Dog days

Our friend Andrew has posted some of his pictures from the European tour. He ended up in the hospital in Belgium with a collapsed lung and it's a relief that he's safe and at home now. I have yet to go through my own pictures from the trip.

I continue to reflect on the tour and what it meant, personally and collectively. It's part of a larger nexus of upheavals this summer that have included buying a house, switching jobs, and my dad having surgery to remove cancer. I haven't tweeted or posted in a while because I'm living in the new house, and currently not working, but haven't been able to have an Internet connection installed. Mostly my days have been spent solitary; installing fixtures, moving furniture, setting up a new home. I did bike out to Wernersville, PA (~63 miles each way) with my dad to spend a couple days at a Jesuit monastery. Sustained silence is unnerving for people raised in the technological/Internet milieu, but it's a valuable exercise. I spend a lot of time craving quiet, living in the city. But when I finally achieve that quiet, I don't know what to do with it, and the noise in my head becomes louder than the usual noise outside.

I have also found that during times of stress and change, it is helpful to paint a room orange:

Euro tour recap

The Murphy's Law European Tour 2009, 6/15-7/1

"A disaster a day keeps the hubris away"


Seems like everyone else beat me to pictures and videos. I'll post some of my own pictures later, but for now you can find videos here, here, here, here, and here. Other people's pictures of the shows we're putting in a Myspace album.

First, what went wrong:
-My amp was overweight for the airline, had to pay $150 to get it to Poland
-None of the requested equipment rented, had to play first show with reduced backline
-Spent a whole day looking for power converters, which don’t seem to exist in Poland
-Buses switched to vans, have to wait four hours to figure out rental trailer at last second because gear won’t fit
-Not enough seats left for my sister to join up with tour in Brno despite assurances to contrary, even though she bought her plane ticket specifically for the tour back in February.
-Athens show rental amp has blown tube and nonworking footswitch
-Athens show doesn’t break even, John gets hassled for money
-Two people have to sleep in the van in Brno to allow my sister and her friend a place to stay, since it turned out they weren’t even budgeted for at all
-All tour cash gets “lost” after Brno show (no one seems to care…?)
-My wife loses her wedding band in Budapest
-Rainy and freezing cold for 48 hours, clothes won’t dry
-Roof of Vienna venue leaks during bands’ sets, equipment gets wet
-3 people get sick (respiratory virus)
-After two straight 9 hour drives, van starts leaking fuel in Belgium, sprays the trailer
-Poor organization/curfew in Berchem means Rosetta only plays one song, lots of angry people demand their money back for the show
-Had to sleep in venue in Berchem, air mattresses deflate during the night & mosquitoes bite everyone; my wife's face swells so badly her right eye shuts
-Fest in Knokke is in a warehouse with no bathrooms and no electricity, amps buzz wildly because of the gas generator used for power
-Had to cancel Hamburg show because the routing is impossible --- not enough time to actually drive nine hours from Belgium to Germany and then turn around and make it back to Belgium for next show
-“Secret show” was actually not a show at all, it was just never booked to begin with
-On morning of canceled show day in Belgium, Andrew’s lung collapses and he has to have surgery to repair it, leaves tour, stays in the hospital for a week
-Berlin show falls through
-Last minute replacement for “secret show” draws precisely zero people, no money and only one shirt sold
-GPS goes crazy multiple times, takes us around in circles
-Driving from Holland to Poland, second van has a wreck, possibly totaled
-At final show in Gdynia, no hospitality, no sound check, and Sepultura’s drum set takes up so much of the stage that Rosetta can’t fit on it, and we almost didn’t play.
-GPS goes crazy on the way to the airport causing us to almost miss our flight home

Regular old dislikes:
-Too much drinking and not enough exploring
-Group is too big to go anywhere expediently
-Final tour routing didn’t make sense, unreasonable drives
-Would prefer reliable equipment and tight logistics to cushy accommodations and hot food
-Cocaine?? Really?!

Positives:
-Encores almost every night, including some double encores
-Sold a ton of merch
-People drove to see us from all over:

Latvia/Ukraine/Sweden/Russia >> Poland
Bulgaria/Macedonia >> Athens
Moscow >> Prague
Croatia/Romania >> Budapest
and probably lots of other places I'm not aware of.

-Went on a 24-hour “date” with the wife to Amsterdam
-Cathedrals are awesome
-Post-soviet Europe is full of super nice people
-Glad to count Mojo, Jon, Milan, Davy, and the Blindead guys as new friends.
-Got to meet some internet friends in person for the first time
-Beautiful countryside
-Incredible food and hospitality from basically everyone
-Goregrind and black metal jokes
-Insane crowds who know the words and go crazy
-Learning about cultural differences between white people. White people are not all the same!
-Coming to appreciate some ways that America really is unique in a positive way
-Got to play after Sepultura (can't believe they agreed to this) in Gdynia to a sweet audience who stayed way too late to see us play, now I can say that "Sepultura opened for Rosetta"

I'm sure I'll be able to reflect more on this with time. It's not the kind of experience that I can say was good or bad by some scalar measure. It's not even primarily an experience (which implies a kind of consumption). Touring is work --- which is to say, production --- with particular hardships and particular perks.