Atlanta - Looking for Blowjobs in Boarders

Atlanta is where the ghost of conservatism confronts the new America. What is that exactly? The emergence of the hip-hop generation? The aspiring black man and woman? The re-resurrection of church and state? The nouveau riche? The old rich? Whatever it is, one hallmark stays the same – a culture of excess.

Huge lots of land extend their reach further and further, converting pastures, forests and streams into the satellite malls and highway restaurants of another urbanized and gentrified generation. Everything converges into concrete: rows and rows of shopping malls, fast-food chains and pump stations. An unconscious council mediates the omnipotence of simulacra. East Berlin had more individualism in Trotsky’s day. Perhaps that is the great irony of capitalism: everything is more of the same.

The lights of downtown hum in the night. Omnipotent black motor-carriages drift listlessly by on Atlanta’s nine lane highways. Downtown actually makes Atlanta a pretty city. Someone got the distribution of highway and high-rise right, or wrong for that matter. There are virtually no busses in Atlanta. The public transport system is reduced to a couple of scattered lines in order to limit the mobility of lower-income earners. The MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rail and Transit Authority) has been disturbingly re-coined to infer the “Moving of Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta”, which is more or less its resulting function.

Like in almost all American cities, segregation farms a disturbing dual personality across the lines of East and West, black and white, rich and poor, possibility and death. East Atlanta is a free-market crack den. However, there is potential here, shunted along by the procession of capitalism. Entrepreneurs are welcome to the grim streets. Gentrification is converting, composing and covering-up. Cross-sections of downtown seem to have been implanted with Walt Disney’s DNA, sprouting legions of designer streets and boulevards. Other parts mimic the old South, the French and the Spanish architecture prettied up for the likes of me.

However culture is still rooted in simulacra. If you want a book in Atlanta, you go to Boarders. If you want a coffee, you go to Starbucks. If you want a blowjob, you go to church. I went to Boarders.

Savannah - Salt, Sex & Death

I want to die in Savannah. I want to be a 19th century ghost.

An open-ended graveyard sits wishfully by the police station. Grave robbers don’t go there anymore. There is nothing left from the mausoleums and carcass-fed flowerbeds to extract except for the tombstones themselves. But cemeteries too wish for patrons and there is no shortage of bodies in Savannah. Fresh flowers on youthful graves lay boastfully next to hardened moss covered crypts. Wind and rain has withered much of these decrepit stones. Some have been washed to the bone, leaving only a date or a partial name, a forgotten epitaph or the story of a child lost to cholera. Even in death, we grow old.

A sweet sea breeze drifts down the boulevards and avenues, lamenting the past and serenading the present. Savannah itself is a crypt of memory – Civil War treaties, Southern generals, murdered mistresses, cotton colonies, abandoned slaves, abandoned wives, the whorehouses… the dead have memories and they dance and drink on their graves at midnight to remember.

Savannah was once the dollhouse for the old and the rich – the Belle Époque. Now their kids have grown up and turned it into their playground. The introduction of the Savannah College of Art and Design has brought a youthful zealousness to this culture of death. Youth is the great antidote for death, as death is but the great intoxication of youth.

It is a sensual town. The duality of sex and death flavours the air – a mixture of salt water and aged moss. All that curved and ancient stone: mighty monuments to the memory of the South. One always hears the “click-clock” of a nearby horseshoe echoing from the oyster shell pavements. One imagines parades of fornicating bodies perched on benches, clawing behind/beneath tombstones, lining dim avenues and thumping rickety awnings.

They call Savannah the ‘Garden of Good and Evil’, as if the two were absolutely singular to one another. However man is naturally an organism infused with seeds of both – irrevocably bonded to the twin forces of nature. The human mind is a twisting well of caverns, forms and shadows trying to resurface all that was lost and forgotten. However at midnight the latter gene takes prominence above all. The haunting ghosts of a blemished life take hold. Strange things happen in Savannah at midnight. “Not gonna lie”, says Leigh.