Listening to the 1983 synth-pop album
Red and Blue by Cee Farrow I feel like I am sitting with a cosmopolitan or martini in
one of my old Atlanta haunts, Red Chair a long, long time ago. Red
Chair is ancient history and I faded out of the nightlife scene ten
years ago this year. I had my fun, have no regrets and I am grateful for having my fun when bars and clubs were different.
Today, there does not seem to be a
sleek, stylish, moody and masculine decorated gay bar (not a club)
left in Atlanta that just plays music and pours drinks. A bar that is
fashionably slick, not trendy, and it feels like you are wearing
sunglasses indoors in the middle of a Human League or ABC music video.
Halo, in the basement of the Biltmore,
fit that mood many years ago, but the music tended to be more ambient
and trippy lounge (think Hotel Costes) which was cool too. Halo
became something very different in its last years before it was
finally put out of its misery.
One of those blurry nights at WETbar. Photo by me, August 2006.
Oh, there was the sleek and long bulldozed for student housing WETbar too. I
spent many a night making that short walk from 6th and W.
Peachtree to Spring and 8th. We had it pretty good in gay
Atlanta in the 2000s. Everything changes and they label it progress. Well...
Yeah, happy gay pride and all that this June 2026.
Cee Farrow.
Cee Farrow, real name Christian
Kruzinski, was a Frankfurt born model who emigrated to Los Angeles in
the early 80s and recorded one album. Red and Blue was a commercial
flop, but the single Should I Love You? reached number 82 on the
Billboard Hot 100 chart. It did not help matters in terms of sales
and promotion that the record label, Rocshire Records, was seized by
the federal government in 1984 and shut down.
Commercial success is not an indicator of talent or lack thereof and I like the album for what it is and not what critics thought it should be. My favorite songs on the album are
Touched, Wildlife Romance, Should I Love You?, Paint It Blue,
Backwards, Lost and Memorized and Think of Me. These are all songs
that fit within the context of being played in my favorite type of
gay bar where one could sit alone, think and drink, mingle with
friends or pick up a stranger on the way out the door.
With his music and modeling career
over, Christian did what one does as a former singer and model if one
wished to continue a glamorous lifestyle and became involved in the
club scene. He was associated with The Apartment, Maxx and Arena in
L.A. up until 1990. He released a final single in 1991 called
Imagination and it too had no success.
Christian Kruzinski.
Cee Farrow, Christian Kruzinski, died
in 1993 of an AIDS related illness. He was only thirty-six years old.
He is one of the too many AIDS victims who should be remembered and
celebrated this June.
Sometimes the world is so flat it feels like you could slip free of Earth's gravity and slide off. Early February on the road. Photo by me, 2026.
The tail end of January and the
beginning of February was two weeks on the road, sometimes dirt
roads, of the south. It was the winter thaw for the mind collecting
new sights, sounds, scents, tastes and discarding the mental plaque
of the previous year. I wore my accent when needed, gave nods of
indifference to strange politics of strangers and found myself
shooting the shit in the middle of the road with locals. I wandered
for hours through another history museum, watched water flow and
listened to the birds in the trees. There was lots of bad coffee in
gas station travel cups too. Some of the experience might end up in a
book or maybe in a blog post. I thought a lot about the death of an
old best friend between the mile markers and the hash marks on the
speedometer. I wanted one more stupid teenage argument with him for
the fun of it. This is how life and death go as the inseparable pair that they are.
Columbus, Georgia. Photo by me, February 2026.
I came home to bulbs waking up from winter and sat behind my desk. It was time to get back into the rhythm of writing my next novel.
Golly gee. Tell me about them lyrics son. You are one pontificating rascal, that's what you are.
Somewhere I was in a bookstore and
noticed in the prominent displays by the door a stack of poetry books
with the bedraggled face of the hammy actor Matthew McConaughey. He is the actor/renaissance man who straight guys of my generation have crushes on and secretly wish they were. As
you can tell by the sepia toned cover photo Matthew is a man with
deep thoughts with his half open shirt and is surely in the running
for a Pulitzer. Poems & Prayers is exactly the book that the world
does not need, but it is what it gets. Traditional publishing is on a mission to destroy and humiliate itself in the most shameless ways. I hope he
publishes a cook book next. Maybe something called Corn &
Coca-Cola.
