I HEART PARIS

PARIS
BEAUTIFUL ON THE INSIDE

I’ve been on the road now for roughly two-and-one-half months, and in that time I have learned many things that I was not so apt to believe beforehand. One of the most important things that I learned was that nothing works out exactly how you would like for it to work out no matter how hard you try. It is possible to wish your life away hoping that everybody likes what you are doing but inevitably there are some people, and often this constitutes a massive majority, that just don’t seem to get it even though they should get it. However, it is not in my place to force feed onto others what they choose not to believe, and so I just keep on doing what I am doing and hoping that those that do get it really do get it, get it.(?)

It would be impossible for me to name everybody that so believes that certain aspects of the Punk Rock saga need to be documented because it just seems so logical not to let these aspects become subjects of revisionist histories (like that of the beats and proto hippies), and so no matter how much I like or dislike what others have written about the culture of which I chose to take part for so long, I am simply happy that they took the time to do so.

I could comment that Get In the Van is a bit on the uber-dramatic side, and that I know a few people that attended one of the Baltimore shows where the light that fell and hit Henry on the head was written in GITV as him being beaten up by skinheads (nice), but it presented information for a comparison of what some witnessed and what Henry revised as “truth.”

I could comment that in American Hardcore many aspects of the East Coast scene were deleted in order to make California look that much more powerful in shaping the future aspects of “American Hardcore.” But in failing to research the smaller scenes, Mr. Blush simply gave room for others to document it more fully (and that was pretty cool of him; now who wants to pick up the torch???).

Over the past few years a lot of books and a lot of documentaries have found their way to the shelves of my favorite book stores and my favorite movie rental houses, and I have tried to watch them all in a way that was, shall we say, most objective (meaning not allowing my scene affiliations to effect how I felt about the information being presented). The one thing that I found to be true in most instances is that (drum role) PUNK ROCK EXISTED. Not only did Punk Rock exist, it thrived. Not only did it thrive, there were people there who were so possessed by what it had to offer that they felt compelled to document it so that I could watch it. Not that they documented it specifically for me, but they documented it so that me and all of the other people that wanted to know how it existed for those other than ourselves could check it out.

I’ve watched movies about African Americans in the Punk Rock scene, women in the scene (specifically Riot Grrrls), about disparate scenes, about punks in England, Germany, Japan, and the like. I’ve seen interviews with people I’ve always wanted to see interviewed, and with people I didn’t even know existed (but had an opinion and wanted it to be voiced). As well I’d seen some friends interviewed, and I’d seen some of my former enemies interviewed (though I don’t really keep enemies alive any longer, so that is sort of a misnomer I guess).

Anyway, what I am saying is that I am quite happy that Barred For Life is following a similar track to a certain end. For those of you who don’t know the philosophy of my effort, it is that there exists this symbol that once belonged exclusively to the efforts of one very important hardcore band called Black Flag. The logo, called The Bars (a creation of Raymond Pettibone) have now transcended the band by a factor of almost 30 years, and while they still do wholly represent the band Black Flag, they more-or-less now represent a sort of Washington Monument of Punk Rock (specifically American Hardcore). Now, this logo, in basically an unaltered state (though I have found other examples to discount the word “unaltered”) been communicated through about three generations of Punk Rockers and is now been imbued with more positive attributes than the band surely ever intended. In fact, in some of the interviews I’ve conducted I’ve found that people use the bars to denote everything from “destroying everything” to “building a better future” and everything in between. And, as you might guess, I find this to be quite awesome. Even in death Black Flag is as misunderstood as a cultural phenomenon as it was in life.

PARIS

So what does all of this have to do with PARIS…? Well, everything, really. Many of you that know me, or have recently met me, know that I quit my job, gave up my apartment, and have disconnected from all things stable to pursue a 4 month trip across the US, some of Canada, and a bunch of places in Europe, just to document this phenomenon. So, while I was working my mind-dulling job with the City of Philadelphia’s Department of Recreation, and simultaneously booking the BFL tour, I stumbled on to a Face Book page called, oddly, PEOPLE WITH BLACK FLAG TATTOOS. It was there that I think that I found a man named Patrick Waterpeach from Paris, and he had stated that he had the bars in an unfinished mode. From the information that I gathered I had asked him to take the people that I had found from France and invite them over for dinner and host a shoot if he thought this was appropriate.

