Brutal South

My guest is Amethyst Ganaway, a chef and writer from North Charleston, South Carolina.

Amethyst has been working in the restaurant industry for about 12 years, and during the past year she got deep into researching the history of food from our part of the country. She has published a few great pieces on what she's learned.

The articles we'll be discussing are "Black Communities Have Always Used Food as Protest," from Food & Wine magazine; and a tribute to the late culinary giant Martha Lou Gadsden of Charleston, which ran on Today. The New York Times recently published Amethyst's recipe for Lowcountry Okra Soup, which I'll be trying out as soon as okra season hits.

One word you'll hear a few times in this episode is Gullah. If you aren't familiar, Gullah people are the descendants of formerly enslaved West African people who developed a unique language, culture, and cuisine on and around the sea islands of North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The longer I've lived in South Carolina, the more I've realized how central Gullah culture is to the way of life here. I'm glad I learned a few new things from Amethyst.

Amethyst and I have some friends in common, and we grew up in the same area and even went to the same college and had stories to share about a professor we both had in the religious studies department — but we hadn't actually met somehow. I admired her work from afar, so I'm glad she accepted the invitation to talk.

Follow Amethyst on Twitter at @ExcuseMyFly or on Instagram at @Thizzg. Her website is waterwhippin.com.

This podcast is an offshoot of the Brutal South newsletter, which you can get for free every Wednesday at brutalsouth.substack.com. For $5 a month, you can get access to some exclusive newsletter issues and podcast episodes as well as some sweet Brutal South logo stickers while I've still got them. If you can subscribe, that's great, but if not, please just spread the word. I depend on word of mouth, so if you enjoy my work, please tell your friends.

The episode art is a picture of an okra cross-section by Prathyush Thomas, published under a GNU Free Documentation License.

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My guest is Gardnsound, an Atlanta-based electronic music composer who is also one of my oldest and truest friends.

I know him as Gardner. As long as I’ve known him, he has been a restless experimenter, from his classical training on the bass to his hard-partying dubstep phase to that time he wrote a song a day for an entire year.

Along the way, he taught me a few things about music theory and kept the rhythm in a string band we started called The Camellias. We played shows at our neighborhood bar and recorded a few albums together.

While we were playing straightforward Americana at our weekly living-room jam sessions, he was delving into trap music production and avant-garde modernist composition techniques. In the last two years, in the basement studio he built from scratch, he has gone all-in on ambient electronic music, composed and recorded the hard way with a jumble of synthesizers and patch cables.

I’ve watched him pull off live electronic performances on YouTube and Twitch this past year and come away stunned by the preparation and focus required. It’s a far cry from a dude in a nightclub hitting the play button on a Macbook and then waving his hands in the air (not that there’s anything wrong with that! he can do that move too).

Today on the podcast we’re discussing his new ambient electronic album Atmospheres, out April 20 on all major streaming platforms. It’s a followup to his 2019 album Ambiences, which has become one of my go-to writing jams. That last album referenced Philip Glass, John Adams, Brian Eno, and Tim Hecker in the liner notes, and you can hear those influences again on Atmospheres, with some new boundary-pushing experiments thrown in.

I’ve included samples from the new album throughout this episode, along with a short clip from Iannis Xenakis’ “La Legende d'Eer,” which Gardner cites as a major influence on his development as a musician. I encourage you to listen to Gardnsound’s whole album on Spotify, Bandcamp, or wherever you get music.

Thanks for listening. If you haven’t yet, please consider buying a subscription to the Brutal South newsletter at brutalsouth.substack.com/subscribe. $5 a month gets you access to exclusive newsletter issues and podcasts, and it helps me keep writing and making podcasts.

The episode art is from a page of Iannis Xenakis’ notebook from 1951.

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My guests are Bristow Marchant (@BristowatHome) and David Travis Bland (@dtravisbland), reporters at The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C. They and their colleagues went public with the formation of The State News Guild this week, seeking voluntary union recognition from management.

On this episode we talk organizing strategy, debunk some common myths about “right-to-work” laws, and obsess over their absolute banger of a union logo, courtesy of Dre Lopez.

You can follow the guild at @thestateguild on Twitter and Instagram, read the guild’s statement at thestateguild.org, and cop some of that sweet sweet union merchandise at shop.spreadshirt.com/thestateguild. For more information about organizing your newsroom, visit newsguild.org.

I previously interviewed two members of the Packet/Gazette Guild, the first successful local newsroom union in South Carolina. Check out Episode 9: Good news for people who love local news.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

My guest is Pastor Jim Conrad of Towne View Baptist Church in Kennesaw, Georgia. His church was, until recently, one of the only Southern Baptist churches that openly accepted and affirmed lesbian, gay, and transgender people. His church has been in the news since February because the Southern Baptist Convention, or SBC, voted to remove his church and another from Louisville, Kentucky, for taking their stand.