I read this Atlantic piece on Rod
Dreher. It was interesting as the writer attempted to portray Dreher
as some noble romantic fighting to save the soul of Western culture
from Budapest, but instead he seemed miserable in a fantasy world of
his own making. I have only read a few pieces by him over the years,
though I have known about him for a long time, and Dreher is a
peculiar one. The slipping in of the line by the brilliant and highly regarded atheist Richard Dawkins about him being a “cultural christian”, which I am
familiar with, is intellectually dishonest with the usage of
“declared” as if it were some major proclamation from on high (it
wasn't) and it is very troubling for the use of “ally” (it is
laughable to suggest he is, since Dreher is anti-science) and there is
zero context given. I remember Dawkins saying that remark either in a debate or interview and it was not a grand gesture as it was a
reference to how he was raised during his childhood without a choice
on the matter. I respect and agree with Dawkins more than I ever
could with Dreher. The tone of the article seemed to be a weird
attempt to launder the ideas of Dreher and position him for future
shadowy political influence in the United States.
Most of Carlton, Georgia. All five of these storefronts are occupied by this one antique store. Photo by me, February 2026.
One day well east of Athens in Madison County near the Elbert County line we stopped in the tiny community of Carlton clinging to life next to the train tracks. It is the kind of place you have to pull off the main road and intentionally seek out or you would never have a reason to pass through. Few people do as evidenced by the population change from 1900 to 2020 that was a loss of fourteen people in one hundred and twenty years down to two hundred and sixty-three. I find it charming that communities like this have managed to survive safe from Atlanta's sprawl. I remember when places like this were the norm in North Georgia outside of metro Atlanta in the 1980s.
Photo by me, February 2026.
This is the kind of place you have to dig, maybe get a little dusty and you will be rewarded. Two buildings down to the left next to the post office is a local branch of the Hell's Angels. I suppose they will not bother you if you do not bother them.
Photo by me, February 2026.
You do not know the smile and warm feeling I had when this jukebox played Don't Make My Brown Eyes Blue by Crystal Gayle. I skipped by like the small child I was in 1977 when my mother would play this record on our living room stereo which was near the same size as this jukebox.
Photo by me, February 2026.
A cat strolled through on its rounds as I flipped through a copy of the photo book Warhol and Friends.
Photo by me, February 2026.
It was digging paradise where prices are rough ideas.
Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.
Athens, Ga. Photo by me, February 2026.
Another day I attended a festival in downtown Athens and tried to shake loose a ghost. That old best friend of mine who recently died lived there in the early 1990s while he attended UGA. He went off to New York afterward to work in historic preservation. Athens of the '90s was a different place from the Athens of today, kind of like most of the state. It was one of the hot music scenes at the time like Seattle.
This is REM performing live in their hometown at the 40 Watt (pictured above) in 1992.
And so it goes...
Me. February 2026.
on the road with an accent in my pocket chasing those sunny days.
Naughty and nice are not mutually exclusive. Photo by me, Greensboro, Georgia.
More people I have known died in 2025.
Is that too blunt or too obvious? It is not a mystery that the older
I become, the more it happens and that is the logical and detached
way to approach it. The longer life lasts the more it resembles a classic BMW in need of repairs
beyond the routine maintenance, but the backfire of death is no less
of a surprise each time it is heard. Preppies in the snow put their hands up to cover their ears and wait.
Too many people have died too
young. Dear Generation X, what are you doing ?
I read the obituaries and tried to reconcile the adult to the
kid I knew. I am often surprised to read the twists and turns of what
people became. People do change, or maybe I never knew some of them
that well past the superficial observations in a red brick school in
a country town. A boy pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose,
twirled his number two pencil and did multiplication on his fingers.
A teenage girl leaned back in a rocking chair and laughed too hard on
the wrong beat as she tried to grasp the conversation of adults. What
did we learn?
Funerals are the wrinkles on the face
of a life. Gray hairs in the mirror are the honest rebels stealing
from the self-image that mistakenly thinks you could still pass for
thirty. Forty? Not even. Whatever the kids are listening to and
whatever slang they are inventing is whatever the kids are listening
to and saying. Translators are not made for that duty. You still think 2006 was a week ago as you tune into
99X or River 97 and drum your fingers on the steering wheel to
Everytime You Go Away by Paul Young. You squint at the red light that
is poorly timed and notice that the restaurant that was there on the
corner your entire life is now a vape shop and tattoo parlor serving
burritos without a permit and when did they build that Dollar
General? Only yesterday your child was six and you were late for
soccer practice.
The end of a year always makes us consider time and where it went. The mind has difficulty with time's salamander slick and slippery nature.
Andrew McCarthy in 1987's Mannequin.
