Monday, July 14th 2008

Yesterday we had some nice adventures in Echo Park. We began the day with a practice and we created some new tasty musical transitions for the set. We packed up and headed for Los Angeles (we got our first taste of the traffic)and got to the Echo Park area with enough time to explore a bit. Echo Park is very eclectic, with stores and cuisine from various parts of Latin America and Asia. We had a hard time ordering anything because none of the local businesses took credit cards. Victor and I (Ian) got a bite to eat in this Salvadorian dive and ended up getting a little sick. Echo Park is well worn, but it was also very beautiful. My great-grandfather Barsom Eskander had a home close to where we were. The streets were lined with interesting apartments, arabesque gates, tall Suess-like trees, various flowers and assorted trash left behind by local wanderers. We saw some random balloons hovering over head, Mauricio bought the best hot dog ever and the local buses made a really interesting whooshing sound as they passed by. Victor also found a credit card left at an ATM machine and made sure it got back to the owner.

We finally arrived at Echo Curio (which was in my opinion one of the coolest venues I have ever experienced) and unloaded the gear. It is a small art shop/music venue on Sunset Blvd. Two really nice socialist dudes run the place and have a wonderful philosophy. According to the Echo Curio Philosophy, every person has the desire should have a venue to show their work and they will present anything and everything in their store. Everything is egalitarian. They even pay all the musicians the same amount regardless of how many people an artist brings to the show. Marx would be proud! There was some amazing work on display. Silver Pines had played there on their recent tour and we saw one of their hand made tapes.

We had a great show! There were video projections on wall as we played. I felt like I was on a carousel. I'm sure the 16oz Dos XX helped the feeling along. We were really into the set and the people who came to see the show seemed to have a good time. We started the set with Bone Dance and ended with a new song that has yet to be named. Afterwards, we went to a bar and chillaxed with a few friends who came to the show. We drove home, almost ran out of gas, Mauricio missed the freeway entrance and we crashed out as soon as we got home.