NC Day 3 - Markets, Mexico, and Making the New South in Charlotte
I spent today in Charlotte. I started out by getting breakfast at Central Coffee Company, one of the premier coffee shops in the city. The coffee was indeed very good, but the real specialty was their baklava. Holy god was it good. Flaky, sweet, and just the perfect breakfast.
They also earn bonus points as a coffee shop for easily having the best bathroom sign I've ever seen.
After my breakfast, I went to visit the McGill Rose Garden, a local award-winning rose garden that used to be only open on Mother's Day but has since been opened to the public. Unfortunately when I was there, it was closed because the florists were out making a delivery. What I could see through the fences though was really beautiful, and I was a big fan of the way they chose to say they were closed.
After the Rose Garden, I went to the Museum of the New South. I really didn't know what that term "New South" meant before my visit, so I wasn't sure what to expect, but I ended up really loving this museum.
The New South essentially refers to the South post-civil war from Reconstruction onwards. The museum does talk about the geographical south more broadly, but it tended to focus on North Carolina and Charlotte in particular. The main permanent exhibit on the bottom floor is a walk through history starting with a reconstructed (sorry for the pun) share cropper's hut and tracing the economic, political, and social changes in the region from a primarily agrarian society to the rise of textile mills to the communications boom of the 50s to today. I give a ton of credit to the museum for not just saying what happened, but really trying to dig deep into why things happened and how different events fed into one another, like how rich politicians would use economic down turns to exploit racial tensions in a way that ensured their continued power. The museum was very interested in class relations, which I found intriguing because they pointed out that while slavery was undeniably, undeniably cruel and debilitating to the black community, it was only the rich who were actually benefitting from the fruits of slave labor and it was actually also used to establish dominance over poor whites. While poor whites weren't treated as cruelly as the blacks were both before and after slavery, they were maintained in a place where they had little to no economic autonomy thus also placing them at the whims of the upper classes. I had never really considered this, because I think in my head and probably in the head of most northerners, everyone had slaves in the south. This is not to say that the museum sugar coated the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow, or the rise of the KKK but they did try to paint a more complete picture of what the south actually was like. I also give them a TON of credit for always saying outright that the KKK was a terrorist group, because especially now when a lot of politicians aren't willing to outright say that, I think it's very important to look at them for what they are. Calling them a social group is like calling the Nazis a knitting club. Even if they've been "relatively peaceful" now post-Civil Rights (I've heard people make this argument), you can't scrub the history of what the organization was founded explicitly on.
On a lighter note, once the museum gets more into the 20th century there was a more fun facts like how people were really mad at Vince McMahon for moving the WWE Headquarters out of Charlotte or how many barbers went on to lead successful political careers purely because of all the community support they had. I love that. They also had a cool chart on different communication styles in the North and South, and how these little things like tendencies toward direct or indirect speech can drive perceived regional differences.
On the second floor were the special exhibits. The biggest one was pretty heavy, and was about the Black Lives Matter movement and contemporary protests to police violence. This was an extraordinarily well done exhibit that seemed to arise from very earnest questioning after a protest and riot that happened in Charlotte of "How did this happen here?" Based on this museum's portrait at least, Charlotte seems to pride themselves on being a relatively open-minded and liberal city but they proved to not be immune to this national crisis, and the museum exhibit looked to really try to understand why. I was very impressed with the way the museum opened with three big line graphs plotting the history of education, housing, and criminal justice policies over the past hundred years positing that these three things combined give a clearer understanding of how a system of unequal racial treatment by the justice system could have arisen. It's much more nuanced and less reductive than the simple "the police are racist" narrative some people do seriously push, and probably more people incorrectly think is is trying to be pushed by different protest groups. There are definitely a more than a few bad apples who find their way into the police force, but the actual extent of the injustice can only really be explained by bad policies rather than bad individuals. It was a really powerful way to start the exhibit and from there, it got almost impossibly heavy as it just highlighted really tragic stories of individual stories of people of color who for varieties of reasons were unfairly killed by law enforcement. This was then coupled with a timeline of the Charlotte protest of one such killing, that escalated into a riot leading to the death of at least one protestor. It was a lot to take in, but I think very important stuff to take in. And I think it was all presented as free of judgment as possible, which I really liked it. They included a lot of quotes from families, participants (both police officers and protestors), and witnesses to try to provide as fair an account of every instance as possible.The goal was definitely more to criticize a system that allows this to happen rather than to demonize or deify any one group.
