Platial | Who and What's Nearby
Platial | Who and What's Nearby
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Kitsch is that stopover between being and oblivion.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I will not start from the beginning. That is when I was three or four, and was taken in the night to have tubes put in my ears.
My appendix was on the verge of rupture on a bus ride back from my 7th grade class trip to Washington, D.C. I didn't tell anyone. The bus was so quiet, and creeping so peacefully through the Pennsylvania night, that to complain about my dying body would have been a merciless infraction against the dark glowing rest. Later, when my appendix was removed, my mother or my brothers drove me around on long, song-filled county drives, to keep my mind occupied and rumble me to sleep.
I went out to Kingsbury in April of 2005 with Matt and Holly. I was in the sumblime state of healing that any other night-drive does to me. Matt's rental car, Race Suzuki, was riding low and crooked--the wheelwells were busted two nights ago, when he took us and his bestfriend Cody to fishtail out on rain-slicked backroads. We went into a farmer's hatch, took a wagon trail through a windsheer and half the car slid into a ditch. We got out and pushed Suzi back onto grit. She took off and Matt mawkishly laughed as he peeled away, leaving his friends in the cold mud.
Kingsbury was a spook story he never told us about. An abandoned military installation, the only reason for a town to be there at all, had been peeled back after the Korean war, and all the implements for making mortars and shells had been hauled out of the still-standing buildings. The fortifications, the outposts, the mess-halls, the recreation buildings all haggard and rain-rotted, like swamp-submerged skulls. The road into the complex was so over-grown with bramble and briar we drove past it twice, never angling our headlights onto its low-brush demarcation, finally tumbling onto the road blindly, where Matt intuited. We lost a chunk of the front-bumper as Suzi nose-dived into a massive pothole.
Hegel, Marx, Freud--if I'd read anything on them then, I could have prostituted their ideas for my own safety. But in this trespassing zone of rural exploration, I only felt the gloom and majesty any abandoned endeavor produces. The phenomenon has been explored extensively, mainly in the idea of the 'uncanny,' the everyday turned unfamiliar, as Vidler describes, 'the stubborn resistance of nature to the assimilation of human attributes and its tragic propensity to inorganic isolation.'
When the drizzle let down, Matt and Holly and me got on top of Suzi. Matt said, 'Let's roof,' so that's what we did. He had his leg in the driver's side window, steering the car as it trundled forward, gear in drive, and I had my legs hanging off the back. Holly bravely faced forward. We roofed through the debris, stopping here and there to inspect empty lots, circles of dead trees, the resonating shimmer of an inky pond, and three gutted buildings.
Fixed below is a link to a youtube.com, Okkervil River's music video for their song, 'For Real,' off their album Black Sheep Boy. It has this line in it, 'If you really want to see what really matters most to me, let's take a real short drive." It's all about kids and night and monsters.
Kitsch is that stopover between being and oblivion.
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I will not start from the beginning. That is when I was three or four, and was taken in the night to have tubes put in my ears.
My appendix was on the verge of rupture on a bus ride back from my 7th grade class trip to Washington, D.C. I didn't tell anyone. The bus was so quiet, and creeping so peacefully through the Pennsylvania night, that to complain about my dying body would have been a merciless infraction against the dark glowing rest. Later, when my appendix was removed, my mother or my brothers drove me around on long, song-filled county drives, to keep my mind occupied and rumble me to sleep.
I went out to Kingsbury in April of 2005 with Matt and Holly. I was in the sumblime state of healing that any other night-drive does to me. Matt's rental car, Race Suzuki, was riding low and crooked--the wheelwells were busted two nights ago, when he took us and his bestfriend Cody to fishtail out on rain-slicked backroads. We went into a farmer's hatch, took a wagon trail through a windsheer and half the car slid into a ditch. We got out and pushed Suzi back onto grit. She took off and Matt mawkishly laughed as he peeled away, leaving his friends in the cold mud.
Kingsbury was a spook story he never told us about. An abandoned military installation, the only reason for a town to be there at all, had been peeled back after the Korean war, and all the implements for making mortars and shells had been hauled out of the still-standing buildings. The fortifications, the outposts, the mess-halls, the recreation buildings all haggard and rain-rotted, like swamp-submerged skulls. The road into the complex was so over-grown with bramble and briar we drove past it twice, never angling our headlights onto its low-brush demarcation, finally tumbling onto the road blindly, where Matt intuited. We lost a chunk of the front-bumper as Suzi nose-dived into a massive pothole.
Hegel, Marx, Freud--if I'd read anything on them then, I could have prostituted their ideas for my own safety. But in this trespassing zone of rural exploration, I only felt the gloom and majesty any abandoned endeavor produces. The phenomenon has been explored extensively, mainly in the idea of the 'uncanny,' the everyday turned unfamiliar, as Vidler describes, 'the stubborn resistance of nature to the assimilation of human attributes and its tragic propensity to inorganic isolation.'
When the drizzle let down, Matt and Holly and me got on top of Suzi. Matt said, 'Let's roof,' so that's what we did. He had his leg in the driver's side window, steering the car as it trundled forward, gear in drive, and I had my legs hanging off the back. Holly bravely faced forward. We roofed through the debris, stopping here and there to inspect empty lots, circles of dead trees, the resonating shimmer of an inky pond, and three gutted buildings.
Fixed below is a link to a youtube.com, Okkervil River's music video for their song, 'For Real,' off their album Black Sheep Boy. It has this line in it, 'If you really want to see what really matters most to me, let's take a real short drive." It's all about kids and night and monsters.
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