This is totally different. My debt of gratitude is too large to be repaid, but I couldn’t be happier to owe so much to so many people. I realized that as I tried to exit the Cox Capitol Theatre to get to Envy, which was equally difficult to leave. Every person I passed on the way out—almost every person I saw from across the room—I wanted to hug and thank for being a part of last night, which, in most cases, was thanking them for being a part of this, for lending us their special talents of just being themselves and doing what they do—for helping create our city inside the city, a cross between an underground, an oasis and a shelter. 

It was present in Brainstorm Lab bringing a crew of five people, starting up early and going all night with us, filming the entire event, streaming it live on the web and then giving it to us so we can relive the whole thing. But it was also seeing Amy Beth dressed up like Wonder Woman,and Hannah and Chris Marney dressed like they stepped off the set of the Pirates of the Caribbean.

It was in seeing Roger Riddle get his third straight Favorite Local DJ award, and remembering those nights upstairs at Liz Reeds when only three drunk people were there dancing, spinning like falling leaves while he played music no one around here knew about yet. It was in Envy at the after party where Riddle was
spinning—from Mos Def's Ms. Fat Booty to Ram Jam's Black Betty (Bam-a-lam!)—as Clyde and Al K!NG had a dance-off, which was punctuated by an unidentified (to me) B-grrl who stepped in and stole the show.

And the musicians. Damn. None of them made a dime last night but they played their asses off. They gave everything like this would be the last show on earth, like it was a birth and the only way we’d know they were breathing is if they screamed. It was also the off-stage times with them last night, and after other gigs, on the street, in the bars, getting to know them as people and having the opportunity to feel proud like a parent when they got up and showed out in front of 600 people.

My own mom (aka Moms) was there with my Mammaw and Pop, and I could see them snapping photos, smiling big. They got it, I think. They understood why we do this. And they weren’t alone. Al King’s mom and dad both looked like they might burst with pride and joy, and rightfully so. "Momenclature”, dh’s mama, was not only there but she came dressed up in a kimono with a bird in her hair (Nomenclature’s “logo” is a birdie), AND she won a $50 bar tab. Shawn from Citizen Insane had his mom backstage—she surprised him after driving from Savannah just to see her boy play.

Then there’s the extended family of friends and fans, which grew for every act that took the stage. They were there with video camera taping the performances, getting candid shots backstage, clenched with nervous excitement on behalf of their people, pulling their eyes away only to look around to see if everyone loves it as much as they do.

And the city grew, is growing, bigger than our admittedly limited focus on downtown. The scene may (rightfully?) situate itself downtown because, as an area, it is the crossroads for our city, but our attention is growing to bring more folks to the table. To have the Rivalry’s crew come out IN FORCE like that then see Stephen propose to Kelsey, to talk to Matt and Annie Moncrief afterward, and remember this one very important fact: none of this matters without people, without family. 

That’s what we have that we didn’t have before. Say what you will about the crazy mojo in this town—it’s there, I know it is—but the one thing that makes all this worthwhile is the people, and there are so many damn beautiful people in this city it makes my heart want to explode. That is why I am so grateful. This is what the gratitude is about. You all have no idea how much I owe you, but you best believe that everything I do from here on out, for as long as I can muster it, will be geared towards showing you how much I appreciate you. And what really excites me is that I know you’ll be doing the same too. This is the beautiful cycle. 

Yes, I know… that’s lame. But it is true and you know it. So, drink it up, y’all. Breathe it in. Hold it. Savor it. This is going to be the time of our lives. We have community and the rest will certainly follow. We do this for each other, to enrich ourselves and our people, and that’s why this is good. If folks don’t want to be a part of this, so what? Let them regret that decision later. This is about us. We’ve built our city, and it’s growing.

Goddamn right it’s a beautiful day.

Today, after a homemade dinner of beef curry and rice, my Mammaw said, "You look like you feel like dog squeeze." I mention it because my answer was affirmative, and because I'm now trying to better incorporate "dog squeeze" into my vocabulary. I'd appreciate it if you did the same.

Despite a history of late nights and binge drinking, I'm actually just a little sick right now. Coughing, fever, achy muscles and such. Perhaps shouting for six hours in a smoky bar wasn't the best way to get over my cold. But it was the most fun way to ignore it.

The second gathering of the Associated Creatives and Eclectic Malcontents for Productive Deviance, Local 478 (sponsored and supported by The 11th Hour) was fan-damn-tastic.

