Art Sonic Festival = Buckwild

The last date of this Second Helping Desired, Required 2007 Summer Tour was a muddy extramarital affair. (Muddy because it rained and rained on the dirt. Extramarital because they let you marry extra in France if you're into fancy cheese.) We went so buckwild that our avocados grew shrimp, Tour Manager Chalkie grew a mole, and Zachary lost a pant leg.




The show was all kinds of brilliant, though all photodocumentation has been exported to the States. (My re-entry has been forbidden; Germany is my home now.)

Tomorrow I'm going to give you a belated tour of the bus that carried us, the next day I'm going to to give you a tour synopsis.

I love you in German,

Ben Lee Handler

Our Sovereign State of Love

Zürich is for lovers. It's impossible for us not to fall in love every time we come here. Granted, we've only been here twice, but both times have given us memories (and diseases--love diseases) that will warm our hearts for years to come.

After a brilliant show at the Abart, our dear friends Richard and Robert took us to the Hafenkneipe, our favorite bar in Europe, and partied us under the table and out of our clothes.








Oh, it's grand to be in love...

Yours forever,

Ben Lee Handler

Intentional Accidentalism; Glastonbury, Southside Festival

We make a lot of mistakes on the road. We say 'whoops' a lot. But after about the 30,000,000th 'whoops,' one starts to wonder if all these mistakes are really mistakes. Like, every time we say, "okay, no more service station sandwiches," we get drunk and eat a service station sandwich. Or every time we say, "okay no more adopting pet rodents at venues and keeping them in our suitcases," we get drunk and do just that. Or every time we say, "okay, no more throwing dead identical twins boys into the river after we lure them into the van with candy and have our way with them," we get drunk and lure identical twin boys into the van with candy, have our way with them, throttle them in their sleep and throw them into the river. Whoops.

It says a lot about us, I think, that we always wind up doing the things we say we don't want to do. Three things, specifically: First, we are ashamed of a good portion of our desires. Second, we use alcohol as an excuse to do the things we are ashamed to do. Third, we get away with doing the shit we would be ashamed to do at home on the road. And this is just one of the reasons why touring is totally awesome.

Some shit we are definitely NOT ashamed of:

- Nathaniel, Zachary, Zebastian and I taking three different airlines and stopping in two different countries before we are finally reunited with Dyan, Tour Manager Chalkie, and Sound Tech Yiannis in London.

- Performing in front of perhaps the biggest crowd the Blood Arm has ever performed before at the Glastonbury Festival.

- Nathaniel forgetting half of the lyrics to his songs at the Southside Festival in Germany.


- Our love of the chunnel.


- Zebastian's newfound love for girlie ice cream bars.


Now Chalkie is in the middle of our 500 mile drive to Bremen, and the others are working on some identical twin boys they lured into the van at the last service station... time for me to get drunk and join in!

I love you madly,

Ben Lee Handler

Tom Cruise, Thanksgiving

We are now in St. Ives, celebrating the American holiday of Thanksgiving at the house of Tour Manager Chalkie and his beautiful girlfriend, Claire. For those of you who are unaware, Thanksgiving is the American holiday wherein we celebrate our liberation from the horrible alien warlord Xenu and his army of body thetans.

Anyway, we have a day to recover from our last European date in Amsterdam, which was, well, we can't remember? (Just kidding! I'll post a more detailed acount when we're able to post bail and I'm at my own computer!)

Now it's back to Chalkie's Singstar PS2, where I just dominated Zebastian at Cyndi Lauper's 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.'

I love you,

Ben Lee Handler

Pre-Tour Party Ejaculations

I'm told London is supposed to be foggy and rainy, but it seems that every time we've been here it's sunny and pleasant. Either global warming is real, or everyone I know is a liar. (My guess: it's the latter.) Regardless, the sublime weather enabled us to go on a 48 hour drinking binge with our dear friends Chris, Kristina, Dania, Michael, Cat, and a few 18 year-old whose names I can't recall. The debauchery was so immense that it covered half the city, two hotel rooms, a game of frisbee on Primrose Hill, three apartments, and more pubs than one can even attempt to count. Between the six of us (Chalkie included), we took a 5,067,982 collective days off of our lives. (It remains to be seen whether or not Chalkie actually survived the weekend.) We had fun, basically.

Pictures coming as soon as the beautiful Chris Svensson emails them to me!