i sleep the sleep of french angels in the pensione accommodations at casa del popolo and arise early to walk up st-laurent to meet dear anthony at the sparrow. this place has been on my mind since an unbelievable cheese sandwich in january, and i am excited to try their much lauded breakfast, which includes a pretty mindblowing crumpet, nevermind the homemade cream-filled donuts. i grab a “sausage roll” which turns out to be basically a sausage patty hamburger. then anthony and i are off to his cafe, myriade, so he can fix the espresso machine and i can get some work done, since, to a mix of relief and nuisance, the internets haven’t worked for me once yet anywhere in montreal. while i am in myriade they break there too. possibly the cosmos are trying to tell me i’m getting a permanent iphone-shaped-hand-claw.

magik markers and aaron and leah join for coffee and we realize that once again the clocks have broken and we’re running late to the next engagement, the last engagement, in western massachusetts. better to head to the border than dawdle for brunch, so we begin the long drive down rural quebec towards vermont armed with some fairmount bagels and root beer for sustainance. we do however eventually succumb to the combined biological needs of a bathroom break and a poutine break all at once.

we see a scary road sign indicating to us that a very ferocious wind monster will surely blow us off the road to a breezy death. i drew my interpretation of it since i didn’t get a photo, but there is also one on the internets here.

most of today’s drive is through vermont, which means frozen waterfalls, land whales, and other goodness. elisa is clipping coupons in the back of the minivan, and we are listening to neil young as we drive through the mountains. pete is keeping a tour diary on the surfaces of a manilla folder by the way. it is a way way better tour diary than this one.

palmer

we arrive in palmer, mass., and commence to looking for the diamond junction bowling lanes. it is right in the wee downtown, and we load into the video arcade area and eat some pizza. the bowling alley has an addams family pinball in great shape, and i play this til the experimental cymbal player starts up and i need to show some respect. a belated birthday carrot cake is produced for john shaw, who was already living the rock and roll life on the auspicious day itself, and friends fill up the bowling place, everything is really pretty great and hey, has anyone seen elisa’s guitar? looks like it didn’t make it here with us from montreal. fuuuuuuckkkkk.

bill nace steps up to loan her one and the last markers show i’ll see for awhile is three inches from my face in a video arcade, loud and crooked and immediate and grand despite all the jinxes put upon it. northampton wools close the night with a sound i’d like to try to type but can’t, and just like that’s it’s over, elisa’s in a car to hartford, john shaw wants to get home to his wife and beagledog, and pete and i are only a few hours from our homes in brooklyn but they are such rainy ones, so instead of driving all night we sleep.

though in the morning, it’s like brooklyn gets further away the harder we drive to it. dodging water over road, blowy bridges and high-speed garbage trucks, we finally make it to the five boroughs only to be greeted by the ancient infrastructure that sustains the largest city and the economic center of one of the most powerful countries in the world: a drawbridge is up on the hutchinson parkway. we wait and wait, and sit in traffic for another hour or more before there’s finally brooklyn. and so closes a rust belt dream trip with three of the raddest people i know. thank you for this time, magik markers! you are so good onstage and off, you always want to eat hot dogs, and you are good friends. see you at ben’s chili bowl next spring or sooner?

i’ve never slept with my head next to a traffic light before, but there’s a first time for everything: my amazing friend sasha’s living room window is wedged right up against a stoplight on bathurst street, though since i fall asleep with the birds this is less of an issue than one might think. there will be fewer than 20 waking hours to spend in toronto, so i get up soon after to breakfast with sasha and ride the subway around town in a daze.

there are a couple of things about visiting toronto that are weird: one is that it feels like i never really left, that nothing is that different and i should be able to just walk home from wherever i happen to be (sadly, inconveniently, no longer true.) the other thing is that it also feels like i never moved there at all: i truly see the city as i did before i spent that decade there, before the friends and the reading series and the crawling through unbuilt subways and the cancer hospital and the long spring walks and the meandering ontario drives, all of it. it’s a city i see as so new to me again, yet where i know my way around so well. it’s also, by the way, completely fucking freezing.

one way to handle having too many people you want to see is to just turn up at their homes or places of employ unannounced, and amazingly this works all day: my homies are at mercury espresso, sam james is at his new cafe, shawn and sebastian are at home in cabbagetown, peter and chris are at the comix shop, and on and on. i wander with shawn and bus and streetcar around the deceptively sunny toronto day and try to see who i can without being a rushed jerkface about it, settling in for a perfect dinner with kate and nousheen before heading to the garrison (which was a portuguese billiards hall last time i was in town) for the markers show.

nevermind the weird intersections that occur once i get there — canada is a real small country, as it turns out — but the night takes a weird emotional pitch that’s met perfectly by this show, tell me a story where you leave your home, ok.