I'll just start at the end and work my way back. Perry Valentyne and Jubee—collectively called City Council—got together with some of the members of Citizen Insane—namely Jesse, my new favorite guitarist, and Shawn, my new favorite funky drummer—as well as special guest bassist, Travis Something Shirt-n-Tie, and Matt (bka – One Bad Catholic) on the ones (no twos), and they made beautiful party music together. In a week's time, they learned four songs together. It was, as Stephanie "Freakshow" Furst (of Under the Gazebo) awkwardly said, "Off the chain." On the last song—the already awesome "Thru the Blinds"—Willie D of Nomenclature hopped on stage. It was live. I don't think I was alone in hoping it'd keep going.

And maybe they're psychic because after I said thanks and y'all be safe getting home, I noticed Shawn, Travis, Jesse and Matt were still going. They hadn't stopped. And if Vic hadn't kicked us out, they might still be playing now. Jubee and Perry took turns freestyling. Then Floco Torres and Al King took their shot. Then Jubee again.

That was just the end of the night, like from 12:45am until close. The whole night had been crazy, a constant crowd that easily doubled the turnout for the first Local 478. Word's getting out, and the early reviews are all positive.

I'll be honest. I thought I'd over-reached with this one. I thought I was pushing it because I had the Freedom Jazz Trio starting things off, and nothing about jazz seems like the Hummingbirdon a Saturday night. But that big 9 o'clock crowd didn't flee. They dug it. The reincarnation of the cool, y'all.

But then panic struck when Freedom Jazz was almost done and I couldn't find 9fh Gutta. In a pinch, I turned to Floco and Al who agreed to rock out without any rehearsal. Despite being on the spot, they didn't disappoint. They never do. In fact, I had some folks asking why I didn't let them go longer. They're each stars in the making. No joke.

One of their new fans is Interscope/Myspace recording artist Meiko, a Roberta-native and former Macon resident who has been making waves all over the country, touring with Katy Perry, Sara Barelles, Mat Kearney, and several others. She's had her music popping up on TV shows like Grey's Anatomy, was an iTunes featured performer, a former 1 download on iTunes, and her self-titled album just cracked the Billboard Hot 200, a pretty impressive feat considering she peddled it herself for about a year when she was just an indie. Anyway… I'm a fan, yes.

(The Local 478 is doing a very special Christmas show with Meiko at the Cox Capitol Theatre on Tuesday, December 23. She's hooking up with Sonia Leigh, and we're working on a surprise local act to put in the mix, so stay tuned. {It'll be a good way to get worked up for the next Local 478 show on Saturday, December 27—the perfect way to blow off steam after Christmas.})

So, with Guttz still nowhere in sight, Floco and Al introduced Roxy Love for her Hummingbird debut. She only did one song, but she's already building a fan base. Her voice is hard to describe. You really have to hear it yourself.

One of my favorite things about last night was that we had some hardcore punk rockers in attendance, mixing easily with our hipsters and hip-hoppers, the oddballs and the squares alike. I've known some of the guys (and fans) of The Intoxicated for a while, and I loved having them side-by-side with folks like Gutta, who finally showed the fuck up. (He says he had car trouble so I'll give him a pass.)

With some help from Synister Sounds and Hymajesty Ace, Gutta brought his enlightened Dirty South sound to the stage. As hard and heavy as he was, it was the perfect set-up for The Intoxicated, who came screaming straight out of the slums of Crap Country. Wouldn't mind seeing them work on something together...

As this thing goes forward, I want to hear more from folks about what they like and don't like, about what they want to see and what they've seen enough of. It's always going to be a work in progress and I've learned some lessons already. But I'm always open to new suggestions (that doesn't mean I'll use them all, or immediately). So far, the consensus is that Macon has done this homegrown music thing before and we're close to seeing it jump off again. Regardless of the outcome, we're having fun trying.

Thanks to everyone who was a part of it. See you real soon.

(When you get the chance, peep this soul-affirming blog by the one and only Lady A-1 Sauce!)

{Note: this is a preview of an article going in tomorrow's paper because the public meeting is tonight and you really ought to be there. Newton Chapel at Mercer, 7pm}

Design Matters: Interface is all in yo face!

by Chris Horne

"Macon is an amazingly beautiful city," Scott Page says. And he doesn't seem to be blowing smoke just because he and his company, Interface Studio, are responsible for the master plan that will guide the College Hill Corridor into its early golden age.

"I work in a lot of tough neighborhoods. I work in a lot of neighborhoods that haven't seen investment in decades, in cities that are 60% vacant. Those are the kind of problems we're used to," he continues. "Macon certainly has its challenges, but considering what there is to build on, Macon has a lot more than a lot of other small cities."

