Mouthin off...

(This is the long overdue posting of my long ass response that I wrote {and sent to the appropriate people} to an editorial in the Mercer Cluster, which stated we have no music scene and then blamed it on the lack of bands and venues. While I agree we have some work to do, my belief is that what we lack is fans. Wow. That's probably all I had to write... whoops. If you feel like reading three pages of my ranting, get down on it.)

Mr. Brown, Editors, et. al,

Loved the April Fools Day stories. Good satire. It is unfortunate that Eric Brown's piece about the Macon music scene wasn’t conceived in a similar vein. It would’ve been closer to the truth if it had been.

It’s disingenuous for Brown to name Nomenclature and then say they moved away and think that’s an accurate or even adequate description of what’s happening here, as if the only good band left town. The problem here is folks here don’t look for local music so they don’t know that there is anything good.

So what Brown accidentally illustrates is one of the major and generally unaddressed causes of our chronically sick music scene: uninformed opinions have become the prevailing wisdom, having spread like a fungus that colors public perception so that it becomes a "reality".

In other words, one of the reasons our “music scene sucks” is because so many people think our “music scene sucks”.

Just as it is hard for a “dirt-poor college student” to “create an award-winning venue”, it’s hard for a dirt-poor musician to bust his and/or her butt when no one’s showing up because they’ve already decided that there isn’t a music scene worth supporting. (The musicians, however, continue to.)

To avoid making this a totally subjective argument about taste, just look at one of this year’s Bearstock posters. The bulk of the opening acts are local, spanning a variety of styles and sounds, and there were many more from which to choose. The bands that made the cut (and most of those that didn’t) all play frequently, so the real question is why didn’t Eric Brown know that they existed?

Until recently there haven’t been enough fans to support local bands to make it a financially reasonable prospect for venue owners to showcase more local talent, which means the scene wasn’t very visible. But that’s changed. All the good venues—limited as they may be—book a healthy dose of local bands.

Even though local bands sometimes suck at promoting their shows—whether humility or laziness—they do play often enough that, if you’re looking for live local music, by now, there are no good excuses not to have seen Floco Torres, Citizen Insane, Trendlenberg, Rolybots, Al K!NG, Oh Dorian, Abby Owens, Magnificent Bastard, City Council or the dozen others I could name.

UNLESS… A#1) you’re scared to frequent the venues where they play, or B#2) you don’t actually like music enough to go see someone that doesn’t already have an album on a major label.

So now the question is: Do you REALLY want more “interesting and experimental” bands? If so, forget about learning an instrument and starting a band, as Brown suggests, just be “interesting and experimental” yourself. Be adventurous enough to see what already exists.

Folks like to compare Macon to cities with a thriving scene, but they forget one of the most crucial elements: FANS! In places like Athens and Atlanta, people will go see music for the sake of seeing music. And then… then the bands have to work to steal attention away from other bands. Our bands compete against prime time TV and the hordes that only go out to get drunk and get some booty.

Brown asks: “So how to fix this problem?” My response is stop being a part of the problem. If you look for good local music, you’ll find it. You’ll become a patron of the Hummingbird and the Capitol where regional and national acts play. You’ll know that the biggest strides in the local music scene haven’t been made by The Refuge (though I love JJ Weeks and his crew) or at Jittery Joes (where I sit typing this). It’s in the cracks and crevices downtown, like the Golden Bough, the Macon Venue Project, Envy and the 567 Cafe, or even uptown at Rivalry’s, the Shamrock and CJs.

Honestly, I don’t even like all the music here, but I don’t have to. I support what I like and try to be nice to everybody else. There is enough going on here that that’s all you have to do. It isn’t a charity. It’s like anything else, you might suffer through some crap to get to the good stuff, but regardless of how well it matches what you like, there is plenty to choose from—far more than most think.

I’m not trying to invalidate everything Brown wrote or even to take jabs at him, but I believe there are some serious issues to address before the blame is aimed at a supposed dearth of musicians or venues. Remember, we’re all still driven by very simple market realities: supply and demand. There is a dearth of demand. That’s what must change next.

Or maybe we just need to admit we’re not really THAT interested in local music, that we just want bands like The Flaming Lips and Death Cab for Cutie to play Macon so we don’t have to drive to Atlanta. If that’s all this is about then we’re just displaying a fundamental misunderstanding of music business, and the problem remains the same. Those bands don’t play here—not because there aren’t local bands to open up (see who’s opening for Gym School Heroes and Chester French) or because there are no venues (we have spaces so small they only fit 30 to those big enough to hold thousands)—but because they cost tens and tens of thousands of dollars for a performance.

And really, that’s only a problem because “no one” pays to see live music here. Ludacris didn’t sell out the Coliseum and Dwight Yoakum couldn’t even fill the much smaller City Auditorium. Our problem is the absence of real music fans, and the money they generate, which funds it all.

