I've been thinking about all the places I want to go see and experience once we're able to travel again, and also taking time to reflect on the highlights of some previous trips, like Atlanta. (The piece below was previously published on Atlas Obscura. You can see it here.)
One of corporate America's best-kept secrets is also one of the most publicly displayed. As far as trade secrets and intellectual property go, it’s hard to think of a better-known example than the formula upon which Asa Griggs Candler made his fizzy fortune. In 1888, Candler bought the Coca-Cola brand and formula from pharmacist John Stith Pemberton and launched what has become the largest beverage company in the world. While the formula itself is kept safe, the safe that holds the original written recipe is displayed prominently within Atlanta’s World of Coca-Cola museum. The formula was moved from its former location at SunTrust Bank in downtown Atlanta as the capstone to the company’s 125th anniversary. The formula, which passed from Pemberton to Candler to Ernest Woodruff and a group of investors, wasn’t committed to paper until 1919 when it was used as collateral for the loan that Woodruff and his colleagues secured for the purchase of the company. The formula remained in a vault in the Guaranty Bank in New York until the loan was repaid in 1925, at which point it was moved to the Trust Company Bank (now SunTrust). The current vault is the central part of an exhibit within the museum. To be clear, visitors are welcome to view the vault, but you won’t be able to see the formula itself unless you buy the company.
The museum is home to a number of other exhibits on topics ranging from the history of the company to the now largely-automated bottling process. Visitors can also have their pictures taken with the brand’s polar bear mascot and sample various Coke-owned beverages from around the world, including Fanta Melon Frosty (popular in Japan and Thailand) and Brazil’s Guaraná Kuat, inthe tasting room on the second floor.
“May it be a light to you in dark places, when all other lights go out.”
Like others all over the world right now, my wife and dog and I are all
weathering the COVID-19 pandemic, with varying degrees of success. For Tinker
Bell it’s probably the easiest – she is overjoyed that not one but now both of
her human servants are at her beck and call all day. For me it’s essentially
not much different than most of my days over the past decade. I have worked as
a writer and contractor from my home office for the better part of 10 years now
– it’s strange only in that I now see my wife, friends and family working
through the same disorientation and disconnection that I felt at first.
“Don’t worry,” I tell them. “In my experience it gets much easier after
the first three years.”
Maybe they chuckle, or grimace. They know that my sense of humor runs
dark. But in times such as these, I believe that humor (however twisted) is perhaps the best tool at
my disposal for managing that which I cannot control or make sense of.
We’ve all got our ways of dealing with things, from meditation and yoga
to alcohol or escaping to other worlds through the portals of books, films and
video games. It’s more than understandable… it is quintessentially human. Wars,
plagues, disasters of all sorts, force us to confront how very little we really
control. They reveal how flimsy a defense our wealth, our military might, and
our scientific advancements really are. It forces us to confront our mortality
on a prolonged and collective basis. And that can be upsetting, terrifying in
fact. How are we to manage, confined to our homes like prisoners with our fear
and uncertainty as an unwelcome cellmate?
If we are to be prisoners though, it does not exempt us from making our
choices, even if there are far fewer of them than we might wish. My choice is to
laugh, and in doing so I spite the anxiety and terror of all this is unknown to
me. I do so knowing full well that my laughter is just a very tiny candle with
which I am trying to hold back the infinite darkness. And I know that the inevitable
outcome of that battle, between light and lightlessness, is a foregone
conclusion. But I’m not focused on winning some battle that can’t be won. I’m
interested in making bearable, in making meaningful, whatever time I have.
And
so I hope to share this small light with you, that it may momentarily tame if
not dispel your fears. Let’s cast clumsy shadow puppets together. Let’s crack
stupid jokes, make artworks out of the contents of our canned food and let loose our defiant, awkward, loveable snorts and bellows and
guffaws against the silence. Because for however long we can ward off the darkness
with our small, flickering lights, I believe it is worth doing.
There are places where the city shares its own secret language with who know how to seek it out.
As I've mentioned in earlier posts, the process of saying good by to my childhood friend, Steve, and the process of saying goodbye to the city of Chicago became inseparably intertwined for me. As I committed myself to better knowing one (the city), at the same time I committed myself to better remembering the other. More than once I called his cell phone to try and memorize the voice I'd known for most of my life, a voice that I can still recall as I write this, but one that sadly I will not hear again. It was his voice I imagined with me as I made up my list of Chicago places and activities.
I set out to discover the place I'd been living. I chuckled when I went to visit Shit Fountain, and I was fascinated when Jen and I went to visit the button museum, but I wasn't truly or fundamentally altered until I walked Carroll Ave.
