Paint Me The Places You've Seen

Photo by me, January 2019.

Early yesterday as the sun rose on a frosty winter morning I was on the road. I melted the thick ice off my car windows and began driving from my home in Atlanta to my brother's house in northeastern Alabama. I am writing a book and our monthly meetings are informal interviews in front a fireplace, with cups of coffee and college football going in the background. I need his memories and his confirmations of mine.

I have made this two hour drive so many times in the last fifteen years since he moved there that I could do it in my sleep. Bored by the drive, I sometimes switch the route just to break up the monotony of the landscapes. I go one way and I avoid where I grew up in Paulding County, Georgia by driving around it. Of my choices of roads this is the preferred way.

I dislike the first parts of the drive as it leaves the city through the northwest suburbs of Atlanta and up to Cartersville, Georgia. Interstate 75 is a swollen mess of lanes, always in a hurry to get nowhere drivers and ugly scenery through Cobb County. The only beauty is the crossing of the Chattahoochee River caught in a brief glimpse as a stranger caught from the corner of an eye in a crowd.

My route from home to my brother's area.

After Cobb, the landscape changes from buildings, billboards and sprawl by the time I reach Lake Allatoona and Red Top Mountain in Bartow County to something more pleasing. Allatoona is where I swam, played with my plastic boats and loved the 1970s as a small child.

In Cartersville I exit the interstate and head north on old U.S. Highway 41, the road immortalized in the song Ramblin' Man by the Allman Brothers. Highway 41 was the precursor to Interstate 75 and was decades ago the main north/south route for northerners from the Upper Midwest headed to the sunny beaches of Florida. In my mind there is no other road that I identify more with the old Georgia that I used to know. Today it is a mostly commercial highway through metro Atlanta filled with endless traffic lights, fast food restaurants and shopping centers that could be outside any city in the country. 41 is an ugly scar.

I  am on Highway 41 only a few miles before merging onto U.S. Highway 411 north of Cartersville. This is the road that will take me north and to the west close to where I am headed in Alabama. This road is a lonely road of woods on rolling hills, the cold flowing Etowah River and pastures. I hope it stays that way and never changes. Miles onward, it skirts the city of Rome, Georgia in Floyd County and breaks south and west through Cave Spring, Georgia and scurries away into Alabama. The stretch of two lane road from Rome to Cave Spring is the highlight of this drive and the prettiest.

Northwest Georgia is known for its low topped ridges and valleys that are the final tails of North America's oldest mountains, the Appalachians. These are not the big mountains of the chain like those found in north central and northeast Georgia, but are more like grooves in the geological record. Having grown up in Northwest Georgia in what was then a rural area I feel very much at home passing through.

Topographical map of Vans Valley.

Vans Valley along Highway 411 between the community of Six Mile and the town Cave Spring is the most scenic stretch of the drive. It is a wide valley with grazing and crop land on the floor enclosed by two of those low topped ridges.

I have also seen this particular area spelled as "Vann's Valley" which I believe to be the correct spelling. The name is said to come from David Vann who lived here. Vann was a sub-Chief of the Cherokee Nation and was treasurer between 1839 through 1851. Vann was killed by Union supporting Pin Indians during the American Civil War in 1863.

Highway 411 follows the same road through the valley as it did when the Cherokees were forcibly removed from their land during The Trail Of Tears.

Photo by me, January 2019.

The road along the floor of the valley hugs the southeastern side. The area reminds me of the area in Tennessee where my father's family lived and farmed in the mid 1800s up to now. A picturesque world of bottom land and hills that pop up out of everywhere and nowhere. 

Photo by me, January 2019.

The eastern side of the valley and the ridges that enclose it.

Photo by me, January 2019.

Photo by me, January 2019.

A large estate can be seen looking to the western side of the valley. There are many nice homes through here and into the town of Cave Spring.

Leaving Vans Valley I enter Cave Spring. It is a town known for a cave, spring water, the Georgia School For The Deaf, antique stores and it is a speed trap if there ever was one. The cops aggressively enforce the ridiculously low speed limits that stretch too far. A person could walk through Cave Spring faster than they could drive through it.

Cave Spring is the last town in Georgia on my drive. U.S. Highway 411 veers due west from here and in a few miles crosses the state of Alabama line in the direction of Centre.

