23 March 2008
Small Town Gay Bar
28/03/08 15:29
Gallery Above is surprisingly spacious considering how small the entrance is. It is right there on the main street, but you will have to know what you are looking for to find it. It does not have a shop front or anything, just a colorful flight of stairs crammed in between two stores. Arriving at the top, you find yourself in a large room that extends all the way to the back of the building. The main exhibition section is reserved for a local artist who paints a kind of mythological pop culture icons on small pieces of wood. Going through them I find everything from portraits of William S. Burroughs and Rasputin to Jonah in the whale and your great Lovecraftian god Cthulhu. The style is a mixture of traditional and modern. Native Americana, I guess you might call it.
After being introduced around to the local gay community of writers, surfers, farmhands, and Uzbek dissidents (!), we grab a seat and settle down for tonight's movie. Small Town Gay Bar turns out to be a documentary about the hardships of being gay in rural Mississippi. It tells the story of the rise and fall of gay bars throughout the area, and makes sure to include all possible extremist points of views. A Baptist preacher forgets about forgiveness, and openly condemns the whole lot to hell, while a 300 pound lesbian tells people who do not like her to go fuck themselves.
I am a little surprised at how everybody in the movie seems to be bogged down in what I thought to be the civil rights conflicts of the 1960s - but apparently even reforms tend to slow down in the blistering heat of the Southern sun. This point is only made all too clear in the story of a young man who was brutally murdered for being gay by three kids his own age. They tied him to a chair in his own trailer home, and spend several hours torturing him before partly decapitating and then burning him. Even though we are in Florida, I begin to wonder if I should be more paranoid about spending time with gay people. Of course, I decide not to, but just the fact that the thought somehow had to cross my mind gives me the creeps.
Horror stories aside, the evening ends in good cheer. I practically have not eaten all day, and I am starting to get a kick out of it. My head is buzzing, my feet are numb, and my whole body seems to be spinning around the vortex gnawing away at my stomach. I am sure a beer or two would have sent me straight out of orbit, but unfortunately they only serve soft drinks at the gallery. Instead I just talk my head off, and even promise to return the next day, and buy one of the Native Americana icons. Well, that day has come, and I have actually ended up buying three. I still really have not eaten anything yet, so I had better get down to some lunch business before I spent more of the money I have not got. Not that I worry about it, though. Not after watching Small Town Gay Bar, anyway.
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O sweet Georgia sun!
26/03/08 10:00
I got up
this morning with a strange feeling that something
was not quite right. After spending a week in the
South, I knew that I must finally had gotten the
blues, and that I must had gotten them pretty bad. My
skin felt all puffed and sore, and my throat was
crying out for water. When I turned around to see
what bed could possibly have treated me to such a
poor night's sleep, I was met by a godawful sight -
my skin had come clean off my face to form a complete
replica of it right there on the pillow!
I guess this is the kind of stuff miracle hunters pay thousands of dollars to see, yet to me the only miraculous thing about it was that I still knew how to breathe. My forehead stung like hell, and to every smile there was a grimace of pain. I tried to recall exactly what scenario might have produced such a crippling effect on my skin. I went through the moves of the past few days, and kept coming back to that fated morning outside Jittery Joe's Coffee Shop in Athens. The sun had been low in the sky, and the parasol had cast its shadow across the chairs at the other side of the table. Thinking back, I do in fact remember a pricklish sensation on the left side of my neck and face. Tellingly, I also remember a cooling breeze, and a whole lot of good cheer. A mind over body experience, I guess you might say.
Seven hours and 300 miles later, I am finally out of the scorching Georgia sun. A crate of Nestlé® Pure Life® water has rehydrated my body, and my skin is beginning to take on the nostalgic color of Danish bacon. Luckily, we have just decided to spend tomorrow at the pink and peachy Best Western Hotel we checked into this night. We have a literary portrait to write, a portico to sip sweet tea under, and a pool to cool our aching bodies in. Though Florida is nicknamed the Sunshine State, I swear by the bright light that burns above that I will creep by the walls, and keep my head in the shade. Tomorrow, that's really all that matters.
I guess this is the kind of stuff miracle hunters pay thousands of dollars to see, yet to me the only miraculous thing about it was that I still knew how to breathe. My forehead stung like hell, and to every smile there was a grimace of pain. I tried to recall exactly what scenario might have produced such a crippling effect on my skin. I went through the moves of the past few days, and kept coming back to that fated morning outside Jittery Joe's Coffee Shop in Athens. The sun had been low in the sky, and the parasol had cast its shadow across the chairs at the other side of the table. Thinking back, I do in fact remember a pricklish sensation on the left side of my neck and face. Tellingly, I also remember a cooling breeze, and a whole lot of good cheer. A mind over body experience, I guess you might say.
Seven hours and 300 miles later, I am finally out of the scorching Georgia sun. A crate of Nestlé® Pure Life® water has rehydrated my body, and my skin is beginning to take on the nostalgic color of Danish bacon. Luckily, we have just decided to spend tomorrow at the pink and peachy Best Western Hotel we checked into this night. We have a literary portrait to write, a portico to sip sweet tea under, and a pool to cool our aching bodies in. Though Florida is nicknamed the Sunshine State, I swear by the bright light that burns above that I will creep by the walls, and keep my head in the shade. Tomorrow, that's really all that matters.
Almost on the road
24/03/08 12:05
For now, we are enjoying the peace and quiet of the Travelodge. Standards are a bit lower than at the Super 8 Downtown Motel in Atlanta, but so are the prices. Catching a decent meal proved somewhat harder than expected, again due to the Easter Sunday holiday. We ended up at a 24 hour diner epitomically named "The Grill". Burgers and fries were decent, and so were the coffee we got from the local gas station on the way home. Unfortunately, we forgot to buy water, so now I am stuck with the chlorine-infested liquid that pours from the motel tap. I tried to pick us up something a bit more decent at the vending machine downstairs, but I did not really seem to accept my choice of water. Instead, it dropped a can of Sprite on me. Just can't beat the sugar around here!
On the bed next to mine, Kristian has settled down for a televised game of baseball. I think I will go for William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying instead. After all, we are in the south, and the guy actually did win the Nobel Prize sometimes back in the 1940s. Anyway, I finished Joe Queenan's America yesterday - and boy! was it cool! A sometime movie critic, the poor snob's flirtations with American pop culture got him hooked so badly he had to go cold turkey in Paris. Writing about his horror tour of Suck, he compares his orginally vague awareness of the existence of Michael Bolton to his similarly vague awareness of the Ebola virus plague in Africa. Discussing the absurdity of front page quotations in mainstream bestsellers, he even goes as far as suggesting a Danielle Steele quote to kickstart The Satanic Verses with: "His eyes drank her in like wine, and she looked up at him with a small smile".
Thanks to my local supplier of underground movies and literature back home for this particular parting gift. Jan, you're the man!