bus roads

2009-06-12T10:49:00.001-07:00

There are approximately 84,233 people with the last name Benson. This Surname ranks the 332 most common in the United States. There are an estimated 41,359 Males with the last name "Benson". It is further estimated that there are about 318 Males with the exact name, John Benson.
one was born today 42 years ago. that was me!

pacific high school

2009-06-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

i never finished a whole year at one school.
my kindergarten was on a closed down ohio naval base. they tore it down part way through that year.
first grade got moved to a portable. i moved half way through second. third grade the building
got torn down. 5-6th i moved 4 times to different schools. finally ended up in california.
pacific highschool was shut down at the end of 10th grade. it was the newest school built in
sanleandro at the time but was on the "wrong side of the tracks"
this video is from one of the times we broke into the school after they closed it. creepy as hell.
i tore the clock off the cafeteria wall that was stopped at 3:00. the hour we got let out.
1988.
the music is night ranger
im sporting totally rad fashion in this video by damian potesta:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WvjrWm0l9Y

we all got moved to the rival highschool, sanleandro hi. one of the more violent times of my life. there was a full blown race riot that made national headlines, they
installed metal detectors and security cameras and narcs patrolled the halls.
still do

not from damian but cool phs history:

aurielia aurita

2009-06-01T11:13:00.000-07:00

lake merritt oakland was where many
creeks met the sf.bay. really its a
tidal lagoon. there are cement
tunnels flowing from the s.f. bay
into the lake.

this jelly fish was stuck in muck
in lake merritt,

even though the lake and its creeks
have been reshaped and mostly covered by concrete the critters still
come, still an occasional salmon
tries to spawn unsuccessfully into
the sewers. crabs, jellyfish,fish and others
get into the "lake" and get trapped.

this one went to an oakland birthday party and
listened to the band "bulbs" before it was released
back into the bay.

a.m.f.

2009-05-06T01:12:00.000-07:00

whollly smokes.
i just spent five hours going thru boxes of flyers and letters
and photos.
ugh.
man, whew. im pretty mentally taxed scanning over 150
show flyers. lots of memories, and many times i wondered
"..wha?" (no recollection what so ever)
1993 to 1997 ish, mostly i was impressed at how many shows were not represented, like our last show or first tour.
now what...

howl at the moon

2009-05-03T15:39:00.000-07:00

sometimes the moon covers the sun

im not sure how, but my mom knew lawrence Ferlinghetti.
he came to a pot luck and we drew on paper plates together.
i didn't know that he was a famous beat poet and that he opened "city lights bookstore" at that time.
later that same week i learned that he had been arrested in the mid 1950's on obscenity
charges for publishing allen Ginsbergs "howl"
it kinda blew my 17 year old mind to hear how some one could start a book store,
and pay to have a book of poems printed and then get put in jail and have
all the books taken away by the cops. i had no real way of understanding how that could happen.
it made me think poems must be very powerful.
A Coney Island of the Mind was perhaps the first book of poetry i every saw.
my dad had the poem about the "dog trots freely in the street" memorized.
it had a picture on the cover that
i thought was old disneyland and thought the book
must be about the most awesome stuff ever. i had to read it over and over to figure out
what the hell it was talking about. i romanticized it long before i ever knew what "poems" were.
after i drew pictures on plates with lawrence, i bought a copy of "howl" from him at city lights
along with some of ferlingehetties other books.
he wrote some stuff inside the cover for me.
i don't remember what he wrote, however he encouraged me to keep being creative.
those books all got stolen when i was in college. i still look in used book stores at copies of the books to see if i can find what he wrote to me.
i still feel there is something about poems that i don't get. they must be more powerfull
than i know. those cops sure thought so.

great kulti -bonner

2009-05-02T16:35:00.000-07:00

in maumee ohio marge bonner is back in her home
her husband built it 46 years ago.
the photo on the left is her at the age of four with her
mom and dad, mr. and mrs. kulti.
my great grand parents.

