GA Day 7 - Mead, Museums, and Moss — Joe's Big Dumb Comedy Blog

I spent today in Savannah. The first thing that immediately struck me about Savannah is that it is freaking weird and beautiful. The trees are so twisty and the Spanish moss just hangs from them in the wind. It’s spooky and lovely, and the term Southern Gothic finally makes sense to me. Just look at this shit:

The first thing I did in the city was get some coffee at a place called Foxy Loxy. While they did not believe me when I told them the sky was falling, they did have a really cute location and a horchata latte which was out of this world. I’d never seen anything like it on the menu before, and it’s gonna be real hard looking back now.

After my coffee, I made my way to downtown Savannah. I started off by going by going to the Paris Market which I read about on Atlas Obscura. Started by a speech pathologist and an emergency physician couple after they fell in love with flea markets and bazaars in Europe and the Mediterranean, this weird little shop has arts, crafts, taxidermy, taffy, a french bakery and everything in between. Whoever organized the various displays definitely had an eye for curation and design, because it often felt like being in an off beat art gallery more than being in a store. A big highlight for me was getting to smell the locally made candles and also read the highly tongue in cheek descriptions of each scent. For example: The scent of Savannah - mystery, magic and Spanish moss.

My favorite thing though was a collection of children’s books with blank pages. This was intended for you to be able to illustrate them yourself, but because the bits of writing on each page were intended to spark creativity sometimes the stories got wonderfully insane. This was my favorite:

I didn’t buy the book although that took just about every ounce of willpower I could muster. I did however buy a mint julep salt water taffy because that seemed like a good mix of the south and my own new England culture. In reality it was honestly kinda gross, but I don’t think that was any one’s fault really it just wasn’t the best idea in the world to begin with.

While doing my darndest to chew and swallow the taffy, i wandered around downtown Savannah and stumbled into two particularly great stores.

The first of these was called 24e Design Company, and they had a sign out front proclaiming themselves to be the coolest store in Savannah so you know I had to check it out. It turned out that it was a furniture store, full of amazingly comfortable and stylish things that I will probably never be able to afford in a million years. It was nice to lounge in them though if only for a fleeting moment. There was also eclectic and strange local art all over the place giving it more of an art gallery feel than a store feel similar to the Paris market.

The coolest thing by far, to me at least, was a series of arm chairs made out of recycled jet engines that you could look at while also enjoying a drink at the in store bar also made out of recycled airplane parts. How weird, cool, and totally unexpected is that?

The other not particularly hidden treasure I stumbled into downtown was the Savannah Bee Company. They had free samples of a wide variety of different honeys (I think the tupelo was my favorite), artisanal honey comb chocolates that were almost too beautifully decorated to eat. And best of for a mere $7 you could get a tasting of five of the different meads they had in store. I didn't know how many different styles of mead there were, with some being more similar to beers and some being more similar to wines all while keeping that nice honey sweetness. The five I tried were the Savannah Bee Company Sourwood, a white wine kinda mead; the Redstone Meadery Nectar of the Hops, a hopped up IPA kinda mead; the Crafted Artisan Meadery Pollen-Nation, a blackberry mead; Savannah Bee Company Tupelo Blossom, a fruitier white wine type mead; and the dark horse St. Ambrose Cellars Banana Fosters Forever, a banana fosters flavored mead. Honestly I never would have expected this, but the banana fosters one was really freaking good with the vanilla and brown sugar flavors doing a lot to keep the banana from being overwhelming. On the more traditional side, I think the Sourwood dry white wine style mead was probably my other favorite. My bartender was also really nice and explained to me the difference between a cyser and a cider, a cyser being fermented apples and honey and a cider being ferment apples and grains like a beer. There were no cysers in the tasting though so he gave me a free sample of his favorite one a honey and ginger cyser. Sometimes making small talk pays off, because that stuff was delicious.

