JAPAN HOLIDAY. 2002 .two words: Slayer Karaoke
SCANDINAVIAN HEAVY METAL HOLIDAY. 2002. . interviews with Mikel from Opeth, a boat called the "Fjord Lord", and interviews with finnish rappers. As in, 'more than one Finnish rapper.'
KOREA 2003. . . land of burly female drummers, Charlton Heston fans, stuffed poopy animals, and the BEST DAMN TREES ON THE PLANET!
KOREA 2004. . . again!
australia damage report !!! 2004. . . yobbos, hysteria, platipi,
TOKYO DAMAGE REPORT.- 2003-2006. 2 1/2 years of reports!
travel to the long-lost continent of america -- 2005 -- nonstop complaining!
hawaii damage report 2005-- yet another rip-off.
my TRIP TO LAS VEGAS ON NEW YEARS' EVE, AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENIUM. i hope that's how you spell millenium.
THE STREETS WILL RUN WITH VOMIT, PISS, BLOOD, AND NOVELTY HATS :
a tale of Vegapocalypse, Dec 31, 1999.
John Mink had somehow convinced me to go with himself, Sarah, and Jay to Vegas for the end of the world. The point wasn't to have fun; who would ever think Vegas was fun?? We were going just to see if we could survive the ordeal. In pop culture terms, it was less Fear and Loathing or Swingers and more Apocalypse Now and Lord of the Flies.
After all, the TV had promised us everything from computer madness to mob rule to terrorism, and Vegas also offered the heady possibilities of a race riot and out-of-control Mafia goons. Plus, of all the awful places on this doomed Earth, Vegas would be the funnest place to see get destroyed. All the conditions were in place for a full-scale, Homeric Odyssey into destruction, a test of one's manhood (or Sarah-hood) against larger-than-life foes and hideous monsters in an apocalyptic time of earth-shattering forces. So here's our Iliad already.
DEC 31-
12 am: Leave Richmond.
2am: Denny's, home of the inscrutably named 'Bowl of Soup.'
10am: Enter Las Vegas, where we decide Slayer is all we can play until we leave.
10:30: Finally find parking at the Barbary Coast, which you'd think would look like some tropical slave-trader's dungeon but mysteriously is done up in an 'Old West' style, like they're celebrating eighteen ninety-nine out on the frontier, instead of 1999. The elevator is smoke-free which is odd seeing as how you'll be inundated with smoke as soon as you get out, no matter what floor. There's even ashtrays in the bathroom stalls.
11:00 First mullet. Mink voluntarily discloses his own father has a mullet.
11:20 First 'ho-directory' vendors. These are the most amazing people on the Las Vegas Strip: Picture a couple of middle-aged Mexican women in dingy sweat suits, boredly handing out gaudy pictures of young white hoes, sort of the hooker yellow-pages, and wordlessly thrusting them at men walking by with their wives and sometimes their kids. Rad! I'm sure the "New, Family-Friendly Vegas" casinos aren't really happy about this: They spend like 20 billion dollars on theme-park rides and castles and stuff to make Vegas look not sleazy, and then some pimp pays a migrant worker $4 an hour to sleaze it right back up again.
All the casinos have these Disney-like national themes to them: There's a
Paris casino with a half-size Eiffel tower, a Chinese casino, an Egyptian
one and, improbably, a Cherman Bier Hall doubling as a casino. It would be
rad if the Chermans started bombing the hell out of the Parisians down the
street: the roulette wheels pop up to reveal V-2 missile silos... We also
try to think of the most inappropriate casino themes: Rwandaland, Bosnialand
come to mind. I think the raddest would be a casino called The Singaporean,
where if you put even a nickel in any slot machine, you'd get a $4,000 fine
for gambling. Same for drinking or smoking. A total failure!!
11:25 See this amazing old, fat guy at a bus stop with a blatantly fake mullet toupee. Jesus.
11:30 First Fe-mullet. We go to the Mirage casino and explore their pirate-oriented theme park, which has a 'real' galleon floating in a man-made moat around it. It would be rad to have the pirates go and kick some ass on the Venetian gondoliers at the Italian-themed casino across the street. ARRR.
12:30 Go to Caesar's Palace, where the cocktail waitresses have the most degrading uniforms yet: every casino seems trying to outdo each other on how low they can make the bar girls look, with the general flavor being Angry, Bitter Transvestite. Caesar's has pleated micro-miniskirts with a matching bustier and a sort of mini-toga that comes over one shoulder. Sort of like Flashdance meets Caligula. Also, Caesar's is so big they have conveyor belts to transport the customers to and fro. The conveyor belts are spray-painted with the Caesar's logo, I guess in case someone, like, steals the 400 foot long belts and tries to pawn them, the pawn shop owner guy can go "Hey! This 400 foot conveyor belt is stolen! I better call the cops!"
