Day 16: Stuffabouts

I decided to purchase a van for my trip around the US. Now, I figured that it would probably be a similar process to how it works in Australia – a simple transfer of funds, taking the registration paperwork to the relevant office and getting it signed over to a new name.

Ha, ha, ha. Tell him he’s dreaming.

Go to one office. Wait in line for 45 minutes. Get told to go to another one. Wait half an hour there. Get paperwork. Sort out paperwork, then take it to another office. Get told one set of information. Come back a week later and get told contradictory information. Wait three weeks – three weeks! – for paperwork to get mailed to you.

All I can say is thank christ I’m buying from someone who’s been through this whole buying/selling malarkey before, because I’d be completely and utterly lost otherwise.

Day 15: Das Racist, Danny Brown and Despot

I missed out on two sweet-arse gigs last week by finding out the day after they actually happened. First BlackStar played, then Mastodon supported by Dillinger Escape Plan. So when I read about this gig happening the morning of, there was no way I was willingly going to miss it.

Despot’s been around for a few years, without ever making a huge impact. This probably has a bit to do with the fact that he was on Def Jux until El-P closed down the label, while sounding a lot like a less vicious El-P and looking like a cross between El-P and that gay ranga from Modern Family. He apparently has a new record coming out produced by indie crossover darlings Ratatat though, which should distinguish him enough (as opposed to getting production from, erm, El-P. Not that I can blame him, El-P’s awesome).

Danny Brown doesn’t look like any other rapper alive. He wears skinny jeans and what looks like a dude with frizzy black hair attempting a circa-2005 emo fringe for… what sake? Idiosyncrasy, I’m guessing, though he hardly needs an image for that – his rapping sounds halfway between Pharaohe Monch and Jello Biafra. He’s also incredibly smart, a walking tome of hip-hop history with a great attitude toward the genre and making and enjoying music in general as evidenced in this recent interview. He’s also great on the live level, getting the audience roaring along to the hooks of a song they’d never heard before.

And the main act, Das Racist. Holy crap. Smarter and funnier than any other hip-hop act while also being better rappers than most (Heems’ brag of “worst rapper on this track/third coolest” notwithstanding, or rather balanced out by his other brag of “yeah, I’m fucking great at rapping!”), making fun of hip-hop because they love it, having an appreciation of rap’s history and paradigms just so they can bust them up. Dap, a superfluous non-presence on the records, comes into his own in the live arena, and Lakutis – sort of like their DJ, except it’s on Ableton on their netbook rather than a set of decks – seems to be making a career for himself as an MC, dropping some really good verses and further pushing DR out of hip-hop’s comfort zone by looking more like someone you’d see at a metal show – white guy, long hair, black t-shirt – than a hip-hop show, and also by stage-diving and never breaking flow while being carried around the crowd. And the core two rappers, Heems and Kool A.D., not to be outdone, take the show to higher levels, trading lines, talking shit, leaving the stage to deliver verses from the merch stand and basically acting like they were born to save hip-hop from taking itself too seriously and not seriously enough at the same time.

The fact that this will struggle to make the top five live sets I’ve seen this year just points to how much of an unprecedentedly good year I’ve had with live music.

Day 14: Homelessness

Some of the best friends I’ve made here in the US so far either have been or are homeless. No, I haven’t been slumming it that much, and this is not my take on George Orwell’s classic Down and Out in Paris and London (tempting as that might be for a poofy class tourist social sciences student like myself). It’s simply that in the United States, homelessness is a fact of life for a huge portion of the population.

It’s something that simply can’t be comprehended if you’ve never visited the US and spent time among locals. There is, for all intents and purposes, no welfare other than corporate welfare, minimum wage is far below anything resembling a living wage and even then comes loaded with loopholes employers can use to avoid paying even that paltry $7 an hour or so, and IR laws are thirty-nine different types of rooted.

The net result of all this is that in the United States, you can work a full week – not Scandinavia’s thirty-five hours, Australia’s forty, Britain’s forty-five but often well in excess of fifty or fifty-five hours a week – and still not be able to afford a roof over your head. It’s pathetic. This is a failed state by any real measure. And it means that if you live in the States or have spent any amount of time here and don’t know any homeless or ex-homeless people, you live one hell of a sheltered life.

Day 13: Katamari

Katamari Damacy is a Japanese video game. The core premise is that you roll around a sticky ball (the titular Katamari) picking up small things at first, then bigger and bigger before launching it into the sky to make a new star – or something like that, it’s Japanese and ergo wholly incomprehensible. It’s also got the catchiest title song of any game ever, for what it’s worth.

