AL Day 5 - Burgers, Bus Boycotts, and Big Fish
I started out my day in Montgomery by visiting the grave of country music legend, Hank Williams, and his ex-wife, Audrey (I wonder how his wife at the time of his death felt about that one). It was a really lovely gravesite, complete with a marble cowboy hat. Interestingly the area surrounding just his grave is all astroturf because overzealous country music fans kept picking out the grass to have souvenirs. I never would have even thought of that.
After the grave, I went to get some coffee at a place called Prevail Union, Montgomery's premier craft coffee roaster. I ordered something called an Alabama Stinger because I liked the sound of it. It sounds like a wrestling move, but actually it's espresso, honey, and milk shaken (not stirred) over ice, and it was really tasty and also really strong which was up my alley. The shop also had a really eclectic vibe, and I got pretty excited to see art by Butch Anthony, of Drive Thru Museum fame.
Properly awake, my next stop was the Rosa Parks Museum, which basically everyone told me was a must see. There's actually too museums, one for everyone and one geared more toward children (though the guy at the front desk said it would also be interesting to anybody). I just did the non-children museum, but it absolutely lived up to all the hype.
While the museum did talk about Rosa a lot, it also walked visitors step by step through the entirety of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts with lots of cool artifacts and interactive exhibits. Like just about every American public school kid, I had a basic knowledge of the bus boycotts, but there were so many details I had never heard or properly considered until this museum.
The museum started with a model of the bus Rosa Parks was arrested on with a video reenactment of the event. It made for a neat immersive effect. The thing I learned here that I never knew before was that Rosa wasn't actually breaking the law by sitting in the front of the bus. She was sitting in the middle section which was allowed for Blacks, but the bus was so crowded that the expectation was that she should stand and start giving up the middle rows to whites. It makes the already incredibly trivial nature of the racism seem even more ridiculous. Even in the confines of terrible Jim Crow laws, she wasn't actually breaking the law. The particularly awful bus driver didn't know that, so he called the police. They asked her to stand up, she politely refused, so they said, "If you don't give up your seat, we'll put you under arrest." She replied without any hesitation, "You may do that." That's some seriously bad ass grace under pressure. I got goosebumps, it was such a cool thing to say.
Little did Rosa know, she would be the spark for something much bigger. There was some speculation that because she was secretary of the local chapter of the NAACP she might have gotten arrested intentionally so that bus segregation laws could be challenged in the supreme court. The fact that she wasn't actually breaking any laws makes me doubt this theory, but the fact that she was well educated. strong willed, and already involved in the civil rights movement did make her the perfect spokeswoman intentionally or not.
It was fascinating seeing all the actual preserved documents tracing requests to the bus company, their responses, and the different groups that sprang up on either side of the issue once the boycott started getting underway. Again, the actual absurdity of the racism reached much higher heights than I previously could fathom and there it is all documented in ink and paper. The boycotters didn't even want full desegregation initially! Their demands were not having to walk back outside and get in through the rear after paying up front, first come first serve seating with segregated sections, being treated with respect by drivers, and hiring more Black drivers. Can you even imagine white people reading this and saying, "They're asking for too much!"? When these basic demands weren't met, Dr. King was so shocked, he said he would never again assume he was dealing with rational opposition.
And boy did the opposition get irrational. Rather than just treat people like people, the bus company lost $3000 daily, they had MLK followed by the FBI, they bombed people's homes, and they used legal loopholes to get people who gave rides to boycotters arrested for operating taxi services without a license. It's a lot of work put into losing money while being an asshole. The most shocking thing I read though was a proclamation by a white group called the Men of Montgomery who called the boycott an act of violence against the town of Montgomery because it was hurting businesses. Imagine having the nerve to say that while Black boycotters (and their white allies) are actually getting murdered, beaten up, and bombed. The human capacity for self-delusion is truly mind blowing on occasion.
Something that I never really realized before was that MLK was only 26 years old at the time of the boycott. I always picture him in my head as a real adult, but he was barely older than I am now. He had his house bombed with two young children in it, and not only did he not give up, but he never lashed out in anger. What kind of 26 year old is capable of that kind of willpower and strength?! I guess there really are some causes that transcend ones own importance, and he and everyone involved was right in thinking this would be a major victory if they could do it. Below is a pretty touching model of MLK sitting at his kitchen table after receiving a death threat and praying for the strength to keep going.