Damn the changes, damn the politics,
damn the numbing disease of cheap nostalgia and damn it all to hell,
but I am thankful that my waist size is still a thirty. Now the light
is green, the radio plays Starship's Nothing's Gonna Stop Us and you
want to believe it. You are convinced. Traffic flows like it did
before millions moved here to ruin paradise and Andrew McCarthy sure
was pretty in Mannequin. You strain your voice singing, “We
can build this dream together.” You swear you did not once tell
that minor piece of trivia in a Thomas Drive bar in Panama City that
the lead singer, Mickey Thomas, was from Cairo, Georgia. That is Cairo
pronounced like the syrup and not the city in Egypt.
My 2025 was like sitting down to eat at a
favorite restaurant, eating my favorite foods and leaving full but
not satisfied. I do not know what it was about this year, but it
lacked novelty. There were new sights, sounds, places and aches in
the joints. I was not bored; that seems to be a condition I never
experience, but perhaps I became immune to the news, the messed-up
weather, confused flowers and the next batch of woods toppled for
luxury apartments over a Panda Express. Gas was cheaper and I spent
an hour looking for the ear hair trimmer. The year was over before I knew it.
At fifty-two, I noticed my age like a
phone notification that I could not swipe away. I felt a little
slower, less nimble and it took me longer to recharge. It now took me
two cups of coffee and a handful of Costco supplements before my
brain began to percolate in my skull. Silence for the first hour of a day was a requirement or I became the grumpy old man who I never wanted to imitate.
Home Away From Home in Fort Lauderdale. Photo by me.
The secret “home away from home” in
Fort Lauderdale was sold this year. It was a unique and special place
for sixteen years. I will miss talking to the lizards on the patio, curious stray cats and morning coffee walks to Sebastian Street Beach. I doubt we will find another place like it.
Novel 4 (it really does have a title)
came along nicely from January to December. It is something new,
something current and has nothing to do with me. There are always so
many miles in my year, on foot and by car and do not think that has
not been an influence on me. Novel 4 is the first book I did not
begin writing in Fort Lauderdale. I had a notebook of ripe ideas and
then sentences formed in my head on a cold day on the square in
Gainesville in January with a stomach full of barbecue. The
characters Adam, Hastings and Evan were born without the need for
painkillers.
Weirdest moment:
Standing on the shady side of a street in
Warner Robins outside a restaurant. That middle Georgia heat and
humidity had stolen the birdsong and my patience. A car creeped up to
me and with the sun reflected on the windows and I could not see
inside. A scratchy voice called, “Hey white boy.” I looked
without looking and gripped my phone a little tighter. The voice
called out again, “Hey white boy,” and again I ignored it. My
eyes moved behind my sunglasses and I widened my stance. I was not a
boy except for maybe in the way some southerners mean it. Three more
times the voice called with the same words. Trouble and I was no
fool. The car went into reverse and backed away with the possible intention of hiding the tag.
Favorite moment:
Watching the fog in Normaltown in
February. Yes, it is more than just a lyric in the B52's Deadbeat Club. 2025 was still goo, shapeless, untethered and iridescent. I
could have been in any moment in my life when winter was spooling off
into a gray pile of yarn. Maybe I was drifting in the early 90s with
a hole in the sleeve of my sweater and wearing a barn jacket and
boots. There was a whiff of Polo from the green bottle in the air. A
water tower was the appearing and disappearing UFO down the street. I was happy.
Worst moment: Sitting in a Johns Creek Hospital room and waiting with
my grip on the arms of a plastic chair. Helplessness bred in
hospitals is the worst.
Best Festival:
Flannery O'Connor's grave. Photo by me, October 2025.
I went to too many. It was a tie between Athfest and that one down in Milledgeville where I hunted down the grave of Flannery O'Connor. Death was on my mind at every turn this year or so it seemed.
My favorite movie:
Eddington. It satirized the times
better than any other movie that tried. It was smart and the only
movie that made me laugh out loud.
My favorite new to me music:
The White Birch album by Codeine. It
may have come out in 1994, but I had not listened to it until this year. I found it by way of Slint and Shipping News.
Cheap nostalgia at $20. My actual Bon Jovi ticket from 1989.
There is no singular defining moment to
a year, the same as there is no precise moment that defines a life.
