Goodbye to the Whale Wall (& Other Atlanta Stories)

Checking my Google Reader for the first time in months brought some sad news: the Whale Wall will soon be no more.

The girls at Pecanne Log, my all-time favorite Atlanta blog, have a posted a nice little tribute.  They’re right that the mural was kind of crappy and weird, but so were most of my favorite things about Atlanta.

The Whale Wall is one of those things I saw once and then could never seem to find again, convincing me that I’d made it up on some overly-hot summer night.  I don’t generally do a lot of hallucinating while riding my bike, but you know how the memory makes strange things seem stranger.

The parking garage the mural used to adorn had some of the coolest ramps to ride — tight corkscrews spanning several stories — and there really was one sweaty summer evening where we rode up and down them till we nearly puked.  Getting up to the top is fun, but I was so dizzy I nearly took a spill off the side.  Imagine if the Whale Wall was the last thing you saw before you died.  Getting down again the correct way was much harder since we had to fight the downhill momentum, keep to the tight turns, and not stop pedaling, then thread the needle between giant concrete pillars with our heads still spinning.

I don’t think I managed to find my way back to the Whale Wall once in the intervening 5 years, until exploring downtown this summer.  That was the day we learned about the Hustler’s 10 Commandments, What the Chicken?, and the awesomeness of mixing giant beers at the CNN Center with running in the fountain at Centennial Olympic Park.

Weeplaces: ATL style

So you may or may not know that I’m moving from my adopted hometown of Atlanta to Philadelphia in about 3 days.  It’s kind of scary, but it’s also rather thought-provoking.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few weeks thinking about how we experience cities (and trying to experience as much of this one as I can before I go).  I love a good map, I love to look at patterns of travel, and I love making records of things.  Those are the reasons I find Weeplaces so neat.

By linking your Foursquare account to Weeplaces, you can create a dynamic map of your checkins, complete with neighborhood information and an animated run through of the history of your visits.

My Weeplaces page tells me a lot about how I experience my city, and a whole, whole lot about Atlanta itself.  Most of my checkins are centered around where I live and work.  I visit a lot of the “hip” neighborhoods in town, and tend to go to many venues in each of those neighborhoods (though not necessarily on the same days).  I almost never check in on the south side of town, and definitely never to the west — these tend to be more economically depressed areas with fewer bars and restaurants that I would hang out in.

It’s neat to see how close certain venues are — when you drive to places and are forced to take certain routes (traffic in Home Park, ugh), things feel much farther away.  In Atlanta especially, with its long, winding roads and indirect travel routes, we experience the distance between places as a process of travel, rather than from a bird’s-eye view.

As far as the suburbs go, I’ve hit a few places outside the perimeter, mostly when visiting friends who live outside the city.  I’ve also done some hiking and swimming OTP — I remember those times distinctly just from looking at the dots on the map.

I’ve only been using Foursquare regularly since March (when I got a smartphone), and haven’t really had a chance to travel significant distances in that time.  I’ve only been out of the state once, to buy fireworks just over the state line in Alabama.  That check isn’t the furthest out I’ve been from my “home base” though; the furthest was actually when I attended my friends’ wedding in the North Georgia mountains.

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My epic moving roadtrip starts Saturday, and I’m excited to add all those checkins and map my progress along I-85 and I-95.  After that, I’ll be exploring a whole new city, and watching those patterns emerge.

Dalí in Atlanta

I recently got a chance to pop over to Oglethorpe University Museum of Art’s new Dalí exhibit, and it was wonderful.  The museum was gifted with 14 of the artist’s lithographs which had never before been exhibited to the public.  The images, which are now part of the museum’s permanent collection, range from precise and scientifically strange to loose and bright.

Particularly wonderful were the three lithographs from a proposed Tarot card series.  All three shared the same vibrant blues, and, since they were exhibited on the same wall, could be studied individually or as a set.

Love’s Promise by Salvador Dalí

Dalí is having quite the showing in Atlanta this summer.  The High Museum is poised to open their exhibition on the artist’s late work in August.  In the lead up to the opening, the museum has been using their Twitter feed to stir up excitement by posting links to behind the scenes photos and other fun tidbits.  Seeing museum workers uncrate works like “Santiago El Grande” or “Christ of St. John of the Cross” is pretty epic, and definitely has me excited to see the paintings in person.   The museum also teamed with Delta to put a Dalí mustache on a plane, which is awesome and hilarious.

And just today, they revealed their new Dalí microsite, which uses flash to “reveal” many of the works as well as provide basic information about the exhibit.  The site shows selected highlights — though it’s hard to truly get a sense of the scale of these works, many of which are massive.  Visitors can also “dissect a Dalí,” by mousing over particular elements of “Portrait of My Dead Brother” and reading explanations of the imagery.  The site is gorgeous and fun to play around with, with lots of tiny pieces of information.  It includes guidelines for teachers, as well as several videos relevant to the exhibition.