Photo by me, January 2019.

An old barn sits in another valley in Alabama. The scenery on my brother's road is the same as Northwest Georgia a few miles away. The ridges and valleys do not recognize the state line that divides them. Humans can put labels and can draw boundaries but the land does not give a damn. 

 
"Down the way the road's divided
Paint me the places you have seen
Those who know what I don't know
Refer to the yellow, red, and green"
R.E.M. - Maps and Legends

Mud Creek Falls, Georgia

Out wandering around the far northeastern tip of Georgia in Rabun County I went to see a waterfall on a late summer day. There was no hiking through a forest or up a mountain, this was a waterfall for a lazy walk. Mud Creek Falls, sometimes referred to as Little Estatoah Falls, was the perfect waterfall for the moment.

X marks the spot.

The waterfall is located in what was Sky Valley Ski Resort, the only snow ski resort in the state. Fifteen years ago it became Sky Valley Resort dropping the snow skiing altogether, apparently a snow ski resort in Georgia was not profitable enough. It was a place I remember hearing about as a kid and seeing on the evening news when the local Atlanta television stations went looking for a "snow in Georgia" type story.

September 2018. Photo by me.

Out of the 57,513 square miles of land that Georgia has, Sky Valley is one of my favorite scenic places in the state.

On the far reaches of the resort on Tahoe Road and behind Spring Lake is where you will find the waterfall. It is open to the general public, there is no fee to visit and there is no entrance gate to hassle you.

After you park on the rather steep and narrow parking area there is Mud Creek. To your left is the 100 foot waterfall, which you will hear before you see it. If you are so inclined and not concerned with your safety, you can climb all over it. I do not recommend climbing on slippery large rocks with water pummeling you from above, but some people will do it anyway.

If you wish you may also hike to the falls. I would like to return and do that one day. There is a hiking trail that begins on Highway 246. It is roughly a two mile hike one-way that approaches the waterfall from the northwest and parallels Mud Creek. The trailhead is located on the right side of the road just beyond the Sky Valley overlook. There is a small pull off area for parking. The trail may at times have a closed gate, but you can disregard that and walk around it without worry.

September 2018. Photo by me.

The dull name, Mud Creek,  does not do it justice.

 

September 2018. Photo by me.

 

A closer look at the top of the waterfall. It has a nice misty spray for those hot days.

September 2018. Photo by me.

September 2018. Photo by me.

September 2018. Photo by me.

It is a green, cool and shady spot around the waterfall in the summertime. There are ferns growing among the rocks of the waterfall and the creek. This is what I believe to be an eastern hay-scented fern in the second photo above. I am not positive on the identification, but these are common ferns in this type of environment next to a Georgia mountain stream. The UGA Extension service is a wonderful resource for identifying plants and trees in Georgia has a list for identifying ferns here.

Wipers' Silver Sail

S

ince most current rock/pop sucks I am going back and listening to bands and artists that I did not know about back at the time or never got around to listening to until now. I would like to discover new music from the past to listen to that I can enjoy.

 

The state of current music is pitiful, especially what is deemed to be popular today. Last week I turned to the other person in the car as we listened to Power 96 and asked which computer was singing that song. He laughed.

 

This weekend I decided to take listen to Wipers, a band from Portland, Oregon. The band formed in 1977 and continued releasing new material until 1999. The only information I knew about them was that Nirvana's Kurt Cobain was a fan of the band and had three of their albums on his top 50 favorite albums list. Since I'm a Nirvana fan, and if Cobain liked them, then maybe I would like them.

 

Everywhere I turned to learn about the band I saw them labeled as a punk rock band but after listening to their music I decided they sounded more post-punk than punk. The lead singer of the band Greg Sage said that he, "never liked being labeled anything."

Listening to their entire discography I hear influences from punk, but not enough of to call them a punk band on the order of Black Flag or anything similar. To my ears, they sound like an alternative/indie band. What's in a label anyway? What matters most is whether the music is good and strikes your fancy.

I am really taken with their 1993 album Silver Sail. It was a reunion album after the band broke up in 1989. The album sounds different from the albums in the 1980s and has the band moving forward and adopting a sound very much of the time. Some of the difference in sound might be attributable to a change of location since this album was recorded in Arizona and not the darkness of the Pacific Northwest. Not that this is a sunny happy experience with songs titled Prisoner, Never Win and Warning.  The sound is moody and bleak with plenty of fuzzy 90's guitar.