To follow a path in the woods, return a smile, accept an invitation,
or jump from a window and roll to the ground, life equalizes the
regrets and the joys. News readers, nervous funeral orators,
biographers, politicians, historians, TikTok influencers and
novelists will lie to you. Maybe, if I am going to lie, then it was
the Bon Jovi concert at Lakewood in 1989 when I held a flickering
lighter in the air like a torch held in my sixteen-year-old hand to
I'll Be There For You, but I am drowsy from the decades of
remembering those tight jeans and how he was not. A previous lesson learned and only reinforced. All of life goes
into the dryer the same as all of it went into the washer. Moments
are agitated, churned and rinsed in the same spins until it is a soup
of consciousness. They lived, they died and some of it was good,
better than it should have been and what more can anyone want besides
more time?
What do you do with a used-up and
expired year? Nothing really. You go to bed, wake up and open the
next year. The Christmas tree comes down slower than it went up and
goes back into the attic. The mind and the hand learn to write a
different number. In a year, the preppies in the snow will come inside and gather around the fireplace again cradling whatever is the trendy drink.
Monticello, Georgia. Photo by me, September 2025.
2025 is the sunset on the hood of a car
speeding faster than it used to; you cannot have it again. 2026 is a
missed call from an unknown number.
Jump scare. Yours truly. I keep Rabbit Tobacco Field dim to avoid scaring myself. Mood lighting is your friend. December 2025.
Merry Christmas, happy holidays and
have the best 2026 that you can.
And finally it is Preppies In The Snow. Ralph Lauren and Vidal Sassoon would be proud. Last Christmas by WHAM!
Addendum
All dressed in black, he won't be
coming back Save your tears, you've got years and years The
pains of seventeen's Unreal they're only dreams...
As I was putting this post to bed and
proofreading I learned Chris Rea had died. He was not a household
name, but there are not many of them in the days of niche
entertainment and the absence of a shared cultural reality. If you
are a Gen X kid/fortunate 70s child you would have heard Fool If You
Think It's Over in the summer of 1978 on Top 40 Radio. I first heard
it on Atlanta's Z-93 in my mother's Camaro and sliding around on the cold leather backseat of my father's Cadillac through the eighties on
B98.5. We had a copy of it in our music collection. I filed the song
away as a meaningful one of my childhood. I loved the song then and
still do.
Udo Kier in Madonna's Erotica music video in 1992.
It is worth mentioning the death of actor Udo Kier this past Sunday. He was a pleasure to watch in anything from Andy Warhol's Dracula to My Own Private Idaho to Madonna's Erotica music video. His performances and roles were outlandish, unexpected, subversive and original. His face and eyes made anything he appeared in so much more delightful and campy. There are not enough actors and roles today for people like him. The world just became a little less interesting.
One of Kier's scenes with River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho.
********
After the Hunt
Last night, I finally watched After the Hunt. I liked it with a few reservations and Julia Roberts' acting exceeded my low expectations of her. If I were rating the film on a scale of one to ten, then I would give it a six and a half. Luca Guadagnino's film is not a background movie or even a good time and sometimes that is what is needed. With time I suspect opinions may shift more favorably toward it.
I am in the minority in liking this film as critics and audiences have disliked everything about it. Some probably dislike it without having seen it just for the premise alone. For those who did watch it and hated it, perhaps it made them realize how ridiculous and juvenile the moralistic and self-serving lip service that drives the current
culture and its attempts to redefine, not just re-frame, the past is.
Audiences do not like to have their cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy mirrored back at them using their own rhetoric. It still stuns me how intellectually dishonest and fearful much of the cultural discourse has been for the last several years and the stranglehold it has over so many. Such is the case in public, but in private I have found there is much more sanity and this is also one of the points made in After the Hunt.
The reservations I had were that the film needed crisper
editing, better casting in the role of the student and a less ambiguous perspective. The ending scene in the diner was unnecessary as it reveals nothing of importance in a film that runs two hours and eighteen minutes. Also, the role of Maggie, the student accuser, was a miscast. It was utterly implausible that
the
accused professor would have been attracted to someone as psychotic
and completely unattractive as the student character. In terms of perspective, nuance is fine but stronger clarity was needed in the plot.
The film has strong supporting performances by Michael Stuhlbarg and Chloe Sevigny. In one of the more humorous scenes, the character played by Stuhlbarg gets up from dinner without a word during a conversation with student Maggie, closes the door and begins to play loud music in another room. He had had enough of her gibberish nonsense and decided for the sake of his own sanity it was best to no longer engage and encourage her.
I rather liked the
soundtrack that many have complained about. The Trent Reznor and
Atticus Ross compositions reminded me of the avant-garde work of
Morton Feldman, though Feldman was on another level.