I used to think like Eric Brown (and scores of others)—it’s Macon, not me. Then I became the nightlife writer and later the editor of The 11th Hour, and watched what happens here. I'm now the publisher of Georgia Music Magazine, which is housed by the Georgia Music Hall of Fame, a tourist destination that should be treated like a blessing to this city but is, instead, ignored by locals and the officials they’ve elected.

But it isn’t all bleak. For the past three years, I've been on the board for Bragg Jam, a music festival which is hitting its stride. I’ve been a part of the Bearstock selection committee for the past two years and think it’s about to cement its place in the community. More people are warming up to live music here.

To push it more, I helped start The Local 478, which tries to facilitate growth in local music scene with showcases and concerts. With the help of local musicians, I'm putting together Monkeywrench Music Club, a multifunctional space where bands who can't get booked elsewhere can play, where bands who have nowhere to rehearse can rehearse, where they can get their mail, copy flyers, burn CDs and meet other musicians. This summer, we're going to release the first wave of albums on Random Family Records, a record label whose roster is entirely made of local talent.

You can see why I might be a little sensitive about this, but beyond my obvious bias, I hope you see the much deeper lesson: if you’re looking for good local music, you can find it. I have. And with that, I’ve found a lot of great people, crazy stories and the kind of fun I never thought possible here. All I had to do was look.

I agree with Brown when he writes, “By creating a closer community of bands in the Macon area, you can guarantee a better music scene…” I agree because I’ve been watching it happen for the past couple of years, and I hope that now that you all know it exists, you’ll support it. That’s the piece we’re really missing now.

To that end, I would be honored to introduce Eric Brown and the Cluster editorial staff (and anyone else who is interested) to a wide spate of the talented musicians ranging from indie rock to hip-hop and all sorts of stuff I can’t begin to classify. We’d love to see you be a part of building this music scene because I truly believe that history is about to repeat itself in Macon, that there are some names in the lineups around town that will eventually join the list of celebrated Maconites.

See it for yourself. Come out to Rivalry’s this Friday night to check out three of the best bands in Macon, swing by the show at Monkeywrench on Saturday, April 11, or wait until Bearstock and see even more in action. If you still feel like the scene is “far away” then it’s just a matter of your taste being bad. (Just kidding… no I’m not.)

Design Matters

{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.

Jimmy Carter will do anything for $200

The only thing standing between me and a giant piece of cake was the poet professor Kevin Cantwell. And he wasn’t really standing in my way, just off to the side enough that I could talk to him and stare at the cake. My landlord, Dr. Mary Wearn, stood on the other side, framing it. As they spoke and I nodded, I wondered if the autumnal brown frosting tasted as caramel as it looked.

As I finished up the cake, which initially barely fit on the little clear plastic plate, my lady meandered over and I randomly blurted out that I’d conned my way into the Jimmy Carter speech at Mercer. A ‘con’ because I was with ‘the media’—and yes, Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin is correct, there is a ‘liberal elite media’ and a ‘regular liberal media’. Kevin even snickered when I said, “I snuck in as the media.”

He tried to cover saying, “I’d love your job. I’d love having your job, but I wouldn’t want to do it.” And I agreed that I love having my job but I don’t like doing it. Then I sort of groaned because that piece of cake was really too big for one man. Even a man like me.

Sitting in the Willingham chapel at Mercer, next to friend and former editor/occasionally-current editor Jessica Lanier Walden, I listened to Jimmy Carter speak, as I thought to myself, “Holy shit! That’s Jimmy Carter!” Off and on, I had other thoughts, but it usually went back to the whole, “Like whoa! Jimmy Carter!” feeling.

Jessica’s dad and uncle helped get Jimmy Carter elected with a big assist from Southern Rock, which was the musical equivalent of Jimmy Carter. That is, as Jimmy represented a progressive South both proud of its culture and embarrassed to the point of change of its bigotry bands like the Allman Brothers represented a turn from the politics of prejudice as they embraced their storied roots. Like it or not, there was no throwing the baby out with the bathwater in the South, and because of that delicate little bridge, guys like me can wear the snap-button western shirts of our fathers and not be ashamed.

While this prodigal former president basically gave the abridged “History of Jimmy Carter” (like a thoughtful, narrative resume), the most important thought to cross my mind is how overvalued something like experience is. And conversely, how overlooked something like tone is.

The best thing a great leader ever does is with the strength of their personality, not necessarily their brains. Boil it down, the most beloved leaders of any time were really just mascots that we looked up to. Granted, in many cases, it has something to do with their experience and their smarts, but to lead well means setting a tone. It means saying, “We’re going to end racism,” or, “We will be a peace-building nation,” or whatever—not necessarily, “This is how we’re going to end racism,” or, “This is how we become a peace-building nation.” It is about projecting an idea before plans.

