Face The Change

 

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 17^th 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.

Dispatch: From A Loft in Castleberry Hill

 

Sam Wagstaff, self-portrait.

Iwas sitting over a coffee on Peters Street in Castleberry Hill. I realized that I needed to finish that biography of Sam Wagstaff to complete my summer reading list. I have not opened the book for a week. I am struggling to maintain interest. Wagstaff's life story should be more interesting, maybe it is the writing? 

Sam Wagstaff & Robert Mapplethorpe

 

He was the lover and sugar daddy of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, had his own career in the fine art world as a curator and there are his sexual excursions in the 70s and 80s through the New York gay underground. He was friends with Warhol and was the first to hang his work, the Campbell's Soup can, in a museum in 1962. His life should be fascinating, it was in the 2007 documentary Black White + Gray, but it is not in this book. 

*****
 

I see that anarchists marched down Ponce this morning and attacked a Starbucks. The interior was destroyed and customers were injured. It was mayhem as anarchists are want to do. There is a sizeable contingent of them here associated with the ominous sounding The Black Cross. Two were arrested. Here is the Reddit thread about it.

*****

George Plimpton

The Falcons start their season tomorrow and that excites me. Yes, it is okay to like football. You do not have to be a cretin to like the game, even George Plimpton liked football and he was not exactly a dullard.

*****

And now I sit on Peters Street in Castleberry Hill, where in the late 90s I was introduced to Massive Attack in another loft. A guy opened my mind to trip hop. My coffee cools years later, I am still in this neighborhood and he is not. We were too different, but we both liked ETBTG and when I hear this I think of him. Life almost imitates art.

Flux Night 2015: Dream Is A Disaster

Where's the art? Photo by me, November 2015.

A

few years ago I fell in love with Flux Night. Here is my warning that what I have to say of what has become of Flux Night is critical and not pleasant; even what we love must sometimes be critiqued.

There is no nice way to say it, but Flux Night 2015 was a disaster. Some will blame the weather and that it was pushed back a week and then on the rescheduled night it had rained earlier in the day, but that is an excuse. Even had the weather been absolutely perfect this event was a failure. There was so little to see, there was so little to do and trying to find any of the limited art was like trying to solve a riddle that could not be solved. 

Remember that Wendy's commercial from the 1980s that asked, "where's the beef?" That was Flux Night 2015.

 

I arrived with with an umbrella in case and was prepared to suffer through the rain if it returned since I loved Flux Night that much. The event was off from the beginning as Flux Night was a Castleberry Hill event that was meant to be in that neighborhood and not the Old Fourth Ward. Sure, flux means change, but not all changes are equal.

 

I found a volunteer, pretty easy to do in the sparse crowd, and was handed a guide to the night. She hit me up for a donation in a rather rude way and I said, "I'll be back by, let me see some art first."

People standing around with nothing to see. Photo by me, November 2015.

The organization behind Flux Night took a year off in 2014 to regroup and to focus on building a better Flux Night and then produced the worst Flux Night ever. There is an old saying that you 'don't fix what isn't broken' and that is exactly what happened here. Yes, events can evolve and grow, but you do not lose the key vision of what made an event special. Flux Night was a night of the arts on the streets of Atlanta. It was a night to celebrate our thriving artistic scene. What we saw in 2015 was a mess that was haphazard, ill-conceived and dull.

 

A curator was brought in from New York that had no connection and I mean none to the city of Atlanta or its history and culture and you got this lame event. One of the city's most historic neighborhoods is chosen to host and this was produced? This? Really? It was awful and insulting how far Flux Night had fallen. 

 

It was as if an outsider said this is what Atlanta is like; a tourist who comes and spends a day downtown and pretends to understand the place like a local. Atlanta does not need people from other places for validation or to tell us how it should be done. There is plenty of homegrown talent here. I am all for bringing in artists from outside the city, but to hand over the reigns and have someone with no connection to Atlanta be the curator is to betray the event and those that love it.

Cool inflatable something bro! Photo by me, November 2015.

Where was the art? I walked up and down Edgewood and Auburn Avenues and even with a map I kept asking that question. There was a little something here and a little something there, but mostly it was bored people wandering around wondering why they had come and what the hell happened to Flux Night. You had all this space on the street so why weren't you using it? Hardly any of the street was activated by art installations or performers. Food trucks are nice for a bite to eat or grab a beer, but they aren't art and I don't come to Flux to see food trucks. I come to Flux to see A-R-T.

Part of what made Flux Night great was the character of Castleberry Hill. Not to take away from the Old Fourth Ward/Edgewood, which I enjoy and it is the trendy neighborhood du jour, but Flux Night was best suited for Castleberry Hill surrounded by the old warehouses turned lofts. Moving Flux Night was akin to taking a rose and transplanting it into the arctic tundra.

 

Another aspect that made Flux Night special was that it was a nighttime event. Other than nightlife or sports, most city events are daytime ones. It was great to see people out wandering the streets taking in the arts under the night sky. It reminded me of an Atlanta event that I remember from New Year's Eve 1996 that was set in Midtown. It was called First Night. It was not necessarily about the arts, but it was a cultural alternative to fireworks and partying at night and on the streets of the city. It brought out people into what would have been otherwise dead streets.