today she is 91.
she has lived alone in the house that her husband built since he died 40 years ago.
my grandfather was also involved inthe building of the
maumee mud hens stadium and cort house.
the familly brags that when all other buildings in maumee have fallen this house will be as strong as new.
i think that may be true.
one of her stories is how her dad put her on the school bus when she was 9 and she never saw him again.
he went to california and started another family.
she found this new half family when she was in her 80's
i met them this year. her father wrote music. he worked for the Wurlitzer organ company.

pacific to lake michigan

2009-04-30T12:17:00.000-07:00

-robot santa, a foot spa, stephanie b.s skirt, mechanical monkey head is in the bed.
monkey head is pensive usually but some times i would go around back and there
would be a big ol' grin, like " ooooh, im super happy with santa right now!"

some where between the pacific ocean and lake michigan, robot santa
and mechanical monkey head were looking back at the long road behind.
"nostalgia, curse you."
i can't seem to drink my coffee black.
i wish i could but i need the cream
to not make the bitter face.
when i asked for cream at the
mechanics waiting room next to their free coffee stained table scattered with brouchures for the best lubrication available they pulled out this powder stuff in Tupperware that had a piece of tape that said "cream" on it.
(its not really cream)

Tree of Life in Utah

2009-04-11T16:07:00.001-07:00

Tree of Life in Utah

now has a barbed wire fence around it.

pretty sad really, i was here a couple years ago driving the other direction.
this time (last night) the transmission was slipping
finally melting down entirely right here at the base of the tree. 80 mile out side of salt lake city.
its good friday; easter week end so everything is closed. i have to wait till monday to get a used tranny.
with me is a mechanical monkey head. a robotic santa and a huge foot spa with a massage chair.
im on my way to albion michigan.
i need bolt cutters.

hale zukas c.d.r.

2009-03-30T14:31:00.000-07:00

here is something i did finish and sent out about twenty,
the old band i was in with mark small, rob enbom from around 2002 to 2006
i took some of my favorite recordings and put together a cdr.
if you want one send me your address.
mail is the best.
libraries and schools are ok too.

wind up

2009-03-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

the past week i have been spending all my free time (the hours between midnight and 8) working on this wind up music box idea; magnets and springs.
its so mesmerizing to play with them, meditation and muse all those things that
sound cheezy when talking about the creative process but are so real.
if i find myself constantly thinking and doodling about building something i know
that im lost in the project. its fleeting.
so many projects just visit me for a few days then get left in a heap in the past,
there is a sense of urgency about grabbing the obsession and desperately trying to see
it to completion. it fills me with fear and dread that i will fail, it
will be just another pile of stuff in my way, representing of a kind of sad sentiment and self judgement:
"damnit john, you never finish the idea!" "why is all this crap in your workspace?" "gawd john, what were you thinking??"
here i am agian, instead of going out and seeing people or working on something
i know i can finish, i am lost in something that is just ever so slightly out of reach.
now, time writing might better be spent listing off things i actually accomplished. like my friend lisa who went back and collected writing and published projects and compiled them into one site, i might feel better about this process.
however, its fascinating watching myself; discovering that im right dab in the middle
again of this frantic/desperate race with time over something that most people wouldn't
have any reason for doing. i don't want to be in the position of calling my self
misunderstood: for that matter i am resistant to even call this a
"creative process" or by all means refer to this as (gasp) "art"
yikes.
it's way too personal and embodies all of my reason for living, when im in the
middle of the project to belittle it by calling it "art" is so off .not to be mellow-dramatic. hee hee but:
its like time spent playing with the almighty, the mystery, the begining of all time
and my end. im not aware of anything else
~~

since this is like a diary i think ill get to a list of accomplishments soon just
to look at it all however here is what im doing now:

ashby bart station ghost bus (mardi gras float)

