but alive with the streak of milky way and the dust of blinking stars which gradually develop colors.

Back in the car, we see what looks like Vegas, far ahead of schedule, and wake up suddenly, shaking and straightening our seat backs, but something strange happens. Instead of congealing into a city, the mess of lights separates as we approach, becomes buildings isolated on patches of dirt, with roofs lit as if to impersonate a place; becomes casinos large and cold, but certainly no Vegas. This is Parump, a shadow of a town, a slim satellite imitation of the city in the desert, a place at night that has no purpose, save to lurk on the outskirts of nowhere, shining a fools light into the desert.

When finally we hit ‘the real’ Vegas, at 4am, having driven 300 miles overnight, having overshot Death Valley altogether, having found no room, no cheap room anyhow, and travelled on and on, me clutching my discount travel guide like a talisman to light the way; it’s Friday night in the city, and Bike fest is on, but on our third try we find a place, ‘Motel’, clean and quiet with beds bigger than we need and a gigantic television.

Vegas is truly postmodern, the photos you take are more real than the place itself, the concrete mask of a city literally planted in the sand, even after all this time, even after the Mormon’s and the mob and a ‘restortification’ so complete that ‘Sin City’ is a trade mark, and cannot be used.

Caesar’s palace is a city onto itself – if you can stomach the kitsch marble statues, painted night skies and immaculate designer stores, the palace has a certain charm.
What’s impossible to enjoy about every Vegas casino, are the dead eyed slot junkies hunched into their one arm bandits, jacked in via credit card to one, two or even three machines at once – compulsively tapping at blinking keys like skinners rats.

In Vegas, perhaps more than anywhere in America, one experiences a bizarre deja vu – these mean dusty streets, these glittering lights, these laughing shouting carousing b boys and homies and preppy college kids – we’ve seen them all before, bigger and louder and iconographically crystallized in moving images. Vegas really is just any other city, just a sad nest of addiction and prostitution with a thin skein of plastic glamour and aspiration; an opulent pimp, the city flicks its head and shakes its swollen belly, thrusting its hips into the desert, immune to its inadequacy.

Walking down Main street (not the main street, that’s the blvd) Los Vegas on Saturday night I stumble onto Fremont street, a boulevard which stretches three blocks, enclosed up to the centre of the city. Tonight its Bike Fest – always in America such denotative names – and an Ozzy tribute band, not Ozzy as he was, but the Ozzy of today, a rambling shambles of a tribute, which is to say an accurate one, and up further on Main street this place, a bail bond internet cafe, and that is all, and pictures..They will have to wait.

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 cool used to be’.

We rise the F-line tram down Market St for a dollar fifty, passing Halloween headquarters open two months before Halloween and the eponymous Apple store and my first sky scrapers, peaked funky glass structures clustered on the corners of the angled streets.

Everywhere hundreds of homeless – I later learn San Francisco has the highest ‘Bum’ population of any US city – with carts, on bikes, on foot, usually black, often obviously mentally ill. San Francisco is infamous for being ‘bum friendly’ i.e.: not as callous as other US cities – there are shelters and sometimes clement parks which may be slept in, there are free meals on certain days if one is hip to them, there is I’d guess a certain solidarity. It can’t last, one can feel the tension mounting – between the cities evident and traditional tolerance and the sheer numbers of angry, alienated, disenchanted ‘economically unviable’, roaming the civic centre with the transvestites and drug dealers.

San Francisco’s population seems equal parts White and Asian, with relatively few Blacks and Hispanics, and far fewer openly gay couples than one would imagine from the cities reputation. Although SF is car friendly – to the extent that limited free parking is available anywhere – the best way to see it is by bike, so we rent mountain bikes from Blazing Saddles at the pier – a tourist trap worse than Venice beach, and cycle up through the city on a bright calm breezy day when the fog has lifted and the traffic lightened. The roads are bike friendly and with a little common sense and a little acting like a car, all the city can be traversed this way.

After an hours climb up what feel like 70 degree streets we reach Height St and speed across to the corner of Height and Asbury where thirty nine odd years ago something happened. A booming economy and post war generation, disenchanted with a war and government and way of life and exited by the beats and the yippies and the factory and the British invasion, tried an experiment in living consciously and with conscience. It’s a failed experiment as the hip boutiques and smoke shops and trendy Eurasian restaurants testify, but this city and the world still quake from it a little – at the bravery and naivety and in disappointment at its end.
Further up Height we find Kid Robot, a hip toy store which stocks little limited edition wonders – Japanese influenced plastic monsters and megamen – from a couple of bucks to a couple of thousand, and Amoeba records, one of the largest independent record stores in the world, where I go crazy and buy more CD’s than anyone can rightly justify.

