I Escaped From Florida Too

Hello one and all. My name is AJ, and I have been a fan of Against Me! since a friend of mine popped a tape into his car and told me 'it's this record I got by this band that plays around town called Against Me! or something' back in 2002. I borrowed the tape, never gave it back, and broke it.

Now it's 2008, I live in Canada, and Against Me! has their new album in the mall record shops, and I've actually seen them play here, in the middle of nowhere. It's sort of heartwarming to know that other people escape from Florida too.

It's cool to see a fan forum. Welcome, won't you?

Hey, I'm Lex maybe the one you heard about this place from. I've always wanted to visit Florida, but everyone I know talks about is so poorly haha. Canada seems nice, a bit cold though.

lex wrote:

Hey, I'm Lex maybe the one you heard about this place from. I've always wanted to visit Florida, but everyone I know talks about is so poorly haha. Canada seems nice, a bit cold though.

Florida is great to visit for no more than a week, and only then if you like the beach and stay the hell out of the interior.

.....otherwise, it's hot, wet, everyone you meet in Florida is actually from New York, even the people who live there treat it like a vacation spot so there's no real love or concern for the place, no community really, the people are generally weirdly conservative, there is a special kind of religious fundamentalism called "Southern Baptist" there, Miami is a third world country masquerading as a major American city, the environment is being paved over and replaced with golf courses at an amazing rate, Disney Land....well, I could go on and on. It's just a terrible place. It's just a tourist trap, but with racial tension to make it weird.

Plus, Florida has a little city called Gainesville, and I don't know if you know about this, but the music scene there is basically a cult. All of the shit Against Me! gets for "selling out" basically comes from the fact that the people in Gainesville are all insane. There are a lot of great bands down there, but they mostly believe their own shit to the point that you'll get bands that refuse to actually play shows for fear of violating some rule. I'm so glad Against Me! got out.

Canada is cold. Otherwise it's just a huge culture shock, I grew up and only ever really spent time and travelled in the American south, so that's all I know. Western Canada might as well be China, the way things are out here. And it's cold.

How did you break the tape? Was this another story related to wanting to be PM? ;-))

I broke it by playing it a lot. Or rewinding it a lot. I think most modern cassette players are too violent when they stop the tape, which is why I had to give up cassette tapes completely in the end - my old tapes kept getting broken.

And my friend wouldn't give me another copy of Crime, damn it.

Even my old Lily Tomlin tape, which was the first comedy album I ever bought. I forget the name of it, but it was the one where she worked at a phone company. I also broke my indie rock tape that I had painstakingly made from listening to the radio for about 5 years and taping the songs I liked. Immediately after I finished the tape, Korn and stuff like that got big and they stopped playing the music I liked on the local rock station.

Korn! Yughghgdhgsha ... SO the tape was Crime? You seem to like comedy too.

Yes. I suppose I was vague. It was a copy of Crime! he had made from his 7" that he got somewhere. That's why I love Crime! so much. It was my first exposure to them, plus it was my first exposure to local music. I had previously thought that it was impossible for anyone to make good music without access to a studio in LA and a billion dollars. I don't know why I thought this, but it blew my mind to hear that some kids from Florida were doing that. And now they're touring the world and all over the place. I feel somewhat proud that I was cheering them on when they were the hometown heroes. I also feel proud that I'm the only old fan left over, too, because apparently I'm the only one who doesn't give a shit if a band sells out or not.

Do you think they have sold out? I'm not sure that they have. Crime is a great album, very raw, and like you said, no studio can fake that.

No, I don't think that it's even possible to "sell out", at least as far as what people seem to define as selling out.

Of course, this is why I hate Gainesville and the whole "DIY" scene down there - bands that try to play to an audience larger than the 20 people who always show up at the three venues in town are branded as "traitors". They don't seem to understand that a clique isn't going to change the world, or that hanging out in the same bar every night of the week is much of a scene. But that's okay. There are about 900 bands that sound exactly like Against Me! down there that they can listen to, secure in the knowledge that no one else is listening.

Idiots.

[quote=\"arollo\"]There are about 900 bands that sound exactly like Against Me! down there that they can listen to, secure in the knowledge that no one else is listening.\"[/quote]

Haha - sounds like AM! started a little wave like Nirvana with grunge. Ice-T said it best when he said that you should only do something if you are either the only one to do it, or if you can do it better. More people should listen to him. Then there would be no Whitesnake and we could be happy

I suppose they are comparable to Nirvana in that way. I'm sure all the Seattle kids shit their pants when they signed to a major label, and whined and whined. C'est la vie.

"I always question people who want to get in the business. They say \'I wanna be a singer\' and I say \'Can you sing better than Mariah or Whitney? Let\'s get real right now. You say you can sing like Mary but there\'s already a Mary and who\'s to say that she can\'t sing as well as Mariah?\' What I\'m trying to say is that you not only have to be unlike somebody, you have to be better! You have to come in on a professional level to make it, otherwise you just can\'t get into rap. When I was first getting a record deal, I met with the A&R lady who said \'What\'s the title of your third album?\' What she was saying to me was that this is a deep game and just coming in with a couple of rhymes or ideas won\'t get you in, you have to be deep!"
Ice T

http://www.daveyd.com/iceprops.html

Haha, I love it!

