if robert smith drove a tractor
winter just wont give up in portland, i remember when i visited here last year around this time of year and the weather was stupifying enough to convince me to relocate, if it had been this year i'd visited and not last year i might have formed a very different first impression about the northwest. the prolonged darkness and rain has got me a little homesick, and like i do to cope with most of life's little jabs i've turned to books. I just read a complete collection of flannery o'connor's short fiction including Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it away. Now i'm about 3/4 of the way though Faulkner's Go Down, Moses, with Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms next on the que. i'm knee deep in southern gothic literature, giving myself the sort of class that i guess would cost me 500-600 dollars to take at the university but since i've got Powel's bookstore a few miles away its cost me about 15 to get all the those books so far. Factor in the fact that i get my coffee for free at Tiny's now and i'm a fairly frugal freelance bookworm.
i really like the southern gothic style of writing, at least the two authors i've read so far, because it really grasps how heavy the south is to me. comparing it to the west coast, i feel like the past is almost tangible in dixie, its a yolk on everyone. theres a stirring in your blood when you kick the appalachian dust that was the dust of your forefathers for generations long gone and forgotten except in the traits of yourself bequeathed to you by a long line of hard living sonsofbitches you'll never know in this life. out west everything's new, and everyone looks forward, its "progressive", no one except the mexicans really care too much for their roots on the west, because the west is no one's but the mexicans and the indian's and the indians are all dead. the southern blood is a blood that wants to flow backward, the south is a land who's glory days have long since past. its a land that has endured the shame of defeat in war, then the scolding of the rest of the nation for its actions since then. the south is mean and spiritual and scary and beautiful. heres a little passage from the faulkner book that i've read over and over again. an old man is talking to a child who believes he's seen some of kind of spirit in the forest:
"think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting allot out of it, because after all you don't have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that's shame. But you can't be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth don't want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they don't want it, need it. besides what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?"
thats a sentiment that i think people who've lived in the south can understand, but people existing on virgin land like the west maybe wouldn't.
the other night i went to see deathcharge, the estranged and specters at satyricon, a 60 year old woman with 4 teeth was there sloppy drunk talking about how she was enamored of all the "hot punk dick" walking around the club and after a few formalities offered to buy me a drink and ask me in no uncertain terms "wanna fuck?". the estranged were awesome, they're touring the US right now check and see if they're gonna play your town. Vancouver BC'sspecters headlined the show, between deathcharge and spectres i got high so my appreciation of them might be a little skewed, but they were also most enjoyable, very post punky gothic joy division derivations, and a respectable stage prescience. a few days after that i went to see the sword, who i saw a few years ago and thought they were pretty ripping, but since then they've gotten a track on guitar hero, and the crowd was pretty similar to a frat party kegger, most humiliating was seeing people actually doing the guitar hero air guitar during the song featured on the video game. another one bites the dust i suppose. on the horizon in PDX we've got japanese 80's hardcore legends SYSTEMATIC DEATH playing with tragedy hellshock and one of the most slept on bands in portland, autistic youth, and ENGORGED is going to explode portland with skarp and funerot. good times ahead, good times behind
i really like the southern gothic style of writing, at least the two authors i've read so far, because it really grasps how heavy the south is to me. comparing it to the west coast, i feel like the past is almost tangible in dixie, its a yolk on everyone. theres a stirring in your blood when you kick the appalachian dust that was the dust of your forefathers for generations long gone and forgotten except in the traits of yourself bequeathed to you by a long line of hard living sonsofbitches you'll never know in this life. out west everything's new, and everyone looks forward, its "progressive", no one except the mexicans really care too much for their roots on the west, because the west is no one's but the mexicans and the indian's and the indians are all dead. the southern blood is a blood that wants to flow backward, the south is a land who's glory days have long since past. its a land that has endured the shame of defeat in war, then the scolding of the rest of the nation for its actions since then. the south is mean and spiritual and scary and beautiful. heres a little passage from the faulkner book that i've read over and over again. an old man is talking to a child who believes he's seen some of kind of spirit in the forest:
"think of all that has happened here, on this earth. All the blood hot and strong for living, pleasuring, that has soaked back into it. For grieving and suffering too, of course, but still getting something out of it for all that, getting allot out of it, because after all you don't have to continue to bear what you believe is suffering; you can always choose to stop that, put an end to that. And even suffering and grieving is better than nothing; there is only one thing worse than not being alive, and that's shame. But you can't be alive forever, and you always wear out life long before you exhausted the possibilities of living. And all that must be somewhere; all that could not have been invented and created just to be thrown away. And the earth is shallow; there is not a great deal of it before you come to the rock. And the earth don't want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again. Look at the seed, the acorns, at what happens even to carrion when you try to bury it: it refuses too, seethes and struggles too until it reaches light and air again, hunting the sun still. And they don't want it, need it. besides what would it want, itself, knocking around out there, when it never had enough time about the earth as it was when there is plenty of room about the earth, plenty of places still unchanged from what they were when the blood used and pleasured in them while it was still blood?"
thats a sentiment that i think people who've lived in the south can understand, but people existing on virgin land like the west maybe wouldn't.
the other night i went to see deathcharge, the estranged and specters at satyricon, a 60 year old woman with 4 teeth was there sloppy drunk talking about how she was enamored of all the "hot punk dick" walking around the club and after a few formalities offered to buy me a drink and ask me in no uncertain terms "wanna fuck?". the estranged were awesome, they're touring the US right now check and see if they're gonna play your town. Vancouver BC'sspecters headlined the show, between deathcharge and spectres i got high so my appreciation of them might be a little skewed, but they were also most enjoyable, very post punky gothic joy division derivations, and a respectable stage prescience. a few days after that i went to see the sword, who i saw a few years ago and thought they were pretty ripping, but since then they've gotten a track on guitar hero, and the crowd was pretty similar to a frat party kegger, most humiliating was seeing people actually doing the guitar hero air guitar during the song featured on the video game. another one bites the dust i suppose. on the horizon in PDX we've got japanese 80's hardcore legends SYSTEMATIC DEATH playing with tragedy hellshock and one of the most slept on bands in portland, autistic youth, and ENGORGED is going to explode portland with skarp and funerot. good times ahead, good times behind