Memphis

Memphis is totally different in both look and feel to Nashville.  Again, it’s that horizontal rather than vertical thing.  It’s lively in a different way too: here it’s all blues clubs and street performance; Nashville was all saloons and C&W. 

   

We stayed at the Peabody Hotel which is famous for having ducks that live in a ‘palace’ on the roof but come down in the lift to live in the foyer fountain during the day before marching back up via the lift again in the evening. There’s a big parade and everything. I suppose in an infinite universe everything happens at least once.

 

It is obligatory that one visit Graceland when in the area.  The house and grounds are interesting; everything else about the experience is hateful.  The shops, food court and rapacious ticket prices are to be expected; the slow and terminally indifferent staff were not.  Every other attraction or museum we’ve visited has been staffed by keen and knowledgeable staff.  This place is staffed by morlocks.

Negativity thrown hastily to one side, Elvis had quite the setup.  Utterly tasteless, but cool all the same.

If I had a smoke house, I like to think I’d have the vision to turn it into a shooting range

Just to maintain the light-hearted, upbeat tone I’m setting, we also visited the Civil Rights museum.  It’s partially constructed out of the motel where Martin Luther King was shot and also the boarding house across the road where he was shot from. I dunno if that’s ghoulish or exploitative, but I could make a spirited argument that it was as appropriate a place as any.

The museum documents the great American hobby of being awful to humans with a higher level of melanin than themselves.  They really dedicated themselves to it, too.  At least in the age of slavery (stretching generosity and decency to breaking point) you could fathom the economic argument to the South’s dehumanisation of their fellow man.  After that, wow.

 

Again, we had and have bigotry in the UK which was broadly acceptable even at an institutional level until relatively recently.  We’re all working our way through it. 

That said, I don’t know when it was last acceptable to blow up a church full of kids during Sunday school, but some states in the US were cool with it in my parents’ lifetime.  I’m not really trying to be all self-righteous and I would sooner keep the tone of the blog on the fun side, but I guess I just found it all a bit jarring.  One benefit to our travelling the way we have, with the historical insight it lends, is you can sagely point out with 20/20 hindsight the ways it could have all been nipped in the bud after the civil war. The efforts toward reunification took priority and the Federal government didn’t bother too hard to enforce those newly-found civil rights for freed blacks.  The subsequent implementation of Jim Crow laws and the Supreme court rulings supporting them as constitutional also betray the sympathies or ambivalence of the Northerners.    Funfax: there are twice as many toilets as needed in the Pentagon because Woodrow Wilson instigated racial segregation for federal employees fifty years after the civil war ended.  Dickhead.

2015 New York, illustrated by most prevalent race in each area.

An interesting political aside was how, during the Cold war, the racial struggle was utilised by the Soviets to undermine the US in the eyes of those nations that both superpowers were trying to influence, by painting the Americans as fascists.  It was probably the institutional persecution of minorities as subhuman that sold it.  Accordingly, the racial segregationists in the South then accused civil rights campaigners of being in league with the communists.

 
Pictured: irony

So, yeah, today was not light entertainment, but it was an enlightening and –on a certain level- optimistic visit.

I’m aware that this post is a bit of a brevity rollercoaster, so I’ll maintain that pattern with a picture of a fried peanut butter and banana sandwich.  The King would approve.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch:  Wir haben Graceland, das Haus von Elvis Presley besucht. Das Haus ist wirklich cool, aber das Personal sind schrecklich. Wir sind auch zu dem Civil Rights Museum gegangen. Es war erschütternd, aber auch hoffnungsvoll.

Nashville

I’m not a particularly big country music fan, but Chan grew up with it playing in the background and everyone likes a bit of Johnny Cash.  Chantelle has also been watching the eponymous TV series of late,  so we spent a few days in Nashville. We rented an apartment over on the east side of town, next to Shelby park.  Because Tennessee isn’t finished making me feel foreign, I went for a run one morning in the park and startled a black vulture from whatever equally odd dead thing it was pecking at. 

There was also a farmers’ market in the park shortly after we arrived, from which I made another abortive attempt at cooking an economic meal.

“Seriously, Gareth, McDonalds only costs a fiver” – The cosmos

Anyway, Nashville is another relatively small city in that it has a population of only about 700,000, although that is predicted to double in the near future as you can now get 2 years of free community/tech college education if you’re local.  As it is, they are throwing up hotels and apartment blocks at a rate of knots.  The hotels that there are are wildly expensive because of near-constant popularity from tourism (foreign and domestic) and a running shortfall of rooms. Hence the construction efforts and why we rented through Airbnb again.

The building on the left with the spiky ears is the AT&T building. They call it the Batman building around here. Wait, what’s that on the right?

 
Someone explain counting to these people

We got on a hop-on, hop-off bus and got given the tour of the town. First thing we visited was the Johnny Cash museum, which is small but well presented.

   

Yeah, I only really found out anything about him after that Joaquin Phoenix film too. I made the mistake of downloading his entire back catalogue from Bittorrent once (don’t give me that look), it’s huge.  I don’t recommend it by the way, not unless you want 50 albums of gospel tracks that all sound the same.  That said, check out his version of Nine Inch Nails’s ‘Hurt’ on YouTube: it’s lumpy throat viewing. Trent Reznor wrote that very personal song about his own struggle with substance abuse and concedes that Cash came along and utterly made it his, both musically and emotionally – which has to be a hard thing to see as an artist.  Still, if your work is going to be co-opted by anyone, you can do worse than Johnny.

