Noisy Balloonist Blog is the apprentice

Nine Inch Nails at Planet Hollywood Las Vegas, Saturday December 13. Final engagement of the lauded Lights in the Sky Over North America Tour 2008, which marked the departure of epic session drummer Josh Freese and (previously unannounced!) keyboard savant Alessandro Cortini from Trent’s live quintet. Cortini flipped his keyboard into the crowd as he left the stage. Also previously unannounced is the return of a “from scratch” four-piece live NIN to the U.S. in spring 2009.

These guys blew every hot rivet out of every girder behind every quaking wall of the Planet Hollywood dome. Somehow I made it to 32 years of age without ever seeing NIN live, and I was ecstatic. I spent the entire show beating drumlines into the balcony railing and bouncing up and down like I was on a trampoline. Fortunately I managed not to donate my cap (or my teeth, or the rest of me) to the headbangers in the orchestra below. It baffles me that people are capable of witnessing such vital live performance seated and motionless with a cup of eight-dollar beer sweating between their legs. I wonder if they are alive.

The Lights in the Sky are generated by two stage-spanning LED “light curtains,” one downstage, one up. Composed of segmented panels not unlike samurai armor, they fly in and out depending on the song and can appear transparent or opaque or anything in between. The rear curtain is backed by a traditional lighting rig. Flanking the stage are strobes so massive they must have been ripped off an airport runway. The result of all these GPU-intensive photonics is a towering spectacle the likes of which rock and roll has never seen. Mostly the band occupies the space between the two LED curtains. With visuals swirling both in front of and behind them, they appear suspended in an ocean of lights. Trent can interact with or remix certain visual sequences in real time, as when he punches randomly through a wall of digital sleet during Only. Videos here. Wired mag technical primer here. Setlists abound online. My highlights:

• The Frail to abridged Closer with The Only Time break. A NIN medley! I swore I heard Pretty Hate Machine in Closer and thus far the only person to call it is some bloke in Romania who doesn’t seem to have actually attended the show. Go former Eastern Bloc!

• Gave Up.

• The Great Destroyer.

• The Ghosts segment. Consists primarily of keyboards with an all-acoustic rhythm section, including marimba, xylophone, tympani and stand-up orchestra bass. Also a Ghostified rendtion of Piggy.

• Wish.

• The Big Come Down. A rare entry from The Fragile and devastating live.

• Head Like A Hole. Soul crushing. New blood rushes from the marrow. Closed out the set.

• Reptile during the encore.

**UPDATE** Thanks to chaonatic for stalking Lights Across the Sky across the earth and accumulating some of the best live HD material available on the web. The Great Destroyer and Ghosts 31 are must-watch.

On Sunday I decided to visit Hoover Dam. I was issued a fucking four hundred and twenty-five dollar speeding ticket along the way. This is ironic because, courtesy of hotel deals and reward points, the NIN show was effectively free. The “good” thing is, as this citation was issued by a federal agency on federally managed land (Lake Mead NRA, along a strip of vacant desert road clearly speed trapped for out-of-town rubes like myself), it will not appear on my driving record. The bad thing, besides the obscene fee, is if I abscond instead of paying up or opting for a court date, a federal warrant is issued for my arrest. Whereupon I’ll be whisked away on a black flight to Guantanamo and sodomized with a rifle until I reveal everything I know about that kiosk in Planet Hollywood that sells pearls still in the shell. Ow! From Hawaii! I hope they play March of the Pigs.

You will never appreciate clean underwear more than after you reckon the stench emanating from a three-day-old pair after a 12-mile hike nearly seven days into a summer camping trip. It spikes the nose and addles the mind, like heatstroke or reality TV. There was a grocery bag in my car that I called the The Bag of Incomprehensible Funk, where especially noxious apparel went to outgas before returning to my pack. Then there is the thrill of stripping those brined undergarments off for a campground shower. Undisguised grunts of pleasure escape from the neighboring stalls, ohhhhhhhhs and aaahhnghs and sharp, contented exhales. So mesmerized are you by the sensation of shedding filthy skin that you don’t notice you’re making identical noises. But it hardly matters—vanity has no place in the wilderness and you have hot water for less than 25 cents a minute. Which highlights this universal axiom of camp cleansing: Always shut the tap yourself. Being caught unawares, dripping and quarterless, in a coin-op shower when the water clicks off is an awakening nearly as rude as birth.

