For a long while, I thought maybe there weren’t any proper hipsters in Atlanta. I speak of the blasé, vintage-ruffled-shirt-wearing, retarded-rock & roll-haircut-sporting, kitsch-fixated, low-brow art and music connoisseurs one finds commonly at Echo Park house parties or Eagle Rock garage sales. Along with perhaps London, Tokyo, New York and San Francisco, L.A. is one of the capitals of hipsterdom.
But one evening, my wife and I went to a Planet of the Apes themed art opening at The Gallery in East Atlanta, which is attached to a tattoo parlor. As we looked for a parking space, I commented that this seemed like an event where we might encounter our first hipsters in Atlanta. To our infinite surprise, the place, which was packed with rockabilly tattooed lamesters and the usual Pabst beer six-pack drinking chubby blonde girls, was also awash with bonafide hipsters, gals with fashionably nerdy glasses and fellas sporting know-it-all grins. It reminded us of openings at La Luz de Jesus in Los Feliz. Mind you, people were not as old, wrinkled, and fuckin’ scary looking at this opening as they are under La Luz’s harsh lighting, but the art (humorous Planet of the Apes themed hipster art), the free cheap beer and wine and almost everything else was dead-on. There was even a burlesque act with gals dressed in banana outfits, which seemed La Luz, even if it wasn’t. So, there are hipsters in Atlanta we discovered, even if we were too shy to talk to anyone, and find out for sure about what sort of record collections they had. There must be anarchists, atheists, Cacophonists, Satanists, alterna-Jews, dachshund fanciers and other weirdos in Atlanta too. I will report so here when I next stumble upon them.
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The Journey of a Westside Jew
ENTER THE JEW
I am a Jew from the Westside of Los Angeles, where there are many such Jews. About nine or so years ago, my wife and I moved to Atlanta, Georgia. They call Atlanta "The North of the South." You can find tapas, good rye bread, art house films and forlorn antiwar protests in Atlanta like you can in any sprawling metropolitan American city. But thirty minutes or so outside of Atlanta, you enter the real South. Confederate flags start popping up every-which-where. People transform from being a little bit chubby into massive, undulating blobs. Crumbling, one-block-long towns beckon you to stop at the Supreme Fish Delight or the abandoned house with trees growing out of its windows. One thing that has really surprised me about the South is that it is really more Southern than I ever could have imagined. In these pages, I shall attempt to explore and understand these exotic, foreign lands, but I will do it from the perspective of a latte-sipping, conscientiously-recycling, NPR-listening, Whole-Foods-shopping, vegetarian Jew-Ass-Jew from the Westside.
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1 comment:
Too funny!!! Yeah, the openings at La Luz are crazy. I've been to a couple. There are a LOT of aging wrinkled painfully-on-purposely odd looking art creeps, but I still wouldn't turn down an opening there if they accepted my paintings!
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