A few thoughts from my recent travels in Canada and Denmark.
Since Trump's latest inauguration and Shitshow 2025 commenced, countries I've visited have included several of those most often mentioned by #47 as targets for trade wars and even potential military action. In March Kamala and I visited Mexico, and then California, along with England and Scotland in early April. (I wrote travelogues about those visits as well.)
After a little time back home with my family I then spent several days traveling on my own and doing gigs around British Columbia in Canada, and then six days in the Jutland region of Denmark doing the same sort of thing, with a little tour that was a last-minute addition to spring plans.
So, with the constant backdrop of incessant news stories about Trump's latest schemes, threats, and deportations, and the constant backdrop of the silence of the western leaders along with the outrageous distortions of the mainstream western media's coverage as Israel commits genocide against everyone in Gaza, withholding all water, food, medicine, electricity, etc. for over two months now, I set off for BC.
Canada and the US naturally have such parallel histories in so many ways.
My first stop was Centralia, where in the town center you can now find, along with the statue of the Legionnaire, a plaque remembering those IWW members railroaded into prison or lynched under a bridge for daring to defend their union hall when it was under attack by Legionnaires, during the times of the Palmer Raids in 1919.
On my way north I passed through the cities where once lived Rachel Corrie, and Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, both of whom were killed by the Israeli military in the course of their efforts to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank.
When I arrived at the land border in Blaine, Washington, there was no line at all. For the first time in my life that I can remember, I drove right up to the border, waited for the one car ahead of me to get through, and then it was my turn.
The agent looked at my extensive list of bannings and other problems at the border over the course of my adult life, asked me a few questions about that, and then let me in.
The nonexistence of any line at the Canadian border was a continuation of the experience I've had with international travel so far in 2025 -- hardly anyone is leaving the US, or coming to the US. Whereas one could normally expect to stand in line for at least an hour at immigration, often much more than that, at airport after airport -- in Los Angeles, at Heathrow, at SeaTac, in Amsterdam -- I walked right up to the agent.
Part of the fun in touring, at least if you're well-suited for that sort of thing, is all the travel involved with getting from gig to gig.
Stopping at cafes along the way, walking around on the ferries, talk of tariffs was a very regular thing. Buying a cup of coffee was one transaction that provoked a conversation I overheard between a customer and the barista, who seemed also to be the cafe owner. Although coffee isn't a big crop in most of the US, the coffee this guy was importing from Indonesia went through California on the way, and would thus be subject to these big new taxes. He was looking into alternatives.
Among the wonderful folks from around Vancouver Island who traveled to the historic town of Cumberland to hang out and catch my show there was one Kevin Neish, who, along with Rachel and Aysenur and many others on both sides of this border and around the world, has dedicated a large part of his life to solidarity with Palestine, and was very nearly killed for it when Israeli soldiers boarded the aid ship he was on in 2010, killing nine of his comrades.
The event in Cumberland, as elsewhere, was a fundraiser going towards medical aid for Gaza. As I told stories and sang songs about the ongoing genocide there, and the resistance to it, in the audience were more than one person who had risked their lives on one or more occasions in efforts to break the deadly siege of Gaza that has been in place for the past twenty years, Kevin very much among them.
Cumberland and Centralia especially share history in common, both being towns where prominent organizers for the Industrial Workers of the World -- or in Canada, the One Big Union -- were martyred. In Centralia, Wesley Everest, tortured, disfigured, and lynched. In Cumberland, prominent union organizer Ginger Goodwin was shot and killed while hiding in the woods, trying to avoid being sent off to fight in a war -- World War 1 -- which the IWW denounced as a war for the bosses, where the workers of the world all lose.
Together with several other wonderful folks, I visited Ginger Goodwin's grave once again, for the first time in many years, as well as the old Japanese and Chinese cemeteries, or what little remains of them.
On both sides of the border there were waves of Asian Exclusion acts passed, along with waves of deportations, and eventually internment, and laws following release from internment that forbade the formerly imprisoned from moving back to the west coast. After the initial wave of exclusion acts and deportations, the ad hoc neighborhoods known as Japantown and Chinatown in Cumberland were mostly abandoned. After Pearl Harbor the Japanese cemetery was largely destroyed by vandals. Later, Japantown and Chinatown were bulldozed by the authorities, who, I'm told, didn't want the places to become havens for hippie squatters.
On my way to visit the cemeteries, with a friend from Victoria in the car, one of her fellow Canadians, presumably, passed us on his motorcycle and made sure to flip us off three times. Three times, presumably, to make sure we didn't miss the gesture.
The motorcyclist apparently hadn't passed us because he had been aiming to go faster, because after passing us, he resumed going the speed limit, as we had been doing, which was a very low speed limit. Given that I was going the speed limit, driving a nondescript car with no bumper stickers, there was no question at all that our offense was that we were driving a car with Oregon license plates.
Having had many more disturbing experiences in the United States driving a car with license plates from another, apparently unpopular, state, such as what has often happened to me vis-a-vis road rage incidents while driving a rental car with Florida plates, the Canadian nationalists have a long way to go to muster up a similar degree of hostility. But certainly this was the first time I've ever had a negative experience in Canada as a result of being from the US.
