The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

WHY WE LOVE ATLANTA

One of the advantages of having an online journal is its virtual reach over a range of cultures and into the lives of as many readers as we can find who in turn find interest in The Grapevine. The main disadvantage is that we miss having a local habitation with a name. We are setting out to ground our journal by paying attention to the city of Atlanta, north by northwest in the state of Georgia, USA, Planet Earth, where most of us who write for The Grapevine live and move and have our being. In this issue, we begin (shamelessly) to describe our love affair with the city.

It is not always easy to love Atlanta. Start with the traffic? the crime? the politics? No. And we don't need to dwell on the city as the business hub of the Southeast, a place where value is determined more by commodities and commodification than by artful expression. Instead, we are going to be on the lookout for soulstirring places and people within the city and its environs. And we may even find angles from which we can see soul in business, politics, crime, and traffic. But first, let's find a friendly place to slip into a discussion of the city. Let's look at trees. Consider the life of a tree as described by philosopher Edward S. Casey:

A tree stands in its own place. Its life is sedentary. It is a life in one place, a life without anxiety. Not only is a tree in its place; it actively contributes to its place, filling it up with its own organic substance. It knows no menacing void...and, having no place to go, is never lost.

The abundance of oxygen-generating greenery in the city not only helps us breathe but also nourishes our need for natural beauty. We are a city of gardens. Most of them are created in outlying residential spaces, but even along the freeways that thread through the city, there are beautifully landscaped groves and long vistas of mature trees. In the springtime, lavender wisteria dangles ornamentally down green-garmented banks of them. In summer, crape myrtles create a spectrum of red blossoms in clusters balanced on branches that resemble legs of gazelles. Autumn brings a glorious richness of red and gold shimmering from leaves and berries. As we busy car-driving animals work our way through the labyrinthine traffic of the city, we can reach out with our eyes to the calm reassurance offered by our trees who are, as Casey says, never lost.

One does not usually look to a city for strong expressions of nature, though we are immeasurably enriched when we find natural beauty in urban environments. We do expect the presence of art and of arenas where we can go to refresh ourselves mentally, emotionally, spiritually. In this column The Grapevine features places and things, institutions and persons who seem to us to be stirring the cultural life that surrounds us here in Atlanta and the towns that cluster close to the city.

Reference: Edward S. Casey: Getting Back Into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World, 2nd ed. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009 p.xi.

Shakespeare: a surprising choice for top of our list of things we love about Atlanta? Not when you consider the richness of theatrical offerings in this city that includes not one but two venues where the lover of Shakespeare can always find a satisfying matinee or evening performance. Most cities do not have even one stage devoted to Shakespeare. Follow the link to find out why we consider the fact that Shakespeare dwells here to be important.

In tandem with our focus on the richly diverse theater scene in Atlanta, which we will expand as we move toward the next issue of The Grapevine, we look now at a couple of veteran Atlanta actors whose singular accomplishments have already left lasting impressions on the city's cultural life. Both have been featured in interviews published in The Grapevine, and the profiles here contain links to those interviews as well as to theater reviews in which they appear.

BREAKING NEWS....

Downtown Atlanta has made New York Times list of 52 places to visit in 2014. Go here and scroll down to Number 40: New York Times List