Visiting Carroll Ave. seems like such a simple task - it's just a street after all. You can spot it easily enough on old printed maps, google maps or any GPS system. But when you try to find it, even when you seem to be right there on top of it, you likely won't see any sign of it.
And that's because you are, literally, right there on top of it.
You see, the story of Chicago is one of buildings reaching ever higher, one alongside and on top of the next, ever upward into the sky. Which means that walkways and bridges and streets needed to be built up as well. Such is the case with Carroll Ave. from which one could, once upon a time, look up from and see the sun. Now however, looking up from Carroll Street, you'll only see the bottoms of shoes and the tires of cars through grates as they pass above you - completely unaware of your presence. The street has been devoured completely by the city and reborn as a secret subterranean tunnel.
To get there I went down an elevator to the Marina along the Chicago River - but rather than stop in to examine the boats, I kept walking and found myself in a long, dingy passageway. There were train tracks that had fallen into disuse. I passed the lower entryway to the House of Blues, and I continued walking until I was directly under the Merchandise Mart.
It felt like being one of the Goonies, discovering a wishing well from the bottom; as if, at any moment, I might stumble over the remains of Chester Copperpot or some similarly hapless explorer who had come this far, but no farther. It was a place I'd passed or walked over hundreds of times, but never once even wondered how anyone would get down there. Thus I had my first real taste of the vaguely subversive pleasure that is urban exploration. Carroll Ave was my invitation and indoctrination into a quasi-secret second city. A second, Second City, if you will. Clive Barker's Midian.
I could imagine Steve's presence there with me, just over my shoulder. Would he have had the foresight to tell me that this was what I loved and what I had been seeking without realizing it? Would he have seen the words as they formed, what was to be my newest iteration of self? It wouldn't surprise me - he usually grasped such things before I did. He knew me at least as well as I did, but without the subjective baggage and blindness.
I circled back and took a ramp back up into the daylight. I was on LaSalle Street. And I realized I'd looked at that very ramp so many times before without really once ever seeing it. It was the city's own form of steganography - hiding there in plain sight, a message to its inhabitants, and I was seeing it for the first time.
From that point forward I began to notice doors and stairways that seemed to lead to nowhere; windows where there was no logical reason for them to be. It opened my eyes at last to the place I was leaving and to all places I've visited since, making new those places I'd been before and making sacred those places to which I was new.
And it brought me back to one specific time when my friend Steve and I were no more than thirteen years old in the late summer afternoon sunlight and dust choked shadows of a barn loft where we witnessed something that made us pause and ask each other, did we just see that?
Halloween is a fun and fascinating time to visit any city in America, but it seems especially well suited to the Crescent City, which knows perhaps better than any other how to don wild costumes and throw a memorable party. Two years ago this week, Jen and I had the exceedingly good fortune to stay at the Edgar Degas House and it set the tone for what remains one of our favorite trips together.
(The piece below was previously published on Atlas Obscura. You can see it here.)
The only home of the famous French impressionist painter open to the public is now a museum and bed and breakfast. Edgar Degas, born in France in 1834, is known around the world for his Impressionist masterpieces. Less well known is the short, but critical, period of five months from 1872 to 1873 that he spent at the Creole estate of his mother’s family in New Orleans. Degas’s mother died when he was a child, but he still had family in New Orleans, including his uncle, his brother René, and René’s wife Estelle, who had begun by this time to go blind (a fear that haunted Degas for the rest of his life).
During his visit with his family, Degas produced 22 paintings, including “A Cotton Office in New Orleans,” which depicted the work of his uncle Michael Musson and was the first of his paintings (and the first by any Impressionist) to be purchased by a museum. He also painted a number of portraits of his relatives, and it was during this time that he began to explore a looser style of painting that would evolve into what we think of as Impressionism. The home he stayed in was built in 1852 by developer and architect Benjamin Rodriguez as one of the original homes in the Esplanade Ridge Neighborhood. Wealthy Creole families like the Mussons composed of many new residents in the city, which experienced a boom prior to the Civil War. Following Degas’s visit, René’s business collapsed, plunging the family deep into debt and the Musson home was torn apart, first figuratively when René left his wife for a close friend of the family, and then literally in the 1920s when the main house was cut in half with one wing moved 20 feet to the side, thereby creating two residences.
Today, both halves of the house have been reunited under the ownership of Degas’s relatives and Musson descendants. A major restoration was performed on the main house, which now serves as a bed and breakfast, while the other portion, which contained Degas’s studio and bedroom, has been restored to the way it would have looked during his visit. A visit to the museum includes a documentary video with historical details on both the family and the artworks that Degas created while in New Orleans. The museum, breakfast, and mimosas are all complementary if you happen to be staying as a guest.