As much as I have enjoyed Silver Sail you cannot go wrong giving a listen to any of Wipers albums if you are looking for real music.

 

Magnapop

Magnapop's 1994 Hotboxing

I was writing something up about Los Angeles, VU meters, over modulation, potentiometers and how to operate certain aspects of a studio while I was listening to music on Youtube.

Then I remembered this mostly forgotten band from 1990s Atlanta called Magnapop. They were/are a good band and I remember hearing them get airplay back in the day on 99X when I was bopping up and down Ponce de Leon Avenue. A quick search revealed that they are apparently still performing. Hmmm.

The songs I liked from them were Slowly Slowly, Open The Door (my favorite), Merry and Piece Of Cake.

Magnapop rocked.

We had good alternative rock in the 1990s from all kinds of bands with male and female lead vocalists. I wonder when if ever alternative rock will ever make a return?

Damn I miss guitars in music.

For The Love Of The Turtleneck

Designer Halston. Photographer unknown. Probably 1970s.

So I have read, heard and seen turtlenecks are back. I greatly approve of the recycling of the turtleneck back into fashion. I love turtlenecks and have worn them off and on since the late 1980s.

For the last decade or so I haven not worn one because I didn't own any and they were impossible to find. Then much to my delight they came back into style. I will admit that turtlenecks have been much maligned and some people absolutely detest them. Some people identify them with the beatniks of the 1950s and poetry readings. Others associate them with boring English professors that are too concerned with books than fashion.

I think that the turtleneck has gotten an unfair bad reputation and I find them chic and sophisticated. I associate them with the glamorous 1970s. Just look at the photo of Halston above, was he a beatnik or a nerd? He was anything but. Some people might dislike or be uncomfortable with how a turtleneck gathers closely around the neck. Some people say they feel choked by them, but I suspect they are wearing one that is too tight fitting. I like my turtlenecks to be just slightly loose. The fabric around the neck does not bother me because I so often wear scarfs in the fall, winter and into the cool spells of spring.

Some just are not going to like the look and feel of turtlenecks and that is understandable because they do take getting accustomed to if you have never worn one. I am not one to follow fashion trends all that closely, but I have been waiting a long time for turtlenecks to return to stores so that I could again get my hands on some.

So back last November I finally bought some turtlenecks and I have been happily wearing them when it has been cold enough. Hooray for the return of the turtleneck because I adore them.

Donna Summer's I Feel Love from that wonderful decade that was the 1970s.

Avant Parker

Acouple of years ago I found out about Australian performer Courtney Barnett. I fell in love with her song Avant Gardener. I thought the song was interesting and the lyrics were humorous. I also liked her voice and that was left handed like me. She was a breathe of fresh air in a musical landscape of auto tuned robots that can't play instruments.

Last year, she was in Atlanta for the Shaky Knees Festival and recorded a series of ten music videos for her latest album, Tell Me How You Really Feel, at an impromptu performance in Piedmont Park which was not associated with the festival. How cool is that? I wish I had known about it.

Out of the ten songs I liked Nameless, Faceless the most.

My Favorite Albums

These are my top ten favorite albums that I have fallen in love with and never tire of listening. They are listed in no particular order because I could not rate one better than the other.

First, a little about my background and how it relates to music. I was raised in a household that always had music playing on the stereo. In my house we listened to records or the radio more than we ever watched television. Music is important to me and much of my life is remembered in association to certain songs or albums.

My musical influences at home were rather varied. I heard lotss of Elvis and even though I was young when he died I remember my mother going through an extended period of grief by playing all of her Elvis albums for weeks afterwards. My mother was more into rock listening to Bruce Springsteen, John Mellencamp, Tina Turner, Rod Stewart and anything with a guitar and a good beat that she could snap her fingers to and tap her foot. My father was more of a listener of smooth rock and soul groups like Earth Wind And Fire, Steely Dan, Kenny Rogers, Chicago, Christopher Cross, Diana Ross and Lionel Richie. My brother who is five years older than I am was into Def Leppard, Loverboy, Boston, Twisted Sister, Kiss and AC/DC.