If the 2022 film Tar with Cate Blanchett appealed
to you, as it did me, then you might like this. Between the two, Tar is the better, sharper and deeper film. I am glad that art, at least in film, is challenging people to reconsider what certain segments of western society are shaming others into believing is the truth without examination. May the spell be broken.
Radiohead's Daydreaming from A Moon
Shaped Pool played as we headed west out of Dawsonville, Georgia
en-route to Ellijay. We were on a mission to buy apples and cider doughnuts, look at the
mountain foliage and maybe, if the weather held, enjoy a hike. I
craved the trails and the smell of fall. It was not looking good for
the weather, light rain was on the radar to the west and clouds were
banking up against the Appalachians. The weather models had said not
to worry that the weather would hold until evening, but reality was
not looking so favorable. The trees were putting on their best show,
much better than last weekend when we were up here and the leaves
were weak with color that looked like dried pea soup.
I was digging my head out of reading
David Foster Wallace essays. People have made so many moral judgments
about him since his suicide in 2008 and one-sided details of his
personal life were revealed that his writing has fallen out of favor.
People put others on pedestals and realize that they should not have
done so and topple them. Or could it be they learned that people are
complicated and imperfect? The time had changed or fallen back one
hour. Standard time arrived and it is my preferred time with early
sunsets and longer nights when daylight no longer needs to be saved.
Standard time should be permanent time.
Radiohead has been one of my favorite
bands since the magical period of music in the early 1990s. I first
saw Thom Yorke on MTV in Creep with his short, bleached hair and looking
oddly sexy. He smoldered. My desire for him was like Cobain in that I could never
tell if I only found him attractive from certain angles or if my
attraction was fooled by the hairstyle. Yorke's physical beauty has
not aged well since and “sexy” would not be a word I would apply
to him in his late fifties. He is five years older than me, but I
never had sexiness to lose and I was also never a rockstar.
Photo by me, November 2025.
The countryside unfurled on the twisty
Georgia Highway 52 that is married to the southern border of the
Chattahoochee National Forest. The first raindrops smacked the
windshield as we passed the sunflower farm that we visited five years
ago when COVID-19 was still the threat du jour and people were masked
outdoors. It felt silly even then to be outdoors in a mask, but I was
pragmatic, responsible as adults should be and fearful. I would not even eat inside a
restaurant until the summer of 2022. It feels so much longer than
only three years ago.
Photo by me, November 2025.
Clouds rolled over the mountains. We
passed the turn to Mt. Oglethorpe. I was still hopeful about the
weather. Three years ago in a mask felt more distant than the clouds
atop the mountain and the early 90s. Getting older and standard time
is the past disordered, out of sync, scattered memories mixed up on
the floor and leaves on the ground. Life is a straight line, but the
human mind is nonlinear.
We stopped at the first apple place we
saw. It was comically painted red, white and blue. It was photogenic
in the drizzle and temperatures in the upper forties. Gray weather
and gray times. In the gravel lot in my Columbia fleece, Mexican
made Levi's jeans and American made Brooks running shoes I tried to connect apples to the American flag
theme. No signal in my head and I shrugged it off. The rain kept the crowds low or back
closer to Atlanta in the exposed bulb lit food halls selling craft
beer and noodles. We went inside for apples. This was not our regular
place that we visit every fall, but new things were needed. Piles of
apples looked at us and the disappointment was simultaneous between
us. We were of one mind and turned and left without apples. We would
buy them down the road.
Photo by me, November 2025.
The sky sagged. It was loaded with
rain. A model failure and the rain unleashed on us. Knobs were
adjusted to warm the car. Rain streaked windows and the hope for a
hike drained. The cold and dim world closed in around our capsule of
warmth. At least the leaves were pretty and we had apples. The
Cartecay River appeared out of the trees next to the car. Someone
told me once it had the cleanest water in the state, but I do not
know if that is true. What is the truth from a stranger's mouth and
what is false? It is okay to not know everything and it is okay not
to believe everything too.
When will the next Radiohead album be
released? A Moon Shaped Pool came out in 2016. It is not that fans
will forget the band or that I imagine the band being worried that
they need to release an album to stay relevant, but I would like to
hear some new music from them. They challenge my ears, stimulate me,
sometimes depress me and they never have bored me.
They are the only rock band that I do
not mind maintaining an active, albeit slower, career into their
older years. I do not see them as an embarrassment to still be on
stage on a tour around the world. The band is not a cashing in,
nostalgia act like the Rolling Stones or those other bands from the
sixties, seventies and eighties. Radiohead's music always seems to
stay new and maybe that is because the music has been ahead of
everyone else their entire career and we still have not caught up.