2009-03-02T14:36:00.001-08:00

ashby bart station ghost bus (mardi gras float)
Originally uploaded by followthatparade

im looking forward to going out and work on the bus again.
admittedly, the past few months had been a needed vacation from that project,
however it haunts me.
so many times am i asked about it and
then things like this mardigras float show up and i am caught
off gaurd by how much a reference it is for odd ball d.i.y projects
the bus is.
i only got to see this event from a quick distance while i was
driving my work van around town and low and behold a
bus show! i do miss it.

bus doc

2009-02-08T13:14:00.000-08:00

this is a trailer of ryans bus documentary

http://www.scion.com/easy10/films_xlr8r.html

parenthood

2009-02-07T11:22:00.000-08:00

my daughter quinn is going to turn 14 in a month from now. i have been a dad for 14 years.
i haven't thought of myself as a dad much, however since she started showing signs of becoming a self concious teen i feel distance becoming part of it. there have been rare tears from us both in the whole time she has been alive but this keen, distinct process of watching her start to judge herself and find her way through peers
has been heart breaking.
i have re learned how to have genuine fun, feelings, just be myself through her and now im
watching her re evaluate herself in context of her friends. i have heard it described as "finding
her identity" however i think its completely the opposite. she is masking much of herself and
only showing a little piece.
"dad, youre so crazy"
she has taken a step away and now it makes me a little lonely after finaly getting comfortable with the intimacy that comes through nurturing someone. it feels cruel now.
"im tired, im cold"
now im the one who wants to do things, she acts like she has (haaaaas) to do things.
before these past couple of years she was the one wanting to do things that some times i
was too shy to do. like singing in public, playing with the big ball in the store, running and laughing. then you start to get use to it. its a given part of being around a kid. running down
a hill and picking them up and spinning around soon is the natural interaction, and the laughter.
"da aad" -- silence---- "nuthin"
maybe the hardest part is remembering those feelings. you only have a dozen years yourself
then as a parent where its allowed. then youre reminded, oh crap. people judge you too
you may be excluded some how. look at how funny you look in pictures. what stupid clothes
you have. how dumb your life is.
i don't know why but it all goes full reverse in about six years and you start braiding your
beard and wear funny hats and listen to art music. i don't know why but the battle of identity
takes over your whole life and maybe you become a parent and start to witness playtime again.

im quinns age in this picture. i had lived my life
with my dad in the midwest, here i had jus moved out to california to be with my brother sister and mom.
everything that happened in my life up to this point is what shaped the next half of my life.
all my athetics and judgments were made in the
constant attempt to get love from an alcholoic absent man who, when this photo was taken, was the age i am now. i wonder what my dad thought
or did he think about me leaving.
physically there were alot of tears. i remember sobbing on the
airplane everytime. i remember him hugging me when i arrived for visits, however i have
no idea what went through his mind when he ignored me the rest of the time.
i hope quinn feels constant love and approval from me at all times.

what the hell is that in my living room??