As a kid in the 1970s and 1980s I never heard much country music other than Hank Williams Jr. or Alabama and I never found it interesting on my own despite living in a rural area in the American South. My family was not country music fans and I was into whatever was on MTV and the Atlanta radio stations of Z-93, Power 99 and 94Q. By the time I started to form my own musical tastes in the 1980s I was into WHAM! then George Michael, Culture Club, INXS, Bon Jovi, Natalie Cole and Whitney Houston.

The first record I ever bought was a 45 single of Bill Squire's The Stroke followed by Paul McCartney's Take It Away and Rod Stewart's Infatuation. As teenager I went to a random assortment of concerts from Duran Duran, Bon Jovi, Rod Stewart to Joe Cocker.

During the 1990s I was all about alternative rock and female singer/songwriters.

By 2000 I was heavily into triphop which morphed into a love for jazz.

---

Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)

I had been a fan of Radiohead going back to the Pablo Honey album from 1993. By the time 2001 had come and Amnesiac was released the band and I had both changed and grown. Radiohead had morphed into an experimental rock band and gone was the straight ahead rock band they were when Creep brought them onto my radar all those years before. Radiohead changed their sound with Kid A which was recorded at the same time as Amnesiac but released first into this musical abstract painting of electronica and noise. The songwriting was still there and still meaningful, but the layers of production often obscured them. Amnesiac was the better of the two albums and is my favorite from the band. Like all great albums this one takes the listener on a journey. Amnesiac is like drifting down a river on a small raft into deeper and deeper water, hitting rapids, sometimes going under the cold water and then resurfacing soaking wet. Knives Out for all the violence in the lyrics is the most smooth and peaceful song to listen to on the album. Thom Yorke's phrasing strings the words together in his vocals into one long blur over a languid guitar that lulls you into false sense of safety. Pyramid Song, another favorite of mine on this album, is like floating through space as someone pecks away on a piano. Amnesiac is one helluva journey.

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Sarah Mclachlan - Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993)

I was at the house I grew up in the country sitting out on one of the outdoor decks soaking up the sunshine of summer 1994 at the age of twenty-one listening to the legendary Atlanta alternative radio station 99X. The late great DJ Sean Demery was on the air and he played the song Good Enough from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. It was one of those unforgettable moments. I had up until that point never heard of Sarah Mclachlan and I was so taken by the song. Quickly thereafter I went to the nearest Turtles Record Store and bought Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. I loved that album from song one Possession to the bonus track piano version of Possession hidden at the end. The album features sharp songwriting, slick production and exudes an atmosphere of hidden doors in dark corners of the human mind. It can be melancholy at times, but the songs are grounded in raw emotional writing that keeps the album from sinking into a depressing miasma. Give one listen to the bonus track of the piano version of Possession and tell me this isn't great music.

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R.E.M. - Murmur (1983)

My first introduction to R.E.M. came in 1988 in high school with the release of their album Green. I bought Green on cassette at the recommendation of a friend and ever since 1988 R.E.M. has and forever will be my favorite band. Little did I know at the time that Green was their sixth studio album. I had plenty of music to go back and personally discover like hidden treasure now that I had been handed the map of R.E.M. Murmur released in 1983 on the I.R.S. Records label features a couple of the band's more well known songs - Talk About The Passion and Radio Free Europe. Yet, most of the songs on this album are not generally known to people other than R.E.M. fans and would not be considered hit songs. Murmur is a fun upbeat collection of songs that gallop along to the early sounds of the band that is often described as jangle pop. There are a couple of slower songs such as Laughing and the brilliant Perfect Circle (my favorite R.E.M. song). Being a band from Athens, Georgia they are in my mind the sound of the 1980s in rural Georgia largely disconnected from the world, covered in kudzu, falling down barns and junked out cars in the backyard surrounded by privet. That is the sound that early R.E.M. evokes for me because I grew up in that landscape and Murmur is the best example of that sound.  Some might think that country music best fits the rural countryside of the American South or maybe the blues, but not for me because when I look at the pine trees, the pastures and rotting farm houses I hear R.E.M. This album is an invitation to mischief that is out there lurking somewhere down the country road and I suggest you follow it.

