#HUGE. puritan religious assholes

[grell-writes-stuff]

A Self Indulgent First Chapter

Enjoy...something

Words: 2,549

Genre: Young Adult / Paranormal

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Slam!

Gasp!

And then the apathetic yell of “Walk it off, Willow!” from Coach Martin. No stopping the game or running over to make sure I’m not deprived of air or dying or something. Just “Walk it off, Willow!”

I suffer for a second with the wind knocked out of my body. My inhaler finds its way from my pocket to my hand, and while I hold the one breath I force myself into and wait for my crap lungs to jump-start again, I contemplate the most-likely-illegal play that landed me flat on my back in the middle of the field. Quarterback Tom Styles’ outstretched elbow connecting with my neck at full speed in his chase for the checkered ball and high school sports glory, clearly confusing his claim-to-fame varsity moves with a pickup game of soccer since I doubt he has the brain cells to remember the rules to two sports at once. And probably a little bit on purpose. Because he’s a dick.

My chest wheezes a little, but at least it’s something, and the weak inhales finally start to catch as a sun-freckled face appears above me and blocks out the light. Ivy offers me her hand.

“Did th-that look a-as bad as it f-felt?” I sputter.

Ivy tilts her head from side-to-side like it’s the scale measuring how uncool I am. “Worse. Very pathetic. You will die alone.” She yanks me to my feet and acts like a support in spite of the height difference.

“P-Please stop making m-me take gym with y-you.”

“Nah. It’s too funny.” She ignores my scowl. “Come on. Let’s get you some water and wait for those shitty lungs to work again.”

She escorts me – hobbling like some eighty-year-old man with spine problems and not just what will soon be a terrible, ugly bruise – toward the bleachers, empty except for the water bottles of our classmates. I’m happy enough to sit on the sidelines, not just while recovering from having all of the air robbed from my chest, but for the rest of gym class, and also forever. Ivy is equally as happy, but only because it prompts the girls’ teacher, Coach Caruthers, to scream in her booming voice:

“Hammond! Back on the field!”

Without missing a beat, Ivy responds, “In the event of moderate injury, students are allowed to have a friend or fellow student for mental, emotional, or physical support. It’s in the code of conduct.”

I don’t know if that’s actually something in our school’s rule book, but Ivy has read the whole thing cover-to-cover for the sole purpose of seeing how many provisions she can disregard without getting into trouble through malicious acts of over-compliance or sheer dumb luck. So, she’s either following the rules to the letter or lying about them. As I sit, I see that Caruthers does not look impressed when Ivy plops onto the bench next to me. The whole reason our gender-segregated phys. ed classes collaborate so often is because they’re full of athletes – and me, the outlier – so more often than not, it’s just an extra practice for the varsity players. Even though Ivy was born with the “good at physical stuff” gene, and talented enough to be a forward on our girls’ soccer team, she prefers to rely on the natural part of her ability and not the practice part to the vexation of literally everyone.

“Hammond!” Caruthers screams. “On the field, or off the team!”

Ivy squirts a stream of water into her mouth and quickly swallows before passing the bottle on to me. “Cool. Who’s replacing me?” she retorts.

I focus on downing some water and breathing evenly again and not on the vein beginning to pop out of Caruthers’ angry-red neck. She can’t say anything back because, well, Kinross High School isn’t huge. Pretty much everyone who can play sports is already playing sports, and as far as Ivy’s tendency to disrespect anyone of authority can go, she’s also crucial to securing victory over visiting teams. Caruthers just grits her teeth and returns to refereeing the game where Tom Styles has once again stolen the ball that got away from him, this time without incapacitating anybody since the one guy with asthma has left the field. (Asshole.) I watch as Abby Jefferson starts to gain on him, and Tom makes the choice to skillfully send the ball flying across the grass to the next open player, Drew Young, the only person in our gym class who does even less than I do.