the morning comes too quickly again, and there’s a little time to sneak out for a baked pancake and some peameal bacon with howie and susan, and pester the shopkeep at the monkey’s paw, the best store in toronto. if you don’t know it’s the best store in toronto, you’re a fool, plain and simple. i rejoin my marker people for the long drive to montreal, for which we will definitely need to lay in a supply of (west) indian burritos from the inexplicable queen west dive called “new york subway” (no relation to new york or any form of a subway, though it is next door to an actual subway sandwiches shop.) have i told you about this place? curried vegetables, roti filling style, topped with shredded lettuce and thousand island dressing and served as a burrito. okay? also, the place is gross, kinda. but the food is so delicious! it’s spicy, though — luckily we still have root beer!

we’re off to quebec, faced with the usual roadside distractions (pingle’s fun farm? nuclear info centre? ZooZ? corn maze? nudist colony? canoe museum? mrs mcgarrigle’s mustard hut?) and along the way we call up this dude adam, who our friend pete in brooklyn told us to contact. none of us remember why exactly we are supposed to contact him other than that we trust our source, and suddenly the friendly stranger has invited us over for dinner in his home, which — though this scenario might socially intimidate even me — turns out to be 100% the right thing to do, and not even because the food is great, just because you’re supposed to take chances like that since sometimes the person on the other end turns out to be completely awesome, which he does. thanks for dinner, adam!

casa del popolo is twice as big as last time i was inside, and the new stage room is great, perfect for magik markers and for a chilly quebec night like tonight (why, why did i think it would be spring here when i packed?) we’re back from adam’s sausage party in time for a petit pre-show chill out; leah quimby, former magik marker, is here, as is john’s bandmate in son of earth, aaron, who thinks montreal bagels taste like sand. the markers set is one of my favo(u)rites of the tour, raw and langourous in that slightly scary way connecting the old style markers vibe with the song-strewn one of now. pete seems to be grinning throughout, an energy only complemented when elisa’s fever breaks in the middle of the set. she’s on the edge of a sickness and her throat’s too sore to go on and on and on, suddenly partway through “bad dream” she’s gone from the stage like a walk-off home run, and nolan and shaw finish up in no hurry at all, a false ending or a false start of sorts that leaves the audience with no idea if the show is over. i like this grey area and i loved that show.

riding high on the fumes of that dangerously crowded show at bourbon street, the magik markers posse wants, we think, nothing more than to continue overeating after the gig, so we head to dirty frank’s, a hot dog restaurant/bar open late downtown that ron house hipped me to. this kind of joint, if it were in brooklyn, would be instantly ruined by any number of malevolent factors, but in a place like columbus or milwaukee, a paradise like this can thrive: a huge list of inventive — even multicultural! — hot dogs (sonoran? pacific northwest? all they need is scandinavian), great cheap beer list, mysterious array of slushie drinks, and good god, a side of salt and pepper fried leeks. no one is hungry either when they arrive or once we leave, but we are all somehow pleased and satisfied without passing out completely. word!

when we get back to bela’s house at a million o’clock, we find he is still awake, waiting up to tell us a joke, and show us to our sleeping places. i make a nest in his daughter’s play tent, and sleep wonderfully. mental note: tour with fairy princess tent.

pete and i are the two in the group up “early” and go for a nice spring walk to one thing i really want to do in columbus: visit a coffee shop opened a few years ago by a couple of guys from the late great band gaunt, named after one of their albums, and reputed to only operate on two french presses. the music side of me and the coffee side of me can’t think of anything more awesome than this, and it is even greater and more iconoclastic than i imagined, especially when they give me a super heavy “why are you taking pictures/who the fuck does this girl think she is” vibe upon my whippin out the camera. luckily i don’t get my ass kicked, and anyway the place is fantastic, they are great, etc. their off-the-gridness is refreshing after all the people (kind friends included) who corner me to talk about oh, i dunno, the hot new gossip in the grinder industry, when to tell the truth some mornings i’d just as soon have any kind of cup of coffee with rad people and talk about music and cars. i like being a nerd as much as the next guy, but this whole morning becomes one of the best parts of the trip.

me and p-unit hang out here a long time, probably longer than they want us to, and take jovan’s advice to eat at northstar, a local-sustainable-medium-fancy place where no one orders the thai-style turkey burger, and we hit the road to the mistake by the lake.

cleveland

“you’re sure you just want us to let you out anywhere random in the middle of downtown cleveland??” asks worried elisa, but, it’s fine, i assured her: i’m kinda into that. the band wants to check out the rock and roll hall of fame, but wandering downtown CLE sounds much awesomer to me, without much notion of a plan. i head towards lake erie — or at least i think i do — to check out the view. though i don’t get too far, i do get a splendid aerial view from a parking structure, and minutes later accidentally run into my friend todd from pittsburgh, at his hotel, which i have completely randomly sat down in the lobby of to steal internet for a moment. i had already planned to have dinner with todd before the markers show, but didn’t know where he was staying. after convincing him i wasn’t stalking him, we have a long amazing dinner conversation about family and christian bikers over sausage samplers and cheddar-stilton-ale soup at great lakes brewery, and then he whips out a free hotel rewards certificate he has and donates the slightly roadweary magik markers a deluxe hotel room for the night, blowing everyone’s mind kinda.