Since childhood, October has always been my favorite month of the year.
All months, all seasons have their unique qualities, but October is the one for me. Of course, it all culminates with Halloween –
our reinterpretation of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people
wore masks and disguises to ward off ghosts and spirits. It was though that the
veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was thinnest at this time,
making it possible to pass through like simple diffusion through a cell membrane.
Not even Pope Gregory the Third’s designation of November 1st as All
Saints Day could succeed in dispelling the underlying pagan pageantry of it.
There’s magic in change, a reason that solstices and equinoxes mean
something powerful in myth and older religions. And fall in the northeastern US
is particular visually stunning as the leaves let out their collective final scream in shades of red and brown and orange. In the northeastern suburbs of Philadelphia,
I remember it being always the first month where it became cold enough to see
your own breath. The first month when the setting of the sun became noticeably earlier.
The first month for wearing gloves.
A time for conjuration. For necromancy. The autumn leaves, the bare tree branches and the raising of the dead, were forever bound together for me the first time I saw a particular painting by TSR artist Jeff Easley.
Nobody brings the undead to life like Jeff Easley.
I have good memories of October and Halloween.
On Sundays, my dad and I would watch football together, although I didn't really follow it. For me, it was all about the "Creature Double Feature" that would follow the games - old campy black and white horror films with Boris Karloff or Vincent Price or sometimes Godzilla movies (for the record, I always assumed that Creature Double Feature referred to some specific two-headed monster). My dad always pronounced Dracula with an extra "r" so it became "Dracular."
Then there was Shawn, who lived in the house on the corner of my street. He was a few years
older and I thought he was the coolest. His older sister, Haley, baby sat
sometimes for my sister and I, so we were young. I was maybe seven at the time.
The first Halloween I remember Shawn gave me a set of glow in the dark stickers of
the faces of the classic movie monsters – Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, the
Wolf-man. I remember staying up late that night after trick or treating to watch
scary movies in what used to be my father’s old den. I watched Silver Bullet
based on “Cycle of the Werewolf” by Stephen King and John Carpenter’s remake of
The Thing starring Kurt Russel. It was the best kind of terror – the kind you
can hide under your sheets from and make disappear. As I got older I loved
horror movies – Steve and I would rent a couple almost every weekend of the
school year. The original Nightmare on Elm Street series, Ghost Story, The
Stuff, Return of the Living Dead, those were just a few of them. As we got
older we would make more elaborate and monstrous costumes. By middle school his
favorite was a cloaked skeleton costume and my preferred mask was of a fanged
horror. I remember when I put it on there was the strong scent of rubber and it
would become oppressively hot after just a few minutes as it filled with my own breath. When I took it off the sweat on my forehead felt good in the brisk
night air.
I thought it was a lost pleasure, but New Orleans brought back a taste
of it when Jen and I visited a couple years ago. Halloween was the perfect time
to go – we came for the Voodoo Music Festival and stayed through the 31st.
New Orleans seems to do Halloween pretty much year round. Where the gates of
Guinee are perpetually at least partly ajar while Papa Legba and his fellow loa MC
the endless night party. If you believe in such things, of course.
The tomb of "Voodoo Queen" Marie Laveau
This year Jen and I joined various groups of paranormal hunters at
Summerseat Mansion in Morrisville, PA. I was more interested in the history –
two signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution lived there
(Morris and Clymer). George Washington spent a pivotal week there, where he
allegedly made the decision to attack Trenton, thereby changing the tide of the
revolutionary war. Two British spies were said to have been held there briefly before
their execution. If ever there was a historic home worthy of haunting, it would
be this one. But I just couldn’t suspend my disbelief. The dancing lights of
the various hunters' EMF devices seemed more like a nice visual effect than a
message from the other side. The static on the EVP sessions seemed more likely
to have come from the bonfire party going on across the street. The rattling, thumping and clanking noises, nothing more than water pipes.
Inside historic Summerseat Mansion for a paranormal investigation.
After just a couple hours Jen and I wandered outside. It was cold and
dry. For me, it was refreshing – something I’ve missed living in Florida, although not as much as I thought I would. Jen
felt no such nostalgia.
“Want to get out of here?” I asked.
She nodded vigorously. “Eastern State Penitentiary would have been
better,” she frowned.
