Agoraphilia: Thrifting in B-52 Country

Like most college towns, Athens, Georgia abounds in thrift stores. My theory on Athens and its writers, musicians, and artists is that it produces a lot of them partly because there are so many thrift stores around. There's more to this symbiosis than just the need to live cheaply in the beginning. Thrift stores are your ticket into places heretofore denied you by the accident of your being born on a particular day in a particular year. Present-day thrifting among the middle classes is not necessarily economic desperation or poverty-driven; it is a conscious choice by some who love old things, some who just don't like being herded, and some who seek to expand their sense of time in ways useful to them as artists.But if you want to see America's attic compressed over time into an accidental and random museum, go to Agora and spend some hours in thought. If you are a student of cargo cults, as I am, this is a good place for you. I have scribbled somewhere this quote from some anthropologist whose name didn't stick: "Sometimes, metaphorically, cargo represented the search for a new social and moral order that would insure local sovereignty and the withdrawal of colonial rulers." There's nothing like the sight of a kid musing over an aluminum ice-tray, trying to figure out how it works, amazed that such things were ever manufactured in small American cities.

Agora is a co-op of about 50 "thrifters" or vendors who sell items gleaned from estate sales, garage sales, thrift stores (and only they know where else), all expertly managed by Ariee Hong in an old brick storefront at 260 Clayton Street, around the corner from the Caledonia Lounge in Athens.

On the day I visited, it was one of the busiest establishments downtown. Customers mostly under the age of 25. Prices are affordable, but not dirt-cheap, as these gleaners are sort of the mediators between you and a dirty bin of vinyl records in somebody's attic or a trunkful of old ballgowns set out by the curb or donated to Goodwill. Vintage fabrics, toys, boots, home decor, jewelry, whatever mode of backwards time travel you choose. Athens bills itself sometimes as 'the classic city' so the name of the registers as an allusion to the Greek, but also to the old Agora Ballroom in Atlanta that figured somewhat in launching Athens bands in the late 1970's. I am always like some stunned, mute, rapt museumgoer in such places; it's all an explosion of historical memes to me. So I wandered around and took about fifty photos with my I-phone, sort of like reference notes to myself, stuff I want to remember. Carnival chalk animals, tulle gowns from the 1950's, Pat Nixon dresses, Bill Black's Combo records, church hats, feed store hats, Brady Bunch paperdolls, pasteboard suitcases, Patsy Cline records, old dress patterns,party shoes, everything America has heretofore set out by the curb in its rush to be on the road to nowhere.

I kept thinking about the B-52's great song, "Mesopotamia," composed in this neck of the woods:

Turn your watch, turn your watch back,
about a hundred thousand years.
A hundred thousand years.

I'll meet you by the third pyramid
I'll meet you by the third pyramid
Ah come on, that's what I want, we'll meet
in Mesopotamia.




You can find cheaper ways to scrounge,like taking a walk through any street in America on garbage collection day. If your conscience can take it, go into the thrifts frequented by the poor and elbow them out of the way to snag that vintage popsiscle stick lamp simply because you can hawk it on E-bay for six times what it's worth. Agora is a great place to while away an afternoon, with a clear conscience, studying the next wave of artists who are in there poking around in America's rag and bone shop of its amnesiac's heart.


Here's an old clip of a live B-52's performance of "Mesopotamia." Note the thrift store-ish threads.

