Asheville Holiday

Yesterday, I went downtown to roam Asheville.  When I got there fairly early on a Saturday, I couldn't find a place to park.  A bit later, I found why.  Asheville was putting on its annual Christmas Parade.

Eventually, I found a place in a lot for permitted cars only.  I asked a fellow who was getting out of his car if that referenced weekends as well.

"Well. . . they only ticket about half the time and when they do it's only seven bucks."

I was hoping he was right.

I believe I saw Asheville at the Christmas parade.  I stood and listened and watched and photographed, trying to be a recorder.  There are no jobs in the area, I am told.  Everything has gone away, shut up, closed.  Downtown was a hodgepodge of independent shops and galleries and buildings for rent.  Hippie jewelry and fabrics and organic stores were plentiful.  Hungry, I stopped into a breakfast place that served food with creative ingredients and twists on old recipes.  It was the sort of place I used to eat breakfast when I was in college.  And really not much had changed.  The waitresses had on stockings and leggings with holes in them, mismatched clothing, hair in braids or pigtails with bits of ribbon in them.  They were obviously weary and hipper than the customers because they were working there.  It was a seat yourself place with tables that were barely bussed, a bit sticky and crumby so that you took it upon yourself to clean it.  The food was great with big chunks of rough, grainy toast and preserves served in little tin cups.  The omelette was Southwestern--with a twist--full of fresh vegetables and a surprising sauce both sweet and spicy.  When I picked up the salt shaker, it was textured with years worth of sticky fingers.

Back on the street, the parade continued.  It seemed to go on forever.  There were marching bands and dancers and drill teams and floats advertising restaurants.  Nothing, really, except kids and their parents.

I tired of the parade before it was finished, but finally it was over.  The Christmas season had been officially ushered in.  Of course, there still was Thanksgiving to contend with.

I wandered about town looking at the old brick buildings that were still standing.  Some of the old painted signs could still be seen like palimpsest in brick and mortar.

I wandered over to the other side of town, to the River Arts District, where a bunch of old factories and warehouses had been converted into studios.  Visually, the area was interesting, rather barren and forlorn. The art, however. . . but I found solace in the empty hollowness of the railway yard, watching as they connected car to car in the cold afternoon sunlight.

When I got there, John Minnicks called.  He was about two blocks from where I was walking, so we met up and looked at some of the art but mostly talked about art, he once having owned a commercial business in Manhattan at One Park Place with a giant studio, giant clients like Dewars and G.E., and a giant overhead that broke his back.  He did not want to judge the works, he said. He was over that.  Everybody was just doing what they do trying to have fun.

Sure, I said, but that maybe isn't enough for me.  I want to walk into a studio and feel inspired.  I want to feel something--envy, awe--something that I didn't get from all of this.  John, I think, was unmoved.

The day winding down, we went back to John's American Court with its old flickering neon sign.  He wanted to show me a couple things about the camera that he had forgotten the day before.  We took his out into the dusk and opened up that big old lens, he talking me through some of the peculiar things I will encounter when I shoot with it.  Exposures change, he told me, depending on the focal length.  Hmm.  I could see trouble coming.  We talked through the possibility of shooting at night with a weak strobe at 1/4 of a second, dragging the shutter so that the background streaked.  He showed me a trick to allow me to focus in the dark.  Then we went inside and sat and talked until all the talking was done. Two weeks, he said.  You'll have your camera in two weeks.

It was early, only seven or seven-thirty, but I was tired from being out all day, so I drove back to the hotel, getting lost for awhile, stopping in gas stations to talk to locals, then finding my way back to the behemoth of luxury.  Sort of.  The place was packed to the rafters with hoi-polloi who had come for weddings and conventions and even to see the annual gingerbread display (oh, it is hideously awful with people coming from all over the state throughout the holiday season to see gingerbread houses and gingerbread fences and gingerbread people), sitting in rows of rocking chairs in front of the big fireplace and crowding around the bar.  But I was too tired to think about going back out on this big Saturday night, and so I resigned myself to ordering a burger and a beer and making an early evening of it.

As you know, I like to say, "Power to the People" even as I ridicule them.  All are created equal, I believe, equally wonderful and hideous.  None of us has a lock on any of that.   So now read this.