The Hackensaw Boys

Sky City - September 16

Six gentlemen travel in a passenger van crammed to the gills with stringed instruments on their way to a festival in northeastern West Virginia. Ferd, Justin, Jesse, Robert, Shawn and Ward make up what they call an “excitable roots string band.” The Hackensaw Boys originally began in Charlottesville with four members growing to as many as twelve in what is now home in central Virginia, and have since then downsized to touring with the current line-up for about two years.

Despite the recent resurgence of bluegrass music, being a roots rock/Americana/bluegrass band in today’s world still poses some difficulty when finding an amicable bill to play. Even still, the band is always up to the challenge and willing to match energy levels with any and all bands they have been paired with. The Boys have shared the stage with De La Soul, The Flaming Lips, Camper van Beethoven, Cake, and even lost a member to Modest Mouse. With their own personal musical tastes running the gamut, they find it easy to discover pieces that fit the puzzle. 

The Hackensaw Boys have kicked some bluegrass in the CSRA in the not too dusty past. The Boys have crowded the stage of Stillwater Taproom, Augusta’s home for great touring bluegrass and Americana bands, in addition to Aiken’s Bluegrass Festival. Both venues, they say, exceeded their expectations, citing the large size of the younger crowd in attendance. 

With this show at Sky City on September 16th being coupled with Augusta’s cowpunk band, Hogslobber, The Hackensaw Boys and any who brave the night will most certainly have a grin from ear to ear as they witness the energy between both bands build upon each other. Behold this bluegrass bonfire at Augusta’s newest live music venue, Sky City.

Tuesday 9.16 at 9 pm -  $8 to $10

Sky City - 1157 Broad Street

skycity.com - myspace.com/hackensawboys

friday night live / a different music experience

september 5 & 19 -  the well

The Well, an interdenominational church at 716 Broad Street, is hosting Friday Night Live on the first and third Friday of every month from 7 to 9 pm. Beginning September 5th, The Well will bring quality music in a smoke free, alcohol free, family-friendly environment, with regional and local artists ranging from bare-bones acoustic setups to full on electrified bands.

September 5 - Hannah Miller: Fans of artists like Jennifer Daniels will find the sounds of Hannah Miller, from Columbia, SC, a bit more bluesy and raw. With sultry, possibly even smoky, vocals and introspective lyrics, you will be quickly drawn into Miller’s world as she strums her guitar, her husband plucking away at his mandolin beside her. This will be Hannah’s fifth return to Augusta (you may have caught her at The Mission or 1102).  Check out her music at hannahmillermusic.com.

September 19 - Jacob Beltz: A veteran of Augusta’s music scene, Jacob Beltz consistently pleases audiences. I can honestly say that this is a man that truly enjoys being a part of the music that it is so much a part of him. In his junior year of high school, Jacob picked up a guitar. Six months later he wrote his first song. Listening to Eric Clapton, Jeff Buckley, John Denver, and Dave Matthews, Jacob found his direction musically as well as his voice. Beltz realized it was time to decide if his life was going in the direction of music, rowing, or competitive skateboarding. Music took over. Hear Jacob at myspace.com/jacobbeltz.

Visit thewellaugusta.org for more info and a list of upcoming performers.

The Jury Room: 551 Greene St.

A wonderful place to eat if you want a soothing atmosphere and great food, The Jury Room specializes in coffee, salads, and sandwiches for the lunch crowd.  Not only that, but they are becoming well known for their home-made Italian gelato and fudge as well. The décor is reminiscent of an old court room chamber with polished solid wood doors and bookshelves filled with old law books. This small and simple café really lives up to its name. The wait staff is personable and pleased to help in any way possible. The manager Cathy Walker invites anyone to come and visit Monday through Friday from 9 am to 3 pm.  Lunch is served from 11:30 am to 2:30 pm.

Tribeca Buddha Lounge and Shoe Bar: 968 Broad St.

Tribeca is the hat-trick for your night out on the town. A blend of full bar, Buddha lounge, and shoe store, Tribeca will certainly play to one if not all of your fancies. They have two full bars with experienced bartenders to help pick out the perfect drink for your night. Their shoe store has some of the coolest and latest fashions and is sure to catch your eye. The Buddha lounge is a great place to chill out and go with the flow if you find the bar atmosphere a little overwhelming. Their hours are limited to Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in the evening and they are located at 968 Broad Street. Stop on by to entertain yourself in any of the ways they offer.

Rebel Lion Den: 910 Broad St.