Patrick, like most of my European hosts, went to it with the fervor of a saint. He put up a FB page and handed out fliers at gigs, and did what he could only to find that there were just three (or possibly four) people in all of Paris with The Bars. He seemed saddened by the lack of enthusiasm of his compatriots, but I assured him of two things: (1) Maybe there were only two or three people in Paris with The Bars, and (2) It didn’t matter because I was planning to come to Paris if it was just Patrick with The Bars and nobody else. I am not sure but I think those statements made him feel better because when he picked up Audrey and me at the airport he was 100% FUCKING GO.

We arrived on a late flight into Paris, so to make things work properly, and so that we could shoot JB (in from Avignon in southern France) before he left early the next morning, Patrick arranged everything with military precision. He picked us up, dropped us at his home, left to pick up JB, and returned moments later and ready for action. Dinner on the table, we ate, drank some wine, and set up shop. Moments into setting up my lighting I soon realized that my Amero/European adaptor was not working (more electrical problems, ugh!!!). 2 minutes later Patrick arrives on the scene with a halogen work light and we were back in business. I shot JB and Patrick on Patrick’s leather couch (individually, obviously) and soon JB was being ushered back to his home with Audrey and myself in tow; through the streets of Paris at night. It was fucking amazing if I must say so. In under 24 hours we’d seen the birthplace of the Smiths, then the birthplace of the Beatles, then the birthplace of the authentic French Kiss, and Air (French Band). And then it was off to bed.

The next day Patrick took the day off of work to show us around Paris before going to the home of Benoit to shoot another set of Bars. Benoit lives in the Bastille-section of Paris, which is a very artsie place indeed. Benoit works on a magazine called Maelstrom and lives in a really cool flat with a really cool girlfriend and some really cool furniture. We showed up, ate some candy, drank some water, and shot Benoit in his leather chair near his record collection. With my lighting up and running we took another few shots of Patrick, which turned out to be slightly more flattering than those taken at his house, and then we exchanged information.

Benoit suggested that we drop off in Lyon to photograph some old bandmates with the Bars. He gave us phone numbers and locations, and off we went back to Patrick’s home. In a strange twist of fate, Patrick’s son was not going to be returning until the next day so Patrick invited us to stay another day in order that we see more of Paris and to properly organize our trip to Lyon, and then to Rome. So we accepted. The next day was spent sight seeing, eating, chilling, and organizing our trip, and then our last dinner with Patrick and his lovely girlfriend Carol.

Our train left at noon the next day and by some strange occurrence we managed to find yet another Barred individual that lived very close to the train station. Making the proper arrangements we found ourselves at the home of our last Parisian participant in time to photograph/interview him on the street, and then to the train station with enough time to easily make our train.

Having coffee in one of the most posh cafes I’ve ever been in, we bid our hosts a final farewell, and then boarded the train to Lyon (Obviously I will get more into Lyon next time). My heart sank because in Patrick I met yet another kindred spirit that I had to leave in order to finish my book. Knowing, however, that I will meet up with him again is an amazing feeling, but for now I just don’t even know how to settle down enough to build a lasting friendship. While I am focused on Barred For Life, the project and the end-product, I am afraid that I just cannot be anybody’s friend right now. It is a sad fact but I will have plenty of time to cultivate these friendships in a few months, once I am a bit more stabilized back in my country of origin.

So, to me it would not have mattered whether we only photographed Patrick, or Patrick and 100 other Parisians. What is important is that he did everything in his power to make the stay in Paris one of the most amazing of the trip, and I hope that I can do the same for him when he comes to stay in America (along with all of our hosts) sometime in the future.

MANARCHY in the UK, cont'd...

THIS JUST IN
VIRGIN OWNS EUROPE

Boarding a Virgin Train, two hours later we landed in the northern town of Manchester. Virgin owns just about everything. They have their own planes, trains, communications networks, record labels, fast food joints, rocket ships, and stuff like that. One cannot walk but a few feet before stumbling into something owned by Virgin, and this seems especially true of England. So, yeah, okay, we rode a very fast train to Manchester owned by Virgin.

So we were a little late and oddly our host Phillip was waiting for us at the station. I've never met Phillip, and from his FaceBook picture (in makeup), I wouldn't have been able to pick him out of a line-up. But somehow he saw us getting off of the train and ushered us to The Studio where people were waiting to be photographed for Barred For Life.