Some of these aren’t gospel

As is required, we visited the Country Music Hall of Fame and recognised at least several of the artists featured.  Taylor Swift has built an educational wing there; I know who she is, at least.  Even ignoring the Country and Western musicians featured, it’s a fascinating museum of the evolution of 20th century music and culture, showing all the cross-pollination of slave, hillbilly, blues and rock’n’roll music from either side of the Atlantic.  It also has some rather eclectic exhibits:

Handmade Banjo made from woodchuck hide:  There is no instrument more redneck than this

 
This car looks very necessary

  
The triple-necked guitar is also a bit dubious

A walk down Honky Tonk Row was also obligatory.

  

All the bars are called saloons and they all have live music, as the agents for the major music labels are constantly skulking about, searching for the next big name that I’ve never heard of.  The band will talk to you too, which is a bit unsettling. Normally In the UK I ignore live music while drinking until it goes away.  Over here it interacts with you because you’re drinking in the middle of the afternoon during the week and there are only two other people there.

”Where you folks from? England? Guess you win this bar’s furthest from Nashville award!”.
 
Indeed, now leave me alone to sip my beer and awkwardly regard the tips jar while pondering whether I can take change from it.

Couple of interesting things: Nashville’s main income generator is not music but healthcare, with 300 healthcare companies based there.  So there you go   Another thing is that it has a Parthenon, which was unexpected.

We wandered about the Bicentennial Mall, which features a 1400ft granite wall detailing the history of the state from 1 billion years ago ‘till today, with dramatic breaks and cracks denoting conflicts. Another couple of cool things were the Tennessee Map plaza, where they’ve carved a 200ft wide map of the state-and a plaza with 50 columns containing a 95-bell carillon (representing the 95 counties of the state) which periodically plays music important to the state (like “Crazy” by Patsy Cline).

  

And Chantelle still loves how they all talk.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Wir haben Nashville besucht. Country-Musik ist mir egal, unabhängig das Hall of Fame war recht interessant.

Tennessee Bemusement

After the battlefields and before Nashville, we stopped in Pigeon Forge, TN.
Chan and I struggle to describe this place.  It’s in the shadow of the Smokey Mountains and seems to exist as a tourist town, being predominantly constructed of novelty hotels, themed dinners and other attractions. They have a Titanic museum with half a scaled-down Titanic outside, which was unexpected. The overall feel of the place is a bit Vegas-y without the gambling or maybe a bit like Blackpool minus the burnt chip fat and post-apocalyptic barbarism.  We also drove past a bible-themed dinner show. I cannot vouch for the authenticity of the cuisine.

If you like bread and fish, it could be a winner

Naturally we stayed in a hotel where it’s Christmas every goddamned day of the year.  This could be described as either magical or horrific depending on whether Chantelle or I write this post, respectively.

    
Delightful, I’m sure

There is perpetual glockenspiel Christmas music playing in the foyer and played over the rest of the hotel via the PA system.  It’s like insanity is waiting to claim you around every corner if your vigilance wanes for even a second.
They do have free cookies by the front desk, though.  My soul can be bought.

Don’t look the dolls in the eye

Demented hotels to one side, the big reason we were here was so we could go to Dollywood - Dolly Parton’s own theme park, for the  unaware.  Frankly I had no idea what that would look like and could say in all honesty that I had no preconceptions to confound.  I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did, however.

  

It’s a theme park, with your standard ride and concession setup, only people were really, really nice.  The whole place feels so pleasant.  Chan was smiling like a simpleton the whole time because she liked how the locals talked. 
We did catch the park at the back-end of the season so it was relatively quiet, and many of the attendees were of an age and condition such that they were unlikely to congest the queues for the rollercoasters, so everything could be got on with minimal waiting.  Once we had elected to get wet at the end of the day, they let us ride the log flume until we had to politely ask to get off. The rides were of a decent standard too, with at least a couple of rollercoasters in the Busch Gardens league.

 

Food was very southern, and not bad at all for that:

 
Pictured: Obligatory Chicken-fried steak. Look it up.

It’s the first theme park I’ve seen with a church, too.

This was not a shock to find

There is a shop where you can buy any of Dolly’s outfits in ‘Your size’.  I did not see any of the inevitable horrors birthed by buffet-lines and blind optimism, but the facility is there if you need it, ladies.

Just imagine

They also have an eagle sanctuary (which is apparently very successful and has released several breeding pairs into the wild, which is nice) and a steam train for rides into the hills.  And since I can’t punch Mother Nature directly in the face personally, I’ll have to settle for this trip’s recurring theme of burning solid fuel to get nowhere in particular.

Dioxins, y’all

So yeah, I was largely baffled this whole couple of days. Although, aside from occasionally waking up in a 3am cold sweat with Santa/Satan’s own festive tinnitus haunting my dreams, a good time was had.

Kurzfassung auf Deutsch: Dieser Staat ist seltsam.