Pfft, the USA. Camperdown's where it's really at.

Hey Raven and Maoam!

Keep the updates coming!

Hey Kit!

You keep the Camperdown updates coming too!

While Raven & Maoam traipse around the USA, Kit is mindin' the house...

Went to Aquarius yesterday & got assorted goodies... Boredoms' Super Ae (still looking for Vision Creation Newsun and Vision Recreation but hey... 3 1/2 weeks left yet!); Greg Davis & Stephen Hess; Stephan Mathieu On Tape, and sundry other stuff.
Also went to Borderlands Books for much awesome sf in SF.

Today we hired bikes and rode from the Haight end of Golden Gate Park all the way to the ocean, and then back again.
Went to the Haight St Amoeba and bought 11 CDs including a couple of Cerberus Shoal albums, a couple of old Daedelus albums, the awesome-looking Fennesz/Dafeldecker/Brandlmayer double CD, the Bay Area Dubstep 2 comp, the first Pluramon album, the latest Mochipet, and more...
Then just down the road was the John Fluevog store, and got some beautiful new boots. These ones. Bit tight as I wear them in, but surprisingly wearable straight off for a new pair of boots.

Went to Church St to a bar/restaurant called Chow where I recall having the best burger ever a few years back. It wasn't the best burger ever, but was pretty great - basically meat pattie and melted cheese on a baguette, with salad & chips on the side, very American :)

Am tweeting the trip here and Maoam is too.

Oh, and it's t-shirt weather FFS. Will be v cold shortly methinks:
Washington on Tuesday, the New York for a bit, then a nice all-day train trip to Toronto, few days there, overnight train to Chicago (the last two will be freezing!) and then the wonders of Seattle and Portland. Absolutely can't wait for Portland, and that's where I imagine I'll be buying up big, with record stores galore and the amazing Powell's Books. Plus Portland (Oregon) has no sales tax :)
Then we drive back down the west coast over three days to San Francisco, where we have another 5 or so days before heading home.

Triparama!

shopping extravaganza!

need photos so we can live vicariously through you.

Any gigs, plays or movies lined up?

no tshirt weather on the east coast broey!!

shivers

Maoam has been taking some photies and will no doubt Twitpic them and other stuff soon enough. I've taken some iPhone pics but unfortunately with 3G costs being what they are, I could only Twitpic them when near WiFi...

Tonight, Dirty Projectors supported by K-Recs artist Little Wings... Then we'll be seeing Modeselektor (live I think) in Williamsburg (Brooklyn), Fuck Buttons & Growing in Seattle and Anti-Pop Consortium in Portland. Haven't booked any of them.
There may be other things that come up, but that's what we've unearthed so far!

can you go to a gun show and buy a gun without i.d.?

i just think it'd be cool. you can pawn it back right away, or get you money back holding up a corner store. whatevz. c'mon. raven and maoam crime spree across america! that's a top selling video game!

tinyman, king of bad bad suggestions...

those boots are kinda trenchcoat mafia...

raven and maoam crime spree across america!

The trenchcoat mafia are currently waiting to shoot up the club, uh, I mean see Dirty Projectors @Bimbo's 365 Club, where they have free wifi.

*waves at M+N*

Bimbo's 365 is a great club! Bloody jealous! If you get to Amoeba at Berkeley there's a bookshop across the road where Daniel Clowes works (at least, he did so about 10 years ago). Mission district is awesome ...

Going to Amoeba in Berkeley tomorrow. Also Comic Relief, which is the best comics shop in the world, or was. I shall report as to whether it still is :)

Make sure to provide detailed comparisons between CR, Lambiek and The Beguiling.

Very doubtful that Dan Clowes was working in a bookshop 10 years ago!

Fuck Buttons & Growing in Seattle

please bring growing back with you.

Make sure to provide detailed comparisons between CR, Lambiek and The Beguiling.

I shall. I forgot that I'm going to The Beguiling in about a week :)
Lambiek has been a while - I'm not sure I remember it well enough. It's certainly awesome. What was great about Comic Relief last time was all the minicomics, unusual independent things and so on. Stuff you imagined you really wouldn't find anywhere else.

please bring growing back with you.

yes, please do.

Also, iconic City Lights Books where I bought an amazing collection of 3 Art Spiegelman sketchbooks

I offered to grab this from Kino for you three months ago!

There are only two heavy books in my suitcase and I mostly bought them to make Raven feel better about his purchases.

