Scene & Herd - Blonde All Over
Making the most of not-as-late nightlife
Thanks to the city leadership’s decision to quit governing the city and start parenting it, Atlanta’s nightlife in 2004 is less fun. Bars have to stop serving alcohol at 2:30 a.m. and formerly all-night clubs such as Backstreet and Club 112 have to go back on the heezy no later than 3 a.m.
It’s a sad time to be an energetic drunkard with more time than responsibility (or Jermaine Dupri). Because gentrification has filled intown neighborhoods with homeowners obsessed with trivialities like property value, sleep and crime, the anti-party trend is likely to continue.
One bright spot on the increasingly dark entertainment map is the good old Clermont Lounge on Ponce De Leon Avenue. I’ve been several times since I started writing this column, but have never written about it. I figure that I’d better do it now because it’s only a matter of time before someone replaces it with luxury condos (although the new owners say that’s not their plan).
I went to the Clermont last Saturday night. Despite the rain and cold, there was a long line of people waiting to get inside. Why the line for a place known to be a dive? I suppose the Theory of Campiness is the best explanation. When something stays bad and harmless for long enough, bored people with a sense of irony eventually decide to think it’s good (latest example, the shoulder-baring shirts that Jennifer Beals wore in Flashdance are back. Hell, Jennifer Beals herself is back.). And so the Clermont, a dingy bar/disco in the basement of a rooming house with low, claustrophobia-inducing ceilings, filthy decor and restrooms that your urine actually cleans, is a trendy nightspot. It has been for as long as I can remember.
The Clermont’s main attraction, other than the ambiance, is stripper/performance artist Blondie. On Saturday she told me that she was in a lousy mood. (We’re not friends. I simply said, “Hey Blondie, how’s it going?” when she passed by, and I got an earful.)
The reason for her bad mood was not readily apparent. Like every other Saturday, she spent much of the evening dancing on the bar, pulling up the flesh on her lower abdomen to show off her comprehensive blondness, and, of course, using her breasts to crush beer cans and hit people in the eye.
Everyone else appeared to be having a great time, particularly the people dancing. Saturday is disco night and disco is happy music. Even Quasi (the DJ’s real name) joined the fun. Around midnight, he removed his shirt and joined the crowd to dance to each song. Enjoy the Clermont as much as you can before the bad people take it away.
Art Attack: In a feat that rivals the Normandy Invasion and even Hands Across America for complexity, the logisticians at the Atlanta Gallery Association are, as you read this very page, putting on a citywide art exhibition and lecture series that they’re calling ATLart[04]. Just the punctuation and capitalization alone must have taken hundreds of man-hours!
Last Friday, I went to Virginia-Highland to try to check out two of the gazillion or so participating shows. My first stop was Aliya Gallery, where the abstract landscapes of Scott Hill and R. John Ichter were on display. Hill’s landscapes are misty and sad. Ichter’s were bolder (or gaudier, depending on your taste) and flat. He was in the gallery, sketching a new work while chatting with gallery-goers. I also went to Modern Primitive gallery across the street. There, I particularly liked Roy Carruthers’s paintings of misshapen people in lingerie. They look like the mannequins that Michael Jackson showed interviewer Martin Bashir in his Vegas hotel room.
Although it wasn’t part of ATLart[04], I also stopped by Hodgson Photo Service’s exhibition of Dave Radlmann’s Middle of the World: My Journey Through Ecuador. The exhibit is a beautiful black-and-white travelogue of interesting, imposing and freaky-looking places.
Dast nazan: Dastan Ensemble, a five-man Persian classical music group, played a brilliant and emotional show at Emory University’s White Hall on Sunday. The show began on a somber note, as they dedicated the performance and the tour to singer Iraj Bastami, who died in last month’s earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam, and to their Kamancheh player Saied Farajpoory, who’s stuck in Canada with visa problems.
The show opened with a haunting call-response piece between barbat player Hossein Behroozi-Nia and setarist Hamid Motebassem. The setar is a four-stringed lute that, like the much bigger Indian sitar, is best heard in person because its subtle, quiet resonances are seldom picked up in recordings.
Between sets, the crowd went to the lobby to eat some Persian food. However several people, all men, walked to the lip of the stage to point at, gawk at and talk about the band’s gear. Music geekdom is an international phenomenon.
ALMA MATTERS: On Saturday night, potential Scene & Herd Recurring Character Jeff Elkins took me to the Alexander Memorial Coliseum at Georgia Tech to see his alma mater’s basketball team put a beating on my alma mater’s basketball team, the University of Maryland Terrapins.
