Wildcat

 

Last night I was watching Wildcat, an Ethan Hawke directed movie about Southern Gothic writer and Georgia native Flannery O'Connor, and I realized I knew exactly where it was filmed. In this scene above the actor playing Flannery is walking through my old neighborhood in Old Louisville. It is the exact same spot from Shadow's Gravity where Everett and I walk after the bakery to the fountain. I was glad to see that the movie was filmed in Louisville as it is not a place often used in films unlike Georgia or California.

Anyway, it was a good movie. I was completely unaware that Ethan had lived in Atlanta with his mother as a young boy for a short time. He is apparently a big fan of Flannery O'Connor.

 

My favorite quote from Flannery might be, "The truth does not change according to your ability to stomach it."

Shadow's Gravity

 

Me during the various periods of the Aviary Hill series from 1979 to 2005.

This week was the release of my latest novel, Shadow's Gravity. It is the last book of the Aviary Hill series. The series is written about my family and my life between the years 1979 to 2005. 

The series began with Dweller On The Boundary in 2020 and ends this week with Shadow's Gravity. It has been forty years coming since a conversation with my father over pizza in December 1984. There have been many secrets, tragedies and a few triumphs in this story. Hopefully there has been some humor along the way and readers have met some interesting characters, from Uncle Ridley to Robin, David The Bishop, English Stan, Dylan, Everett, Piper, a boy from New Hope and the rest. I will miss writing about most of my characters, but I still have some of them in real life. 

Shadow's Gravity is the most complex, mature and most lengthy novel of the series as it takes place when I was twenty-two to thirty-two years old. It is set in the past, but readers should find that it remains relevant to today with some of the topics contained in it. 

I began writing this series in 2018. The release of Shadow's Gravity brings to an end a writing process that spanned the last six years with origination for the idea dating back to a conversation with my father over pizza in December 1984. This book brings to an end a forty year project. There is no plan or desire by me to write further in this series. I am free to move on to writing something else after four decades and what comes next will hopefully not take as long to complete.

There is plenty of material and stories that were edited out of the series, but with anything, it is impossible to tell everything. What was published in four books was the distillation of those years. It is unlikely that any of the stories cut during the writing process will see the light of day, though I believe some of them are some of the best writing I have done. Perhaps they will serve as inspiration for what I write next.

Shadow's Gravity is in part dedicated to the readers who took a chance and allowed me to tell them a story. I am grateful to them for their time and interest.  Thank you for reading.

Steve Albini Dies

Steve Albini in the documentary Breadcrumb Trail.

 

Sometimes it feels like the 90s were yesterday, but then someone who had a major influence on that decade dies and I am reminded that the 1990s were a long time ago.

 

It was surprising to learn of Chicago based producer/engineer Steve Albini's death last week at age sixty-one. 

 

I most associate him with his work with Nirvana on In Utero and Fugazi. He was also known for his odd engineering choices made on Slint's Tweez album. Slint is probably the most well known rock band to have come from Louisville. Spiderland produced by Brian Paulson was considered their best album.

 

What I admired most about Albini was the indie ethos that he stayed true to in his work. He achieved much success in the 90s and it would have been easy for him become a sellout. 

 

Culturally the country is in a very different and worse place decades later with no Nirvanas and Albinis around.

Update On My Next Novel

 

That is me in October 2001 at a special place I have written about a few times, Patton's Run on the Nantahala River in North Carolina.

As of this morning's edit, it appears this novel should be finished and out by late June barring any major life interruptions or unforeseen developments. The word count currently sits at 112,000 words which would be by far my longest book. The cuts have already been deep and I want to bring this book in at around 100,000 to 105,000 words max.

This is the end, spanning from 1995 to 2005. It contains all of the answers that I can ever provide about everything I have written about my family and life. I hope readers find it engaging, fun, mysterious, surprising, not too depressing and different. I have been open how I struggled with a period of serious depression to write this. There are some seriously ugly, shocking and sad moments in it, but humor finds its way through. The last chapter, Silent Bridges, fits this lifelong project.

Farewell to Robin, Oliver, Elliot, all of the characters from all of the books, the past and may they rest in my new written time capsule. This book is for Everett, Louisville, Paulding County, Baby X and all of the other hidden children.

Thank you for reading.