the venue is a crazy place in west cleveland called “now that’s class”, maybe i’m forgetting an ellipsis somewhere, and they feature a skate ramp, and microwave taquitos among other things. the show is great, and for some reason there are a lot of wasted people in cleveland on a wednesday night, both at the show and wandering around the middle of abandoned downtown alone in tuxedos. (hope you’re okay, dude.)

by dawn, the sense of spring we’d been building up recedes a little bit: ice drifts in on lake erie, and as that’s too cold to swim in i have a dip in the doubletree pool. we take a rainy excursion downtown to the world’s strangest remaindered book shop, make another great lakes/sausage stop, and we’re out.

buffalo

we’re well out of sheetz country now, and it’s a little weird to be back in new york state but nowhere near and nothing like home. an underrated place with what seems like a dim future, buffalo is still one of my favorites, a fondness long honed over my years in toronto, when this was the nearest version of “america” to me — not that it’s anything like the rest of the united states, just the kind i am the most familiar with. past the granaries that made it queen and the railway station i’ve crawled top to bottom of is humble downtown buffalo — wait, is that the clang of the light rail subway? — and we arrive at soundlab where we are immediately offered some “fuckin good root beer” by a guy who claims not to be the promoter or bartender but sort of also is. soundlab is buffalo’s experimental music home, and tonight there are legit, out, opening acts who seem to unify the room more than much of what we’ve seen so far. my storyteller friend scott comes out and it is awesome to see him, as well as a few other buffalo-proud and sorta mysterious types. here is a typical bustling street scene.

we load out and load up for canada, are gratefully and a little bewilderedly plied with about 300 more bottles of saranac root beer for the road, and get in the car just after john accidentally maybe alienates a dude (“he’s not gay, he just ran away when I kept saying ‘Homo F Kennedy’”) and we’re over the border in no time, immigration far more excited by the imminent arrival of larry king and whoopi goldberg (not together) into ontario than magik markers. looks like we’ll roll up on my former town at about 4:30 am, which is about as good a time to arrive someplace you’re unsure about as any.

day one: dc to pittsburgh

it’s not quite the dirty south, but what better way to start the spring than to inaugurate it with a magik markers tour, and an introductory meal of chili half-smokes at ben’s chili bowl, the official restaurant of the magik markers. hi guys! it is so nice to see you all again!

after ben’s we pile into cabin john’s van and make like bandits for the city of pittsburgh, a place i’ve neglected for too long. i am a big fan of pittsburgh (…it’s the milwaukee of the east!) and its hilly bricky industrial charms. as we wind our way through clara barton country i realize this tour must pass through breezewood, so naturally i am terribly excited about this and do my best to educate the band on breezewood’s finer points (“and and and there are only hotels there and no grocery stores and they don’t have a mayor and and….”) we get to breezewood and admire its vistas of interchange, multiple gaseteriums and ample choices for affordable lodging. the sky is always slate grey when i pass through this place, which just makes the shiny red fast food signs glow more brightly.

pittsburgh

our destination tonight is pittsburgh’s garfield arts center, a dirty place on a dirty stretch of penn avenue, patronized by a community of those with both good will and the ability to turn a blind eye to things like a cascading wall of festering mold. the show’s organizer is manny theiner, who has been running pittsburgh’s music scene for about a billion years now. he is even more iconoclastic than i remember. opening act has a gong which falls on the gongist partway through, but i guess that’s why they call it an arts center. markers are great despite the strange energy, though they’re not allowed to haul out their cover of “ramblin’ gamblin’ man” because of (visibly posted) house rules against playing cover songs, just in case manny is busted by ASCAP spies.

apparently last time the magik markers were in pittsburgh they stayed the night at a house that was such a party the memories are hazy (“i remember a pizzeria….and a balcony?”) but this time we stay at the house of the aforementioned opening act, in a gong-filled highland park home overlooking east pittsburgh which also includes a dog named chi. our generous hosts pressure cook us some rice and vegetables and we fall asleep at a respectable hour, only to be woken up to host mike’s insatiable urge for deanna troi. “it’s weird,” he says, “I woke up needing to have my fix!” and then puts on a dvd of star trek: insurrection which we all sit down and watch in a bit of a daze, partially because it is television and partially because it makes such a strange counterpoint to everything else in the house: the spiritual statuettes, the incense that i never see but that won’t stop following me around the house, the dolphin iconography, the gong collection. we’re sure they’ll be ashamed of us if they know we really want enormous deli sandwiches topped with french fries on them for lunch, so we slip appreciatively and discreetly away before picard reverse ages any further and starts selecting his wardrobe from the abercrombie & fitch catalog.