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Natalie Merchant - Tigerlily (1995)

I was a fan of the band 10,000 Maniacs and their jangly pop/folk infused music so when Natalie Merchant left the group and went solo I did not know what to expect. Then she released her first solo album and killed it from the first note of San Andreas Fault. It was as if she had all these great songs bottled up, stored away and ready to unleash onto the world. Natalie is a wonderful storyteller and the unique texture of her voice, that is full and strong has an uncommon beauty, is ideal for tugging at your heart. Tigerlily is an album that will make your soul richer for having listened to it. There is not a bad song on this album. The song Beloved Wife is one of the sweetest songs I have ever heard and Natalie's voice commands you to listen and then...then her voice breaks ever so slightly on the chorus and your heart tears into pieces. By the time the album closes with the song Seven Years it is the end of a journey, a cathartic exorcism of emotional demons. This album is one heavy listen. Tigerlily for me is the overwhelming smell of incense and the moments of sitting and staring out the wall of old factory windows from my loft overlooking the gray winter landscape of Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta because that was my life in 1995. This album is like time traveling for me, but even in 2019 as I write this I can listen to this album and find it still as good as it was then.

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Nick Drake - Bryter Layter (1971)

This first time I heard Bryter Layter I was so confused by it, thinking what in the hell have they done to Nick Drake. This initial impression was based on years of only listening to Drake's Five Leaves Left and Pink Moon albums and before I had read the various books about his short life. Once I knew more about Nick the person and what was going on at his record label when this album was recorded I came to better understand it. Bryter Layter was such a departure from his other albums that my impression of him came to change. It took repeated listens, but then I saw the magic in this album and it never left me, becoming my favorite album of his. This album to me is Nick Drake leaves university, goes to the big city (London), gains sophistication and finds himself a more polished musical identity. If you know the story of Nick Drake then you know what unfortunately happens next. Nick's voice is as smooth as some 70's crushed velvet, his guitar playing is bang on and tight as always and the session musicians perform the lush piano, horn and string arrangements beautifully. John Cale was hanging out in the studio with Nick for the recording of this album and he plays celeste, piano and organ on the song Northern Sky. Nick Drake's voice once it gets into your head will haunt you especially on the song One Of These Things First. Overall, his lyrics matured from his earlier album (Five Leaves Left) and what I think is his best song, At The Chime Of A City Clock, is found here on Bryter Layter.

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Nirvana - Nevermind (1991)

There is no album that changed the music industry or influenced a generation in my lifetime more than Nevermind. This was a singular cultural earthquake that will forever define Generation X, my generation. Hair bands like Warrant, Poison, Motley Crue and their ilk were wiped off the face of the planet, MTV and the radio when Kurt Cobain screamed, "here we are now, entertain us." I remember the fall of 1991 when this album came out and seeing the video for Smells Like Teen Spirit on MTV every hour. Nirvana put me into a trance. There was Kurt in his brown and green striped shirt and those anarchy wearing cheerleaders and those kids slamming into each other and I was forever mesmerized at age eighteen. Nevermind was this fuzzy wall of sound that came to be known as grunge and suddenly I had a new band to obsess over. Come As You Are was then and is still my favorite song on the album. This is still true even though the guitar part is probably lifted from the Killing Joke's Eighties (seriously see how obvious it is) who probably lifted it from The Damned's Life Goes On (I mean is there any doubt). Lithium, Something In The Way and On A Plain are also favorites of mine from the album. Nirvana gave us this very special album and I wish there had been more after In Utero besides the Unplugged album and all the old material that has been released posthumously. That's the thing about Nevermind to me, I don't listen to it or love it for nostalgic reasons, but to listen to the best alternative rock album ever recorded that won't be eclipsed in my lifetime.

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Portishead - Roseland NYC Live (1998)

In July 1997 the trip hop band Portishead recorded this live album in the Roseland Ballroom in New York. Typically I am not a fan of live albums, but this one is the rare exception. In the late 1990s as alternative rock music lost its way I was introduced to trip hop by an industrial designer I was dating and he set me off on a path of musical discovery that would forever change me. I went deep down the rabbit hole of trip hop which would eventually lead me to electronica and onward to jazz. During my trip down the trip hop rabbit hole Portishead became my favorite band in the genre. Beth Gibbons on vocals and the rest of Portishead performing live with an orchestra backing them sets a mood, a vibe that is ecstasy for the ears. It is dark and dramatically lit with the lights dimmed, you have your feet up, smoke is wafting by and this chanteuse named Beth pleading with you as she grabs you by the collar. "Just listen," she says. Roads is my favorite song on the album and of all-time by the band. Just listen to the crowd's reaction when they realize the band is about to perform Roads and you'll get the idea. As Beth sings "storm in the morning light and I feel no more," you shake your head in acknowledgement that yes, I totally get that.