 

Spring Roses and Bob Edwards

 

It has been such a wonderful spring for the roses this year at home. The blooms have been abundant and with the rain last Sunday the weight almost broke some bushes.
 

This orange one growing at one end of the back yard has been spectacular.

 

The New Dawn that we grew at my childhood home and I grow now has its first bloom of the season. It should be covered in the coming weeks.

The tall Louisville, Kentucky boy, Bob Edwards, with President Jimmy Carter.

I did not learn until yesterday that former NPR Morning Edition host Bob Edwards died in February. Bob was the original host of Morning Edition since its inception in 1979. He was a hero of mine in radio with his wonderful voice and style. I was a regular listener to his show in the 1990s and early 2000s. He was also a Louisville native and there was that special connection since I lived and worked in radio there too. Bob is mentioned in my next novel, Shadow's Gravity.

I no longer listen to NPR, haven't for several years, as the hosts are insufferable and the programming is insulting. The Atlanta affiliate WABE has completely lost me too with its narrow viewpoint and activist journalism that I can't relate.

Louisville which has three public radio stations under the Louisville Public Media umbrella, including one that is still dedicated to classical music (rare these days), is a better option.

Although Bob Edwards had the rare longevity of hosting the same radio program for twenty-five years, it was a shame that he was pushed out in 2004 and what NPR became.

At My Most Fragile

 

It is late winter, the middle of February, but here in Georgia that means early Spring. We come by our global warming here naturally. The trees are budding and I sit here in my Keith Haring tee shirt, needing a haircut and wearing a fuzzy cardigan still living like it is 1994. Blueberry yogurt is digesting in my stomach and the morning sun is out. The birds, no Robins, are singing what sounds like Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Needless to say, I'm feeling stupid and contagious.

Without further fanfare here is the promotional mock interview for my next novel due this summer.

 

---

 

At times I didn't think I could write this book.

 

Let's talk about secrets.

Okay. You first. (laughs)

You have written extensively about family and personal secrets. Some of them have been quite tragic including sexual abuse, rape and suicide. Some of these secrets are related to growing up gay in a small town and others were more common to American families from the 70s and 80s such as infidelity, domestic violence and divorce. Having revealed all of this, how do you feel about it and what's left to tell?

I said something a month ago, it was that I found writing to be an emotionally abusive occupation. I had to go back during the writing process and relive all of it to some degree by reading my old journals, watching videos, looking at photos and talking with people that knew me then. I've cried over some of it, I've been angry about other parts and Shadow's Gravity put me into a serious depression last year. At times I didn't think I could write this book, but then it clicked for me and out it came every morning.
It comes with a price besides my mental health and there are some people who look at me or think of me differently after knowing, but I can't be worried about it. I wanted the truth to be known.

And it's not like domestic abuse, infidelity and some of these topics were exclusive to the American family only when I was growing up. Humans are still humans and there remains no cure for those problems within families, nor are these problems strictly American.

If growing up gay today is easier, I can't say. It might be a different time and on some level easier, but being different will always be a challenge. It might be new times, but with that possibly comes a new set of problems. If anything, it may be more confusing and embarrassing for children with some of the attention placed on it in school these days. I know that if I was a fourth grader and the teacher was discussing gay life in class I would have turned bright red and tried to crawl into a crack in the floor. I don't know if that perspective is taken into consideration. I knew what I was, but I didn't want others to know because I was taught what I am was shameful by society. Children today may be different though and if the shame associated with it can be minimized then that's a good development. It might save lives. It's difficult to find trustworthy current statistics on suicide rates because of how the numbers are clustered together under the umbrella of LGBT.

There are plenty of secrets left. I've never teased some of what is in this book. Also, I've never told all of the abusive stories that happened in New Hope at home or at school. There is one story in this novel which is about a complete emotional breakdown of mine in my teens. I finally came clean with it in therapy in the 2000s. I also come clean with readers that have followed my books about what I felt for someone that I wasn't completely forthright about before.

 

When does Shadow's Gravity take place?

Originally it was planned to span nine years. It ended up covering 1995 to 2005. I was a busy person, much happened and it made for a more complete circle from 1979 to end in 2005. This book sprawls and covers lots of territory in terms of themes, people and locations. During this time, there were also crucial events that still define our world today such as the widespread adoption of the internet and cell phones, Y2K, September 11 and the heinous murder of Matthew Shepard. This novel is my most ambitious. I'm excited about it and I feel the same about it as I did when I was writing Dweller On The Boundary.