in the strip district of pittsburgh we coffee up at 21st street coffee and tea, and are waylaid on our way to our gluttonous lunch by a fresh donut place: a real pittsburgh guy here with a buzzcut and a bluetooth headset is fresh frying donuts under rainbow signs that say “peace love donuts”. none of it goes together but i’m starting to get that that’s the theme in pittsburgh. speaking of things not going together, but going together perfectly, we get absurdly huge capocollo, cheese, slaw and french fry sandwiches to go and hit the road in shame at our own future gluttony. we are already off at quite a food pace.

columbus

i don’t even know where to start talking about columbus; it’s been a hundred thousand years since i’ve been in this place i know so well and which has changed so much. though i don’t really want to start a sentence with “back in the 90s”, back in the 90s i used to drive here all the time: an easy 2.5-3 hours down us-23 from ann arbor to see yo la tengo at stache’s after class, catch the coctails on their way through the midwest, see guided by voices, anyone from near or far that was touring through the area because you knew it would be a great show in that town, and if i rolled up, as i often did, without a plan, it would take literally minutes for someone to graciously offer a place to stay that night, even if i hardly knew the person.

eventually these trips to stache’s to see out of town acts became trips to see local bands and annual long weekends lost to the anyway festival, yearly communions with my other friends from new york, boston, canada and wherever who all recognized in columbus the magical scene that only a sort-of-artsy, sort-of-charming, sort-of-sad place stuck in the middle of ohio could generate. the music community here was full of egos larger than its cracking sidewalks could bear, and as they strained against their own self-imposed limits, the most incredible music came out. during my time as a resident of ohio’s neighbor to the north, i developed a keenly un-michiganian obsession with ohio, and produced an entire zine dedicated to its proud exploits and exports. it is without a doubt that the seed for that obsession was set on my first trip to columbus, an irreproducable roadtrip with the mountain goats and friends that started with a moviola matinee show and ended at a summer fair and a private karl hendricks show in bela’s living room. i hated comfest, but i loved ted and bela, our shy (!) guides that day, and this bizarre hip college city with a million cozy front porches and two million dogs.

though i have felt distant from those times in recent years, anyway fest long since over and so many of the acts vanished, broken up, moved on to adulthood, or dead, i’ve been feeling quite close to it in the last six months through bela’s blog about jerry wick and jenny mae leffel, a deeply real and important blog that has documented a lot of the essence of what columbus was about for anyone that lived there or just enjoyed its contact high. it’s a pretty amazing thing to read if you know any of the characters, but i’m thinking it’s probably amazing on its own if you’re, you know, a human being in the first place, if only because the writing is so completely put out right out there you can’t help but be humbled, and in many ways it is a story very much about growing up and not growing up combined into one, something i and probably all of us are thinking about every second of the day.

anyway, seeing bela (now long sober, now with children, still married to the beautiful woman who somehow picked him out of that mess and kept him through it all) after reading all these things was kind of heavy, though in a good way, and when i met his four-year-old daughter the first thing she does is point at the gaunt button i’d recently reattached to my jacket and say “i like your pin”. i don’t think she actually read it or anything, but whoa.

magik markers have an instore at used kids this day, and it’s kind of surreal to park next to the wendy’s and wander down to (almost) the same place and look at dollar tapes in 2010. ron and paul and dannemiller are waiting for me, and then shirley, and we reune in that past-meets-present way where your friends are still totally drinking budweiser in the middle of the day but now they can’t go out late because they have to put their kids to bed. the markers play three songs only, in an attempt (which fails) not to spoil the town for the show later tonight, and we head from there to the grotty bourbon street cafe where the show will sound HEAVY DUTY earsplittingly punk but basically no one besides bela, who will be our kind host tonight, will attend. a tv over the bar is showing footage of jet ski explosions, and a mentally challenged guy that is a fixture here asks the band if they’ll back him up for the theme to batman. they do.

part one day one: chicago to phoenix to tucson

i don’t know what kind of measurements you use, but going by tacos per hour, this trip clocked in at 4.5 tacos per hour (tph). maybe not that much of an accomplishment in the digital era, but hey, a girl’s gotta sleep.

so! what better way to extend an already unruly christmastime trip home than by taking up a crazy, generous adventure offer from my oldest showgoing pal andy to meet up and see sonic youth in tucson and tempe? it’s not irrational to fly to the desert for two days to eat a dozen tacos and see a band you’ve seen 20 times that lives in the same city as you, right? not if you’re me, anyway. and in any case the tacos are terrible in new york city.

i flew into sky harbor airport on ummm three hours’ sleep monday morning, on the heels of just barely escaping a lake effect snowmare at my family’s house in indiana the day before. i remember clearing four inches of snow off of mom’s camry, then clearing another four off again an hour later. but in 24 hours time i’m somehow in a rental car in phoenix with my shoes and socks off, exclaiming like a hyperactive child at all the oranges just growing for free and falling onto sidewalks and roadways just everywhere!! CAN YOU JUST TAKE THEM?! phoenix is kind of like atlanta but with palm trees. i digress.

