- The is amazing, if only for the fact that so many people from so many age ranges can spend a weekend together sharing port-a-potties without anybody kicking anybody else's ass. If I'm just sitting around listening to music, I'm not partial to New Orleans style brass jazz. On the other hand, if I'm in a crowd of people and the band (the Madison Elites) is standing in the middle of that crowd bobbing and dancing and blowing with huge Dizzy Gillespie cheeks, that's a party.
- If you lean your backpack against the wall and sit on a bench on the street in downtown in Black Mountain, N.C., nice people will stop and talk to you.
- The bluegrass group has a really nice retro visual stage style and the members write their own songs. I remember when bluegrass groups tried to look like the Eagles and the fans complained when anybody played a song that was written after 1965. The scored high marks for talent, but a couple of people said the members weren't all that nice when they talked to them around the campus.
- Ichabod's, which I remember as a dive bar in Blowing Rock, is now a dive bar AND an Italian restaurant. But the same owner is still there, and the people are still very friendly, and I had four PBRs and talked to three barflies and a bartender before 4 p.m.
- If you go to the LEAF, the $25 culinary passport is a good deal, because you not only get three meals at Eden Hall, you also avoid having to pay by the pound for the food. But DON'T buy your passports online (you pay a $4.25 service charge on the transaction) and DON'T buy the five-meal pass, which actually has a HIGHER unit cost than the three-meal pass.
I guess they're figuring that hippies don't do math...
or maybe the people doing the pricing are hippies and don't do math...
- The middle of May, just before Memorial Day, is a great time to go to the Blue Ridge, particularly early in the week. We had the run of everything, everywhere we went.
- Coffee shops in Blowing Rock don't open in the morning.
- A good place to get coffee in Boone is called Grateful Grounds, which is a Grateful Dead-themed coffee shop and a bead shop, on King Street. I make this statement because Sloop hates the Grateful Dead, but liked the latte he got there on Monday so much that he wanted to go back on Tuesday.
- Robert Huffman might just have the funniest deadpan delivery I've ever heard.
On Monday morning Sloop asked him how he'd slept. Robert's answer: Like an old man in a tent. That's a funny line, but it's not nearly as funny if you didn't hear Robert say it.
- If you attach a tin cup to your belt loop with a lash strap for a morning hike and then forget that you've done this, so that you go out in public with a tin cup attached to your belt-loop, you'll never hear the end of this from your old college roommates. Bastards. If you're ever stuck in a downpour and you run into an event tent in the dark to get dry during a concert, you might get lucky and run into a really cool someone (Nicole) you met at Moe's Crosstown Tavern and her husband (Buck) and then get introduced to (Farrah and Mitchell), all of whom live in your neighborhood a couple of hundred miles away.
- Farrah has a documentary out on DVD called and I got to see it in the children's tent at LEAF on Saturday night. Wow. These are stories that I just don't get from the legacy media. Plus it's just exciting to find out about creative people in my own community. Still, it makes me wonder: Why do I have to go to the main event tent in Black Mountain, N.
C., to find out about a documentary filmmaker from my own town?
- There's a good place to stop for lunch in Old Fort, N.
C. It's called the Trainwatcher Cafe, and Sloop says the vegetarian sandwich really is great, like it says on the menu.
- The old Holly's Tavern in Blowing Rock is now called Canyons, and Beth, the waitress over at Knight's on Main, says you can still sit there on the deck and have a beer, just like the old days.
We never went in to check it out, but that really is the best view I've every seen from a bar.
- John Sloop and Robert Huffman are both brilliant men, but neither one of them is capable of remembering how to get to the Blowing Rock Assembly Grounds, where both of them worked for months back in the 1980s. I'm not sure what that says about either one of them, but I do know this: I wouldn't have brought this up if it weren't for all the shit they gave me about that damn tin cup.
Heh heh heh...
- I get really confused by contra dancing.
- really is the best radio station on planet Earth. And you can via the magic of the Internets.
Which is one of the things about a festival, apparently: the performers get judged as human beings off-stage, too. Here's the interesting thing about my reaction (to me): I reserved judgment on their personal niceness, since I didn't have the experience myself, but when it came around to buying CDs at the tunes table, that negative report was probably the deciding factor in me buying a CD by the rather than by CCD. So accurate or not, that word-of-mouth influenced one of my decisions.
So I recommend you try that sometime.
So it is with the all-the-way dog at Yum Yum, the ice cream and hotdog joint on Spring Garden Road in the College Hill section of Greensboro, NC.
I spent six years growing up just a few blocks away in the 1970s, and a Yum Yum dog with an RC Cola remains one of the most pure memories from my childhood.
Here's why they're different -- and for my money, better -- than any other hotdog on the planet: The Yum Yum all-the-way is a fusion of dog, chili, slaw, onion AND BUN into an enigmatic culinary unity, an elemental combination inexplicable by deconstruction into its original component parts. It comes wrapped in plain paper, two to a white paper bag, and each sells for just $1.