2009-02-05T15:50:00.000-08:00

meat cornicopia/ pictures i took in chicago

2009-02-05T12:35:00.000-08:00

throwing shoes

2009-01-29T17:44:00.000-08:00

~~~PLEASE CLICK ON PICTURES~~~~~~

from chicago we went to new york. quinn was waiting for me at the airport.
quinn is 13 now and her schoolmates think obama is a rockstar, he is
so popular that they graffiti his name. quinn wanted to go to the inauguration.
flying into d.c. you could feel the excitment sitting on the plane.
i was sitting next to some singer guy who was asked for autographs.
he was a very good looking black man wearing a ramones t-shirt.
i struck up conversation by saying that the ramones were the first concert i went to
without my parents. he said that he just liked the presidential seal. i never found out who the
guy was but he did tell me that he was performing at the inauguration.

we packed as tight as we could onto the subway. it was the last train. more people showed up than could fit into the train. many were wearing gowns and tux's .
already i could only see smiles, richpoorblackwhiteasianyoungold.
only smiles in an over crowded train that didn't pull out for over a half hour at each stop. they
didn't know what to do with too many people trying to shove on.
then the escalator was out of service, every one had to climb up the length of 10 stories to get out
of the subway.

washington square had an inflatable Bush and a pickup full of shoes to throw at it.

the streams of people were coming from all directions.
many roads were shut down by the military. i counted 13 starbucks
along the road we walked to the "mall"

we were at the fence to the white house and someone
threw shoes over the fence and was immediately taken away.

during the inauguration when bush and Cheney took the platform
a wave of 2 million "fuckyou"s and "boo"s and some shoes were thrown. a pair of tevas landed next to me. later i didn't hear any of that on the replay of the event on t.v. only a faint sing along
of "na na na good bye"

the networks were all there
in little glass boxes. people
loved them and crowded around
the sweeping cameras on cranes.
there were so many different people there, they didn't come to this festival to take drugs and hook up. they didn't come
to the festival to ride bikes naked with fun fur hats even. they came to see it happen, i could
have hugged any one of the millions of people and it woulda been o.k. no problems . one of the things to take away from the
whole experience was that the media loved to talk about michelle
obamas dress but that was the last thing on anyones mind.

twelve below

2009-01-29T00:36:00.000-08:00

when we got to chicago we learned that the same airline we took had landed a plane
in the hudson river in n.y. we would have been on that plane if we decided to fly straight to the
east coast instead of stopping in chicago first. i was very jealous. daves sister thought we
were on the river plane and called us worried. we saw the news while at a breakfast diner
in chicago called the egg palace. here is a picture of the palace:

ah, beautiful.
the owner gave me free coffee and told me how she can read
auras. she talked about disturbed teens giving her napkin art
in exchange for free food. she excitedly pulled out the pile of napkin art and droped it all on the floor:

~~~~CLICK ON PHOTOS~~~~~

she was concerned tht kids don't have the right
place to talk about their most secret thoughts.
she showed me her favorite drawings

2009-01-12T00:19:00.000-08:00

back to the bus;
in four days from now im flying out to albion/ chicago to visit the
bus.
my loose plan is to get the bus back to california by june.
if i can have a home coming show on june 12 th i would be very happy.
here is a collection of movies of bus shows taken on a broken camera phone last year;
i strung them together, it reminds me of a seven inch record my old band
put out called "so jesus was at the last supper..."
it was recorded on a tape player who's batteries slowly died by the end of the recording.
the result was a long song that slowly sped up and got very blown out and noisy.
ah, happy accidents are the rule.

ed roberts

2009-01-11T12:33:00.000-08:00

a small woman named tracy gave me her old wheelchair once she got her new one.

i repaired it with some effort, (electronics are so much harder to fix now than five years ago)

i took the wheel chair to my brothers house for our family's christmas gathering thinking

the chair would be used by my 90 year old grandma to keep up with us when we take our traditional after diner walk. she's slowing down alot.

unfortunately, something like a wheelchair holds such a huge stigma,.

even in my own family.

i forget this. my grandma felt like it was putting her in an awkward situation.

she said to my mom,

"why do you keep forcing things on me?"

my poor mom had nothing to do with the chair, it was my idea.

the chair did get used however, grandma stayed at the house while

the kids got turns driving it along our xmas walk.

my sister said things like

"leave it to john to bring something like this.."

her two kids were loving it, making it go in circles around us, giving eachother rides.

we went about two miles and they never lost interest.

i couldn't grasp the tone of random comments from the adults. it was almost

unconscious, but the implications were that they were disturbed seeing their kids in a wheel chair. i didn't understand this at the time.

i only saw the kids joy and felt a validation of sorts.