andy and i are hungry (well, we’re always hungry) so our first stop is super bougie grocery-compound la grande orange on north 40th street. i feel underdressed here, but they are playing mid-period new order. also, a guy in a very elaborate Rockstar Energy Drink athletic jersey is eating a sandwich with his mom..or is it his wife? none of that stops me from completely enjoying their “commuter” breakfast sandwich: homemade english muffin with egg, avocado, bacon, tomato. we lay in some pastry supplies (chocolate chip fleur de sel cookie, cherry-almond brioche, macaroon, ooey gooey cupcake) for the overnight trip to tucson, and hit the interstate.

but first, andy obliges while i pull over and grab some oranges off a tree on the side of the road. they are too juicy and almost inedibly tart, but whatever. i grew up in the rust belt. too early in their season i imagine, but i would have liked to cook with oranges that taste like lemons. one day.

a couple chatty hours later we arrive in tucson where we drive straight to pico de gallo taqueria in south tucson. when i open the door of the taqueria the first thing i see is sonic youth tour manager dan mapp. he is with misters ibold and ranaldo, and let me tell you, when i see mark ibold in a restaurant i know i have chosen the right place to eat. it turns out to be his second time here that day. at pico de gallo i begin what will be a trip-long theme of trying to find a place to charge my phone in a taqueria, and order two fish tacos and a carne asada. the asada (as i had been warned moments before) was pretty dry, but the fish were burstingly moist underneath crispiness so prevalent you temporarily forgot there was fish in the first place. but truly the focus here was on the corn tortilla, not doubled but double-weight itself, supple and more complex in texture than what i’m used to (due to being so damn thick). the head cold i’d been working towards over the prior two weeks in the midwest evaporated immediately upon contact with the hot sauce.

a couple of middling thrift stores later, we roll over to juanitos taqueria where i order a crispy, crunchy, chunky al pastor taco and another carne asada. it’s good but not magical. we figure we still have time to try a sonoran hot dog at el guero canele and check into the hotel congress before the rock show, so we do this. andy tries a taco at el guero as well as a double hot dog, known as the “sammy dog” (spanish menu translation: “2 winies”). i stick to the straight and narrow. this thing is pretty weird… fluffy white bun into which a bacon-wrapped mediocre frank has been submerged, covered in fresh onions, jalapenos, mayo, mustard, grilled onions, tomatoes…and beans? i didn’t think the “winie” was that good, but i did like the free calendars.

liz: “i think the weirdest thing about this hot dog is the beans on top.”
andy: “i think the weirdest thing about this hot dog is the second hot dog.”

sonic youth are a pleasure at the rialto, sticking (not a surprise) exclusively to songs from the eternal and a smattering of things from daydream nation or earlier. i take some pictures and go stand with andy for the rest, who reminds me during “brother james” of the time his feet hurt so bad at a sonic youth show in washington, dc he almost went to the hospital but then they played “brother james” and everything was alright forever again.

day two: tucson to tempe

it’s probably not possible but i can’t find any evidence anywhere on the internet that the beer i drank in the hotel congress’ tap room (amid the overflow from what i think was a big lesbian dance party) last night actually exists, but even though jeremy and andy didn’t care for it, and even though it may not exist, i do recommend the sierra nevada juniper black ale beer camp #16. i also recommend that you probably only want one. moving on, andy and i check out of the congress and head to breakfast (oops, lunch) at little cafe poca cosa. steve shelley is already eating in here, which generates that “i’m eating in the right place/man the band must think i’m a stalker” feeling i’m becoming familiar with. the house lunch plate is tremendous: chile relleno, tamale, pork taco on the side and a tall glass of basil pineapple juice (!!) that changes my worldview on pineapple juice rather significantly. the tamale is perfection, a super honeysweet corn wrapped around gooey cheese with the odd pepper.

totally stuffed, andy and i walk around the gravel sidewalks of sunny tucson’s old barrio, taking pictures of cactuses and shit while dogs bark at us from every other house. it’s gorgeous and strange, prickly and cozy all at once. the st. vincent depaul is an everything graveyard and has 100 rooms, but i am somehow able to not buy anything. i will need the space in my luggage later for chile peppers and cupcakes.

last tucson stop is to check out the local specialty carne seca my friend chris has been talking up to me, so we scoot over to st. mary’s mexican food where the carne seca taco is good (hard shell…was there another option?) but the tres leches cake is ridiculous. trust me…you want your tres leches cake to be sitting in a pool of its own milk, and this thing was as good as it looked, or better. i will miss you, tres leches cake at st. mary’s mexican food. i will come back for you sometime.