I mention this because I like to think of myself (after reading it used to describe a musician – it was either Sufjan Stevens or Das Racist, I can’t remember – and stealing the metaphor) as a cultural Katamari. I roll around picking up bits and bobs from here and there, ever greater ideas and knowledge and folklore and pop culture. People hear this in the way I speak, where a sentence will have an English “well” (used as an intensifier) and a Scottish “aye”, an Italian “boh” (an apathetic “don’t know”) and a Spanish “mañana” (literally “tomorrow”, but practically “We’ll get around to it whenever”), along with the usual selection of Australianisms (“stoked”, “piker”, “buggered”) which Americans have been swooning over. And as noted previously, two decades of exposure to American popular culture has brought its own influences: “hella” from California, “y’all” from the south, “nahmean” from black New York.

I’ve sort of realised that I should probably ease up on those latter ones in case someone thinks I’m taking the piss and gets offended by it.

Day 12: Pronunciation

Some of the most obvious. Food-related, for some reason. Strine on the left, Murkin on the right.

Tuh-mart-oh = Tuh-mate-oh
Baz-ill = Bay-zill
Pee-kan = Peck-arn
Noice = Nice

Day 10 and 11: One Dollar Can

I’m a fan of iced tea. It’s good stuff. The only problem is that back home, a 365ml bottle of Lipton’s or whatever from a corner store is what, $3? It’s a luxury item (not to mention more expensive per bottle than Cascade Blue, meaning I’ll go for that for a summer cool-down drink – and if it’s more expensive than beer in Australia, it’s damn expensive).

Enter Arizona Iced Tea.

It comes in about ten flavours, all delicious, and all 99c. And the cans are about 700ml. I have a good half dozen sitting in the fridge at the hostel.

It’s a beverage so good it had a tribute song written about it.

Day 9: RSA Animate

Not sure if they’re American or not, but along with an hour-long Paul Keating interview by Kerry O’Brien they kept me happily occupied for an afternoon while my mp3 player charged. All fantastic introductions to economic theories featuring great thinkers like Slavoj Zizek and David Harvey.

Day 8: Two Worlds

Talking to American liberals ins an exercise in extreme frustration. Because everything American conservatives say, everything I’ve been fighting off when Australian and British conservatives try to adopt the argument to use against non-conservatives in those countries, all the talk about ‘ivory towers’, ‘out-of-touch’, ‘elitist’ – for the majority, they’re completely true.

America doesn’t have a ‘left’, or social democracy or (lol) socialism. There are individuals (Bernie Sanders What Up) and small groups, but it doesn’t exist as a movement. This means there is nobody in America who gives a practical, effective shit about the poor or the working class.

To most American liberals, the poor and the working class are a symptom. Remember Obama’s stupid, stupid comment about ‘clinging to guns and religion’? He’s not Pat Malone there, such talk is the bread and butter of American liberals. There is no attempt to reach out to and communicate with the poor or working class, the ones who can’t afford to spend an evening enjoying complementary wine at an art gallery. The word “empathy”, one I’ve always considered to be utterly essential to any intelligent person’s political understanding – not merely sympathy, but empathy, understanding, an appreciation – is alien to most American liberals.

I remember talking to someone in 2008, who said that they’d “never met anyone who would vote for McCain”. That’s because that sort of person, as I’m quickly realising in a situation even worse than I anticipated, doesn’t just not pay attention to the sort of person who might not vote Democratic, but who actively avoids them, gates themselves off from them. America is an utterly polarised country – how a nation manages to get itself stuck between ‘right’ and ‘far-right’, I have no explanation other than all of the usual comments about inevitable products of unbridled capitalism which I’m sure most of you have started ignoring at this point. And that polarisation, that vulnerability to wedges and culture wars, is its pathetic weakness.

Chattering classes. Latte sippers. Elitists. It’s all true.

And they wonder why they keep losing elections.

Day 7: Buzzwords

Americans like to use a surprisingly limited palette to describe things. Everyone has themselves, or someone they know, or a particular thing boiled down to a fine, snappy statement. It’s much more infuriating than you’d think.

Last night, an aspiring stand-up comic used the phrase “culturally subversive” three times in thirty seconds while describing his act.

The best part? Because this has become the American way to do things, American politicians have adopted this, especially over the past thirty years (part of what made Obama’s 2008 campaign so groundbreaking and so successful was his use of full sentences instead of soundbite fragments). And because American politicians do it, then by god, Australians are going to as well.

“Moving Forward”.

“Stop The Boats”.

Shut up.

Day 6: Coffee

Americans are not known for good coffee, as I noted earlier – although this area is considered the best in the country, barista-wise. I also noted in a different post that what America does well is size.

With this in mind, my first step to a post-Halloween party recovery came with a 24oz coffee.

Which is over 100ml larger than the biggest I have ever seen in Australia.

Oh yes. God bless America.