GA Day 5 - Self Portraits, Self Owning Trees, and Seeing Old Friends and New
Today I said goodbye to Atlanta and to my friends, Katie and Ian. I loved the city, I was very grateful to them for hosting me, and I am so excited for their upcoming nuptials! They are one hell of a couple!
Before I could actually leave the city properly though I needed one last cup of that Atlanta coffee. I went to the highly recommended East Pole Coffee. Located in an old warehouse in a little industrial park, the coffee bar is wide open, welcoming, and spacious. The coffee was very good, but I didn't get anything too fancy so I don't know if they have any cool specialty drinks or anything. The baristas were all really nice though, and it seemed like the perfect place to just sit and work removed from the bustle of the city proper.
With coffee in tow, I now had the energy to actually leave Atlanta and head for Athens, the home of the University of Georgia. One of my best friends from childhood, Dan, is getting a masters degree in classical saxophone at UGA so he can officially be a sexy sax man. Dan moved to Rockland in fifth grade and was the only other person in my elementary school who knew the Harry Potter Puppet Pals so we were bonded for life. In high school, we did a weekly radio show together that was probably the only radio show in South Shore Mass that would play back to back Slayer and Mountain Goats. I was excited to get to see him again in Georgia, but he was still in class when I got to Athens so I had to busy myself.
My first course of action was to get some brunch. My favorite kind of restaurant to see while I'm scouting is one with good reviews and a silly name. Mama's Boy did not disappoint on either front. It was apparently a pretty popular place and I had to wait to be seated. I took that to be a good sign for what was to come. When I did get a seat I ordered the Mill Town Breakfast Plate. It came with two eggs, cheesy grits, bacon, and a biscuit. Everything was amazing but the bacon was definitely the star of the show. It was really thick cut, crispy, and salty. I've had a lot of good bacon so far, but this might be the best I've had so far. I'm not totally sure I understand grits. I like them, and they went really well everything, but I'm not sure why people would want them over more substantial sides. They're like really warm mush, but if I'm in a mush mood I think I'd prefere oatmeal. Perhaps that's just me.
After breakfast, I made my way to the Georgia Museum of Art. It's free, and right on UGA's campus which was super convenient. I started out by looking at the permanent collection. It wasn't a very large collection after the three building museum from yesterday, but it covered a lot of ground. Things started with early European works from baroque, medieval, and renaissance periods. Lots of religious imagery.
Then came the decorative arts. The silverware and stuff was lovely, but pretty standard; the thing that I liked most was an early photograph of General Tom Thumb, a famous dwarf performer in P.T. Barnum's circus, on his wedding day. Apparently the good general was so popular at the time, even getting to meet Abraham Lincoln (!), that this photo was widely circulated and it was highly fashionable to have it in your house. This was also partially done as a display of wealth because photographs were such a hot commodity at the time, but picturing everyone just having another couple's wedding photo in their home seems so odd by today's standards.
After that came the early American Art. This was mostly all landscapes, and then one large and pretty incredible reclining nude by an artist named Kenyon Smith. To my very untrained eye, this is pretty atypical of that era of American popular art, and certainly for this gallery at the very least, so while I think it's a very good painting it did stand out like a sore (and very naked thumb). The landscapes were also pretty impressive, if less memorable, and I particularly like one called Tallulah Falls by George Cook because it features a bunch of early settlers pushing a tree off a cliff for some reason.
The modern and contemporary stuff came next which is always my jam. They had some big names like Matisse and Georgia O'Keefe and that folk-artist Henry Finster. My favorite was a painting of a ballerina by an artist named Everett Shinn, that had a really cool, hauntingly ethereal backdrop.
After that was a collection of different local arts and crafts, ranging from gunsmithing to painting to quilting to making odd porcelain figures of Methodist theologian John Wesley. You know, the usuals.
There was special exhibit featuring and partially curated by an artist named Mickalene Thomas. She is an absolutely incredible photographer who has a real painterly way of constructing her backdrops and staging her models (This would make sense though because she is also a very respected painter).This exhibit was largely focused on themes of identity and personal history with Mickalene's works generally featuring she, her mother, or both of them as the model(s), and featuring a mock up of her childhood living room with a documentary she made about her mother playing on the tv set as the centerpiece. The works she curated for her gallery were all by artists she admired and felt spoke to some part of her identity as black, a woman, and queer.
While the whole gallery was outstanding, this work might represent my favorite combination of art and name I've seen so far.
As I was leaving the museum, I noticed three big paintings by an artist named Philip Morsberger that I had somehow missed on the first go around. I really loved these, because they had a great dreamlike quality to them, mixing up highly representational figures, abstract shapes, and really cartoonish imagery. Most importantly there was a turtle wearing a little hat.
After the museum, Dan still wasn't quite done with class, but I was already starting to fade so I got my second coffee of the day at a place called Jittery Joe's. It's a popular local chain with a few different locations around the Athens area, presumably to help the all the college students around not pass out in lecture. I liked the coffee and the vibe, and it was a good place to sit and work while I waited for my friend.
Dan met me there and we went off to see what there was to see in Athens. The thing I was perhaps most excited to see was The Tree That Owns Itself. William H. Jackson loved his white oak so much that upon his death, he granted it total autonomy and also ownership over the 8 foot radius surrounding it. This was done as a sign of respect and love for the tree and also to ensure it's protection. Sadly the original tree fell in a storm, and a seedling of it was planted in it's place becoming the Son of the Tree that Owns Itself, which sounds like the name of a very not scary 50s horror movie. I also read online that legally trees cannot own property, but the city of Athens I guess loves this tree only a little bit less than its original owner and completely respects its right to own land regardless of what the law says. Everything about this tree's story makes me very happy.