Internet rumors are out there that a
new album is coming, sometime, possibly in 2026. The band is
beginning a limited European tour this month going into December.
The shows are sold out. I am ready for new music from the band who is
possibly the only band who would excite me to hear a new album. Nine
years in my mixed-up memories have passed since the band's last
album. I was younger, still not sexy, was spending a lot of time in
Grant Park, hiking, swimming, dancing and buying apples in the
mountains.
Ellijay, cradled by the ridges, sat in
the pouring rain. We circled downtown. Tourists dashed for doors and
warm tables. We debated whether to eat or leave in the early mountain
darkness. I said something about the 80s and coming through here when
it was nothing. I noticed that I am saying stuff like that too often
the older I get. “When it was nothing” or “when it was cheaper”
or “when it was different” and sometimes “when it was better.”
My mother smiled in my mind around 1990 and took a bite of an apple behind her big sunglasses. I held the camera into 1991. Tom Cochrane's Life is a Highway was fun with the windows down. My mother was funny, easy to be around and I
missed her. The present or the past, the carousel of memories was the
same on standard time. We retraced our miles home down the highway in the falling
leaves.
My old neighborhood looking west down Ponce de Leon Avenue toward Midtown. Photo by me, September 2025.
Turn and face the strange. - David Bowie's Changes
A couple of weeks ago I was in my old
1990s neighborhood in Atlanta. The only reason for me to go there is
I have some need to go to Ponce City Market and that was true again
as I walked into Madewell. I visit Ponce City Market or to me, City
Hall East/the old Sears building, about twice a year since I am
rarely down in the city anymore. My infrequent visits to Atlanta are
marked by the changes to the landscape. I play the game of what is
the same and what is gone. The changes used to happen around me in
more of a gradual sense like the frog in a pot of boiling water, but
since I have not lived in the city for four years this month, the
changes are more noticeable.
The Clermont became a boutique hotel
with a rooftop bar, the Masquerade was gutted, Zesto and Paris on
Ponce are gone and The Eagle and MJQ moved out of the neighborhood.
Ponce has changed as part of the evolution of the city at large. It
would be stereotypical to feel that the change was bad, but I am
indifferent, as I am emotionally checked out on Atlanta and that
feeling has been building for the last fifteen years.
Where I lived in the Ford Factory and Ponce City Market next door. Photo by me, September 2025.
Walking through Ponce City Market, I
noticed there was some turnover in the retail and more vacancies
since my last visit. There was some odd place that felt very
downmarket with vendors selling products that were obviously made at
the kitchen table and it had two live DJs playing over each other.
Was it a club or a store? Most of the other people there were talking
to each other and not buying anything. My ears hurt, I straightened
my collar and realized that whatever that place was, it was not for
me. A couple of other places were odd fits too. Ponce City Market is
a nice piece of architecture, but the shine is wearing off and it
felt less chic.
I am not as plugged in as times past as to what
happens in the city and unbeknownst to me, it was the first day of
the Shaky Knees Festival, which has moved to Piedmont Park and
replaced Music Midtown. I remember when Music Midtown began off Tenth
Street in what were then empty lots west of Peachtree behind what was
Weekends before the Federal Reserve moved from Downtown to Midtown. I
remember trying to get to work at Turner through the Music Midtown
scene and the detours. I would say Atlanta was more interesting and
alternative then, but I would guess the people who attended Shaky
Knees this year would say the same about modern Atlanta. In your
youth and mistake making period, all of the world can seem to be an
interesting playground.
James Laid.
The first Music Midtown lineup in 1994
varied from James Brown to The Knack to James. I am a sucker for
bands from Manchester and I loved James. They had hits with Say Something, Born of Frustration and in 1993 their big hit was Laid, a
song about messing around with gender roles. If that song could be a
mainstream hit in the U.S. in the early 90s and it likely would not
be in the climate of 2025, then what has changed and is society going
backwards or forwards? Why are we more uptight about some topics and lowering our standards everywhere else from public behavior, education, the arts, government, architecture, fashion and so on?
The Bank of America building from North Avenue. Photo by me, September 2025.
Peachtree Street looking north from North Avenue. September 2025.
If the city was not more interesting
and alternative in the 90s, it certainly was more loose, rundown,
smaller and society and culture were entirely different. Was the 90s
the last great decade and the peak of personal freedom? I was in my
teens and twenties then, so with youth clouded memories, I am biased.