Before talking more about Barred For Life and the Manchester participants just let me explain that I FUCKING LOVE MANCHESTER. Besides there being so many great bands from Manchester, like the Smiths and Stone Roses and Chapterhouse and, um, millions of other bands like that, there was just such a chill and open vibe going on there. Given that Audrey and I spent half of our time in downtown London dodging commentary and criticism by a consort of frat-boy-looking-douchebags, the open-mindedness of Manchester was both refreshing and chill-as-hell.

Phillip and his crew took us under their wing, gave up their beds and their food to share with us, and three days later it seemed like family to me.

The Studio is a rather interesting tattoo-joint-slash-punk-rock-shop just off of Pickadilly Square. It is just one of about 50 punk-rock-shops jammed into one huge punk-rock-building, and this is where Phillip organized our shoot, which ended up taking two or three days to document all of the people from Manchester with the bars tattooed on themselves.

Tattooist Claire became a fast friend, and on our last evening spent the entire night tattooing our fingernails, and herself, with the bars (among other things; Audrey got her boyfriend's name on hers and I got RISE ABUV on mine, duh). On all of my journies Claire was the first person to tattoo herself in front of my camera and I will be damned if I DIDN'T LOOSE ALL OF THOSE PHOTOS TO SOME RANDOM SAVING ERROR..! FUCK, FUCK, FUCK...

11 people came forward with the bars, or had the bars consturcted on them for this shoot and, and as I mentioned before it took us about three days to do the documentation (and I lost some of them too)...

Thrown in for good measure was a trip to see Jay Masckus (sp?), a few nights of awesome cooking, a trip around the city, drinks in the space shuttle, some well placed showers, a few bottles of wine, more dinner, and a lot of fucking rain. Oh, yeah, and a bunch of rather angry bus drivers that seemed intent on not letting us ride their busses or be helpful in any way at all. Oh, yeah, and there were some museums, some coffee shops that made their cappuccino with milk cooked so long that it was almost merrangue. Okay, so not everything was perfect, but it was not a bad scene at all. In the end it was exceptionally hard to leave that city, however necessary it was.

Then night before leaving the internet made it quite difficult to book our flight to Paris but somehow we managed to score some alright priced plane tickets to Paris. Due to some flight constraints we almost missed out on the opportunity to shoot a man from the south of France in Paris, but more on that later. Long story short, because of a number of unforseen difficulties some events did not work out as well as they could have. But somehow everything worked out and, not only did we get to Paris, but we had a total blast in Manchester.

WHERE THINGS STAND.

I could have called this tour quits after the US and Canada, and this trip would have been a success. However, rummaging through Europe and finding no shortage of amazing people here with The Bars, and equally inspiring stories has made this an amazing success. Just as in the US, some places shit-the-bed and some have risen well above the standards.

One thing that i've noticed about our European shoots, and our European promoters, is that the ones that don't drop the ball are REALLY, REALLY, REALLY seriously amped, and they will work so hard to rally people to the shoots that it warms the heart to watch them in action.

Making phone calls on our behalf, helping us book our trains and flights, speaking to people in their native language, and going out of their way to make us feel welcomed, um, I don't want to come home. It is unfortunate that we will not be shooting in Germany (and most likely not in Spain either), but if I decided that I wanted "full coverage" of cities, towns, countries, and people with the bars I could easily spend the rest of my life (and definitely the rest of my savings) trying to make this a reality.

The fact of the matter is that when Black Flag was a band, and long before we Punk Rock Historians decided what parts of the DIY ethic to attibute to them, they were a relatively unknown band here in Europe. The only facts (if you want to call them that) that I know of BF's European tours is from "Get In The Van," and from that the tours didn't look like they went that well. For many early US punk bands making their way in Europe seemed to be a daunting task. Figuring out tour routes, working with promoters that didn't speak English, and dealing with punk cultures that were not really all that similar to that of the US. Just traveling as a solo traveler in Europe is a humbling experience. In America I can at least call somebody and instantly communicate, so if I need a place to stay or a person to organize a shoot or whatever, the communication barrier is only personal. Here however there is just this huge communcation and cultural barrier from easy flow of information and movement; though it is not impossible.

