Eugene weekly., March 31, 2011, Page 36, Image 36

culture
BY RICK LEVIN
Among the Natives
Huffing Fumes at the Matt Court Monster Jam
N
ot to gloat but, on paper, my cultural
resume is fairly sophisticated. I
have eaten escargot. Every year I
loyally re-up my New Yorker subscription.
Within a few bars I can identify Beethoven’s
symphonies, one through nine, and I’m not
averse to watching movies with subtitles. I am
conversant in the dialectical materialism of
Karl Marx, the post-structuralist critiques of
Roland Barthes, the scorched-earth feminism
of Luce Irigaray and the transcendental
idealism of Gilles Deleuze. My bookshelves
are home to such worthies as Woolf, Whitman,
32 MARCH 31, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
Stendahl, Dostoyevski, Hamsun, Nietzsche,
Malamud, Munro and Melville. I can explain
the Monroe Doctrine.
That said, I would now like to offer
some different bone fi des which, say what
you will, I do not consider contradictory:
Whenever I have to blow my nose, I plug one
nostril with my index fi nger and fi re a string
of snot into the street. My favorite place to
piss is off the end of a porch. I eat pork rinds.
Growing up in a small rural town on the
Olympic Peninsula, I was reared among an
extended family of Croatian immigrants who
fi shed and logged for a living, who drank
Rainier out of cans and drove Ford pickups
that were bashed in from sideswiping trees.
My jobs have included running skiff on a
purse-seiner, pumping gas, shoveling shit,
picking gypsum in Omak and butchering
salmon in Dutch Harbor. I lost my virginity
by walking a wooded trail behind my house
to visit a sweet girl who lived in a propped
doublewide and whose mother drove my
school bus. My favorite smell is turpentine,
and I think farting is hilarious.
So when I hit the fl oor of the Advance
Auto Parts© Monster Jam truck show on
Saturday morning, March 26, at Matthew
Knight Arena, and beheld the collected
crowd of mullet-heads, shit-kickers, tough
mamas, grizzled yahoos, grease-monkeys,
cud chewers, bikers, long haulers, cholesterol
cowboys and tow-headed kids with tight
crew cuts, I thought — without an iota of
irony — these are my people. I grew up on
this shit. The euphoric masochistic auditory
pleasure of having your eardrums blown by
the unmuffl ed roar of eight cylinders revving
is not lost on me.
If you’ve never been to a monster truck
jam, you’ve likely made fun of a monster
truck jam. It’s understandable. Cars have
colonized our once-beautiful planet, and
bounteous nature is losing the asphalt
battle, eaten to shreds by the exigencies
of highways, byways and parking lots.
Addiction to oil has cost us gazillions of
dollars and an immeasurable sacrifi ce in
human blood — not to mention our spiritual
integrity. Why in the name of all that is holy
would anyone want to spend his money and
leisure time watching other people drive
around for entertainment?
Why? For the same complex reasons
arsonists start fi res and nymphos seek sex
and cutters cut themselves and commuters
rubberneck at head-on collisions. The thrill
of watching a jacked-up truck with 62-inch
tires ($2,500 per tire) drive willy-nilly over
the top of four cars is all that, and more:
excessive, explosive, sensual, deliciously
painful and extravagantly, compulsively
pointless.
Continued p.34
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