Dispatch From Abercorn Street

Abercorn Street, Savannah. April 2016. Photo by me.

S

lightly after eleven in the morning in Savannah and I had come from breakfast a couple of blocks away on East Liberty Street. I stood waiting for someone outside the Cathedral of St. John The Baptist. I had been in the vast church before so I waited and watched people pass on the sidewalk. I studied the buildings on this particular block that I had never paid much mind to in my many visits to this city. 

 

For the historic district, this block was not all that noteworthy so I turned around and caught the light streaming through the gate of a locked courtyard. I liked most that the sunlight was caught in the English Ivy like a spider's web. I took this photo.

Nick Drake. Date and photographer unknown.

Many years ago I became a fan of the English singer/songwriter Nick Drake. I do not remember how or where I came to know his music, but I took an instant liking to it and him. His soft voice, his guitar strumming and the comforting melancholy of his music was so easy for me to relate. His music for me was like sitting next to a fire and watching the sparks drift upwards to the starry night sky or wading through the wet and green countryside on a cold, misty day. I am never more cozy than when I listen to his music.

Behind the music Drake’s life was brief, tragic and he never came to enjoy any measurable success in his twenty-six years. In 1974, when I was only a toddler, Nick swallowed thirty of his antidepressant pills that he had been prescribed and committed suicide at his parent’s estate in the English countryside. He had dealt with depression for much of his life and finally he gave into it. The legend of Nick Drake was partly built on his early death, but the posthumous fame and success is mostly due to the limited catalog of great music that he left us. He is most well known for his song Pink Moon which has been used in commercials, movies and television shows. My favorites songs of his are: Time Has Told Me, Man In A Shed, When The Day Is Done, Fruit Tree, Way To Blue and Riverman.

Photography has meant a lot to me since I was a child. I would not consider myself a great photographer, but sometimes I do get lucky and take something worthy of being considered art. I respect serious photography like I respect a painting. For some time now I have thought that photography as art was dead or on life support. I believe social media, cell phone cameras and everyone taking photos of everything all the time has made everyone think they are a master photographer. People take photos of food now and share them and we are obsessed with selfies (oh, how I hate that word) which means that really they are just self-obsessed. Photography has been devalued and has become a method to indulge our own narcissism. 

 

The famous photographer William Eggleston of whom I am a great admirer, had an exhibition and book called Democratic Camera. Now that film is no longer necessary and digital photography can be much more cheaply done I believe the camera is more democratic and thus so is photography. What was once a special hobby for enthusiasts or a meaningful way for people to record their family in snapshots for a photo album has become a thumb press away on a smart phone for every meaningless second to be recorded. The world is flooded with images and not photography. 

 

I was further convinced that photography was dead when I saw this recent ABC story.

Yes, photography died.

Nick Drake, Riverman 

The Land Of Laughing Water

The trail head to Minnehaha Falls. Yes, someone misspelled the name.

In reading up on some material before writing this I came across the Native American phrase "laughing water" from the Dakota tribe. Laughing water translates to waterfall and Minnehaha is the Dakota word for waterfall. I had never thought of waterfalls as laughing water but the imagery it creates is playful and beautiful. I can hear the water laughing as it tumbles over a cliff and down the rocks and I hope I can remember this phrase the next time I see a waterfall.

From a spring, water comes out of a mountain at around 2,800 feet above sea level along the Rabun and Habersham County line and moves north forming Falls Branch. Falls Branch comes off the mountain descending to 1,800 feet in elevation before spilling into Lake Rabun, which was built in 1915 by damming the Tallulah River. Falls Branch takes just over a mile and a half to come down off the mountain and one hundred feet of that descent is laughing water. That stretch of laughing water is called Minnehaha Falls in North Georgia.

Minnehaha Falls is located in the far northeastern corner of the state about two hours from Atlanta and near Tallulah Gorge. It is one of several waterfalls located in this portion of the Appalachian Mountains and the Chattahoochee National Forest that cover the far northern reaches of Georgia. The waterfall is named after the famous fictional character Minnehaha in Longfellow's The Song Of Hiawatha.