After the mead tasting, I went to visit the Telfair museums, which are three great museums all for the price of one! I started with the Jepson Center which is the Telfair museum of Modern and Contemporary Art. In case you had any doubt that this was a contemporary art museum, this was the first you saw when you walked in.

The first gallery I looked at was called Avanguardia and featured works by a local artist named Lisa D. Watson who uses recycled or reclaimed materials to make mixed media works that examine the intersections of the manmade world and the natural world. All these works had three dimensional wooden elements and two dimensional painted elements and frequently had really cool uses of negative space that tricked your eye and your brain. I really loved it.

Next up was a gallery called I Have Marks to Make featuring art work exclusively by adults with disabilities and wounded veterans going through art therapy. This was far up my alley, combining art, psychology, and celebrating the disabled (basically all of the things I've ever tried to pursue in my life). I was very happy, and some of the artwork was really impressive.

The next gallery was called Artcade and was dangerously cool. It was all fully playable arcade games made by different artists, and I say dangerous because it would have been exceedingly easy to lose hours and hours there. My favorites were a beautifully surreal game called Hylics, a game called line wobbler that somehow combined fighting, puzzle solving, and platforming all on a single line of LED lights, and a Henry David Thoreau Walden Simulator played on a keyboard spray painted to look wooden. I tried really hard to get the virtual Thoreau killed but it took too long to starve him and I didn’t really know how to play well enough to do much anything else so I moved on to the next gallery

This gallery had all the blown glass artwork, most of which was pretty avant-garde. The coolest piece in this section to me was a big glass house with multiple rooms you could walk in and out of. It was called, easily enough, Glass House by an artist named Therman Statom. Rock throwing was very strongly discouraged.

After the glass art, I made my way upstairs and saw main featured exhibit, a gallery of works by Rodin. I've seen a good bit of his stuff around the country now, but I never get tired of seeing it. The dude was just so damn good at sculpting.

A happy byproduct of the Rodin exhibit came in the form of two different glass cases. In an effort to teach different groups about Rodin's sculpture making process, the folks from the I Have Marks to Make gallery and a bunch of local elementary school kids all made plaster casts of their fists that they got to paint. There's something just kinda awesome and oddly revolution-inspiring about seeing a bunch of tiny, brightly colored fists in the air.

After the Rodin exhibit, I saw a gallery from the permanent collection that was all focused on uncertainty in the post-war era. My favorite piece in here was two cartoonish profiles of KKK members by an artist named William Christenberry called Pointed Male and Pointed Female. Sometimes being honest and literal can be the best form of ridicule. It was also pretty cool to see a collage by Mickalene Thomas after the Athens museum really put her on my radar.

In the main hallway between galleries were a few non-Rodin sculptures. One that I really loved was by an artist named Harriet Whitney Frismuth, who had actually been a student of Rodin's. Her work also had his lifelikeness, but with a more playful approach. The other sculpture I liked a lot was called Bird Girl by Sylvia Shaw Judson. It used to be part of a famous plot in a Bonadventure Cemetery before relocating to the museum, and it's sort of become the unofficial mascot of the Jepson.

The last special exhibit was called Kirk Varnedoe: In the Middle of Modern. It featured a biography of Kirk Varnedoe, former bad boy Chief Curator of MoMA, considered by some to be a genius and others to be one of the worst curators they ever had. From what little I know and learned from this exhibit both of those opinions are probably a little extreme, though I think he was more good than bad. The coolest part of this exhibit was that it featured a recreated and slightly altered version of one of his exhibitions that was particularly controversial (at least in the art world, i can't really picture the general public then or now caring all that much about the standards of the MoMa) called High and Low: Modern Art in Popular Culture. The recreation was done by an underground art collective called Triple Candie who intentionally left some stuff out and exaggerated some things while totally nailing others. Their goal was to kind of blur the line between creation and replication to question what makes something "art" and "original" which I think Kirk would have approved of.

