Bucolic Dillard Pasture
Welcomed by the horses.
Our stone Fireplace
The snow and sleet begin
Room with a view-from our window and porch...
--Jack
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
Going North
Our Valentine's Stay 2015 at the Dillard House.
Welcomed by the horses.
Our stone Fireplace
View from our balcony
The snow and sleet begin
Room with a view-from our window and porch...
Dining at the Dillard House on a summer stay (photo by Wolfgang)
--Jack
Welcomed by the horses.
Our stone Fireplace
The snow and sleet begin
Room with a view-from our window and porch...
--Jack
Thursday, January 08, 2015
Holidays in New Orleans and Savannah 2014-2015
Joseph Mydell and Alfred Corn: Georgia Actor; Georgia Poet...
Eight days into January and I feel at last that we are home and the holidays complete. The drive to New Orleans, especially the 8 hour return in the rain, wore us out; but did not diminish the fullness of culinary excess we experienced at Galatoire's Restaurant - New Orleans, the Gumbo Shop, Tujague's Restaurant, and especially Susan Spicer's Mondo. The art we saw, beginning in Atlanta with the Cezanne and post-Impressionists show and the exquisite photographs of Gordon Parks at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, continuing with the Basquiat show at the Ogden Museum, and art galleries, continued on to Savannah, with the innovative interpretation of Dante's Divine Comedy (click) by several African artists. In New Orleans, Joe purchased a painting at the Antieau Gallery (click). We also visited Longue Vue House and Gardens where we saw and purchased some of the gorgeous jewelry of Mario Villas (click).
If food and art were themes of the holidays, so too was camaraderie. Despite Darryl's ducking into and hibernating in our luxurious suite at the Place D'Armes, there was much walking the Quarter, hearing music, and good conversation among Joe, Starr, KT, and me. Starr, Joe, and I took the St. Charles Streetcar uptown for a look at Tulane, Audubon Park, and the grand houses from the Garden District to the Camellia Grill, where we stopped for a late lunch or a piece of Coconut Cream Pie.
Starr and Joe on the
St. Charles Streetcar
In Savannah, Alfred Corn joined Joe, Effie, Darryl and me for walks downtown, a sort of VIP visit to the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home, provided by Jane Fishman, and a stroll on the wind-swept beach by Dar, Alfred, and me-- before joining John for the traditional fresh shrimp at CoCo's Sunset Grille. Conversation was always lively, whether over a game of Scrabble or sitting on the Jasper House balcony having breakfast. On our walks, I pointed out Savannah's key houses and gave a few stories of clandestine trysts therein. On our final evening in Savannah, John, Joe, and I attended the classical performance at the Unitarian church featuring Effie and others. We followed the music with our own reception; then dinner at Vic's on the River.
The concert this past Sunday was glorious, featuring pianists Sanford Jones & Marvin Keenze, soprano Stacey Stephens, & violinist Effie Mydell. What a warm and welcoming crowd we had, too - even with a tornado warning outside!
Unitarian Universalist Church of Savannah
Dad and Dar can Dance
John and Dar also joined me for a riverside get-together with Dad, now a doting 93.
Darryl accompanied me to a celebration of Albion's Voice, where I spoke along with Bill Strong and former Mayor and activist Otis Johnson.
Connect Savannah published an account of the reunion: http://www.connectsavannah.com/savannah/shouts-from-the-underground/Content?oid=2517150
For New Year's Eve, John, Alfred, and I walked to the river where, just as we set foot on the plaza near the Waving Girl, the fireworks show burst into action. 2015 has arrived.
Enjoy our Photographs of our Holidays (click):
https://picasaweb.google.com/106057231025325213398/Holidays20142015
Christmas Day: Jackson Square and St. Louis Basilica
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
Albion's Voice copy
Connect Savannah
Shouts from the underground
A look back at the gleeful subversiveness of Albion's Voice
By Jessica Leigh Lebosjll@connectsavannah.com@typeitloud
Will Strong (l.) and his Armstrong college buddy Otis Johnson reunited to celebrate Albion’s Voice, the underground newspaper Strong started in 1970.
