Lou is one of the many talented, inspired, and hard-working artists and writers that will be displayed at the AiR Inviational. The opening reception is February 16th at the Showroom…I hope to see you there!

The City Paper review
Images of the installation

This Hog had been ridden by Mark Rice

Mouth drape.

Mouth mane.

Nose broom.

Surrounding woven oral bib.

There are many names for beards, but I have never heard them called any of these.

Being the owner of an occasional and usually haphazard beard myself, I tend to take its presence for granted. In the winter months, it gives a much-appreciated bolster of insulation. If ever seeking work in the frigid season, briefly bow your mustache combs to the man who must shave for a job interview.

It can give a jump to the front of the line at the auto mechanic, and narrowed eye from the bank teller.

Which brings up an interesting point, when exactly did beards, and facial hair for that matter become a sign of sloth, and a symbol and apathy, laziness, and uncleanliness? Does this have to do with fast food and the system of complex nets one must wear to rock a mouth mane whilst flipping a burger or two? Beards were a symbol of power and prestige and still are in many cultures, yet things have changed. Beards have gone the way of corpulence, which used to signify an upper class fat-laden diet. They have gone the way of paleness, which used to symbolize a life of leisure, wealth, and a lack of physical labor…(errrr….except because of the “Twilight” series…I suppose its back again.) They have gone the way of tight rolled jeans and Koosh balls.

Alright…well, beards are back with a ferocious thickness and so are these three guys that have them attached to their faces.

Come see Travis Blankenship, Eric Kocher, and Patrick Whitfill spout, fume, coo, coax, cough, whistle, whimper, and whisper their poems out of the thing that is located in the middle of their respectively gorgeous facial plumage.

As I now recite to my own beard what a person that was quoting another person once said to me…

“Grow ye. Grow.”

And grow together we shall.

This poetry reading is:

Wednesday

January 18^th

6pm

@ Hub City Writer Project

186 West Main Street, Spartanburg, SC 29306

Pictured below is one of my older paintings of a mustache.

See you there!

This Hog was ridden by Mark Rice

Right now, I feel the exact opposite of the way this person feels:

(This video was taken last summer at the  American Coliseum in Spartanburg)

Explosions in the Sky are a now widely hip band. They are the go-to of nearly every Austin, TX bar and listening to them will make you seem cooler now, at least to the middle majority. I’ve been lighting candles and inviting dates over for dinner to their music now for nearly a decade. They have yet to disappoint me.

Ben Marcus’ introduction to The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, which he edited, will change the way you look at a short story. It’ll even change the way you read a book. Swear. And his fiction is just as legit. At the Hub City Book Shop you can currently buy the mentioned anthology, and look for his new The Flame Alphabet on the shelves soon.

Michelle Borkin cares about the quality of human life. Her work so far has crossed the disciplines of art, astronomy and medicine to help doctors visualize patient’s hearts using 3-D imaging tools. She is a badass. And she’s making your life better. Watch her brilliance here:

Shree Bose is going to affect your life one day. Still a teenager, she has already provided research on chemotherapy resistance that will eventually alter the way we treat cancer. She won the 2011 Google Global Science Fair. Check out her abstract:

genius.  The 2012 competition begins on January 12, for you agile minds. Check it out! http://www.google.com/events/sciencefair/index.html

Stephen Pinker will convince you we can be better people. We really can. Just read his book on the decline of violence: The Better Angels of Our Nature. In fact, you should be a better person today, go to Hub City Books and buy it.

The last year has been so exciting for me! It was such an honor to be featured on the Ellen Show website! It opened so many doors for me and allowed me to sign a management deal with LH7. Over the summer, I had some very cool things happen! A few weeks ago, I played my first show in Nashville, TN, at The Basement. After I finished my set, a girl came up to me while I was putting my guitar away. She was very complimentary and spoke with me for several minutes. It was dark in the club and it wasn’t until she came over to my table later to meet my parents, that I realized she was Sara Bareilles!!! She had been sitting in the front row during my set and had videoed me on her phone!

Sarah Bareilles and Noah

I also had the pleasure of opening for Selena Gomez at her concert in Charlotte at the Times/Warner Amphitheater. She also plugged a couple of my videos on YouTube which

Noah and Selena Gomez

was a HUGE help! A couple of weeks ago, she and her parents, my managers, invited me to come out to Los Angeles to open for her at the House Of Blues in West Hollywood for her 2nd Annual Benefit Concert For UNICEF! I’ll also be performing at Room 5 in LA for several record producers and industry people for a showcase. This is my first trip to the West Coast so I’m VERY excited!!!!