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Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain (2000)

Felt Mountain is a trip to the fun house at the carnival or maybe being locked inside an insane asylum. Goldfrapp have never been a band that takes themselves too seriously and they have taken more strange musical turns than any band I can think of in my memory. The whistling to open the album on Lovely Head tells you to understand that this is no ordinary album. This album is cohesive in its strangeness, its "otherness" from beginning to end; listening to it, it never fails to capture your attention. At times it borders on being avant-garde with the heavily filtered vocals of Alison Goldfrapp on Deer Stop. She has an ethereal voice singing a lullaby in Oompa Radar to only be overtaken by the carnival tubas while your mind is turned wrong side up in a house of mirrors. Horse Tears, my favorite song on Felt Mountain, has the lyrics, "night has fallen mute and cold, my horse is crying," and I chuckle at it every time. Listening to it I feel like I am sitting in front of a fireplace on an icy night in a big old empty country house. Felt Mountain is music for those with an adventurous mind and I dare you to take it.

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Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes (2008)

If ever there was album that makes the perfect soundtrack for one of my other favorite hobbies, hiking in nature, it would have to be Fleet Floxes self-titled debut full album in 2008. Robert Pecknold's voice is like a tall old evergreen tree standing on the side of a mountain and at the same time a cold spring fed stream cascading over boulders. Put that voice on an album full of dense and beautifully constructed lyrics and backed by sublime harmonies and you have Fleet Foxes. The acoustic guitars at the beginning of Tiger Mountain Peasant Song (my favorite song on the album) sound just as I imagine the sunlight shining through the branches of a tree high above in the forest canopy would sound like. Meadowlarks with its slow strumming makes me want to go sit by a stream, close my eyes and drift away into the atmosphere. White Winter Hymnal will always reminded me of hiking down the Dockery Lake Trail in the North Georgia Mountains in the late summer heat on the way to camp. This song has a bouncy beat that is ideal to keep humping it down the trail for miles even though you are already beat. This album has its dreamy moments, tender moments and a strong sense for longing for place to call home whether in a physical space or in the heart of someone else. Fleet Foxes came at a time when listeners were in desperate need of authentic singers and musicians. The band found an overwhelming audience, but unfortunately what should have been a clarion call to the music industry to find genuine artists that weren't auto tuned robots wasn't heeded. Popular music instead would headlong into hell.

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Mono - Formica Blues (1997)

Mono is another trip hop band, but they did not have the career longevity as Portishead or Massive Attack, as a matter of fact they only released one album called Formica Blues. They did manage to have one hit song off of their album called Life In Mono that was featured in the film Great Expectations starring Ethan Hawke. The band consisted of vocalist Siobhan de Mare and keyboardist Martin Virgo. Despite their one hit song most people are not going to be familiar with Mono and their album Formica Blues is rather obscure. While unknown to most, this album resides deep in my heart like a long ago lover that you cannot forget and you can still smell their scent. I listen to Formica Blues late at night with the headphones on and often with my eyes closed. This is not music for the daylight as sunshine renders it impotent. I compare this album to walking through an underground labyrinth with water dripping from the ceiling and lights glimmering in this distance. This could be music for a slow burning spy film during the Cold War. The album borrows from jazz influences and people such as Burt Bacharach and Phil Spector. My favorite song on the album is The Outsider. It has fat beats and a hypnotic rhythm with seductive vocals panning from left to right and back again. The songs The Blind Man and Penguin Freud are in the same vein as this too. Penguin Freud with the lyric, "beautifully stupid," is a close runner up to my favorite song on the album. Hello Cleveland is like a smooth drink after the longest of days.

2019 Arrived

Spring Street in Midtown Atlanta, December 31, 2018.

 

H

appy new year I suppose.