That’s not for lack of talent either. I’ve seen Drew actually try on the rare occasion, and he could absolutely score a spot on a boys’ sports team. But most games, like today, he receives the pass and kicks the ball along to the next open player – it’s intercepted by one of the girls – and continues pacing the field leisurely. Coach Martin yells at him to get his head in the game, but Drew doesn’t bother. If the activity doesn’t involve selling the pens that he stole from the cheerleaders to the football team, the little weasel has no interest.

The game continues on.

Ivy reclines until her shoulders are touching the bench behind us, tilting her head back and staring at the sky. I have to wonder how comfortable it is.

“My dear Sid,” she theatrically addresses me. She likes to be dramatic sometimes. She thinks it’s funny. “I have a proposal for you.”

“I told you I’m not training a messenger pigeon with you. We only live three houses apart.”

“I’ll wear you down eventually, but no, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.” She looks over at me without breaking her questionable position. “I know what we’re doing tonight. I’ve concocted a perfect plan, you see, for this most All-Hallowed of Eves.”

“You can say ‘Halloween’ like a normal person. It’s okay.”

“Let me bring you back in time,” she continues, ignoring me, “to the Kinross of yore. Just decades after its founding, the Salem Witch Trials came about and our town was no exception to the noose–”

“Salem is two hours away, Ivy,” I interrupt with the fact.

“Shut up. The Salem Witch Trials swept across the state of Massachusetts, migrated into Kinross, and thus the most famous trial of Kinross history was set in motion when one Ann Kelly was accused of being a creature of the occult!”

“Can I get the abridged version of this plan please?” I ask her. “Like, the part that takes place in this century?”

Finally fed up with my interjections, Ivy sighs exaggeratedly and rolls her eyes at me. “Blah, blah, blah, she was hanged, she’s buried in the historical section of Riverview, and we’re going there tonight during the witching hour to see” – she switches to her best spooky voice with elongated, trembling vowels – “her haunted grave.”

“Hard pass.”

That makes her sit upright again with a slouch to her posture. She’s wearing a fabricated pout. “Sid,” she whines.

“Ivy, I’m not sneaking out with you at three in the morning on Halloween to go see a ‘haunted grave.’” She opens her mouth, but I follow up with, “Our parents would kill us. Besides, what’s-her-name probably just angered a bunch of Puritans and got executed because of religious prejudice. That doesn’t mean she was a witch.”

“Well, of course. I think angering Puritans was a mandatory activity back then. But come on, Sid! The legend says she’s a witch, and it’s the perfect Halloween thing! I think we are obligated – if not encouraged by the spirit of Halloween herself – to go see a ghost witch.”

“Does the spirit of Halloween have a gender?”

Ivy pushes past that and waits to catch my eye dead-on. “Bet you a hundred bucks we actually see Ann Kelly’s phantom.”

My lips part to say no just a split second before I register the number. “Wait – a hundred?”

Something cocky has taken up her face, and she recites with inflated confidence, “Ten A-Hams. A Franklin. A thousand Roosevelts.”

“You know what? Fine. I’ll take your money,” I tell her. “You’re on.”

Her grin is smug as we fist-bump on it and close the deal, but I decide that I don’t care so much with the promise of an easy hundred dollars coming my way. Ivy ingests another stream of water, and swallows while her eyes quickly scan the grass to catch up with the game again. Suddenly, a yell flies from her mouth:

“Box him out, Julia! Come on!”

Then she’s up off the bleachers and jogging back out onto the field. As unwilling as Ivy is to make an effort and practice, she’s also equally as competitive, even if this is just a gym class where victory doesn’t really matter. I, on the other hand, take my time on the bench. Struggling to breathe isn’t my idea of fun. I need to stop letting Ivy manipulate me into taking phys. ed. If she keeps it up, she might kill me.

 ***

I can nearly be qualified as a mess by the time Ivy and I reach our lockers after final period, and she’s humming like she’s got live wires for veins despite just spending an hour burning off energy. Meanwhile, I’m still recovering from my last bout of airlessness after I returned to the field and ran for maybe ten minutes. And I feel gross. The benefit of having P.E. last period is that I don’t have to shower here and can wait until I get home or to Ivy’s. The con is the window of time in between. I usually try to keep the gap as short as possible, and therefore, my time at my locker brief. I think Ivy and I took enough time getting changed after gym to avoid most people – at least the non-athletes.