The coliseum is nicknamed “The Thrillerdome.” I imagine that’s partly because the overwhelmingly male student body finds the nippled breast-shape of the dome roof exciting to behold. It might also have to do with the fact that there’s not a bad seat in the house. It’s a perfect basketball experience. You can see the players from the highest seats and even hear the band (whose repertoire includes, appropriately enough, “Thriller”). Tech home games even have a resident celebrity. Life University founder Sid Williams sits courtside at every game. In Elkins’s words, “He’s our Jack Nicholson.”
andisheh@creativeloafing.com
It’s a sad time to be an energetic drunkard with more time than responsibility (or Jermaine Dupri). Because gentrification has filled intown neighborhoods with homeowners obsessed with trivialities like property value, sleep and crime, the anti-party trend is likely to continue.
One bright spot on the increasingly dark entertainment map is the good old Clermont Lounge on Ponce De Leon Avenue. I’ve been several times since I started writing this column, but have never written about it. I figure that I’d better do it now because it’s only a matter of time before someone replaces it with luxury condos (although the new owners say that’s not their plan).
I went to the Clermont last Saturday night. Despite the rain and cold, there was a long line of people waiting to get inside. Why the line for a place known to be a dive? I suppose the Theory of Campiness is the best explanation. When something stays bad and harmless for long enough, bored people with a sense of irony eventually decide to think it’s good (latest example, the shoulder-baring shirts that Jennifer Beals wore in Flashdance are back. Hell, Jennifer Beals herself is back.). And so the Clermont, a dingy bar/disco in the basement of a rooming house with low, claustrophobia-inducing ceilings, filthy decor and restrooms that your urine actually cleans, is a trendy nightspot. It has been for as long as I can remember.
The Clermont’s main attraction, other than the ambiance, is stripper/performance artist Blondie. On Saturday she told me that she was in a lousy mood. (We’re not friends. I simply said, “Hey Blondie, how’s it going?” when she passed by, and I got an earful.)
The reason for her bad mood was not readily apparent. Like every other Saturday, she spent much of the evening dancing on the bar, pulling up the flesh on her lower abdomen to show off her comprehensive blondness, and, of course, using her breasts to crush beer cans and hit people in the eye.
Everyone else appeared to be having a great time, particularly the people dancing. Saturday is disco night and disco is happy music. Even Quasi (the DJ’s real name) joined the fun. Around midnight, he removed his shirt and joined the crowd to dance to each song. Enjoy the Clermont as much as you can before the bad people take it away.
Art Attack: In a feat that rivals the Normandy Invasion and even Hands Across America for complexity, the logisticians at the Atlanta Gallery Association are, as you read this very page, putting on a citywide art exhibition and lecture series that they’re calling ATLart[04]. Just the punctuation and capitalization alone must have taken hundreds of man-hours!
Last Friday, I went to Virginia-Highland to try to check out two of the gazillion or so participating shows. My first stop was Aliya Gallery, where the abstract landscapes of Scott Hill and R. John Ichter were on display. Hill’s landscapes are misty and sad. Ichter’s were bolder (or gaudier, depending on your taste) and flat. He was in the gallery, sketching a new work while chatting with gallery-goers. I also went to Modern Primitive gallery across the street. There, I particularly liked Roy Carruthers’s paintings of misshapen people in lingerie. They look like the mannequins that Michael Jackson showed interviewer Martin Bashir in his Vegas hotel room.
Although it wasn’t part of ATLart[04], I also stopped by Hodgson Photo Service’s exhibition of Dave Radlmann’s Middle of the World: My Journey Through Ecuador. The exhibit is a beautiful black-and-white travelogue of interesting, imposing and freaky-looking places.
Dast nazan: Dastan Ensemble, a five-man Persian classical music group, played a brilliant and emotional show at Emory University’s White Hall on Sunday. The show began on a somber note, as they dedicated the performance and the tour to singer Iraj Bastami, who died in last month’s earthquake in the Iranian city of Bam, and to their Kamancheh player Saied Farajpoory, who’s stuck in Canada with visa problems.
The show opened with a haunting call-response piece between barbat player Hossein Behroozi-Nia and setarist Hamid Motebassem. The setar is a four-stringed lute that, like the much bigger Indian sitar, is best heard in person because its subtle, quiet resonances are seldom picked up in recordings.
Between sets, the crowd went to the lobby to eat some Persian food. However several people, all men, walked to the lip of the stage to point at, gawk at and talk about the band’s gear. Music geekdom is an international phenomenon.
ALMA MATTERS: On Saturday night, potential Scene & Herd Recurring Character Jeff Elkins took me to the Alexander Memorial Coliseum at Georgia Tech to see his alma mater’s basketball team put a beating on my alma mater’s basketball team, the University of Maryland Terrapins.
The coliseum is nicknamed “The Thrillerdome.” I imagine that’s partly because the overwhelmingly male student body finds the nippled breast-shape of the dome roof exciting to behold. It might also have to do with the fact that there’s not a bad seat in the house. It’s a perfect basketball experience. You can see the players from the highest seats and even hear the band (whose repertoire includes, appropriately enough, “Thriller”). Tech home games even have a resident celebrity. Life University founder Sid Williams sits courtside at every game. In Elkins’s words, “He’s our Jack Nicholson.”
andisheh@creativeloafing.com