The thought (fact?) that the image, smell & feel of white chalk dust , as both a reality and allegory, will cease to impart the emotions of youthful pursuit due the increasingly diminished use of chalkboards in school anymore (replaced by the stimulating future of dry-erase and, progressively more, digital ‘smartboards’) is both crushing and, strangely enough, pleasantly dissociating. Remember when that was a classroom chore, worthy of a particular colored star on the name chart, the banging out of erasers, and that strange smell; shit, some teachers who were especially consumed with passion and a need to scribble would wind up coated in that pallid powder by the end of the period, as if they were a pastry chef tasked to cover the Octomom’s birthday party, on short notice. This song is, in turns, terrifying, spellbinding, distanced, and even threatening---and to be honest, I have always been largely put-off by Polly Jean Harvey’s tunes; I’ve always dug her DIY ethos, but the music has mostly left me cold, that is until this opus of melancholia kicked my ass, “…white chalk hills are all I've known, white chalk hills will rot my bones, white chalk sticking to my shoes, white chalk playing as a child with you…” So many of us seek endlessly to overcome & compensate for the dead-end towns we began our lives in, perpetually assured that, indeed, they are vortexes that will sap our souls of the motivation to move ahead---and yet, whenever I go home, there is such solace to be found in those chalk hills…