Walkabout Athens, Ga.: Whoa, You Almost Missed Bizarro-Wuxtry

If you're not careful you could miss this place when you make your visit to Athens, Georgia, like you can miss it in this photo of their entrance. That would be a shame. Bizarro-Wuxtry overlooks the corner of Clayton and College, sort of sideways to the epicenter of things. It's the kind of place that devotees know how to find, and ordinary sods (sodettes?) like myself stumble into out of curiosity and accident. Bizarro is upstairs, over Wuxtry. Bizarro is comics, Wuxtry is music. You can find out more about Wuxtry in Denise Sullivan's book about REM, Talk About the Passion : An Oral History. Bizarro-Wuxtry is worth a visit, not only because of Wuxtry's role as we enter the Epoch of Scarce Vinyl, but because of this guy shown here. This is Devlin Thompson, benevolent shopkeep, who rules the upstairs shop once complimented by cartoonist Peter Bagge as "the funkiest business establishment I have ever seen." Thompson is not only a longtime fixture in Athen's graphic art/comix scene, he is well-known outside Athens for keeping this landmark indie business alive and well in the age when you can't swing a dead Bill the Cat without hitting some chain bookstore that has snuffed out venerable indies. Devlin is beloved by comics aficionados; you can read one pilgrim's summer vacation trip specifically to see the store here, complete with many photos of Devlin's home and collections of what academics would call "pop culture artifacts." You can find comics anywhere; you can walk into any chain store and even have them sold to you by someone who does not read them or get them or value them, much less draw them. You can not always find a human being with encyclopedic memory to help you find what you don't know you're looking for yet. Whether you draw or just script, or both, or whether you are this new type of student I'm seeing a lot of these days, fiction writers interested in grafting anime and manga techniques into narrative, guys like Devlin could prove indispensable to you. When I was in his store, he was playing an old Bobby Bare album, country from back in the day before he may have been born. I suspect he's probably indispensable to writers in search of worthy music also, so my skeeve-for-obscure-music radar went into overdrive even in the comics part this store, but I could be wrong.
The shop is a dark but comfortable warren of well-used rooms, not much messed-with in the decor department, so you get a sense of layers of time, 1880's to 1960's, same difference. What's special about this place is it seems to exist in its own time dimension, off the beaten path of evil-empire Hollywood blockbuster merch-marketing that seeks nothing less than global domination.

Here's a project for some young Georgia writer who wants to make his or her mark: write a novella set in this store, spanning a couple three decades. How and why has it survived? If a man's daily work upstairs on this corner in Athens overlooks the ebb and drift of changes in America from this window, what does he see?







Bizarro-Wuxtry
Comics * Toys * Stuff
225 College Avenue
Athens, Georgia 30601
706-353-7938
bizarro@spook-town.com

Isn't It Pretty to Think So?

A bravely handpainted t-shirt in a shop window on University Avenue, Fort Worth, reads, "Love. Texas. Peace." To fully appreciate this sight, you need to hear the test-fighter jets streaking across the sky above the city.

Who knew? We love peace so much here, our local bread is buttered by the perennially egalitarian need to enable even the smallest of nations to wage war against each other and ourselves. We reserve the right to sell any weapon to anyone at any time for any price. It's the American way. Local bread is also buttered to a lesser degree this year in boutique-land by the peace symbol meme, which is hot, hot, hot this season to, fasci-, uh, fashionistas, even appearing as a motif in purses at the Pappagallo Shop (that look also like odd homage to the metal rivets in black leather jackets of the Stonewall riots long ago). To reduce political participation to the purchase of a singular metal rivet pattern! What a concept! Reduce the neuronal associations with peace to a simple swipe of a credit card, ka-ching, I support peace. A strong military insures that our values and way of life prevail: Twenty per cent interest rate, non-negotiable, you complain & we jack it up to twenty-eight, because freedom is not free, baby.

This Just In: North Idaho Drug Kingpin Seeks Ghostwriter

From the Dallas Craig's List, July 1, 2009. H/T to my colleague Cheryl for this one. The typos are his'n,the kingpin's, not mine. Anyone? Anyone?

"Writer Wanted For Ex North Idaho Drug Kingpin: Looking for someone to write life story, unique story, unique Individual. Story consists of dealings with Colombians,Cubans, Mexican Federallies, 16 years in prison hanging out with mafia members from the Phildelphia Scarfo gang, Charlie Iannache, Anthony Pungitore, Gene Gotti-brother of John Gotti of the New York Mafia, being successful jail house lawyer. Story begins with the consequences for a boy with a gifted IQ who deals with uniagnosed ADHD and the path he takes in life through taking over the underbelly of the drug world,prison,self inflicted extrodinary rehabilitation efforts to his succesfull entrance back into society. This isnt some run of the mill drug dealer story! I SHOULD BE DEAD A HUNDRED TIMES OVER. GOD HAD HIS HAND ON MY SHOULDER TO GET THROUGH IT. ps: All Statue of Limitations are finished and all prison time completed. The story just needs to be told by a gifted writer. TO SEE 6 PAGE SYNOPSIS GO TO: http://bobbyconvict.blogspot.com If interested, please submit writing proposal/compensation plans. I would prefer to give the writer a portion of proceeds, but would pay the right writer to do the story. Follow up to the book would be self help videos/books for children-parents-educators-inmates to not go down the path I took, or to change an inmates life through education. please email me at: write4me87@yahoo.com

Location: Dallas
Compensation: Negotiable
Principals only. Recruiters, please don't contact this job poster.
Please, no phone calls about this job!
Please do not contact job poster about other services, products or commercial interests.