Above Castro, the famous epicentre of gay life in SF, and by implication the world, we stand on a rocky outcrop and overlook this city – wrapped around by the icy blue bay and shimmering colonial houses with great bay windows right down to the piers and harbours and ships gliding and settling in to the ocean.
We ride down into Castro, tiny and welcoming – not the intimidating explicit burlesque that I’d expected, and of course I get a flat and we frantically run across the city, Francis cycling ahead to get our car and pull back across Fulsome and toss my bike in the boot and race down to an expensive car park and frantically search out the bike ship to return our machines and finally at last without a minute to spare, meet new friends at the berth of the blue and gold line ferry to Alcatraz.

I wouldn’t bother with the rock, its small and unimpressive and the much vaunted tour is short and unexciting. The few tales of the place, one bloody battle, one Indian occupation and one successful escape are unenthusiastically reported by a jaded national parks guide and for the first time I truly feel like a tourist looking into Al Capone’s second floor cell and listening to the kitsch clinking sound effects on my complimentary head set, missing the party boats cruising the lit up jewel of San Francisco bay.

Tonight we reached Yosemite, but to hear of that, and our journey here, you’ll have to wait, as the Ausies waiting for one of the two computers in a hundred miles already hate me.

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..

The Flight over..

Mudflats of what I guess was Hudson bay, stretching into infinity, a mottles dirt brown hide of mostly land and lakes then mostly lakes and land. The only signs of human life the straight cold bones of oil pipelines.
Later, the regimented rectangles, quarries and sparse highways of the flyover farmsteads, middle America – the open expanse of the protestant dream.
Wyoming roads, roman straight, curving only around the sectioned flecks of urban conurbations, all of it to the haze of cloud and horizon, vast and thoroughly explored.
Utah mountains and deserts like the crumbling edges of gods sandbox, white desert runways and strange regimented salt flats and at last after a crooked tangle of highway…green. Green and the great still explosions of towering Cumulus and Cumulonimbus, white thick and beneficent. Closer to LA, the San Gabriel mountains are speckled poppy seed bagels interspersed with flat plains and here and there sandstone red, and soft grey and black shading and the water courses begin, great blue crooked fingers whetting the desert on either shore to a white salty skein, and in the distance the high plains rise, canyon country. A vast beauteous wasteland, from up here, no towns or roads at all.

LA..

A dusty low city, stretching out in Boulevards – Sunset, Century, Ventura, arcing back around the coast to the vast amorphous LAX, and up into Hollywood blvd and Beverley hills and the Hollywood hills overlooking the city, mansions set right against the road, carved out of the muddy hills, with clear views of the sprawl below.

Our hotel, the backpackers paradise was clean, but crowded, set off Century blvd in Inglewood, a run down Hispanic neighborhood. We met a group of Irish who’d never left the place in their three days in LA, preferring to sit by the pool and drink $14 pitchers of strawberry iced margarita. At $8 a night, and with the best French toast I’ve ever eaten, I can definitely recommend it. Our first night we walked about, feeling brave, past stores with bizarrely descriptive names like ‘Department Store’ and ‘Cheap Food’. Next day we hit Venice beach, and cycled up to Santa Monica. The boardwalk is full of tattoo parlours and boutique clothes stores and ice-cream stores. Santa Monica pier, as featured in the finale of ‘Falling Down’, is a wonderful old wooden construction, with nails jutting up through the floor and a miniature fairground, ferris wheel and amusements – it looks out onto the pacific, and little groups of Asian tourists stand taking pictures of the sea.
On the way to Hollywood we stopped in UCLA, an amazing campus, sandstone buildings surrounded by palm trees, with steps rising up Powell Library and Royce Hall, looking down onto intramural field and Drake stadium.
On Hollywood blvd we walked to the Kodak theatre and Grouman’s Chinese theatre. The boulevard is lined with the tackiest eateries and electronics stores, sex shops and tourist traps. Near by on Sunset things get more upscale, with boutiques and clubs like the infamous Viper room. Alas we didn’t get to check it out, or to sample the delights of ‘Hollywood Hooch’, instead driving up into the Hollywood hills, the sound of the BBC proms blaring, to explore neighborhoods protected by roving bands of heavily armed mercenaries, stopping only to look over the city of LA, great flat suburbs lit in rows into the distance, and streams of red and yellow highway traffic intersecting on the 405. Finally we crashed from jetlag and the heat and bright of the day, back to the Paradise for strawberry margaritas.

