Non-fiction: La Paz Collective

The Royal Enfield Experience

The Royal Enfield should be familiar to those who have ever spent a prolonged period of time in the parts of India that ebb and flow with the movements of her long-term travellers, artisans, pirates, digital-nomads, and hordes of Israelis. These beautiful old-school motorcycles are as much a part of the territory as chai, chillum, charas, and chapatti.

If you were in India and don’t remember seeing one, you didn’t stay long enough. Even if you don’t remember seeing one, I guarantee that you heard one of these little beauties tearing its way out of town, or ticking over sweetly as it awaited a passenger outside a restaurant or guesthouse.

I first tried to learn how to ride a Royal Enfield with my good friend Dante on the side of a mountain as the sun set somewhere near the top of the world in Upper Changspa, Leh. It was a wholly futile first effort at taming the beast and the next day I awoke at 5AM to take the weekly local bus to our planned destination. 12 bumpy hours later, a Spanish girl and I stood in dazed silence at the side of the magnificent Pangong Lake; a place that was to change my life forever.

Two years later I was back. I went to see Mukesh (a great man and hero of many stories) at his shop in Pushkar and bought a Royal Enfield Bullet for myself. I had a bike but didn’t know how to ride it, so a Palestinian girl, travelling with Mukesh and some other bikers, drove it down to Goa for me with her little dog nestled on the petrol tank. I took the train and then once they caught up with me in Arambol I learnt on the job exactly what it takes to become an Enfield rider.

Three mad months later I needed to escape Goa. Somehow I had learnt how to ride and with my Russian princess singing soothing lullabies in my ear on the back, we first fled south through the jungle to Karnataka and Kudle Beach for a 10 day rehab in paradise, and then flew like two loved up angels all the way back to Pushkar. It was a magical, unforgettable trip of a lifetime.

A Royal Enfield allows you to see this amazing country in ways that a quick flight or a 36 hour train journey never will. You can take off into parts where foreign skin is rarely seen and you are turned into a travelling circus upon arrival. The bike opens the door to another, realer India, and quite possibly a whole new you.

The trips below are for those who want to find out what the noise is all about and really discover something deeper about the country, the bike, and themselves. These are scenic routes designed for those adventurers who have the luxury of time on their hands, want to savour that great entity to its fullest, and have the capacity to process the great downloads of wonder that will surely come along their way on the road.

I have simplified the trips into stages which won’t all necessarily get done in one day. Sometimes you’ll just have to find the way for yourself because getting lost and making it back to where you were going, or ending up in a completely different destination all together is a large part of what doing something like this is all about in the first place- enjoy!

Arambol- Mahalabeshwar- Ellora Caves- Mandu- Udaipur- Pushkar: Arambol to Kudle Beach is a beautiful little starter ride that can be done in a long day, but this one is only for the fully initiated. The ride up the coast, once you’ve negotiated the weird little ferry north of Arambol that connects you to the mainland, is stunning and forever rising until you turn inland and head up even further for the strawberries of Mahalabeshwar and the amazing scenery in all directions around this quite bizarre hilltop town. You’ll then give the big cities of Mumbai and Pune as wide a berth as possible as you seek out the Ellora Caves and step back into a world long lost in fables and story books for children. You keep going because you have to get to Mandu and the most beautiful middle of nowhere that ever existed. Then, a little tired, you push on further north where the desert of Rajasthan and gypsies older than time itself await to welcome you home.

Pushkar- Bundi - Agra (Taj Mahal) - Orchha -Khajuraho - Varanasi:

This is a trip for serious culture vultures with a lot of stamina. Pushkar is the perfect jumping off point for any trip to India and the half-day ride down to Bundi is a good way to ease yourself into this marathon journey. After a couple of shanti days around the lake and old Maharaja palace in Bundi you’ll have a long cross-country slog to encounter quite possibly the world’s most beautiful building. There is little else to see in Agra other than this incredible piece of architecture and monument to love, but what more do you want? The ride down to Orchha is a gentle one and this old temple town on the banks of the Betwa River is ideal for a few days R&R. Rested up you’ll head to Khajuraho and its exquisite collection of Hindu and Jain temples, 10% of which are covered in the erotic art of the Karma Sutra. The excitement of this stop-over will power you through towards the mad heart of India and Varanasi, where for over 3000 years the fires of the burning ghats have not ceased sending the dead directly to paradise via the portal of the great Ganga River.