I don't think they were on the schedule but decided to do a street performance and busk for money. They were more entertaining than a dead street. Photo by me, November 2015.

Another aspect of what made Flux Night special was that it was an overwhelming and exciting experience. You could turn a corner and be wowed by the next installation or performance or the humanity. It was about the unexpected. There was always so much to see, to do, to admire to be inspired by. There was a feeling of the unexpected and sometimes you had to stand there awhile and think about what you were seeing. Nothing from 2015 had that.

To repair Flux Night it needs to be local again, involve local artists, thinkers and performers and embrace what makes Atlanta unique. People that understand this city need to be running Flux Night and they need to bring life back into it and put it back in Castleberry Hill. Make it overwhelming again, make it exciting and unexpected again, but never ever do what was done in 2015.

Photo by me, November 2015.

This was the Yoko Ono installation. It was at least interactive and went along with the notion of world peace that she and John are known for however it was nothing more than a world map that you could stamp. Photo by me, November 2015.

A larger view of the Yoko Ono installation. Photo by me, November 2015.

Photo by me, November 2015.

This is where we went down into a mud hole on a vacant lot for something that was doing nothing until much later in the night.

Photo by me, November 2015.

Photo by me, November 2015.

Sparse crowds with nothing to do related to the event. 

 

Photo by me, November 2015.

The most interesting things I saw all night were the things that already make the Old Fourth Ward interesting, the old Fire Station number six and the King Center.

Photo by me, November 2015.

Photo by me, November 2015.

My face summed up how disappointing the night was from beginning to end.

The Side of the Sound Table

Photo by me, November 2013.

Murals are something Atlanta is blessed with thanks to organizations like Living Walls. You can even on the grayest of days find hope and energy in the colorful work of artists from all over the world that have been brought here to brighten our blank walls. I enjoy photographing them because it takes me to all parts of the city and corners I've never been to before. Street murals have the ability to draw us in, have us stand and contemplate them for awhile, evoke an emotion and satisfy us as other forms of artistic expression will do.

There's plenty to admire and consider on this wall. Photo by me, November 2013.

The murals on the side of the Sound Table can be seen coming east on Edgewood Avenue and north/south on Boulevard in the Old Fourth Ward. In some ways it is a bit hard to figure them out. First there is the advertisement for local artist Radcliffe Bailey which is the head on the left side coming through the pieces of wood and where the word 'High" is located. Second is the 2012 mural from Argentinian artist JAZ which is the two riders on horses that are seemingly mirrored and blending together. The third is the work of French artist Roti painted in 2013, which is the whale, the structures in gray and the playful hands pinching the head from the advertisement and the other holding an eye.

Cadavre Exquis or exquisite corpse. Photo by me, November 2013.

Roti had the chance to start with a blank wall for his work by covering over the existing murals but chose not to do so and took on the challenge of making his interact with the others. He decided his mural would be based on the parlour game Exquisite Corpse. The game is based on multiple players drawing a collage in turns overlapping one another on a sheet of paper folded in quarters. That game is also a derivation of the game known as Consequences which utilizes words instead of drawing. Roti's idea was genius in creating the wall that we see today which does resemble a collage created by multiple artists. His inspiration for using a whale was that it is the largest mammal and every year despite its travels it will return to the same spot. He calls the whale the mother and says that it supports everything.

You can read an interview with Roti and other Living Walls artists in this piece in Burnaway.

Sunrise of Edgewood

Photo by me, November 2013

Walking along the streets of the Old Fourth Ward you can see any number of murals with a variety of styles and messages. This one called The Sunrise of Edgewood by Gaia and Nanook is the most vivid and eye catching. The mural arrests your attention and since it faces an open gravel lot you can easily see and admire it walking east on Edgewood. The mural was commissioned by Living Walls and was produced in 2012. The man's face in the mural is aptly round and has a warm orange and red tone mimicking that of the sunrise. The day I went to view it was a cloudy Fall day and it had the effect of brightening up the neighborhood.

Gaia is based in New York and has painted dozens of murals around the world. Nanook is based in Baltimore and has a portfolio of murals as unique and colorful in locations around the globe too.

Mural At Howell and Irwin Streets

Photo by me, February 2013

One of my photography projects is to photograph the myriad of murals scattered around the city. We seem to have an awful lot of them and so it is a project I hope to accomplish as this year goes by. I doubt I could tackle this project in one day but my goal is to photograph them while I am out shooting other subjects. As February ends I have managed to capture a couple.

The mural in this post is located at the corner of Howell and Irwin streets in the Old Fourth Ward. The building it is located on is Banna Grocery. Sadly, the owner of Banna was murdered during a robbery at the grocery in February of 2012.

When possible I will list the artist that painted the mural in this case it was done by olive47.

Joy Wall

Photo by me, March 2007.

On a cold and windy January night, early morning as it was past midnight, I left the Masquerade and walked down Angier Avenue. I was walking back to the car when I noticed these pieces of street art or as others might call them graffiti. I didn't have my camera with me at the time and hoped that these pieces would not get covered over.

Photo by me, March 2007.

Photo by me, March 2007.

 

Last week I was back at the Masquerade, again in the early morning hours, and snapped a few photos.

I was surprised to see these, but then again they are hidden away off North Avenue in a rundown area.

The paintings bring to mind the sound of Joy Division.

I love grittiness.