I read about the convention’s decision in a New York Times story by Ruth Graham last month, and it struck me that on the same day, the convention also disfellowshipped two churches for hiring pastors with a history of sexual assault. These four churches were all lumped in together and given equal weight in a statement by J.D. Greear, president of the convention, who bemoaned “fissures and failures and fleshly idolatries.”

This is grotesque and heartbreaking and completely unsurprising behavior by the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded to defend human slavery and has been on the wrong side of nearly every battle since. What did surprise me was the testimony of Pastor Conrad.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church in South Carolina. I led Vacation Bible School groups, went on mission trips, and played electric guitar in the youth group praise band. I met some of my best friends and role models there.

But it’s also a place I had to leave behind as an adult because I found some of its teachings abhorrent. I still live in South Carolina, so I am always in the shadow of some Southern Baptist Church or another. The church is a community center, a cultural anchor, and it’s caused a lot of suffering for a lot of my friends over the years.

I’m part of a church that marches in the Pride Parade now. Growing up, I never thought I’d see this day. I never imagined I’d meet someone like Pastor Conrad either. As we’ll discuss in the interview, he didn’t think this was a fight he’d have to fight, until one day late in his career when he did. He made me think of that old hymn that goes, “If you tarry ‘til you’re better, you will never come at all.”

***

The episode art is “Baptism of Christ” (1931) by Vimos Aba-Novak.

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My guests on today’s podcast are Cary Ann Hearst and Michael Trent of the band Shovels & Rope.

Most of the songs featured in this episode are from their latest album, Busted Jukebox Vol. 3, which you can buy at your local record store or download on Bandcamp.

I was thinking back to 2012, when I interviewed them for a profile in the Charleston City Paper. They were hugely popular in Charleston at the time, and after years of relentless touring they were finally breaking into the national scene for folk and Americana music. They were a little self-conscious about the first taste of success, which seemed like a good indicator that they wouldn’t let it go to their heads.

I got to see one of their last hometown shows before they really blew up, and it still ranks as one of my favorite concerts ever. It was a scorching August night at the Pour House, a James Island bar, and people were sweating and screaming and dancing their asses off in the crowd.

Onstage, Cary Ann and Michael were sweaty and delirious as the rest of us, stripped down to their undershirts and singing their guts out. They took turns keeping rhythm on a drumset that looked like it had been salvaged from the side of the road. It was bandaged together with duct tape, and they pounded away on the snare and floor tom with a plastic maraca.

They still play hometown shows, but they need a little bit more space now. They host the annual High Water Festival at a riverfront park in my neighborhood, a fact that brings me no small amount of civic pride. It’s been a vicarious thrill to watch them scrap their way into a successful career, and it was a pleasure to catch up with them about their art, their view of the world, and their adventures in parenting.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

My podcast guest is Chuck Johnson, a musician who composes meditative songs on the pedal steel guitar.

Chuck grew up in North Carolina, where he heard pedal steel in the context of country music. After building a career playing fingerpicked acoustic guitar in the style of Elizabeth Cotten and John Fahey, he picked up the pedal steel and took it in a new direction, using its vocal quality and unlimited sustain to create mournful soundscapes.

On his new album The Cinder Grove, Chuck recreates lost performance spaces through a technique called convolution reverb. We spent some time discussing the sensory memory of places that have either been destroyed or become inaccessible, and I thought that theme dovetailed nicely with what I’ve been reading about the architect Paul Rudolph’s “psychology of space.”

Here’s something beautiful he said during our conversation:

“I think that when a space is lost and exists only in memory, it’s sort of like what happens when people are lost. I guess depending on how they’re lost and how you’re able to process the loss, they can linger in our memory like ghosts. With the spaces that I’m working with or thinking about in The Cinder Grove — which are these urban community spaces but also forests and wild areas that have been lost in fires — just because I’m a musician and I have sonic experiences of places … it’s useful for me to try to work with my memories of these places and process the loss that way, using sound.”

I used a few snippets from The Cinder Grove in the episode, but I would encourage you to spend some time with the entire album if you get the chance. You can stream and buy Chuck’s music at chuckjohnson.bandcamp.com.

Friend-of-the-newsletter Eddie Newman had Chuck as a guest on his own podcast last year, and he graciously introduced us. You can check out Comfort Monk Episode 46 if you want to hear more of the story.

Grayson Haver Currin also wrote a moving profile that ran in the New York Times on Feb. 10 titled “Chuck Johnson’s Ode to What’s Been Lost in California’s Fires.”

The episode art is “Fire evening” (1929) by Paul Klee.

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My guest is Kate Wagner (@mcmansionhell), architecture critic at The New Republic and proprietor of the McMansion Hell blog. Like me, Kate grew up in the South, and like me, she is a defender of brutalist architecture. Unlike me, Kate really knows what she's talking about.