“Hi, Sidney! Hi, Ivy!”

A mixture of feelings suddenly rockets through me and don’t add up in the end. While my chest is beginning to slowly overclock, and the hallway seems a few degrees warmer and rising steadily, I’m ready to play dead as Naomi Park opens the locker right next to mine on the opposite side of Ivy’s. Her shoulder is a fraction of an inch from touching my arm which is probably too close when I’m still drenched in gym sweat. Ivy greets her politely with ease while my brain is trying to catch up with the mundane situation and not think about how she smells like some kind of flowery perfume and I smell like crap.

“Hey, Naomi,” leaves my mouth and sounds too drawn-out and weirdly cheesy, so I just try to smile to make up for it. That feels awkward too, but she thankfully doesn’t seem to react to that, and her glossy pink lips tilt up without much effort into a perfect grin.

She puts some books on the shelf in her locker. “Any exciting Halloween plans?”

“Nope,” Ivy says immediately, likely because our actual idea involves a wager and might not be entirely legal – it’s a misdemeanor at the least. I just take the hint and don’t add anything to refute her answer.

“You? Any plans? For tonight – Halloween?” I wish that had come out differently. It could have at least sounded coherent.

“Nothing tonight,” Naomi responds. “But Heather’s having a ‘Belated Halloween Bash’ on Saturday while her parents are out of town so I’m ‘required’ to be there.”

“Oh, cool. That’s…cool.”

“I guess so. Heather’s parties get a little boring after a while though. I bet your plans for Saturday are much more fun.”

“Yep. Pints of ice cream, horror movies, and making bets on how long it takes Sid to hurl when the blood starts gushing,” Ivy interjects.

“Ivy.” I mutter the snap of her name so it doesn’t sound as harsh as I want it to. The temperature in the hallway rises astronomically.

Naomi giggles, which hurts. Well, it would if her laugh wasn’t so musical and twinkly. It’s like a damn harp quartet. “Sounds like a good time,” she comments. Her locker door shuts. “I’ll see you guys tomorrow.”

“Yeah, totally – tomorrow. See ya’, Naomi!” She’s nearly out of earshot down the hall, and I wait until I know she definitely can’t hear anything before I say to Ivy without daring a look at her, with the heat of embarrassment and shame boiling me alive from the inside, “Please say nothing.”

I can hear the grin on her face when she speaks. “You realize she’s just another human being, right?”

“Are you kidding? She’s at the right hand of Heather Loch. She’s popular. I’m shocked she still knows my name.”

Ivy shuts her own locker with a characteristic slam. “Dude, you’re ridiculous. She likes you back. If you just talked to her, and told her that you like her, you would have a girlfriend.”

“Ivy, she thinks I’m a loser.”

“I think you’re a loser and I still like you sometimes.”

I roll my eyes and can’t say anything to that. I don’t care if Ivy thinks I’m lame. It’s not the same. We’ve been together for as long as I can remember, so at this point, she’s locked into this friendship, no matter how easy it would be for her to hang out with the people at Kinross High who are actually popular and liked.

I close my locker and we start walking to the main exit of the building and eventually across the school’s student parking lot. Some groups linger, but most people seem to be dispersing and heading home for the day. Ivy and I walk straight through the lot as always, avoiding the cars pulling out.

I want to avoid the Styles’ Ford Everest – which is so bright red that it’s an assault on the eyes – but we have to walk past it and the clump of popular kids loitering next to it: blonde, perfect, popular Heather Loch, Asshole Quarterback Tom and his not-as-terrible twin, Ed, and my locker neighbour and secret crush, Naomi. The girls are under the guys’ arms like they belong there, popular with popular. There’s usually not much interaction between our pair and their group because I’m pretty sure most of the popular kids either don’t know who I am or just hate me for no reason, but today Tom decides to rub in his full-contact plays on the soccer field.