It’s nice to see the High use social media like Twitter and Youtube, paired with a well-designed site, to increase exposure and get potential patrons interacting with the art online.  Oglethorpe’s museum, which is admittedly much smaller, could have potentially gotten an increase in traffic by using some of the same techniques.  It would be as simple as updating their Twitter feed more often, possibly @mentioning the High and getting some dialogue going about the exhibits, and posting some behind the scenes photos.  The art is beautiful, but tucked away on the top floor of the campus library, how many art lovers in Atlanta are getting the chance to see it?

Dalí: The Late Work opens at the High on August 7th.  They will also run a Dalí film festival in late August and early September.  (Sadly, I’ll have moved out of town by late August, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to see and blog about the exhibit before I go.)  The Dalí exhibit at Oglethorpe is open until September 5th.

The freakshow in modern performance

K-rock and I saw a really interesting show last night from Out of Hand Theater, just called The Show!.  It was a 10-in-1, based on the idea of the carnival freakshow, featuring local actors and puppeteers.  I went to see some good friends who were filling in the guest artist slot with a puppet show about a man and his gay horse (hilarious and awesome).  I was a little wary of the freakshow theme at first, and I certainly watched with a feeling of trepidation, but I ended up being pleasantly surprised.  Everything felt like it was done out of love, never out of a desire to laugh at the freaks or participate in the act of Othering.  In fact, the MC talked in the opening about watching actual historical carnival freakshows and how the point, and the result, was to view and acknowledge the performers’ humanity.  And while the performance wasn’t as incredible as the one described in The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show, it was still by turns funny, scary, thought-provoking, and weirdly touching.

It’s clear to me Out of Hand did their research, and tried to approach the theme from a sensitive standpoint.  They’ve posted a few links to interesting articles about freakshows, though I’ve not had time to take a full look through these, so proceed at your own risk.

I’m really attracted to the carnival theme as a framework for performance art (but only when it’s done well).  Obviously it can go horribly wrong, and be a terrible example of hipster ableism.  But I don’t think the theme is inherently bad or even exploitative.  I do think there can be something joyous in coming together to celebrate what makes each of us a “freak,” in a performative sense.

This theme also runs through the show we’re currently doing at the Center, Paul Bunyan and the Tall Tale Medicine Show.  This one’s a kids show, so it’s obviously a lot tamer, but it still has that medicine show aspect — a collection of stories told by a raggedy conglomeration of performers who both shine in their own right and assist each other, whose stories blend together to build something bigger in a community sense.

I think I love most the tiny moments where one performer is helping another to tell her “tale.”  To use an example from The Show!, when the escape artist becomes the tango partner of the contortionist, helping to tell the story of her death by becoming another character all together.  When one identity layers on top of the performer’s main identity, I suppose.  It’s a kind of double-obscuring of the performer, which still serves to emphasize the artifice of each and every identity on the stage.

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If you’re in Atlanta, I highly recommend seeing both shows I mentioned.  The Show! has one more performance, on Friday, April 30th at 11pm. It skips May 7th and 14th, then starts up again every Friday night.  Paul Bunyan runs Tues.-Sun. from now until May 23rd.

Favorite albums of 2009

Disclaimer: I’ve not yet properly heard The Decemberists’ Hazards of Love, Tegan and Sara’s Sainthood, and a whole bunch of other stuff I really should have. I took a biiiiiiiiig break from music around this summer — reviewer burnout, it’s a terrible job hazard — and I simply haven’t caught up yet.

Honestly, this list won’t really tell you that much about what was going on in music this year. It’s totally biased, completely incomplete, and signifies nothing more than my personal tastes. (Hence the word “favorite” and not “best.”) But I love writing about music, so I thought this exercise might still be worthwhile, and hopefully at least somewhat interesting for you to read.

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Honorable Mentions:
Bat for Lashes – Two Suns
Camera Obscura – My Maudlin Career
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart
Passion Pit – Manners
The Raveonettes – In and Out of Control
The xx – XX

10. The Miniature Tigers – Tell It to the Volcano

By all rights, I shouldn’t like this album as much as I do. What a way to start the top ten, huh? But seriously, I’ve gotten so entirely sick of quirky, slightly twee masculinity that I want to scream. And yet. Something in this album is just sophisticated enough, just self-aware and self-deprecating enough that it rounds that corner for me. (See my review for actual thoughts on the music here.)