It was the peak of the fall foliage in late October of 2016 when I visited Minnehaha. The area was experiencing a severe drought and streams were running abnormally low even for what is normally the dry season in Georgia. This meant that the waterfalls weren't quite as beautiful as they should have been since the water flow was limited.

The trail to the waterfall is rather short by my hiking standards at only fourth tenths of a mile from the parking area on Bear Gap Road. The trail follows along the side of Falls Branch and has a gradual incline that is very easy to walk. That short walk into the woods among the mountain laurel is much cooler from the cold mountain water than what you will experience at the trail head.

Photo by me, October 2016.

Even with the lower than normal water flow Minnehaha is a beautiful sight. It might be my favorite so far that I have visited in Georgia. I would like to return one day in wetter conditions to see the water raging over the rocks. The fallen leaves scattered on the rocks and the late afternoon sun striking the trees higher up on the mountainside made for a peaceful scene that day.

Minnehaha Falls is a little off the beaten tourist path and for that reason it isn't as well known as the other falls in North Georgia. This lack of popularity makes it a nice getaway from the crowds that often flood the Georgia mountains during the peak of the fall foliage. In my visit I encountered only six other people and I managed to get some alone time to reflect on the beauty of nature.

Lake Rabun. Photo by me, October 2016.

The parking area on Bear Gap Road. Photo by me, October 2016.

 

Some of the pretty fall color. Fall is a great time to visit. Photo by me, October 2016.

On the drive out to the waterfall you will see beautiful scenery such as Lake Rabun. The roads are twisty and narrow and speed limits are very slow on these roads. Bear Gap Road where Minnehaha is located is a gravel road with blind curves but it is well maintained so even small cars will have no problems on it.

Rethinking Reeve

Street Smart 1987

In 1987 Christopher Reeve was looking to expand his movie career beyond the Superman franchise. New York was still suffering astronomical crime and decay. AIDS was the misunderstood plague and the closeted mayor Ed Koch was in his third term. Street Smart, a movie about a dishonest journalist, a murderous pimp and the colorful street life of New York when Times Square was still exciting and not in a Disney way was relevant for the time.

Street Smart 1987

Street Smart was a personal project for Reeve, he had purchased the rights to it four years earlier and struggled to get it produced. He only agreed to do the last Superman movie so that Cannon Films would bankroll Street Smart for him. The movie had a limited opening in March of ‘87 and was only shown in 207 theaters before closing. It was a minor film that only grossed just over $1.1 million. Just a few months later in July Superman IV would open also starring Reeve and Street Smart would be forgotten.

In the same year Three Men and a Baby, Fatal Attraction, Beverly Hills Cop II and Good Morning Vietnam would all gross over $100 million at the box office to illustrate how poorly Street Smart did by comparison. However, box office receipts are not the only indicator as to whether or not a film is any good.

Imagine Morgan Freeman as a killer pimp. He was incredible in the bad guy role.

Street Smart was a clever film that never found an audience despite positive reviews. The only recognition it ever achieved was the much deserved Oscar nomination of Morgan Freeman for best supporting actor. The weekend it opened audiences were more interested in watching Lethal Weapon, Platoon and Nightmare on Elm Street 3. Even Christopher Reeve, the heroic Superman, could not persuade audiences with his star power to see his thriller with him cast as a New York reporter.

Almost thirty years had passed and I had never heard of this movie until last week. Once I watched it, I realized I had missed out on this excellent movie and it was as if I had discovered a collectible camera or book in a thrift store at some ridiculously low price.

This movie captures an era of New York street life that's gone.

From the clothes to the setting this is a beautiful movie to watch.

Some of the appeal I will admit is my nostalgia for the clothing, my attachment to the pre-internet and cell phone world, my romanticism of the gritty Manhattan I never got to experience as a teenager in rural Georgia in ‘87 as a freshman in high school and the stunning beauty that was Christopher Reeve.