1:20 Jay, Mink, and Sarah gamble. Jay wins $10 but Mink and Sarah lose around $7 each. I determine I will gamble any tokens I can find lying around, but it seems the Vegas ecosystem already has some very entrenched scavengers. Even as the night becomes drunker and drunker, no one forgets and leaves even a nickel on the ground. In the end, I return to California not only without gambling but without spending a single cent on anything. in your face, Nevada!
1:30 Spot two dudes with open 40-ouncers of liquor in each hand, which would be excellent by itself, but as a bonus, they're both wearing Miami Vice suits. We look at each other like, "Jesus, it's starting already." More drinkers appear, none happy, all sort of desperate and mean drunk. We mentally revise the Lord Of The Flies timetable to move the inevitable bloodshed up a couple of hours. See the First Leather Pants. Also, see the First Emergency Ambulance of the day but not the last by a long shot.
2:00 Our search for free water finally ends at a Starbucks. Vegas, which has huge man-made lakes and geysers seemingly everywhere, doesn't have any public water fountains. I guess that would interfere with the alcohol. Some Asian girls are staring at me as we sit in the window, so I whip out a comb and begin some Fonz-like preening. Sarah is flabbergasted that my first reaction to female attention is to deliberately make an ass out of myself, and I'm like, "You don't even know the half of it."
2:15 See another mullet outside, which we decide is the kind of really smooth, sophisticated mullet you'd see on one of those Apocalyptic Canadian Terrorists. ( this was just after a Canadian man was arrested in Washington State, he'd transported a New Year's bomb from British Columbia. . . ) That's the scary thing about Canadians, as Michael Moore once said: "They walk among us. You can't tell who's Canadian and who's not." This guy kept laughing and we knew it was cus he'd just planted the biggest bomb down the street and was waiting for it to blow.
2:45 The Starbucks guy says we have to leave because their store is closing. He then explains that the entire strip is getting closed down at 4 pm and everyone inside the casinos after that will be locked in until 6 the next morning, for security reasons. We're really bummed about that until we ask some cops and find out he was totally lying to us cus we are some dumb tourists. Then we all agree that the Starbucks guy is totally awesome for being such a smooth talker. All except Sarah, who is thoroughly appalled by our thirst for destruction, and obsessive speculation on how we're going to die (Canadian terrorists, race rrriots, Christian Militia uprisings, drunken looting spree, Seattle-like police riots, etc.). "You guys just want to find the worst situation you can and put yourselves in the middle of it!!" And we say, "And your point being?"
3:00 In rapid succession, spot the first dashiki, first chili-hawk, first tiger-striped pants. (chili-hawk being the winner of the Name That Incredibly Embarassing Hairdo On Every Funk-Metal Bass Player, Where It's Half-Mohawk, Half-Pony-Tail ) We enter the Paris casino, which has a totally insane, football-field sized trompe d'loeil sky painted on the 30 foot high roof of the first floor, and the most scanty cocktail-lady uniforms yet. Sort of baby-blue unitards with huge shoulder pads and tuxedo tails.
3:15 The streets, immaculate at 10 am, are now full of discarded hoe directories. In fact, all the litter I've seen today has been porn. It's not until now that I see the first non-porno litter of the day: some "Jesus Loves You" catalogs in the gutter next to the whores. Rad!
3:30 Sarah takes a $115 plane back to San Francisco rather than stay in Vegas another 9 hours.
4:00 I start to get mad that I've seen neither oppressive police riot cops nor crazy mafia guys running around. Mink insists the wiseguys aren't involved in Vegas anymore, but I say "I'll believe Vegas is mob-free when they're so nostalgic about it they open up a mafia-themed casino to match the other fallen empire casinos like Caesar's or the Egyptian Luxor." Imagine spending a night at Casino de la Corleone. At 7:00 and 9:00 there's an animatronic recreation of the Buggsy Siegel hit. And of course you can pay extra for a horse head to be left in your bed when you return from a full day's gambling.
4:30 Feet sore as hell, I settle in for some serious crowd watching, and am thus rewarded with some amazing sights:
A guy in a Native-American-style fringed leather jacket with a ho directory in one hand, and the other hand patting his kids reassuringly on the shoulder while his wife looks on.
An Indian couple; the woman has a shawl on over the top of her head, and her husband has a scarf over the lower half of his head.
