It’s high-time that I resume my updates. For the past two weeks I have failed to meet posting deadlines because I have been putting out fires left and right.

Last Monday night (April 6) I was driving through northern California to my brother’s house on Route 101–in heavy rain. On a notoriously sharp turn, another car came screaming around on the inside, halfway into my lane, and I had to swerve hard to miss them, sending me fishtailing and ultimately putting the front of my car into an embankment. I was fine, but my radiator and frontal structure took a very serious hit. The other car did not stop, which leaves me with no insurance.

My car was pretty banged up (I couldn’t get the driver-side door open for a while). But it seemed to drive alright, so I pushed on to my brother’s house, and in the morning I set off to try to catch my show in San Francisco.

I made it to Santa Rosa. At that point, my car started making horrible noises and throwing up warning lights, evidently because the inverter coolant had all leaked out. I got towed to a dealership that gave me an estimate of $10,000. I had $15 total. I spent Tuesday night in Santa Rosa, sleeping in the back of my car, missing my show and consequentially causing my friend to miss it as well (I was her only way to get back to Davis). I convinced my mom to upgrade our shared AAA membership, so that we could get 100 miles of towing, just about enough to get it to San José, however it did not take effect for two days.

On Wednesday, I caught a bus to San José–leaving my car behind–and spent the night at my dad’s. I spent a lot of Thursday resting and figuring out what to do about my car (I’m still not sure), and on Friday I bussed back to Santa Rosa and got towed to a collision center in San José, where I got a lowball estimate of $12,000. Right now, the best plan seems to be to sell it for scrap, and put that money towards buying a used car.

As for my actual project, it’s starting off pretty well. Before getting to California, I attended two shows by a group of touring bands (Chumped (NY), Jeff Rosenstock (NY and CA), The Smith Street Band (AUS), and Andrew Jackson Jihad (AZ)), which I will detail in a following post. I came just $1.10 of the bus/train fare I needed to make it to a ska show in San Francisco, but I managed to catch two of the bands at a small Santa Cruz show the next night. San José so far looks to be in as much of a music drought as it is in a water drought, but there are a few upcoming shows of interest in San Francisco and Santa Cruz, as well as Sadfest 2KX5, a small punk art/music festival in Dublin and San José at the end of May, which will coincide with Fanimecon, San José’s anime convention.

I have a number of friends and contacts, who I’ll be talking to in order to find out about shows and to arrange interviews with musicians and others involved with the music business/scene. In between these, I mean to visit record shops, music stores, recording studios, venues, and record labels to conduct interviews with the employees, managers, and patrons, as well as to learn of other music stores, record labels, shows, &c. and start flushing out my network. I mean to visualize this network both digitally and physically, though I’m still working out the cork board for my wall. As part of my interview process, I will be asking people about which parts of the Bay and San José they have particular relationships with, whether those be neighborhoods, houses, schools, or whatever else, and I mean to express this as part of my network, which will be overlaid on maps of San José and the greater area.

I will also intend to explore the whole of San José via skateboard and public transit. While trying to find the Greyhound station downtown on Friday, it became painfully clear to me that I don’t really know the town at all, so I mean to go all around, sketching, filming, and photographing. Then if I can manage it, I’ll pull it all into a multimedia piece (every week if I can manage) featuring either original or local music. That’d be cool! That’d be difficult!