photo/Anders Nielsen

Flushing a psychic toilet
An op-ed by Gregory Souza

The cover story of your August issue [“That’s Our Dump!”] features photos of the door to my practice room at Prime Artist Studios on Thompson’s Point. The use of those photos and the end of the article, where Anders Nielsen writes, “by the fall of 2013, the biggest dump in Portland may be the biggest attraction in town,” were telling.

Clearly, the trashed and chaotic fringe space that is Prime, from the perspective of the author, is a wasteland to be done away with. Forget all the bands that practice there — they’ll “find other rooms to get loud.” It’s going to be harder than that, but that’s not the central issue. The message is: development is superior, disorder is to be cleansed. Every place should eventually be exploited to look like the fucking Maine Mall.

Can there really be no place for freaks to just exist? No place that can just be a wreck, to host chaos and disorder and people disenfranchised by the bullshit of society in general and the pathetic, mewling “arts” scene of Portland in particular? Because these people are present, and that misery is real, and that chaos has to be taken out somewhere, but the sociopathic perspective persists — stamp out every emergence of dirt and grime.

I know that Portlanders like to consider themselves progressive, living in a “cool” city, etc., but the fact remains that there are no galleries of any integrity in this city — galleries showing work that would at least force uncomfortable questions. Nobody is saying anything real about the world, only showcasing pedantic speculation and trendy entertainment.

Serious work most often comes from the fertile ground of ruined, marginal spaces, where artists are free from any pressure to be productive or have anything look appealing or be safe for neighbors. Prime Studios is such a space.

To me, Portland’s music scene — with very few exceptions — is weak, insular and unoriginal. I hold to that opinion even though I make music and I am trying here and still believe that this place has lots of awesome potential. Ninety-five percent of bands in Portland are either regurgitating someone else’s original idea, playing “local hero” for kicks, or writing escapist backdrops for depressed drunk people to help them forget life, when instead they should be learning how to take over life and make it what they want.

The trashy, unwanted space that is that corner of Thompson’s Point has been home to many fruitful chance encounters with musicians for me. It has been a space where my ideas can breathe and get tried out freely, where I’ve met other dissatisfied people and formed bands with them.

The space is gross. It’s dirty and trash has usually littered the parking lot. Kids from a local band left their trashed touring van abandoned there for several years until it became a bum toilet. We had it towed away when I most recently started renting at Prime again this spring. We picked up a lot of the trash and cleared the brush and stumps that Portland Trails had dumped on the property (without permission, as far as I know, but whatever). The place has been an edge space that no one gave a shit about, but free for those who chose to go there to vent whatever energy they couldn’t elsewhere. My friends and I helped to “improve” the property in our own way, make it more awesome to hang out for ourselves, a shrine to all that is ignored and feared.

So yeah, maybe Anders’ impression of the appearance was correct, but there was no thought given to what else that meant or why it had become that way. It doesn’t matter if it is picked up and tidy or not. That is window dressing to the real content, and though I know that America as a society has chosen to exclusively base its soul in a worship of window dressing, know this: It is necessary for every community to have such a space. It’s a psychic toilet.

What’s not valuable to me is another cookie-cutter parking lot with rotting, soulless buildings sucking up power and being used only half the day, forcing property into one, and only one, possible form: development for the profit of already rich people.

Portland is the end of the line. What bands will tour up here, and on the way to where? And if they do come, how will that help foster a “scene” around here? People drive up, park, see the distractions and then drive home. A big concert hall controlled by some giant development conglom, located off-peninsula and run in an impersonal manner is not going to bring fresh air into our creative community. It’ll just siphon money to more “real” (MTV-approved) bands from away.

And above and beyond all this, why is Maine so into groveling for tourists’ money? Tourism is fucking heroin. This development is another vein to get that shit in, not the start of a cure for anything.

A few pathetic jobs is nothing. And I’m not talking down: I have survived on pathetic, tourist-appeasing jobs for seven years. I am not “better than” people who earn a living this way. I am them. But every day I was painfully aware of how I was not improving myself, not learning to stand on my own two feet, and how much it sucked to wake up with scuffed-up knees and a sore jaw from dicks I don’t even enjoy sucking. Once going out to get drunk every night, surrounded by sad people who want to forget, became stale and old, I started to make changes.

So I did learn to stand up and now I feel better and think the rest of Maine should as well. Tourism is fickle, like fashion. It doesn’t help Maine’s economy in the long term. Entertainment revenue is subject to the whim of individuals. Moreover, it doesn’t put our state or our people in charge of anything. It’s just crawling around looking for a handout, with costumes on.

If Thompson’s Point were being developed into a manufacturing facility, I’d be stoked. But nothing gets made. Development that gets us further into a dead-end economic structure is the advancement of the problem.

The way we evaluate spaces in the city is subjective and needs checking and examining by opposing opinions. What’s good for money can be bad for everyone. Cleaning up can often mean destroying something priceless and irreplaceable. (I will never let this city live down tearing out Union Station in exchange for a strip mall. FAIL.)

“One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is a platitude, but it needs to be said. And really, if you think that a windy, dead-end development with crappy, neo-modern, mishmash buildings near nothing and mostly empty is going to be a new, hip cultural center for Portland, you’re fucked. Not that I think such a place is even worth fuck-all, because what that translates to out of white-people-speak is shitty rows of snotty coffee shops and hipster bullshit fashion emporiums — nothing creative or constructive at all.

Gregory Souza’s latest musical project is a band called Feral. He splits his time between Portland and Turner.