I had a wind breaker just like that.

The script is not perfect and there are a couple of plot holes, but  this is a well done movie that is entertaining and intelligent. It stands up better today than anything Mel Gibson ever made and Christopher Reeve though being a rather stiff person was actually a good actor that never got much respect. Perhaps it was because of the Superman success or from his paralyzing horse jumping accident eight years after this movie that cut his career short. He was Julliard trained, a veteran of Broadway, was surprisingly versatile and was the perfectly chiseled leading man, but even still he is not widely known for being a great actor. He is still known as Superman and the guy who was paralyzed by a horse.

Reeve was very lanky at 6'4.

You could wear that shirt again today and be in style.

It seems in three decades that this movie has been forgotten. You won’t find it running at midnight on a basic cable channel, streaming on Netflix (though it can be found on their DVD service) or ever mentioned anywhere when people discuss their favorite movies of the 1980s and it isn’t a cult classic either. For it to be such a good movie it is a shame that is goes unrecognized and unseen. Street Smart falls into the category of underrated movies that are very good and only film buffs seem to remember but if they were more widely known more people would enjoy them. Movies that are similarly underrated and forgotten from the 80s are Apartment Zero, Diva, Love Streams, Kiss Me Goodbye, Garbo Talks and Author! Author!

 

Reeve would write in his 1999 autobiography, Still Me, that he was “deeply depressed” leading up to this movie and changed his management company. He went on to say the Street Smart/Superman IV deal “turned out to be a disaster.” He said that no money was spent on advertising Street Smart despite the good reviews and that it quickly vanished. He described Superman IV as a catastrophe and that this period was a “huge blow” to his career.

 

He would go on to act in a few other films like Remains Of The Day before his near fatal accident in Virginia in 1995 but television and theatre would be his primary acting outlet as his film career never soared again.

Street Smart mentioned in the March 1987 issue of Jet Magazine. That's Anne Bancroft below in 84 Charing Cross Road which is another good movie.

Equally as good and maybe even better is Deathtrap starring Reeve in 1982. In this film Reeve plays a young playwright caught up in a murder mystery in the Hamptons. Reeve shows his acting range in this role and he’s a little too believable playing opposite Michael Caine. Deathtrap is directed by one of my favorite directors, Sidney Lumet, and the film keeps you guessing until the end as to whom did what and why.

 

If you happen to be looking for something to watch that you may not have seen before and you aren’t allergic to thirty year old movies that aren’t completely CGI or based on comic book characters then maybe go watch some of Reeve’s other movies.

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.

Up At The River

The Tennessee River near Perryville, Tennessee. Photo by me January 2003.

In the mid 80s I was staying with my grandparents part of a summer up in middle Tennessee at the river. I say at the river because they had a cabin on the Beech River and not far off from the much bigger Tennessee River. It was common in our family to say, "up at the river," for anything that took place or involved where my father was born in Decatur County, Tennessee.

 My family history goes well back into the 1800s in Decatur and Perry County, Tennessee. They were and some still are big land owners, farmers and involved in the transportation of goods along the Tennessee, Ohio and Mississippi rivers. My grandfather was the exception, after leaving the Navy he took a job with Lockheed in Marietta, Georgia and he and his family left Tennessee. My father though born also in Decatur County was raised in Georgia and that's how I would become a Georgia native. Upon my grandfather's retirement in the 1980s he and my grandmother moved back home to Decatur County, Tennessee. Incidentally my father would also for work Lockheed his entire career, retire and then move back home to the river just like his father.

My grandmother once back home became a social butterfly. She wasn't one to want to stay home and tried to be involved in as many community activities as possible. She loved to go to these Saturday night country dances mostly so she could gossip with the locals and she would drag my grandfather along not that he much cared for it. My grandmother was the biggest gossip in the county and she loved to hear herself endlessly talk. The dances would take place in nearby Lexington.

