Morning Belz, Feb. 22
Went to Howard Finster’s Paradise Garden yesterday in Summerville, Ga., a ramshackle collection of buildings and sheds filled with all kinds of weird art, including a long covered walking bridge, a mirror house and a massive pile of discarded bicycles. Highly recommend. Some of you know about it already.
Finster was a retired preacher and self-taught artist who became a minor celebrity in the art world in the 1980s and 1990s. He made album covers for R.E.M. and the Talking Heads. Here’s his incredible appearance on the Johnny Carson show. He died in 2001.
The garden is on the outskirts of Summerville, a town deep in the triangle between Atlanta, Birmingham and Chattanooga that I wrote about a couple weeks ago. It’s 18 miles north of Rome. My favorite thing about the garden is how welcoming the spaces are. The paths meander over a little creek and into areas that evoke La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, or that look like a backyard playhouse that someone’s dad put extra effort into. My kids loved it. And the cheerful colors and exuberance of the art are in contrast to the sullen town around it, a place dominated by Highway 27, where F-250s blast through a corridor of parking lots and telephone poles and strip malls.
Finster’s garden is a nice reminder that this tail end of Appalachia has something to offer. Because despite the beauty of the mountains here, and the hiking, and the mild winter, and the low cost of living, and the relaxed pace of life, and the in-person school, and my fascination with the people who live here, I struggle with the culture. Part of my fascination is with the vague sense of menace in these hills. I can’t quite explain that, but it’s there. To quote Duke Weaselton from Zootopia, “It’s the opposite of friendly. It’s unfriendly.” Southern hospitality, in the Bermuda triangle of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional district is, as far as I can tell, a myth. Easily the friendliest people we’ve met in our little community in six months are a Bosnian refugee, a couple from Pennsylvania by way of South Dakota, and a family from Staten Island. Maybe that’s true everywhere. Expatriates stick together. Lucky for us, we’re busy. And Chattanooga is close by. That city feels not all that different from Minneapolis, on a much smaller scale, and is full of extended family and friends.
By the way, if there’s anyone on this list who still believes the election was stolen, I’d like to correspond with you about that. What are the reasons you think it was stolen? What are the reasons you think we can’t know if it was stolen?
The newest Scuffed News video, from Daytona, is here.
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Op-ed: America’s rotten national mood — WSJ
ICE detainees really suffering in Texas, Louisiana — Intercept
Former SS officer, living in suburban Knoxville, deported — FOX
Good thread explaining Texas gas grid failure — Arvind Ravikumar
The creativity accelerants of Tik Tok — Eugene Wei
Quotes
“Twitter can be a reality distortion field in a lot of ways. You might still be staying home and being safe, but this weekend was the first nice one in weeks here in Raleigh/Durham, and the mall was apparently packed. Mostly masked, but others without. Lockdown's over.” — Blair Reeves
About: I was a newspaper reporter for 14 years, most recently at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. I explained why my family left Minneapolis here. Now we live just outside Chattanooga and I work on Scuffed News, a project that either succeeds by July or will have to be abandoned. This is my newsletter. Please share it with anyone you think might enjoy it. You can support all of this work with your money on Patreon.
I'd agree with Blair Reeves, above. When I traveled from Miss. back to NC this past weekend, the stark reduction in mask-wearing in NC was a bit of a shock, esp. in rest areas.
I have a probably crazy feeling about what you describe as the sense of menace in that area of Georgia. I feel it in many parts of the South. I think a location, and the culture in it, retains the emotions of its past for generations. And some parts of the South tolerated horrific violence/cruelty during slavery for many years, and then added the crushing violence of Civil War battles on top of that. I don't think that leaves a place. Maybe I read too much Faulkner. He certainly felt that was true -- blood in the soil, so to speak. I never feel that when I'm in the North or Midwest.