Right down the street from the Jepson was the next Telfair museum, the Telfair Academy. Designed in 1818 by famed architect William Jay for Alexander Telfair, a son of one of Georgia's first governors, the building and all the art that had been collected privately by the family was later given by Alexander's sister, Mary, to the Georgia Historical Society. It was then turned into the very first art museum in the south. Because of this cool history, this museum as it exists now in 2018 is sort of a meta-museum partially about how museums used to be run in the 18th century, trends in art collection, and how both have evolved in the time since.

It was really interesting and honestly the building was so beautiful that it would have been cool just being there even if the museum hadn't been really cool. Based on the more meta galleries preserving the original Telfair collection, it seems like early American art museums were really concerned with showing that they were as cool and smart as European art museum. This wasn't really a bad thing though, and led to some really beautiful sculptures, landscapes, religious works, and early impressionist paintings. I think the last thing was particularly important, because impressionism was kinda controversial at the time (which is weird to think about) so that was them showing how hip and edgy they were by purchasing those works when they were still cutting edge. To celebrate that and also showcase local artists, the current more contemporary exhibit was all about Southern impressionism and featured some beautiful dreamlike paintings of Savannah's beautiful dreamlike trees.

My favorite thing at the academy was one with absolutely freaking massive paintings on each wall. My favorite one was in two panels and was called La Parabola by Cesare Laurenti. The first panel had a line of young women going up a flight of stairs and the second panel had a bunch of old women going down a flight of stairs. As metaphor, it's maybe a little bit on the nose, but as a painting it was really stunning.

An unexpected but pretty interesting part of the museum, I wasn't really expecting to see was the preserved slave quarters with a photograph of the staff that used to work there. It's not something you see in ever art museum but kudos to them for acknowledging the unfortunate class systems that made the museum possible but also came at the price of considerable human suffering.

After the Telfair Academy, I went to museum which was not part of the three Telfair museums, but was one of the things I was most excited to see in Savannah: Flannery O'Connor's Childhood home. She's one of my favorite short story writers, but I haven’t read nearly enough of her. She was a great writer, and also led a kinda sad, all too short, interesting life. I visited her house at a time where it was just me there so I got a private tour and my guide was super nice and really into her girl Flan, so I feel like I got all the best stories.

Some highlights: The first thing you see when you walk in is a really intense portrait of a baby. It isn't Flannery though,but her funny rich cousin who didn't have any kids of her own so she liked to send lavish gifts to little Flannery and parents who otherwise had a pretty modest home.

Their family was super Catholic which I knew because it comes through a lot in her writing, but I didn't know that she was so Catholic that her baby crib was literally placed so that it fell in the shadows of the only Catholic Church in Savannah.

Flannery was an early viral video star when she just five years old. Her rich cousin saw her in the backyard teaching her pet chicken to walk backwards and she thought it was so wild that she called a bunch of British film people that she knew to get it on camera. When they showed up, the chicken got stagefright and wouldn't do it so they just had wer walk backwards with chicken following her normally and then played the footage backwards. It became a big hit for the time, and Flannery said that she considered it possibly the high point of her life.

Flannery was crazy precocious. Once she turned six, she threw away all her toys and declared herself an adult and insisted on only calling her parents by their first names.

She was multi-talented. Besides being a great writer, she initially garnered acclaim in college for her work as a cartoonist.

Her favorite room in the house was the bathroom. Her and all her childhood friends would decorate the potty like a throne and take turns reading to each other in the tub until Flannery scared everyone else with Grimm Fairy Tales. She was an adult though so she didn’t mind.

My favorite thing though was this copy of her childhood book, The Fairy Babies, in which she had written her review "Not a very good book". So damn sassy.