 

It is raining outside this morning and that has been the case for almost a solid month now. We completed one of the rainiest Decembers that I can remember with 12.02 inches of rain and for the year it was 67.22 inches. That yearly total was 14.25 inches above normal. It rained and rained through fall and into early winter after a dry summer.

On a drive over to my brother's house in northeastern Alabama on Sunday I noticed that all of the rivers and streams I crossed were close to flooding the landscape.

It has been mild since Christmas day and I am ready for the cold to return after this mild to warm spell. I bought a new black wool coat for the winter in early December and I have only had a few occasions to wear it so far.

Another new glass tower in Midtown pushes the old to the curb.

Yesterday walking around Midtown I saw teenagers sitting on a bench eating ice cream cones while wearing short sleeve tee-shirts. That's not normal, even for Atlanta, on New Year's Eve. 

Since I was last here I have read six books:
Lost In Hollywood: The Fast Times and Short Life Of River Phoenix by John Glatt
Eruption: The Untold Story Of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson
The Book Of Matt: Hidden Truths About The Murder Of Matthew Shepard by Stephen Jimenez
Skin Lane by Neil Bartlett
Being There by Jerzy Konsinski
The Devotion Of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

I enjoyed Skin Lane the most out of those books followed by The Devotion of Suspect X. Despite Being There is one of my favorite films I was not so impressed by the book on which it was based. It was one of those rare cases where the film was better than the source material. I felt the same way about the film of The Shining which was better than the original book.

 

The last few months I have been exploring more punk and post-punk music. Somehow, I'm not sure really, I discovered this band called Pink Turns Blue. They are a band from Berlin that began in the mid 1980s and are still performing today. They would be considered a "post-punk" band and some categorize them as a "dark wave" band. I think of their sound as post-punk and I have been enjoying immensely their 1987 album If Two Worlds Kiss.

Pink Turns Blue - When It Rains

I got a pair of Dr. Martens  boots last month, so I'm totally hardcore punk now, just kidding. I do like the boots though and have always wanted a pair and they are to my surprise so comfortable. It is a bit of a style departure for me to wear combat boots, but I find the punk aesthetic so appealing. I have not gone as far as to get a black leather jacket yet or to shave my head into a mohawk, but the leather jacket could be a possibility.

By the way there is no similarity between punks and skinheads so please don't confuse the two. The politics of those two groups were polar opposites despite some being confused about the two groups. Skinheads, real skinheads, would just as soon as exterminate my kind as look at me.

The photography book Skins And Punks Lost Archives 1978-1985 by Gain Watson is an excellent visual resource about the differences between skinheads and punks.  

Image source: Wikipedia

In the 1980s and the 1990s there was a gay subculture of skinheads in the United States and Europe. It was a movement that was about appropriating the look of the skinhead with the shaved heads and combat boots. It was about adopting the look without the politics. I remember seeing gay men wearing the skinhead look back then and I thought it was rather hot on certain men.

I will not be shaving my head, I like my hair too much for that.

A September Saturday Morning

 

Hurricane Florence this morning.

The sun is blazing and it is hot this morning. The wind is beginning to stir on the last remaining days of summer this Saturday. We here in Atlanta await the remnants of Hurricane Florence which is still over in South Carolina and moving ever so slowly this way. The rain will come, but not so heavily and the wind will blow and at least it will be cooler for a day and maybe two. I am looking forward to the rain.

It has been some time since I sat down to write here even though I have been thinking about it. I could say that I have been too busy and it is true that I have been busy with life and whatnot. I guess I have just been thinking about the 90s and how I miss them. I miss life before the internet and cell phones saturated modern living and so I have been staying away from here to think.

Last night standing outside talking to my neighbor until it was too late, after midnight, we talked about society on a hot and humid night. He's younger than I am, in his 20s, and even though he was alive in the 90s he was only a child so he cannot appreciate the differences in life and society as it is today compared to the 90s. I said something about how I felt that people were too serious these days and I don't think he could fully grasp what I was talking about.

But...I do miss those days without cell phones and limited internet access.

Enigmatic Miami

Miami. Photo by me in 2009.

Several times over the last nine or ten years I have traveled to Miami and each time I leave I still feel like I do not know the city any better than I did before. Part of me wants to love this city carved out of the swamp and perched next to the ocean on the southeast corner of the state, but I cannot love something I do not know.

