Newspaper Page Text
ATHENS, GA: W
S outherners love words. #e love drawing them out, making
them up and pronouncing them creatively. We especially
love proper nouns. And though we're not especially re
nowned for being trailblazers m the field of etymology,
we children of the South know certain secrets about how to hang
a handle on a man. woman, chicken or whatever needs naming.
There's a lot in a name. And when it comes to our towns and cit
ies. we know well the technique of optimistic evocation, i.e., giv
ing something a fancy name in the hopes that it will live up to it,
and thus do its own name justice. We call upon names like Cairo,
Memphis, Macedonia and Bethlehem. This approach works on kind
of a backwards logic—I call it the Oada of Dixie—and it's suc
cessful once in a blue moon. Most often, though, a Southern town
w>U seem to immediately shirk whatever airs its ancient name
imparts. It might even tear off, screaming, in the opposite direc
tion. To wit: My hometown of Manchester, GA, christened in 1909
after the celebrated British city of industry, remains a one-horse
railroad town that's been struggling for survival ever since Goody
and Playtex pulled the plug on the town's two major factories 15
years ago. sending many of her inhabitants to travel through a
Weak Shiloh, GA (whose name means “Place of Peace*) to work for
mckels and dimes at a poultry abattoir.
A name, however heroic, cannot and will not magically inocu
late us against the inherent tragedies of existence—which brings
us to Athens. GA, a place I love. Mow, I'm determined not to get
going here about ancient Greece and how our Athens compares
to that other one. Grandiose, allusive meanderings like this are
best left to PR firms, travel mags and chambers of commerce.
After all, it's the actual thing that's being named that lives,
breathes, grooves and moves. Our fair city has her own mojo
rising and we need to not forget that. With this in mind, let
us now turn towards the praises of Athens. GA, population
110.000, east of Atlanta, west of the Atlantic Ocean, and about
as far from Greece as you can get, in almost every way imaginable.
Athens is the home of the Human Rights fest. the Twilight
Cntenum and Athfest. It's the place where you gotta be care
ful where you de-seed, because if you're not. you could end up
with a SWAT team in your front yard. Athens is fertile, fecund
and receptive. It's a city that sustains. And let me tell you about
sustenance I've eaten pecans in the Athens winter, figs in mid
summer, scuppernongs on the cusp of autumn honeysuckle in
early spring, and they were all free for the taking. I've harvested
chanterelles from puWk parks, copped endless meals at endless art
openings, and once even spotted a dump of psilocybin mushrooms
nudging up through the rotting hardwood mulch in front of UGA's
Park MalL That last event resulted in seven hours of navigating the
hallways of always with a Catahoula dog and my two goggle-eyed
buddies, all of us about to graduate, suspended high above Athens'
darkened streets on a trestle that more than bore our weight. I've
bailed friends out of jail for their avant garde graffiti art I’ve seen
grown men square off and slug it out in a Holiday Inn parking lot
while their wives watched in horror. And I've watched a moment in
time expand across weeks as Tibetans constructed ephemeral sand
mandalas downtown. Like a good-enough irother, Athens has wel
comed and sustained us all.
MULTIPLICITIES
This is a town of multiplicities, too. where many amazing
things are tangible all at once. There are Sufi gatherings, house
parties, trapeze performances and UGA gamedays. In Athens
you can fveguent a bona-fide Thai massage therapist who smokes
hand roiled cigarettes, eats BlTs, and lives in a tree house. In my
15 years here. I've seen some beautiful chaos theory enacted. I
once saw a drunken man accept Christ as his personal savior in a
Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. I’ve watched a hawk swoop down on
a squirrel and dismember him bone, pelt and flesh in one of the
ancient oaks on North Campus while, nearby, renegade kung fu
students tumbled in the grass. I've attended poetry readings by
Pulitzer Prize winners, followed by a trip to Barnett's for smokes
and a lucky numbers book. This is a town that Cab Calloway, Louis
Armstrong, Patti Smith, Rudy Ray Moore and Bob Dylan have all
blazed through. And, as if we could forget, it's where our golden
boys turned a birthday party jam into a 27-year alt-rock saga.
Worthy of a pilgrimage, she's got her own patron saints, too:
John Seawright, Linda Phillips, Coleman Barks, Meghan Burke,
Vic Vickery, Angie Grass, Arvin Scott, Rick The Printer, all Melted
Men, past and present, Vernon Thornsberry, Andy Cherewick, Jim
Herbert, Larry Munson, Bruno Rubio, Dextei Weaver, Vic Chesnutt,
the R.E.M. boys, Judith Ortiz Cofer, the Pylon crew, and so many,
many more. This can be a charmed, saintly place, the kind of place
where grassroots benefit concerts help out local artists saddled
with too-huge medical bills. Anarchic homebrewers call Athens
home, as do poet-chiropractors, brotherty sausage vendors, bar-
keeps who write novels, wise old women and friendly old men who
build birdhouses and squint into the distance, because they can
see what"s cornin' down the line, and it ain't too pretty.
POSSIBILITIES
Social inequity is forcing the working class out of old, working-
class neighborhoods. Gentrifiers flip houses and the demograph
ics change. The poorest of the poor move on out or maybe down
to Athens' hidden shantytowns, tent villages and bridges -last
refuges for the local proletariat struggling to hang on. It's a land
split by poverty and wealth, where many people go hungry while
many others feast. It's also a place where more than a few re
sourceful citizens dumpster-dive, and where Food Not Bombs and
soup kitchen volunteers slip loaves of bread into # the hands of the
hungry. Athens is a town in danger of becoming another suburb of
Atlanta, or—even worse—of itself. Like America, it's a place where
anything that took time to develop and grow can be erased over
night by expansions, sprawls and malls: its very soul threatened by
its own comeuppance.
Ah, but souls and cities change and grow like anything else,
and Athens is a place of much beauty and creativity, where the
vibrant heartbeats of her inhabitants kick out a McCoy Tyner and
Bud Powell-on-lSD polyrhythm, and nto knows where that will
take us? There's more than enough good people here, people who
want to ease humanity's suffering. Maybe someday soon we ll get
it together and make social justice viable. After all, this is the
town where independent filmmakers set up their projectors in
parking tots and waive the 12 admission fee for their friends, so
nobody ends up paying. Dance parties ensue. It's a Dixie Dadaism
stronghold. It's a place where people work hard, make art and
always have time to say hello to strangers. Home of the decent
meal reasonably priced and endless possibilities, it's Athenstown
baby, the A-T-H, where the whole shack shimmies. YVetcome home.
Jonathan Bailey
*5 OFF
any service
Welcome 8<ick Students!
125 I CLAYTON SI
DOWNTOWN
’Ob ■ tb HK.'b
mericanit’lassie
Welcome
Students!
TACO
STAND
3 Grtat locations!
tv«. Imim tntub
11 UAGTOU COM AUGUST IS. 2007
NfWS & FIATURfS I ARTS & IVfNTS I MOVIES I MUSIC I COMICS & A0VICE I ClASSIW DS