From its introduction, the College Hill Corridor Commission (CHCC) has threatened to change the scope, feel, function and coolness factor of downtown Macon by reuniting it with its closest student body, Mercer. On Wednesday, November 19, Interface will have a big public meeting where they promise not to reveal much of anything.

Why? They want to hear from the community before they set their plan in stone.

"When people did a master plan in the past, it showed the city from 3000 feet up and it showed where everything was built and it was very, very rigid," Scott says. "Those were also the days when you had a mayor—or a king, in some cases—lording over the landscape. These days you've got neighborhood groups and banks and foundations all over the city who have their own agenda."

Those agendas are good things too, especially as he means it, because they reflect the involvement various community members and organizations have taken in the improvement of the downtown district as well as its Intown brethren. There are some in the city affectionately calling downtown "everybody's neighborhood", and that's starting to grow from slogan to reality.

That said, it's going to be a chore trying to balance all the wants and desires that we (the people) have accumulated for this city and in particular this area. But at this public meeting, they are inviting the community to further overwhelm them with even more of that very input. That's how they're going to build their plan.

As Scott says, "Our objective is to put together a living document that everyone can get behind with some pragmatic short-term ideas as well as long-term ideas to get people talking."

They aren't drawing up plans for one big home run idea or multi-million dollar project. There will be suggestions in the master plan—which isn't due until January—that can be implemented immediately. They're building this plan believing it'll actually be used in the very near future. That's pretty bold considering the stacks of unused plans collecting dust in non-profit and government closets all over the city.

"We want to keep momentum going," Scott says. "Cities have always evolved. What we try to do when we put together a plan is remember it is a set of ideas for one point in time. We're building on the things that have been done in the past and we're planning for a hopeful future—but, in five years, the plan should be re-evaluated."

They believe the Corridor can draw in young professionals and the creative class, as well as retain (and get more out of) the people that are already here. According to the Interface website, they're lending their vision to a master plan of the Wicker Park/Bucktown area of Chicago, which is—if you don't already know—very hip. One element of "the city" that they hope to enhance with the help of Land Strategies is to make the Corridor friendlier for pedestrian and bicycle traffic.

"The entire community seems to be behind becoming more walkable/bikeable. Before (the gas price spike), you'd hear a lot of lip service about making cities more walkable and bikeable, but now it's gotten easier to convince people to restore priority to peds and bicycles," Mark says.

Doing so in Macon would physically connect downtown with the area to and around Mercer, which then could be developed with specific stopping points along the way. To hear Scott and Mark talk, one of the biggest obstacles they usually face was taken care of before they even stepped foot here. That is, getting the community—its leaders and affected citizens—to buy in. If this continues, the chances of their ideas becoming realities increases greatly.

"We're looking at this with fresh eyes. I think not being from Macon gives us that perspective," Scott points out. Then asking if we're responsible for the Thriller Dance that he saw on YouTube, he admits he showed it around the office to which his co-workers remarked, "Macon's so cool!"

With any luck and their help, that just might become our motto.

After my last blog, milady and I went for a walk. There in the middle of a park, in 50 degree weather, a clean-cut muscular white guy who was so artificially tanned that he looked like C. Thomas Howell in Soul Man stood shirtless and flexing. Two women in matching black outfits chit-chatted with a bystander. C. Muscle Howell smiled and laughed, taking his time putting the shirt back on. I couldn't figure it out. Several scenarios raced through my head, but none fit. Not even the suspicion that it could be the Louisville version of bum fights.

Well, an hour or so later, once we'd finally found a place to eat—that city was three times as big and almost as dead as Macon on a Saturday afternoon—we enter the convention center next to our hotel. Louisville has a system of skywalks that run through its hotels and parking garages, the Louie Link, and given the dropping temperature, it seemed like our best bet.

That's when we saw this poster for Kentucky Muscle.

My brain went off like that closing montage in The Usual Suspects. Everything made sense in the confines and contrived logic of bodybuilding, starting with the shirtless dude and leading through all the super bulked-up guys I'd casually noticed but not noted out around the city. We peeked into the auditorium where they were setting up for the night's events, like peering behind the Wizard's curtain... or, into the Ultimate Warrior's dressing room. A huge black dude stalked the sidewalk with a leather backbrace belt thrown over his shoulder, like he might need it at any moment for a spontaneous lifting competition, like he might have to pick some motherfuckas up.

I soon traded my girlfriend for the college football-loving mathematician that rode up with his girlfriend and us to this conference. We went to a sports bar to watch LSU eventually lose to Alabama. Along the way, I intentionally lead us back to the convention center so I could see what Kentucky Muscle was up to then.