One thing that I have learned in my many travels is that being humble and appreciative is the best way to move. Making demands just doesn't work, and it just doesn't work for me personally. It is a cool way to live, always being thankful for the little things, and by being thankful and showing it in as many ways as you can just makes good sense. Anyway, I don't mean to be all sentimental here but I swear that so far our hosts here in Europe have been so incredibly helpful that I cannot explain it exactly. And for that, and for their efforts, Barred For Life is going to be an amazing product that represents a very, very broad swatch of people who are all struggling to be part of something bigger than themselves. And, honestly, The Bars are just totally representative of that. Sure, they are becoming a pretty cool HIPSTER tattoo, but it just doesnt' matter. It never has. Hipsters suck. They will always misrepresent everything. The rest of us know this, and it is the "we" that will be represented here. The HIPSTERS CAN SUCK IT, thank you very much.

MANARCHY in the UK

ENGLAND'S
screaming
NOOOOO FUTURE

Arrival. Prejudices. Hurdles.

I never wanted to see London. I am a crabby, cranky, pissy guy with some serious hang-ups on what I like and what I don’t like. So, for most of my traveling through Europe I determined any country that speaks the same language as me, thus making it easy for me to communicate and exchange information, as culturally inferior to those that spoke incredibly difficult languages (and many with crazy dialects).

Well, I’ve grown up a bit since those days and have overcome many of my hang-ups simply by understanding that the worlds’ cultures do not live-and-die in the world of Stewart. It just makes sense to try new things every once and a while, whether you determined them to be lame in a former lifetime or not. So, after a rather insane commune with the multitude of travel routes that got me from my home in York, PA, to Philadelphia, to Jersey City, NJ, to NYC, to Queens, NY, to JFK airport, I fell asleep on my carry on baggage at my gate and proceeded to worry a lot about what was to happen to me once my plane landed at Heathrow International Airport.

Language be damned, in a world dominated by mobile phones, and me without mine, I had to take a massive breather in the airport and sip across my first British cappuccino for nearly 2 hours while I made my plans to enter the city, meet up with my contact, Wayne, settle in at the POGO CAFÉ, and prepare myself to photograph Europeans tattooed with an obscure American Punk Rock band’s logo; a band that broke up 25 year ago; a tattoo whose wearer’s average age is around 24 years of age. Weird. Here, yes. And, in the US too.

Weird.

My assistant, Audrey, flew into Manchester with a layover in Frankfort, Germany, and was slated to arrive in the UK about 4-hours after me, and then take a 2-hour train ride to London, where I would meet her and bring her back to the café. Only one problem stood in my way of making this a basically flawless operation: The Pogo Café was closed due to some unforeseen plumbing problems and, so, I had to wait outside for quite a while until I could communicate with Wayne so that he could get me into the café, drop my gear, and then run to pick up Audrey.

Understand that if I were simply traveling by myself through Europe I could get on with simply a backpack and a weeks worth of clothing. But since I am taking pictures for Barred For Life I found it necessary to travel with my bag, a FUCKING HUGE bag for my lights, plus my camera case. Once these three pieces of travel luggage find their way into/onto my arms all at once it become incredibly difficult to carry them comfortably and safely. In fact, if, while walking, somebody decided to try to rob me I would have to allow them to do so even if it took them 20-full-minutes because I would hate to have to reposition my bags, or try to run with them, or try to fight off an attacker with them on my arm. It would just suck, so I would let a robber rob me. It would just be easier that way.

Finally, after taking a series of underground trains and overground trains, and then finding my way to an ATM to pick up some cash, and then a seemingly long walk up a crowded avenue in the rain, um, I found POGO. I found it closed, locked, and the lights out. I found a closed, locked, and uninhabited POGO CAFÉ. FUCK ME.

Toting all of my bags back down the street I called Wayne on his mobile phone. Wayne works as a bicycle messenger so he was busy, busy, busy, but found some time to call a fellow co-op friend and get me under a roof and into warmth; and there were some comfy couches. Oh, and there was internet.

Dropping my bags, scooting down the street, buying more train tickets, training it to Euston Station (yup, the same on as in the “LONDON,” the song by the Smiths), I met up with Audrey and totted her back to POGO.

By the time we arrived back at the café a sizeable contingency of folks had showed up to await the plumbers and to prepare food just in the case that everything went well and they could open later that day.

THE LOWDOWN.

POGO CAFÉ is a fucking rad place. All vegan, mostly organic, and most of the food is prepared on the premises. Most of the kids that work there are dedicated squatter-types with an anarchist-bent, and seem to love bikes and alternative culture. If you are ever in London you gotta go to this place. Prices are fucking totally good and the food is amazing, especially the cakes and cupcakes. Yeah, what a blast.

WAYNE.