And here is an actual photo of Dr. King and a big group of Boycott leaders all getting arrested together as an act civil disobedience.
Obviously the boycott did prove to be a success after over a year of constant turmoil and lots of long walks, and it's incredible that so much of the community was able to rally that hard for that long. Something the museum pointed out that I also never really considered was how much church was a big part of the movement. Churches were really one of the only safe spaces for large groups of Black people to meet, and they were supportive environments where people could share their individual struggles with one another and seek guidance. I've been critical of religion occasionally, but I think the sense of community it can provide when done well is really not something that is found easily out in the secular world.
The end of the boycotts also gave me my favorite thing in the whole museum which is this sculpture of an old white guy looking hilariously uncomfortable on a desegregated bus.
Besides the boycott exhibit, the museum also had two special exhibitions. The first was on celebrations of womanhood in African culture. They had artifacts and sculptures from all over the African continent with explanations of different rituals and symbols. It was really awesome, and I liked that different works celebrated women not just as mothers, but as warriors, dancers, and leaders as well.
This exhibit also had a photograph of Rosa with Nelson Mandela when she was part of the welcoming committee after his release from prison. It's not like she stopped being awesome and fighting for social justice after the boycotts were over.
The other special exhibit was a series of photographs of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first all Black squadron of military pilots in the United States armed forces. The military was still segregated at this point, but the Airmen were so damn good at their jobs that they struck a big blow against preconceived notions of Black competence, which in turn helped eventually lead to desegregated units. The popular notion that no planes escorted by the airmen were ever shot down has since been proven false, but the number of planes lost that they escorted was roughly half of the average number for all other squadrons so it's a still pretty big sign of their prowess.
One of the last things I saw before leaving the museum was a video of Rosa being thanked by Bill Clinton in a State of the Union address, and I think I snapped a photo at a pretty fitting moment in the subtitles.
After the museum, I got lunch at a place called Hamburger King (not to be confused with a certain fast food chain). The place is regarded as the best burger joint in the city, possibly the state, and it is the definition of no frills. It's small, family-owned, sparsely decorated, and you see them grilling everything right in front of you. They don't do anything too fancy, but what they do they do damn well. The burgers are handcrafted, greasy and delicious. A little bit of melted cheese on top, and it's just about perfect. Just be prepared to wait in line, because the whole town knows how good these things are.
After lunch, I took things easy by driving around and seeing a few other sights around the city (read: I didn't have the energy to walk after wolfing down that burger). My first stop was the Civil Rights Memorial designed by Maya Lin to honor the 40 people who died fighting for equal rights between 1954 (Brown vs. Education) and 1968 (the year MLK was assassinated). It's a really beautiful memorial, and a guard is always present to make sure it's never vandalized. It's right outside the famous Southern Poverty Law Center as well which is pretty cool to see in its own right.
After that I saw the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where MLK resided as a pastor.
The next historic building I saw was the First White House of the Confederacy. I didn't know that Montgomery had been the capital before they moved it to Richmond, but Jefferson Davis initially ran his operations there. I alway think of the Confederacy as just an army, so it's always weird to think about them as actually having to run the day to day operations of being their own country. You do think if they were rebelling against the Union that they wouldn't copy them so closely with their White House. At least show a little creativity.
Eventually I did get out of my car to explore the home of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They only lived in the house for a little more than year because Scott's work and Zelda's mental health kept them fairly nomadic, but no other place in the country had a museum dedicated to them and Zelda's family was from Montgomery so the city got together to preserve it and open it up to the public.
I am sad to admit that I haven't read much of Fitzgerald besides some short stories and the Great Gatsby, but I really loved seeing the house museum. It was a lot more suburban than his roaring 20s lifestyle might have suggested, but they had artifacts and photos from all over the world to commemorate the flashier aspects of their lives. One of the coolest things to me was the collection of Scott and Zelda's stamps from everywhere they traveled to. They went through a few books to put it mildly. I also really liked seeing the collection of Esquire magazines featuring Fitzgerald's comic stories about a failed Screenwriter named Pat Hobby, portrayed in the illustrated covers as a bug-eyed Colonel Mustard Type. One of the things I wasn't expecting to see was a pair of Boxing gloves. Apparently Scott, liked to invite local boxers over to spar with them, and his strategy was "get inside their guard and destroy them". Seems more in character of his buddy Hemingway.