PostingID: 1248169567"

A Walkabout in Athens, Georgia: Listen to the Music; Eat at the Grit

To begin: let me not violate this place.
Let these words not come off like a drive-by shooting: some outsider speeding through a special place too fast, violating it terribly, moving on. I would have stayed longer if it had been possible.

Herewith, a little valentine to the music in Athens, mostly for the benefit of my students in a course I'm teaching in the fall, who, being Texans, will likely not know much about it. Look at it this way: the music life in Athens, Georgia is important enough to warrant its own mindfully tended Wikipedia page. If you are not fortunate enough to have my brother Lee to show you around, try this Musical Tour Guide. This blog,Cable & Tweed seems to stay abreast of the more ephemeral aspects of Athens music life.

If you go to Athens for music, don't go like a tourist to Nash-Vegas, ready to rubberneck like a rube or stalk folks. Go like a pilgrim with an open and needful heart. Even if you don't know the music yet. All you need to know: thousands of young people have preceded you in this place. Many lingered and found the courage there to make the art they wanted. It was the place that gave them the refuge they didn't find back home. It didn't matter to them that they were scaring their parents, that they were scaring the neighbors back home, or the police. This is not Disneyland. They did what they had to do. People lived and loved and suffered and played some music here. The rest is American history, not just photos in history books but the real history, decades of radio waves knitting the country together in a way that nothing else does.
Even before B-52's and REM re-positioned Athens on the national music radar, Athens was home to what is now the oldest surviving venue for vaudeville in North America, the Morton Theatre, where some luminaries such as Blind Willie McTell came through to sing the blues. If you are a young person with some songs to write, Athens is still as congenial a home as you are going to find in North America today.

You should eat at The Grit, a vegetarian restaurant at 199 Prince Avenue that has been nourishing local and touring rock n' rollers for over 20 years. Southern soul victuals cooked without pretense, served to you the same way. No heavily starched waiter-patter about tonight's special is sauteed ostrich armpits in bearnaise only savored properly with a singularly expensive Pouilly-Fricasee, yadda yadda. It's safe to say that the Grit does not target the food fascist demographic. The waitstaff here are rock and roll hardy perennials, quite likely musicians, artists, writers themselves. Just girls of good cheer in soft summer dresses or guys in worn T-shirts and jeans, in a way that seems straight out of a Leonard Cohen song, bringing you a plate of something that is going to taste like somebody loves you.


Against some gray autumnal day when you might fear your continued presence in this world, purchase to take home with you The Grit Cookbook, by Hill Street Press (2001), so you can master the secret ingredient to many Grit specialties, yeast gravy. You can also download it on your Kindle, if you have one. I like the way the recipes are written; the "Sunday Miracle BBQ Sandwich" goes, "The secret is to brown the bejesus out of the tempeh. The miracle is it ain't meat!" Their specs for pancake size? Make 'em the size of 45 rpm records. This is an eclectic trove of recipes, everything from old Southern field-hand and Sunday dinner-on-the-grounds church picnic food that has roots in Africa, to old-school California-coast vegetarian standards like black bean chili and tempeh reubens and others that seem to pre-date "Asian fusion" plus a good many of the Grit's legendary desserts, such as Orange Creamsicle Cake. It's also fun to peruse the testimonials liberally sprinkled throughout the recipes: "Whenever touring bands come to play at the 40 Watt Club and ask about a good place to eat," said Barrie Buck, "I always send them to the Grit. Anyone who's been there once can't wait to mention that they're off the the Grit as soon as the sound check is over." Other testimonials come from Counting Crows, Better than Ezra, others. "Where else in the world can you get soup seved by the singer/songwriter of Jucifer? Life is beautiful," said Kevin Kinney of Drivin' n' Cryin'.

I suspect that part of the longevity of the Grit is its menu is largely its stubbornness about comfort food, cooked like somebody who loves you would do it. That's a difficult thing to find on the road.

Here's an assignment for you: go into the Grit, order the collard greens. What does it mean that the waitress will bring it in a swish of her soft peasant dress, and place it before you like it is the most normal thing in the world, a bowl of collard greens. What does it mean, how can it be? Behold your lowly bowl of collard greens, and understand that you are actually probably communing with Blind Willie McTell, of whom Bob Dylan has said nobody can sing the blues like. This the basic lesson of making art: you start with survival in hard times, master subsistence and simplicity, and then you move on to more complicated issues, like surviving all the success and plenitude. Send me a postcard, sometime in your lifetime, and tell me what it means, the way the girls at the Grit will serve you that lowly bowl of collard greens with equal grace as they serve the house tofu specialty, The Golden Bowl.

