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Thursday, April 19, 2007
NITE MOVES
Grovesnor
Hot Chip's DJ-KiCKS mix
!K7 : 2007
[Pre-Order It]
BLACK REPUBLICANS
Lil Wayne feat. Juelz Santana
Da Drought 3
2007 mixtape
KRAZY WORLD
King Geedorah feat. Gigan
Take Me to Your Leader
Big Dada : 2003
[Buy It]
These are among the songs that carried me to my thwarted camping trip last weekend.
The thing about trips is that, while they feel so much realer than everyday life while you're on them, they immediately dissolve into the fragmentary dreamstuff as soon as they end. Given that we'd driven to North Carolina's outer banks to camp, given that the ferries were cancelled by the gale-force winds wracking the state, given that even our secondary plan to camp on the mainland was foiled when the wind and rain got so heavy we couldn't keep the tent on the ground, given that we wound up checking into a little motel with water that smelled of rust and brimstone in a blighted beachside town-- given the distance between all of this and our intentions, this trip feels particularly obscure in retrospect, and the images I retain of it range from dreamy to out-and-out surreal, all capped by a ubiquitous livid sky.
I remember a corridor of trees, browned by chemical spray at the bottom, purple with flowering wisteria higher up, funneling the dark river of the highway down to a thin runnel, gradually vanishing into a gray shroud of distance. I remember the smoke from the camping stove we used to make coffee in the hotel room, pooling incongruously under the shade of a wall-mounted lamp. I remember the alien landscape of the shore there-- the sun spangling hard and flat off of brackish pools, the misty plumes of sand blowing off the tops of the dunes, over inexplicable mounds of neatly stacked, decomposing Christmas trees. The beach was covered in broken glass, unidentifiable metal scraps, random plastic detritus, and many many automobile tires, half submerged in the sand at the tide's edge.
I remember feeling caught between the sadness and digust I felt at the shore's utter ruin, and the sense of wonder, of interest (the sensation I crave most), sparked in me by the tableau-- the Christmas trees lined up like mummified sentinels and a rotted wreath hanging on a raw wooden post; some of the tires so barnacled that only their shape betrayed them, clustered and weirdly beautiful, like archipelagos viewed from a plane. It was as if the debasement of the world renewed my ability to perceive it, which is the ultimate goal of all travel, and even now, several days back into my routine, some part of me is still standing on that windy dune, the malevolent refuse of a construction project looming behind me, they sky violent and bruised, rotted pine at my feet, staring down at those artificial yet glittering skerries, caught between conflicting desires-- for the world to be always transformed, yet somehow preserved.Labels: brian
posted by Brian
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