Savages Oct. 9, 2013

Two forces are at play at the Savages show tonight: restriction & excess. Four black-clad silhouettes take over the stage; their black shirts and pants suggest a uniform, a color restriction that focuses the attention of the audience on the dimly lit stage. The band's plea for the restricted use of phones and cameras, those lit screens held up with the hopes to capture an ever fleeting event, is a forcible attempt to seize you in their space. Savages want your whole presence or they don't want it at all.

 The intention is to bring you to inhabit an area of an excessive presence (yours & theirs) where their music is possible. "I Am Here", the first song in last night's set list, is a statement of purpose revealing that intent. Their presence is stated musically, and it's absolute Staccato and spiky guitar chords, a bass like a motor coupled with chugging, tom-heavy drumming propels their music into a dark swirling tunnel of noise where the band disappears after a 10 + minute closer "Fuckers" ('Don't let the fuckers bring you down'). The lights go out, no encore, their absence is now absolute.

Combustion (3)

The certainty of the heat felt first on the skin: by the middle of the summer they could feel it in their entrails. The heat: what had started as a promise for longer days, always ended as a threat to rot their intestines. But there was an undeniable beauty in sitting on the sidewalk outside the store facing the parking lot, witnessing the calcination of concrete. She flung her cigarette under the car parked in front of them. For a few seconds she imagined metal, plastic and glass flying around. Blowing shit up was something that came to her mind every time she lit one: for her, smoking was not an addiction but a commitment to that beautiful image.

He put what was left of his cigarette under one of his boots and crushed it until there was no more smoke coming out. Before standing up they kissed. The menthol lingering in their lips created the momentary illusion of a cool intimate retreat. But when their tongues met, a world of warm organs in bodies exposed to the outside heat was revealed to their senses. She wasn't sure if the repulsion she had just felt was ignited by the smell of antifreeze leaking from the car being started two parking spaces from where they were sitting or by his breath, hot as the afternoon breeze.

Their brake was over and the store manager was about to stick her head out of the door and yell at them. She saw them coming back in and muttered something about how much they smoked. And didn't they know how unhealthy it was? Weren't they told at school the way cigarettes destroy your lungs and your body? "Yes" said Laura as she walked behind the counter, next to the cash register, "I know that, I'm not stupid". She took the pack out of her jeans pocket and put it on the bottom shelf behind her. Working mostly behind the counter meant that she had to bend over a lot. If a customer wanted to buy one of the masks on the wall behind her -they were there only for display-, she had to get it from the lower shelves or from cardboard box under the register.

Before she got the job there, Laura didn't know there was a costume store downtown. Having spent all of her life where most people in the city live she barely knew there was a downtown. The suburbs had always been the center of her life: trailer parks, subdivisions where maintenance had been long neglected by neighborhood associations, churches, abandoned strip malls, gas stations and gigantic auto-parts stores.
to be continued>>

Life on the Tips

"The English language is dead" he wrote. How many other things had he declared dead in the last decade? If it hadn't been for that resurrection trick under his sleeve this new millennium could have very well been considered a mass grave.
"Today it starts again. With me". The pulsion of each keystroke performing a digital CPR.

Resistance

"When injustice becomes law, Resistance becomes a duty"/ "Cuando la injusticia se convierte en ley, la resistencia se convierte en deber" 
Rolando Zenteno Ramirez GUYA (GA Undocumented Youth Alliance) Activist/ arrested on 4/16/2013 @ the Board of Regents meeting in Savannah, Georgia.

Hence, the charisma

"Nate turned away, spat. 'I'm thinking we could ask Satan for something.' All this bullshit was said in a thick Southern accent that made him impossible to know very well, if at all. Hence, the charisma".
Dennis Cooper, Period.

Combustion (2)

The certainty of the heat felt first on the skin: by the middle of the summer they could feel it in their entrails. The heat: what had started as a promise for longer days, always ended as a threat to rot their intestines. But there was an undeniable beauty in sitting on the sidewalk outside the store facing the parking lot, witnessing the calcination of concrete. She flung her cigarette under the car parked in front of them. For a few seconds she imagined metal, plastic and glass flying around. Blowing shit up was something that came to her mind every time she lit one: for her, smoking was not an addiction but a commitment to that beautiful image.

He put what was left of his cigarette under one of his boots and crushed it until there was no more smoke coming out. Before standing up they kissed. The menthol lingering in their lips created the momentary illusion of a cool intimate retreat. But when their tongues met, a world of warm organs in bodies exposed to the outside heat was revealed to their senses. She wasn't sure if the repulsion she had just felt was ignited by the smell of antifreeze leaking from the car being started two parking spaces from where they were sitting or by his breath, hot as the afternoon breeze.
To be contiued>>

Combustion

The certainty of the heat felt first on the skin: by the middle of the summer they could feel it in their entrails. The heat: what had started as a promise for longer days, always ended as a threat to rot their intestines. But there was an undeniable beauty in sitting on the sidewalk outside the store facing the parking lot, witnessing the calcination of concrete. She flung her cigarette under the car parked in front of them. For a few seconds she imagined metal, plastic and glass flying around. Blowing shit up was something that came to her mind every time she lit one: for her, smoking was not an addiction but a commitment to that beautiful image.
To be contiued>>