So, it seems, this October some portals have thus far remained closed to
us. We’ll keep looking though. There may be magic and wonder and spirits yet to
be uncovered, but we didn’t find any residing this autumn at Summerseat.
In the three years now that Jen and I have lived in Tampa, I’ve
struggled to understand and define its relationship with the adjacent cities of
St. Petersburg and Clearwater. My latest attempt at comprehension entails putting
it into a familial context, as three sisters.
Tampa is the oldest, and most grounded. A bit of a cigar-smoking
tomboy who grew up playing with trucks and frequenting strip joints with
pirates, she’s turned out to be resourceful, reliable and resilient, even if she’s
never quite been able to get that old criminal record expunged entirely. She’s
got intelligence of the practical, actionable type. Even if she’s not most stunningly beautiful of the three, she is unquestionably the one you will call when your car breaks
down. Or if, late at night, you find yourself needing to dispose of a body.
St. Petersburg is the middle sister that left home to get an
education – specifically an undergraduate degree in musical theater, a Masters in Fine Art and most of a Ph.D. in Religious Studies (one of these days she'll finish that doctoral thesis on how geographic location and
topography impact belief systems). You want to talk abstract art, literature,
punk rock, craft beer, famous muralists or pretty much anything culturally
significant, she’s your gal. The downside? Predictably, she’s got a bit of a
thing for hipsters.
That makes Clearwater, city of star worshipers (of which the
sun in our own solar system is just one popular option), the youngest. The
prettiest of the three, but also the flightiest. Last week she was into
astrology, phrenology and tarot, before that it was numerology, and as we speak she’s out
on the beach with a metal detector looking for buried treasure. Not that there’s
anything wrong with any of that, but just keep in mind that if you're joining her for dinner or drinks be prepared to have your birth constellation charted in detail.
The analogy could end there, but let’s extend it to include
the Broadway cousin, Orlando/Celebration. She’s kind of a big deal these days and getting bigger all
the time. It might be due to her insatiable appetite - after consuming both the
Marvel and Lucas universes, she’s still hungry. As she expands, day by day,
mile by mile, she’s getting closer and closer to her cousins until eventually,
one assumes, she’ll be living right next door.
There's also the quiet, understated cousin to the south, Sarasota. She ran off to join the circus as at a young age but has since become surprisingly sophisticated. Quiet but articulate, when she speaks it's more because she has something to say than to hear her own voice. You've got to scratch the surface to get to know her, but it's worth the effort.
I was part of the generation that grew up making mix tapes on cassettes - for friends, for myself, Steven and I even put one in our own private time capsule when we were kids. Consequently, almost every experience since then is connected for me to some song or album. Carpooling over the summers to Blue Bell day camp, I can hear "Invisible Touch" by Genesis issuing out from the speakers in the back seat of Dave's beat up car (the speaker on the driver's side was better). First crush - Crowded House. Teenage bus trip through the southwestern US - the Doors and Aerosmith. My teen later teen years - mostly punk rock and alternative. Designing and writing various zines - the Pixies, Bad Religion, Jane's Addiction and the Jesus and Mary Chain. Driving from Philadelphia to Seattle after graduating from the University of Michigan - Third Eye Blind's self titled album. My first year in Chicago - Dubnobasswithmyheadman by the Underworld. My brief return to suburban Philadelphia - White Ladder by David Grey. My wedding - "More than This" by Roxy Music. And so on and so forth.
Having come lately and late to a passion for not just seeing and passing through but discovering my surroundings, it stands to reason that I'd eventually tie it back to music. My playlist has been a carefully curated selection of both memories I have and memories that I want to have - it's like selecting the right brush for the background of an oil painting or the right setting for a ghost story you're telling.
This particular playlist is almost two years old now, and it's served me well as the backdrop for the long drives that Jen and I and Tink have taken from Tampa as far south as the Keys and as far north as Atlanta and Savannah. We're planning a trip all the way to Philly now, so it's probably the right time to retire this particular list, but I thought I'd share it with and include a bit of commentary.
Josh's Exploration Playlist:
1) Dig for Fire by the Pixies - Isn't that after all, precisely what I'm doing? Seeking passion, seeking something that will move me, reconnecting with that elusive sense of wonder and awe? As an added benefit, when I hear this song, I think of working on the first couple issues of Driftwood magazine with Steve and Geoff.
2) Intro by The xx - The first time I heard this song Jen and I were visiting Tampa (prior to moving there), sitting at a table outside of Ella's Americana Folk Art Cafe. When it came on, I thought it was maybe a song by The Cure with which I was unfamiliar, but I couldn't find it. Later, when it appeared in one of the first few episodes of The Magicians (when Julia is on her way to meet with the hedge witches), I was able to identify it. It is, for me, the sound of opening doors to hidden realms.
