After an all nighter in Boston, hitting both Greg Fournier’s Heartthrob, then his Rave Cave, we headed to New York for almost a week before burning straight across the country.
We stood just down the road and away from the final battle field where the overzealous General Custer met both true Americans Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull as well as over 3000 Cheyenne and Lakota warriors. Days before the battle Chief Sitting Bull had participated in a sun dance which lasted 24 hours and included self sacrifice and torture, culminating in a vision of white soldiers falling upside down from the sky.
I stood in front of the gift shop, the smell of human shit so powerful it was everything not to wretch, a notice posted on the wall that the Judiciary budget of the Crow Indians had been reduced from 500,000 to 1 dollar.
“Do you want to go over there?” Lauren asked.
“I don’t think I can.” I said, and with a sick feeling we got back into the car and continued to Washington.
The feeling has still to leave me, and when I reflect on it the same internal sickness is there, the same disgust I feel when I see row after row of cookie cutter houses,
“One does not sell the land people walk on.” …
Crazy Horse, Sept. 23, 1875
or fields upon fields of worthless, no, detrimental cattle, which were ushered in after the majestic and free roaming buffalo were intentionally slaughtered to starve the Indians off the land and usher them into perpetually shrinking reservations in the greedy scramble for gold. See also: government housing projects, and a McDonald’s, Popeye’s, etc, on every inner city street corner; or the implied obsolescence of the New Orleans levees, which, if unchecked will be one of this countries largest applications of hostile gentrification since the small pox blanket.
And why not rest easy, young gentronaut, you can now buy a home in the Bywater neighborhood of NOLA for as low as 10,000-20,000 dollars. You too can be part of the whitewashing which due to population growth and huge disparity in wealth was to be inevitable, so that twenty years from now we can all look back and push that sick feeling I was describing earlier to the pit of our feet,…or, I mean, fuck it,… tilt a PBR to the ceiling, this is America, land of the entitled,….right? If you got the right wallet I suppose. Enjoy it with willful ignorance while it lasts because its fleeting fast.
Crust punk squatter – gay art cliché – college students – yuppies.
The Gorge.
When we got to The Gorge we were a day early for the Sasquatch fest,…another of these huge packaged multi day/stage concerts which charge about 40 dollars a gallon for water and offer nothing in the way of shade, or healthy food options, unless you have prepurchased a “VIP” bracelet, which would entitle the purchaser to stand under a guarded awning.
We played the parking lot for several hours each night, only, by choice, entering the show for about an hour on the last day to see Sam Brown and The Whitest Kids You Know, before being fully disgusted by the throng of people huddled around the few water spigots, and when looking down saw an extension cord linked to another at my feet, about one inch beside a muddy flow of water with dozens of exposed barefooted or flip flopped feet.
“Holy shit.” I said to Lauren with a laugh, “look at that.”
“Ha. Well that figures.”
Following the line with my eyes I saw it lead about 50 feet to a plasma screen television, where a man was advertising insurance under a tent. I walked down the small hill and confronted the man.
“Can you do me a favor and humor me for a moment?”
“What’s that?”
“Here, follow me?”
“What?”
“Just come here,..see this chord?”
“Lets follow it.”
Following the line to the splice, I got the man to agree to unplug his (off) television.
“Wait man, you got to follow this back to the source, what you just did was make this even more dangerous.”
“I’m sure its been unplugged up there.” was his answer, and I shook my head as he walked off and of course, retracing the line it had not been unplugged. THIS IS INDICATIVE OF THE ATTITUDE PORTRAYED BY THE STAFF FOR THE ENTIRETY OF THE FESTIVAL. See also: shutting off the water in the campground a day before the concert ended, or the aggressive quelling of a drum and music circle at dawn in which the staff attempted to confiscate a group of people’s musical instruments,…and just after over an ounce and a half of mushrooms was spun around the circle in goodwill. See recording “Dawn Engorged” on the 1620 myspace player. Suprised? Not really, I did have to pay a few hundred in bribes last year to escape with a few thousand.
We left with our wallet a little fatter and headed to Portland Oregon to locate and purchase a short school bus,…but after several nights in a tent city in SE, a couch, and a backyard, we realized registration and transportation would be hard to impossible in Oregon, so we flew to Florida, where due a glut of rental cars, we have decided to rent and swivel the east for two weeks (50 dollars a week of you drop the car off outside of the state) in a scramble for cash which will end at Bonnaroo on the 14th,….
oh, and we played our first “show” I guess, an open Mic night in front of 7 people at the Red and Black vegan cafe @ SE12th and SE Oak in Portland.