In late August/early September I took a two-week solo camping trip, looping around California, penetrating its vacant northeastern corner and straying briefly into Oregon and Nevada. The journey included Mendocino County, Humboldt County, Redwoods National Park, Crater Lake National Park, Lava Beds National Monument, Lassen Volcanic National Park and Yosemite. I kept detailed notes; I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to post, nor why the post has been so agonizing to write. Prematurely then, I turn this travelogue over to you. Some portions have been obsessively rewritten, some have been stolen verbatim from my journal and some have been dashed off to maintain the narrative. Other bits have been omitted entirely, and at this late stage I am only ambivalent about their absence. A viewer’s note: The photo gallery below includes a few snaps from a prior trip to Death Valley in January 2008. This is a little underhanded, but I like the photos and DV was on the original California Loop itinerary. After two weeks of camping, I was simply too wasted to confront the heat. The trip was romantic and restorative and often lonely, and I saw a lot of volcanoes. It was a conscious assault on the mediated existence of urban life, and in that respect it was a direct hit.

Los Angeles to Hopland, 509 miles

It’s a little glib to compare good times in Mendocino to good booze. Fine palliatives are always on the itinerary, and during my travels I sampled 17 wines, 11 beers, 11 brandies, two mezcals and one stupendous absinthe [the links will take you to my top selections], but time in this real Northern California enriches the soul as well as the blood. Maybe good times in Mendocino are like good dreams—vivid during, hazy after and utterly rejuvenating. One evening, Kumar, Sunny and I dined on foot-long Golden Slipper oysters from the Mendocino coast. These monster bivalves could consume an oyster knife whole, so we set them over charcoal until the shells just cracked and pried them open by hand. The flesh within was lobed and wet like a toddler’s liver, speckled with grit and as big as my palm. We carved them into chunks, basted them with Tapatio and lemon and slurped them down.

With friends the next day, we tasted at Navarro Vineyards and Roederer Estate, where Trina insisted the willowy blonde behind the bar was hitting on me. I gave her Pod Chocolates and she gave me a fat discount on two bottles of wine. Technically, this means she has my phone number. There’s a photo of me leaping about 12 feet from a rock into the Navarro River that you will not find in the gallery above, since my silhouette resembles The Penguin from Batman Returns (it does no longer; thank you Wii Fit). On our way home we stopped at the Anderson Valley Brewing Company for craft brew and jars of coveted spicy mustard. The AVBC staff were kind enough to let me collect hops directly from the vines suspended over the beer garden. I thanked them with chocolate, which they double-reverse-thanked with a free pint. Outside, a circle of shower-deprived Mendofolk were smoking bowls off a bud the size of a perfecto cigar in plain view of the daytrippers. I was exquisitely happy. Remind me to tell you about the $350, 22-year old Germain-Robin Anno Domini brandy.

Hopland to Mottole Beach, 171 miles

Up the 101 into Humboldt County, the sticky kind heart of the ganja galaxy, a broken down, exceedingly rural landscape of hills and valleys where cattle meander in the road and one can drive for miles without seeing any evidence of a legitimate economy. The town of Honeydew, as it were, consisted of a few ramshackle farm buildings and a hybrid post office-general store with wood plank floors. The locals toasted my arrival with Miller High Life, which they sucked down from the hoods of their pick-ups moored in the dirt out front. I’m not making this up to enhance the story. A strip of Dymo label-maker label was stuck to a nearby outhouse: Shake more than twice and its playing with yourself.

