For the last 2 months we dedicated our lives to wandering through the USA between Portland of the Pacific and Portland of the Atlantic with wicked animation NRG and now we are back in the west.....napping! This is what the CARTUNE XPREZ tour looked like:

Early in October we drove from Portland to Denver to play our first show at Plus Gallery, a little art space in a firehouse. Much to Christopher's dismay, Denver did not look like a palace built from rocky mountain spires, but inspirational human feats like P Design Gallery and an upside down pyramid art museum surely filled in the city's splendor.
Following this rocky-slope-show, some hyper-charged faculty at KU brought us to Lawrence where once upon a time there was a place called the potato mountain cafe that served nothing but mashed potatoes! When that place closed, the owner opened a new restaurant that only served carrot cake! Beautiful and mind-bending.
The wonderful world of Kansas City with its thrift stores and pet shops followed Lawrence. Rumor has it there is a baby kangaroo for sale here, but we only saw an empty cage and some dead grasshoppers.
In Lincoln, the University gave us a first-class 14th story apartment for the weekend that included a tea set, a collection of daguerreotypes, and some pumpkin masks. We made a video there but lost the tape. If anyone comes across some footage of pumpkin-headed men in their underwear drinking tea and gazing out the window please email us!
Our time in Omaha was new and exciting since the Bemis Center was no longer home, as it was last winter. We didn't build any forts, visit the champagne buffet, or even go to the zoo but we did wrestle with wild English Bulldogs, ate Kong Fries, and wiffle balled in lead-filled lots.
We followed this stop with a double-header in Chicago at the Select Media Fest and the Green Lantern Gallery. We had never sung and danced GO in such a frosty world as we did here...... thank you everyone who pew-danced along! It turned a chilly trance-time into a hilarious winter party.
Home-sweet-Pittsburgh! It felt so good to return to our motherland. The nasty rain cloud that we brought with us from Chicago didn't seem to keep anyone from trekking to the Mattress Factory to see our homecoming show. And holy HOTT 4 TEACHER! Sweet Miss Mary Mack got us to throw down some old jams at this crucial dance party under the Bloomfield Bridge - a force to be reckoned with. May we never forget how much we love you, Pittsburgh.
Finally, our drives started to get shorter as we approached the eastern seaboard, marked by a family show at Christopher's parents' restaurant in Carlisle. Spanikopita and soda. Mmmmm.
Our doppelganger band Dites Donc joined us for our next show at Space 1026, adding their man-forest vibes to our inflatable crystal world. We could have used that man-forest in Brooklyn too, but made due with what we had in the Subaru for our Monkeytown jam. Rumor had it that they were closing down soon after our show but popular force is keeping them upright. If you are ever in Williamsburg check this place out for a magical meal and/or some video performance action to keep keeping their support alive.
Mellow New England welcomed us with open arms at the peek of autumn's glory. Perfect weather for a school assembly. 4 of them, actually. Soo rad to rock out hoolystyles on stage for an auditorium of students......breaking up the class schedule proper.
We dipped into Providence to play a secret show at the Looney Bin before heading up to Portland, Maine, the farthest we got from our starting-point-Portland. It was here on our friend Jake's farm that Mother Nature brought some of her gnarliest rainstorms, turning pastures to muddy turd-fields for the sheep and cows. We waited out the rain in the MECA student lounge playing ping-pong and eating pizza.
Heading back west, we stopped in Troy to play a show in a big old church where we traded 1 of our DVDs to Mike Bonanno for 144 decks of playing card. We haven't figure out what to do with all of them yet, but with Dites Donc's help we came up with a few ideas for our new band, We're Wizards. Keep your eyes out. Thanks to Astria Suparak, our wonderful tour guide in Syracuse, we ended our east coast antics on a high note filled with French cuisine, snake pits, and ska!
Oh, Ohio! With consecutive shows in Oberlin, Columbus, and Yellow Springs our brains began to unravel. In the midst of this at Antioch College we lost our trumpet, mixer, and mic stand. If anyone comes across it please let us know! We are desperate without our trumpet.
In Minneapolis we played our third church show of the tour. This one kicked us into hyper-gear with an amazing performance by Hardland Heartland kids followed by a righteous dance party that happily smashed our makeshift Styrofoam screen into bits.
Due to poor tour planning, we had to backtrack to Madison and Milwaukee for our next shows, but all the driving was well worth our "Happy Birthday Lindsay" experience at Darling Hall with Dites Donc and a cast of nineties dance hits. We also got to drink a flaming cocktail the size of our heads.... finally!
We stopped in Yankton, South Dakota for Thanksgiving weekend where freezing rain threatened our drive back to Portland but alas, the nuns who came to our show must have blessed our trip back....safe and sound for our "Welcome Home" show in Portland, a rad reminder of why we live in this City. UNIVERSE and YACHT brought their local love to the show with a introspective PowerPoint jam that included a computer+human+computer+human finale to end all finales. James Sumner ended CARTUNE XPREZ in Anacortes with his inspirational visions of super-nature, a long-awaited happy ending.