A Back Porch Chat
The editor's old friend Rob Rushin-Knopf has a back porch chat with us. It'll be the first of many, we hope.
This Friday marks the beginning of our Back Porch gathering. This is where we will gather to talk about music and books and movies and basically any kind of “cultural” what-not that comes from or pertains to the South.
Putting it mildly, it’s a pretty broad target.
For example, there is scarcely a note of American music, or much music of the world for that matter, that is not influenced by the fruits of Southern culture. The literature of the region casts a long shadow, as does the historical record, especially the long arm legacy of 1619, the peculiar institution, Reconstruction, and so on. Movies? Hell, we’re still dealing with the hangover of "Gone With the Wind" and "Birth of a Nation," never mind all the new and great original work coming out of the South and its diaspora.
And once you recognize that the South’s slave machinery served as the philosophical model for Hitler’s program against the Jews, it’s an easy enough progression to accept that what we might consider regional in nature has implications way beyond the area once known as the Solid South.
To kick things off, Salvation South critic-at-large Rob Rushin-Knopf looks at the classic Flannery O’Connor short story Revelation as refracted through an adaptation by Compagnia de' Colombari, a New York-based theater company that was born in Orvieto, Italy.
I have known Rob since our younger days at the University of Georgia where I was the editor of the campus newspaper and Rob was the station manager for the student radio station. I still recall one alcohol-soaked shindig where Rob grabbed both my shoulders, looked me square in the eye, and insisted that I had to listen to John Coltrane if I ever hoped to be a fully realized human being. What can I say? He was right.
Fast forward a bunch of decades and Rob still has strong opinions, and he is going to be sharing them on our Back Porch on the regular. But once he has his say, the ball is in your court. Give him a “hell, yes” or a “what the ever-loving hell”. He’s a big boy. He can take it.
We encourage conversation, even arguments, as long as they stay within the bounds of what we might view as acceptable for our own back porch or parlor. No spitting and no calling anybody’s mama ugly. Y’all know how to act right. If we are lucky, we can help each other see this mean old world from a different angle. World could use more of that these days.
