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January 17, 2004
"The Highest Bar Fight I've Ever Seen"
After talking to my students about Fight Club (yes, I know I've just broken the first two rules of fight club), I had one of those much needed whirlwind nights where several of my colleagues and I were in constant motion until they dropped me off at my car sometime after 1 AM.
We started with a brief post-teaching drink at the hotel at Technology Square, Georgia Tech's new high-tech conference center where they make some very good gin martinis.
Then we kept moving, stopping off at several different local art galleries for several exhibitions which were participating in ATLart[04], a citywide event offering exhibitions, lectures, tours and special events from Atlanta’s leading art galleries and museums. ATLart[04] effectively connected several of Atlanta's up-and-coming art spaces, which are scattered all over the city.
Two exhibits were most memorable: First, Saltworks Gallery, a gallery/studio specializing primarily in conceptual art featured a cool exhibit by New York artist Larry Miller and a video installation, Cakewalk, by Jeremy Helton. I especially enjoyed Miller's treatment of popular culture figures using what appears from a distance to be giant pixellated images, creating a halftone effect, which on closer inspection turns out to be created by heavy paint strokes. The play with popular culture (painting included images of Audrey Hepburn, Vincent Van Gogh, baseball images) was also interesting to me, especially in relationship to Warhol's prints.
The other gallery I really enjoyed is tucked away in an area just south of Philips Arena and the Georgia Dome and directly west of the state capital in the Castleberry Hill neighborhood, which appears to be targeted for revitalization. Skot Foreman Fine Art had an amazing exhibit of late twentieth century art featuring works by Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, and Howard Finster. Finster, who lived in Georgia, has seen his "outsider" work popularized by musicians REM, the Talking Heads, and Vic Chesnutt, and mixes mass media images (Coke bottles, especially) with fascinating mystical and religious images. Really cool stuff.
After a few other gallery stops we wound up at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel (designed by John Portman), at one time the tallest hotel in the United States. The top floor--seventy-odd storeys up--has a revolving bar and restaurant with overpriced but tasty drinks (I had a mango daiquiri--mildly disappointing), and when we arrived the bar happened to be fairly crowded with conference people and, I think, a few hockey fans in town for a Thrashers game.
Our group was briefly joined by a muscular guy in his twenties who was drunk enough to mistake us for his group of friends (for reasons that are not clear at all, I think he claimed I was his roommate). A few minutes after the guy found his way back to his group, we hear a loud crashing sound. Chairs falling. People scattering. Slurred threats. Looking along the circular bar, we see the guy in fighting position, another guy (who somehow managed to take off his shirt, showing off his back tattoos) ready to fight back. It got a little scary when we were more or less stuck between the edge of the bar and the sparring guys, but fortuntaely, order was restored pretty quickly and nobody got thrown out any windows.
I think now I can safely say, as one of my friends put it, that it was the highest bar fight I've ever seen.
Posted by chuck at January 17, 2004 2:58 PM
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Comments
Do you know what else happened that night? Post bar-fight, we drove Chuck to his car at the train station near Decatur. Kate, Trish, and I dropped him off and headed back to Midtown. As I rounded a blind corner on the dark trek back to town, a large possum suddenly appeared in the middle of the road. Before I even had a chance to react, we hit the stunned creature head-on. Trish shrieked so loud that my ears are still ringing. A perfect end to an odd night.
Posted by: Glenn Zelniker at January 22, 2004 7:01 PM
I gotta admit, that beats the story of my drive home. I stopped at a couple of red lights. I contemplated buying a bag of chips at the gas station across the street and then drove on home...
Posted by: chuck at January 22, 2004 8:41 PM