“Nice moves out there, Pussy Willow!” he shouts clear across the lot. It makes me feel the bruise on my back, still fresh, but I’m past the point of being mad about it. Really, Tom’s just an annoying jerk, and that’s all he’ll ever be.

I try to tap into Ivy-like sarcasm and passiveness. “I get it. Because my last name is Willow, and you’re insulting me. That’s really funny. It’s original.”

He yells something back that includes one of Ivy’s favourite swear words, but we disregard it and turn out of the parking lot in the direction of our houses. Ivy states that we’re going to my place because, in her mind, it’s easier to sneak out of a single-parent household. I don’t try to refute it because arguing with Ivy when she has her mind made up is like talking to a brick wall.

#writing #wip #untitled #my writing #my ocs #ya #young adult #writeblr

[thorias]

Random thoughts watching Riverdale episode 6

First thing we see is Betty and Polly as kids. There goes the Polly-is-Betty’s-split-personality theory, I guess. It was a long shot anyway. 

Alice is the first character to draw attention to how bizarre Jughead’s name is. Nice try, Alice, but I still hate you. 

Delivering on all the build up Polly has had is going to be tough. I’m thinking about what Polly could be like and imagining everything from Norma Bates to Patrick Bateman. 

I think a big reason why the story about Archie and his music doesn’t feel terribly compelling is because it’s too reminiscent of the comics, whereas everything and everyone else has been so heavily reimagined. We’ve got this Polly story and how it all connects to the murder mystery and it’s pretty fascinating stuff, but then we cut over to Archie having stage fright in a variety show, and it’s not bad, but I just want them to go back to the murder mystery because this part seems so unimportant by comparison. As much as I disliked the Grundy plot, it was the only thing Archie had that was as twisted as the other big plots on the show. Without it, he’s rather boring right now. 

Archie hallucinating people wearing wolf masks gets my attention, but Betty’s already got the ‘mentally unbalanced’ storyline wired and he’s got a long way to go to catch up to her. 

Reggie heckles Archie after Archie let him have the captain’s job on the football team last week. Because Reggie is a dick. 

Archie asking Val to sing with him at the show seems like a reasonable request and her excuse doesn’t really hold water. She “can’t step out on the Pussycats?” He’s not asking you too, sweety. If your band is already performing at the show, fine. Is there any reason you can’t do both? I wouldn’t put it passed Josie to try to put a stop to that, but Josie seemed cool with Archie after he helped them with that song, so where’s the issue here?  

Polly’s “group home” sounds less like a hospital for the mentally ill and more like a puritanical reformed school. Yeah, that seems like a place Alice Cooper would send her daughter to. 

Veronica ‘ex machina’ Lodge is a thing now. I was trying to come up with a nickname for her, so how nice of her to do the work for me. 

Thirty seconds into a Pussycats practice session and it seems that Josie is huge a control freak. Weird that Josie is the one credited as a regular cast member, yet Val is the one emerging as the more likable character and has had more screen time at this point too. 

Josie says Val can sing with Pussycats or Archie, but not both. Apparently, Archie helping the band with that song meant nothing to her. First Reggie and now Josie -- the short term memory loss seems to be spreading. I’m dangerously close to feeling bad for Archie here. 

The look on Josie’s face has me cheering Val for calling her bluff and walking out. 

Veronica stumbling upon her mom making out with Archie’s dad has me torn. On the one hand, it’s so awkward, I can’t look away. On the other, the kid in me who read the comics is fashioning a crude crucifix and waving it around in utter horror that likely mirrors Veronica’s. 

Archie is surprisingly cool with his dad potentially dating Hermione. Yeah, Archie is suddenly the well-adjusted one. How did that happen? 

Wait a minute. Val writes the Pussycats’ songs? Then maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to practically kick her out of the band, Josie! Dumbass. 

