Author Archives: Ben Smith

Stories of heroism, honor, sacrifice on the field of battle—the kind repeated every Memorial Day—are in a peculiar way not only about the people whose lives are remembered through them. They are also about us and where we come from.

This is true for Malcolm McDuffie, who has long championed the preservation of a cemetery that represents great significance to his own family, as it does for the history of Georgia. The Utoy Cemetery is connected to one of Atlanta’s earliest churches and the remains buried there tell stories about his ancestors, the Civil War and our shared history.

Adventure and discovery demand we take risk, and we parents measure this all the time when it comes to our kids. One of the greatest adventures is to travel around the world, and the blogosphere is still harshly buzzing about the recent failed attempt (and expensive rescue) by parents Eric and Charlotte Kaufman to sail around the world with daughters Cora, 3, and Lyra, 1.

This saga and debate intrigued me. In a span of five years, I traveled around the world and became a parent. Though separate milestones, my experiences make me one of the quiet supporters of the Kaufmans.

Long before TV’s “The Amazing Race,” an elaborate competition with puzzles and physical challenges already took place each year around Atlanta with little fanfare. On Saturday, the 25^th anniversary Get-a-Clue featured 13 teams in a high-tech elaborate scavenger hunt, a modern tradition started by Georgia Tech musicians.

Contestants jumped out of cars in front of eateries in Decatur and Buckhead looking lost and determined at the same time. Carrying cinderblocks, they scampered through Inman Park, scanning QR codes from cryptic notes attached to public art, benches and other things.

Through all the ice, snow and harsh temperatures of Atlanta’s recent winter, Christi Behrend waited for the Peachtree Road Farmers Market to open for the season. She keeps an organic kitchen at home and likes to support local farmers. The market, only 10 minutes from her home, shortens the distance from farm to her family’s forks. “You can shop DeKalb Farmers Market and Whole Foods but it’s not the same, definitely not the same,” said Behrend.

On a sunny morning Saturday, her wait ended in the parking lot of the Episcopal Cathedral of St. Philip, filled with 50 vendors operating out of pickup trucks and popup tents to open the eighth season of the largest producer-only market in Georgia, according to Lauren Carey, market manager.

After censorship, can there be reconciliation? That was the question for Atlanta artist Ruth Stanford on a recent visit with her to the re-installation of “A Walk Through the Valley” at Kennesaw State University. A month ago, the university’s president ordered her artwork removed from the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art as controversial.

It’s back after the sides found common ground, but the notoriety forced Stanford to scrutinize her comfort zone as an artist and sort out the ambiguities exposed by an issue that seems black and white. Is it possible for an introvert to take a stand as an artist?

This week, Louisa Hill, a young playwright who learned to keep going in Atlanta and win national awards for making audiences laugh, will return to her alma mater to speak at the 43^rd annual Agnes Scott Writers’ Festival. Organizers say Friday’s scheduled reading by Hill, who graduated in 2009, almost certainly marks the fastest turnaround for a former student to be invited back as a headliner.

With a history of drawing luminaries such as John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Reynolds Price, James Dickey, Eudora Welty and Robert Penn Warren, the Writers’ Festival often features one alumna whose Agnes Scott education helped launch her success in writing poetry, plays or books.

As technology makes creative work move faster, the careers of Deeds Davis and other illustrators have slowed way down. In a world of stock photography and digital design, fewer people seek intricate, original drawings by a human. Davis, whose art has always had a proletarian feel to it, found a small sweet spot in the tight art market and has some profit to show for it.

Last week, the Dallas, Texas, native launched a month-long exhibit of her latest sketches at the Java Monkey coffee shop in Decatur, where she works as a cook.

While Mardi  Gras was breaking out in New Orleans last weekend, an anti-carnival with all the snazz of a paper box unfolded in Atlanta. Scores of cardboard-covered figures paraded across downtown Atlanta last Saturday night, attracting attention from conventioneers, bar-hoppers and others out for good time.

In case you missed it – chances are you’ve never heard of it – Saturday marked Atlanta’s fifth annual CardboardCon. Welcome to the antithesis of DragonCon, the world’s largest fantasy/sci-fi convention that brings tens of thousands of costumed conventioneers into downtown Atlanta on Labor Day weekend. CardboardCon draws them there by the tens in late February or early March in outfits repurposed from a product with 101 uses and its helpful sister, duct tape.

Morehouse College, the alma mater of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., has never been the kind of seeding ground for championing the civil rights of gays as it was for African Americans and other minorities. To some critics, it has been the opposite. Throughout the 1990s, the Princeton Review ranked the institution as one of the nation’s top homophobic campuses.

Last week’s student-initiated forum at the Thomas Kilgore Jr. Campus Center offered a chance to see how attitudes are becoming more tolerant. A packed crowd of 120, mostly young black men, listened to a panel of students—including football players and an LGBT campus representative—and professors discuss the highly publicized decision by star college football player Michael Sam to declare his homosexuality prior to the NFL draft.

Dozens of customers were waiting outside when Tony Powers unlocked the door of his Intown Ace hardware store in Decatur the morning before the ice storm.

Before the day ended, he had run up 22,000 steps, the equivalent of 12 miles on his fitness app, after assisting customers swarming for snow removal chemicals and sleds and fixing the broken knob on one guy’s propane grill tank – mine. He sold four pallets of ice melt and 200 sleds in the first two hours and seven generators and all the kerosene, firewood and lanterns before anyone felt the first drop of ice or snow.

Ryan Hidinger’s dream of opening his own restaurant did not die with him. That dream, which the late chef had shared with his wife, Jennifer, to make a living running their own establishment, has grown into something much larger: a restaurant that will provide financial support to restaurant industry workers beset by catastrophic illnesses.

The service industry is the backbone of Atlanta, the reason that thousands of people gather here every year for conventions and big events. However, those who choose service careers – like the restaurants Hidinger worked for and devoted himself to –  are especially vulnerable to catastrophic events. About 250,000 of them work in metro Atlanta, and tend to be counted among those most likely to be uninsured, and hit hardest by lost wages when they lose shifts due to illness. Hidinger, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 gallbadder cancer in December 2012, experienced this firsthand.

The week before the Super Bowl, Kavin Caruso showed off his stellar memory by naming every NFL title winner in the 1960s and the teams they defeated. With a mental vise grip for dates and statistics, he’d be a ringer for any trivia team. But in the wider arena of job competition and social acceptance, Caruso is a decided underdog. At 32, he is mostly deaf from the massive ear infections he suffered as an orphan from India before his adoption by a family in Tucker. He also suffers from a mild form of schizophrenia and anxiety.

These disabilities are huge strikes against him in his quest to find a job, like the one in sales at Home Depot that he held for nine years until the economic meltdown. According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the unemployment rate for adults diagnosed as mentally ill is three to five times higher than the general population. Caruso’s persistence is a hopeful sign, especially for those among the thousands of Georgia’s long-term unemployed. Faced with so many reasons to give up, Caruso does not.

In fiction, superheroes often elude the camera, their legends created by what bystanders thought they saw. Inside an Atlanta photography studio, Batman, Wonder Woman, Nightwing, Superman, the Green Lantern and other beloved superheroes are captured in light and shadow and framed as stylized fashion portraits.

These are real people from Atlanta, not movie stars or models. They make their own elaborate costumes and wear them to entertain hospitalized children. They are now the subjects of a photographer using his eye to elevate their zeal into an art form. The photographs, currently on display at the Showcase School of Photography, are windows into the world of fantasy, and show the power of refining the lens we use to look at the world.