Visibility:

if we all had the chance to ride a wheelchair it would loose much of the association

of "sick"

replaced with a visceral expericence of "fun"

or at least "moves me around ", "small electric car", "ooh, robot.."

instead, so much of the imagery of a wheel chair is used to provoke sympathy or imply tragedy.

the more direct variety of personal experiences we have daily, the more broad our definitions become.

ED Roberts:

lived with a high level of physical disability.

and he liked girls.

i knew him in the 90's at the end of his life.

his legacy is much larger than i could have guessed. he is know as

"the father of independent living"

i ended up in Copenhagen once,

there was a world wide conference on disability there.

not only was i the only one from berkeley, but i was the only american,

as well as the only person who spoke english as a first language,

strangely the confrence was held in english.

i was there originally to be the attendant for a japanese man however it turned out that i was put on the spot

most of the time;

"you knew ed roberts?" (imagine every accent of the world)

ed was a star there.

ed wrote the american act on disability, the first curb cut, made

all public buildings mandatorily accessible,

i was shown a dutch book where he was a prominet figure, it also had pictures of him on stage nude with other disabled naked people and sexy able bodied girls.

there is a logical trajectory here;

"visibility"

the basis for eds philosophy.

ed was a u.c. student 20 years before me;

"We've tried cripples before and it didn't work", said the university. they reluctantly admitted ed in 1962 and arranged for him to live in the campus medical facility.

his brother, also a student, served as an on campus pa. often pushing ed from class to class in an old manual wheelchair.

ed was accustomed to rejection,

a year earlier in '61 the state vocational rehabilitation agency refused to serve him as he was considered too severely disabled and labeled "unemployable".

that decision was later overturned. one of the many ironies of eds life was that fourteen years later in 1975 governor jerry brown appointed ed as state director of the same agency

that deemed him too severely disabled to ever work.

ed believed that if you see people with a disability in daily life; going to the store, school, working, an association would form,

society would have the chance to normalize adaptive tools like wheelchairs, canes, walkers, dogs, etc. stigmas would be lessened with real life example.

an extension of this would be sex;

if you see some one with a disability having sexual relations the association would stick.

disability doesn't mean you can't be sexy. ergo the performance art with naked girls.

see,

http://www.sinsinvalid.org

over the past few months i have been taking a picture every day.

my new office is going to be built right above the ashby bart parking-lot. it will be

a huge mall housing many disability related groups.

a "one stop shop for those with disabilities"

i feel it's ironic that it is going to be named the " Ed Roberts campus"

i maybe alone in this opinion however i think he would be against the project of essentialy making an institute of many groups of working disability projects under one roof. ed hated institutions.

this campus is taking these nonprofit and businesses away from more public, integrated spaces.

i have been photographing the construction of this place for a timelapse animation.

im not sure what to do with that afterwords but i would like to

get the spirit of visibility across.

naked ladies always help with that.

2008-12-11T00:35:00.000-08:00

"john, would you mind picking up a wheel chair at sanpablo and alcatraz, there is a
berkeley cop there waiting for you."

"sure, what is the clients name? is she wanting me to bring her chair to the hospital?"

"no, i am not sure, she lives in alameda some where but the chair is broken, maybe
you can just hold on to it for a while?"

"well, i guess i could, she has our number obviously, right?"

"ill make sure she does. "

2008-12-09T13:50:00.000-08:00

when i was 15 i got taken to the Musée Mécanique.
i was changed forever by -...