Another great train trip was the Seattle to Portland one! Only 4 hours and it went really quickly because of comfy seats with heaps of room for laptop-ness as well as beautiful scenery. And a canteen where we could buy sugary cereal - yay.

The other advantage of trains/buses to nearby cities is that you often get dropped in the centre of town so there's little messing about with airport transfers or lugging stuff through three forms of public transport. But I guess it's reliant on wanting to visit a few nearby places.

The other thing to point out is that the Amtrak service has been great the whole time. Lots of talk in travel forums about them being terribly late and unreliable but we haven't found that.

College Street?

Close! Pretty sure it was Augusta Ave around the corner from Nassau in Kensington Market.

Hi black_wasp!

Hi! I wave to you!

thanks raven. good thread. where are you now?

We're back in San Francisco! Had a fun drive down from Portland to SF over three days, saw enormous trees (redwoods, maybe some sequoias?) and some funny US country towns.
Oregon is absolutely gorgeous. We stayed in this house in the middle of a forest (sortof) in Port Orford, saw wildlife and walked around a bit... Once you get into Northern California it's still lovely but the houses are a bit more decrepit and it's not quite as charming.

We're in SF now until Friday night, when we fly home. Completely miss out on Saturday, arrive on Sunday morning, and I'm doing Utility Fog on Sunday night, so I'd better listen to lots of new music before we get home :)

I thought I bought heaps of stuff while in the US... as anok says, reading this helps my shopper's guilt ;) even though I did come home with a Jazzmaster...

Summer has arrived back here at home raven so you and maoam should drop by Mollusk Surf Shop. I never been there but ''window shop'' at the website every other day. Awesome range of tshirts, art, boards and such. get down there waxheads.

Oregon is absolutely gorgeous. We stayed in this house in the middle of a forest (sortof) in Port Orford, saw wildlife and walked around a bit..

Awesome....they have REAL wildlife too....I'd like to spend some time in that part of the world.

McGauz, I'm still considering getting that Line6 DL-4... I'll have to wait till my next pay goes into my account, and then work out how the fuck to pack it into my luggage. Argh.

runout, I am thankfully entirely un-tempted by the surf shop :) And very very happy to have missed the insanely hot weather, although still not looking forward to high 20s or 30s :/
We did see some ''Bigfoot Crossing'' signs and the like. But no sasquatch/bigfoot/other imaginary creatures...

mississippi records?

Hey nony,
Sorry, went to Mississippi and it was, er, full of vinyl and cassettes and stuff. As expected. I really couldn't make head or tail of it - there were clearly some cassettes which were ''house cassettes'', but the vinyl was mostly second-hand. I'm just not that interested in vinyl, and not at all interested in cassettes, and I couldn't work out what the hell would be interested (also, it was mainly genres I'm not interested in). So... didn't get anything :/

Was an interesting trip out there anyway. Meanwhile, lots of awesome rekkid stores for me in Portland!

I just bought stuff and figured out how to fit it into luggage later ;) I ended up buying an extra suitcase, which was too small in the end, cos I bought so much shit... AND my guitar case counted as a 3rd bag, so I had to pay excess luggage on way home anyway. They tried to sting me $160US for extra bag AND overweight, and I only had $100US on me, which they accepted. After that I went to the ATM and withdrew more money to buy duty free alcohol :)

HA! Sheeeeit.
I brought an extra suitcase - both Ange & I did. Ange has now bought a bicycle frame & a few other parts (will get it constructed at home - beautiful frame thought) and so her smaller suitcase will have to come on board.

:)

We're home! Made it through customs. Were informed in the USA that the baggage limit is 24kg per bag, not 32 - gonna check now because the site definitely made us think it was higher.
But some judicious rearrangement of our luggage and we fitted fine. *phew*

Time for breakfast, unpacking, organising... argh.

Welcome back guys! Thanks for this diary of sorts, definitely food for thought for my January trip. Cheers, and happy listening.

Anyone who wants to tune in to Utility Fog tonight will hear lots of stuff wot I got overseas, and hopefully some new promo stuff from FBi (visiting soon - I need new Aussie material!)

I haven't had a chance to listen to a lot of what I got yet, so today will be a listening hot-tub. And hot it is, although I hear it was painfully hot(ter) earlier in the week. Glad to have missed that!

OK, so Maoam and I are going to Japan on Thursday. Time for a new fred I think! Will start it when we get there though.

safe travels!