So Josie was stressing because her big shot musician dad is taking time out of his busy schedule to come visit and see the show, but if it sucks, her mom will get blamed for it? FFS, that’s ANOTHER kid with insane parents! I’m starting to think the luckiest ones on this show might be the kids being brought up by only one adult. Archie, Veronica and Kevin have no idea how fortunate they are. 

Josie certainly makes a lot more sense now that I’ve seen her with her mom. It’s crazy how so many of the problems the kids on this show have can be directly blamed on the people raising them. 

“What about dad?” Veronica asks her mom, as if her dad being in prison and causing his wife to become a social pariah didn’t likely cause the end of their marriage already. Ronnie didn’t really think they were going to work things out, did she? 

Archie is quick to swap Veronica out for Val as his singing partner, which is kind of a dick move. But then Veronica fires back by being a jerk about his dad and her mom kissing. Archie then stumbles onto the topic of his parents being separated and Hiram’s biggest romantic concern these days being to make sure he doesn’t drop the soap in the shower. So I guess the upshot of this scene is that they’re both being assholes and Val is the only nice one simply because she was the only person smart enough to keep her mouth shut. 

“Garden of Deliverance?” Yeah, that doesn’t conjure up any horror imagery at all. Are we adding religious thriller tropes to the mix now? 

At least Alice didn’t force an abortion on Polly, but sending your child to mental institution/religious-themed prison seems pretty damn cruel. Then again, having seen what lunatics Cheryl’s parents are, maybe Alice had the right idea by taking steps to make sure they don’t find out that Polly is carrying Jason’s progeny. At this point, I wouldn’t put it passed Mrs. Blossom to try to cut Junior out of Polly’s belly with a spork. 

I might believe that Jason only broke up with Polly because his parents forced him too, but the idilic future Polly said they had in store for them sounds downright psychotic. I knew people back in high school who became parents at this age and... let’s just say that it working out as perfectly as Polly describes is pretty freaking unlikely. 

Polly not being taken away until July 4th feels a bit awkward. I was under the impression that she’d been gone longer than that. But her being dragged into a van against her will isn’t exactly helping with the allusions to Polly basically being a prisoner here. 

In the blink of an eye, Polly turns the crazy up to eleven and it’s a little disturbing. Yeah, she definitely needs to be in a hospital, but I’m not entirely sure that’s what this place is. 

First Josie gets pissed at Val for singing (god forbid someone in a band try to do that) and now she’s pissed at Veronica for NOT signing? This girl has no idea what she wants. 

Veronica is upset that she hasn’t seen her dad in three months. Man, that really makes you think. So many of the parents on this show are out of their damn minds, but they still get to walk around free, so what exactly did Hiram do that was bad enough to land him in prison? Cannibalism? Murder/suicide cult? I’m guessing it was a wee bit more extreme than embezzlement or whatever the excuse they gave us in the pilot was. 

Archie and Val actually sound good together. See, Archie? This is what a healthy relationship with a female looks like. 

Alice was definitely being cruel by not telling Polly that Jason was dead, but considering how quickly Polly’s mental stability just shattered like stale potato chips, keeping her in the dark may have been the lesser of two evils. 

Fred, Hermione, Archie, Josie, Josie’s control freak mom and her arrogant asshole dad are all having dinner and the tension is thick enough to kill a horse. Should they just call for an ambulance now or wait for someone to draw blood first? 

Betty straight up asks her dad if he killed Jason. I’m surprised they’re playing that card this early, but I guess red herrings aren’t meant to last long. 

Oh shit! Don’t use the “C” word around Betty! Even at the best of times, she’s one bad day away from breaking out that Darth Betty wig and going to town on this whole cast with a meat cleaver. Why tempt fate? 

I wouldn’t put it passed Josie’s parents to not give Archie’s dad the contract simply out of spite for his son luring Val away from Josie’s band. That’s not the reason they give him, but that’s probably what it’s really about. At any rate, those two are world class pricks for coming to dinner with him and letting him go through that whole presentation just to tell him that the contract was already given to someone else. 

