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November 08, 2004
scalp-crinkling!
Ok, since I am suffering from insidious writer's block, as there is so much news to report, so many pictures to post that there is nowhere to begin, here is a link, which, even if you are incredibly busy and overwhelmed with crucial and inescapable tasks you really must go to immediately for your own amusement and edification. If you don't believe me, here is a brief synopsis~ David Foster Wallace reviews a biography of Borges and he doesn't think its so good.
The long-anticipated trip to Savannah GA went well. The town is certainly beautiful, small and slow-paced, with beautiful old houses, some of them poetically boarded and rotting, and parks and squares dripping with Spanish Moss. We also saw cemetaries, one very old in which were buried yellow fever outbreak victims, influenza epidemic victims, a famous painter of miniature portraits, and at least one young man who died fighting a duel, the exact circumstances of which were and are unknown.The other cemetary we saw was not so old, but equally tragic and ghostly due to the lush vegetation and overarching canopies of branches dripping with moss. The streets have charming and in some cases funny names like Oglethorpe (the founder and planner of the town, after which lots of things in Savannah are named) Abercorn, Habersham, Bee, and Bull. The reputation for hauntedness in Savannah is not surprising given that the past hangs heavily on everything, and the humid air makes one loathe to hurry up and go anywhere or do anything but sit in one's bare feet on one's porch (or in our case in one of several coffeehouses in the town) and drink sweet (or, as they say, unsweet) tea.
Once one drives a few minutes outside of the historic district, speed picks up again, and time snaps you back into the great strip of Waffle Houses that is the 21st century Georgia highway. God Bless America and the Waffle House! We only ate there once (photos to come!) but we could have eaten at
a different one for every meal and not run out of fresh ones between downtown Savannah and the Motel 6 in the roughly 4 days we spent there. Once I had a friend from Texas who said that in the whole entire world everything comes back to Waffle House. Now I know what he meant.
As for the school, SCAD, it appears to be a lively community of hard-working, if a bit inarticulate, eager young art students. The school obviously has ample funding from somewhere (?) and owns a good portion of the town. There is a charming green three story house which serves as the illustration building, which is where I hope to spend a fair amount of time. It has light airy rooms with tall windows that face the trees and the neighborhood, and is quiet and somewhat sterile with narrow hallways and an old, tiny, ornate spiral staircase, now nonfunctional, which curls into an old, nonfunctional attic with a skylight. The library is housed in a former department store. The design is spacious and sleek but at the same time it is such a relaxing space, clean with low bookshelves, a wide, central stairway with frosted glass stairs (apparently at one time the stairs had been glass, and perfectly transparent but this design flaw was quickly corrected when young men were seen lurking on the lower levels, looking up at girls in their summer dresses) that my brother and I were compelled to spend three evenings there, reading and looking at the internet, enjoying the cool quiet and comfy leather chairs (and simultaneously avoiding a dreary evening at the Motel 6 in Richmond Hill~ not an entirely bad deal at 30-some dollars a night but pretty bare-bones, although the parking lot provided much entertainment in the form of camo-clad guys with hunting gear and big trucks, a woman with no front teeth who had a barky little wiener dog whom she told had "the biggest mouth in Georgia", and some interesting debris~ more about that later!). It was also pleasing and inspiring to see students drawing, apparently working on homework assignments, at the tables in the library as well as in the coffeehouses near the school. I saw this a couple of times, and it did my heart so much good seeing them with their pencils, earnestly bent over dog-eared sketchbooks! We were told, on a tour of the school, that there are Sequential Art (essentially comic book art) students who are rarely seen in the light of day, or at any other time, and when they are, they appear pale, permanently hunched, and grasping at sometimes invisible drawing utensils. The building where these students work is in a remote corner of town, and we didn't get out of the bus to look inside.
In another part of the tour we saw industrial design students at work in factory size sheds, fabricating their car and boat designs. We also saw the film and animation departments, and the most shiny new Macs I have ever seen in one place at one time in my whole life.
Sooo... in all I was quite impressed with the school, now it is a question of scraping together the piles and piles of the really large cash one is required to fork before gaining admission to this prestigious institution. Stay tuned for the boring details as they develop..
Posted by pippypippy at November 8, 2004 09:53 AM
Comments
I think Eli is the secret master behind the Floof. Just where does the "casual" relaxed look on the couch come from? I suspect a gato. SCAD sounds wonderful and I recommend bank heists to get there. The Wallace piece reminds me of eating cereal on meth.
Posted by: john at November 11, 2004 12:51 AM