A great place to experience Afro-centric influences from around the world, Rebel Lion Den brings a little bit of Africa into every part of their varied inventory. Shama Cartwright, owner and operator, says it is his passion to make people aware of the culture surrounding Africans in every part of the world, from the unique Bahamian culture to past and present Africa itself. The shop includes Bob Marley t-shirts, clothing from many different African cultures, Rastafarian colored hats and jewelry, flags from countries with heavy African populations, reggae music, hemp and seashell jewelry, and natural incense.  Business hours are Monday through Saturday from 11 am to 7 pm.

Pub Crawling Down Broad Street

Let me be honest with you. Whenever I take vacations and leave town via car, plane, bus (one painstakingly twelve hour ride to Lynchburg, Virginia), or foot (which I imagine will be soon if gas prices continue to rise at this rate), I ultimately end my day in some random bar or restaurant that serves an ever-deserving array of alcoholic beverages. Despite whatever vacation-esque activities a town has to offer (Lynchburg hardly had any, if you’re curious), it’s difficult to really get a feel of the locals without seeing them loosened by several rounds of the local elixir. Bars are also one of the better places to openly admit that you’re a tourist, especially if you want to inquire about all those seedier places towards the 400 block of Broad Street that seem to increase in popularity during the first week of April.

Truthfully, I can’t see why anyone needs to wander further down Broad than Ninth Street to have a decent night out in Augusta. Our best bars and venues downtown are located along one street within a two block radius, which is highly convenient when you realize that you’ve lost a member of your party to the magnetic pull of cheap beer and generously poured cocktails. [Read more]

A Sense of Place

Gertrude Herbert - Opens September 19 

It’s that time of year again for the Gertrude Herbert Institute of Art’s A Sense of Place Juried Art show, opening for its 28th year on September 19. This year, the show coincides with Augusta’s Westobou Festival, which should add to the increasing popularity of the annual exhibit. 

A juried show has a judge or “juror” that accepts or declines an artist’s work into an exhibition based on the theme of the show, expectations from the gallery, and sometimes the juror’s personal criteria.  Though there are prizes awarded to the best in show, it is also significant to have made it into the exhibit. 

A Sense of Place has proven to be nothing short of a success for the gallery, and the evidence is in the amount of submissions it receives in preparation for the event. This year over 1000 artists submitted work to be juried. The show’s chosen juror, Amanda Cooper of the Arts Center in St. Petersburg, Florida, found it difficult to whittle down the selection to thirty-eight artists representing twenty-two states to be featured this fall. “When I first heard the theme of this exhibition, I naively assumed I would be looking at numerous interpretations of the landscape,” says Cooper in response to show’s titled theme. “Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw the creative extent to which these many artists went to convey the theme, very few of which consisted of the traditional trees and lake views.” It’s true, at first, one may naively expect to find a literal and redundant collection, but ultimately this theme can be deciphered to include all sorts of context from one’s place in society to a mental state of mind. 

A Sense of Place is not only a pleasure to the artist’s showing, but it’s a great place to view work that may otherwise be unseen in Augusta. 

A Sense of Place 28th Annual Juried Fine Art Competition opens on Friday, September 19 with a reception and awards presentation at 6 pm.  The exhibit is open to the public.

dystopian literature

I’m often asked what my favourite book is, or to list my ten favourite books.  I like so many books that I think a list of one hundred wouldn’t be enough, and worse yet, putting them in a list would imply that I liked book one more than book one hundred even though book twenty-seven is really better than both.  Maybe one of these days I will actually make this list.  In the meantime, you can be certain the books I write about here definitely belong on it, especially this month’s books.  I especially love them because they all fall into one of my favourite categories of writing: dystopian literature.

Even though I could count off a handful of dystopian novels when I set out to write, I had no concise, formulated definition.  According to the American Heritage Dictionary, dystopia is “an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.”  If it weren’t for that caveat about imaginary, I would have assumed dystopia a synonym for the reality of the better part of our world.  Before I looked it up in the dictionary, I had a narrower view of dystopian literature.  Now I realize that a great number of books I previously hadn’t considered to fit the bill are quite at home in this category, which may help to explain why I like them so much.

For me, the crème de la crème of dystopia is George Orwell’s novel 1984.  Even if people don’t recognize the title, it is likely they have encountered the idea of Big Brother (at least in the form of a ridiculous unreality show on television).   Modern references to 1984 seem to focus on the technological aspects of the tyrannical regime controlling the world of protagonist Winston Smith. But Orwell was more concerned with the ideological aspects of a society.  Big Brother wasn’t the result of a capacity to intrude into the everyday lives of citizens.  Rather, the intrusion was precipitated by an ideological shift toward Socialism, which Orwell paralleled to Nazi Fascism and Soviet Communism.  