Speaking of Papa Hemingway, there was a big portrait of him in the living room complete with a letter he wrote Fitzgerald, which had the wonderfully dickish response to Scott and Zelda's marriage troubles: "I thought Zelda was crazy from the first time I met her, but you had to go and complicate things by being in love with her." Way to make it about you, Ernest. I suspect platonically or otherwise there was definitely some kind of love between Hemingway and Fitzgerald beyond just friendship. I looked up if smarter people than me also sensed this and i found this hilarious interaction between the two literary giants from Hemingway's memoir:
“Zelda said that the way I was built I could never make any woman happy and that was what upset her originally. She said it was a matter of measurements. I have never felt the same since she said that and I have to know truly.”
“Come out to the office,” I said
. “Where is the office?”
“Le water,” I said. We came back into the room and sat down at the table.
“You’re perfectly fine,” I said.
“You are O.K. There’s nothing wrong with you. You look at yourself from above and you look foreshortened. Go over to the Louvre and look at the people in the statues and then go home and look at yourself in the mirror in profile."
“Those statues may not be accurate.”
“They are pretty good. Most people would settle for them.”
It seemed like a lot of their like a lot of their letters back in forth were a dick measuring contest, but this is the next level.
Probably the biggest thing I learned from the house was that Zelda was a pretty great artist in her own right. I mostly knew her as "F. Scott Fitzgerald's crazy wife" but she was really excellent painter and from what I hear a pretty solid novelist to boot. I'm sure that lack of recognition, as well as some family predispositions, probably contributed to her mental health struggles, which is pretty sad. I think she was one of countless talented women who were just born a little too early.
After the Fitzgerald House, I got some more coffee at a place called Cafe Louisa. They specialized in amazing looking pastries and frozen coffee drinks. I intended on getting something less dessert-y, but the barista talked up the blended drinks so much I couldn't resist. I got something called a Frozen French Love Affair (exotic!), which was vanilla gelato, hazelnut, and cold brew coffee. I've never had a regular French love affair, but this was pretty incredible.
Refueled, I set out for the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. It was a beautiful building right on a lake, and admission was free so I was sold from the get go.
The special exhibit was really cool, and all about contemporary art in Alabama. It's always great to see that people are still being creative and innovative wherever you go, and by the looks of it Alabama's got some real talent to look out for. I know from having gone to art museums with my dad, that contemporary art isn't everybody's cup of tea, but I think there was enough variety that there was something there for everyone.
My personal favorites from this exhibit were the sculptures of an artist named Stacey Holloway, who made these deer with robot looking stilt legs to kind of mess with your perceptions of nature, and multi-media pieces by an artist named who used old photographs, her own painting, and electric lights to create these kinda surreally timeless and ghostlike images. They were both my kind of weird.
I also really loved a series of prints by an artist named Jennifer Bartlett that traced a weird skeleton's walk through the four seasons with different dreamlike imagery representing ideas associated with each season as well as the general passage of time. The prints were really impressively multi-layered and I thought they were pretty hauntingly beautiful.
I also liked that one of the artists took letters from children about her art. I forgot to write down her name but she took photographs with her pet falcon so this question makes sense in context but I love the idea that this is that kid's go to opener:
After the special exhibit it was on to the museum's permanent collection, which was mostly modern and contemporary art from America. There were a few pieces from before 1900 and maybe even a few Europeans snuck in there (gasp), the meat and potatoes was American and modern.
My personal favorites were a sprawling, slightly nightmarish, three-deimensional Diner scene by Tennessee artist Red Grooms; a suburban photograph entitled Husavik Reflections by Pamela Venz that uses mirrors really effectively to give it a dreamlike painterly quality; A sort of just classically beautiful oil painting called Reflections by Robert Reid; a lonely street scene called called New York Office by my main dude Edward Hopper; an oddly spooky dinner scene by an artist named Guy Pene Du Bois (who is shockingly not European, but French-American) where you can just feel the tension in the two Diners' relationship; and lastly an odd Biblical allegory called Daniel by Joseph Hirsch which features a naked woman falling asleep at a fancy dinner party.
After the main collection, I went to see a big room filled incredible stained glass by an artist named Cappy Thomas, that seem to me kind of strikes a balance between classic medieval churches and whimsical children's book illustrations. I just sat there for a fairly alarming amount of time just taking it in.
After the stained glass, I looked at the museum's photography gallery. It wasn't very large, but there were some pretty stunning landscape photos and one particularly sarcastic piece of grafitti that I enjoyed.
