September 14, 2010

Tarzo, Italy w/ Unkind @ villa house resort

Morning. Separate walks around Bolgna, some get lost. Load van. Drive through more winding mountain roads and look out upon things not like Florida. No oranges, no strawberries, no miles of flat boredom, no overabundance of chain stores and restaurants, no mutant hillbillies. Pull into another small town and all I can think of are the endless teenage hours spent watching Argento, Bava, and other Italian horror movies filmed in settings identical to these.

It appears we play in a resort villa built hundreds of years ago. We have a promoter host family and they begin proudly serving a variety of wines, beer, prosecco, and later, shots of mystery liquors. Then the cats. A family of cats who all look the same hair pattern wise, including a lazy father baking in the sun, graceful mother going through the mom motions for a tiny, beautiful little clone, running free and living life in the best cat life scenario one could imagine. See photos for proof of this small child and understand the power it held over all of us for the next 24 hours.

Puss n boots

Pulling myself away from tiny cat, it is time to eat more of the glorious Italian pasta and try to balance out the hours of drinking before we have to play. The show space looks like a vintage wine cellar and there are in fact some old ass wine bottles around. The people posing as the audience in this situation seem less interested in what bands are playing than the fact that any bands are playing and it is an excuse to go out. During our set, the dad from the host family films us with a video camera, sometimes very close to our faces as we are making music happen. It is not the normal experience but I would still like to see the video and compare our performance to my favorite MTV hits from the 80s, Hall and Oats “Maneater”, Billy Joel “Uptown Girl”, Lionel Richie “Dancing on the Ceiling”, etc. Unkind plays last and we get drunk more.

After our set, time to relax

Unkind

Drinking skyrockets after the show and things get blurry so I refer to photos from this time. Us and the Fins took turns petting the kitten, who kindly curled up on its bedding pillow and then in our box of shirts. We caught each other staring at the kitten a few times and reverted to man activities, attempting to cover our tracks. Surprisingly, things devolved into drunken chaos. Greg and I decided to go upstairs and chill in our resort room, ending up watching an episode of Dexter in bed together. We realized that we didn’t really feel an attraction to boys and went downstairs to check on the rest of people. The lights had been turned off in an attempt to slow down the party but the party was still raging by candlelight. By this time it was close to 3am and Italians were freestyling with no regard to small town sleep patterns. Troi threw his hat in the freestyle ring but was shown up brutally by the locals, possibly due to the easy rhyming nature of the Italian language. I tried a video chat with home and failed miserably when my video was darkness and served no use in a video chat. I gave up and went to bed.

Troi sings Alejandro

Finnish lap kitten

Alcohol