Here's another assignment: Grit co-founder Ted Hafer, onetime frontman for the 80's band Porn Orchard, died in a mysterious fall from an upper deck of a parking garage in one of those grey Athens autumns in 2007, and my brother Lee covered that here for the Athens Banner-Herald. Write a story that reads like a love medicine to the ones Hafer left behind, or a talisman for their protection. Due date: sometime in your lifetime.


Tomorrow: Bizarro-Wuxtry, onetime employer of the gentleman in this photo.

Abe Books Featuring 60 Years of National Book Award Winners

Abe Books is at the ready to help you celebrate 60 years of the National Book Award, with a catalogue of all previous award winners, with original covers. The National Book Foundation will offer for public consideration and voting, a "short list," presumably the best of the best culled from these, by NBA winners.

That should get interesting.

From the Abe website:
"Writers connected to the National Book Awards will vote to select a shortlist, which will be announced on 21 September. A public vote will then decide the overall winner and the result will be revealed on 18 November at the National Book Awards dinner.

AbeBooks.com is an official partner for the Best of the National Book Awards and we would like to hear your opinions about the contenders. Which book will win? Which ones deserve a revival? Have you read every single one? What omissions should have been on the list? Email your thoughts to media@abebooks.com ."

Still Cool After All These Years: A Walkabout in Athens, Georgia

First time I ever saw this town was 1964 or thereabouts, I was nine or so, and we were delivering my oldest brother Mark into the hands of UGA. I knew immediately that Athens was a ticket to coolville, somehow. Three years later, we delivered my other big brother into the hands of UGA, and it was even cooler by then, what with the counterculture that was coming hard on the heels of the Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War. Athens was the place where you could speak your mind, where you could be fully American and exercise your right of free speech without fear of reprisals or somebody doing a front-yard flaming-cross installation of yard-art on your premises. Athens was so cool, in fact, with its antiwar protests and thriving counterculture that my mother refused to let me go there to school when it was time for me to be delivered into the hands of some august institution. So I've always seen it as the place I should've gone, and in many ways I am still trying, always, to go there. Athens welcomed me and my first novel with open arms, so it always occupies a special little room in my heart, tho now that I think about it, it was probably all because I am Lee Shearer's little sister. He is the real writer from our family; he has earned his living for decades by covering Athens and UGA for various papers, most recently the Athens Banner-Herald.

Almost fifty years later, Athens is still the ticket to a place worth going, especially if you are a "creative type." Not because so many other creative types have put it on the map ( 40-Watt Club, REM, B-52's,); that's just lagniappe. The real reason to go is that the place feeds your head, like any other place in America where you get this accidentally large concentration of educated people interested in leading an informed and mindful and good life.

This week's posting will be a serial salute/valentine to Athens, which is still cool after all these years. I drove there all the way from Brooklyn in one day last week, because I wanted my daughter to see it before she spends the rest of the summer in Fort Worth. We visited with my brother Lee for a very short while, as a newspaperman keeps slightly whack hours, what with burning theaters, murderous perfessers, and such like. He has a semi-encyclopedic knowledge of Athens, the perfect person to show you what's worth seeing. (If you don't have Lee, rely on Flagpole, the local indie paper.) We were there less than 24 hours, but it was a nourishing little walkabout. I even got to practice a ritual left over from childhood: raiding his books, musing over all his stuff that is always 'way cooler than mine.

Athens is 'way more than hip music and good food and hipsterati emigres grooving on themselves. The university is a force unto itself, without which the town wouldn't even be a blip on a roadmap. On this trip I got to meet Dr. Corrie Brown, from UGA's School of Veterinary Science, a woman who helps veterinarians practicing under "Third World" conditions (think Afghanistan, think Africa) master new techniques in combatting pathogens. The town is full of people who function in a global context, who also "get" the idea that any big idea is only as good as it can translate to the improvement of local life somewhere. It doesn't get much cooler than that, mes enfants.

Though the original 40-Watt Club is now a Starbucks, downtown Athens has fiercely resisted the encroachments of corporate homogeneity. It's one of the South's biggest indie business scenes, with block after block of boutiques, coffeehousess, art galleries, thrift stores, eateries, bars, all a big draw to the throngs of young people who frequent it.

Athens is cool because it is full of people who live with the courage to insist on their way of life. That's really where the cool genome begins: courage.

That's what I skeeve on when I go to Athens, the courage. Not the coolness, the courage.

On deck for tomorrow: more on downtown.