Latest in
IN A WAY, 1970 seems like a million years ago, ancient history, even:
Gas cost 36 cents a gallon, and a postage stamp was six cents. Richard Nixon hadn’t yet disgraced the presidency, and Neil Armstrong’s footprint on the moon was a brand-new marvel.
The country aggrandized its economic and industrial accomplishments, but it was also a year of outrage and sadness: Enmeshed in Vietnam, U.S. troops invaded Cambodia.
The National Guard shot and killed four student anti-war protestors at Kent State. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin both O.D.’d.
By then Savannah had made it through the Civil Rights Movement with remarkable unity and minimal drama. But macro social and environmental shifts still eluded the city in 1970, as city leaders doggedly resisted school desegregation and begrudgingly built a sewage treatment plant only after repeated threats from the State Water Board.
“The ‘60s came to Savannah in the ‘70s,” drily notes lifelong activistTom Kohler, a student at Armstrong University—then Armstrong State College—that same year.
The fact that the counterculture made it to Savannah at all may well be attributed to a kid named Bill Strong, who had traveled to San Francisco and maybe inhaled at People’s Park in Berkeley and saw that America was on the brink of cultural and sociopolitical revolt.
The Southern son returned to Savannah a long-haired hippie freak, determined to get something happening here, though just what wasn’t exactly clear.
The doors of perception unfogged in 1970, when Strong got his hands on a $750 grant to start a literary publication at Armstrong. He and a handful of like-minded bohemian weirdos launched Albion’s Voice,an underground newspaper that attacked the scourges of racism, women’s inequality, environmental degradation, unchecked capitalism, gay bashing, police brutality and other topics that the self-proclaimed decent folk hoped to suppress and ignore.
With a handwritten aesthetic and scissor-cut graphics from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Albion’s Voice resembled a cross between an 18th-century political pamphlet and a Grateful Dead poster.
Unafraid to confront the status quo with gleeful sedition, its founders thumbed their noses at threats from the KKK and a city plot to plant drugs in their office.
They sold their papers illegally, declaring a Free Speech Zone at the corner of Victory and Bee Road (right across the street from the current Connect offices. Coincidence or conspiracy?)
“The potential for change was so great, and we reveled in being rebels,” recalled Strong—who grew up to become Will instead of Billy—at a packed Sentient Bean last Saturday during a reunion for Albion’s Voice contributors.
The revelry was short-lived, however: After Albion’s Voice published an article about Union Camp’s horrific polluting practices, the college’s administration kicked the paper off campus, forcing it to go truly underground—or rather, into the living room of English professor James Land Jones.
Strong and his crew of subversive rabblerousers managed to publish a few more issues, but it was hard to find sympathetic advertisers (shocker!) to pay for print costs.
The last edition—and its first annual Save the World issue—dropped the same year.
“Obviously, the time isn’t right for Savannah to have this kind of paper,” lamented Strong in his last editorial.
Forty-five years later, in a strange turn that would’ve seemed inconceivable and probably a total sellout back then, all six issues of Albion’s Voice have now been archived at Armstrong’s Lane Library.
“As far as we know, this is the only complete set in existence,” said Special Collections librarian Caroline Hopkinson, who digitized the collection.
Hopkinson emphasizes that the pirate paper’s preservation was made possible by Armstrong history professor Mark Finlay, who rediscovered Albion’s Voice while researching environmental activism in Savannah. Dr. Finlay had pushed for its proper recognition for years before he died tragically in a car accident in 2013.
Faculty sympathizer Jones is gone, too—murdered in the late 80s—and his partner Jack Millerdonated the collection from his personal belongings. Also commemorated at the reunion wasAaron Buchsbaum, the beloved local civil rights attorney who passed away earlier this year and, according to Strong, spent much of 1970 bailing kids out of jail for selling Albion’s Voice on Savannah’s streets.
In the first week of 2015, more than 100 people paid homage to the little liberal rag that shook its fist at the Man: Student firebrand and immigration advocate Elly Marisol Estrada addressed the subjugation of women then and now, and Armstrong alum Mickey Youmans quoted an article about the industrial wasteland of the Savannah River that sounded like it could have been written last month. (Oh wait, it was.)
