<nettime> Re: Deeply boring age

["James Allan" <jamesallan@hotmail.com>]

>and life and creation have to be experienced first hand, not in a mediated 
>fashion...

>"My life has been a poem I would have writ / But I could not both live and 
>utter it." Thoreau

>In the late 1970s...

It's the late 1970s, I'm a teenager in Lindsay, Ontario. My buddies and I 
sit around, under the bridge, in the freezing cold, drinking straight rye 
(it costs more than Canadian beer but works. only a dog would drink American 
beer) and bitch about how boring everything is.  When we get too drunk we 
throw up into the slow Scugog River and watch and laugh as the carp rise 
through the mud to the shimmering surface like some fresh water swamp sharks 
and suck in the puke. Within walking distance, Earl and His Musical Squirrel 
is playing his accordion at the Moose Lodge. The Trent Muskies are fighting 
with the Cobourg Cougars at the rink (and there's always blood and teeth and 
hair on the floor by the snack bar). A bar called the Kent Tavern has 
sawdust on the floor and a juke box full of every Hank Williams song that 
matters, and Micky Foucault (pronounced: fooš-kawlt) is holding forth about 
the history of his sexual adventures while mixing asbestos at the brakeshoe 
plant....

Were there books?
Yes, there were books.
Tell us about the books.
There were always books to read. Big books, small books, book with pictures, 
art books with pictures cut out. There was Kafka and Voltaire, Beckett and 
Joyce. Books on venereal disease, beekeeping, Vietnam, That Summer in Paris, 
and How to Win Friends and Influence People....

And we would listen to Neil Young singing "There is a town in north Ontario, 
all my changes were there..." and we new what he meant.
And we would dream about getting out.
And when I got on that bus I swore I'd never go back.

Lindsay was boring. And (nostagia) so am I.

-James


http://art.teleportacia.org/james



_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net