today in wash dc… this place says a lot about the culture what an odd state of contradictory affairs exist in amercica now… the streets here are well populated with homeless, mostly men, as we arrived from boston in the early morning many of these half dead souls were waking up and stirring in their sidewalk encampments, cardboard boxes, garbage bags etc… further on an ambulance was removing some guy who hadnt made it through the night… i recall that on past trips dc was home to vast slum areas… this condition seems to have been corrected but for whatever reason the nations capital is still filled w/homeless , maybe its partly cause of housing costs going up but whatever its just weird… we walked around georgetowns main drag which resembles a street from universal studio in florida… in the midst of this ultra straight reality is of all things a tattoo joint and i was amused to consider that some of the guys in golf shirts and women in stepford wives drag might be sporting massive tribal tats under their disguises (not) actually after seeing the tattoo place i looked but didnt see a single tattoo anywhere… the night before in boston was a very great show and i wished that it’d been the one on tv but of course part of the reason it was good was due to us being relaxed in comparison to the tv event, everyone said that they felt quite released to be back in the real world as it were…the gig itself was really an odd one as it took place in a large club that was divided up into various size rooms and at the same time we played there was a concert of local punk/thrash type bands going on right on the other side of a dividing wall, when a song would end there would be a rumble of awesome sond that would arrive from the stage rear, i dont think our audience heard it though… i heard a bit of the “Street Dogs” who i think were the headliners and were good (they gave me a t-shirt)… (on that note i should mention another band i ran into in minneapolis [i think] “All The Pretty Horses”, i really like them, have been listening to their cd, they’ve got a site up, very cool) now i also couldnt help but feel that one of the reasons the boston show was so enthusiastic was due also to the A&E show, the power of tv and celebrity myth and all… but debbie was very on, relaxed… (she said later that if the crowd hadnt been singing in hanging on the telephone she would have missed a cue, that pertaining to the state of general burnt outness that lingered from the tv show) we found dc’s china town which is tiny and didnt yield any asian films except for basic kung fu stuff… went on to see kill bill 2 which is pretty great, i liked it way more than #1,my only problem with it was that i dont really think the ‘elle’ character could have really poisoned the chinese masters fishheads, i mean she couldnt really have killed him so easily… when we got to the theater i was amazed to see a big banner for “Riddick”…none of us had heard anything about this movie being made… i was a huge fan of “Pitch Black” have seen it many times, i checked out the very elaborate ‘riddick’ site (i wish we had fifty grand to spend on the blondie site or whatever that thing costs) and i got to say im really fucking disappointed with what this thing looks like its gonna be, pitch black was a terrific sci-fi film and i had had thought that ol’ vin was gonna go on to be a really hip star, instead he has just done a load of dumbass hollywood crap and ‘riiddick’ appears to be another overblown cgi hollywood piece of un-original mass produced commercial junk with feeble stabs at ‘Dune’ references… very sad, still sticking to asian horror films for now… oh i did see that Quentin has tagged his name onto the Jet Li movie “Hero” and probably is involved with it finally getting a full blown US release… i for one never appreciated that there are some great major big budget films coming from asia that never see tha light of day in the states… ‘hero’ is maybe four years old already, is a massive epic feature, i saw it a few years ago and was surprised at it being ‘under the radar’… in our current quest i’ve come accross a current similar chinese big budget production called “Double Vision” which is in a way almost cooler than ‘hero’, its a modern genre film that is like a lot of formula hollywwod ‘occult serial killer’ except it deals with Taoist/ Chinese magic