Miami is a mystery to me that comes wrapped in sandy beaches, glistening waters and shiny towers pulsating in a rhythm and energy that unsettles me. The city has the most aggressive drivers I have ever seen - worse than New York, Atlanta, Washington, Chicago or Los Angeles. Maybe it is all that hot sunshine boiling the atmosphere that removes patience from the human mind? Driving on I-95 or any street in that city is an education in seeing how quickly a car can be maneuvered through traffic and miraculously squeezed into the narrowest of gaps. It is more than the driving that perplexes me about Miami, it is the entire city that feels so anxious, on edge and violent as if cocaine is swirling on the sea breezes.

In an effort to better understand Miami I decided to read Joan Didion's book called Miami in hopes that it might give me a better idea of what I am missing from my own experiences in the city. Didion's book published in 1987, which I read over the last couple of weeks while traveling the American West and finished back at home unfortunately was not the book I hoped it would be. Miami is a book that is narrowly focused on the history of Cuban exiles and how they have influenced South Florida since the 1960s into the 1980s. The book is good at examining the key players in the Cuban exile community since the 1960s and their activities here in the U.S., Cuba and Central America, especially Nicaragua, but it never steps outside those bounds to provide a larger take on the city as a whole. If you want to read about guerillas training in the Everglades, bombings, the Bay of Pigs, clandestine CIA operations and U.S./Cuban politics then this is a great book for that. If like me, you were wanting a broader view of a Miami and its people this is definitely not the book to provide such a background.

I will have to keep looking for a book that will help me better understand what it is I am missing from my own experiences in Miami. In reading Miami the most interesting piece of information that I learned about was a temporary art installation by artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1983. I was ten years old at the time so I must have missed out on seeing this on the television news or I simply do not remember it, but this was a large scale installation that would have made national headlines at the time. The installation was called Surrounded Islands and was incredible.

Surrounded Islands 1983. Image courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

The installation consisted of surrounding eleven islands in Biscayne Bay with floating pink polypropylene sheets. It would have been beautiful to have seen this in person. Prior to this I only knew of Christo and Jeanne-Claude from a documentary I had watched several years ago about their temporary installation known as The Gates of Central Park in 2005.

Though I may not have enjoyed Didion's book about Miami I do have her to thank for exposing me to Surrounded Islands. Here's a link to a 2018 story from the Miami Herald looking back on Surrounded Islands thirty five years later.

High Falls, Alabama

Photo by me, July 2016.

As with most places in Alabama, High Falls waterfall is in the middle of nowhere in the northern part of the state a few miles east of the Tennessee River. Once you turn off the main road you find yourself driving between large fields, chicken farms and down narrow little roads that are more like lanes but at least they are paved. This waterfall is off the beaten path even by Alabama standards and is not all that well known outside of locals but it is worth a visit.

Photo by me, July 2016.

A walk down a path from the parking lot, through a picnic area and you emerge through the tree canopy to find the waterfall from an overlook. Unfortunately, when I came it was the driest time in summer and the water flow was low. So what is probably a beautiful waterfall in more wet weather was little more than a small trickle cascading thirty-five feet over the rocks into a pool below. It was so dry that the view was more of a rocky cliff than a waterfall. I recommend coming after a heavy rain or in the winter if you want to see more water gushing over the cliff.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Still the lack of water did not deter people from enjoying the rocks to jump down into the pool of water below. With the lack of raging water this was actually a great place to go swimming on a hot summer's day.

Photo by me, July 2016.

As you can see the water here in Town Creek is very shallow as it approaches the waterfall and you can easily walk out to the edge without getting swept away when the water is low.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Photo by me, July 2016.

The calm waters were reflecting the sky well on a hot July day.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Photo by me, July 2016.

To have a better view of the landscape there is a pedestrian bridge above the waterfall.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Photo by me, July 2016.

Prior to the current bridge there had been a covered bridge that spanned the shallow creek. As with some many things, especially covered bridges, the bridge was lost to time and burned in the 1950s.

Photo by me, July 2016.

The only remaining portions of the covered bridge are the original stone support pillars from the early 1920s.

For more information and directions to this out of the way place you can go here.