time to head through the desert!!!! now, my friend doc says the desert is “more crowded” than it used to be, but since i live in a city with about 400,000 in just my neighborhood, i like hwy 79 just fine. we don’t see much in the way of life — a few state troopers, a few cows — and we visit the tom mix rest area, where in 1937 the western film star drunk drove into a flooded-out gulch and died not from the car crash but from his airbone aluminum suitcase whacking him in the back of the head. note to all of you heavy packers…this could be your end. the desert is rambling and relaxing, and i’m pretty sure we’re the only people listening to big dipper driving towards florence that day. also, go for long enough and saguaro cacti begin to look like people. just sayin’.

we turn towards coolidge just in time for sundown at the casa grande ruins national monument. i admire their irrigation and the nubs of ancient walls. i can imagine the hohokam people cooking up some squash pretty easily, and for a moment that life doesn’t seem too distant from current reality. and then i go brew us a couple cups of coffee in the parking lot like a giant enormous coffee nerd. (thanks for the outlet to plug my kettle into, national park service!) this dalliance doesn’t count out a visit to tempe’s cartel coffee lab, a nice space with an impressive gear setup and onsite roasting. i’m not sure about my macchiato but the vibe is totally great. it’s nice to be focused on tacos instead of coffee for a change anyway.

my dinner fantasy for phoenix has been noca, but luckily it’s closed for a winter holiday and we are diverted to carolina’s, which at 7pm to an out-of-towner sure appears to be situated smack in the middle of total fucking nowhere. blocks of nearly blacked-out dark streets led to this sad-looking tortilleria, which could not have looked less open, but in fact was. we were the only patrons, but i can only express delight at the oaxacan special burro (w/chorizo, potatoes, cheese, served enchilada style; green) and the machaca taco, which comes on a freshmade flour tortilla that at first appears soggy-wet…but upon embrace reveals itself to be deliciously slicked-up, with crispy edges that seem almost caramelized with beef grease. a truly special taco in a charming (once you got past the “is this an abandoned building” mood) place. high marks for carolina’s.

the ooey gooey (buttercream/chocolate cake) cupcake baked by tammie coe procured yesterday gets hastily consumed on interstate 17 on our way to the sonic youth concert. its heavy-duty buttercream frosting is super sugary but you could eat it for days, and i almost don’t leave any to share with andy, but seeing as the trip was his idea i save him 40%. andy’s review of this cupcake was: “i couldn’t tell where the frosting ended and the cupcake began”, which describes it with alarming accuracy. we cross a bridge and i wonder why there are bridges in arizona, but this one actually has water under it.

nowhere we have gone in tucson or tempe or phoenix (except carolina’s) seems to have adequate parking. i think the state motto of arizona should be “arizona. more people showed up than we expected.” we park somewhere vaguely proximal to the concert venue and encounter a huge line of people being made to take off their shoes before getting patted down by security. is this normal? i’ve never had to take off any clothing to see sonic youth before. (i know arizona is a little wild, but usually a simple “please don’t bring your firearm in here” sign suffices.) the show was super loud and super awesome, very similar set but with “white cross” swapped in at the end, and i danced a lot during “cross the breeze” except my feet were really sticking to the floor. we take gwen lemos out for a drink while jeremy packs all the gear into the sonic semi-truck, and head home to the hotel andy’s pricelined for us, at a friggin golf resort, the kind of place i’ve never been in before and don’t expect to ever be in again. he keeps expecting the staff to treat him like he “isn’t even a golfer” but us two punks slip past unnoticed. arizona is weird.

day three: phoenix to brooklyn

morning finds us on the south side of phoenix, poised perfectly for ranch market, a most festive and expansive grocery store with an excellent taqueria and good security cameras as well. i have no sooner tried futilely to capture the “party” vibe of the produce department/tortilla factory/grilling area when a member of the ranch market family tells me he is very glad i am enjoying ranch market but no photography, please. i dare andy to get the five taco special and he does, going al pastor straight through, and i have a moist moist moist carne asada, carnitas, and al pastor trio, we shop the giant grocery store for chiles and other delights, and then encounter another taco stand outside on the way to the parking lot, where i get another asada and andy gets another al pastor. while we order and wait for these last succulent tacos, a mexican version of cheap trick’s “i want you to want me” is playing from a boom box three feet away. i thought the trip had peaked several times already by now, but undeniably, this is my moment. (it’s your moment too; since these tacos were consumed outside of the ranch market premises, you can enjoy them vicariously.)

on baseline road we pass a biker funeral, the lead car followed by a hearse followed by a car towing a ghost motorcycle with a stuffed animal on the seat and the vanished biker’s leather vest draped ominously over the back, dozens of road hogs behind it. then we try to visit the mystery castle, a private novelty residence made out of mosaic tile and goat cheese, but it’s closed on wednesdays. well, you can’t have it all.

the last order of business is postcards and cupcakes, meaning i have a very pleasant life indeed, and we stock up on the latter in time to drop the car off at the sky harbor rental return which is no fewer than 62347238982399002 kilometres away from any of the airport terminals. andy is psyched to see his wife and kids and i am still in total denial of my imminent return to 30 degree brooklyn tonight, but when i wake up in the morning and shake the tortillas out of my sneakers, i think i will still remember this feeling forever.

thank-yous-so-much to andy for the adventure itself, to jeremy and sonic youth for the musical hospitality and excellence, and kiki, chris and doc for advice, hand-holding and the like. i owe you each a slice of tres leches cake. word.