3) Lonesome Dreams by Lord Huron - A more recent discovery of mine, their music seems designed for exploring strange, wondrous and haunted places.
4) People Are Strange by Echo & The Bunnymen - do you recall the opening scenes of Lost Boys, when the family is relocating to the town of Santa Carla in California, while the camera pans past a menagerie of odd and uninviting characters along the way? I do.
5) Seven Wonders by Fleetwood Mac - Rather on the nose, this particular selection. I am convinced however, that it pairs perfectly with standing in front of the Buckner Mansion in New Orleans (the setting for American Horror: Coven).
6) Fascination Street by The Cure - Ever since I was a teenager hearing this for the first time, it is to my ears the sound of magic; the denizens of some secret, hidden world coming out into the night.
7) Africa by Toto - This song is just one of the many things we have Stranger Things to thank for reminding us of. As a kid I remember listening to with my mom in her car.
8) Dead Man's Party by Oingo Boingo - Quirky and endearingly off-kilter with just a dash of creepy. If a fiji mermaid and a wind-up monkey with cymbals and a dia de los muertos bobble head doll all got together and started a band, this seems like the kind of song I would expect them to produce.
9) Cities in Dust by Siouxsie & The Banshees - I challenge anyone to find a more appropriate song for exploring ruins and ghost towns than this one about Pompeii.
10) Humans from Earth by T Bone Burnett - From the Soundtrack of the Wim Wenders film, Until the End of the World. The twangy guitar sounds like something you might hear along the Mississippi delta, but the lyrics are about humanity's less than well intention colonization of space - creating a rather unique juxtaposition. It reminds me of all the movies I watched with friends in high school, and, at the same time, to be respectful as I travel and investigate lands that once belonged to others.
11) Pinch Me by Barenaked Ladies - Catchy and a bit goofy, but I am indeed trying to achieve that personal escape velocity and see the world beyond my front door.
12) Secret Journey by The Police - The journey of the mystic - it makes me think of the main character from the Razor's Edge trying to achieve enlightenment studying with Tibetan monks. While my own journey is far less secret, my objective is, in many respects, the same.
13) Building a Mystery by Sarah McLachlan - One of Jen's favorites on my playlist, about carefully crafting a mysterious, if disingenuous image.
14) Renegades by X Ambassadors - I guess you know you're getting old when you start finding new music by listening to car commercials. Be that as it may, I came to like this song so much that I incorporated it into a draft of my first full (unpublished) novel.
15) Walking On a Dream by Empire of the Sun - Another fairly recent discovery that seems to capture how I often feel on my "adventure days."
16) To the Shock of Miss Louise - Another selection from the Lost Boys Soundtrack. Given how much time I've spent at circus museums, carnivals and abandoned amusement parks, the creepy Wurlitzer carousel music just seems to work.
17) Carnival by Natalie Merchant - Seems a logical continuation of the amusement park theme.
18) Crawling on the Dark by Hoobastank
19) I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie - I first came across this song while looking for music for my wedding, and it stayed with me ever since.
20) Song of the Stars by Dead Can Dance - If there is a song that is more on point for exploring Tocobaga and Calusa shell mounds, I have yet to hear it.
21) Across the Universe by Jim Sturgess
22) World in My Eyes by Depeche Mode
23) Going South by the Monks of Doom
24) I Have the Moon by Lush
25) Soul to Squeeze by Red Hot Chili Peppers
26) Don't Stop Now by Crowded House
27) Very Cruel by POLICA
28) How Bizarre by OMC
29) Wave of Mutilation (UK Surf) by Pixies - the slowed down version that I remember from the old Christian Slater movie "Pump up the Volume."
30) Lonely Planet by The The - "I'm in love with the planet I'm standing on." Confessional, bittersweet, redemptive and just plain beautiful, in my humble opinion.
31) Ceremony by New Order
32) Pork and Beans by Weezer
33) Wandering Star by Portishead - A bit darker turn musically. Pairs nicely with a visit to The Seance Room at Muriel's in New Orleans.
33) Somewhere Only We Know by Keane
34) Meet Me In the Woods by Lord Huron
35) Digging In the Dirt by Peter Gabriel
36) Mmm...Skyscraper I Love You by Underworld - More of an urban exploration tune. Pairs well with architectural wonders and towers - unexpected beauty out of industrialization, conjured from steel, concrete and glass.
37) So Real by Jeff Buckley - "...And the wind blew an invocation, I fell asleep at the gate..."