The next little exhibit was a really lovely palette cleanser from dealing with social ills, and just focused on celebrating love in all its forms in Charlotte. It was just a series of black and white photographs of different couples from all kinds of walks of life, orientations, and persuasions. It was super sweet. There was one gay couple though where both guys had the same first name, and while I don't think there's anything wrong with that, it must get confusing as hell.
After the museum, I went to the ImaginOn, a children's museum and Library. It was really awesome, and I loved all the art around the place, but I didn't stay too long because it felt weird being an adult who liked it there as much as the little kids.
Next to the ImaginON, I went to the 7th Street Public Market for lunch. It was a really nice indoor marketplace, filled with lots of different international vendors. I really liked just walking around and looking at everything. I ended up going to Zia Pia Imports for lunch. It was a good little Italian Bakery and Deli, and they made me a mean prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich, and the woman at the cash register was really nice. To wash it down, I went to a coffee shop called Not Just Coffee. I did get there coffee though so I don't know if I got the full experience.
After lunch, I went to the Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. It was a really weirdly designed and beautiful building right in the middle of downtown Charlotte with a great view overlooking the city.
The museum had three floors of exhibits most of which were cool visiting ones. The visiting exhibits were all linked thematically by regarding different artists' approaches to photography in Mexico. I really liked the way they explored photography's sort of blended role as documentation and art and whether it can be true documentation if the goal is purely artistic. The first floor of exhibits was focused on the photography of Paul Strand, one of the first already well established American photographers to live in and take pictures of Mexico. I think moreso than the other artists on display his photos blurred the lines between serving as documents and works of art, because for most of the US and the Art World, they were some of the first images of Mexico that people had ever seen. Thus they do have a certain exotification effect, but they also paved the way for a lot more interest in Mexican Art more generally, so while they weren't my personal favorite works in the museum, I can see why they're important and also a good starting point for the exhibit more broadly.
Tucked away in the hallway behind the Strand photos was this work by an Artist who's name I forgot to write down. I really liked it though because it looks so simple until you realize it's made from corrugated iron that was very carefully beaten and sculpted to project the image of smooth water rippling. I thought it was really cool, and I am just kicking myself for not writing down the dude's name.
The second floor of exhibits was a little break from the photographs and instead focused primarily on works by just two artists, Max Ernst and Alberto Giacometti. Max Ernst is one of my favorites. I love his surrealist paintings and sculptures, and his abstract tribute to WC Fields was a highlight for me. As for Giacometti, I'd seen bizarre figure sculptures in lots of museums, but he also had some jewelry and paintings which I'd never seen before so that was pretty cool.
The third and final floor was the largest and continued the exhibit on photography in Mexico by highlighting selections of work from five modernist Mexican artists: Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Manuel Carrillo, Flor Garduño, Graciela Iturbide, and Mariana Yampolsky. I liked these photos more personally, I think they were both formally more interesting and also more culturally authentic because they were actually being taken by people of Mexican descent. Alvarez Bravo was my favorite because he was more blatantly surrealist than the others.
The third floor also had selections from the permanent collection. Compared to the large galleries for the photography, this gallery was very small and unassuming, but then all of a sudden, bam tons of Picassos. Just casually tucked away in a corner. There were some really cool ones too from when he was doing illustrations of bullfights.
The rest of the small gallery was also stacked with great modern art. My favorites were a painting by Le Corbusier called Spirales Logarithmiques, a Joan Miro, a series of drawings by Alexander Calder whom I'd onlyknown from his mobile sculptures before, and a painting by Maude Gatewood called Absolution that was intended as a critique of America's handling of the AIDs epidemic.