Hermione is trying to get Fred the contract, which is self-serving, but also a really nice thing to do considering the way Hiram wanted to go was undoubtedly a lot shadier, but Veronica refuses to put her signature on the thing because she doesn’t like her mom dating someone. This is one of those rare occasions in Riverdale when the parent is actually more likable than the kid. I get that Veronica is upset about this, but seeing as her dad has most likely spent the last several months behind bars being someone’s bitch, maybe she should give her mom a break.   

Archie tells Val she should perform with the Pussycats. I think he’s trying to do the right thing here, but doesn’t this mean that he just dicked with Veronica a second time since she just replaced Val in the Pussycats and Val coming back will make her a fifth wheel? 

“They’re parents. They’re all crazy.” On this show? Yeah. Truer words have never been spoken in Riverdale. 

JUGHEAD KISSES BETTY?!?! WTF IS GOING ON?!?! THE ONLY WAY THIS HAPPENS IS IF HE’S IMAGINING A HAMBURGER WHERE HER FACE SHOULD BE!! FUCK THIS!! THESE WRITERS KNOW NOTHING!! 

The Pussycats sing a cover of some disco song at the variety show. Wasn’t them not doing other people’s songs a big thing for them? I’m pretty sure there was a line in the pilot about that. 

Poor Veronica looks like she feels really out of place onstage with the Pussycats and I feel bad for her. Sure, she’s been a jerk at times in this episode, but she’s been jerked around by other people just as much. 

The Pussycats give a great performance which Josie’s musical snob dad leaves in the middle of. Because Josie’s dad is a jackass. 

Archie and Veronica apologizing to each other was sweet. Something I’m noticing with Grundy gone now is that, while Archie continues to screw up pretty regularly, his mistakes are becoming less severe and he’s getting quicker at trying to fix them. 

Archie has to follow the Pussycats on top of battling stage fright. They really threw this poor schmuck into the deep end head first, didn’t they? Did Reggie choose the order of these acts by any chance? 

Awww, Betty feels bad that she’s missing Archie’s song. This girl is so pure that she has me absolutely dreading her inevitable psychotic episode. Crazy does seem to run in her family after all. 

Archie does really well and gets a standing ovation. Because no matter how many times he screws up, I guess it wouldn’t be Riverdale if everyone in town wasn’t in love with this guy. But, hey, he had a personal problem that didn’t involve statutory rape and he overcame it. I call that progress. 

So what was that stuff with the wolf masks all about? 

How long is Veronica going to be passive aggressively giving her mom shit for this thing with Fred Andrews? I’d tell her to be realistic about the chances of her parents getting back together, but this is apparently some wacko, bizarro world, parallel universe where Jughead likes girls, so clearly the writers have checked realism at the door.  

Polly escaping the mental hospital (or whatever it is we’re calling that place) seriously plays like the beginning of a slasher flick. But she jumped out of a second or third story window, heavily pregnant. How far could she possibly have gotten?  

My newest theory is that Polly killed Jason and then convinced herself that it never happened because, you know, she's fucking nuts. 

#archie andrews #betty cooper #polly cooper #josie and the pussycats #1x06 #faster pussycats kill kill #riverdale

[baskny-blog]

Cringes, Creeps, and Chemicals; Bask's Definitive Guide To The Best and Worst Of Music Festivals.

Ahhhh the great American music festival. The time honored tradition that turns sorority girls into spiritualists, frat stars into sobbing psychedelic stoics in a gloriously repulsive sensory overload. 

Love them or hate them, one thing is for certain; almost no other social function combines the collective with the cringe-worthy quite like a music festival. Thankfully, we here at BASK NY are here to help you sort through the dopeness and detritus.

We have compiled a guide of all the characters, chemicals, creeps, and cause for alarm one can expect to encounter at each event, bringing you BASK NY’s definitive guide to the best and worst of the great american music festival.