–Noah Guthrie

In 2010, I launched the first version of the show with the help of friends and acquaintances in music and media from western NC and upstate SC. It was an ambitious project, a show that was filmed at a venue and streamed live to the internet, where viewers could comment on and question the folks on stage. I was the host of show, and interjected the viewer comments by monitoring our Twitter and Facebook streams via an iPad. We had a panel of several artists and music professionals on stage, discussing topics like “What Would You Do In The Music World If You Were King or Queen For A Day?”, “Songs That Get Stuck In My Head” and “Upstate and Western NC Music History,” which we would talk about for roughly fifteen minutes before breaking and letting our musical guests play a song.

The first two shows were at the White Horse in Black Mountain, NC, in August and September, and the third was at The Showroom in Spartanburg, SC, on November 30th. John Watson filmed and edited all three shows, and in The Showroom episode, we were joined by emcee Barbie Angell and musical guests The Antibodies and The Pulse dancers. Paul Riddle of The Marshall Tucker Band, Joe Bennett of The Sparkletones, plus producer, performer and songwriter David Lee and archivist and producer Jason Perlmutter made up the panel. The link to the video of the first part of that show is here.

It was a stormy night, so much so that the annual Dickens of A Christmas was cancelled. Sirens went off a number of times as tornadoes passed through the area. Despite the bad weather, there remained a crowd at The Showroom and we went on with the broadcast, which was well worth all the work and preparation. The band was tight and focused and the panel had plenty to say about the musical heroes of the region, rare and vintage vinyl and analog recording. The audience jumped in on the conversation and we were covered in the Herald-Journal and on Channel 7. It was wonderful to be there, to see everyone taking part in a show designed to bring everyone closer together from their love of music, and realize that I had put it in motion.

Afterwards, I went home and collapsed for a few days. It was an exhausting, albeit exciting, experience, and I knew there had to be changes for the show to succeed. For one, streaming the show live to the internet was a technical hurdle that we never pulled off without some snafu or another. Also, the quality of the video was never very good, being hampered by our inability to afford either the bandwidth necessary to upload the video with better definition nor a paid account that took out the intrusive advertising. My dream of #linguamusica becoming a trending topic on twitter was light years away, it seemed, as there were as many or more people in the live audience as there were watching the show online. I let the project lay dormant over the winter and thought about new directions and new dialects.

Upon coming back home from Easter vacation, the idea hit me: interview artists on shorter videos. Instead of making a grand production involving lots of people, produce simpler shows with an interviewer and artist(s) talking about their music, their friends and colleagues and their passions outside of music. I focused on artists from or passing through Asheville, and teamed up with a new group of volunteer videographers and host interviewers. Barbie Angell, a key partner since the beginning, was there to push the project forward once more as well.

Since May of 2011, Lingua Musica has made 30 shows, interviewing everyone from up-and-coming acts like RBTS WIN! to  regional heroes Jonathan Scales Fourchestra to international stars Lloyd Cole and Rosanne Cash. Myself, Barbie Angell, Kelly Denson, Erin Scholze and James Cassara interviewed the artists while Tony Preston, Jackson Stahl and Jesse Hamm did the bulk of the videography and editing. Music magazine Blurt is a sponsor of the show and regularly profiles our episodes such as this article about our interview with Danny Barnes.

Going forward, we seek more sponsors and broaden the scope of the show to include more footage of the artists playing and singing, whether in concert or just for our cameras, and to shoot more interviews at sponsor businesses. Of course, we also plan on reaching out to more artists from the region and those playing here in our effort to document how music is the universal language. I hope you will subscribe to our YouTube channel where you can see all of our shows, and let us know about your own musical story. Our show is just the beginning of the conversation, really, and truly comes alive when you take part.

Yours in music,
Joe Kendrick

http://thit.bandcamp.com/album/perspectives-soundtrack

Melissa Walker

This guest blog post is written by Melissa Walker, HubCulture Board member, history professor at Converse College, and writer.

My husband and I came to Spartanburg in 1996.  I boasted a brand-new Ph.D. in southern and women’s history, a credential for which there were way more experts than jobs.  Chuck was a banker and finance professional in search of a job.  We weren’t too sure about Spartanburg.  Chuck, a Jewish, Rockefeller Republican, New England native who had lived in the liberal hotbeds of Philadelphia, Boston, and Providence for his entire adult life and I, a lapsed Presbyterian and moderate Democrat, had trouble imagining ourselves living in a small town in the Bible Belt. The only context in which we’d ever heard of the town was as the home of Spartan Foods, the owner of all the Hardee’s restaurants in my Tennessee home town. What little I saw of downtown—during a quick drive-through after dark—was not impressive.  Still, college history teaching jobs were hard to come by, and the GSP metro area seemed like a place where Chuck might find a job. We also knew that housing costs in Spartanburg were far more reasonable than the overheated New England market. So when the department chair called to offer me the job, I said yes.  And Chuck agreed to move with me.