Wayne is one stand up motherfucker. Irish as the day is long. Barred For Life. Squatter. Amazing guy. He works all day as a messenger then comes home and cooks at POGO. Wayne was handed the torch to set up the shoot in London and managed to organize it in just a few weeks. In fact, most of my European helpers were able to do amazing things with very little time, and Wayne showed us the light rather quickly.

Giving us his room for two nights, hooking us up with free vegan food, and providing space on a crowded Saturday night for our shoot, this is the kind of person that is necessary to keep one’s spirits high while traveling in a foreign country. A consummate London-ophile, he knew where to go, how to get there, and what to do once there. It is good to know Wayne Glass. Fuck Yeah.

THE CITY.

Okay, even with a common language I still had difficulty doing a lot of things. I had a “LONDON UNDERGROUND” guide that should have made traveling a snap, but it didn’t always, but that was fine. Not all cities are easy to navigate. Over the course of two evenings Audrey and I managed to find our way to some of the more popular tourist sites, get a bit lost, and then find our way to an overpriced eatery even though POGO had us on its dole. I have heard the “when in Rome” saying but never the “when in London” version. But we did what we had to and made it happen.

Of note, even though London is a rather culturally diverse spot on the planet, um, if you look weird on your own accord you might just get fucked with like we did. Both nights in town found Audrey and myself on the catching end of some downright fucked up commentary from rather normal looking douche-bags and their haggard, dolled-up for no good reason, lady-friends. It was pretty fucked up but rolling with the punches is all part of the program. In the end I have some interesting memories of toting around London, but way more amazing memories of toting around, and shooting around, Hackney, where the POGO is located.

THE SHOOT

Between the number of social networking sites that I use to track down barred individuals, I had compiled a list of about 20 folks in the London vicinity. I reached out to them early on, just before the trip over, and then again once I landed. Mind you, some of these people reached out to me first, and I was just returning the favor. Many had pleaded that I come to the UK, so I did. However, once the shoot was on only 5 dedicated individuals showed their faces and tattoo. But as I like to say now that I am some 70 days into my tour schedule, THIS BOOK IS ABOUT DEDICATED PEOPLE, NOT SLACKERS. So slackers found their way to the door simply by slacking. Dedicated people found their way to the shoot despite the desire to say, um, stay at home and drink beer. You know. I don’t have to tell you.

Plagued with light difficulties, I managed to burn out two voltage converters inside 20 minutes. Running out of POGO at the speed of sound, I followed a trail of electronic stores to a full service shop and bought a converter capable of charging a fucking hospital and not burn out, and it cost me as much. Inside just a few hours of shooting abroad I spent a chunk of my travel budget on a necessary evil, a power converter that I could use all over Europe (or at least I had hoped)

Following my “OJ Simpson in a Hertz Rental Car Commerical from the 80’s” style hunt, find, and return the shoot went without incident. While I would like to offer a huge FUCK YOU to those of you that made it sound as though you would swim through shit to make it to a shoot if I made the effort to get to London. Yeah, FUCK YOU.

But what seems so strange about this whole thing is that Black Flag, at least according to Get In The Van, was hated by the Brits. Maybe it was a generational thing. Henry could have just been exaggerating his understanding of how the Brits treated Punk Rockers back in the 80’s, but it seemed as though a lot of them now draw quite a bit of inspiration from that band; at least as much as most American kids do. And this was a revelation to me. While I generally regard Rollins’ testimony as way on the DRAMATIC side of things, my feeling is that all the spitting and bottles breaking and the dark, smelly squats were just par for the course for the early British scene, and not so much part of the American scene’s evolution. So, who the fuck knows…? All that I know is that I had a blast inside a city that I never really thought I would go to in my traveling life and I owe an awful lot of thanks to Wayne, Audrey, the POGO staff, and the 5 folks that made it out to the shoot to rap it up with us and allow us to place a name with the face.

THE END

Day One; London

SAME OLD STORY
DIFFERENT CONTINENT

BEFORE THE TRIP

Seems like every time I prepare to leave for a trip I have some fucked up argument with a girlfriend and lose her. It is becoming such a par for the course piece of my working framework that if I had to guess, well, I would say that it is fated that I not ever be in a committed relationship. Whether it is them or it is me, or some roughly equitable combination of both of us together, it happened again. And here I sit in Heathrow Airport (London, UK) drinking my cappuccino wondering why these episodes keep occurring, and how I am going to find my way to Hackney, and sometimes I think about both at the same time.