Next day we set out for the ruins of Watts and Compton, expecting scenes of horrific urban degradation – what we found – at 10.30am – was a set of quiet rundown neighborhoods superficially no more intimidating than Cherry Orchard or the Crumlin road. One hairy moment did occur, when we took a wrong turn in Compton, and got on a street where the right and left lane are divided by a pipe, and got our way blocked by a stopped truck – a perfect pace to ambush a pair of pasty middle class Irish ghetto tourists. We managed to fight our way out.

Route 1..

After the richly appointed laid back hills of Malibu on the Pacific Highway, where houses cling to hills overlooking flocks of surfers hitting the first rough waves since Long Beach, Route 1 brings you past your first trailer parks and flat grape plantations tended by Mexican immigrants.

On a map LA is surrounded by gray blotches of military bases with names like Edwards, twenty nine palms and Chocolate Mountain – perhaps it’s a coincidence that these enormous temples of military might – together amounting to more surface area than LA itself, surround the city in a semi circle, as if poised to consume it.
I’m struck again and again as we pass hoardings and imitation 50′s cafes, and new GM owned Chevrolets with retro styling, how America is a nation consuming and reconsuming the myth of itself – like a great loud advert, a curtain behind which is no wizard but only a wizened old uncle sam.
On the mountain roads of route 101 – which remind us of the ring of Kerry, sheer drops on the left and overhanging granite outcrops on the right – we stop to ascend a waterfall, a sweaty hour long hike into the deciduous frosted hills, part of a forty mile trail.

On Route 1 no hitchhikers lie in wait, and few cars overtake us or block our way, just the Doors on the stereo, the road and Monterey 67 miles into the future. Eager not to miss our check in, we speed round these sheer one eighty bends and past the quaint and welcoming wooden motels of Big Sur.

Monterey is a small city, a sort of south western Dawson’s creek, with a wide fishing boat scattered Warf, and a center of bright wooden colonial buildings and bright tall shining white Americans – many of whom look like they’ve left the local naval school for an evening on the town. We arrive at night, in the middle of an annual hot rod tournament, heavy growling automobiles crawling down Fremont street, low riders and classic Chevy’s and modified SUV’s and quirky strange combinations of all three – we watch out the window of a Japanese restaurant as blondes holler and leap at the sight of these great finned phallus’s.

On Route 1 again, after a breakfast of free pancakes in our overpriced but comfortable hostel, we’re on the road again – on the radio Christian rock blares without irony ‘I get down on my knees’ and ‘Trout fishing in America’ croon in faux Appalachian excitement ‘My hair had a party last night’.

In Santa Cruise a homeless man on crutches looking like a hobo from the 30′s holds a sign for ‘a little help’ and asks if I want him to stand in front of the wooden city sign.

San Francisco..

We hit San Francisco, the foggy city – no one warned me – and cross the Golden Gate Bridge, the bay invisible below. We find Golden Gate Park, back across on the southern shore – $5 the poorer, and catch the last hour of a free music festival and Thai red tofu and mango juice and friendly kids from Berkley and UCLA, and Spearhead singing ‘Power to the Peaceful’ to 80,000 freaks and hippies and joyful stoned onlookers – the smell of bud and incense hanging its own comforting fog over the valley, hemmed in by trees in either side.

Our hostel in SF is horrific – special mention to the Globe – avoid – no kitchen, rooms like prison cells, tiny run down bathrooms, 2 aging PC’s with a 15 minute limit for the illusion of net access and no parking for our car which we’ll have to bounce around for the next three days. Apparently the area we walked through last night, civic street, the UN plaza and Tenderloin, was amongst the most dangerous in the city. This morning we pass a bum spitting on a small old Chinese man, yelling about immigrants, who threatens and follows us when I tell him to watch it. I’m suddenly glad of the pepper spray I picked up for five bucks on Venice Beach.