Though I had already spent a few days here in advance of meeting up with the band, having a day off in this lovely city was more than welcome. I had a few tacos and cups of coffee to catch up on before leaving town, and though I had the best of intentions to work them off at one of my favorite swimmin’ holes (okay, it’s a YMCA, but you still have to put the water in some kind of hole) I was thwarted by what we will without a doubt refer to through the ages as the great rain of October 26, 2009. In fact, later that day, the only subject of conversation seemed to be: “Where were you when it started raining really hard?” As I reconnected with the band over a simple 637-course meal at Quince (just an average night for Yo La Tengo) we compared notes on this shared civic tragedy — some of us were in bookstores, others coffee shops. Amazingly, though it really was, in fact, quite wet, we all persevered. The only person not to have a “trapped somewhere for an hour in the rain” story was front of house sound engineer Mark Luecke, because he was busy leaving his passport and man-purse in the teatime screening of Zombieland.

Yes, there’s nothing like a little misplaced identification drama to slow down a billion-hour drive to Portland, and obliging Frank The Bus Driver and various among us returned to the scene of the zombiefication and tried to turn up Mark’s belongings to no avail. Trash cans were emptied, allies scoured, teenage theatre managers shaken down. Curses! As stressed as the others must have been about the sudden “how to get our sound guy into Canada, Europe and Japan” problem, it’s also no fun to watch someone’s inner monologue shouting “stupid! stupid!” at themselves. Wouldn’t you know it, though, by morning those zombies had redeemed themselves and the same mysterious forces that couldn’t find Mark’s bag the night before had no trouble turning it up in the morning and overnighting it to Seattle. Crisis averted. Drama deferred…at least for now.

Portland

A long and soothing drive — in the iPhone era, you just wake up in the dark periodically and hit “locate”, which is kind of like being in a place, except even less than usual. I scramble to put shoes on in time to race Mark and James to the nearest Stumptown — there are as many of these in Portland as there are check cashing places in my part of Brooklyn, but the one we’re nearest is at the Ace Hotel. I run into someone I know from CoffeeWorld(tm) within .0004 seconds of arrival in the Stumptown, which is actually a little longer than I had expected that to take.

Half the crew takes off to go get free shoes, but I instead hitch a ride with a cute gay man who agrees to take me to more coffee shops and back to his place for a hot shower and some quality kitty time. We also squeeze in a little Mexican food. It was going to be Por Que No?, but they seem to have burned their kitchen down temporarily, continuing fate’s plan that I never, ever eat there.

Portland is having super duper fall color the day we’re there, and I think about how I was there almost exactly a year ago, and how I for some reason didn’t go to Portland for 10 years and have now been 4 times in the past 12 months. I’m sad the visit is short, but at that rate it feels like I’ll be back there next week without even trying. (Speaking of short visits, JJ, did you come to the show?) In other news, Portland is the home of the Voodoo Donut Bacon Maple Donut, which is every bit as right and wrong as it sounds. I finished up a solo dinner, made an obligatory Powell’s run (their selection of LSD-induced sci fi still the best in the nation) and walked through the gross, crazy-homeless-people-filled downtown to lie a couple of these sugary bad boys in reserve for later.

Over at the concert venue, Yo La put on a triumphant show, despite the extremely edgy, seemingly insatiable crowd. Really? What inspires that level of imbecilic shouting, audience participation and WTF-ness? And that was even before Ira digressed into a long defense of…Seattle. Well, you never can tell what the kids are into these days. This is the same night someone slips a note under the dressing room door professing their hatred for “seasoned” experimental noise. Would cut-out ransom note letters have been too much to ask for? These passive-agressive Pacific NW haters are so lazy these days.

The next show was in Vancouver but a morning stop in Seattle to pick up Mark’s passport while on our way north had me thinking I might be able to shoot for the holy donut 4-plex within a 24-hour period: Voodoo (Portland), Top Pot, Mighty O (both Seattle) and Lee’s (Vancouver) were well within my sticky grasp! Alas, it was not to be, as our stop at the parcel store was only long enough for me to get lost downtown in the rain trying to find a Starbucks with a public bathroom. You’d think they’d be every three feet in downtown Seattle but apparently due to earthquake-proofing they’re actually every six feet.