There is no easy answer, but I would be dishonest if part of me did
not want to say it was. When comparing today to the 90s and if given
a choice of being young today or being young in the 1990s, even with
the ever-present risk of AIDS and the gay rights struggles of that
time, I would choose the 90s again without hesitation. Young
people today are growing up in an entirely different world that is in
some ways better and in some ways worse and I do not envy them. The
person I am, the young person I was and the experiences I had are not
suited for Atlanta in 2025. I do not belong there and I am
comfortable with that, nostalgia is not leading me by the hand to a rose colored past.
A new skyline. Photo by me, September 2025.
The only building visible in the photo above from 17th Street from the foreground to the background
that existed in the 1990s is the one marked. That is 999 Peachtree
Street or what was known as First Union Plaza completed in 1987.
First Union bank was purchased by Wachovia, now Wells Fargo, in 2001.
In the 90s, the foreground was the Atlantic Steel mill.
The original goths, the punks, the alterna kids of the past are all grown and gone like the hippies of the Tight Squeeze before them. Gone too are the hangouts from 688, Midtown Music Hall to The Metroplex. Atlanta once had a thriving rock and alternative scene, not that most not from here would know since the media only fixates on rap and hip hop and ignores anything else. The city of today is a different playground for a different generation that lacks an original cultural identity. Are they Generation Recycle? I suppose I should be happy that Little Five Points still exists.
Nirvana playing at the old Masquerade on North Avenue in 1990 before they took over the globe. They would play here again in the fall of '91 in support of Nevermind and then on subsequent visits, they played the big venues.
Summer's death duly noted in Athens, Ga. Photo by me, August 2025.
Summer died on the backs of my knees in
a cool, dry breeze this past Sunday in Athens. It was a recognition
the same as the flocks of birds beginning the migration south as they
speckled the sky of smeared clouds. It was a relief as if I had
accomplished something more than play witness to the passing of
another season. I was running errands and the surname of the
protagonist of my current novel had come to me. I had been stressing
over this not-so-minor detail for months. The last name had to sound
right or sing when spoken aloud with the first name and I had paired
numerous names in my head without success. Then in a parking lot
among the first tinges of fall color in the sugar maples it came. The
name was simple, solid and was a fine tonic to the more complex first
name. The character was fully born.
Fiona Apple's album When the Pawn...
I have been listening to lots of Fiona Apple the past couple of weeks and this happens to me most every
fall. I am the eternal fan. Her music reminds me of Louisville in the 1990s and a particular
autumn when I thought everything in life was as perfect as life could
get. I was in my twenties and foolish; what else can I say? Life is
never perfect except in small increments and the good news is that it
happens even long after the twenties are nostalgic memories. Perfect
in a parking lot in the breeze in Athens, Georgia kind of way or
perfect in the sense of appreciating happiness in victories over
creative blocks.
With perfection comes the imperfection and Saturday we attended an arts festival
on the square over in faraway Marietta. I can do without ever attending
another arts festival for the rest of my life. I am so tired of
seeing booths of the same makeshift art projects made in garages and
basements with glue guns, glitter and limited inspiration.
The book cover of Pieces of the Frame by John McPhee.
Labor Day was about getting in the
miles on the legs through the woods, reflections on a lake and
feeling fresh in the crisp air. Fall is a rejuvenator not sold in a
bottle at the cosmetics counter or in the energy drink aisle at the
grocery store. Deer foraged in the shadows and my mind thumbed
thoughts on the book I have been reading, Pieces of the Frame (1975)
by John McPhee. There was a story in the essay, Travels in Georgia,
about McPhee, Sam Candler (an heir to the Coca-Cola fortune) and
Carol Ruckdeschel (a conservationist) canoeing down the Chattahoochee
River with then-Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter with Georgia State
Patrol troopers as bodyguards. Carter, a country boy, a former Navy
officer and an avid outdoorsman, fit perfectly into the canoe trip,
which was meant to serve as a way to convince him to protect the land
along the Chattahoochee, which he did as President of the United
States. After the trip, the group ate grilled cheese sandwiches at a
twenty-foot table under a crystal chandelier and then played
basketball in the driveway of the governor's mansion on West Paces in
Buckhead, a thirty-room Greek Revival home I toured as a kid in the
1980s, either during the George Busbee or the first Joe Frank Harris
administration. I thought, “Well that kind of politician no longer
exists,” but politicians sure like to play up and pander to the
average common person when trying to get elected. Carter, disparaged
by people who have never done a decent day's work in their life,
unlike the phonies, was genuine. Since 1980, if you are as old as I
am, you have to wonder what people value and expect from their
presidents.
