An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
One of the paradoxes of George Ellis’s career, in hindsight, is that alongside his run of cheap exploitation films, he maintained a parallel career as Atlanta’s first great arthouse film exhibitor. It adds a layer of complexity to his work, to know that his own taste was impeccable—he understood the full range of cinematic possibilities and would have seen exactly where his films fit into that spectrum. Around the time Demented Death Farm Massacre was hitting theaters, Ellis was introducing Atlanta to the French New Wave and the New German Cinema, hosting retrospectives of Chaplin and Bergman.
A poem from our Georgia Music Issue.
In his call to the marketplace
the griot urges the skin clasps
the first beat
A poem from the Georgia Music issue.
That ribbed black box that could be coaxed to croon
by surer hands than ours—where did it come from?
From whose family history? Was it in tune?
A poem from our Georgia Music Issue.
Come June this brook runs soft,
takes its lumps, before the family
gets AC, your cheap bike busted,
walking tar-heeled, skin-to-skin
Ray Stevens is a slippery one. He’ll don an endless succession of zany personas, then suddenly play it straight and savvy when you least expect it. In the music video for “The Streak” he’s all over the place, making his entrance as a voluble TV news reporter, chasing down the scoop on a flashing incident at the local Bi-Rite.
Gordon Tanner was seventeen when he found himself thrust before a microphone, fiddle in hand, at a makeshift Bluebird recording studio in San Antonio’s Texas Hotel. His father Gid—cofounder of the original Skillet Lickers—stood beside him, along with the blind guitarist and singer Riley Puckett, a prolific recording artist and bona fide hillbilly star.
Cole Caswell’s photography explores the lives of people who live off the conventional grid, such as a homeless DIY punk couch-surfing in Savannah and a retired stock trader/primitive-skills-master hiding out on a swampy homestead. Caswell develops his images, all tintypes, on the road in a hand-built portable darkroom.
A conversation with Marcus Kenney.
I love to tell the story of my elderly Cajun grandmother in Louisiana. Once I found her in the garden spray-painting a camellia bush in bright silver enamel. I warned her that she would kill the bush, to which she replied, “Yes, but it will be beautiful!”
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
I listened to “Just Like You” by Keb’ Mo’ over and over again the same way I did when I was working at a coffee shop when I was in college. Keb’ is singing, “I feel just like you and I cry just like you and I heal just like you and I break down just like you,” and I'm wondering if people would actually live their lives differently if they listened to that song every morning before they went out into the world or interacted with other people.
In Not All, Pascal Amoyel looks at people and places that form the landscape of South Carolina and Georgia. These photos examine the cycle of life and death, of birth and decay, natural rhythms that overlap as winter folds slowly into Spring.