my mom did a pretty good job of making
carousels the most exciting thing to see. she was so infatuated
with them that in our kitchen there were wood carving
peels on the linoleum getting stuck to my socks and swept into the carpeted living room from a wooden horse that she was cutting out of maple.
chiseling away at a wooden horse after diner in the kitchen.
she would talk about how beautiful carousel music,lights, the ride slowing down
at the end....she was like a little girl with her excited voice chipping away at the heavy wood.
we would get taken to see carousels like they were great works of art or scientific monuments
in the musee was a little carnival scene made entirely of toothpicks.
hundreds of toothpicks glued together making a Ferris wheel, people holding baloons, clowns
and a moving carousel. even the horses would go up and down, the mechanisms made all
out of toothpicks. it had to have taken years of work. the little typed out card simply stated
that it was made by a prisoner at the turn of the century.
i was 15 , totally emotional charged by this idea. it was such an investment, it had to
be made by a wonderful person, but here it said that he was a criminal. how could any one but
the most pure of heart devote so much of himself to such a machine? the man was obviously
totally obsessed with this innocent vision. so soft and child like, yet with the mechanical ingenuity to pull off a functioning clock like machine with his only resource; toothpicks and glue.
how was it possible he was in prison for some horrible crime?
it must have given him grief to no end. a painstaking, soft task in an unflinching
hostile hard environment, im sure he assumed that his creation would be crushed maliciously by
guard or inmate. the duplicity of criminal and gentile artist created a object that lasted over a
hundred years and left my 15 year old self tearing up in a museum. would he have allowed himself to create anything to such an effect had he not been committed?

my mom never finished the carousel horse. she got pretty far but got in a bad motorcycle
accident. she was driving her motorcycle to a P.t.a. meeting when the principal of the school
ran a stop sign and broke her back/arm/ankle. she was in a wheel chair for years and
was told she wouldn't be able to walk around any more.
i moved out a year later to go to collage. i think the horse is still in storage some where.

feeding him lunch

2008-10-26T00:07:00.000-07:00

for 17 years now i have been working with disabled people in berkeley.
i have been around for so long in this field that i have filled almost every role there is
from working with the city to get funding, being on the board of directors, to the terrifying
time spent in the hospital with a broken neck and laying in bed in nonstop pain thinking i will be disabled the rest of my life for saving some one else.
the way i see people is totally enriched by my job. i love it. its blood shit and piss and degrading.
its asking for money. its saving someones life and not getting any thanks. its also being with
people while they die or just go bye bye in spirit. as well as getting overwhelmed with gratitude for
itching a nose or plugging in a lamp.
today it was all about class issues;
j.d. is recent to being disabled. he has power issues around this and i know that he wants me to
be invisible while i feed him his sandwich. he is talking to two girls on campus and they are
mustering up awkward small talk about their teachers and dissing on fellow students.
totally ignoring my presence. i don't mind and i wipe his mouth. give him a drink and
pull out the other half of his bologna sandwich, not untill they are arguing about a dumb
half unit class that they need to fufill some credit.
i spoke my first words of the hour. " i took a half unit of ballroom dancing."
in that sentence i
1. made myself exsist
2. let them know that i too was a student at this university before them
3. made light of the whole serious dilema by suggesting the non academic "ballroom dancing"

they laughed, they started to look at me -something real happened in the supperficial awkward
meeting they were in.

however it is breaking the power that j.d. had in keeping me as his tool.
in a progressive town like berkeley this is thought of as "bad"
but in the context of a disabled person getting his needs met i am just getting paid to attend.

to me its a significant metaphor; physically i have all the power. socially i am just a tool.
just like larger groups of repressed people who are being used. its not so obvious right away.
it was easy for those girls to treat me like that, like i wasn't there. untill i opened my mouth
but that inadvertantly took j.d.s power.

genoa

2008-10-23T15:45:00.000-07:00

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/13/HODLUU63M.DTL&type=printable

my house in oakland was where i ended up after barrington hall was forcibly shut down by the
university of berkeley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrington_Hall#Barrington_graffiti

there was about 200 of us officially and un- living in a huge three story building with a flat roof
top for the naked suntanning inclined.
also the was a scary boiler room basement that no one went into. i saw it twice in the three years
i lived there. in the official court papers filed against barrington (and there were alot)
are claims that teen aged run aways were kept as sex slaves down there.
we were also charged in court as being "experimental testing grounds for drugs of the future"
after barrington hall was closed a small hand full of us tried looking for a place to start another
co-op. fast forward almost 20 years i finnally did it.
genoa st. house, a.k.a purple house is officially a collectively owned house with the title
no longer in my name but in "pink inc." a non profit with a board of directors.
we still have parties and run a muck with the city but its no longer my liability !!

