While Nashville was cool, it’s not the best thing when the first part of your day is the best. Free breakfast was hard to beat; but the Parthenon was even cooler.
Nashville, for some ridiculous reason, has a replica of the Parthenon. Both Yoshi and I knew a bit about its arrangement, structure and purpose. That said, the coolest thing was definitely the size. The damn thing was huge. Really, freakin’ huge. We walked around it, and around the surrounding park, filled with joggers slogging through the heat.
According to the City, Elliston is a “young, trendy neighborhood.” We headed there hopefully, anticipating folks who had tattoos and liked The Magnetic Fields. There would be bicycles! Vanderbilt students carrying copies of Proust! Older folks playing chess with younger kids!
Not so much. Nope.
Elliston wasn’t really a neighborhood, but a street. An okay street, but a street. The two rock clubs weren’t anything during the day and there were only a few open stores. The interwebz announced, “No trip to Elliston Place is complete without a stop at the Elliston Place Soda Shop.” So, we stopped. I believe the trip would have been complete without the Soda Shop. The food tasted like high school lunch.
We were also told about “Elder's Bookstore, which has been serving Nashville's literary set since 1930.” Elder’s Bookstore was, as Yoshi put it, “the worst kind of library.” Dark, dank and unwelcoming, the walls were plastered with signs to be quiet and threats against small children. Conservative agit-prop decorated bookshelves. The bookshop owners sat in overrun desks, quiet and solemn.
From there, we saw Donny Smutz, a contemporary surreal artist who uses politically-loaded images. My favorite piece was called Rapture, showing a man staring at a painting that depicts him, moving through a space. At his right was an unplugged TV, showing a similar image. Upon seeing the art, the man had unplugged the TV. Or vice-versa – there’s no clarity of time. While my description doesn’t do it justice, it evoked feelings of introspection, artistic relevance, consumer culture and passivity, conception of self… It did a lot for me.
Next to that gallery, the Tinney were a few others, once showing SCAD artists, the other one involving redone bicycles.
Then, the Frist. The Frist was fascinating. A former Post Office, remodeled into a museum had an amazing art deco style. “Like Brazil,” Yoshi said. It looked prepared for a high-class cocktail party or a dystopian show trial.
The Frist alternated between traditional shows and new displays-- we just missed one on Body and Flesh. The first show was found was an interactive display to teach children how to make all sorts of art, from abstract representations to figure drawing and printmaking. It was very cool and very simple – a set of stations, most unmanned, with precise instructions on how to start artistic processes. If I had a child, I would totally take zir there. Also, the museum was very inexpensive: 3$ per college students, and kids were free. I will be using my Oberlin ID for much savings.
The second show was on museum design, displaying new structures from across the world. My favorite was the “friendly alien” museum in Graz, Austria. The idea of a building as a presence with personality and charm is hardly new. However, the Pixar-like charms of the museum strike me as something new – magical realism intruding in.
Besides having large reproductions of the architectural drafts, and models of the completed structure, the Friendly Alien building also had a video of how each nostril of the beast was made. it was totally a Miyazaki monster.
I also enjoyed the futurism museum in France, the Stonehenge visitor center and a totally unfeasible planned art/tech building in NYC. Many of the new museums took into account details like LEED, multi-use spaces and architecture’s relationship with the overall feeling in the museum. Form complimenting function. The Frist itself was an excellent study. The retro sleekness and the trappings of a post office made the building a foil for its works. The space itself required creativity, and added a layer of dept to each display.
After Frist, we went to 12 South, one of the allegedly cool walking areas in Nashville. While it wasn’t as empty as Elliston, it was a yuppie daydream, lots of restaurants, a salon, clean-cut kids. Alas. After driving through disappointed, we parked on a hill, and looked at a monument. erected on Armistice Day to memorialize the end of the Civil War. It showed the Spirit of Unity, personified by a rather bishonen boy holding two horses, the emblems of the North and the South. Rather like Equus, really.
We strolled around the park. Some squirrels had sex in front of us. We felt uncomfortable with the level of consent displayed.
Realizing that our blood sugar was tanking, we went to the “Frothy Monkey,” a coffee shop, for ideas on where to eat. The barista was a sweetie, a musician who was now taking university classes. Also, after a bazillion hours of only Yoshi and I, it was fascinating to speak to someone who was under thirty who wasn’t… us.
His best recommendation was a café/grocery in the town where the elderly stars of the Grand Ol Opry lived out their sunset years. At this cafe, especially on Sundays, they’d flock together on the porch and scratch out some tunes.
Imagine Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird playing some ball on the street. The best players in the business, not worrying about being the best. Just having fun. Now take out the basketball and make it country music.
Apparently, the café made pretty good fries too.
While that sounded amazing, we were hungry. After a few false starts, we ended up at Bosco’s: expensive and unsatisfying. Had a good talk, as a result. Not an easy talk, but something that need to happen.
Night driving. A false hotel, too pricey and full. A new hotel. Sleep.
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