9. Franz Nicolay – Major General

If you’re put off by how much the first song on this album sounds like The Hold Steady, you’re not alone. But keep listening, because there’s a lot here to love past the narrative tricks Nicolay has picked up from bandmate Craig Finn. (As a matter of fact, I happen to love those too, because there’s no way Finn would’ve ever written “Jeff Penalty,” and I think it’s a cool song.) Nicolay is at his best when he’s singing about fucked up relationships, seemingly drawn from his personal life. Case in point: “Confessions of an Ineffective Casanova,” which is the most epic and simultaneously most charming hatefuck song I’ve ever heard.

8. Venice is Sinking – AZAR / Okay EP

Athens’ ViS can basically do no wrong in my book. Both their releases this year were spectacular — and I say this as a girl who doesn’t even really like shoegaze-y pop most of the time. They’ve got another album coming soon (had it not been delayed, they probably would’ve been the only band I can think of to score a hat trick this year), a collection of songs performed live on the stage of the since-destroyed Georgia Theatre. It will stand as a testament to the venue’s gorgeous acoustics, while also serving as a fundraiser to get the theatre rebuilt. (You can read about the fire, and my personal reflections both on the theatre and ViS, here.) And if that weren’t enough, the band has also spent 2009 being the nicest, most accessible and fun kids in the Athens/Atlanta music scene.

7. Heartless Bastards – The Mountain

2010 needs more albums like this one. Sure, there aren’t a lot of hooks, but the dirty southern-inflected rock and Erika Wennerstrom’s raggedly beautiful voice are enough. This is the kind of album to put on in the background of any kind of day: drinking in the heat on front porches, driving in the rain, while prepping for a holiday dinner party, walking your dog through the snow, &c., &c.

6. Girls – Album

If last year was all about Phil Spector, and the year before that was all about Springsteen, it’s pretty clear that the zeitgeist of aught-nine was The Beach Boys. This is my favorite album of the bunch, mostly because of the painfully desperate lyrics, which managed to still sound detached when coming from Christopher Owens’ mouth.

5. Ida Maria – Fortress Round My Heart

I reviewed Ida Maria’s album earlier this year and said everything I could possibly say. Read it here.

4. Marina & the Diamonds – Crown Jewels EP

Yeah, okay, this is a cheat. A 3 song EP in no way actually compares to a full-length. But Marina is my favorite of all the female-fronted electropop bands to come out this year, so she gets a place on the list. “I am Not a Robot” is fun, danceable, joyous, and one of the best messages anyone has managed to fit in a pop song possibly ever. Increasingly, this has become the anthem of the end of my decade, a sentiment to be remembered over and over again.

3. The-Dream – Love Vs. Money

My favorite r&b album of the year, though to be fair, it may be the only one I actually listened to all the way through. The-Dream is the best songwriter currently working (why yes, he did write “Single Ladies” for Beyonce, and if that isn’t proof enough, your tastes and mine simply do not mix). His album is nothing but top of the line tracks a la “Single Ladies” and his other huge songwriting coup, “Umbrella.” If you want the best of the best, check out “Rockin’ That Shit” (on the right stereo system, it’s the sexiest massage you’ve ever gotten) and “My Love,” the song that made Mariah Carey tolerable to me again.

2. Neko Case – Middle Cyclone

So the best voice in Americana moves to Vermont, fills a barn with orphaned pianos, and releases the pop-est album to ever feel like country and folk in its heart. Did we know we needed this? Not really, but there it was this spring, stripped of the last vestiges of twang but still seeming to issue from the desolate fields and unending roads of the American countryside. Girl ain’t even from the South, y’all.

It’s possible that Case’s lyrics are growing more cuttingly insightful with each successive album, a scalpel slicing effortlessly between our true selves and the shields, walls, and masks we hide behind. Witness title track: “Can’t give up acting tough / It’s all that I’m made of / Can’t scrape together quite enough / To ride the bus to the outskirts of the fact that I need love.” Or, even simpler, this stinging line from another song: “I want the pharaohs, but there’s only men.”

1. Lady GaGa – The Fame Monster

Let’s not even lie — 2009 was the year of GaGa. Though The Fame was released in 2008, girl took off this year in the charts, in her increasingly weird ass music videos, and in a series of stellar awards show performances. We’ve seen her graduate from low-rent hipster party video concepts to living the actual, for-real Gossip Girl dream, and then shook our heads as she murdered Aleksander Skarsgard, danced as a cripple, bled to death live on MTV, and showed us the strangest bathhouse ever dreamed up, then topped it all off by lighting her piano on fire and pouring whiskey into the flames while continuing to sing the shit out of… whatever it was. Do you even remember? Did you pay attention to anything out of Stephanie Germanotta’s mouth in 2009?

It’s a dirty trick that she makes us think the images matter more than the words in the Haus of GaGa. Sure it’s all flashy weirdo fashion, subtle CG tricks, and more performance art than most performance artists can muster, but the actual words out of GaGa’s mouth, truly, speak volumes.

