#wilmingon

[sbnr-scraps]

Destination Peace Gifts – Wilmington, NC. Photo by mpace.

[dumbluckjournal]

When you feel like you're in Hilary Duff's Come Clean video. #hurricane #Wilmingon #NC #Rain #LetTheRainFall

[jayesbrain]

Thought I might ease back in by listening to some Cash. Listening to the Folsom Prison album, especially GREYSTONE CHAPLE. It takes a ring of keys to  move here in Folsom, but the door to the house of God is never locked.

[dentalhospital]

Notes on my trip to Delaware last Saturday: -My friends and I often reductively refer to Delaware as “weird,” and while I’m kind of uneasy with that descriptor, it’s probably the best shorthand for what Delaware is. There are complicated reasons for this that I don’t fully understand. I’ve heard the First State described as a “feudal society” which is essentially owned and operated by DuPont. What bearing this has on the state’s anarchic tax law and notoriously horrendous public school system isn’t immediately clear to me, because I’m dumb. But really, I think the reason Delaware is so weird is its insularity. I grew up roughly 25 minutes outside of the Wilmington metropolitan area, making it way more accessible than Philadelphia, and I’ve hardly ever gone. To get there, I have to drive down a path of winding roads in deep forest populated by imposing private estates surrounded with myths of Satanism, incest, infanticide, and KKK lynchings. This is the trip I took to the Oddity Bar last Saturday. -I try to explain this to everyone and no one seems to get it, but the best spots in Delaware employ a 1950′s kitsch design aesthetic which is, itself, decidedly 1990′s. A whole tome could be written on this subject, and I am not the person to do it. But just think about everything from that period that included some warped take on 50′ s iconography and/or imbued a sense of Cold War nostalgia: Twin Peaks, Ren and Stimpy, the music of They Might Be Giants, maybe Man or Astroman? too, the invocation of Archie and Friends illustration style on innumerable pop-punk sleeves (more on that later), Mystery Science Theatre 3000, etc. The two best examples of this in action are Lucky’s Coffee Shop and the Oddity Bar, which features a lot of taxidermy and red neon. For good measure, they were showing “Firewalk with Me” on the bar TV when I got there. -Another thing about driving to Delaware: this is the way I used to drive with my mom around 1998 to pick up my sister from the private school she was going to. For some reason, my most vivid memories of the decade take place on this stretch of road. 3EB was on the radio and we were going to Einstein Bagels to get Fruitopia. Every time I drive through Greenville, it’s like I’m going back in time. -I was there to see the Headies, who are my friends, and one of my favorite bands to watch live. They play a genre that I’m alone in really loving amongst my PA friends: stuff in the Queers/MTX/Weasel canon, with some serious Plow United worship thrown in for speed. They always play like they are having the best time. I also appreciate them because they’re lifers: dudes in their early 30′s who have been going to and playing shows in Delaware for about 20 years. Despite the fact that I haven’t spent too much time there, Delaware feels so much closer to my own experience than Philadelphia, and so I value my Wilmingtonian friends as historians. While I can’t really explain why, when I hear stories about “The Anal Cunt show at the Girls, Inc. in Wilmington in 1997 where some kid got thrown through a wall,” it means something to me. -The first band that played was Jake and the Stiffs. I knew that name, and because the members appeared to be in their 40′s, I figured they’d been at it for a while. I looked them up while they were playing, and yep, they’ve been a band since 1990. Playing first at a bar show in Wilmington with little fanfare. As I’ve said before, I don’t have any stake in what punk rock is supposed to be, but this kind of seems like the right thing: to make music in the place you’re from and to keep at it because you love it. Maybe that’s why I feel so alienated by everything in Philadelphia, where the scene is populated by recent twentysomething transplants and college students who have a tendency to disappear up their own asses with a sense of regional identification that just doesn’t belong to them. Not to mention the constant self-mythologizing and inflated sense of importance. -While the Stiffs played, I was sitting at a table alone. A lady sat down next to me and we talked and exchanged numbers. I felt like I was in a parallel universe, and in some sense, I suppose I was. This sort of thing has only happened to me one other time. Guess where I was?