Also, the first Viking Hat, first large lesbian couple, and a bunch of guys with actual, We're-Not-Kidding-Here Gold Chains, and the first motorcycle cops driving on the sidewalk. Depressingly, there's no exotically grotesque Midwestern people with Hawaiian shorts and black socks and obese wives wearing tube tops and stretch pants and hair in curlers. I am sorely disappointed.
Ambulance count is now up to three.
5:15 See the first and last overweight cocktail waitress of the day.
5:30 Drop into the Emperor's Palace, which has the most amazingly half-assed motif of any casino. Like, the roof molding is Chinese. That's it. Spot a dedicated Emperor's Palace customer wearing a Carpal Tunnel brace from too much one-armed-bandit-lever pulling, still at it. Excellent! Also spot the incredibly rare and exotic Double Fe-Mullet lesbian couple, and get mad that my friends aren't here to verify it.
5:40 See the first guy in a dress, which is odd because there was nothing remotely fabulous about the guy: just a regular dude who happened to be wearing a dress, and kind of a dull khaki, with a totally modest hemline at that. What's the point? Almost as if in response, I turn the corner and see two 6' transvestites in full regalia, posing for tourists.
5:45 A news camera has appeared on the corner, causing people walking calmly down the street to pause and scream at it like they're having the time of their lives, making a total ass out of themselves for 30 seconds, and get bored and keep walking normally away. The best of these incidents was a clique of silver-lame-bustier clad girls whooping for the camera for an oppressively long time, when this Hessian walks out from behind them wearing a shirt that says SHUT THE FUCK UP in really big letters.
5:50 First drunken pratfall in the street.
6:00 Meet back up with Mink and Jay. Mink has spotted a crew of Latino ho directory vendors working with bandannas over their faces looking like porno Zapatistias, and an SUV filled with Limp Biscut fans, out of which protrudes a video camera and a sign reading "Show me your tits."
6:30 First all-silver-lame suit.
6:45 Stop to see the giant 40' water geysers that spout and twirl in time to the insanely tinny speakers playing some song called "One! Singular Sensation!" which Mink instantly changes to "Huns! Pillaging and raping!"
7:00 Half the lanes of the Strip have been closed off to accommodate the increasingly numerous and rowdy pedestrians, which makes for some funny confrontations when a mob of people just up and crosses the street and the Vegas drivers, long accustomed to intimidating peds, still try to ram their way through. We spot two crews of drunk guys arguing about the increasingly popular "Show me your tits!" slogan. One group of guys is yelling "That was OUR idea!!" Mink at this point decides to join Jay and myself in staying sober the rest of the evening. I figure that, as the only 3 sober adults in the whole metropolis, we and only we will be in an 'altered state of consciousness.' This because being high and drunk will have become the normal way to apprehend reality. So not only are we one again in the vanguard of altered states but we save money too.
7:30 Tension seizes our little group as we realize that we've seen 16 pairs of Leather Pants, compared to only 14 Mullets. This being Vegas, I propose a wager as to whether the Mullets will eventually claw their way back to the top, but neither Jay nor Mink wants to root for Leather Pants and I can't blame 'em.
7:45 The Mullets have successfully edged to dominance over Leather Pants, at 20 to 19. Meanwhile, Mink has taken a separate count of Funk-Metal Goatees, which are gaining fast on both Mullets and Leather Pants.... 11 this hour alone.
Meanwhile, after a 30 minute hike on aching feet we get to the Luxor, and are rewarded by seeing a dude wearing a huge clock around his neck like Flavor. Mink and Jay find this positively sacrilegious, like a Jew putting on the Pope's hat or something. The Luxor has a huge animated billboard advertising "TASTEFUL LATE-NITE TOPLESS REVIEW" I bust out the camera and Mink shoots me licking the Luxor Pyramid. Jay snaps Mink jumping up and sitting stoically on the 7-foot-high Anubis sculpture in the lobby as cops rush to the scene. The pyramid, and all the other Vegas monuments, seem oddly small and unimpressive. I think this is because they have that phoney, matte plastic texture and simple, clean lines one associates with bad computer animation. So instead of looking like really huge and elaborate compared to other buildings they look kind of small and uninspired compared to the 3d simulations I've seen in movies.
8:00 By this time, we're pretty exhausted but still must force ourselves to experience Nitro: a 'wrestling sports bar' nestled in the bosom of a medieval theme park named Camelot. Camelot is insanely crowded and apparently there's an animatronic dragon that comes out of the moat and Dio kills it, but there were so many people I couldn't see the dragon, only hear the hissing sound effects. I just thought there was a Japanese Noise band doing a lounge act, and wondered why Vegas would do something so hip.