I’m not trying to be an advocate of style over substance. I just think that the reason we, the people, pick leaders—elected and anointed—is that we want someone to look up to, someone who’ll help us know what to feel and how to act. And truthfully, there are so many people who know how shit works that it doesn’t take a genius to be president (e.g. – 2000-2008); it just takes someone who knows how to pick (and listen to) smart, stable people with whom they can be surrounded.

That said, Jimmy Carter probably is a genius. Driving away from his speech, I again took note of the dropping price of gas, rejoicing in that way about the next time I need to fill up—almost excited by the prospect now that it’s well below $3/gallon. Then I remembered the stupid Myspace bulletin/email forward that went around accusing gas companies of inflating the price to a point when people would consider the mid-$2 range cheap. It made me think I’d fallen for something, especially when I thought about the energy crisis Jimmy Carter presided over.

Back then, he made predictions and proposals that could’ve kept us out of this, instead, the price of gas dropped again and people kept driving like there was no tomorrow. That was during a time when the suburbs were really about to flourish because people could afford to drive an hour, if they wanted, to and from work. That’s one reason our communities devolved into satellite pockets of paranoid people revolving around an abandoned core. If gas had stayed high, we’d be driving electric cars by now. Maybe the same has happened here. Gas is still expensive—more than 2.5 times higher than when I started driving 14 years ago—but it doesn’t feel that way because it sat so close to $4 for so long. So, we’ll pile back into our SUVs and shit soon enough. But the hybrid kind, just in case, right?

My favorite portion of Jimmy’s visit was the Q&A at the end. Though pretty much every question was good and thoughtful—the first one was a personal request for guidance in resolving tension between a student’s Muslim friends and her friends in the armed forces—there was one question that seemed capable of derailing his charm as the “cute”, liberal grandfather figure. (*Note: I heard more than one female gush at how “cute” Jimmy Carter is.)

Echoing Carter’s Jesus name-dropping, a gentleman stood up and said, “I’m asking this as a practicing Christian”—and you knew it could mean trouble. It’s so easy to like Jimmy Carter because he’s a walking contradiction—at least in accordance with our modern stereotypes—as a Southern, evangelical Christian liberal. Anyone who has read his memoir-heavy books—or old, white, Baptist civil rights activist Will D. Campbell’s “Brother to a Dragonfly”—should know that the social history of the South isn’t as cut and dried as folks like to make out to be. For every bloodthirsty clan member, you had someone like Carter’s mom who crossed over racial taboos “with impunity”. Well, most liberals like him as long as they don’t have to think long about him being an evangelical, and most evangelicals like him when they don’t have to think long about him being a liberal. And that’s why I liked the way he handled this particular question.

To paraphrase the question: “I, a practicing Christian, want to know how you can justify all the attention you give to saving the 300,000 kids who die from starvation and disease a year when abortion has killed millions of babies.” It was poised in a way that would either make Carter a hypocrite, or would ruin his rep with one of the aforementioned groups. For me, it just cemented the high opinion I have of him.
He said, in essence, that he doesn’t like abortion—never has—and he doesn’t think Jesus Christ would either, but as president he obeyed the law and instead decided to focus on reducing the demand for abortion. That’s why we have WIC. He figured a pregnant woman in dire straits would be less inclined to abort a child, in order to avoid bringing a baby into a bad situation, if the government made it easier for the infant to be more properly nourished. Basically, he viewed abortion the right way: recognizing it as a choice that no one makes for fun and trying to eliminate the reasons for using it. Having explained it that way, I loved him even more.

It is not that hard to find Southern Christian radicals, but it’s getting harder to find them in my generation or younger. The progressive Christians are too “Christian” to be radical. The radicals are too liberal to put stock in a faith tradition. And Southerners are being simultaneously assimilated into the larger culture, or dumbed down in the effort to financially capitalize on the resistance of some to be homogenized. In other words, most Southern folks who are too smart to fall for Larry the Cable Guy are eschewing their accents to avoid being associated with dumbasses, and for some of the dumbasses, being educated means having outgrown your raising. There aren’t many choices in between for the native of the American South now that fewer choose the path that Jimmy, the Walden brothers, Dr. King, and Will Campbell took.

I don’t know how to end this tirade, so I’m just going to say that I’m getting ready to attend my first Lamar Memorial Lecture Series talk. It’s something Mercer has done for ages, bringing in an academic who talks about the South. I’ve been collecting the books from it for about three years, but now I get to be at one. Monday and Tuesday, November 3 and 4, Paul Harvey, Ph.D.—not that Paul Harvey… Good day!—will be presenting his lectures around the theme “Moses, Jesus and the Trickster in the Evangelical South”. And I am stoked about that. It sounds so interesting. One of his talks will be “Religion, Race and Southern Ideas of Freedom,” and the other will be “Jesus of the South.” This is so up my alley that it isn’t funny.

And neither are balloons, but that’s for another time.