There was another unplanned change. When I was writing this novel something happened in real life to one of the people behind one of the main characters of all my books. This development resulted in a drastic change in the course of the book.

I deeply loved him and considered him my twin brother.

What happened and to whom?

I can't say what exactly happened, but it was David The Bishop. I was shocked at what occurred involving him and it made me want to go back and delve further into that relationship in an attempt to find clues and offer an explanation. I haven't had any contact with him since the 1990s, but I was hurt by what recently happened with him. It made my head spin because I thought so highly of him, I deeply loved him and considered him my twin brother. It tainted my memories of us. As with any of my relationships, I've never spilled everything, just what I viewed as the most important aspects. I had to go back and examine that relationship and I did write more about it. My heart breaks for him that it came to this.

 

Paulding County has been the epicenter of your books, how much Paulding County is in this book?

The story picks up with life at the factory in Atlanta when I worked at Turner Broadcasting. It surprised me when writing this book, how much Paulding County is in it. I look back on life in that period and I don’t automatically think about Paulding County, but I realized it was still an important part of my life and I was often there. I lived there twice. Even when I was living elsewhere it seemed like there was a chain tied around my feet connected to the bumper of a van with one of those murals painted on the side that was popular when I was a kid and it was dragging me back out there for events. Years after I had graduated I was at Paulding County High School three times, talk about being surrounded by ghosts. My mindset then was, one day I will say goodbye to Paulding County once and for all, but it seemed impossible. I suppose I'll never say goodbye to it now.

 

What's your relationship with Paulding County these days?

I was there this past January, but I don't have a relationship with it besides the cemeteries. I don't live that close to it anymore, about an hour and a half away and with traffic it's a miserable drive. I pass through there a couple of times a year and it's less recognizable each time. I'm proud to be born and raised there, but we aren't compatible. If I haven't made that case yet then I hope it is obvious in Shadow's Gravity after I disclose what happened at my last house there in 2002. In the last few years, writing these books I have walked down Main Street in Dallas, the cemetery in New Hope, the Silver Comet Trail a couple of times and have been a few other places. I feel like maybe I've conquered the past, but then being there still makes me a little jittery. Also, I doubt I'll ever be asked to come out and speak at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon or at the main branch of the library where I met David The Bishop at a chess tournament. My experiences there are probably not something they would want to promote.

 

My belief is that if you wanted me to say something nice about you then you should've treated me better when you had the chance.

 

Are you saying you've presented Paulding County in a negative light?

Not entirely and I haven't been unfair to it by any stretch. My belief is that if you wanted me to say something nice about you then you should've treated me better when you had the chance. I loved growing up there, but I have to be honest. The Paulding County educational system was great to me at the time with some failings, but the community as a whole wasn't too kind. It was a pretty place though. As an adult, I don't have much in common with it and that's a sign that one, or in this case, both have changed.

 

Does Decatur County, Tennessee figure into this book?

Yes, I was there frequently in the 2000s. I don't even know if my family knew how often I was there then. My mother didn't know. It was the beginning of something new with my father. There may never have been any of the books in this series without those times in Decatur County. My relationship with my father may not have been as cut and dried as readers may suspect. We were close for fourteen years, with twice weekly phone conversations, regular visits and we traveled together.

 

You mentioned ghosts earlier, are there ghost stories in this book?
Yes, there are three ghost stories and another type of supernatural experience in this novel. The one ghost that my character experienced terrified me in real life. You can think what you want about ghosts, but I believe they are a genuine phenomenon. Whatever they are I cannot say, maybe they are a form of hallucination or maybe they are something that is not a creation of our mind. I'm open to either possibility. Most people will not believe in them, but unless you've experienced it then I suggest keeping an open mind about them. I've experienced way too many shocks in my life, but the experience I had in this book was the most shocking experience I've ever had and I have no explanation for it.

 

Who is your favorite character in this book?

Everett. I loved getting to finally write about this wonderful person that was locked away in my past. He was a transplant like me to Louisville, but had lived there longer and had a family connection to the city. He was a significant part of my Louisville life. He came from New York, was private schooled and was very much from a WASPY background. He was a polished person in areas that I was more rough around the edges. He was someone that I would have considered unattainable, he was extremely beautiful, sophisticated and intelligent. He was the kind of person that I did not think I would ever know or become involved. He came into my life in an unusual way and I'll leave it at that.