The Worst:

Coachella

Coachella is literally a meme at this point in time. It is the original blueprint or all the irony and ire recently surrounding music festivals. Coachella is the epitome and full embodiment of what is generally askew, astray, or flat out terrible about music festivals, American society, and the larger sub-context of all of human existence as a whole. People go to Coachella to despise it, to gawk at the glaring whackness of cultural appropriation and pervasive rape culture, propagated by the most essentially pure manifestation of the “bro.” Normally cubically confined, these weekend warriors, frustrated with their recent transition from frat star to entry level associate throng throughout Coachella, reclaiming whatever remnants of their days hazing pledges and delivering unsatisfying sex to sorority sweethearts they can salvage

These mobs of testosterone chargers revelers, peaking off stomped on molly, its impure and untested effects inducing them into a kind of blissful frenzy, experiencing ecstasy, at the mercy of the exploits of a professional button pusher, writing like some sort of religious experience or write of passage for the Anglo Saxon, North American “Bro”

However, not everyone attending Coachella seems to bask in the mediocrity with the same fervor. Coachella has long been a hot bed for a pervasive rape culture and downright ignorance to flourish un-abounded. A short walk along the festival grounds will expose any wary observe to cultural appropriation on a pandemic scale: Sorority Girls don cornrows or native headdresses, while Caucasian frat stars named Chet don dashikis  in an utterly overwhelming display of cringe-worthy ignorance.  

To add the cherry on top, recent allegations against the festivals owners have confirmed that these endemic problems of ignorance and corporatized whackness extend not just to the type of festival goers Coachella attracts, but are intrinsic to the festivals larger organization. This is evident in recent allegations that festivals owners not only denied climate change, but actually consistently donated to LGBTQ hate groups. The active homophobia of the festivals organizers, coupled with their total lack of any action to correct problems of rape culture and cultural appropriation simply adds to more reasons to skip out on Coachella this year.

Bonnaroo

Bonnaroo is the older slightly more refined (but only marginally so) to Coachella, actually less of a sister and more of a liberal cousin, fresh home from college in Vermont or Washington state, with developed chemical preferences that place a good DMT trip well over a (parachute) of amphetamines passed off as molly any day of the week. However, the southern geography, and notoriously underwhelming town of Lexington Tennessee lends Bonnaroo the dual feel of half Woodstock half hedonist southern hoedown from hell.

However, not all is amiss as this Tennessee festival. Festival goers who attended both Bonnaroo and Coachella reported that the festival was certainly a shit show in certain senses, however it was a decidedly less cringe-worthy one than Coachella. People who have attended Bonnaroo praise not only its organization, pervasive presence of doctors and medics (to provide care to any overdosing college freshman), as well as a substantially less rapey vibe, with less lurking intoxicated bros. Other Bonnaroo goers have praised the relative lack of body shaming, with people receiving compliments for what they were wearing regardless of their figure in a way that was genuinely positive and reassuring rather than creepy.

Electric Forest

This woodland located, dystopically cheesy of a wonderland so frankly and undeniably whack Lewis Carroll undoubtedly rolls in his grave for two weeks every august. For many of Electric Forrest's Kandy crusted attendees, the entire experience for certain attendees is merely a repressed memory, like middle school make out stories, or that one time in bandcamp.

At current press time, during the writing of these words, the author was shocked that electric forest had not been discretely yet lovingly discarded like many in the treasure trove of cringeworthy occurrences encapsulating the exceedingly strange fog defining the years from 2002-2011 during which the PLUR lifestyle and the modern festival asshole as we know it emerged.

Ultra

Ultra music festival seems to be the unstable cousin of Coachella. The festival itself plays out a lot like a coke fueled weekend in Miami: everything seems so sleek and sophisticated, the connections made with total strangers so substantial and pure only to wake up hungover with the sinking realization it was all a powdered fueled extravaganza  of smoke and mirrors.

Why Now? A Corporate Autopsy

In order to understand why mainstream music festival culture has gotten so whack is important to trace the historical timeline evolution of Music Festivals in order to get a clearer picture of how we got here. There have been several different waves of music festival culture (since Woodstock) and each have been different, defined by genre, location, type of attendee etc. However one defining trait seemed to united early festival culture; in that it was an attempt to get away  from the establishment.