Dan and I then went to see some trees with much less property ownership at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia. I can only imagine the gardens are much more beautiful when the flowers are actually in bloom, but as this is early January we were not generally in luck in that regard. What we could see was lovely, and park surrounding the gardens was really scenic and great to walk around in. It wasn't too cold out either, so it was also just kinda nice to be outside for a bit. There was also something kind of funny about all the signage that described what would be blooming there in very hyperbolic language, like a sign saying "Beautiful Award Winning Roses" next to a big pile of dirt.
After all the tree, we ended up hanging out at a store owned by the son of the owner of that cool Junkman's Daughter shop in Atlanta. Fittingly enough, the store is called Son of the Junkman's Daughter, which sounds like a slightly scarier 50s horror movie. The store was going out of business though unfortunately, and everything was really marked down. It was a lot smaller than the Atlanta store, and I think a lot of the inventory had already been sold, but there were still some fun knickknacks and random pieces of art to be found.
Next at Dan's suggestion, we went to a place called Trappeze Pub, which he suspects has the best beer selection in the city. I think he must be right because they had both quality and quantity covered with over 30 craft beers from around the world on tap. This is also a particularly good time to visit them, because they just recently celebrated their tenth anniversary and as a special treat the head bartender visited different local breweries and worked with them to create ten one of kind limited release beers only available at their pub. I tried two of these The McNulty's Nitro Stout from The Southern Brewing Company and the Wake-N-Bacon from Terrapin. The McNulty's was damn good nitro stout with just a hint of chocolate and mint giving it a kind Bailey's flavor to it to go with the Irish name. The Wake-N-Bacon was much stranger, but in my opinion a tiny bit better. It's a breakfast stout aged with bacon and finished with maple to give it a little bit of sweetness and smokiness to round out the full bodied stout flavor. I also tried the Koko Buni Coconut Porter from Creature Comforts (these were all half pour samples I should mention, I have neither the budget nor the fortitude to just down three beers in a row like that) which I thought was much more well balanced and not as overly sweet as the last coconut porter I tried. I also had a taste of a beer that Dan got called The Cold Ground from Orpheus Brewing which was a sour ale blended with coffee. The little description on the menu said that it was Strange but Good, which seemed pretty fair to me.
Our dinner more than lived up to the beers as well, quickly cementing this as a pretty much go pub for me. I got the pan fried North Carolina trout with gouda grits, tabasco honey butter, and garlic mushrooms, and I couldn't have been happier. The fish was so perfectly cooked, the right balance of fluffy to crispy, and all the ingredients just went so well together packing in a ton of flavor. I was most pleasantly surprised by the butter. I don't normally use a lot of it, but I should learn to trust the South when it come to butter, because the tabasco gave everything just the slightest kick which was then offset by the sweetness of the honey. I don't remember what Dan got exactly other than that it came with Garlic and Rosemary fries which were out of this world.
After dinner, I said goodbye to my old friend Dan and cheated a little bit by going back to South Carolina to see my new friend Ally again. Columbia was only about two hours away, and after this week I was gonna be too far South or West to be able to easily get back there again, so I wanted to seize the opportunity while I had it.
It was a good decision because not only did I get another night of hanging out and drinking with someone I really liked, but the bar I met her at, the New Brookland tavern was hosting a pretty rad concert that night. The lineup was a really mix of local musicians and traveling acts: Blocker, Mel Washington, Haunted Like Humans, and Paisley Marie. I'll be honest I didn't give everyone their full due because I was spending time hanging out with Ally, but she insisted that Mel in particular was not one to be missed and after watching his whole set I was totally sold. He performed just by himself with an acoustic guitar doing a mix of gospel, soul, folk, punk, and even a pretty wonderful cover of Kanye and Chance's Ultralight Beams. In both music and comedy, it is so darn cool to see someone by themselves just completely take control of a stage and their audience, and Mel did it, holding his own even after people from the audience handed him at least four shots of whiskey. Plus you can go on his bandcamp page buy a calendar of him hanging out with cats (as well as all of his music). What's not to love about someone so dedicated to giving the people what they want?
Favorite Random Sightings: "Don't Be Chicken, Go to the Dentist" (This ad campaign would do wonders for Marty McFly); "The Dump: America's Number One Furniture Store"; Beaver Ruin Road; "Hair Transplants: $2 a Graft" (this could be a good deal but there's something kinda sad to me about knowing exactly how many hairs you have); Badcock and More
Regional Observations: The UGA campus and Athens generally had the most college football madness I've seen outside of Ohio State. Dan says the frats also go crazy on the weekends which would be something new for me to witness.
Albums Listened To: A Mighty Wind by Various Artists (soundtrack to the very excellent Christopher Guest Film); Miles Ahead by Miles Davis; Miles in Berlin by Miles Davis; Miles Smiles by the Miles Davis Quartet; Mingus Ah Um by Charles Mingus (maybe my favorite jazz album to close out a very jazzy day)
People's Favorite Jokes:
Me: Do you know any good jokes?/ Cashier: I don't know... My life?/ Me: That might be answer I hear most often. Cashier: Oh... That's kind of sad
Songs of the Day:
One of the all time great album openers
Good music and good improv. That's also all the members of Spinal Tap that didn't spontaneously combust