 

What made Louisville so special for you that you mention it on a frequent basis?

It was a city that gave me everything I ever dreamed and experiences I didn't know that I wanted. No place has ever embraced me the way that city did in the nineties. It was beautiful, historic, interesting, charming at every step and it had zero connection to my past. It was everything Atlanta was not for me, a chance to live a fresh new life. It was also fun trying to figure out what the mystery odor was that wafted around the city on certain mornings.

 

It feels like I'm losing them all over again and that hurts.

 

Since this is the end of the series, readers will expect resolution to the storylines that have been featured in your books. Is that going to happen?

Yes. It will not be neat and tidy though and requires an epilogue which is something I've not included before. I will resolve everything from my grandmother, to the search for Oliver, coming out to family, my relationship with Dylan, David The Bishop, Elliot, other people and places too like Aviary Hill.

Now this is coming to end, I am both happy and sad that this is the last book in the Aviary Hill series. I am happy to finally finish what I set out to do since I was a child and can move on to new writing territory. I am sad because I fell in love with some of these characters and I am unhappy about letting them go. I've spent years with them and trying my best to convey how meaningful to me these people were. It feels like I'm losing them all over again and that hurts.

No mention of Robin.

I'll be honest and say that there hasn't been a resolution with him, I don't believe it will ever be possible and that's for the best. He's not a major character in this novel as I never communicated with him during this period, though his presence and influences are heavily there as there was no way to deny the lasting impacts he had on me. Readers might think the sound of the crickets story and its effect on me in Uncivil X was fiction, but that was one example of the very real influence he had on me. He was a major figure in my young life and you don't ever shake someone like that.

 

Any plans to write another book about your family or your life?

No. I feel like I'm still living in the period that follows Shadow's Gravity and I want to keep my privacy. I might find some inspiration from parts of it, but I would not wish to do more than that. My day to day life isn't all that interesting anyway. Writing, hiking, gardening, photography, travel, work around the house and loafing in antique shops or wherever is what my life is these days. People on my Facebook can tell you that it's terribly lame like watching old music videos on YouTube or bad photos of stuff I see alongside the road or where I walk. I collect postcards and maybe I should start sharing that hobby on Facebook. I'm not all that interested in social media. I'm still a shy person no matter how much I have written about the past parts of my life. I won't say never, I learned that lesson a long time ago, but it is very, very, unlikely that I would ever do it. I still maintain a journal, but that's for my eyes only.

All that remains of the past that I want to publish is my poetry book from the 1990s and much of that is subject matter about family and growing up. I'd like to do that this year, but I don't know if it's the right time. It's me at my most fragile. 

 

A Chris Jr. running around out there? Hmm.

 

You shared a few details about the possibility of you having a child. Do you?

A Chris Jr. running around out there? Hmm. Well, it would spoil a few things to answer that here. I answer that in Shadow's Gravity and the circumstances about that very possibility. I'm a good secret keeper, I've proven that. I'm not one to share everything about my current life on social media and I have serious concerns about the detrimental effects of what social media does to children's mental health.

 

What's one weird story in this novel?

There would have to be several or it wouldn't be my life, but I'll mention hanging out late one night at Charlie Dick's house in Nashville. Okay maybe two, how I was dragged onto the film set of Remember The Titans, which I've still not seen. I did leave out the story of  my being at 99X and how it involved a thrift store album of my favorite, Barry Manilow.

 

There are a lot of music references in your books, from names of songs that were pivotal to the stories or playing in the background of scenes. It's obvious music is important to you, so what are some of the bands or songs mentioned in this book?

