I told myself that I would find a place to live for a little while this past November as a gift to myself for turning 25. I chose Barcelona, which seems glamorous AND punk. I’d been there before, I flew there for ten days in early 2007, when I was spending few months in Dublin. Ireland was good, it was okay, kids were real nice and we had this stupid band going that was asked to play a 17-year-old’s Saved by the Bell party, that was cool, but everything was small, damp, dank, and expensive. Barcelona, in comparison, was so warm and dry and so free. I was put up in an old squatted linen factory, beer was a cold 60 euro cents for a bottle at the bodega across the road, and I was staying with Americans who’d make me stovetop espresso after stovetop espresso while sounding off on me their ideas for a Unabomber-themed hip-hop project they were recording. I think it was called THE POWER PROCESS. I’m pretty sure they were calling their album “Surrogate Activities.”

For those unfamiliar with the Unabomber Manifesto, basically, the power process refers to what Ted Kaczynski believed was the basic human drive to have goals, to have these goals require a certain amount of effort, and for these goals to be reasonably attainable. Important for some is to have this process be reasonably autonomous. The lack of these things, imputed to modern industrial society, results in demoralization or whatever, you know, middle class vacuity. This leads to us pursuing a surrogate activity, or, an “artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward.” (paragraph 39)

I had timed this ‘07 Barcelona visit around a FUCKED UP show, right around the Hidden World LP hype-era. It was fairly glorious. “We love you, Barcelona,” they said as a massive enthusiastic crowd climbed all over each other. “Me, too,” I thought.

“Maybe I’ll move here,” I said the next day, on the rooftop terrace of the linen factory squat, a beautiful 4-storey oblong building no one paid money to live in. I was looking over a palm-treed, green mountained skyline, 21 degrees in January. (Americans: sorry, 70 degrees)

I heard that in Pittsburg, these punks encourage other punks to move there by offering them a bike and setting them up on two blind dates. When I tried to move to Barcelona, it felt that the punk house you’re told is way cool to stay at, but you when stop by, it’s totally the wrong time. Like they won’t make you sleep outside or anything, but they are kind of bummed, they’ve been having a lot of house guests lately, a bunch of shitty ones, it’s been a strain on the house, there’s some tension. When I showed up there, all my friends were gone, all the squats were overpacked and stressed out, and for reasons too complicated for anyone to ever translate into English for me, every show coming up during my short stay was cancelled. Plus I didn’t know what I’d do there. I needed some goals. Squat eviction was a big problem, but I am bad at fighting cops. Maybe I’d learn Spanish and be able to finally read LOS CRUDOS lyrics. I really wanted to research Spanish punk, but when I tried to move into the empty room in the apartment of the dude rumoured to have the biggest record collection in Barcelona, the vacancy was usurped by an Italian industrial design student. Then I accidentally moved in with some racists in the suburbs. I avoided their shitty comments by staying in my new bedroom with the window opening into a tiny courtyard that every kitchen in the building opened up into, every day waking up to the grumpy morning routines of five other families, pushing me towards my decision to skip out on rent and to go to Paris and learn to play the keyboard in order to join an old roommate’s band, this pop indie unit, a 9-person group-singing weird instruments combo that needed some lead melody reinforcement due to both an accordian player and a keyboardist having mental breakdowns and quitting the tour.

I think someone from that punks-playing-old-timey band PINE HILL HAINTS once likened being on tour to being in heaven, in that you never grow old and you always see your friends.

I once said in my previous column that touring is a easy way to absolve yourself of the depressing responsibility of finding meaningful ways to occupy your time. So I caught a rideshare to Paris and sussed out my new situation. I was now spending my days and nights (the tour had some down-time due to a cancelled UK portion of tour, the usual immigration problems) in what the band was calling The Eggshell Apartment, a small flat with a big living room where we’d sleep in an adorable summer camp-esque row. The two bedrooms off the living room belonged, respectively, to one of the drop-out band members and her roommate that liked personal space and hated houseguests. Outside was snowing and overpriced. Oh well. I sat in a corner, sharpied the notes onto the keys of a casio, plugged in some headphones, and practiced the parts I needed to play onstage, thereby qualifying me for transport and feeding on the band bill. I tried to seem quiet, non-intrusive, and invisible when the previous keyboard player made the trip from her room to the kitchen. Maybe it was a little like Barcelona, but at least I had activities, and eventually I’d move back into a van that I knew would never leave without me.

When the indie pop tour brought me to Lyon, France, I went to go visit my friend Alex, whose band PIZZA O.D. my other band, the Canadian punk one, had toured with just a month earlier. I didn’t invite him to the show because I knew he would hate it but I wanted to see him, so I stopped by. He told me that he was asked to book another comprehensive European tour, like the one we had just done, this time for some New Zealanders, but that he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. Why?

“It was just so much work, months and months of stress and booking.. And touring is such an easy, non-challenging way to travel. Plus,” he said, referring to the tour we’d just done, “if I had written what I thought would happen at each show before it happened, it would’ve been completely accurate.”

I wasn’t offended. Okay, maybe I was a little offended, but I tried not to be. But I disagreed too. I guess for the Canadian contingent, having no frame of reference for what the actual, run-of-the-mill basement squat scene in most of Europe is like, everything was pretty new for us. We couldn’t have predicated how even the usual played-out cities like Paris would go, much less, say, Slovenia. Plus Alex and I, who had become penpals via his fanzine RATCHARGE, had decided to do that tour before ever meeting each other, like we met up at an anarchist radio station in Paris, interviewed each other on air, introduced our bands, and went to 11 different countries in 30 days, and it going swimmingly is one of the reasons that I’m—and please excuse my boring cliché rehashments of punk enchantment— still stoked on punk. Or, after touring with a completely not-punk band, I should say, rather than punk (although varieties within this genre are still my usual jams of choice), the underground realm of DIY organizing and networking.

But, sure, I can see where he is coming from. I probably I could do the same predictions with a Canadian tour, maybe even American. But still, even retracing a small portion of Western Europe again, the same cities, it was was pretty fucking different from when I had just done it a six weeks earlier. Guys, indie pop tour world is weird. It's a chaotic experience of always free alcohol, but not always the guaranteed food and lodging I had thought was characteristic of touring Europe, one of not having a hired driver and only the drunkest member of us being able to drive, one of mandatory, hour-long sound checks, one of weird French clubs in Berlin that we can't play drums in with furniture nailed to the ceiling. True story. Safe travelling, sure, but still weird. As in, I played the a casio in front of a hipster audience. As in, I guess I had a goal and I guess I attained it and I had to exercise my own power to do so. As in, I've staved off demoralization for another month. I think.

Stay punk.
julsgeneric@hotmail.com