This section of my updated report on Kingston veers away from discussion about the brave new zeitgeist imprinting itself upon this old city, in order to focus on the infrastructure of what lies beneath. The past has not disappeared; it’s still hiding in plain sight, waiting patiently to be tripped on and stumbled over.

As an incubator of pointless anger, Kingston is ground zero in the Mid-Hudson. It has been a crucible of dark feelings since the dawn of recorded time. That a fat loser not long ago chose the local mall to act out his frustrations with a semi-automatic rifle is not an anomaly. It’s more like the tip of the iceberg.

Indeed a lot of the music, as well as the art and writing coming out of Kingston, seems to feature this same high degree of unexplained anger and frustration. While anger is a common response to growing up and seeing for the first time what a manure pile your parents have left you, there’s more to it than that, especially in Kingston. The anger emanating from here is more than just personal. It’s not just a reaction to the vapidity of general existence in late 20th and early 21st-century America. There’s a historical aspect to it. It’s ancient — and nasty. Like a curse.

For almost 500 years, Kingston and environs has slowly deteriorated at the hands of the European mercantile class that still runs things today. Their swords, musket balls, fires and bacteria wiped out the Esopus Indians, and their great-great-great-grandchildren remain in place as the landlords, judges, lawyers and bureaucrats who decide who gets a building permit. They still lord it over the lower classes, giving all the crap jobs to undocumented Latinos glad to work five to a Social Security number.

In Midtown, beat-down descendants of the slaves from Africa who worked the fields and lugged the stones that built all these marvelous, historic Ulster houses hang on by a thread, as they do everywhere else in America, and the southern European and Mediterranean classes, while eventually managing to “pass” as WASPs and wrestle some of the local power away from them, still occasionally squabble over the right to fix their toilets or haul away their filthy garbage. It’s not hard to imagine at least one dying, pissed-off Esopus tribesperson laying a curse on the Dutch and English usurpers of this once beautiful land, judging from what has happened since.

Because Kingston surely seems cursed. Just underneath the thin hipster veneer, it’s a true post-industrial wasteland, largely populated by the progeny of underemployed factory workers left over after it was stripped of its original white-man’s purpose as an iron-smelting, brick-making, dirt-mining backwater. When these industries died and left the town a rusting hulk, IBM came in and finished the job, making sure to dump millions of tons of toxic chemicals into the streams and aquifers before the company bolted and left half the population without a job. Check out the cancer death rates in Kingston and Lake Katrine, out by the mall. They’re the highest in the state, and it’s not a secret why.

This cursed, toxic evilness affects the art coming out of Kingston, whether the artists know it or not. In the pre-Covid environment it was only natural that punk remained alive and well, even as its anger faded elsewhere. CBGB might have been just a fond memory in NYC, but not long ago two hard-drinking, dissipated yet highly intelligent Kingston punks thrashed about onstage at The Anchor, turning their obsessive fear of the supervolcano lurking beneath Yellowstone National Park into screaming, distorted art. Down the street a grimacing singer was growling “Murder murder, death and murder,” as dancers hurled themselves into each other. Another band’s lead singer tried to mitigate his natural nice-guy lyrical tendencies by throwing furniture at the crowd. People were getting drunk, acting badly, letting their anger fly, starting fights over nothing.

Even now, the post-Covid art is percolating angrily. The trailer for a new Kingston-based podcast, aptly titled “That’s F**king Awesome!” features a crazed carnival barker announcer’s intro to a video review of the best pizza places in town: “Broadway Pizza is located in at least A DOZEN sites where unsolved shootings have occurred in the last year!” The producer is rarity: a relatively young Gen-Y artist/hipster who happens to be a lifelong Kingston native.

Kingston has always had a nasty reputation. My good friend Spike, a Kingston native who was a roommate in a dingy party apartment when I lived in Albany, was perhaps the angriest young man I ever met. He was a short, seething fireplug of a kid who carried a German luger, and wasn’t afraid to use it if his fists failed him, which was never. On a bet, he once beat the tar out of a black-belt kickboxer in the ring, using only his hands and his vicious, pit-bull nature. He personified Kingston, and told me many of the urban Kingston legends that defined the place for me. Now that I have lived there, I can see he wasn’t lying.

Kingston will remain angry, even as the carpetbaggers, tech geeks and now ultra-rich Covid refugees move in and take over what’s left of the slums, trying to gentrify the place. No amount of pastel paint and fancy brick sidewalks will change that. The city still has freight trains running through it carrying garbage, toxic chemicals, plutonium bars and God knows what else that’s emanating and leaking into the brains of the poor saps who live along the tracks. Brain-rotting drugs are still being concocted in local coke and meth labs. Countless thousands of rusting 55-gallon drums leaching perchlorethylene and trichloroethane into the water table are still buried under every school, shopping plaza and sports complex. Even if all this poison doesn’t give us cancer, which it eventually will, it’s giving us headaches and making us as angry as treed wolverines.

But again, all of this is why I appreciate Kingston, and would have never moved away had there been a real choice in the matter. I like its stubborn post-apocalyptic vibe, and that it will never be tamed. Then there’s the entertainment factor, as half the people you see walking down the street are waxing fantastical in ways I have never seen anywhere outside of an old Star Trek episode. Or, come to think of it, New York City.

I like the edgy feeling of walking into a bar not knowing if some jockomo is going to blow his top and start punching people. And I like Kingston’s pointlessly pissed-off arts and music scene, and how people have a way of expressing themselves by yelling at the top of their lungs. Again, not unlike the New York I left 20 years ago and still carry a torch for.

When this pandemic runs out of gas and slides into history, which it will, Kingston will still be Kingston. And chances are good that, much like the big, brawling hardcase of a city you thought you had left behind, Kingston will conspire to wear you the f--k down, too. Which makes sense, really. Like the tough guy sang about the Big Apple, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

Welcome aboard!