 

There are several music references in this book, but hopefully fewer as I was aware of it and trying to get away from that, but since I was in radio for much of this book it was kind of unavoidable. Also, it's kind of an interactive experience for a reader. I enjoy exposing people to music that they may not have heard and may enjoy if they look it up when they read a book of mine. Did people go listen to Robbie Dupree's Steal Away after reading about it in Dweller On The Boundary? I don't know, but they should. It was one of those songs bouncing around in my little brain in the evenings when I was out running around with Robin in the twilight. Or maybe readers my age were reminded just how great the Cure's Lullaby was by having it playing while Tavin and I fumbled around in my car in a church parking lot. People could go study the lyrics to songs by The Police and see the similarities to my life.
As for Shadow's Gravity, Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark album is part of a scene with Everett in Louisville. Her songs Free Man in Paris, People's Parties and The Same Situation from that time with him capture the mood. Another band mentioned would be Pansy Division, a San Francisco gay punk band, who I got into in the mid 90s when I was going through this period of finally being comfortable in my skin for the first time ever. By the way, the guy on the album cover is from Georgia and was the last lover of William S. Burroughs and was involved with Allen Ginsberg too.

 

What is one random object like a toy that you still have from your childhood?

This toy gun. It shot those red paper caps. I used to play with it with Robin. I may have mentioned it in Dweller On The Boundary. I lost it for a time, but as a teenager I found it sticking out of the mud one day walking around the front yard.

What is something random from your childhood that you have not written about?

I loved train sets. My first train set was the Golden Eagle. There was always something with birds, wasn't there? I had a few train sets and would buy extra cars and buildings for my town at the Kessler's at Cobb Center. That store had one of the best toy departments except for the Lionel Playworld on Windy Hill Road.

 

Since I can't ever say who he was or share a photo, that is the closest I can come.

Any final secrets you care to share?

Okay, why not? When Robin left me a music video came out that June and it was like this gift to me. It was Bonnie Tyler's mega hit, Total Eclipse of the Heart, and one of the best videos ever made at the height of the MTV era. The video is set at a boy's school. One of the boys looked to my ten year old eyes like Robin. I fantasized that it was him in the video and I never moved when it came on television. I was pitifully heartbroken. He appears at the very end of the video and runs up to the group of boys already assembled. Since I can't ever say who he was or share a photo, that is the closest I can come to ever sharing what he looked like. I loved that video and took comfort in it. You can cross your heart on that. This video was also released near the time my gifted teacher wanted to send me away to private school and it shaped my idea of what it would've been like. It might be the most homoerotic video ever made too.

What is next after all of this?

I have piles of research on a Georgia murder from the 1970s that I may use for a book. I recently went by one of the locations for it and some time ago I hiked out to where the bodies were dumped. It was a spooky place. I have other ideas in various stages of development too. I am tempted to write something that is pure fiction and stretch myself. Part of me wants to write a book with 80s Atlanta punks as the main characters. People probably don't realize that there were punk clubs like 688 or the Metroplex in the eighties because that facet of Atlanta never seems to be talked about. I'm not certain what comes next, but whatever story is next it will be set in the American South, one of the most complicated and beautiful places on the planet. It has bothered me for most of my life how people get the South wrong, even people born here. There's a lot of lazy propaganda produced in the news and entertainment industry about what the imperfect South is from attitudes to culture. Without being an apologist for the South and the history before I was born, I want to try and change some of the misconceptions about what the South is.

 

Last question. What is the biggest challenge for indie writers?

Finding a book I wrote on the shelves of a Barnes & Noble bookstore was an incredible feeling. November 2020.

A lack of a promotional budget and a big publisher behind you when it comes to publicity. I'm grateful for the audience I have who took a chance on me, but of course I'd love to sell more books. Every writer wants to be read. I don't care anything about being famous or culturally important, but I do want to be read more widely and not be a niche writer. I willingly chose to be an indie knowing the challenges that come with it so I'm not complaining, but I'm mentioning it as a challenge to the business side of writing. I try not to promote myself all that much because there is something unseemly about that. Much of my promotion comes via word of mouth on social media and I'm dependent on ratings and reviews from readers on services like Amazon to help coax the the algorithms into favoring me. I wish more people that read my books would take the two minutes to rate or review me there with their genuine feedback. I have far more readers than ratings and reviews on my books and more feedback would definitely help me.

 

Thank you for reading. 

 

Season's Greetings And Christmas Cards

Some 1980s Christmas cards from WXIA-TV Atlanta that I received during my time affiliated with them from 1985 to 1990. Signed by Johnny Beckman, Guy Sharpe and other meteorologists and staff.

