Stephanie and I went on a daterz vacation in San Francisco. We stayed in a lovely room with a rad balcony and ate at amazing restaurants and took in a brilliant show (Teatro Zinzzani). Megan Harris and Ferocious J met up with us for a proper Napa Valley wine tour, where we did get drunk and sign up for a wine club.
This is a picture of Stephanie taken by Jake Riskin a couple of years ago. I’ve uploaded it for Underworld.
If you know me, you know my favourite band is Underworld. I’ve been a hardcore fan since 1996 or so, when I was about 16. It’s one of those fandoms that changes your life and influences directly or indirectly just about everything you see, hear and do henceforth. I’ve seen them live six or seven times all over the U.S. (which works out to basically every time they come here), attended art exhibitions they’ve curated, bought all their music I can get my hands on, and simply sing their praises whenever I can.
I wrote to ask them if they’d give a shout-out to my girlfriend and fellow Underworld fan, Stephanie, during one of their in-studio radio broadcasts that happened to fall on the date of her birthday. You can't imagine how gratified I was that they actually did it!
While the broadcast was on December 11, I waited until her birthday party this past Saturday to play the recording of Underworld’s message. I stopped the party and plugged my iPhone into the stereo so everybody could hear it (lots of UW fans around that night), and Stepho just about died. It was just a fantastic birthday surprise, and perhaps even more special for me to have experienced that kind of interaction with my favourite musicians.
(For more Underworld, you can hear a bit of their music in my latest DJ mix, which I would never have made if not for their influence and inspiration)
After almost two years of very slow realization, I’ve finally come to accept the truth that my girlfriend is a cosplayer. Further, many of our friends are cosplayers as well.
However — and I’m sure you’ll agree after seeing the photos — it could be a lot worse. A whole lot worse. Really, incalculably worse. At least I’m not sleeping with a stormtrooper.
The following is a compilation of some of the hundreds of photographs taken later in the evening, a few hours after Stepho’s Winehouse winery tour concluded. I suppose it makes sense that copious amounts of wine leads to things like this.
Most of these were taken by Ginny, Sam, Louie and Jacob, and you can find tons more on their respective flickr sites. These are just the ones I liked best and thought would give you a good idea of what went on.
For my girlfriend Stephanie’s birthday, a few of us took a splendid trip out to the otherwise godforsaken Temecula, CA for a splendid tour of four splendid wineries.
Our tour guide Cindy was awesome. Three wineries were awesome. One winery was run by a right-wing Old Money American family with lots of pictures of themselves giving thumbs-up on various aircraft carriers— which is also awesome, in a way. During the presentation, the douchey heir-to-the-millions guy kept telling “jokes” about how awesome his life is because all he has to do is get drunk every day. After every “punchline” he would raise his hand in the air and say, “Party on, Garth!”
Moments like that fill me with both enormous delight and nameless dread. It’s in those times that I know, deep down, the terrorists are going to win.
But then I also remember I’m half-terrorist, so either way I’m chill.
Monday, May 4, 2009 at 8:00PM 