Of course the outrage at Trump's threats and other statements is perfectly understandable, if not the assumption on the part of this motorcyclist that some random guy from Oregon supports the dude. My song about the time the US and Canada did go to war, a war which the US lost, was well-received at all three gigs -- though in a typically polite, reserved, Canadian kind of way.
On my way to Denman Island I stopped to visit two labor-and-music activists I first met on my first visit to Cumberland a long time ago. Brian and Steve recorded an interview with me for their community radio show. Along the way I learned that one of them was on the committee that was working on future editions of the IWW's Little Red Songbook. I learned with great pleasure that the efforts of my detractors to have my music removed from the songbook failed, and "Minimum Wage Strike" will remain in the next edition.
I was also interviewed on Denman Island, by a Danish man for his community radio show. He remembered first hearing me play in Denmark around 25 years ago. He hadn't kept up with my career until he saw that I was playing on his little hippie island-within-an-island, where they call Vancouver Island "the mainland." I also met a Swede and a Norwegian during my brief stay on that island.
Most people I talked to in both Canada and Denmark on these visits said they would avoid going to the US under the current situation. Most everyone had heard the stories of other Canadians and Europeans getting detained in miserable conditions for weeks on end, and most of the folks I tend to know have records of concern, whether arrest records, or records of their involvement with far left organizations of one kind or another. Many people in both countries asked me if I was worried about being arrested in the US, and offered to help in some way if I needed to flee.
In the city of Vancouver I did another wonderful gig with the brilliant local band, the Gram Partisans, and the Solidarity Notes choir. The choir opened with their rendition of one of my songs about Gaza ("If A Song," they call it).
Folks involved with that gig were some of the same folks who organized a concert at the Peace Park that separates the US from Canada, around twenty years ago, during a time when I was banned from entering Canada for a year. So they organized a concert in one of the very few locations where folks from both the US and Canada can gather, where none of them have to go through immigration first.
On the way back into the US, the pattern of no wait at the borders didn't quite hold. It was one of the shortest waits I've ever experienced at that border crossing, but I was sitting in the traffic for a half hour or so. The majority of the cars had Washington plates, with most of the rest having BC plates. There were no cars I recall seeing from further afield, and I was looking, for reporting purposes.
On the way to Denmark, the big breaking news was that because of Trump's bullying tactics, tariffs, etc., the less Trumpian of the two main capitalist parties in Canada, the Liberals, won the election by a landslide. A few days later it was Australia's turn, with a big victory for the Australian Labor Party. Now that everyone's getting tariffed around the world, suddenly the nationalists modeling themselves after Trump are completely toxic.
On the news, the Canadians interviewed most often use the word "betrayal" to describe the new, hostile attitude of the Trump administration towards their country. My guess is the Canadians who feel most especially betrayed are the formerly Trump-aligned members of the rightwing of the political elite.
I was heading to Denmark because only a couple months earlier I got an email from one of the folks who book gigs at the legendary punk rock social center in Aalborg, 1000Fryd, about playing there on May 1st.
Since I first started touring in Denmark around 24 years ago, playing at 1000Fryd on May 1st was an annual thing.
The biggest cities in Denmark are Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, and Aalborg.
I'm not sure what happened to Odense, but the other three of Denmark's biggest cities have long been the homes of my biggest fans as well as much of the country's population. It's in these three cities where I'm apt to get the biggest and most enthusiastic audiences. It's from these audiences that I learn which songs from my most recent album have hit home the most, and I often discover this based on how loudly people are singing along to those songs.
1000Fryd is the only venue I ever remember playing in in Aalborg. Aalborg is the fourth biggest city in this small country, much smaller than Aarhus. In Aarhus there are a whole variety of great venues, backed by various wonderful organizations, and this is also true of Copenhagen. Aalborg has one venue that I've ever run across, and it's a great one, but there's only that one.
So of course it shut down in 2020 for the pandemic lockdown era, but unlike the rest of the country, 1000Fryd didn't open back up for events after the lockdowns were over, because of problems in the neighborhood with noise complaints. Over the course of years, involving much fundraising and other forms of struggle, the collective was able to soundproof the walls and satisfy the needs of the folks next door who for some reason decided it was a good idea to move in right next to an infamous punk rock club.
Over the years since 2020 of coming to Denmark and never getting invited to Aalborg, in my more paranoid moments I started wondering whether the anarcho-puritan crowd from Portland or Freiburg had gotten to the folks in Aalborg, and convinced them that I was really a fascist in disguise. So when I got the invitation from the booking committee, and it involved a plane ticket, I extended my spring touring to include a very short visit to the country that my friend and musical collaborator Gregg Weiss recently and accurately referred to as "David's happy place."
Only when I was in Amsterdam, looking into the connecting flight to Aalborg and such details, did I realize that I had booked the rental car for the wrong day.
Having done this before, I knew that this would mean it, and the price I had gotten for it, would no longer be available, and I confirmed that to be sure. This then meant paying three times as much for the rental car as I had planned, throwing a major wrench into this already not-particularly-profitable visit to Denmark, but that's how the cookie crumbles when you're stuck with my brain.