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 Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, it was common to see the phrase “Season's Greetings” on Christmas cards, advertisements and other decorations, but the phrase dating back to Victorian times seems to have fallen out of usage or I seldom seem to encounter it any longer. My mother seemed to favor it for our family Christmas cards and I remember as a child seeing it the most often compared to other popular phrases like Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays. 

 

Without fail and with enjoyment, my mother sent out Christmas cards every December. Revco, Zayre, K-Mart, Richway, Rich's or from wherever she got them that year. I was there with her, going through the boxes in the aisle next to the wrapping paper, until she asked me what I thought and she decided on just the right one. Some years it was a reindeer, a sleigh, a bird or barn in the snow or Santa with a bag of toys slung over his shoulder that she chose. Sometimes we agreed and sometimes we did not.

Christmas cards from my childhood home in the 1980s.

 

The tradition was for her to retrieve the red address book from the telephone table in the living room and sit down to write out a stack of cards intended for friends and relatives. People got them even if she had not seen or spoken to them during the year; she was going to think of them for the moment it took to write their name.

 

The addresses rarely changed as people did not hop from house to house like the nomads of today seeking an upgraded kitchen and twenty car garage, except for a crazy aunt of mine who was constantly marrying, divorcing and moving. Houses are no longer homes, but investments and there are more people in Georgia than I ever would have imagined as a child. You could write my name and Route 5 Dallas, Georgia without any other numbers or a road and the mail carrier would have known exactly who I was and where I lived thirty or forty years ago. Not so today.

 

Christmas cards on a fireplace mantle in my former Louisville home. Photo by me, December 1996.

I sat next to my mother on the sofa and watched and waited for my turn in our conveyor belt Christmas card operation. Her handwriting was much prettier than mine; I am a left-hander and she was a righty, so she did the writing. My job was to stamp and seal the envelopes after she had signed the cards and filled in the address. Some television show would be on the background that neither of us cared for or in the seventies, she would have the Elvis Christmas LP from 1970 playing on the wood cabinet stereo.

No one interfered with us, as it was likely there was no one else around. When the writing, stamping and licking were done, we would drive to the post office in Dallas and I would run inside and drop them through the slots marked "Dallas Only" or "Out of Town."

A 1970s Christmas card from my great grandmother and great uncle in Visetown, Tennessee.

I do not imagine a scene such as that often plays out in contemporary life. Children have little interest in anything that is not on a phone screen and the same could be said of adults too. Christmas cards have been replaced by social media posts that sound like they were written by public relations firms and accompany an over stylized family photo in front of a Christmas tree or a summer beach vacation at Destin or Panama City at sunset with everyone dressed in white. The smiles will be wide, the hair will be blown, the sand will fill every wrinkle and the sunburn serious. Were these people stranded in the desert? After all, there are appearances to keep up and as I said to someone recently, everyone on social media appears to be happy and living the best life. Much show must be made of every moment at that very moment.

Most people of my generation and older will think of the Christmas card as an artifact of our past lives. Younger generations likely do not think of Christmas cards at all because they have probably never signed one. The Christmas card can be considered The Ghost of Christmas Past warning Scrooge to remember the innocent Christmas spirit that he possessed in his youth, lest he die miserably and sentenced to become a ghost chained up like old Jacob Marley. It might be Dickensian to hold the antiquated Christmas card in high regard or give it such powers of sentimentality. As a fan of Dickens, I fondly remember the cards as much as the parties more than I do any G.I. Joe or Star Wars action figures that I received as a present under the tree. Receiving a Christmas card meant that you mattered or were thought of, even if it was only for a moment. There was a human connection in the handwriting, the brief words written, the tearing open of the envelope and the licking of the stamp.

There is no human connection in the 'like' button or the heart icon underneath the thumb holding a screen. You might as well keep scrolling for the next video or selfie or time-wasting piece of content.

Half of the enjoyment of Christmas cards was receiving them in the mail. I liked to see the variety of cards that people chose and the handwriting styles. After opening the cards, they would be placed on the mantle above the fireplace, where they would sit until after the new year, when the decorations came down and were boxed up. While they were there for a month, I would look at them and be reminded of that person and imagine our card sitting on their mantle. The lifespan of the Christmas card was another part of the tradition. The unsatisfactory modern equivalent of social media posts cannot be perched on a mantle or satisfy my need to tear open an envelope. Their lifespan is less than a second, as it is scrolled by and never seen or thought of again. Such is contemporary digital life, where nothing endures.