The Mottole River drifts into the sea about 35 miles south of Eureka along Humboldt County’s Lost Coast. A rustic 10-site campground huddles behind some dunes away from the beach, seeking respite from the ceaseless wind. After my first night in the tent—fly off, stars scattered across the black dome of sky—I took a morning hike towards the Punta Gorda lighthouse three miles to the south across deep, ankle-shanking sands. The Lost Coast delivers on its name: foreboding, vacant, indifferent to the travails of life, and wildly beautiful. The ocean is a frigid gray-green and massive waves wheel over and break directly on the beach. The body count included three dead sea lions, a turret of feathers and bone that was likely a pelican and a decomposing gray whale. In life it must have been 40 feet long; in death its perforated vertebrae were the size of dinner plates, and gulls pecked its flanks for scraps of putrid carrion.

Mottole Beach to Redwoods National Park, 108 miles

Next stop Redwoods NP, a UNESCO World Heritage site, hermitage for devotees of the forest and home of the world’s tallest trees, whose location is a closely guarded secret . I was told much later by a geologist I met in Lava Beds—who knew the whereabouts of the hidden grove but politely declined to reveal them—that the world’s tallest tree is now the world’s second tallest tree, thanks to a recent storm that sheared 12 feet off its canopy. I logged 16 miles of hiking beneath the silent arbor, the most trekking I did anywhere. I found a walking stick abandoned at my campsite. It was stamped with the words Lassen N.P., likely a souvenir from an NPS gift shop. I claimed it and prodded the logs in my dinner fire, planning to deliver it to Lassen for someone else to find. From my journal:

8/29/08
I started leaving a spare container in the tent at night so I didn’t have to leave to go to the bathroom. You can get away with a lot when you camp solo, like pissing into a jug labeled “Simply Lemonade.” My tent has glow-in-the-dark zips, which personally I think is really cool. There is this tendency among some of the retired set to show up at camp and simply reconstruct their living rooms around the fire pit. Chairs, lamps, the morning paper, everything. Not bad necessarily, just… comical.

Redwoods National Park to Crater Lake National Park, 210 miles

Crossed the mouth of the Klamath with it scimitar-shaped sandbar, detoured to the Safeway in Crescent City for moleskin and cola and then pointed northwest along route 199, otherwise known as the Smith River Scenic Byway. The moment I left the coastal winds behind, a savage heat gripped the road and the air smelled like tinder. It seemed the mildest provocation might incite the forest to explode. When I stopped in Grants Pass to review my map it was 106 degrees and the air was as still as a mortician’s shroud. The combination of heat, wheezing AC from the cars queued at the Burger King where I was parked and the chatter of overfed drivers ordering double-bacon this and king-cheesy that made me ill.

The alpine caldera of Crater Lake offered respite from the heat, a ravishing volcanic bathtub 1953 feet deep, five miles wide and, having neither inlet nor outlet, caching some of the world’s purest water. I hiked to the peak of Mt. Watchman for a retina-peeling panoramic view of the Lake and the surrounding forest. Mt. Shasta was visible 100 miles to the south, the Three Sisters 90 miles north. I hiked the ruinous dirt escalator called Cleetwood Cove Trail down to the water’s edge. You can see rocks protruding from an underwater shelf 40 feet below before the cabochon light is consumed by blue, then fathomless black. I absolutely love Crater Lake.

Crater Lake National Park to Klamath Falls, 69 miles

I re-provisioned in Klamath Falls, about 20 miles north of California border, where I stayed the night at the Quality Inn (high quality), watched The Hills on MTV for the first and last time (low quality) and breakfasted with a busload of Korean tourists (medium quality) who had followed me from LA to Crater Lake. Miraculously, I’d managed to slip back into civilization directly between the Democratic and Republican conventions. That morning I stupidly asked the hotel clerk where the falls where. “There are no falls,” she replied, “but there’s a park across the street.”

Klamath Falls to Lassen Volcanic National Park via Lava Beds National Monument, 217 miles

From my journal in Lassen:

9/2/08
Bumpass Hell is Bumpass Cool! Or hot, rather. I ran into a California Conservation Corps group on the trail. Mostly they were hammering small stones into even smaller stones and pushing boulders around a rocky incline in a wheelbarrow. I’m not sure what they were conserving, but it seemed like a lot of work. Tonight I started an excellent fire! With nothing but downed wood, newspaper and a lighter. Tonight I am a man. Or a fireman.