The Fame Monster is, at least in part, a fairly sophisticated theorem on the disparities between male and female desire. The differences are massive. Male desire is a consuming force, an appetite to be sated with female flesh, and girls are the unfortunate victims of this uncontrollable urge to devour. That’s the main theme of “Monster,” in which a boy who’s totally bad news eats GaGa’s heart and brain. It’s a powerful and frightening metaphor.

(Days before hearing the album for the first time, I had a conversation with a male friend about how terrifying I found Tom Petty’s video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” in which the characters of Alice in Wonderland consume a cake standing for Alice’s body, while she looks on, unable to move. I literally still have nightmares about that video. My male friend didn’t get it, but Lady GaGa sure as hell does.)

Elsewhere she’s less scared of the predatory nature of male/female relationships, but the metaphor stands. “Take a bite of my bad girl meat,” she goads on “Teeth,” the stomp and stammer closing track. But wanting to be devoured may just be what makes a bad girl, and it doesn’t make the devourer any less of a monster — a word that in itself connotes some shameful hunger, whether in use in myth and legend (Polyphemus the Cyclops comes immediately to mind, or the Big Bad Wolf) or modern parlance about sex offenders.

But while male desire is active in this most terrible way, female desire is presented as thwarted, as unsustainable and even tragic. In “Speechless,” a woman whose man has given up tells him she’ll never talk again; the consequence of loss of love is loss of speech, and thereby loss of agency. Not only that, but she’ll also never write again, presumably songs like the one she is currently singing. While male desire consumes and therefore destroys, female desire creates. It is the fuel used to speak, to write, to perform acts of artistry. Take love away and the female voice follows, and with it the ability for said female to assert herself.

It works only because GaGa is, as she reminds us on other tracks, a “free bitch.” Peeking behind the curtain, we know that the Haus of GaGa is run by the lady herself, almost completely free of (male) label control. This song sung by any other pop diva would scare me. But knowing this girl, I know better than to think she means it. I also know better than to think she isn’t willingly positioning herself in the male role at least half of the time. The monster of her song may be male, but the video for “Bad Romance” has Germanotta herself emerge from a space coffin labeled “Monster,” has her subtly changed into something inhuman (see: those scary-big eyes at one point, and the lizard-like spine protruding from her back at another).

Anything this layered masquerading as simple (amazing) pop deserves no less than the #1 slot. Besides, it’s fucking great to dance to.

Album Review: Nerd Parade

Hearkening back to the days when the American South was inextricably tied to rock ‘n’ roll, Nerd Parade’s The Span of a Life contains the kinds of big sounds and inventive daring that rock music should be about. The songs would, in fact, make the perfect soundtrack to Quentin Tarantino’s next film — gritty, soulful, searing. Their palate is wide-ranging, as though they went into the studio with a big grab bag of ’70s rock and punk sounds, shook it up really good, and then pulled out pieces at will.  But it’s also fresh, not so much stuck in the past as acknowledging a little bit of nostalgia, then moving on in unexpected ways.

Continue reading here.

Movie Review: We Fun

In order to be successful, it seems that rock documentaries need to feature three basic things: awesome music, copious alcohol, and a topless girl. Atlanta music scene doc We Fun has all three, and it’s pretty great.

The movie profiles several Atlanta bands who have become well-known in the wider indie world. The Black Lips, Deerhunter and Mastodon are the big three — Atlanta’s holy trinity, if you will — but there are also notable appearances by and interviews with The Coathangers, Mourdella, The Babyshakes, King Khan and the Shrines, and many others.

The music is loud, the parties are crazy, and the city feels epic.  It’s almost hard to believe these bands weren’t even on the map a few years ago.

Continue reading here.

Live Review: The Morning Benders

The last time the Morning Benders came through town, it was a balmy October and they were the first band of the night, playing in support of Ra Ra Riot. Since then, the four-piece from Berkeley, Calif. has toured the country, had 2008’s Talking Through Tin Cans featured on iTunes’ Indie Spotlight, and recorded a follow-up album. Friday night saw them return to the Drunken Unicorn — only this time, they headlined the bill.

Continue reading here.

Art Review: ARThouse [09]

Atlanta isn’t usually known around the country for its art galleries.  Theater and fine dining we’ve got covered, but art tends to get left out of the talk about us in other towns.  But ATLart[09], this year’s citywide annual event presented by the Atlanta Gallery Association, is working to change that.

The centerpiece of the three-week celebration is ARThouse[09], a museum-style exhibition showcasing many of Atlanta’s art galleries.  The house where it’s being held is a work of art itself: 541 West Paces Ferry, otherwise known as the Pink Palace, an Italian Baroque-style home not far from the Governor’s mansion, is 16,000 square feet of luxury.  From the 18th century English tapestry to the exposed brick work and original incinerator fixtures of the expansive basement, just touring the house would be worth the admission price.

Continue reading here.