Jim Reed delivered a truly memorable reading on the perceived sexuality of black men, cheekily written by none other than the Rev. Leonard Small, another longtime apostle in the ranks of Savannah’s community activism. Information architect Brittany Curry chronicled the ‘zine’s history in a spray of colorful markings.
Big applause came when former mayor Otis Johnson, Armstrong’s first black student and an icon of Savannah’s Civil Rights movement, called for a rebirth of the movement that demanded social change through a vocal free press.
“I still believe in America’s unfulfilled promise of freedom, justice and equality for all,” he vowed.
I think most of us do. And since you’re reading this, you probably also dig the idea of a publication that questions mainstream authority and tries to present alternative viewpoints.
Yet audacious editorials only go so far.
“Underground newspapers can serve as a weathervane,” reminded Strong. “But they can’t create a revolution.”
Dude, tell me about it. As someone who’s been shout-writing about injustice and ineptitude for 20 years at free newspapers, I have yet to instigate a single riot.
We might think of 1970 as the olden days, but in 2015 we’re still writing about the same goddamn problems: Endless war. Police brutality. Protests in the streets. Racial and socioeconomic disparity.
The Port of Savannah may have grown and the hotels on River Street gotten taller, but the future of the river and the schools and the job market look as bleak as they did when the Albion’s Voice kids wrapped the Confederate Memorial in Forsyth Park with protest signs (Savannah’s first yarnbomb?!)
Yet somehow, this city has managed to support Connect for over 15 years, and though any alternative press must now compete with cat videos and listicles about celebrity boob jobs, the legacy of Albion’s Voice is the stubborn belief that the “potential for change” that bubbled up in the 1960s will one day be permanently activated.
That, of course, will require action: A new project by Emergent Savannah is asking every one of us two questions over the next few weeks:
What do you love about Savannah? What do you dream for Savannah?
Post your answers at the Sentient Bean (that bastion of rebellion!) through January, after which they’ll be collated into a collective vision and a strategic plan for the city we want to create.
We don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows, friends—but we do need to get our heads out of the 1970s.
And to fulfill the promise of liberty and justice for all, we have to show up for the revolution.
cs
Read all six issues of Albion's Voice at library.armstrong.edu/speccoll.html
Saturday, December 06, 2014
After Rereading Herbert Marcuse
Meher Baba
--Jack
Tuesday, November 25, 2014
Messiah President (Re-posted from August)
If only the rest of Congress consisted of representatives like mine, what a wonderful country this would be.
John Lewis
Jack Miller
Posted by Jack Miller at Friday, August 29, 2014
Friday, November 07, 2014
American DNA
A new study reveals that Americans have the DNA of Neanderthals.
"It is as if the the DNA has become a virus," senior scientist Skinner Jung said when the results of the study were presented at Georgetown University. "Why the brains of white men are most affected is still a mystery."
Sadly, no cure or way to prevent the Neanderthal Strain is possible at this time.
One particular white male who participated in the study brought some levity to the presentation by asking how Obama was still President when he and so many others like him voted Republican in the 2014 election.
Copyright: Jack Off-center News Service. All content is unprotected.
Wednesday, November 05, 2014
Tsunami of Sludge
As Democrats who distanced themselves from Obama all lost, while a few who embraced Obama won, as in Hawaii, billionaires, banks, bigots, fat cats, Big Oil, corporations, and the Pentagon took firm control of the nation. It would be easy to dismiss the election as unimportant and make jokes-- as Jon Stewart and others will, about the dreadful statements of Republicans. But the devastating result will soon be felt globally and will be undeniable. Man-made climate change will continue unabated. There will be more oil spills and pipe lines through pristine wilderness. There is a lesson here for progressives. Stop thinking there is a revolution at hand-- it's far more likely that the country will become even more radical right wing reactionary!
Americans have spoken; they want the unholy trinity above to control the government. (BTW, This is close to what I was expecting to happen, but I had the fantasy that I was being too pessimistic.)
Jack, 11-4-14
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