On the second floor of the museum was the gallery of Folk and Self-Taught Art. I'm always amazed at what some people can do when they just decide to pick up a paint brush out of the blue. My personal favorites were a piece by Mary L. Proctor called The Light of the World where a female painters, dress was made of painted paint brushes nailed to a door, a bronze fountain covered in strange Elf-like creatures called Flimps by an artist named Geva Mercer, and some bizarre multi-media animal paintings by a local artist named Mose Tolliver.
After the museum, I started heading back to Birmingham because it was a slightly more central launching off point for my other planned travels in the week. Along the way, I visited a little private island in a town called Millbrook where the fictional town of Spectre was built. Big Fish is one of my favorite movies, a beautiful love letter to story-telling and father son relationships that does also unfortunately feature Danny DeVito's bare ass. It's certainly up there for one of Tim Burton's finest accomplishments. Some of the buildings have unfortunately a burned down or fallen apart since the movie came out in 2003, but most of the town center is still standing and you can very easily see how this little island could be a magical Southern Gothic town.
When I got to Birmingham, I ended up going to the resident cool local record shop called Seasick Records because I wanted to pick up the new They Might Be Giant CD. I should know to be careful in record shops like this, because I ended up buying a few more CDs than I bargained for, but I had a really nice conversation with the guys who work there about the new Destroyer album, Van Morrison, and the Replacements. It's always nice to meet people who geek about the same all over the map music as I do.
The record store also happened to be right next to Crestwood Coffee Company so I was able to get a mighty fine iced coffee and replenish my sinking caffeine supply.
For whatever reason, I had a big hankering for Chinese food, so I looked up the best Chinese food places in Birmingham. The internet led me to Black Pearl, where I got some delicious chicken and fried rice with veggies. It came with an egg roll too which was just extra. Unfortunately I took it to go and did a bad job closing the styrofoam (it's complicated stuff) so it all fell into the plastic bag. Rather than be discouraged, I ate it right out of the bag like a real man.
I took my bag of Chinese food to the AMC theater at Patton Creek because I really wanted to see Phantom Thread after Chris, the host from Monday night, recommended it so highly. I love Paul Thomas Anderson, and he basically hasn't made a bad movie yet, so I was excited to see him reunited with Daniel Day Lewis for the first time since his masterwork, There Will Be Blood (I probably like Boogie Nights more but that's neither here nor there).
The movie did not disappoint. Without giving anything away, it was so much weirder and funnier than the period romance I was expecting, and Day Lewis is just a powerhouse alternating wildly from totally charming to being petulant child. Newcomer (to America at least) Vicky Krieps completely holds her own against the multiple Oscar winner delivering a star-making performance
. I really enjoyed it, but it definitely had a non-traditional plot structure and a lot of strange elements that might make it a bit too slight or artsy for some people. One hilarious interaction I witnessed as the movie was letting out was a big guy turning to his girlfriend and saying, "Don't ever do that to me again."
Favorite Random Sightings: a gravestone where the last name was Rotten; Looking Good Man's Hi Style; Bama Boys; The New Hobnob; The Shoppes at My Kid's Attic (no freaking clue what this store name is supposed to mean)
Regional Observations: Chris told me that Birmingham gets a pretty good distribution of weird indie movies, but it's taken them a while to get The Shape of Water and Call Me By Your Name, because apparently gay sex and fish sex can be sort of hard sells in the bible belt.
Albums Listened To: Of Course You Do by Slothrust; Oh My God by Louis CK (this used to be my favorite album by him, now some of the more sexual bits have not aged well but some of the goofier bits about animals and his kids still got some big laughs out of me even after hearing them a dozen or so times); Oi-Skampilation by the Slackers (just Ray Gun Sally) Content Nausea by Parquet Courts (this was one of the CDs I bought hence the slight out of order-ness)
People's Favorite Jokes: I didn't get any today so here's one from the internet -
Boy: if you are smiling send me your smiles- if you are sleeping send me your dreams- if you are crying send me your tears,
I love you!
Girl: I am in the toilet what do i send?
Songs of the Day (a good day for low-fi punk):
Live from the Chris Gethard show, which is about as close as an adult talk show gets to a nickelodeon game show (i mean that absolutely as a compliment). I really like Chris Gethard as a comic, and I really like these guys as a band
that's some pretty impressive word density. i love the cuts of the audience not sure what to do.
