Amerikana

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About Amerikana

Dedicated to the fantastic and savage possibilities of life in this country.

This isn't a group about the folksy and kitsch, but about the brutal and rare. It's about a world Norman Rockwell refused to acknowledge and Edward Hopper only saw from the corner of his eye, the way you steal a glance at the sun.

It's about the nightmare of our collective memories of this Great Land. About times of vicious despair and moments of heartbreaking beauty.

This is about places most of us don't like to remember or acknowledge: cheap motels with that smell of stale cigarettes and cleaning chemicals; antique stores with large collections of racist memorabilia; decrepit truck stops crawling with lot lizards; and drunk old men swilling 50 cent PBRs at the Legion Hall; the mental institution and the drunk tank; the army barracks and the jailhouse.

This is about the things we wish we could hold onto even as they crumble to dust with every year: the rural highway, free of exurban sprawl and corporate hegemony; the ancient vacation home, it's furniture unchanged since 1956; the elegant stake house with it's cigarette machine, unaware that our eating habits tell us fat and red meat are unhealthy and that the surgeon general says smoking will kill you; the quick hospitality of the all-night coffee shop and the brawny cheerfulness of the neighborhood tavern.

This is about the sights and the moments of breathtakingly savage beauty: morning sunlight filtering through the curtains of a rented cabin in northern Minnesota; the brilliant greens of an urban forest surrounding a railroad right of way in the Rust Belt on a foggy late May day; the soft beat of some old R&B man playing on the radio as you drive under the orange glow of the city's sodium street lights on a hot summer night; and of staggering out of the rat-trap apartment, squinting hungover into the harsh light of day.

This rare and savage land of endless possibilities, we salute you.

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