If you'll allow me to be a pseudo-fanboy and ask a tour related question:
Everybody that tours, has toured, or just travels for a living seems to have their favorite city to pull up to. Some because of it's history, others because of the view, and then those because of a sports team, record store, or favorite restaurant away from home.
What was your favorite place in the States/Canada to tour through and why?
I know this seems like a silly subject, but I haven't done nearly the extensive touring as you have and I always feel like I could have a 2nd job as a tour guide to most North American cities.
— joledo
The thing I hate about touring is that it totally messed up my relationship with travel in general — meaning that, even when I’m on vacation now, it still feels like I’m going to work. That’s somewhat problematic for me when I’m trying to relax.
Your experience with touring, however, sounds like a much different thing. I’m wagering this because I’m pretty sure I could never be a “tour guide” for any city in which I’ve only been a recurring transient visitor, if only because the sites that I’m most familiar with — vegetarian food options, coffee shops, record stores — are not super interesting tour-guide material unless you have exactly three hours to enjoy a city before soundcheck and you’re confined to a one-mile radius of a random nightclub. (Also, random nightclubs in America are very rarely zoned in neighborhoods worth exploring.) So ultimately, I feel like a fraud whenever I tell people that I’m, quote-unquote, well-traveled.
Just last night I went to dinner with a Viennese couple. Because they seemed to light up when I mentioned that I’d actually been to Austria, I felt compelled to elaborate on the point so as not to feel like a liar.
“Technically, I was only there for a day and a half,” I said. “But I didn’t really get to see much before I ran into a pack of white power skinheads on the street and decided to head back inside.” Vienna, in fact, later earned the distinction of becoming the only city in the world where my job description included dodging glass bottles while playing guitar, but I left that out of my amendment because, really, that could have happened anywhere.
So when I think about America, it’s hard to consider my feelings about a particular city without losing the plot to this kind of collected mental detritus. Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for example, could very well be a perfectly fantastic place, but I’ll always remember it as the place where a local man told me — assuming that I was white? maybe it was dark out? — that black people ruined the entire city. Minneapolis will always be the city where we played a five-dollar basement show in a snowstorm even though First Avenue offered us a grip to play a “real” show. Champaign, Illinois, will always be the place we were scheduled to play with the Apples in Stereo until two planes flew into the World Trade Center that morning. And so on.
It’s interesting because, as I write this, I’m realizing that I probably couldn’t even point out Winston-Salem on a map — much less tell you what to do there — and in the end, I think that sort of psychophysical disconnect really sums up what I’m trying to say about the American city and my life as a nomad: It doesn’t feel particularly awesome to say it, but while my feet have touched the ground of hundreds of cities, my head was often somewhere else.
“Whispery posts” are de rigueur, but I’m gonna call this a “real talk post” because — real talk now — it bothers me that a blogger, of all people, thinks it’s OK to call another blogger that he’s never met a “touchy self-centered prick” over a post that was not nearly as touchy and self-centered and pricky as the response it received. It was like, “Hey, Pot. What do you think of Kettle?”
You’ll notice I’m not posting links to any of the offending posts, and that’s deliberate. I didn’t really sit down to write about a Tumblr feud that doesn’t even involve me because these isolated things blow over and they’re totally unimportant in the Big Picture™. It’s just that reading Pot’s digs at Kettle gave me some pangs of discomfort over the way we talk to each other on the Internet — depersonalizing one another with the artificial separation between “online” and “IRL” — and as someone who has spent most of his adult life trying to write as a means to connect with other human beings, it makes me sad to think that some so-called writers are trying to disconnect and then burn every bridge around them.
It reminded me of that time in 1993, when I was a nineteen-year-old kid with a fanzine, and I decided to trash a band I didn’t really know as a means of entertaining myself. I thought I was being “clever” — which, I guess, is what we called “snark” in the early ’90s. Anyway, the issue had barely come back from the printers before I regretted it. Unlike Pot, it didn’t take long before I realized that my response was way overdetermined, not as clever as I thought it was, and arguably unnecessary. My own Kettles didn’t deserve it.
So I learned my lesson seventeen years ago, and even though I’m admittedly into being the center of attention — you pretty much have to be to do anything in my lines of work — I try to achieve that regularly without being a dick. In his rebuttal post, of course, Pot accuses Kettle of wanting attention, and charitably adds, “I am completely willing to give you attention; I lose nothing by it except the followers who hate long posts.” But this is not totally true: I was a follower who loves long posts — obviously! — but he lost me for entirely different reasons. He lost me because it’s sadly banal to call someone out for “being a dick” by being an even bigger dick, and maybe also because I’m tired of listening to detached kids in Saucony sneakers trying to debase sincerity as maudlin whimpering. Even Lil Wayne can’t stand that shit.