I was mostly staying in Silkeborg while in the Jutland region of Denmark, where everything was happening on this little visit. My host was my old friend Kirsten Gammelgaard, a not-very-retired pedagog with a long history of working with marginalized people of all sorts, and supporting the party known as the Red-Green Coalition, the Unity List, Enhedslisten.
Of the four events I sang at, two were Enhedslisten events, starting with the first one.
On the morning of May 1st, Kirsten and I were both singing at the local chapter's May 1st event, in the backyard of former member of the Danish parliament, Christian Juhl. It was a fine gathering of several dozen folks involving lots of red flags, Palestine flags, conversation, beer, soup, with speeches and musical sets interspersed.
I can't claim to have understood all the speeches at either of the Enhedslisten events I sang at, but even so, it's clear that the question of solidarity with the Palestinian people, and what to do in response to this ongoing genocide, is a hotly-contested subject. Which side of the debate Christian Juhl falls on was immediately evident, but in conversation with other prominent Enhedslisten members during this visit it was clear that Christian's passion for trying to make an effective stand with the Palestinians is not universal in the party.
Singing in Silkeborg and then driving up to Aalborg to play there all on the same day was a very familiar exercise, though in past years I have made as many as five appearances at different events in different parts of Denmark and sometimes also Sweden, all on May 1st. Just two events on the day was a relatively sleepy May 1st, really.
Meeting folks at 1000Fryd when I got there I heard about the May 1st march folks had attempted to participate in earlier that day. The red and black contingent showed up in the park where the May 1st rally was taking place, with the expectation that they'd march with everyone else. But when the main organizers saw all their Palestine flags, they forbade them from marching with them, apparently claiming that Palestine isn't a labor issue.
The opening act that evening was a young musician at that precarious age of 27, who had clearly been profoundly influenced by the brilliance of Kimya Dawson. When I guessed that Kimya had been an influence she said she considered her music to be "Juno Soundtrack-core." (If you don't know what that means because you haven't seen the movie, I highly recommend it!)
There were a whole bunch of people there who hadn't heard me in at least six years, and the show at 1000Fryd was definitely one of the most memorable ones I've ever done there. Folks started carrying tables and chairs out of the room before I went on, and it soon became evident why they did that, because the room was packed with folks who were standing, and thus taking up less space.
In Aarhus, the show was presented by Pino and associates involved with organizing on the streets. As in many other countries these days, in Denmark there's a spiffy newspaper that you'll see being sold on the sidewalks by people who might be staying in a shelter nearby. But whereas in places like the US groups like these might have an office in a church basement somewhere, in Denmark there's state support, at least to some extent, for nonprofits to have offices and other physical spaces, and even budgets for putting on events.
The interest in this crowd in the welfare of the Palestinians was unmistakable, well framed by the playlist they featured through their sound system before I sang, which was entirely hiphop in solidarity with Palestine.
Among the assembled crowd there were two of my fellow Americans who are in the process of extricating themselves from the clutches of Uncle Sam, having done the necessary ancestry research required to obtain a couple of European passports.
In Skanderborg the local Enhedslisten conference that I, of course, had missed and wouldn't have understood, had evidently been fractious. I learned this only from participants who thanked me after my set for helping heal the wounds, or something along those lines.
Factionalized or not, perhaps one of the explanations for the growth of this party in Denmark over the past few decades is that they often feature live music at their conferences, I can say from lots of first-hand experience. Whether or not Enhedslisten might benefit from the Trump Effect that has helped upset elections in Canada and Australia is yet unknown. What I can say for sure is in the one speech I heard at the Enhedslisten conference in Skanderborg, Trump's name came up at least once per minute.
On my last night in Denmark I stayed at 1000Fryd, in their guest quarters for touring musicians. I had a 6:30 am flight out of Aalborg to take me back to Portland, and I figured it was best to be close to the airport. I hadn't factored in the cost of parking downtown overnight, which is about as costly as paying for a hotel room in some parts of the world.
When I got to the parking garage at 4 am, which I had made sure was open 24 hours, the gates were closed. There was a door for pedestrians to walk through, though.
I momentarily panicked, but then thought maybe if I drove up to the gates, they'd open because the car was there. That didn't work.
Starting to panic again, I thought about a bunch of different bad options, such as abandoning the car in the parking garage and taking a taxi to the airport in order to make the flight, or staying with the car and missing my return flight and having to buy another plane ticket.
As these different bad-dream scenarios flashed through my head, of course I thought of the famine unfolding in Gaza, and my concerns suddenly seemed profoundly petty. I'm locked in a parking garage, while friends of mine were just bombed by a drone as they were about to attempt to sail from Malta to Gaza.
I called the phone number associated with the parking garage on Google Maps. Miraculously, a sleepy-sounding Danish man answered. After a couple minutes he found which parking garage I was in, and remotely opened one of the gates, so I could get out.
The only thing making me get on that plane to Portland was missing my children. Otherwise I'd probably have skipped it altogether, and stayed in Denmark. Or Canada.
No comments:
Post a Comment