Music Festival culture arose as an attempt by people on both musical and  cultural fringes of society to express themselves and enjoy art in freedom in freedom and peace. In this sense, music festivals in their purest form arose as a push-back against  constrictive, authoritative, repressive and puritanical laws and influence of racism, bigotry, and persecution both at the hands of society and the state.

So where did things go wrong? At what point did these organic outbursts of hedonistic freedom on the fringes of society, largely condemned and vilified by the larger public, become corporate events. Ironically, festival culture today deliberately targets advertising away from the fringes and instead towards the moderate, the mediocre, the sanitized, the mainstream, the ignorant, appealing to the very children and demographic of the people who vilified the original idea of music festivals in the first place.

The whackness, cultural appropriation and that music festival once stood in staunch opposition to have now become the propagated and quintessential culture of the music festival itself is in many ways a metaphor for the larger tendency within American society itself. Americans have since the country’s founding, fervently vilified and ostracized new cultures and ways of life as alien or dangerous. This ostracization and institutionalized oppression continues until  American society discovers that they actually enjoy the very cultural/ social/ artistic practice or activity they were repressing, claiming whatever pre-existing culture for their own, ruining and manipulating it from its original form.

Thankfully, as with music in general, the absorption of festival culture by the corporate and mainstream has not in any way resulted in the death of the free spirit of an independent music festivals, the underground has and always be teeming with talented artists and individuals.

In this sense, no matter how much of a skin-crawling nightmare festivals such as Coachella embody, the mainstreaming of fringe festival culture does necessarily signify the apocalyptic death of the genuine expression of art and freedom that initially defined the festival movement. Indeed, as with almost all art forms, the underground will always thrive, dope music festivals are indeed certainly still out there one merely has to look harder. To save you the trouble, us here at BASK have taken the time to find the events with big names, cheap prices, as well as a huge selection of indie artists, just minus the cultural appropriation, cringe, creeps, or chemicals.

The Best:

Project Pabst

Portland, Oregon -- August 27-28th

This late summer festival, encompassing the majority of downtown Portland keeps the underground fringe spirit of the Music Festival alive with a robust indie line up of refreshingly talented, yet alarmingly unknown and underrated artists, combining this underground element with name such as Iggy Pop, Die Antwoord, Beck, and Nas. If you are looking for a wildly crunchy event blending all the best of a diverse multitude of underground scenes, Project Pabst may be the perfect destination to avoid the depraved moral bankruptcy of the other larger and shittier festivals.

Pitchfork Festival 2017

Chicago, Illinois -- July 14th -16th

This is more of the large scale and well known out of the more indie festivals, however Pitchfork manages to strike the delicate balance of being professional without being overly corporate. The line up frequently attracts big names and this year the likes of LCD Soundsystem, A tribe called quest, Solange, Nicolas Jaar, Isaiah Rashad, Joey Purp, and Madlib gracing the stage, fans can still get a big name large festival feel, but with a lineup that is more substantially organically indie and a pervading vibe that is substantially less corporate than functions like Coachella.

Free Press Summer Fest

Houston, Texas

The perfect way to get lit in the Great State of Texas, and avoid the madness driven over hyped Caravan-esque shitstorm that is SXSW. Avoid the madness of 6th St in Austin by pulling up to this Midsummer get down set in Houston's Greater Buffalo Park, on the outskirts of the city, overlooking the skyline. Set in a grass amphitheater this festival features a mind boggling variety of quality indie artist throughout a multitude of different Genres, however the line up is peppered with star studded names such as Solange, Cage the Elephant, The Shins, Lorde, Flume, Big Krit, Group Love among others.

Free Press Summer Press is more low key than SXSW in the best way possible; less chaotically hyper saturated rap convention than its Austin Counterpart, without sacrificing either the star studded features, nor the personalized feel of an exquisite showcasing of underground artists, and it is a very rare event to have so much underground talent convened in one place.

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