Enough with the Portland allready!

June 4th-7th

I went back to Portland before I left. Because Portland is my favorite.

There was a carnival!...
Dinosaurs!...



And Snakes!

Alligator Snapping Turtle's.... tongue...?

The animal part was really depressing. It was some sort of budget traveling exhibit run by red necks. They had a bunch of neat animals, baby bengal tiger, alligator, bobcat, serval, tucan, scorpions, tarantulas, lizards, giant tortoises. But they were all stuffed inside tiny cages with nothing to keep them entertained except the hundreds of screaming kids.

It was also the week of the Rose festival.... Portland's celebration of... I guess roses. So I got to see my first American parade. (the Rose Parade.... its in an Elliot Smith song!)
It was pretty lame, Everything cliche about America... rodeo girls, cheerleaders (who didn't do any tricks, just jumped around enthusiastically. What a rip off!), School marching bands, Huge floats... OK maybe it was a little awesome, I'm just pissed there was no free candy.

I went to a show to. Rererato is a really great artspace run by really neat people. Exactly the kind of place I'd like to start up in WTN.

Church + Double Plus Good
Saturday 6th June
Rererato - Portland




Portland's the only other city apart from WTN I could imagine living in.

Forest, slug, tow truck and dead baby.

So Onyx and Colleen and I had some big plans to go out to the rainforest.
Instead we took a wrong turn off and I ended up getting my 2nd tow-trucklift in a row.

Even though we didn't get to the rain forest.... it was still amazing spectacular....








And we found this guy....
I also saw a few Bald Eagles.


On our way home we headed up to a lookout up the top of a mountain. We only had 1 more mile to get to the top when the car started sounding funny, overheating and smoke/steam/fog started pouring out of the boot.



So we all sat on top of each other for the 2 hour drive home. The Tow truck driver had a whole lot of morbid stories about crash sites he'd attended. Starting with the story about finding a babies severed arm at a crash site on Christmas day. A great way to end our day out indeed.

Sasquatch and Sunburn

23-27th May

So Sasquatch is this neat 3-day music festival in Washington. It has some sweet acts, but really it's location is what makes it so rad.



The mainstage is a natural amphitheatre that looks out over a canyon. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT!


Headlining this year was R.E.M, The Cure, The Flamming Lips, Modest Mouse, MIA, Death Cab for Cutie, The Mars Volta and... what the hell?.... The Flight of the conchords!

The're HUGE over here. Instead of getting the typical "oh, lord of the rings" when someone finds out your from New Zealand, you get "Flight of the Conchords!!!!"

They're on the covers of all kinds of magazines here and a 10 page spread ain't nothing.

"Well they speak English, but its not like OUR English" - Truck drivers I overheard at a diner talking about the Conchords.

Itsy-bitsy Flight of the Conchords on the main stage just before
The Mars Volta and The Flamming lips play.

So here's a quick rundown of who I got to see....

Sasquatch 24th -26th of May
The Gorge - Washington State.

Day One:

Fleet Foxes
The Shaky Hands (ha!)
Beirut

Vince Mira - A 16year old kid who sounds EXACTLY like Johnny Cash. There was actually an audible gasp when he began to sing. Then everyone started screaming and ran forward with their cameras and pretty much created a media frenzy.

Destroyer
The National
The New Pornographers
Crudo
M.I.A.
Modest Mouse
R.E.M

Day 2

65daysofstatic
Truckasauras...

Blue Scholars
Cold War Kids
Tegan and Sarah
The Presidents of the United States
Death Cab for Cutie
The Cure

Day 3

The Choir Practice
Thao with the get down stay down
The Moondoggies
The Hives....



Built to Spill
Rodrigo Y Gabriela
Battles
Flight of the Conchords
Jamie Lidell
The Mars Volta
The Flaming Lips (!!!)

Ok, so Im going to rave on about the Flaming Lips for a bit.

WOW.
Along with the Aurora, Flaming Lips are the only other thing on my list of 'Things I MUST see before I die'. Not that there's not alot of other things I'd like to see, but those are what I MUST see. So I'd put just a liiiitle bit of high expectation on them.

But FUCK. They far surpassed anything I could have even imagined.

Scroll back up a little bit to the Flight of the Conchord Picture. Sweet Lighting rig dangling above them aye? Well yes, but also, as everyone discovered when it was lowered for the Flaming Lips set, its a freakin' UFO.
Wayne appeared from the top in his bubble/Hamster ball, rolled down the UFO and onto the crowd. Magic.
Enter 20 Telitubbies, confetti and streamer guns, smoke machines, massive glitter filled balloons and SIX NAKED WOMEN, and you're got yourself the first 3 songs in a Flaming Lips show.

Also, the archway which you can see pretty good in the Hives photos, somehow (probably by magic) turned into a screen. As well as projecting footage shot from a camera on the end of Wayne's Microphone, projected some really neat clips from crazy Japanese game shows, naked ladies, and kids doing Kung Fu




Beat that Aurora Borealis.


And lets just talk about how great the ozone layer is. I spent 3 days in full sun without any sunblock (only because you couldn't even by it at the festival) All I got was a little bit of a pink sting that had turned into a tan the next day. Go Ozone!


The Journey home was just as much as an adventure as the event itself.
The ride Sally and I had gotten to the campground was leaving before the Flaming Lips (for them Flight of the Conchords was the highlight), so we said fuck it and decided to Hitch-hike home.
What was meant to be a 2 hour drive turned into a 12 hour mission.
While waiting for a ride we got talking to a fellow hitcher from Alaska, which happened to co-encide with getting picked up. So we all piled into the little hatchback and took off. The girl who picked us up was a bit of a concords nut and still had Jermain's face painted on her leg. Neat.
We got about an hour into the drive when the car broke down on the free way.


It was actually really nice where we broke down so we explored the forest a bit and found lots of bones.

(tee hee)

After a mis-diagnostic of having no petrol, getting someone to pull over to take us to get petrol, finding out it wasn't the petrol and then going back and getting a tow-truck, we ended up in a teeny tiny town who didnt have what we needed, but could at least charge us up enough to get to the next town.





Which happened to be where they filmed Twin Peaks!
We slept for a good 5 hours on the lawn in front of the mechanics, while they fixed the car up. Then headed to Seattle, all having actually kinda enjoyed the experience.