The imaginary state of the novel is Oceania, one of three superpowers, which encompasses England, the USA, Australia, southern Africa, and a few other regions.  Winston works for the Ministry of Truth, an arm of the government whose purpose is to rewrite history and language, or in other words, to lie.  By exercising such control, the government manages to manipulate its citizens’ worldview and get rid of Truth altogether.  For those who don’t succumb to the propaganda, there is always the Ministry of Love who enforce belief in the lies of the Ministry of Truth.  Conformity is perpetuated through fear, intimidation, and wonderfully exciting events like the Two Minutes Hate demonstrations, where the more recalcitrant individuals are tortured until their devotion to Big Brother, the iconic leader of Oceana, is assured.  Winston manages to escape the Thought Police (gendarmes from the Ministry of Love) for some time, and through this lens we see how horrific a government can be when its citizens cede their rights for security.

Even though I rank Orwell at the top, a critic would probably place him beneath Aldous Huxley, whose Brave New World was penned sixteen years earlier.  I rather enjoyed the letter at the end of the recent edition in which Huxley thanks Orwell for a copy of 1984 (which it took him over a decade to get around to reading) and trumpets the superiority of his own novel’s view of dystopia as being a more accurate prognostication of current and future reality.  In Brave New World, fear and intimidation are nearly nowhere to be found.  Instead, society is controlled through sex and drugs.  A primitive form of genetic engineering helps to organize society into five hierarchical groups with labor at the bottom, kept nice, dumb and docile, and the intelligentsia at the top or Alpha level.  Even the Alpha’s seem beholden to a system of manipulation so insidiously intertwined into the social fabric that the elite is as subject as the commoner to its rule.  Huxley leaves room for a tribal culture existing where a young man, John the Savage, becomes a foil to a culture devoid of art, literature and reason.  While I found Orwell more resonate with my own angst, Brave New World’s themes seem to leap from the pages and find themselves a familiar home in 2008.

In both 1984 and Brave New World, religion seems silent or has been replaced by another agent (Big Brother and Henry Ford respectively), but in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, it is religion that is the architect of dystopia.  Though it is never quite clear, a crisis preceded this society’s subjugation in which women begin to have difficulty successfully carrying a pregnancy to term.  While the previous novels turned the whole world upside down, Atwood only takes a small portion of North America for the Republic of Gilead.  Gilead is controlled by a militarized religious authority who blames the impropriety of the past for the problems of the present.  They tightly control sex, clothing, and the relationships between men and women to keep social order.  Women are particularly degraded in this society, and parallels between modern issues and imaginary ones are not hard to draw. Perhaps my favourite idea gleaned from this novel is the disparity between “freedom of” and “freedom from” and how the former must be defended against the latter. 

Though I run short of space, I can’t fail to mention Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a young adult novel whose dystopia appears a Utopia at first, until its protagonist, Jonas, becomes the Receiver of Memory and discovers the price of tranquility is a loss of humanity.  Though more optimistic at the end than the previous novels, it expounds the deprivation theme of dystopia better than many of the adult novels I encounter in this genre.  One word of warning, you might cry at the end.

I intended to entice you with several other titles, like Ayn Rand’s Anthem, and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, but I’m afraid you’ll just have to track me down in person to hear about them.  The feature all these books have in common besides my love for them is a challenge to our own worldview and the never-ending attempts to subjugate us to “deprivation, oppression and terror.”

Next Month: Can someone who loves literature really be promoting a teenage angst vampire love story?

David Hutchison is the proprietor of the Book Tavern, located at 1026 Broad Street. David is best known for his unique ability to match the perfect book to a customer’s personality and being a veritable walking encyclopedia of literary works.

September

dee and karen / friday date nights downtown

he saw: We started our evening by going to the Metro Coffeehouse for an adult beverage. The Metro is the “Cheers” of Augusta, and we always run into friends there: people I went to high school with, people who went to high school with our daughters, and people who probably didn’t even go to high school. We shot several games of pool with Jacob, who told us that he and Josh, one of the bartenders (excuse me, coffee makers), were playing at The Loft later that night. 

she saw:  Our Friday date nights always start at the Metro.  From the first week Bobby, Kenny, and Travis opened The Metro Coffeehouse, we have patronized their establishment.  The guys are like family, and we have celebrated many occasions together over the years.  They know how we like our favorite drinks and start making them as soon as we hit the door.  I grew up with three brothers and a pool table, so it’s no wonder the place feels like home. [Read more]

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