I got a lot of great food recommendations from my tour guide so after all that museum-ing I got a late lunch at Fire Street Food. It's an Asian fusion restaurant, but I was told they also had the best burger in Savannah so I couldn't pass that up. I haven't had any other burgers in the city so I'm not sure about that exactly, but it was a damn good burger. It was also a hell of a deal with bacon, lettuce, tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, and cheese all included for $10. The patty was juicy and flavorful, but all those add ons really pushed it over the edge, particularly the bacon and mushrooms. I also read that they had really good teas, so I tried an iced kiwi green tea. It was weird, but really refreshing. The fries weren't anything to scoff at neither.

After fueling up with all that good food. I completed my Telfair Triumvirate by going to the Owens-Thomas House. This one was different than the other two though, because it wasn't a self-guided art museum but a fully guided historical house tour. I must admit though that the entrance seemed like it could have used a little bit better marketing.

The tour was very cool. I think I was picturing Savannah having more lavish Gone with the Wind style plantation mansions, probably because it's one of the best city names to say with Southern drawl, but there weren't any plantations there, and this house was about as decadent as the mansions got. Also designed by William Jay, he was essentially given full creative freedom and used it as chance to show off non-stop.

The most out there flourish was curved wooden bridge between the two ends of the second floor. The tour guide said that they suspect this was a nod to the original house owner's career in shipping because it kinda looks the bow of a ship, but really I think it was just to show that he could do it.

Other cool things were all the weird accoutrements of designing a house to show of the richness of the people inside. This included an elaborate system of pipes and cisterns that made this one of the first houses in the country with multiple floors of indoor plumbing. There was also a lot of weird optical illusions to make the house look even more fancy than it already was like painting wooden columns to look like real marble.

There was a nice exhibit of artifacts recovered from the old slave quarters and as much information as they could get on the former house servants in an attempt to give some semblance of a voice to the people that weren't allowed a voice in their lifetime. It's always amazing how you can find even more new ways in which slavery was vile and evil. One of the house servants was originally a wet nurse for the children in the house, and was then passed down to those children after their father died. I can't even imagine how anyone can literally have been kept alive by another purpose and then somehow look at them like property later in life.

After my fourth museum, I was about due for another caffeine boost so I went to a coffee shop recommended to me called the Gallery Espresso. It was packed even though it was relatively late for coffee, which was a good sign. The coffee was quite good, but I thought I'd order a fruit cup as a healthy little snack, but it turned out to be more of a fruit big ass bowl. It was delicious, but I was a little bit bummed that there weren't any peaches in it, because I feel like that was something I was supposed to have done in Georgia.

My last stop in Savannah was the Crystal Beer Parlor. Their claim to fame is that they were the first restaurant in America to serve alcohol legally after Prohibition, probably because it was already less than legally on the premises. I ordered a local Savannah Wheat beer which was a very solid light beer. Because I was surprisingly full from the fruit cup, I didn't want much food but I couldn't resist the house Crab Stew. It's so fresh that they tell you to look out for shells that might have made it into the broth. It was amazing. Rich and creamy, with big big chunks of blue crab.

After my dinner, I bid adieu to Georgia and made my way down to my Air BnB in Florida. Luckily I brought a little bit of Georgia down with me in the form of Cherry Cyser I had purchased at the Savannah Bee Company.

Favorite Random Sightings: Flying Monk Noodle Bar; Butterheads; Shooz; Boys II Men Barbershop; Marriage Parfait

Regional Observations: I feel like people know that Georgia is famous for their peaches, but pecans are also a really big deal down here.

Albums Listened To: Mm... Food by MF DOOM (a great album showcasing Doom's production as well as his rapping); The Modern Jazz Quartet at the Music Inn by the Modern Jazz Quartet featuring Sonny Rollins; Modern Vampires of the City by Vampire Weekend (just unbelievers); The Mollusk by Ween (a weird nautical concept album with everything from sea shanties to prog rock to country. Probably my favorite Ween album)

Georgia Superlatives:

Favorite Coffee: Pure Taste- Aurora Coffee in Atlana; Best All Around- Golden Drops Coffee- Decatur