In those infant days of the internet, we subscribed to the local newspapers to learn about our new hometown, and reading the paper each week, my heart sank. The state legislature seemed mired in inefficiency and political posturing, giving more attention to legislation aimed at preventing same sex marriage than at the state’s intolerably weak public schools. Spartanburg seemed to be home to an inordinate amount of domestic violence and other serious crimes.   I counted five murders in the first 12 days of May. In May 1996, the Spartanburg County Council passed a resolution condemning the homosexual lifestyle, rescinding it only after the US Olympic Committee threatened to re-route the Olympic torch run around the county and USA Gymnastics began planning to move their training camp out of Spartanburg.  Still, there were promising things in the paper, too.  We read about an organization called Hub City Writers Project released a book called the Hub City Anthology.  According to the newspaper story, a group of local writers had decided to form something of a writers’ cooperative loosely based on the ideals of the New Deal-era WPA Writers Project.  They raised the money to compile, edit, and publish an anthology of their work, including creations by local artists.  First thing, when we arrived in Spartanburg, I insisted that we purchase the Hub City Anthology.  We found the title at Pic-A-Book, the locally-owned bookstore. I read the Hub City Anthology from cover to cover, savoring Jeff Willis’s delightful essay about exploring downtown as a child, Rosa Shand’s lyrical recounting of exploring the railroad tracks that run through Converse Heights with her grandson, and Betsy Teter’s ambivalent account of living on the West Side.  What’s more, we were happy here.  I loved my students (most of them) and my colleagues (most of them).  The Converse community welcomed us, and we began to make friends among like-minded people.  Chuck quickly found a job with Flagstar (the earlier incarnation of Denny’s.) We were able to attend concerts and plays and art openings at Converse and Wofford, so we felt like we had access to good cultural life. We realized that our community boasted lots of people who were dedicating countless hours to making this a better place. Best of all, people welcomed us and invited us to share our expertise and talents through involvement in community organizations.

We met a lot of those folks at events sponsored by Hub City Writers Project.   From the publication of its first book, the volunteers at Hub City Writers Project had organized activities and published books that celebrated this place—this special place with a rich history in the Carolina piedmont.  Hub City worked to reach a diverse group of people by publishing titles that celebrated ordinary textile workers and documented the history of a historic black neighborhood.  The Lawson’s Fork Festival, the Hub City Music Makers concert in Twichell Auditorium, and the Textile Town book release party at the newly restored Cleveland Park Pavilion brought together a diverse array of people.  Creative folks—artists and photographers and designers and folks who liked to hang out with artsy types—joined the writers who founded the organization.  Of course, Hub City Writers Project was not the only vibrant force for change in Spartanburg, of course; by the time we had been here five years, there were positive signs all over.  The city and the county were investing in revitalization, too. Young professionals were returning to town to lead fledgling non-profits, and the city’s wealthiest businessmen put their money where their mouths were, locating corporate headquarters downtown, constructing new office buildings on vacant lots, and revitalizing abandoned textile mills.

Spartanburg was on the move, so we decided not to.  We agreed that we were embedded in the community, in love with the life we had built here.  We couldn’t imagine starting over in a new place, trying to find “our place” in a new town, risking that we wouldn’t find such a lively and welcoming community.

I had the privilege of joining the Hub City Writers Project board in 2004.  And that was the moment when the city asked us to organize some kind of initiative that would help attract and retain our young people.  In 2005, thanks largely to Betsy Teter and a newcomer to town, Kerry Ferguson, HUB-BUB.com was born. Within a year’s time, the initiative that began with a web site and an open mike Soapbox sessions on Thursdays at the Nu-Way evolved into a performance and gallery-space and live-work apartments that brought in talented artists for an Artists-in-Residence program.  Hundreds, probably thousands, of people have had a hand in our organization’s accomplishments.  Countless volunteers devoted innumerable hours to our programs.  Community members provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in financial support; so has the city.  Creative staffers continually developed new ways to bring people together to experience art and culture.  But at the core of it all was the idea that animated Hub City Writers Project from the beginning—the idea that we could build and strengthen the bonds of community through dynamic arts and ideas.

HubCulture has created a complex of activities and places where people from many walks of life gather.  The activities of HUB-BUB and Hub City Writers Project have provided a place where a historian and an economist could find common ground with lawyers, social workers, poets, architects, entrepreneurs, painters, performance artists, environmentalists, and community volunteers.  HUB-BUB events draw all kinds of people—people with inherited wealth, self-made businessmen, ordinary middle class folks, and even people who are just squeaking by financially.  It doesn’t matter if you sport tattoos or a button down; you’ll feel comfortable at HUB-BUB and The Showroom.  And that’s why I love it.

-Melissa Walker

Watch Melissa’s TEDxSpartanburg talk “A New Vision for Building Community” about HubCulture.