Scene & Herd - Chuckle time

Once again, featuring naked women

Ex-Atlantan Chris Verene has a giant show at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (the kids call it The Contemporary). It’s a “this is your life so far” sorta show titled From Galesburg to Atlanta: 1986-2004.

The Galesburg in the title is Galesburg, Ill., the western Illinois town that gave us Carl Sandburg, the poet most famous for dubbing Chicago the “City of Big Shoulders.” Verene’s documentary photographs of his extended family and friends in Galesburg form the backbone of the collection. The Galesburg series is moving, often in a squirmy sort of way. Much of it gets very close to the line that separates “intimate portrait” from “gawking at the freak show in a Diane Arbus sort of way.” It also makes me wonder if calling the people in the pictures freaky is just snobbishness stemming from my shiny, sanitized, upper-middle-class upbringing. In other words, his pics are emotionally provocative. I just shoot bands and porn stars.

Prior to the show’s official “opening,” Verene sat down and chatted about his art with the show’s curator, Helena Reckitt (full disclosure, Reckitt is one of my 13 Friendsters and the only one who lists “sandwiches” as a hobby or interest). Verene, who looked dapper despite mismatched socks, also answered questions. Someone asked him whether he ever combines his music and photography, to which he responded, quite sensibly if you think about it, “Rarely do the two happen together.” Only one person chuckled.

Alpha-bits: On Saturday, millions of Alpharettans gathered in the parking lot of Milton High School for the sixth annual Alpharetta Heritage Festival. The festival provided a chance for modern-day Alpharettistas to get a glimpse at how their ancestors lived. Activities included watching people in old-fashioned outfits firing muskets, watching people in old-fashioned outfits shaping wood, watching a bluegrass band wearing clothes from the mall and cell phones on their belts play beautifully, and watching a Native American man in Native American dress explain teepee construction and Cherokee child-rearing techniques to passers-by.

Most of the historically themed entertainment was next to the school’s log cabin. The cabin was built by student members of the Milton High School branch of Future Farmers of America between 1934 and 1935. Alpharetta must have been affluent then, too; the cabin is huge.

The festival also celebrated several key aspects of modern-day Alpharetta. When I walked up, there was a bar band performing anodyne covers, including a particularly painful version of hit single and iPod jingle, “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” There were many gas-guzzling autos on display (some classic, some not). Last, but not least, no gathering in this state would be complete without a little military fetishism. The festival not only had a display of military uniforms, it also had some hardware laying around, most notably a Jeep with a machine gun mounted behind the driver’s seat. Next to it was a British-made 1950s armored vehicle with “Real SUV” painted on its side. While I was looking at it, a woman told the vehicle’s owner, “I want it to drive into Atlanta,” to which someone replied, “You’ll need it!” They all chuckled.

Nearly took him out: Alex Kapranos, lead singer of the Scottish rock group Franz Ferdinand, jaywalked in front of my car Sunday afternoon. Traffic was moving pretty slowly, so I had plenty of time to stop.

A little old place: If you stopped by Love Shack in Norcross on Saturday afternoon to rent a video or replace your old, worn-out butt plug, you might have noticed a beautiful petite woman sitting on a chair next to the cash register wearing nothing but shoes and a tattoo on the small of her back. That was Gauge, the adult film star. She was at the store posing for photographs with fans and signing autographs. Gauge has appeared in more than 250 films, including North Pole, No Holes Barred, Think Pink, and the immensely topical Weapons of Ass Destruction, Volume One and Two!

For $20, Gauge would sit on your lap and throw her legs open while someone snapped a souvenir Polaroid. Between autographs, Gauge chatted with the store’s staff and anyone who came up to her. Under certain circumstances, idle chitchat with a naked porn star might be difficult or at least awkward, but Gauge was so easygoing that she put everyone else around her at ease, too. During one of her unbusy moments, she told a great story about how she dealt with a short stint under house arrest in her native Arkansas after a passenger in her car was found with pot. According to Gauge, area law enforcement officials were fans of her work, so they helped her circumvent the electronic house arrest monitoring equipment. Actually, her exact words were, “They taught me how to manipulate the box.” We all chuckled.

All that jazz: Partly to try something different for this column and partly because I really wanted to sit, eat and read magazines, I went to Front Page News in Little Five Points on Sunday for some delicious jazz brunch. Light jazz, with its lush chords and often-sparse instrumentation, dominates the while-you-eat genre of music, with dinner theater a distant second. While I dined on eggs sardo and mixed fruit, the restaurant’s nameless trio (guitar, bass, drums) rattled off fantastic renditions of jazzy standards with some clever twists. The cleverest of the twists was probably “Eleanor Rigby” mashed together with the baroquey Bouree in E Minor by Bach. After a break, the trio swelled to a quartet with the addition of a saxophonist. Immediately, the set went from jaunty and cool to sultry, yet polite.

At one point, a little boy stood next to me and gawked at the band. He waved at the drummer, after which his dad crouched down and asked him, “Do you wanna be a drummer when you grow up?” I didn’t chuckle. I just smiled.

andisheh@creativeloafing.com