I debated leaving the walking stick in the gravel at the Mt. Lassen trailhead but was unable to part with it.

Lassen Volcanic National Park to Yosemite National Park, 318 miles

Crossing back into California from Nevada, I stopped at the agricultural inspection station south of Topaz Lake. I declared my Oregonian apple and tomatoes. The woman eyeballed me xenophobically. “Can I see the apple?” she enquired.

“Uh sure, it’s in the trunk. You know, it passed ag check back when I crossed over from Oregon.” This was true.

“Oh. Well… ok.” She dismissed me, seemingly relieved to have been spared the mundane business of interrogating yet another piece of fruit.

In Tuolumne Meadows I tried night photography and Jetboil omelettes and sort of vaulted up the south face of Lembert Dome. Showed you, trailhead.

Yosemite National Park to Los Angeles, 366 miles

I was erratic and emotional on the drive back to LA. I didn’t know where I would feel more alone—at home or in the forest. Regardless, I’d been drifting southward like flotsam in a river ever since Lava Beds, and in my eagerness I vetoed a side-trip to the Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains, one of the many ranges that border Death Valley. I glimpsed a coil of smoke idling over the peaks as I drove past, not an uncommon site in the inferno of summer. Turns out that was the BPF visitor center burning down. It had sparked that morning and burned to the foundations. A cause was never determined.

In the town of Mojave, known to most Angelenos as that dusty toilet where you take a piss on the way to Mammoth, I stopped for a snack: my last contraband apple and some granola. There was a wild old man— bearded, cooked by the desert, with a pinched Hannibal Lechter face and a battered baby carriage overflowing with garbage and Made in China American flags—nosing through the McDonalds parking lot for cans. Periodically he would stop and play a tune to no one in particular on a pink toy guitar strung across his chest. The Lassen walking stick was his, of course; I knew this. I fished it out of the car and offered it to him. He took it immediately and without thanks, as if I was late for the exchange. Then words hemorrhaged out of his face at an incomprehensible rate something about deaddogsundera houseunder andthecitydidno thinga nddidyouseethis articleinthetimesthisman isveryrichthatguyov ertherebeatshisdogsiknowand people beat mewhenisleepand no wihavea weapon! I’m not sure but I think he was referring to the walking stick. He had a ring of ballpoint pens tucked into the neck of his shirt like a Masai necklace . I understood his urgent need to speak; I’d been alone for a while too. When I drove into LA that evening the city was a different color. No visual information was gained or lost; rather my brain, recoded by wilderness, rendered a shifted spectrum.

Total miles driven: 2222.5
Total miles hiked: 38.7
Ratio of miles driven to miles hiked: 57.4 to 1

Usually you’re lucky to spot two or three. The hawks watching over me as I drove north on the 5 numbered over a dozen. Most were of typical size and coloration. Two were hulking, spectacular beasts that looked spawned from a fairy tale. And one especially rare bird wore a cloud white breast and a back of mottled mahogany that crept over its head like the falconer’s hood. We theorized that the cold snap had made them bolder hunters. They brooded over the line of cars huffing through the Central Valley. Everyone agreed this was a good omen.

In Hopland I saw Sunny and Kumar, Krishna, Michelle, Penny, and Nookat, who I hope is really giving that bristle-brush arch dealie the business. I love my friends. I’m afraid I don’t tell them that enough. Freebird was not beaten, cooperatively or otherwise, but there was homebrew, chocolates, an exceptionally warm 2001 Italian red called Chaos, and the ritual visit to Oco Time, so I can’t complain. Yokayo Biofuels continues to evolve: great people, scads of new equipment, streamlined production. Kumar and Sunny have pursued an ethical, sustainable business model defined by stewardship of their employees, the resources used in manufacture, and the community, both local and global. I will strive to follow this template when my chocolates are launched.