8:15 The streets are now full with mostly belligerent young men, who, except for one tiny, strutting guy who keeps yelling "Y 2 Killa!! Y 2 Killa!" are just drunk enough to resemble a slightly out-of-control frat-boy party but not at all drunk enough to start the sort of over-the-top mob violence and apocalyptic blood-and-urine-mixing-in-the-gutter lord-of-the-flies madness we wanted. So really it's the worst of both possible worlds: dumb enough to make us feel stupid for going but not dumb enough to provide the life-threatening catharsis we needed to justify the trip. We are bummed and complicit. This is pretty much the worst part of the trip, but only because we forgot that we were here to feel the pain. In the future whenever someone would get bummed, I would shout "Feel the pain!" at him until he cheered up.
Ambulance count now up to seven. 22 mullets still barely leading over 21 Leather Pants, with 13 funk-metal goatees in the mix.
8:30 Entering the Terrordome of price-gouging Vegas Shopping Mall madness: huge, Soviet-style lines of people queued up for $7.00 hamburgers, $4.00 loaves of bread, and squinty, drunk security guards that resembled the remains of the Iranian Army after everyone of prime fighting age had already been drafted and killed. Only the very old, obese, or those too dumb to even pass regular security guard IQ tests were left to defend the sacred Walgreen's. In our experience, the regular casino security guys were the only employees that didn't seem really surly and hating everyone. But these Walgreen's Cops were cut from a different cloth: One dwarfish guard was yelling at a Dennis Rodman Lookalike "Hell no, I'm not going to search you, man! I'm searching strickly females tonight!" and another guy yelled at me because I entered the Fat-Burger parking lot a whole three feet from the Official Entrance (two orange pylons between some concrete barriers) "Entrance is over there, man!!"
Eventually, Jay and Mink get their overpriced food and we walk past a bunch of security guys to this deserted parking lot where we can rest and eat, when some grizzled, mustachioed veteran of riots past tells us it's a threat to everyone's security ,including our own, hint, hint, for us to be back behind the Club Utopia. Maybe we looked like Canadian terrorists.
8:45 At the Harley Davidson nightclub, The Cult is going to rock in the new year. Not only that, but there appear to be actual people waiting in line. I figure no one could be that dumb, so I ask one young couple if they're aware The Cult is playing, and am told, "Hell yeah!" Still nonplussed, I politely ask "So, you know you're in line for The Cult, right?" and they start to get nervous so I leave in a hurry.
9:00 We find a good curb to watch the Strip which has now been completely shut to cars, and is fast filling with acres of human flesh, which has been cleverly extruded into 5 and 6 foot person-sized packets of revelry but, to the discerning eye, these human-sized packets are clearly part of one vast amoeba and about as smart. People will start chanting or whooping at absolutely nothing, and others will pick up the call. The favored battle cry of the moment seems to be a siren-like, nasal "WHOOOOO!!" in fact, nobody seems to be yelling anything else. I picture some crew of really tough-looking party girls in silver lame miniskirts running around with tire irons issuing beatdowns to anyone yelling "Wheeee!" or, god forbid, "Yay!": WHAM, BAM!! "It's 'Whoo!', bitch! Don't you forget it; there's more where this came from!" BIFF, SOCK!
I photograph some Mullets, although the sheer numbers of both Mullets and Leather Pants is now so overwhelming we realize the futility and sheer hubris of trying to list them all. Mink verbalizes the irritating feeling I've had all day, while solving a pesky mystery: most of the revelers aren't from the Midwest, but from L.A. Damn their eyes! Those cheesy Angelenos ruining a perfectly good apocalypse with their cheesy silver lame pants and cheesy novelty hats. I realize that if the promised global rioting doesn't occur at least we can be happy that those annoying rave guys will stop wearing t-shirts with little millennial green aliens on them. Your aliens aren't coming, dude. Now either put on the plastic face-bag like Heaven's Gate or take that shit off.
Three more hours to go. We fill with dread.
9:30 We check out the inside of the Barbary Coast, where the hardcore gamblers are totally oblivious of any holidays, which to me is much more impressive than the people outside who are pretty much desperately trying to pretend they're having some huge fun at some amazing event.
10:20 Jay tries to catch a nap but is mocked
by the revelers. "If you can't sleep in a gutter on
New Year's in Las Vegas, where can you sleep in the gutter?" he
wonders.