 

The Lenox Square tree in 2007. Photo by me.

Similarly, Macy's killed off the Rich's Christmas tree tradition after seventy-four years in Atlanta. I have been to Lenox Square twice since Thanksgiving this year and the Christmas spirit was lacking and some of that was not seeing a Christmas tree atop the Rich's (it'll never be Macy's to me) store. It was a tradition I grew up with, even in years I did not see the tree in person at the Rich's flagship downtown store on the crystal bridge or when it moved to Buckhead, as the night of the lighting was always broadcast on television. In my lifetime until now, it has always existed and so from my perspective, it should always continue to exist. Tradition is something humans grasp onto when other aspects of life shift with the times and become unrecognizable. They are reassurances on cold, windy nights that some things still matter and are constant when little else behaves in that manner.

The last Christmas card my mother sent me four months before she died.

The season's greetings are not mailed anymore, but are more likely Instagrammed and forgotten. Traditions require too much time, thought and effort in the age of instant and constant gratification. This is how traditions fade out little by little with the passage of time and people. I still send Christmas cards and I will keep sending them until I can no longer find them in the stores or have no one to send them to.

 

River City Rock

In early August of this year I visited Louisville for the first time in twenty years. It was a city I lived in the middle 1990s. I had worked for the transit authority for a brief time then worked as a radio personality for two different radio stations there. As with most radio stations we didn't play local music and played popular commercial music. Even though I was living in Louisville I wasn't connected to the local music scene except for maybe seeing ads for performances in the Leo or seeing a flier at the local music store ear X-tacy. I was more aware of what music was coming out of Seattle at that time than Louisville.

Before my return to Louisville I started researching bands that were from Louisville during the 1990s. I wanted to see what I had missed out on during that time and find a way to mentally connect with the feel of the city when I lived there that I couldn't recollect from my own memories and photographs of the place. That is when I discovered Slint.

I had considered myself a person with fairly eclectic and expansive musical tastes and knowledge. Somehow I had missed out on this band. This was a band that developed a cult following, a legend steeped in mystery and produced what many consider one of the most influential rock albums of the 1990s. This was a band too that had broken up in 1990 and released their last album in 1991, but had somehow become this critical darling.

I listened to their last album titled Spiderland and I understand why this band was so loved. These guys were in their late teens to around twenty years old and had made this important music in a basement in Louisville. Somehow, I had missed out an important piece of a city I had lived in. I would have been in Louisville at the time some of these guys were bouncing around in different bands post Slint and I had no idea about them.

This is hypnotic and shoegazing rock and many refer to the music of Slint as "math rock." Their music features repetitious guitar and drum rhythms that are so beautiful with complex time signatures. The lyrics often border on bad poetry written by angst filled teenagers and given their age at the time it is understandable. The music is the better part of the band and the vocals are often either whispered or screamed and were written mostly at the last minute during the recording session of the album in Chicago.

If you go to a quiet room, close the door, turn down the lights, put on your headphones and listen to Spiderland you will hear great music. It is the best way to fully appreciate this music because I imagine it is impossible to enjoy any other way. This isn't music for a bright sunny day at the beach, but more for dark rooms and focused thinking. This music brings to mind the images of Louisville in the 90s with all of the old architecture it has, the decay it had then and the isolation of the city on the banks of the Ohio River. This was before widespread internet usage so cities then had a much more distinct identity especially in terms of arts and culture.



There are only six songs on this album, but I enjoy all of them. My favorite from the album is Don, Aman. The song has whispered vocals by the drummer combined with guitar playing that ranges from contemplative to blaring. As for the rest of the album I rank them in this order: Nosferatu Man, Good Morning Captain, Washer, Breadcrumb Trail and For Dinner.

If only this band could have stayed together in the 90s they might have made more great music and reached a much wider audience besides music critics and musicians. Slint did reunite in the 2000s, but seeing these guys in their 40s playing this music is awkward and I think their music from Spiderland is best left in that time capsule shrouded in the mystique of what might have been.

There is a documentary on the band that was released in 2014 called Breadcrumb Trail. It can be hard to find, but it is excellent and reveals much about the band, their creative process, and what happened to them.

So if you are in the mood for dark, brooding, and beautiful rock music spend time in Spiderland.