After the museum, I had some time to kill so I just sort of wandered around downtown Charlotte. I went to the Wells Fargo Museum because it was free. It was actually in a still operating Wells Fargo bank so it wasn't huge, but it did have a fun kind of history of banking exhibit going on. It was geared toward a slightly younger crowd I think, but it was still a fun way to spend a fifteen minutes or so. I also got to print out some sweet old-timey currency with my face on it.
My text time-killing stop was to McCormick & Schmick's Seafood & Steaks which normally would be a little too upscale for my price range, but they had a happy hour deal where shrimp and oysters were only $1 each so I figured what the hell. I got two of each on the seafood, and I ordered a dunkel from Old Mecklenburg Brewery which was really satisfying. I must say as much as I love seafood generally, raw oysters are not really my favorite thing in the world. I don't mind the taste so much as the texture. The shrimp however was really good and a lot meatier than I was expecting.
After my snack from the sea, I killed the rest of my pre-mic time hanging out at a nearby coffee shop called Coco and the Director. I mixed it up a bit by getting a Chai Latte, because the weather had abruptly dropped quite a bit and I wanted to warm myself up before the stand up. I liked the cafe quite a bit. It was located just off a big hotel, and it had the coolest/most hipstery seating I'd seen in a while, with just a big pyramid of platformed steps with cushions on them for people to lie down on while presumably talking about Nietzsche and craft beers. It was good place to both chill and get warm.
After that it was time for me to enter a very spooky dimension:
The Comedy Zone is actually a chain of Comedy Clubs, but I'm pretty sure the one in Charlotte is actually the flagship so that's really cool. Even if it was only spiritually, it's fun knowing that I've shared the same stage as lot of great professionals.
Because the Comedy Zone is actually well-known, there was a really good sized crowd in the audience, but it also meant that there were a lot of comics. They were for the most part really good, but I think on a weekday the crowd got tired really quickly and the energy started to drop pretty noticeably after the first four or five comics. There were 26 of us in total.
I think because of the low energy, comedians that were high energy tended to do a lot better. The crowd really liked being directly engaged with by the comedians, and stuff about topics like sex and race tended to do the best because they leant themselves well to certain comics' ability to mix crowd work in with their own material. I think my favorite comic of the night was a guy named Ed Mabree (sp?), but it's hard to transcribe why his stuff was funny because it was mostly masterful crowd work. He just had so much charisma and stage presence, and he did a (seemingly) improvised bit comparing vaginas to Cinnabon that seems odd on paper, but had the crowd howling.
For my own set, I didn't learn from any of the things I mentioned above and did a very low energy set, trying to recapture the magic of my more slowed down delivery earlier in the week. I think it was too slowed down, because while I did get laughs on most of my big punchlines, I never felt like I really built up any momentum for the set as a whole. A few of the other comics said nice things to me afterwards, but I feel like for the crowd I was probably relatively pleasant but forgettable.
My favorite line of the night actually came from the host, Tyrone Burston. He was talking about how growing up poor let him get away with a lot in school, "I could do anything want in class because we ain't got no phone. Oh you're gonna call my mom? Just try."
Favorite Random Sightings: Climax, North Carloina; "Dignity, we treat you with more than medicine"; A billboard that said "I still you Jesus I do" punctuation would have really clarified whether this was directed at Jesus or just really desperate
Regional Observations: I feel like railroads were really important for the development of the south, but the cities down here don't actually use trains for public transit as much as we do up North.
Albums Listened To: Live at the Whiskey A-Go-Go by Hepcat; Live at Wetlands 1993 by the Slackers (real early); Live from the Showboat by the Phil Woods Six
People's Favorite Jokes:
19 and 20 got into a fight. Twenty won (The barista who told me this one prefaced it by saying it was a little kid one but the only joke she could remember on the spot. It is funny to me how things like that from childhood stick with you)
Songs of the Day:
It was a jazzy day
I think the dancing here can only be reffered to as Dad Swing