2008-10-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

im not sure why we got away with what we did the last couple of days before the bus
broke down. it only seems appropriate that the engine just quietly quit. my psyche was telling
it that either i have a mental break down or the bus so she became the martyr ...

first off detroit as a city is as american Apocalypse as we have, block after block
of beautiful archetecure rot, trees growing off the walls of buildings who refuse to give up
long after the community has. boarded up neighborhoods and corporations. we drove the
bus to pick up the audience and bands around an island that was a car racing track. we had
a bbq where lots of young hip folk showed up and dropped acid. that was pretty much the
beggining of the night.
i didn't know that when the sudden flash thunder storm hit that more lsd was being passed
around. we drove thru a stampede of the baseball stadium emptying out into the rainstorm
a drenched girl escaped the shower with her bike by asking if she could come into the bus. she stayed with us all night. other random folk hopped on at the next stop
we pretty much hijacked the audience of the "question mark and the mysterians"
show. we parked at the roll up door to the show right in view of the stage. the band was just
starting "96 tears" thier big hit from the late 60's and soon we had lots of old hippies in the bus
while a band was playing inside the bus. we took over thier parking lot after the mysterians
were finished.
then we drove our larger audience to the 20 story monster empty trainstation. where promptly
all the audience floated into the haunted building.
little did they know or could process that we had been followed there by the most stealth cop car i have ever seen

the cops slowly drove up to my drivers window with the head lights off. sat there then drove to the corner of the block and watched as hallucinating people ducked under the barbedwire
and entered the train station. the band was pod blotz
whos blast of noise could be heard echoing thru the building.
then. strange enough to not really be out of place. a mini van
full of drunk people with black metal corpse paint showed up:

2008-10-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

There have been alot of questions about the bus, where it is and what's happening with it.
today i am spending all day in my room. like a sabbatical, my own self imposed retreat.
yet the phone has been going off and the last few calls were just friendly;
"hey, hows it going? where's the bus?"

so after three of those in a row i turned it off.
started a blog
uploaded some pictures
then im going downstairs and make some food from the fine load of food not bombs deliveries
that showed up this morning.

im very happy with the latest chapter in the bus project.
basically in a nut shell;

the bus is
a big empty show space. inside the bus is a stage, p.a., lights and room
for an audience inside aswell as on the roof. its powered by veggie oil, solar panels
and batteries. we take the venue on tour and have local stuff happen inside.
as of 08 we have done 191 shows, over 600 bands have played inside.

-on our way back westward after our second time around the country the bus engine quietly ate one of its own pistons. we were leaving detroit with somewhere around 18 people. on this leg of the tour
we had done shows with bands in the bus from florida to maine. from maine to niagra falls, around the great lakes
and did an all night show with a bunch of picked up audience members around detroit
(that show is a book unto itself)
i drove about two hours out of detroit on our way to chicago when we had to coast to a stop
in a town called " albion "
about an hour after the bus spewed all its liquids onto the albion exit another white bus
pulled up just to say "howdie! i just bought this bus 45 minutes ago..." all the passengers from
my bus and some music equipment got loaded into his bus, while he was explaining where he was going. just happened to be the very same block in chicago we were headded.

dave kloot and i stayed in albion. the rest hopped trains into a storm in Iowa where they
got flooded in.
we stuck around getting the bus into a yard and trying to figgure out what next.

last weekend we bought a house on ebay for four thousand dollars in albion mi. hopefully we
can get a crew together to go back out and revamp the bus - fix up the house - do art
spread some love around albion.

Flickr

2008-10-18T19:03:00.001-07:00

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.