10:30 At last, the first riot police show up. They look like CHP officers with riot helmets and big orange canisters of pepper spray. They have erected some sort of fort right in the middle of the street, where they stand surrounded by the vast amoeba, like osmosis, and they're clearly not happy about it. They have built this weird, spiky structure inside their chain link fence. It looks like an impromptu jail where protestors can be handcuffed to the bars or the spikes. I ask one officer what it's for and he says "Decoration." Some cop picks a random black guy out of the crowd and demands to search the guy's backpack. I yell, "Fool! There aren't even any black people in Canada!!" but I don't think he heard me.
10:40 First arrest. The cops are putting plastic handcuffs on some guy while the crowd chants "Let him go! Let him go!" and our spirits rise for the first time that evening. Unfortunately, no riot happens. We decide the ultimate riot would feature Brittany Spears, scheduled to play right down the street, coming out of her concert hall with a shotgun in one hand and a Molotov cocktail in the other, and overturning a cop car and posing for pictures yelling "Viva la Revolution!!"
11:00 We relocate to the corner of Flamingo and Vegas streets to await Sean, Ben and their crew. The entire intersection is one huge whooping amoeba, and several 'Show us your tits!' crews have set up shop next to us. We agree that the only people even more pathetic than those guys are the normal, middle-aged couples that are grimly determined to expose their wheelchair-bound infants to the spectacle of y2k in Vegas. "Mommy, what does 'Show me your tits' mean?"
Some inspired reveler has concocted a sign reading "Who wants to have
sex with me?" which Jay said didn't sound too appealing until he realized
the guy was blind drunk, which turned him on. The crowd
is now chanting at almost any excuse, so Mink tries to get everyone to chant
"Pep-per SPRAY! Pep-per SPRAY!" and eventually gets one guy
to sort of chant along until he (the guy) realizes what he's saying and gets
really embarrassed.
11:10 A phalanx of riot cops appears from out of nowhere to arrest some Samoan for trying to climb up a streetlight to get a good view.
11:20 Sean, Ben and their girlfriends somehow find us in the bowels of the amoeba, and we are all amazed. Seeing as how both their girlfriends are Asian, I introduce myself with the words: "We've been here since 10 am and have yet to see an Asian guy with a white girl!" Sean's girlfriend comments that those couples are very rare, but doesn't sound convincingly bitter about it. Ben makes several new friends by playing "Smoke On The Water" on his battery-powered Casio. At one point, one of Ben's new pals yells at the crowd to shut up so he can better hear the impromptu concert. Rad!
11:45 Sean and Ben convince us to go into the heart of the intersection, the precise worst location from a riot-safety standpoint. Figuring that not going to the center would be the equivalent of the Apocalypse Now guy getting all the way to Marlon Brando's HQ, seeing the heads on stakes, and then just saying "Aw, the heck with this!", Jay, Mink, and myself decide to follow him.
12:00 Aside from Canadians placing some non-lethal glitter explosives in the fake Eiffel Tower, there is no destruction at midnight. People actually seem pretty happy. John's dad, despite his mullet, was right on the money when he said that America is too prosperous to embrace apocalyptic superstition with widespread chaos. Oddly I wasn't happy or mad; after 38 hours without sleep I was unable to concentrate on the events at hand. it seemed like everything since 11:45 was a movie I was watching but not paying much attention to.... the 'new millenium' hype dissolving into sleep-deprived anticlimax.
12:30 Get back to the car but the security guy tells us we can't leave because the streets are full of humans and broken glass. He's nice enough to let us go to the car and sleep, though.
2:00 am Wake up and roll out of Vegas. Slayer suddenly seems inappropriate and Tom Waits is called in as a replacement. We drive past throngs of pedestrians still in the streets, and it takes half an hour to get the 6 blocks out of town. Vegas is built at such an insane scale: the blocks are all a mile long, with streets 8 lanes wide and stop lights 3 minutes long. Once on the freeway we see many amusing, life-threatening drunks careening hither and thither but traffic is so light, we can just stay behind them and laugh safely. Ironically the greatest threat to our safety was not Christian apocalypse freaks, lone gunmen, race riots, mob rule, violent cops, Canadians or rampaging Mafia guys but ourselves: driving through the desert all night totally sleep-deprived.
4:00 am In the final epiphany of the evening I realize that it DID make sense for us to, as Sarah put it, "find the worst situation possible and put yourselves in the middle of it:" we know we can handle 2000 now. We've felt the pain. The kids at the Bungle show or the Rod Stewart concert, or certain wimpy sell-outs who shall remain nameless, in the desert with their girlfriends, they don't know if they're capable of dealing with 3d millennium gruesome insanity. We do.
