Category: Michelle Hiskey & Ben Smith

The two-month political campaign cone of silence finally broke Sunday.  Since the May 20th Georgia primary, I have not received a single flier, heard one obnoxious robocall or discovered any earnest campaign volunteers hanging on my doorbell.

But two days before the July 22nd Georgia primary runoff election a friend sent me an e-mail telling me how to vote. “Please know how important it is to vote in the runoff Tuesday,” wrote Margaret Hylton Jones. “I am often asked by many friends who I am supporting for public office because of my lifelong experience in Georgia politics. So I am reaching out to many friends to offer a couple of very important recommendations for critical offices.” So how effective is neighbor-to-neighbor voter outreach?

Sunday’s World Cup final at the Brewhouse in Little Five Points felt like a bar gathering for a big SEC football game, only louder and more crowded.  Hundreds of soccer fans packed the tavern and its parking lot to watch Germany defeat Argentina 1-0. Thirty TV sets served a blend of German and Argentinian immigrants and other diehard fans.

The closing of this year’s World Cup raises the same questions that get asked every time the planet’s biggest sporting event grabs the attention of Americans, who have historically been resistant to embrace the sport. Has it gained a permanent foothold as a spectator sport the U.S.?

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.