DURING THE TRIP

I am beginning to establish a sort of martyr complex in my dealings with this book and its evolution. A few days after completing the tour of the US and Canada a publisher showed an interest in the book. The only condition imposed on my pursuits was that it had to be good. Now, If I were some dirty young punk good might look like a cut-and-paste zine. However, when I was a dirty punk I did a zine and, predictably, my visual aesthetic evolved. As I began buying art, design, and architecture books, what I began to desire visually became more involved than what I used to desire visually. And now I feel like I must perform to that standard. DAMN AESTHETIC EVOLUTION TO HELL.

So here I am in London for the first time ever. Most of my Philadelphia friends never knew me when I traveled to Europe every year, and so when I set out to produce photo shoots there a few of them were like, “do you know what you are doing, really..?” And I had to say, YES I DO. Piecing together information from a number of social networking sites, originally I had 10 shoots set in stone; or so it seemed. However, I let some of my contacts slip while I was overly-concerned with finishing the US tour and I found the entire European venture in jeopardy.

The fact of the matter is that the European venture was never really supposed to a series of photo shoots, but was to be a one month trip to Italy where I would do my damnedest to focus in and finish the text of Barred For Life. The photo shoots would just widen the scope of the book to include The Bars, and the barred, from the perspective of a culture that had no direct connection to Black Flag until they first toured there. And so I opened up the structure to include only the cities that reached out to me since the theme of the data collection evolved from me “taking the country by storm” to me “letting the dedicated reach out to me and document those that share a key piece of the Black Flag work ethic, which happens to contain a chunk about information-proactivity.

The European tour now consists of roughly 5 shoots, including London (tomorrow), Manchester (Sunday), Paris (Tuesday), Roma (Dec, 27th), and the possibility of Milano and Barcelona. All are chill and all are being promoted by people that really, really, really want to tell their story, and that is totally fine by me. The rest of the time I will be camped out in a small town in Italy called Scarlino, in the home of my close friends Mauro and Laura Corbani. I will be accompanied and assisted for the first week by my good friend Audrey, and everything is shaping up to be a solid mixture of work and relaxation.

FIRST FOOT IN EUROPE

My flight from JFK left at 6:50pm, and the trip to JFK from my friend Richard’s house in Jersey City took about 2/3’s the time that it took for me to fly from JFK to Heathrow. I’ve flown into Italy about 5 times in the past bunch of years and to me the insanity of the airport in Rome is less a bizarre situation than landing at 5:30am in a county where English is the native tongue. I don’t know why I’ve been so confused but I am sure that it has something to do with the fact that nobody that I know, and especially those who will be helping me settle in and set up shop, will be awake for another few hours.

Deciding to sit tight in the airport and plan my day has been a blessing. Cappuccino for clarity, fluffy seat for comfort, and ears open in order to sonically spy on those who are moving through space close to me, all of which is keeping me from losing my mind while desperately trying to find a wireless network that doesn’t want to charge me the equivalent of $5 just to check my email for an hour. Plus, I just hate signing up for services that I will use once (and they will batter my email acct for eternity with frivolous advertisements). Fuck that. So when the clock strikes 9am (45 minutes) I will make my first official phone call in the UK and set out on my first ride on The Tube. A few hours later Audrey arrives on a train out of Manchester (yeah, we didn’t book our flights together, or at the same time, or for the same city), and by tomorrow we will be shooting our first Barred For Life folks in Europe. Very exciting. I will have to let you know how it turns out.

From what I’ve been told it is about 40 degrees outside. I brought a sweater, a hoodie, and a fluffy vest. I didn’t bring gloves, but I did bring a hat and some scarves. So off to enjoy the ride. Wish me luck and shoot me an email if you have a chance (stewart.dean.ebersole@gmail.com)

Stewart

Lots of sleep but no rest...

REST PERIOD IS OVER
crossing the Atlantic Ocean

It seems rather premature to say that my stop-over in Philadelphia is over but, well, it is. As of tomorrow I stow my truck, pack my bags, and then to and sit in an airport for about 20 hours waiting for my plane to the UK.

As Noe and I were driving up the eastern coast of the US we had our ears and eyes on a brewing problem here in Philadelphia; that of the vicious split on the roads between cyclists and motorists ushered on by two unsolved bicycle/pedestrian hit-and-runs that resulted in the death of two people.

