More Texas...

Just as a follow up to my last Blog I gotta mention that I am continuously amazed at the number of huge battleship-like pick-up trucks in the state of Texas. Just about every vehicle on the road is either a pick-up or an SUV. The Houston show went pretty well. Super Happy Funland is a very strange but cool place. I just left Dallas and am now in Denton. What is with Houston and Dallas. These are huge cities which have almost no music scene. Dallas especially. That should be a thriving city but even the one little area that used to have stuff going on (Deep Ellum) is pretty much close to disappearing. There is hardly any place to play anymore and those places that do exist aren't that exciting. I did take the opportunity to catch up on some movies. What else is there to do but go to the mall and do a little theatre hopping (please don't turn me in!). I saw Darjeeling limited which I thought was excellent. For some reason it's gotten lots of negative criticism but I thought it looked beautiful and had the kind of characters with whom I was happy to spend my time. I also saw Gone Baby, Gone which had some potential but was kind of flawed. Strangely enough I thought the flaws had little to do with the direction and acting (Gotta give some props to the Afflecks) but more to do with the story. For something that was trying to be super realistic I thought there were a few leaps of stupidity I wasn't sure I could buy. Spoiler alert! When they go alone to the quarry I just wasn't buying it and the whole thing with the kid being alive was a little too obvious and I just wasn't buying the number of sacrifices these guys were making. In any case it was entertaining. I also watched Eastern Promises which was pretty mediocre. If you've got absolutely nothing else to do it was ok but it doesn't go too far and didn't really feel like a full length movie.

China

So I'm back out on tour which means more blogging! Went to China late last night. China, Texas that is. After the show in Beaumont at the Vortex I went and crashed at my friend Herb's place in China. This morning he took me on a tour of his farm. They grow sun flowers and rice and grass and blueberries and a new crop called energy cane which is similar to sugar cane but is more easily converted to ethanol. Most american farmers have been making ethanol out of corn which really doesn't yield any significant energy savings because it uses just about as much fuel to make it as the end result produces. Apparently it also can't be transported in pipe lines necessitating shipment by trucks which burns a shit load of gas. Taking their cue from Brazil which is way ahead of the United States in this kind of stuff they're trying to produce ethanol in a much better fashion. The whole growing and converting thing should be up and running in a few years and hopefully will serve as a model of what can be done. I got to ride in the combine which is one scary and daunting piece of machinery. Herb also had a bio-diesel rig set up for which he gets restaurant grease and recycles it for fuel. The whole thing was pretty exciting to a city boy like me. All that stuff at the grocery down stairs from my apartment actually comes from somewhere...