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Monday wound down as I re-watched
Sunday Bloody Sunday from 1971 starring Glenda Jackson, Peter Finch
and Murray Head. The movie, nominated for four Academy Awards, is
about a love triangle between a straight woman, a gay male Jewish
doctor and a bisexual artist. It was the right cozy movie to start
fall with the drab London weather and scenery and what I like most
about that movie is the abundance of brown fashion.
All the world is beautifully exquisite seventies brown.
Every character
lives in shades of the color brown from scarves, jackets, pants,
coats, vests, sweaters, ties, turtlenecks and so on. The costume design was by the late Jocelyn Rickards who also designed for Blow-Up, FromRussia With Loveand many other films. She was a painter too and published her autobiography in 1987. It is very
1970s, as I remember that decade. Brown is a color not worn enough
anymore. It is a sophisticated color that works well in any season
and people should wear it. It is also the better choice between it
and another popular seventies color, ghastly orange which is best
suited for pumpkins. Perhaps the reason people do not is because it
is a modest choice and does not garner enough attention in our
narcissistic decadent times.
Other than Fiona Apple it seemed to be
an all-out seventies entertainment weekend as the season turns from green to brown.
We dropped into Athfest for another
year this past weekend. It was Sunday afternoon at the arts and music
festival that many townies see as the highlight of townie summer in
Athens after the UGA students leave. We parked on the north end of
campus and walked over to the scene. I am not keen on arts festivals;
I have been to too many and seen the homemade crafts made with glue
guns and chainsaws enough times, but I like Athfest as it has more
live music than art. Though you can find plenty of crafts with
tongue-wagging bulldogs stuck on them if you are inclined.
A rainbow crosswalk at College Avenue and E. Clayton Street out front of Wuxtry Records. Photo by me, June 2025.
A sparse bunch at the main stage outside the 40 Watt Club. Photo by me, June 2025.
The weather was hot and perhaps that
was the reason the crowd was thin at the main stage outside the 40
Watt when we showed.
A band performs on another stage on N. Hull. Photo by me, June 2025.
The crowds. Photo by me, 2025.
Over on N. Hull Street by The World
Famous, we found the crowd by another stage. Maybe they sought the shade? The mood of the
people was that of not wanting to let it wind down, to keep the party
going until it was a last call, beer-goggle-eyed evening that ended
in a long walk of shame to Normaltown or Five Points. We did not
stick around long enough to witness that.
I had heard that James Franco was in town working on a project with William H. Macy and that he had been
seen in the downtown restaurants. If he was going to be in Athens on
Sunday, then he might as well have been at Athfest incognito. Franco
does have an Athens connection, as he directed videos for R.EM.'s
That Someone Is You and Blue from the album Collapse Into Now.
The arts? Photo by me, June 2025.
So
many movies and television shows are filmed in Georgia that you
regularly run into them. A television show for ABC was filming
recently in a park that I often walk in for exercise and I recently
passed another show featuring Sylvester Stallone that was shooting in
Monroe. At my last place in Atlanta, before I moved, some scenes from
Hillbilly Elegy were filmed within walking distance around the
corner and Stranger Things was partly shot nearby too. I am
not impressed by the lights or stars, as I find the productions are
often a hindrance to public spaces and roads closed to the public.
Walking through Athfest I passed a man
on W. Washington Street who looked exactly like Franco and we made
eye contact. He was with two other rather attractive guys who were
more fashionably dressed than most. They gave off the air of not
being townies even though Athens has plenty of local wannabe
hipsters. I was inches from the guy for a few seconds and in that
brief moment I thought it was Franco.
Later, I spotted the
trio again playing hacky sack on a closed street. I wanted to snag a
photo, but the guy was looking my direction as I walked by. I wanted
to be more subtle about it and the opportunity passed. Was it James
Franco? Maybe or maybe not.
I am pretty terrible about recognizing
famous people in person. I have been a huge fan of R.E.M since the
1980s and I could walk by Michael Stipe on E. Broad Street and never
realize it. Well, I did see Stipe once in Atlanta in the 1990s, but that was work related. Franco is only five years younger than I am and the more
I consider it, the guy I saw looked like he was in his twenties
rather than his forties, but some people do age incredibly well.
I look forward to another Athfest next
year to see whom I do not meet on the street.
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