Vashist - Rohtang La - Baralacha La - Pang - Leh:

This is a ride into heaven so it’s fitting that you’ll start from Vashist which sits serenely in what is known as the Valley of the Gods. One last dip in the hot spring before you head out and the snow of the Himalayan mountain tops will quickly come into view as you reach Rohtang La. Rohtang literally translates to pile of corpses as this pass was part of the old Silk Road and people would always attempt to cross too late every year meaning that they were stranded up here with no route out in any direction. You will have no such problems as the road is now only open in the spring and summer months and you will be exposed to nothing more than scenery and views unlike anything you’ve ever seen before as you drive through Spiti Valley in the direction of Ladakh. There is only one way to follow at these heights and while the going is undoubtedly tough the sheer beauty of it all will keep you thirsting for more even though you are mentally and physically drained by the demands placed on you by the road. Beyond Pang you will make one final push over the world’s second highest road pass at Taglang La and then it will be relatively plain sailing as you drop down into the Indus Valley and follow the river to Leh, with perhaps a quick pit-stop at the incredible Thikse Monastery and a prayer of thanks before you roll up into Upper Changspa for a very well deserved rest.

 Unplanned Footnote: Last Saturday I was blind-sided off my bike and bounced across the floor on my face. I lost half a tooth, got a weird circular hole in the top of my head, bruised ribs, and numerous cuts and bruises on my arms, legs and hands. My passenger got a nice collection of bruises to accompany the fright of her life and messed up her foot pretty badly too. We were very lucky.

A life cannot be lived without risks, but your own and that of any passenger is massively rocketed up towards the limits of peril when you come to India and choose to explore it on a Royal Enfield.

Always be aware and never forget that you are riding a very pretty but not always reliable lump of metal around roads full of many people who genuinely have no consideration for the sanctity of your life.

I’m thankful just to still be here and my smile is bigger than ever, even if it is a little bit crooked at the moment.

Love the ride, but please be careful.

Non-fiction: 3-AM Magazine

embracing the bull: an interview with lydia lunch

Interview by Simon Friel.

Lydia Lunch is a name you should know. Lydia moved to New York at 16 and, with her band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, was one of the founders of the still influential, but short-lived, No Wave movement. She has collaborated with artists and performers such as Nick Cave, Sonic Youth, Henry Rollins, Omar Rodriquez-Lopez, Asia Argento, Richard Kern and Hubert Selby Junior, and today from her base in Barcelona continues to produce a vast and diverse range of work.

Her memoir Paradoxia: A Predator’s Diary chronicles her life from its conception up on through to a self-defining reawakening in her mid-thirties. It has been translated into 8 languages. Paradoxia bulldozes through emotions and sensibilities in much the same way that men’s cocks tear into Lydia throughout her numerous, anonymous encounters; ruthlessly and without remorse. Incest, satanism, rape, bestiality, cannibalism paedophilia, insanity and destitution are just some of the many themes explored, devoured and left for dead as the reader is pulled along a road of broken glass under the influence of acid while Lydia rips through the cities of New York, L.A., Amsterdam, London and New Orleans.

The writing is the most honest that I have ever read and for the same reason some of the most beautiful, shocking and poetic too. Lydia never seeks to justify and explain the things that happen or proffer empty apologies. In spite of all the blood, violence, destruction and waste that are left in her wake, it is, for me, Thurston Moore’s final line in the book’s afterword that rings most true: She can love you.

I was lucky enough to meet up with Lydia. This is a little bit like how it went;

3:AM: What is Paradoxia?

LL: Paradoxia fills a void that really exists in literature, which is an aggressive, honest, non-glamorous psychosexual voice. And I think we can find traces of that hyperreality in a lot of different male writers especially from the 50s, 60s and 70s but for female writers there’s still a vacancy. It’s just not their language, and I have a much more blunt way of expressing what I think needs to be expressed. I’m not the only one who behaves, acts, feels or has this kind of void that they look to fill with whatever means necessary until eventually they realise that only the self will suffice and goodbye garbage.

3:AM: I was just reading the first part which says none of the names have been changed, everybody is equally fucking guilty.

LL: Even though I’m not even really naming their names.

3:AM: Exactly, that was the question, because I read a couple of reviews, and every review was positive but there was a frustration that they want to hear more about the real Lydia Lunch story and the real people in it.

LL: Well, the thing is that most of these experiences are with anonymous people, so what good does it do to name their names? I mean, look, people may be waiting and they can wait until the day that I fucking die to hear of the — for me — minutia and the boring details of the rock aspect.

SF: Will we really have to wait all that time?

LL: For me that’s not the most interesting detail. What’s important is what the search was about and what it was for. I mean, believe me, anyone asks and I’ll give them the run down and the score card. Maybe I have a different take on it because from the time I was 12 years old I would always say to my parents when I had to be at rock concerts until 3 in the morning that it was for “my career”. What career would that be, young lady? Yes, Gene Simmons probably has a photo of me at 12 in his Kiss collection. So if it starts there, it’s like, you know, names, names, names… Who cares? Who cares? And for the most part, in spite of it, it’s not like there’s that many names that people would really recognise. They weren’t the most interesting sexual partners. Sorry, they’re not — boring! Just to be a gossipy groupie, the most interesting rock and roll sexual experience was Julian Cope. I didn’t even know who he was, but I have to say that dropping acid with Julian Cope was a beautiful experience.