Brutalism is a style that grew out of 20th-century modernism, and it usually features hulking geometric forms and a lot of exposed, unfinished concrete. The British architects Alison and Peter Smithson coined the term, not to evoke brutality, but as a play on the French béton brut, meaning raw concrete.

Anyway some people love brutalism, a lot of people hate it, and we're going to talk about it this week, of all weeks in world history. I hope you stick around even if that doesn't tickle your fancy. Kate is a brilliant thinker, and I've enjoyed her work for years.

As we’ll discuss some in the episode, I’m working on a book about the history of brutalist architecture in the American South. I recently received funding from the Lowcountry Quarterly Arts Grant Program to pursue the project. Stay tuned for updates!

Show notes are below.

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“This Brutal World: Public opinion has softened its views on Brutalism. That isn’t enough to stay the wrecking ball.” (The Architect’s Newspaper)

“Duncing About Architecture: The ignorance and racism behind the right-wing push for ‘classical’ federal buildings” (The New Republic)

“Underground, Part 1” (McMansion Hell)

Celebration, Florida (Wikipedia)

“The Legacy of Sea Ranch, a Utopian Community in Northern California” (Dwell)

A Softer World

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Gruen transfer (Wikipedia)

Orange County Government Center (Paul Rudolph, Goshen, N.Y., 1967) - photo by Kerry O’Connor via SOS Brutalism

Burroughs Wellcome Company Headquarters (Paul Rudolph, Durham, N.C., 1972)

Pinecrest High School (Southern Pines, N.C., 1969)

Moore County Superior Court (Carthage, N.C.)

Pruitt-Igoe (Minoru Yamasaki, St. Louis, Missouri, 1956)

***

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

Halfway through John Warner’s new book about higher education, it dawned on me that I was reading a manifesto.

The book is called Sustainable. Resilient. Free. The Future of Public Higher Education (2020, Belt Publishing). It’s a sweeping diagnosis of what ails higher education in the United States, written from a place of deep frustration.

John spent 20 years teaching in colleges and universities, including Clemson and the College of Charleston. He’s a talented educator and an incisive writer, and I’ve admired his work for years. I jumped at the opportunity to bring him on the podcast.

In the book, he argues for canceling student debt and making all public colleges free for students. He rails against student surveillance and the insipid utopianism of the edu-tech TED Talk circuit. John worked as an adjunct, not a tenure-track professor, so he writes from experience about the ways the industry grinds down its frontline workers.

One concept that I connected with was the idea of “vocational awe,” originally coined by the librarian Fobazi Ettarh to describe “the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique.” While the term originally applied to librarians, it could just as easily describe the mindset of college instructors, K-12 teachers, nurses, and journalists.

“To the person operating with a sense of vocational awe, the institution is so important that self-immiseration is a worthwhile tradeoff,” Warner writes.

Like any good manifesto, Sustainable. Resilient. Free. opens the imagination. It’s a book for disenchanted voters, workers saddled with lifelong college loan debt, and professors on the verge of burnout. I read it in two sittings, growing angrier and more hopeful with every page.

If you enjoyed today’s podcast and want to hear more from John, you can order a copy of his book from your local independent bookstore or via the Brutal South Bookshop page. He’s on Twitter (@biblioracle), and you can find links to his writing at johnwarnerwriter.com.

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com

Michael Baumann (@MichaelBaumann), staff writer for The Ringer, joins me for the second annual Wikipedia Holiday Special.

Mike and I met at the University of South Carolina, and one of the ways we’ve stayed in touch since graduating is by sending each other articles we find on Wikipedia. You could say it’s our love language.

If you’re following along at home, here are the Wikipedia pages we’re discussing today.

Mine:

* Quadro Tracker

* Methods of divination

* Attacus atlas

* OK Soda

* Elisha Otis

Baumann’s:

* List of eponymous laws

* Wojtek (bear)

* Louis Slotin

* Doping at the Tour de France

* Gilles de Rais

If I get a minute later on, I’ll send out a subscriber-only list of the ones that didn’t make the cut. You can also check out last year’s Wikipedia year in review by clicking here.

Don’t forget to subscribe and rate the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and sign up for the newsletter at brutalsouth.substack.com/subscribe if you haven’t already. Paying newsletter subscribers ($5/month) get access to extra podcasts and exclusive content, including a new piece of short fiction that I adapted into an audiobook earlier this month.

Episode image: “Wojtek sits in front of a soldier,” 1942, Imperial War Museum.

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I convened this emergency podcast shortly after the release of Taylor Swift’s evermore, the out-of-nowhere follow-up to folklore. Joining me on the panel are my colleagues Michael Majchrowicz (@mjmajchrowicz) and Ari Pérez-Mejía.

Subjects of interest for this episode include Myspace, parasocial relationships, Shakespeare, Cats, Zardulu the Mythmaker, eucatastrophe, Noah Baumbach divorce movies, depression, cognitive behavioral therapy, Sufjan Stevens, and Bravo reality TV.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit brutalsouth.substack.com