Competitive Arm Wrestling. It was like TV, but live. It was like Sly Stallone in Over the Top, but better. One match was stopped three times because the two dudes couldn't stay clasped together. So the ref brought out "the strap" to bind their hands in mortal combat. Oh, man. Talk about exciting. I looked at The Math Guy and back at myself. We were each wearing sportsjackets and didn't fit any weight class there. Dudes were either hopelessly scrawny and dorky (observers) or massive and titanic (the bodybuilders and their peers). It'd only be a matter of time before they figured us out.

As we exited, a woman walked by in a short skirt. She was pretty and pretty normal looking except her thighs were enormous slabs of ripped meat. Rocky couldn't have boxed those sides of beef. She reminded me of the line Jean-Claude Van Damme had on SNL a few years ago: "I can crack a walnut with my butt."

(Speaking of Van Dammage, check out this trailer for his new movie, JCVD. Got to see that shit.)

Sorry. He just said the word "magnesium" and I almost lost it.

Right now, I'm in a Borders in Louisville, Kentucky, an otherwise happy fourth wheel at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association Conference. This is what your professors do when you aren't looking. They leave the state and talk to other professors about the minutia that they've spent years studying. And frankly, I love it. These folks spend all their free time thinking and learning and debating stuff so I can get the 30-minute version in a panel or lecture. It's a great system. It is America at its finest. (Thank you, Barack!)

At the Baylor University Press table, they're hocking books like, Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, and Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero's Visions of Hell on Earth. AND… there's a 40% for being at the conference. Those are easy to like—who wouldn't?—but I got all hot and bothered when I saw Quoting God: How Media Shape Ideas about Religion and Culture. I swear, y'all, if I had the funds… While that's rad and all, dig on some of the lectures going on here. 

Love and Failure in the Rough South of Larry Brown.

Gothic Pleasure: Joanne Baille's "The Moody Seer" and John Keats' Lamia.

Defining the Margin as Affirmation: An Example of Empowering Cultural Difference and Effective Learning.

"Yon Fart Doth Smell of Elderberries Sweet": South Park and Shakespeare

"You Taste of America": Talledega Nights, Deliverance, and Southern Studies

"For the Sake of the Song": Townes Van Zandt and the Ballad Tradition

Bootlegging Narratives in the LAWS Corpus

A Sorority Girl Gone Bad, Bootleggers, and Thieves Like Us: 1930s Southern Noir in Print and Film

The Artist's Coda in Cormac McCarthy's The Road

And… Everyone Poops: Children's Literature and the Bathroom

Some of these I've already missed and can't experience, but the rest are pretty much on my agenda. Though just barely. See, Louisville is not only home to the University of Louisville, but also a beautiful River Walk and magnificently restored historic buildings in their downtown area, which happens to be exactly the area I'm in right now. Though I haven't found a copy of the LEO (the Louisville Eccentric Observer, their free paper), I can tell they've got plenty to write about. According to their website, they were a bi-weekly for the first three years of their life and then went weekly. We're in our sixth year, but we're not in Louisville, either. Wow. We're not in Louisville. Never would've thought I'd make that comparison. (It ain't that big a place, y'all.) There are blocks of new construction, like Fourth Street Live! which is some hellish food court/mall thing, that must be pretty appealing to tourists. It's not that bad, I guess. The two-storey Borders is cool.

Anyway. We stopped in Nashville, my first non-Macon love, and had dinner at Rotier's. It'd been about two, maybe three, years since I had one of their famed grilled cheeseburgers and an order of hot fingers. Milady correctly noted the hint of lilting nostalgia in my voice as I pointed out some of my favorite things. Lord have mercy, what a place. And then we moved along.

By the way, the Hyatt sucks ass. That's where we're staying. It costs for Wi-Fi. A single liter of water costs $4.75. Not Fiji or something nice. Fucking Pepsi Co-Aquafina bullshit. And for a bowl of seasonal fruit? $9. They're charging $7.50 for a pot of coffee and $13 a day to park. Meanwhile, there's an Econolodge down the street with more amenities. I know because I'm picking up the free Wi-Fi from them right now.

Oh hell no. That's it, bubba! He just said, "To the winners go the spoils." Where's my fucking spork?

Like the cop who filed out the report (but hadn't gotten to the funeral home in time to nap the guy), I had a good idea who it was. Hard not to, right? Well, the last time I saw him was yesterday at a downtown pizzeria. It pissed me off and had me ready to burst.