Being up at the river for the summer with my brother and a few cousins probably cut into her social time, though she did still manage her weekly trips to the beauty parlor, but one time she took all of us to the dance. There was a singer performing a concert and for the life of me I couldn't remember who it was for thirty years, I could only remember he had a beard and kind of looked like my father. 

After his show he was signing autographs if you bought his glossy photo that he already had printed up. You had the choice of his picture in color or black and white, well I was cheap so I bought a black and white one. I have no idea why I bought one because he wasn't famous, obviously because if he had been he wouldn't have been performing at these dances in small town Tennessee. It's not like this place was on the circuit and it was a couple hours west of Nashville. You couldn't be much further into the middle of nowhere than Decatur County.

Then out of nowhere it hit me that it was Tom Grant (my elephant like memory finally kicked in).

Apparently he had two top 40 country hits and went on to work for the legendary Ralph Emery. He had a nice voice in that late 70s & 80s country kind of way. Sail On, better known by the Commodores, was one of his hits.

The Cherokee Rock Village

Photo by me, September 2008.

The geology of northeastern Alabama plays out in a system of low ridges and valleys for miles and miles. The landscape still mostly rural is beautiful. If you've never spent any time in northeastern Alabama then you would be surprised at how scenic it is with waterfalls, lakes, rivers, overlooks and winding trails. Once such scenic spot is the Cherokee Rock Village above Leesburg in Cherokee County.

The State Botanical Gardens of Georgia

Photo by me, April 2014

On the south side of Athens not far from downtown and the University of Georgia campus scene is the State Botanical Gardens of Georgia. The university operates the expansive 313 acres of gardens and forest that contain over 300,000 different species of plants. From indoor to outdoor gardens, nature trails and the Middle Oconee River there is plenty to see and it is all free to the public.

I've visited in the spring and summer seasons and have found the gardens beautiful both times, but personally I enjoyed them in summer more when the gardens were more showy.

Photo by me, June 2012

Photo by me, June 2012

Photo by me, June 2012

Photo by me, June 2012

Photo by me, June 2012

Photo by me, June 2012

Photo by me, June 2012.

Photo by me, June 2012.

In the summer the gardens are bursting and singing with color like a Bach concerto at an allegro tempo. However, the time I visited in spring I was underwhelmed by the gardens. Perhaps I timed it wrong in early April and I missed most of the early blooms that year or I was too early - it had been a cool spring that year and. There were a few tulips in bloom along with dogwood trees, azaleas, honeysuckle and yellow bell bushes, but for the most part the gardens were rather dull.

Empty spring beds. Photo by me, April 2014.

Photo by me, April 2014.

A very modest display of tulips. Photo by me, April 2014.

Photo by me, April 2014.

That trip in spring was a let down as I was bringing visitors I had from Canada and had told them how beautiful the gardens were on my previous visits. So to arrive in spring and see very little blooming was disappointing and I felt like I had oversold the place which is my fault. It was still a nice day to stroll the grounds.

Photo by me, April 2014.

Piedmont azalea. Photo by me, April 2014.

Photo by me, April 2014.

In addition to the outdoor gardens there is also the two-level tropical conservatory building that houses a rotating collection of tropical plants, a gift shop, restrooms and a cafe. Inside the conservatory is like walking through a miniature tropical forest.

The tropical conservatory building. Photo by me, June 2012.

Photo by me, June 2012.

Photo by me, June 2012.

Photo by me, June 2012.

 

Photo by me, June 2012.

The entire State Botanical Gardens is a preserve that contains over five miles of nature trails that was established in 1968. These gardens are older than the nearby and more popular Atlanta Botanical Garden which began in in 1976. I've always felt that the admission to the Atlanta Botanical Garden was too expensive for what it offers especially considering that many botanical gardens are free and less gimmicky.

In summer there is so much to see and enjoy at the State Botanical Gardens that I highly recommend it even in the sweltering heat and humidity of the south. I need to pay a visit in spring again to see if it was my timing that got the spring blooms wrong and of course come in the fall to see what the landscape offers. If ever in Athens and you need a tranquil place to relax and enjoy the beauty of nature make a stop here.