He's Ice-T man, the Original Gangstah

Arollo - Why did you decide to move to Canada after living in Florida? Canada seems like an interesting choice; I only ask because it's so very far from Florida and seems to be the very opposite in a lot of ways.

Also, it's an entirely different country, so it just seems like it'd be an intimidating move. It does seem refreshing, though.

laurendelore wrote:

Arollo - Why did you decide to move to Canada after living in Florida? Canada seems like an interesting choice; I only ask because it's so very far from Florida and seems to be the very opposite in a lot of ways.

Also, it's an entirely different country, so it just seems like it'd be an intimidating move. It does seem refreshing, though.

My wife lived here. I lived in Florida. (We met on the internet about....6 years ago? Damn. Married 2 years. We didn't meet on purpose, she sent me an angry e-mail [and I mean angry, man, can that woman curse] in response to something I wrote somewhere. True love ha ha!) She lived with me in Florida for several months, and in the end we just sat down and said "which city do we want to live in?" and Edmonton seemed like the better choice for a number of reasons.

I guess I didn't really "choose" Canada. It was just my stupid fortune to fall in stupid love with a stupid Canadian. Had I a choice, I'd have married a muscular Swedish man and lived in Stockholm or something. I would also be 8 feet tall and a PhD in molecular biology and invent a doomsday device, as well. But life is never really about what you want, is it?

Hahah, that's actually a really awesome story! Do you two plan on staying in Canada for a long time?

Found a nice pic of you arollo.

What is the book under your arm and what are the buttons on your jacket? You look like a cold beatnik

laurendelore wrote:

Hahah, that's actually a really awesome story! Do you two plan on staying in Canada for a long time?

I don't know. She was born in Poland, and as such has EU citizenship, so there is some talk of going to Ireland or Germany or France or.....anywhere, really, that isn't eastern Europe. I don't really think we're ever going to stay anywhere for very long. Or maybe we'll be here in Edmonton forever. I'm not attached to anything but her, so we'll just see where the wind blows us.

kropotkin wrote:

Found a nice pic of you arollo.

What is the book under your arm and what are the buttons on your jacket? You look like a cold beatnik

That's not a book, it's a packet of tissues in my breast pocket.

The buttons on my coat are an Against Me! button (of course) that I bought when they played in Edmonton, and a Mount Awesome pin I got the last time I was in Tampa. I went to a show that night to see my friends band play (The Dry County - they're awesome http://www.myspace.com/thedrycountyfl) and right in the middle of the show, when no one was playing and people were just milling around, this big white van comes tearing into the venue parking lot blaring it's horn. Everyone runs outside, and the back doors are flung open and out jumps a man dressed like Batman with a guitar, and inside the van is a man sitting at a drum kit. Some lights start flashing and the greatest 20 minutes of music I have ever seen ensue. Then they jump in and speed off. Mount Awesome. I've heard they live in a cabin in the woods somewhere in northern Florida, called "Fort Awesome". So I stole someone's Mount Awesome pin and wear it to remember that night, that show, and that place in general.

And thank you. I don't really try to look like a beatnik, but I found that coat for 20$ and it is clearly worth a lot more than that. I'm in love with it, as it keeps me warm in temperatures as low as -50, and I can even wear it comfortably when it's +20. It's magical.

Wow - Mount Awesome sound ... awesome! Very bizarre, very cool! Aha - tissues! Thought it might have been some Kerouac ;-)

Oddly enough, the only book I own that can fit into that pocket is Kerouac's "Lonesome Traveller". But I don't carry it around with me because university students want to talk about it on the train, and I don't.

He died in Florida, you know. And his parents were from Quebec, and I believe that he was born there, which makes him Canadian. This is all just useless trivia that I enjoy because he died where I am from. His ghost haunts a book shop down there, supposedly. Though most people just assume it's a complicated scam to sell books to dumb tourists.

Are you reading anything interesting now?

kropotkin wrote:

Are you reading anything interesting now?

Yeah, I'm about done with this book by Richard Halliburton called "The Royal Road To Romance", it's the adventures of the author when he decided one day to go around the world one day after he graduated from university. It's really great, and since it was written around 1915, the passages about Tibet and Afghanistan are even more amusing since that's all that's in the bloody news about a hundred years later.

He's supposedly written about a thousand books like this one, I may try to track more down.

I'm not sure what to read next. I've got a couple of books that are candidates, but I'm not sure. Goethe's "Itallian Journey" sounds good. I'm also desperate to get into Michel de Montaigne's "Essays". I found a really nice new edition that has all of them, plus de Montaigne's letters and some other odds and ends, basically every word the man wrote.

How about you? What are you reading?

I'm going to start a "what are you reading?" thread over in general chat. Let's go over there.

You should definitely, definitely, move to England.

There isn't a good reason why, but it's one of those things in life you just don't need a reason for.