Out of Mendocino now, south along highway 128 to the 29 through the Napa Valley, past gourmet hideaways like Geyserville, Calistoga, St. Helena, and Yountville. I stopped to watch some vultures devour a cat that had been ripped in two by a passing car. The back half was gone and a stub of vertebrae protruded from the severed end like a bloody thumb. The skin had been folded outward, like someone rolling down the lip of a paper bag, and the birds were plucking offal from within. The rest of the corpse was clean, almost washed. This was a different kind of omen, cheerless and gruesome, but honest. The carrion feeders, after all, were just disposing of the stain our species had made. I documented this little death and got back in the car.

Turkey vulture.


Don’t click if you don’t want to see.

I was lamenting speeding past so many first-class wineries, so I stopped in Napa to restore a little cosmic Valley harmony. The tasting room was in a mall, next to a Chili’s. Napa has sub-divisions and Wal-Mart now—not the inebriated tasting jaunts of my youth. The juice was glorious anyway and I bought two bottles, this oddball cranberry-hued sparkling rosé and a dizzying red blend by Girard called Artistry. The guy pouring noted, somewhat apologetically, “Before it didn’t have a name.” Back on the road. Highway 12 winds east, across the marshes and sloughs of the Sacramento River Delta to Gold Country and Yosemite beyond. I stayed about 10 miles outside of the park entrance in a town—nay, a depression beside the road with a jumble of buildings you’d miss if there was something in your eye—called Buck Meadows. Inside it was clean and warm and Adult Swim was on TV.

Yosemite is a maddening, beautiful, holy place. Nature’s twin sculptors fire and ice have carved something magisterial out of the ancient Sierra; this is the most extraordinary piece of earth I’ve ever seen. (The Columbia River Gorge is a close number two.) Nowhere are the forces of tectonics and glaciation more apparent. Vast, implacable granite monoliths float overhead and waterfalls tumble from hanging valleys to the evergreen below. One could meditate upon the sheer slate of Half Dome for days. El Capitan is an emblem of brute geologic force, and with a little scrabbling, its sand-colored flank is accessible from the road. The main falls, Upper and Lower Yosemite and Bridal Veil, are ephemeral in winter, ice-choked veins riven in granite. The cold renders the entire park still, serene, and vividly alive. I saw ravens, mule deer, chipmunks and grey squirrels. Most of the humans in the park had decamped to the old-world luxury of the Ahwahnee Hotel. I swore I was in Twin Peak’s The Great Northern or The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. The lobby bar offers the National Park System’s best selection of single-malts, except for the Bill Clinton Memorial Dogtrack and Lounge.

Yosemite Valley from Tunnel View. Half Dome at distant center.

Half Dome closer, rising 4000 feet along the eastern rim.

El Capitan in the afternoon light. About 3000 feet high.

El Capitan detail.

Ahwahnee Hotel. This is where the blood gets off.

Ahwahnee Hotel detail.

A wispy Lower Yosemite Fall.

Ice on Bridal Veil Fall.

Quoth the raven: “Hand over your lunch, tourist.”

I didn’t attempt any challenging hikes. I was alone, it was frosty cold, and much of the park’s roads and trails were off-limits, made treacherous by ice and snow. This means some of the most famous sights—Vernal Falls, Glacier Point, the arduous 16-mile round-trip to the crown of Half Dome—will wait for a future visit. On the southwestern fringe of the park, I trekked up a closed road to Mariposa Grove, Yosemite’s biggest stand of giant sequoias. In summer, there are cars and concessions and a tram that rolls through the “destination” trees—Fallen Monarch, Grizzly Giant, The Faithful Couple, and others. In winter, there remain only the great trees, the snow, and the noble silence of the forest. I spotted a juvenile fox, yet another rare animal visitation. This felt like timeless solitude, an intimate commingling with the natural plane.

Roots of the Fallen Monarch.

Wood and stone.

Seedpod.

Ice on the Merced River near Happy Isles.

Frozen spray.

Further downstream.

Happy beside myself.

I left the park around 4pm, wending down out of the mountains and picking up highway 99 south through Fresno and Bakersfield. Civilization was everywhere; I felt lost. Somewhere in the dark (right here, actually) I paused at a Flying J Truck Stop to add more Yokayo to the tank. Over the entrance was the final omen. I knew I was heading home.