3:AM: I suppose this leads to a much larger question, one that draws comparisons with the epilogue where it compares your work with that of Brett Easton Ellis, which is the fact that you are very anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism, so doing that would I suppose be trading on yourself as a commodity.

LL: Exactly.

3:AM: But is that not a big fucking temptation?

LL: It isn’t a big temptation. Maybe because I think, in my own mind’s eye, I’m a bigger rock star than any of those motherfuckers. I don’t even mean rock star, I don’t give a shit about rock stardom. I don’t think of myself as a star, I think of myself as a fucking planet, honey. I’m sorry, they’re just stars, I’m a planet — fuck off!

3:AM: Ok, I mean, that’s another thing, we’ve got Nick Cave doing a big concert tonight here.

LL: Yeah, at the fucking basketball arena!

3:AM: These are all people from your history, and that’s what I mean by temptation. It must sometimes be frustrating to think they are doing that and I could be doing that.

LL: But I couldn’t be doing what they do, the same way they can’t do I what I do, because I think what separates me from a lot of the people I came up with, which would be like Sonic Youth, Nick Cave and Henry Rollins, is all three of them, in so much as all three have diversified, they have the ability to take one thing, whether it was The Bad Seeds, or Sonic Youth as a four piece, whether it was The Rollins Band, and do it and do it and do it, and I would fucking die of brain damage.

3:AM: So you don’t have the patience to do this?

LL: I’m a conceptual artist; I’m not a rock band. My concept from the beginning was you find the collaborators, you do a few shows, you document it, you fucking go on. So I don’t understand how anyone has the patience, the capacity for this kind of boredom, to play the same songs over and over. My message is always the same, it is always sexual insanity and political hysteria, or sexual hysteria and political insanity, however I have to find new ways to express this.

3:AM: So it’s not so much you not having the patience, but rather other people not having the patience with you because you’re always doing different things?

LL: How can they even keep up when I don’t work inside the machinery that lets them know?

3:AM: The world can’t keep up.

LL: I don’t fucking care. I can’t care. At 17 one of the first songs I wrote was “Popularity Is So Boring”; fuck off, I still feel the same way.

3:AM: You obviously still have a lot of energy and you have been running it for 31 years, so why Barcelona? I don’t really see that same energy out here in the street.

LL: I don’t need that same energy. I left New York because it was like plugging my finger into a light socket. It was enough. I don’t need to plug into a city for energy. Here, I can just breathe, I can relax and the pace is different. As America went into fascism, I came to a place that is 30 years out of it, although there are a still a couple of danglers here and there. It’s a different energy, and part of Spain’s amnesia sees to that. If I’m focusing so much on what drives me insane, on how politically fucked things are, I need a place that doesn’t further aggravate that. I need a place that doesn’t give me more fucking cancer.

3:AM: So Barcelona is a safe haven?

LL: Curative, because most of the damage that has been done here is in the past. The architecture impacts me. I get very emotional in certain places at certain times, the history infects me. I love the hospital San Pau at the top of Avenue Gaudi: this is one of my stomping grounds. I use the architecture more for stimulation than I do the bars or the club scene.

3:AM: Ok, so what would your advice be to any young images of you who might be out there trying to make their mark today?

LL: Look, people have to be comfortable with being alone, and if you’re strong in yourself, any communication, any experiences you have are going to be far better anyway. If you understand that you may be permanently an isolated individual in a world of six billion people, be comfortable in that, then you — like I — will be able to be an endlessly wandering nomad seeking other like-minded individuals to collaborate with. So, I think you have to make whatever the time is, work for you. You have to figure out a way because there will be so many things always against you, against the individual, against someone who wants to radically create. So you have to find historical references — as I did with Hubert Selby, Henry Miller, Jean Genet, the Marquis de Sade — that can at least inspire you to create or do whatever it is that you have to do. It’s going to be the few who make a career out of complaining about everything that pisses them off, and there is only room for maybe one or two of us. I’d encourage everyone to do it, but to make a career out of it, good fucking luck! So, in other words, do as I have done: create without a budget and find a way to get it out. You’ve just got to be stubborn. I don’t care what your age is, you’ve got to be a fucking bull. Embrace the bull.

3:AM: Embrace the bull?

LL: Take the bull by the horns, cut its balls off, sew them on to the fucking base of your spine and get going. It’s that easy. What’s so hard?

3:AM: You know, I won’t have enough space in the piece for all that we’ve talked about, but that’ll definitely be going in there!

LL: That’s right, grab the bull by the horns and cut its fucking balls off. I mean, there is no other choice. I can’t find a better way of putting it.