50.
And so far as I can tell, the only thing that has changed about this meal is the RC Cola. Today it comes in a plastic bottle instead of a glass one.
So we're driving up U.S. Highway 220 through the belly of the Carolina Piedmont and as when we pass an exit marked STAR ROBBINS, Janet says: You know, that sounds like a porn star name, which struck me as a funny, typically Janet thing to say right in the middle of talking about whatever she was talking about as we passed the exit.
When we passed the next exit and the sign read TROY CARTHAGE, I piped up and said And there's her co-star.
But the real payoff came about 15 miles later when we passed the exit that was clearly the title of Star and Troy's latest venture: CLIMAX HIGH POINT.
Well, it was good for me.
We're in Greensboro now at the Biltmore Hotel, this great old railroad hotel in the vastly improved downtown of the city where I grew up. The first ConvergeSouth event starts in less than an hour.
Schweet.
| So I'm here in Berkeley, Calif., and if there was ever a place where I could let my freak flag fly, this would be it. I don't stand out in this crowd -- I look rather conservative in this crowd.
It's diverse and multi-ethnic and multilingual.
The hotel is nice: just a couple blocks up from Telegraph and just a stone's throw from People's Park, or what's left of it -- vacant lot surrounded by imposing cast iron fence. Think they wanna keep people out of that ground?
Yowsa! Anyway, the hotel is one of those pre-crash 1920s buildings that's been retrofitted. The best feature?
Windows you can open to let the air in. I can hear cars going by and people talking on the street. Yes.
Took the BART under the bay tonight and wandered amuk in San Francisco. Ate an enormous meal in Chinatown. The absolute best event of the day?
Standing in Union Square soaking up the city and an attractive but clearly insane 30-something Jamaican woman is staring up at the glitzy glass edifice of Macy's and she says this:
You are a young woman of 18! Now! Transform!
Now!
I even like the crazy people here better than the crazy people back home. Which is good, because there are a LOT of them here.
I don't know whether it's that the housing costs are so high or because the panhandling is more lucrative, but there are all these basically polite beggars here in Berkeley. When you give them the namaste gesture, they return it.
But I'm punch drunk.
Left the house at 5:22 a.m. EST and it's past midnight on the east coast now and I'm dragging ass.
Flew from Chicago to Oakland next to a very odd 11-month-old who literally sucked on my WIRED magazine. Got felt-up by a fat TSA employee. I don't travel so well anymore.
One other observation about traveling: A cup of Starbucks at O'Hare costs the same as it does in Charleston. Muffins, mints, yogurt -- that's all more pricey, but Starbucks coffee, which is so expensive in the real world, is like the best bargain going in airport world.
I meet the rest of the seminar tomorrow afternoon, but if my ankle will hold up, my goal is to complete the pilgrammage to City Lights Bookstore tomorrow morning.
Beat-tourist geeky, yes, I know. I never said I was cool.
| The Manly Football League wouldn't have gotten that name if the former news editor at The Mountaineer in Waynesville, one Ms.
Kathy Nanney Ross, hadn't gotten wind of our plans and made a big deal about us playing fantasy football.
We told her it wasn't fantasy, it was..
. MANLY! Yes, it's MANLY football!
And a tradition was born.
That was in 1991. Fifteen years later, our little eight-team league from the newsroom of a community newspaper in the Smoky Mountains has grown to 14 teams and we've got traditions and rivalries out the yin yang.
Leave it to a hurricane and vast human suffering to trivalize a really good time.
Janet and I are just back from a two-night road trip, during which we repeatedly wished we had a laptop and a wi-fi connection, because we wanted to record it as we went.
Instead, I'm going to break it up into segments and post them individually, but add links to this post so that it can serve as an index to the chapters and photo galleries.
If Janet winds up posting on the trip, too, I'll add her links as well.
It's not significant on the scale of what people in the Delta are experiencing right now, but..
.
The trip
We left on Saturday morning, drove up to Spartanburg, ate lunch and drafted my 2005 MFL team.
After a beer with the boys I called a place I'd found online in Black Mountain, N.C., and we got a marked-down rate on a suite at The Madison Inn, one of the coolest and quirkiest places on Earth.
We got in Saturday evening, stashed our stuff, and ate a good dinner downstairs.
Sunday morning we had a huge breakfast, knocked around Black Mountain and then headed north up US Highway 221 to Valle Crusis and The Baird House, a B B run by our friends Tom and Deede Hinson. We spent the afternoon hiking at Price Park, got something to eat in downtown Boone, then came back to sit on the porch overlooking the Watauga river and catch up with Tom.
On Monday we had coffee with Tom in the kitchen and then drove out of the valley via the back way down the Watauga River Road. We left the Blue Ridge the same way we came in, but continued down through Rutherfordton and back to Interstate 26.
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