As a former Philadelphia messenger I knew first hand that the police generally favor automobiles and pedestrians when there is an encounter with a bicycle, and frequently cyclists are vilified and fucked with simply for not bending to the whims of people driving gigantic steel boxes with four wheels that can cause huge, if not catastrophic problems when they connect directly with bicycles.

It is a fucked up mess that is resulting in radical legislation toward cyclists in the name of safety, but with more than a hint of anti-messenger glits and glam attached. Two unsolved hit-and-runs, two deaths, and ALL OF PHILADELPHIA CYCLISTS ARE TO BLAME..? That is highly doubtful, but that is what is happening.

What is worse is that in this messy local political landscape is that a friend, and former coworker, suffered at the hands of both a vicious motorist and a frothing-anti-cyclist police force. After being run off the road by a car my friend was pushed onto the sidewalk and fliped over her bars. She landed on her face and was messed up pretty badly. Once the cops arrived they apparently refused to write it up as an aggressive hit-and-run, and blamed her accident not on the driver but on her flipping over her bars. For FUCKS SAKE, flipping over bars is generally something that doesn't happen to a well traveled cyclist, but for some reason the cops just generally gave her a piece of what the city has been serving up for years; a taste of "I don't give a fuck about you. You are on your own."

So, as I prepare to go overseas I am hoping that the PBMA (Philadelaphia Bike Messengers Association) along with the Philadelphia Bicycle Coalition push for legislation that protect cyclists instead of vilifies them. I don't know. I felt helpless the whole time, like there was nothing that I could do. So, I guess that the best that I can do is put it out there to you. Check into the recent incidents here in Philly and judge for yourself if this city is really trying to go green or if it is just talking cheap talk. Let's face it, bicycles are fucking green. Cars are not. Do the math.

HOME SWEET FUCKING HOME

FINALLY (?) FINALE (?) HOME

I feel like I’ve aged a hundred years since October 1st, the first day of the Barred For Life national tour. On this tour about 30 states were traversed in the brave little white Hyundai Sonata. Some were stopped in, some were shot in, and some were passed right through. Trinkets were purchased, people were visited, friends were made, and life moved at the speed of sound. I changed travel partners three times and am greatly indebted to Stefan Bauscmid (35 days), Jorge Brita (6 days), and Noe Brunnell (6 days).

Alas, I’ve only aged 50 days, though my friend commented that I’ve more gray in my hair than when I left (thanks for the ego boost, friend). Along the way I reconnected with old friends Steven Wade, Katya Rudzik, Scottie Neimet, William and Stephanie Phipott (and son Wyatt), Allen Milletics, and many others, while making a whole shit-ton of new friends as well. To everybody that we met, tons of thanks. You made this trip sooooo worth it. While I am at it I should send out a huge thank you to Ron Reyes, Kira Roessler, Keith Morris, Chuck Dukowski, and Rick Spellman for agreeing to be interviewed by me and my crew, and to Mister Sweettooth for offering his assistance videotaping said interviews for a future video companion to Barred For Life.

Finally, at a gas station near Richmond, Virginia, our gas card ran out of funds. While sitting there ready to push my person bank card into the pump, I thought back on all of the folks that made the US/Canada leg of this trip even remotely possible.

In no particular order I would like extend a heart-felt thank you to:

Stuart Leon Esq.
Rachel Fletcher
Shark Fin
Kyber Pass Pub
Chubb Rock
Snack Flag
Brown Jeff
The Danzig Brick
Tritone
Doug “99” Achtert
Copout
Backwoods Payback
Aneurysm Rats
Autolyze
Exit Skateboard Supply
Robert and Tattooed Mom’s
Phillip and the Saylor Jerry Crew
Stephen of Cantina/Kyber/Royal Tavern fame
Dani Hill
Bill from Red Hook Café
Rolan from Reload Baggage Company
Carrie from Fabric Horse

All those that contributed monetarily and service wise to the Barred For Life project, and those that hosted the events (more on that later), those who attended the events (too numerous to mention in one effort), those bands that played the events, and those who put us up on their couches, beds, floors, rugs, and hardwood floors, what can I say, YOU ROCK. You made this event happen and worthwhile in so many ways.

To everybody that has followed this blog, sorry for making you wait so long between posts in the past few weeks but, fuck, I just wanted to get home.

In about two weeks Barred For Life will be in Europe. I promise to be more vigilant with my posts while there. Barring any unseen difficulty, most of the book should be written by my return mid January.