So, not long after this is when the trip gets weird. No, I’m not talking about the part at the border where guitar technician Gil is interrogated about his past theft of a rivet gun. I’m talking about the part where the bus driver goes all Dog the Bounty Hunter-ass CRAZY in the middle of Canada, okay not the middle, but whatever, and after a startling crash from a flying rock (some say boulder, some say softball-sized, depends on the retelling) — begins hot pursuit of a semi-truck (in Canadian: a “transport”). In the tour bus. With a trailer, I might add. And um, all of us who were awake in the front just kind of hanging on in shock.

Mark Luecke tells the official story better than I ever could, but suffice it to say I’d never been in a high speed chase of exactly that calibre and, uh, potential force before. Our bus driver was quite convinced — probably out of fear of reprimand or penalty from his motor coach company — that the errant, flying shard of the Canadian rockies that had smacked loudly into our winshield, spraying his Oakleys with glass-dust, was the fault of the creepy intermodal freight flak who was evading us in his dingy transport with the agility of a Manhattan bike courier. Ol’ “Laddi”, as his driver’s side door read, certainly wasn’t acting innocent, but then again, ol’ Frank wasn’t exactly acting sane. For those of us awake to be conscious of this wild ride —me, Joe, James, Georgia and Mark — our racing thoughts matched the speedometer, the needle wavering somewhere between “Is this actually happening?” and “I hope we didn’t run that car off the exit ramp.” and “How long are we going to have to chase this guy for? Load-in is at 1.”

Eventually the whirlwind detour of Richmond, BC drew to a close and I overheard Frank calling the RCMP (“Hello? Is this the police….of Canada?”) and everyone, both relieved and in a state of shock, went to a go-to stress relief method: eat all the snacks in the bus really fast. Thank god there was tapenade.

(Later, when the rest of the gang wakes up and hears the story of what they slept through (!?!?), vegetarian monitor guy Dutch will reach for the leftover donut supplies, only to have me try desperately to convince him that, no, I’m not actually kidding, he really doesn’t want to eat that donut, because it’s not vegetarian, a conversation I’ve never had to have before in my life.)

Vancouver

Oh my god, did we make it to Vancouver? Retro, seedy, weird downtown Vancouver, truly you are kind of gross. I point James towards the cool video arcade and walk the over the bridge to the good part of the city, stopping at the Granville Island market for snacks and to ambush a pal before taking the False Creek water taxi to a cafe I wanted to check out. I have been to a lot of coffee shops in my many travels, but this is the first time I took a boat to one. RIGHT ON.

One too-quick and awesome dinner with Vancouver pals later, I head back to the Commodore Ballroom (where I last visited on a previous tour-hanger-on-boondoggle with Awesome Color and Dinosaur Jr.). Someone told me once that this venue was once, in between being open as a music space, and being closed and left to lie derelict like a Vancouver junkie, a strip club…but I have yet to corroborate that. In any case, no clothing was removed during either Yo La’s or Rose Melberg’s set that night.

Seattle

WE’RE BACK IN SEATTLE! And so am I, for the fourth separate visit in three weeks, if you count that half an hour the morning before. Oh, hey Seattle. I leave (no one else seems to be around) to find coffee and who do I run into a mile from the bus but Mark Luecke, on his way to go get coffee or something. Now, this would happen in any city (and it does, I have run into Mark by accident at coffee shops in Portland and Brooklyn) but that it happened while we were actually travelling together is a new personal best. I drag him to Stumptown on Pine, though as anyone within earshot knows, he is more of a Vivace man. A real Schomer devotee, that one.

Seattle’s a work day for me — lots to catch up on, and even worse, I’m flying home tonight, not after but actually during the show, the last of the tour. To add insult to injury, the band is actually playing at a venue my cousin works at and will be tending bar at all afternoon and evening. I make lemonade out of these lemons by, at least, combining a brief cousin-visit with a ride to the Showbox Sodo, where all my stuff is trapped way south of downtown on the tour bus, and where he conveniently has to get to work (after letting me shower in his bachelor pad: I have never seen so much Axe Body Wash!)

My only Yo La show that day, then, is soundcheck, during which I use up my camera battery taking pictures of Joe Puleo hanging up shirts. Guess there are less majestic ways to wind down a trip. I pack my little vagabond rucksack and head back towards the big city, not knowing, for a change, which adventure is next. First, perhaps…a nap.

Shout-outs: La Taqueria, morning coffee with Maddy (woof), blue cheese + fig pizza at Starbelly, Clyde Common, Tartine, Toronado, Sutro Baths, Chris Baca’s Santa Cruz Excursions, Inc., Elysian Room, the Honey Hole, Brent Fortune’s car service, Fernando, Amber, TC, AC, Top Pot pumpkin old fashioned, that tiny cheese puff next to the shooter of pumpkin soup at Quince, well-timed text messages, red leaves in Portland, yellow leaves in Seattle, silver skies in Vancouver, and most of all, the ridiculous kindness of my talented and awesome-to-hang-out-with friends for letting me crash the last leg of their tour. Hey, that was fun. Thanks!